Growing Up: A Story of the Girlhood of Judith Mackenzie

The first day of September, late in the afternoon, Judith stood over the kitchen stove making beef-tea for Aunt Rody. The weekly letters from Don had failed—failed for three weeks; but twice before in five years had she missed a letter. At the step behind her she did not raise her eyes; the beef-tea was ready to strain; at this moment she had no interest in the world but that beef-tea.

“Judith, are you ready for news?” asked Roger.

“Good news?” she asked, forgetting her beef-tea and turning towards him, radiant.

“That depends upon how you take it.”

“I’ll take it in the way to make it good, then. I’m not ready for anything unpleasant,” she said, with a vain attempt to keep her lips from quivering.

“Then I’ll tell you. Guess who is married. But you will never guess,” he replied with confident eagerness.

“Some one in Bensalem?”

“No.”

“Bensalem is all my world.”

“You forget somebody on the other side of the world.”

“Not Cousin Don,” in the most startled surprise.

“Cousin Don. It’s a stroke of genius, or something. He never did anything like other people. Just as he was on the point of starting for home, he decided to stay and marry an English girl he found out he was in love with; or found out she was in love with him; he seems rather surprised himself. They were married the day he expected to sail for home.”

“Then why didn’t he come and bring her?” asked Judith as soon as she could find her voice.

“The English girl would rather stay in England, or on the Continent; she has no fancy to live in America.”

“I’m afraid—he didn’t want to,” said Judith who could not believe that Cousin Don had failed her.

“He never did a thing he didn’t want to in his life.”

“But he has not been quite fair to keep it from us; I did not think he could do such a thing.”

“He did not keep it all from me,” Roger replied, seriously; “perhaps I should have prepared you for it. He has been interested in her for some time, visited her in England—whether he did not know his own mind, or she did not know hers does not appear; but now they both seem to be of the same mind. Judith, dear, it isn’t such a dreadful thing.”

“Not to you,” said Judith.

Now, he would never come and take her away. No one would ever take her away. She did not belong to him any longer.

“Judith,” began Aunt Affy, hurriedly in the kitchen doorway. “Oh, you are fixing the beef-tea.”

She strained the beef-tea, salted it, poured it into a cup, and went to Aunt Rody’s entry bed-room as if she were in a dream, not thinking, or feeling anything but that she was left alone in the world, her Cousin Don had cast her off, he had broken his word to her mother, he had not cared for her as if she were his little sister. He did not even care to write and tell her that he was married and not coming home.

“Poor child,” Aunt Affy was saying in the kitchen, “it will break her heart.”

“It shall not break her heart,” was the fierce answer. “I would rather have told her he was dead than married—for her own sake. I cannot understand his shameful neglect. No money has come for her for six months—but she will never know that. His letter to me gives only the news of his marriage—his first letter for a month—but he has never written to me regularly as he has to her. It would be a satisfaction to run over to England to have it out with him.”

“But he had a right to be married,” said Aunt Affy, doubtfully.

“I am not questioning that. He had no right to hurt this child so—she has believed in him as if he were an angel sent out of Heaven for her special protection.”

“He isn’t the only angel,” said Aunt Affy, composedly. “I have been counting on him. That’s why I have had no help—I didn’t bestir myself for I expected news of his coming every week. Mrs. Evans’s sister, a widow who goes out nursing, can come the middle of this month. I didn’t tell Judith. I thought she was happy in being a ministering angel herself. And then she was going away so soon, if her Cousin Don should come I wanted her here when he came.”

“You had better send for the nurse,” said Roger, dryly.

“I’ll go after supper and see Mrs. Evans. I suppose you and Miss Marion will want my little girl again.”

“We certainly shall,” replied Roger with emphasis, “more than ever, now.”

“But she mustn’t be an expense to you,” said Aunt Affy, with an anxious frown.

“Never you mind the expense. If I don’t burn Don Mackenzie up in a letter, it will be because there are no words hot enough. I wish I could send him her face as she came to the understanding of my news. It would rather mar his honeymoon. I’ve kept this news a week, and now I had to come and blurt it out.”

XXVI. AUNT AFFY’S FAITH AND JUDITH’S FOREIGN LETTER.

At the supper table Aunt Affy asked Judith if she would sit in the entry near Aunt Rody’s door and watch while she “ran out a minute to see Mrs. Evans about something.”

With the instinct of the story-teller Judith remembered the little girl who used to sit there and sew carpet-rags, and began to weave herself into a story; the “The Child’s Outlook” was not very hopeful, she thought, but she gave the story a happy ending, just as she herself expected to have a happy ending. She did not know why she had to sit there and watch; there had been no change for days; perhaps Aunt Affy wished her to sit and watch for Aunt Rody to die. The light from a shaded lamp on a table at the foot of the bed, did not touch the sleeping face—the sleeping face, or the dead face, and Judith’s eyes were turned away; she was watching without seeing.

She was too miserable to open a book; she was too miserable to think; she thought she was too miserable to pray.

The tears came softly, softly and slowly; face and fingers were wet; the only cry in her heart was “mother, mother.”

