New Chronicles of Rebecca Part 9

"I thought myself that sounded foolish,:" confessed Rebecca; "but it's what the Doctor calls Cora when he tries to persuade her not to quarrel with his mother who comes to live with them. I know they don't say it in Riverboro or Temperance, but I thought perhaps it was Boston talk."

"Well, it ain't!" a.s.serted Mr. Cobb decisively. "I've druv Boston men up in the stage from Milltown many's the time, and none of em ever said Naysweet to me, nor nothin'like it. They talked like folks, every mother's son of em! If I'd a' had that what's-his-name on the harricane deck' o' the stage and he tried any naysweetin' on me, I'd a' pitched him into the cornfield, side o' the road. I guess you ain't growed up enough for that kind of a story, Rebecky, for your poetry can't be beat in York County, that's sure, and your compositions are good enough to read out loud in town meetin' any day!"

Rebecca brightened up a little and bade the old couple her usual affectionate good night, but she descended the hill in a saddened mood.

When she reached the bridge the sun, a ball of red fire, was setting behind Squire Bean's woods. As she looked, it shone full on the broad, still bosom of the river, and for one perfect instant the trees on the sh.o.r.es were reflected, all swimming in a sea of pink. Leaning over the rail, she watched the light fade from crimson to carmine, from carmine to rose, from rose to amber, and from amber to gray. Then withdrawing Lancelot or the Parted Lovers from her ap.r.o.n pocket, she tore the pages into bits and dropped them into the water below with a sigh.

"Uncle Jerry never said a word about the ending!" she thought; "and that was so nice!"

And she was right; but while Uncle Jerry was an illuminating critic when it came to the actions and language of his Riverboro neighbors, he had no power to direct the young mariner when she "followed the gleam," and used her imagination.

OUR SECRET SOCIETY

November, 187--

Our Secret society has just had a splendid picnic in Candace Milliken's barn.

Our name is the B.O.S.S., and not a single boy in the village has been able to guess it. It means Braid Over Shoulder Society, and that is the sign. All the members wear one of their braids over the right shoulder in front; the president's tied with red ribbon (I am the president) and all the rest tied with blue.

To attract the attention of another member when in company or at a public place we take the braid between the thumb and little finger and stand carelessly on one leg. This is the Secret Signal and the pa.s.sword is Sobb (B.O.S.S. spelled backwards) which was my idea and is thought rather uncommon.

One of the rules of the B.O.S.S. is that any member may be required to tell her besetting sin at any meeting, if asked to do so by a majority of the members.

This was Candace Milliken's idea and much opposed by everybody, but when it came to a vote so many of the girls were afraid of offending Candace that they agreed because there was n.o.body else's father and mother who would let us picnic in their barn and use their plow, harrow, grindstone, sleigh, carryall, pung, sled, and wheelbarrow, which we did and injured hardly anything.

They asked me to tell my besetting sin at the very first meeting, and it nearly killed me to do it because it is such a common greedy one. It is that I can't bear to call the other girls when I have found a thick spot when we are out berrying in the summer time.

After I confessed, which made me dreadfully ashamed, every one of the girls seemed surprised and said they had never noticed that one but had each thought of something very different that I would be sure to think was my besetting sin. Then Emma Jane said that rather than tell hers she would resign from the Society and miss the picnic. So it made so much trouble that Candace gave up. We struck out the rule from the const.i.tution and I had told my sin for nothing.

The reason we named ourselves the B.O.S.S. is that Minnie Smellie has had her head shaved after scarlet fever and has no braid, so she can't be a member.

I don't want her for a member but I can't be happy thinking she will feel slighted, and it takes away half the pleasure of belonging to the Society myself and being president.

That, I think, is the princ.i.p.al trouble about doing mean and unkind things; that you can't do wrong and feel right, or be bad and feel good.

If you only could you could do anything that came into your mind yet always be happy.

Minnie Smellie spoils everything she comes into but I suppose we other girls must either have our hair shaved and call ourselves The Baldheadians or let her be some kind of a special officer in the B.O.S.S.

She might be the B.I.T.U.D. member (Braid in the Upper Drawer), for there is where Mrs. Smellie keeps it now that it is cut off.

WINTER THOUGHTS

March, 187--

It is not such a cold day for March and I am up in the barn chamber with my coat and hood on and Aunt Jane's waterproof and my mittens.

After I do three pages I am going to hide away this book in the haymow till spring.

Perhaps they get made into icicles on the way but I do not seem to have any thoughts in the winter time. The barn chamber is full of thoughts in warm weather. The sky gives them to me, and the trees and flowers, and the birds, and the river; but now it is always gray and nipping, the branches are bare and the river is frozen.

It is too cold to write in my bedroom but while we still kept an open fire I had a few thoughts, but now there is an air-tight stove in the dining room where we sit, and we seem so close together, Aunt Miranda, Aunt Jane and I that I don't like to write in my book for fear they will ask me to read out loud my secret thoughts.

I have just read over the first part of my Thought Book and I have outgrown it all, just exactly as I have outgrown my last year's drab cashmere.