“Mother, I want you,” she sobbed, “will not God let you come back a little while?”

The doors were wide open all through the house; in the sitting-room there were low voices, at first her dulled ears caught no articulate word, then the voice of Mrs. Evans spoke clearly: she was saying something about “faith.”

Perhaps, the listener thought penitently, she herself was weeping because she had no faith.

Now Aunt Affy was speaking; she loved to hear Aunt Affy talk. Mrs. Evans must have come and hindered Aunt Affy in her call; perhaps they both wished to talk about the same thing; but they were both talking about faith. She wished Aunt Rody might hear; she was afraid Aunt Rody was lying there uncomforted. She had never thought of Aunt Rody as a “disciple.”

In Judith’s thought Aunt Affy dwelt apart.

If you called upon Mrs. Finch she would ask you to “step in” to the kitchen where her work was going on; Mrs. Evans with conscious pride would throw open to you the door of her prettily furnished parlor; Agnes Trembly would take you into her sewing-room; a call upon the minister meant the study; Marion’s guests were made at home everywhere within and without the parsonage; but Aunt Affy’s visitor was taken to her sanctuary, the place where she prayed to God and worshipped, to the inmost chamber of her consecrated heart. Aunt Affy kept nothing back; she gave herself.

With lifted head, and intent eyes, there in the dark she listened to Aunt Affy’s impressive speaking:

“Once, it was in June, I was in prayer-meeting, and I was constrained—a pressure was upon me—to pray for more faith. I must have more faith. Not aware that I was in special need through trial or temptation, I hesitated. Could I ask for what I did not feel the need of? But only for an instant, the constraint was strong, and so sweet (the very touch of the Holy Spirit), and in faith I asked for more faith. Then I trembled. Might this sweet pressure not be a prophecy of sorrow? Had I not just this experience, and a few days later brought the tidings of the sudden death of one very dear to me? I had the asked-for faith then, and it bore me through. Was this constraint the comfort coming beforehand? To take God’s will as he would have me take it, I must needs have this faith. It was not too hard before; could I not trust him again?

“Before the week was over, unexpected happiness was given me. Ah, I thought, this is what the faith is for! For we cannot take happiness and make him glorious in it, but for this faith. God knows we need faith to bear prosperity. So for days the happiness and faith went on together, and then, don’t be afraid, dear heart, and then came, but not with the shock of suddenness, the great strain, when heart and flesh must have failed but for the faith the Holy Spirit constrained me to ask. The prayer was in June—all August was the answer.”

“Affy Sparrow, you make me afraid,” was Mrs. Evans’s quick, almost indignant answer.

“If you will only think you will not be afraid.”

Judith listening, was not afraid. Never since her mother went away and left her alone with Aunt Affy had she felt the need of faith, of holding on to her heavenly Father, as she did to-night.

“At one time,” Aunt Affy went on with her fervent, glad faith, “I was moved to cry out: ‘O, Lord, do not leave me, I shall fall, I cannot keep myself, there is nothing to keep myself in me.’ I awoke that night again and again with the same cry in my heart, the same agony on my lips. ‘How can he leave me?’ I asked myself over and over. ‘It is not like him; especially when I have begged him to stay.’ Was I in the shadow of a temptation that was to come? The next day the temptation came; for one overpowering instant I was left to wonder if he had left me; then I knew that he was perfect truth as well as perfect love; I said: ‘Lord, I am very simple, be simple with me.’ Then the wave rolled over me, not touching me. I was tempted—tempted to unbelief; but was I tempted? Did the temptation come near enough for that? I could only say over and over, Lord, I believe in thee. My temptation came and he did not leave me.”

“Affy, you are supernatural. You have supernatural experiences,” replied Mrs. Evans in a tone of awe, and considerable displeasure.

“You and I do not know what other people in Bensalem are going through,” was the gentle remonstrance.

“I hope not through such terrible things as that.”

“I hoped I was helping you,” said Aunt Affy, grieved.

“That doesn’t help. It doesn’t help me. I’d be afraid to pray for faith if I knew it was to prepare me for trouble.”

“Would you rather be unprepared for trouble?” was the quiet question.

“I’d rather the trouble wouldn’t come.”

“Then you would rather God wouldn’t have his way with you.”

“I don’t like that way, I confess, but I have to have trouble like everybody else. You have had as little of it—the worst kind I mean, as anybody ever had—your troubles have been spiritual troubles, and you are having your own way now about everything.”

“Yes, too much. I’m afraid every day of being a selfish, careless woman. A dozen times a day I wonder what Rody would say to me if she only knew what we are doing; selling the milk for instance. Sometimes I stop in the middle of something as if her hand were on my shoulder. Your sister can come next week, then?”

“As far as I know; she’ll be ten times better help than Judith; she’s strong and used to sickness. She can lift Rody, and that’s what you want. I thought the parsonage folks had spoilt Judith for you by making her too much of a lady.”

“Judith is not spoiled,” was the quiet rejoinder.

“You will find my sister Sarah ready for any emergency. What do you think she’s been doing to get into the paper? She sent me the paper with the thing marked in it. I wish I had brought the paper; I’ll show it to you some time. You know she lives, when she’s at home, near a tunnel; well that tunnel caved in one day just after a passenger train had passed through; she knew there would be another train soon, and she had her red petticoat ready and ran out as it came thundering on, and swung it in the air until she stopped the train—and just within a few feet of the tunnel, too. Wasn’t that pluck?”

“Where’s Judith?” called Joe’s voice. “I have a letter for her; one of the foreign letters she used to be so raving glad to get.”

In the half light Judith sprang toward the letter. There was no light in the sitting-room; on the kitchen table a lamp was burning; she was glad to read it unquestioned. Snatching at its meaning she ran through the three thin sheets; then she read it deliberately, understandingly.

He had written to tell her of his marriage, and two weeks afterward, on his wedding tour, found the unmailed letter in his pocket. That letter he had destroyed, and, after a week to plan and decide what to propose to her, had written again—was writing again now, in fact. The shortest way to her forgiveness he believed to be to ask her to come to England, not to be his housekeeper, but to be his wife’s dear little friend and cousin, as well as his own. But, if she decided not to do that, and the plan did have its disadvantages (he had not yet asked his wife’s advice or consent), would she be happy to stay on at the parsonage, or at Aunt Affy’s just as usual? He would never forget her, she would always be his dearest little cousin in the world, and he knew she and Florence would be the best of friends if they could know each other. Florence had a prejudice against America, but that would wear off. He very much regretted he had never written about Florence, but she was something of a flirt and had never allowed him to be sure of her until she knew he had taken passage for America. He hoped she would write to Florence and then they would understand each other better. She must be sure to write to him by return mail. He hoped the delayed letter had not made her uncomfortable. He was always her devoted Cousin Don.

Mrs. Evans went home, passing through the kitchen; Aunt Affy had told her of the unexpected marriage of Judith’s cousin; she was curious to catch a glimpse of the girl’s face over his letter. It would be something to tell Nettie. With her usual thoughtfulness Aunt Affy asked no question concerning the letter. That night Judith could not bring herself to show the letter; the next morning she gave it to her to read, and then asked if she might be spared to go to the parsonage.

“Yes, dear child. And stay all day if you like. I’ll do for Rody. She will not ask for you. She called me Becky in the night. It’s the first time she has not recognized me. And when Mrs. Evans’s sister, Mrs. Treadwell comes, you may go and have a long rest and study again.”

“I don’t deserve that,” said Judith, breaking into sobs; “I haven’t been good, and I don’t deserve anything.”

“No matter, you’ll get it just the same,” said Aunt Affy, patting her shoulder with a loving touch. “And, after this, you are to come to me for money—you are to be my own child; my little girl, and Cephas’ little girl.”

With her head on Aunt Affy’s shoulder Judith laughed and cried; she even began to feel glad of something—not that Don was married, or that she was not to be his housekeeper, or that she was not to be Aunt Rody’s nurse; it was almost wrong to be glad when she should be disappointed; then she knew she was glad because no one in all the world had the right to take her away from the parsonage.

The way of obedience had been easier than she thought. She stayed that day with Aunt Rody, doing little last things for her, and telling Aunt Affy ways of nursing that pleased Aunt Rody that she had discovered for herself.

“She will miss you,” Aunt Affy said that evening, as Judith came into the sitting-room dressed for her walk. Doodles was snoring upon his cushion on the lounge; Uncle Cephas, at the round table, was lost in the day’s paper; Joe, at another table, was reading a book he had found under rubbish in the storeroom: this last year he had developed a taste for books.

The girl lingered, with her satchel in her hand; the dear old home was a hard place to leave; without the cloud of Aunt Rody’s presence it was peace and sunshine.

Aunt Affy, with her pretty, gray head, her light step, her words of comfort and courage, moved about like a benediction; Uncle Cephas, rough and kindly, with strength in reserve for every emergency, gave, to the house the headship it had always lacked; Joe, to-night, was fine and sturdy, and growing into somebody; would they miss her?

Was the girl going away any real part of the strength and beauty of the old Sparrow place?

She was going because she chose to go.

Joe had asked her if she were “going for good.” Was to-night another turning-point?

If she stayed would her life to come be any different?

In anybody’s eyes was there a difference between belonging to the parsonage and belonging to the Sparrow place?

No one was taking her away, she was going of her own free will.

With a sudden impulse she dropped her satchel in Aunt Rody’s empty chair and ran up the kitchen stairs to stay a few moments alone in the chamber her mother used to have when she was a little girl.

XXVII. HIS VERY BEST.

Judith stood on the parsonage piazza; a voice within was unfamiliar, then in a change of tone she recognized something and was reminded of her afternoon at Meadow Centre; that laugh she had heard before, it was not Don—it was—the face at the window looked out into the shadows,—it was Richard King. He was a strong tower; he was safe, like her parsonage life; she would go in and feel at home. No new face or voice would ever come between and keep her away. Across the room, as she discovered by a peep through the curtains, Marion sat with some of her usual pretty work in her hand; Roger was not there.