It is very queer how anybody can change so fast in a few months, but I remember that Emma Jane's cat had kittens the day my book was bought at Watson's store. Mrs. Perkins kept the prettiest white one, Abijah Flagg drowning all the others.

It seems strange to me that cats will go on having kittens when they know what becomes of them! We were very sad about it, but Mrs. Perkins said it was the way of the world and how things had to be.

I cannot help being glad that they do not do the same with children, or John and Jenny Mira Mark and me would all have had stones tied to our necks and been dropped into the deepest part of Sunny Brook, for Hannah and f.a.n.n.y are the only truly handsome ones in the family.

Mrs. Perkins says I dress up well, but never being dressed up it does not matter much. At least they didn't wait to dress up the kittens to see how they would improve, before drowning them, but decided right away.

Emma Jane's kitten that was born the same day this book was is now quite an old cat who knows the way of the world herself, and how things have to be, for she has had one batch of kittens drowned already.

So perhaps it is not strange that my Thought Book seems so babyish and foolish to me when I think of all I have gone through and the millions of things I have learned, and how much better I spell than I did ten months ago.

My fingers are cold through the mittens, so good-bye dear Thought Book, friend of my childhood, now so far far behind me!

I will hide you in the haymow where you'll be warm and cosy all the long winter and where n.o.body can find you again in the summer time but your affectionate author,

Rebecca Rowena Randall.

Fourth Chronicle. A TRAGEDY IN MILLINERY

I

Emma Jane Perkins's new winter dress was a blue and green Scotch plaid poplin, trimmed with narrow green velvet-ribbon and steel nail-heads.

She had a gray jacket of thick furry cloth with large steel b.u.t.tons up the front, a pair of green kid gloves, and a gray felt hat with an encircling band of bright green feathers. The band began in front with a bird's head and ended behind with a bird's tail, and angels could have desired no more beautiful toilette. That was her opinion, and it was shared to the full by Rebecca.

But Emma Jane, as Rebecca had once described her to Mr. Adam Ladd, was a rich blacksmith's daughter, and she, Rebecca, was a little half-orphan from a mortgaged farm "up Temperance way," dependent upon her spinster aunts for board, clothes, and schooling. Scotch plaid poplins were manifestly not for her, but dark-colored woolen stuffs were, and mittens, and last winter's coats and furs.

And how about hats? Was there hope in store for her there? she wondered, as she walked home from the Perkins house, full of admiration for Emma Jane's winter outfit, and loyally trying to keep that admiration free from wicked envy. Her red-winged black hat was her second best, and although it was shabby she still liked it, but it would never do for church, even in Aunt Miranda's strange and never-to-be-comprehended views of suitable raiment.

There was a brown felt turban in existence, if one could call it existence when it had been rained on, snowed on, and hailed on for two seasons; but the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs had at any rate perished quite off the face of the earth, that was one comfort!

Emma Jane had said, rather indiscreetly, that at the village milliner's at Milliken's Mills there was a perfectly elegant pink breast to be had, a breast that began in a perfectly elegant solferino and terminated in a perfectly elegant magenta; two colors much in vogue at that time. If the old brown hat was to be her portion yet another winter, would Aunt Miranda conceal its deficiencies from a carping world beneath the shaded solferino breast? WOULD she, that was the question?

Filled with these perplexing thoughts, Rebecca entered the brick house, hung up her hood in the entry, and went into the dining-room.

Miss Jane was not there, but Aunt Miranda sat by the window with her lap full of sewing things, and a chair piled with pasteboard boxes by her side. In one hand was the ancient, battered, brown felt turban, and in the other were the orange and black porcupine quills from Rebecca's last summer's hat; from the hat of the summer before that, and the summer before that, and so on back to prehistoric ages of which her childish memory kept no specific record, though she was sure that Temperance and Riverboro society did. Truly a sight to chill the blood of any eager young dreamer who had been looking at gayer plumage!

Miss Sawyer glanced up for a second with a satisfied expression and then bent her eyes again upon her work.

"If I was going to buy a hat tr.i.m.m.i.n.g," she said, "I couldn't select anything better or more economical than these quills! Your mother had them when she was married, and you wore them the day you come to the brick house from the farm; and I said to myself then that they looked kind of outlandish, but I've grown to like em now I've got used to em.

You've been here for goin' on two years and they've hardly be'n out o'wear, summer or winter, more'n a month to a time! I declare they do beat all for service! It don't seem as if your mother could a' chose em,--Aurelia was always such a poor buyer! The black spills are bout as good as new, but the orange ones are gittin' a little mite faded and shabby. I wonder if I couldn't dip all of em in shoe blackin'? It seems real queer to put a porcupine into hat trimmin', though I declare I don't know jest what the animiles are like, it's be'n so long sence I looked at the pictures of em in a geography. I always thought their quills stood out straight and angry, but these kind o' curls round some at the ends, and that makes em stand the wind better. How do you like em on the brown felt?" she asked, inclining her head in a discriminating att.i.tude and poising them awkwardly on the hat with her work-stained hand.