“In the excavations in Babylon,” Mr. King went on in easy continuation of the subject in hand, “a collection of bowls was found, inscribed with adjurations of all sorts of spirits by name, and with indications that could not be mistaken of medicines they once held. You know, that capital R with which the physician heads his prescription, believing it stands for Recipe, in the days of superstition was understood to be an appeal to Jupiter.”

“That was consistent,” Marion replied, still bending over her work.

“Imagine our physicians writing at the head of a prescription: In the name of Jesus Christ.”

“As Peter did when he healed the lame man.”

“Our old Meadow Brook physician prays with his patients very often; I tell him he leaves nothing for the parson to do.”

“Roger says sometimes the doctor has a way of getting nearer our Bensalem people than he has.”

“I am not sure of that. They tell the doctor a different kind of trouble. You would be amazed—if you were not the minister’s sister—at the histories people tell me about themselves, and their neighbors.”

“I am always delighted that people have a story to tell. When I first came to Bensalem I thought no man, woman, or child, lived a life worth living. Now I know the sweetest stories. Aunt Affy is one, and Nettie Evans, and even her hard-featured mother brims over once in a while with an experience.”

The coming back from Babylon to Bensalem brought Judith to the consciousness that she might be considered an eavesdropper; at that instant Roger entered in his shirt-sleeves, remarking: “Let’s be informal, like Wordsworth. He used to take out his teeth evenings when he did not expect callers.”

“But you have a caller,” remonstrated Marion, when the laughter ceased.

“Yes, and here’s another one,” Roger replied, as Judith walked softly in. “Judith, must I put on my coat? I’ve been potting plants for Marion and I couldn’t afford to soil my coat.”

“Yes,” said Judith, who was always on Marion’s side in influencing the Bensalem minister to remember the claims of society.

“I wish you had stayed at home. What are you looking so full of news about?”

“I have come back—to stay. No one else in the world wants me.”

“And we don’t,” declared Roger.

Something in the gleam of the eyes under Richard King’s tangled eyebrows was a revelation to Marion. She knew his secret. She would keep it. Roger was stupid, he would never guess. But how could she keep it from Judith? Poor little Judith, was she growing up to have a love story? To-night Marion did not like love stories.

She wished the tall girl with the serious eyes and braided hair were a little girl with long curls.

“Did you get a letter from Don to-night?” Roger asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you like it?”

“I—think I like it. It will not make any difference to me—only the difference that it hasn’t made.”

“A good distinction,” remarked Richard King.

“May I go upstairs, Marion?”

“Surely—your room has been waiting for you as the Holy Land waited for the Israelites to return from their captivity; nobody spoiled either, or occupied either.”

“Mine was not seventy years,” said Judith, “although sometimes it seemed like it.”

Marion did not follow her; it would not be an easy thing to talk to Judith about Don’s marriage; she was relieved that the only view the girl would take of it would be in regard to the difference it made to herself.

When Judith returned, feeling as much at home as though she had been away but for a night, Marion was matching silks for her work, and the gentlemen were talking, sitting opposite each other in the bay window.

It had been so long since she had heard Roger talk; that “talk” was one of the delights of her parsonage life. She had heard him preach but once during her stay at Aunt Affy’s.

“That point about praying came up,” Mr. King was saying, “and I am not satisfied with the answer I gave. The man gave his experience—it was an experience of years—and then he asked me what was the matter with his prayer, and I decidedly did not know. I know he has fulfilled the conditions, praying in faith, and in the name of Christ, and the thing prayed for was innocent in itself. He said, ‘What is the matter with me?’ and I could not tell. He went away unsatisfied. I went down on my knees, you may be sure, thinking something was the matter with me because I had no illumination for him.”

Roger’s strong, brown hand was stretched along the arm of his chair; he looked down at his fingers in deep thought.

“He said he had been praying months to learn if the petition in itself were not acceptable to God, and had, he thought, studied a hundred prayers in the Bible, comparing his prayer with the acceptable and unacceptable prayers of the old saints.”

“He is determined to get at the bottom of it,” said Roger.

“I never saw a man more determined. I quoted Phillips Brooks to him: ‘You have not got your answer, but you have got God.’”

“He was not satisfied with that getting?”

“No. He said he knew he should not be satisfied until he had God’s answer to himself. I think he has almost lost sight of the thing he was anxious for when he began to pray. It has been worth a course in theology to him.”

Marion dropped her silks; Judith was listening with all the eagerness of her childhood. She felt sure Aunt Affy could explain the difficulty.

“The thing that strikes me,” began Roger, “is that he may be like those men sent to the house of God to inquire about fasting.”

“Well?” questioned Richard King.

“These men went to pray before the Lord and to ask a question. Their question was about fasting; but fasting has to do with praying—your friend has certainly been in a weeping and fasting spirit. They asked: Should I weep in the fifth month separating myself, as I have done these so many years?

“The Lord’s answer came through the prophet Zechariah. He understood all about that so many years separating themselves and fasting. He told them the fasting was not so much to him as for them to hear the words which the Lord hath cried by the former prophets. They might better study his revealed will than seek to find a new answer to this question of fasting. The fasting in itself was all right if they wished to fast. ‘When ye fasted did ye do it to me?’ he asked. ‘When ye did eat and when ye did drink, did ye not eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves?’ In feasting and fasting they had been selfish. Then he gives them plain words of command, like the plain words the former prophets had spoken. Obedience was better than fasting; better even than coming to him to inquire about fasting. There is a parallel in the history of one of Joshua’s prayers. He could not understand why the people should flee before their enemies. Then he rent his clothes and fell to the earth, the elders, also, all day, with dust on their heads; praying and fasting.

“But the Lord’s answer was: ‘Get thee up; wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?’

“Tell your old man praying and fasting are good, but sometimes God has enough of them. He prefers obedience. The conditions of the covenant had been violated by disobedience in both instances. Praying in faith, and in the name of Christ, are but two conditions; hearing and obeying is a third condition. Your man may be in the midst of a very interesting experience, but I would advise him to stop questioning the Lord, and try what a little obedience would do.”

“But, he’s a good man, Roger,” urged Judith, “only a good man could bear a trial like that.”

“Good men have favorite little ways of disobedience, sometimes; God’s own remedy is more obedience.”

“I wish we could know all about it—the rest of the story, and, if he ever has his prayer,” said Marion, to whom “people” were becoming a real and live interest.

“Joshua had his prayer. The story of Ai is the story of how God answers prayer when he has made way for it; it shows his disciplinary government; it places obedience before all things; obedience makes God’s answers to prayer a natural proceeding.”

“I’m afraid I have depended too much on prayer,” Judith answered, troubled.

“Oh, no,” Mr. King reassured her, “only you have not depended enough on obedience. I will call upon my old man to-morrow and tell him these two stories of disciplinary government.”

“You are not going home, to-night, old fellow,” urged Roger, “the girls will give us some music. We four will make a fine quartette.”

“Miss Judith, did you know I have a housekeeper?” he asked, turning brightly to Judith.

“I am very glad.”

“So are we all of us,” declared Roger.

“A man and his wife I have taken in. She’s a good cook; the house is a different affair; I wish you would come and see. The man gets work among the farmers and takes care of my horse, which I used to do myself. They are both grateful for a home and I am very happy to be set in a family.”

Judith fell asleep thinking of Aunt Rody’s beef-tea, and wondering if Aunt Affy would remember to keep the water bag at her poor, cold feet.

It was luxury to be at home again; to be at home and in the way of obedience. That was God’s will on earth as it was in Heaven.

The next day the gentlemen went fishing and Marion and Judith kept the long day to themselves. In the afternoon Marion and Nettie had their weekly history talk, and, Judith shut herself up in the study and wrote a story about a girl who learned a new lesson in the way of obedience. The story was from a child’s standpoint; in writing for children she was keeping her heart as fresh as the heart of a little child.

“Judith,” said Roger that evening as the “quartette” were together in the study, “I have a thought of work for you; you smell work from afar as the warhorse scents the battle; how would you like to write up the childhood of a dozen famous women? The study itself will be delightful, and the writing more so. Call the series: ‘When I was a Girl.’”

“I would like it,” was the unhesitating reply, “if I can do it.”

“You can do it. You can do anything you like.”

“Then I will,” she decided, thus encouraged.

“But the books?” said Richard King, ready to place his own bookshelves at her service.

“Oh, the books are easily found. There’s our school library, and the Public Library in Dunellen, and everybody’s house to ransack in Bensalem. Besides, my own library is no mean affair. Books and fishing are my laziness and luxury. No hurried work, Judith, remember. You shall not read the first one of the series to me until a month from to-day.”

“Are you such a slow worker yourself?” Roger’s friend inquired.

“I am a plodder. And I believe in other people plodding. I believe that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. I have sermons laid away to mellow that I’ve been six months on.”

“But you do other writing and studying in the mean time,” said Judith.

“Oh, yes, while the seed is sprouting.”

“Kenney, you are planning something.”

“Yes, I am planning to salt down a barrel of sermons before I take a new charge.”

“Mellowing, salting, sprouting,” laughed Judith.

“Roger, a new charge!” exclaimed Marion, startled.

“A new charge, my dear sister. I am too small for Bensalem, they need a bigger man here.”

“But, Roger,” remonstrated Judith, with big, distressed eyes; “will you not give dear, little Bensalem your best?”

“My very best,” he answered, solemnly.

XXVIII. A NEW ANXIETY.

It was chilly that evening in the old rooms of the house with three windows in the roof; Roger Kenney’s father and mother sat near the grate in the front parlor; curtains and portieres were dropped, the piano lamp with its crimson silk shade threw a glow over the two faces sitting in cosy content opposite each other. The house was still; the girls, Martha and Lou, and the two boys, Maurice and John, had gone down town to an illustrated lecture on India; the maid had her evening out; even Nip, the house-dog, had gone out for an evening ramble; the two “old people,” as in their early sixties they loved to call each other, were alone with each other and a new anxiety.

Mr. Kenney told his wife that nothing in the world made her quite so happy as a new worry, and he wished he could get one for her oftener.

“This will do for awhile,” she remarked; “but this isn’t as bad as that old trouble of Marion’s; a man can work himself out; and Roger has work enough on hand for two worries.”

“Now, what are you going to do about this?” inquired her husband, folding the evening’s paper and laying it upon his knee. “You sent Marion to Bensalem for her charm; will you get Roger away for his?”

“That would do no good,” she replied, discontentedly, “he would not be got away in the first place, and Judith is not a fixture in Bensalem.”

“Judith is worth having,” was the complacent reply.

“That’s the worst of it. So was Don Mackenzie.”

“It’s the best of it, I think. You wouldn’t have your boys and girls carried away by somebody not worth having.”

“But, then, being disappointed in somebody might help them bear it, and turn them around to look at somebody else.”

“A disappointment like that is poor consolation.”

“I don’t suppose the disappointment is the consolation. The somebody else is.”

“You never had the consolation of the somebody else.”

“I have only had the consolation of you,” she retorted.

“Marion has never taken up with anybody,” he said, reflectively.

“She has had no chance—”

“That you know,” he interrupted.

“—That I know,” she accepted meekly, “excepting David Prince.”

“She wouldn’t look at him.”

“No, she wouldn’t. He was younger in the first place—and so different from Don.”

“I’d like to see that English beauty Don has married.”

“How do you know she is a beauty?” asked Marion’s mother, with a touch of jealousy.

“Oh, he wrote that to Roger in his first young admiration. An orphan, living with an uncle, years younger, a capricious beauty, with a little money; wasn’t that the description?”

“Something like it. Marion has carried herself well about this marriage.”

“Why shouldn’t she? She had nothing to carry herself about.”

“You don’t know girls. A memory is a memory.”

“How do you know?” he laughed.

“But this is not helping us out about Roger,” she remarked, ignoring his words and laugh.

“Roger will help himself out; he isn’t his father’s son for nothing.”

“As Marion was not her mother’s girl for nothing,” was the demure reply.

“How do you know—how can you be so certain sure that he wants Judith?”

“She is the very light of his eyes. She has been for years. A mother can see. The thought of her is always about him.”

“Does Marion see it?” Roger’s father inquired, convinced. He had a thorough respect for his wife’s judgment.

“No; that’s the queer part of it. I think Roger is guarded with her. He never had a secret from his mother.”

“Young men never have,” the young man’s father threw in.

“But I know Roger; I wouldn’t be afraid to ask him.”

“Then, why don’t you?”

“Because I know without asking,” she silenced him.

“Now, to come back to the starting point—what do you intend to do about it?”

“Bring Judith here,” she replied impressively.

“That’s a fine move; an effectual separation.”

“If I could send her anywhere else he would think it his duty to go and see her, he would have to know how she was doing—pay her bills, and so forth. There’s no one else to be a father to her. Mrs. Brush leaves everything with him. She has no knowledge of any world outside of that village.”

“Perhaps she is trying to catch him for Judith.”

“Such a worldly thought would never enter her dear, pretty, simple, shrewd head. She has her catch, and she didn’t catch him with guile. She would rather keep Judith than set her on the throne of England. That’s out of the question.”

“Well, I do see that point about bringing her here. He can see her naturally here; nothing to thwart him; she’s such a girl, no older than Martha—you never have any scares about Martha.”

“Martha has never been thrown so with anybody, I wouldn’t allow it. I try to be always on the safe side?”

“You didn’t seem to be on Judith’s safe side.”

“I couldn’t. Nobody asked me. There she was studying at the parsonage, before I knew it.”

“She was only a child then.”

“And I thought it such a good outlet for Marion—it was one of the first things that roused her—that and her Outing Society. My only fear was that she was taking Judith up for the sake of her Cousin Don. His influence somehow seems to run through everything. But I know better now. Judith won her own way. But I didn’t know I was sacrificing Roger to Marion.”

“How could you have hindered?”

“I could have brought Marion home,” she answered, decidedly.

“And spoiled the good Bensalem was doing for her.”

“Oh, dear,” with a sigh, “how lives are tangled up.”

“And it’s rather dangerous for our fingers to get into the tangle,” he suggested, with mild reproof.

“But we must do something,” she exclaimed, in despair.

“Well, yes, I suppose so—when the time comes.”

“Well, the time has come now.”

“I don’t see anything the matter with Roger. He can walk ten miles on a stretch, he rides horseback, he cuts his own kindling wood and makes his own garden, he gives his people two strong sermons a week, beside the prayer meeting and weekly lectures; he goes hunting with one of his deacons and talks farming with another; he neglects nobody, and works like a drum-major. He isn’t hurt.”

“But he will be. Judith will refuse him.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because she has never thought of such a thing.”

“I grant that. Why should she? But she will think of it when he suggests it.”

“She will not think of it as he does. He is an old fellow to her; let me see; she was thirteen when she went to Bensalem, and he was—how queer for me to forget—he was twenty-six, just twice her age.”

“He isn’t twice her age now,” observed Mr. Kenney, comically.

“And a woman is always older than a man,” Mrs. Kenney, reflected. “She is nearer his age then, I think, childish as she is. With her hair up she does look older; it’s those blue eyes like a baby, and that complexion. I told Roger she might sit for a picture of Priscilla the Puritan maiden, in her new-fashioned, old-fashioned dress, and he said he had thought of it himself. But, now, Roger,” with a deprecating little appeal, “it will do no harm to bring her here.”

“Not the least bit in the world,” he consented, cheerfully.

XXIX. JUDITH’S “FUTURE.”

Exactly a month from the day Roger planned the Girl Papers for her, Judith knocked at the study door with her manuscript in her hand. She had written three papers; if he took sufficient interest in the first she would read the others.

Beside the education for herself she had another thought in writing them; she would send them to some child’s paper and earn money. She knew that Marion had never depended upon the parsonage for money; every month her father sent her a check; she had no father to send her a check. No money had come to her from her Cousin Don since his hurried marriage. Probably he considered her old enough to earn money for herself. It would be hard to tell Aunt Affy when she needed a dress, or shoes, or money, when she was not doing anything for Aunt Affy’s comfort.

Last Sunday she had no money for Sunday-school or church; she had no money for anything.

Her last story had been refused, and how she had cried over the refusal. It was even hard to laugh when Roger told her that Queen Victoria had sent an article to a paper under a “pen-name” and it had been “returned with thanks.” She wished she were a dressmaker like Agnes Trembly, or that she could go into a farmer’s kitchen, like Jean Draper’s sister Lottie, and earn money and not be ashamed.

“Come in,” called Roger from among his books.

Her eyes were suspiciously red, she was relieved that his back was toward her; he wheeled around in his chair as she seated herself, and looked as though he had nothing in the world to do but listen to her.

“Have you leisure to hear my Girl Papers?” she asked, with some embarrassment. “They are horrid. I tried an essay, and failed. It was stilted and stupid. I can make girls talk, so I threw my garnered information into a conversation. But you may not care for this style.”

“I can bear anything,” he said, making a comical effort at self-control.

After the first was read, with an inward quaking, she was delighted with his word of encouragement:

“Read the others; I cannot know how bad they are until you read them all.”

More hopefully she began the second paper, which she read in a clear, conversational tone:—

“Do you know,” began grandmother, “who said that she could be happy anywhere with good health and a bit of marble?”

And then we were all astir with eager interest.

“Rosa Bonheur was ‘happy anywhere’ with canvas, colors, and brush; and this girl loved marble just as well, and brought breathing life out of the cold marble, as Rosa brought it out on her canvas. But Harriet was an American child, born into a luxurious home, with no brothers or sisters, and her mother soon died and left her alone with her father. Her mother died with consumption, and her father had buried his other child besides Harriet with the same disease, so no wonder he was afraid for his little girl, and determined to give her a playful childhood in air and sunshine. Harriet Hosmer was born in Watertown, Mass., October 9th, 1830.”

“And now she’s older than you are, grandmother,” said Bess. “I like to know about when grandmothers were little girls.”

“But she and Rosa Bonheur are not grandmothers. They have had canvas and marble instead of a home with children and grandchildren in it. As soon as little Harriet was old enough a pet dog was given to her, and she ornamented it with ribbons and bells. Instead of tin cup and iron spoon, which Rosa had, she revelled in all the pretty things that children love. The River Charles ran past her home; her father gave her a boat and told her to take her air and sunshine on the water and learn to develop her muscles by the oars. And then he had built for her a Venetian gondola with velvet cushions and silver prow.

“‘She will be spoiled,’ the neighbors foreboded, but her wise father was not afraid; he knew how much happiness his child could bear and not be rendered selfish. The next thing to help her become strong was a gun; she soon became what your brothers would call a good shot. By and by you will know how strong her hands and arms became and what she could do with them. All this time, just as you are, girls, these common days, she was being made ready for her own special work.”

Juliet grew radiant. She was hoping for “special work.”

“Her room was a museum. Gathered and prepared by her own eager and wise hands she had beetles, snakes, bats, birds, stuffed or preserved in spirits. From the egg of a sea gull and the body of a kingfisher she made an ink-stand; she climbed to the top of a tree for a crow’s nest. Miles and miles she learned to walk without being wearied. In her work and habits and strength she was like a boy. She was fond of books, but just as fond of the clay-pit in her garden where, to her father’s delight as well as her own, she molded dogs and horses.

“When Harriet Hosmer was taken to a famous school (at home they called her ‘happy Hatty’) the teacher said: ‘I have a reputation for training wild colts; I will try this one.’ She stayed three years. On her return home she began to take lessons in drawing, modeling, and in anatomical studies, often walking fourteen miles to Boston and back, with hours of work and study. Was not that a day’s work? She went to the Medical College of St. Louis to take a thorough course in anatomy.”

“You have to know things to get things out of marble,” remarked Ethel.

“Grandmother, how hard girls can work!” exclaimed Nan, who did not love work.

“After she had finished her studies she traveled alone to New Orleans, and then north to the Falls of St. Anthony, smoking the pipe of peace with the chief of the Dakota Indians, explored lead mines in Dubuque, and scaled a high mountain to which her name was afterward given.”

“That was fun,” said Nan. “I’m glad she had some fun with her hard work.”

“After work in her studio at home her father sent her to Rome. Girl as she was, in her studio at home she wielded for eight or ten hours a day a leaden mallet weighing four pounds and a half. And it was then she told a friend that she would not be homesick, for she could be happy anywhere with good health and a bit of marble. For seven years she worked on her ‘bit of marble’ in Rome. She made beautiful and wonderful things with her good health and her marble, with hard work, and the insight into beauty that God, who makes all beautiful things, gave to this ready and obedient child.

“The first work she copied for her teacher was the Venus of Milo; when almost completed the iron, which held the clay firm, snapped, and all her work was spoiled.”

“Oh!” sighed Ethel.

“But she did not shriek nor cry herself to sleep (that anybody knew), but bravely went to work again. Her works were exhibited in Boston and much admired. Her teacher said he had never seen surpassed her genius of imitating the roundness and softness of flesh. Look at other marble statues and see if the flesh looks soft and round like Harriet’s. One of her works, a girl lying asleep, was exhibited in London and in several American cities. She said once she would work as though she had to earn her daily bread, and, strange to tell, very soon after that her father wrote that he had lost his property and could send her no more money. And then she hired a cheap room, sold her handsome saddle-horse, and went to work in reality to earn her daily bread. Her first work, in her time of sorrow, was a fun-loving, four-year-old child. With the several copies she made from it she earned for her daily bread thirty thousand dollars.”

“And oh! grandmother,” I said (for I am a poor girl myself), “when our heavenly Father has work for us to do, it doesn’t matter whether we are born poor or rich.”

“Either way it takes hard work,” said grandmother.

With a shy glance into his satisfied face she opened her third paper:—

“Children have more need of models than of critics,” said grandmother, “therefore I will give you another model to-night. You will think I am always choosing for you stories of girls that work; but where can I find models of any other kind? What do girls amount to who think only of their own pleasure, and never persevere to the successful end? Now I will tell you about a girl who came in womanhood to live in an observatory. This is her home. She is a dear old lady with white hair, dressed in gray or brown, in rather Quakerish fashion. She said to the girls she teaches: ‘All the clothing I have on cost but seventeen dollars.’ In this unusual home (she is not a grandmother, either), she keeps the things she loves best,—her books, her pictures, her astronomical clock, and a bust of Mary Somerville, of whom I will tell you some time.”

“And then we will remember that her bust is in somebody’s observatory home,” said Bess.

“It is not a wonder that Maria Mitchell has great respect for girls who do something, and for idle girls none at all. As Juliet was at Nantucket last summer she will be interested to know that Maria Mitchell was born in that quiet, delightful place. She was in a home of ten children. Her mother was a Quaker girl, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin. Her father was a school teacher. Little Maria went to school to her father. At school she studied, and with ten little people at home, what do you think she did? She herself calls her work, ‘endless washing of dishes.’ The dishwashing never hindered. I think it helped. I believe in dishwashing. I wonder what this little girl would have thought of the dishwasher that some people have in their kitchens, and is warranted to wash sixty-five dishes (in the smaller affair) at once, in the soap-sudsy, steamy, crank-turning space of three blessed minutes. And all dried, too. But in her observatory she had no need to think of dishwashing. Like Rosa Bonheur, and Harriet Hosmer, she had a good father and a wise father. When he was eight years old his father called him to the door to look at the planet Saturn, and from that time the boy calculated his age from the position of the planet, year by year.”

“Then it began with her grandfather,” said Juliet, who liked to find the beginnings of things.

“Her father had a little observatory of his own, on his own land, that he might study the stars. So it is no marvel that his daughter is ending her useful days in a big observatory. When Maria went to her observatory, her father was seventy years of age; he needed her as nurse and companion, but he said, ‘Go, and I will go with you.’”

“This is the loveliest story of all,” exclaimed Grace, who loves her own old father dearly.

“For four years her father lived to be proud of her, and enjoyed her work and her pupils at Vassar College. When Maria was a girl her father could see no reason why she should not become as well educated as his boys, so he gave her, as to them, a special drill in navigation.”

“Grandmother,” asked Ethel, “did you know all these little girls when they were little?”

“No, darling,” said grandmother, “I found out about them in books. And telling you about the girls is getting you ready to read about them all the little things the world has a right to know. For they belong to the whole world. Maria did not learn fancy work. I can guess what she would say of some girls who care more for fancy stitches than for studies. She has said, ‘A woman might be learning seven languages while she is learning fancy work.’ Still, girls, educate your fingers, and make your homes pretty and attractive. But don’t let stitches hinder the stars—God has his place for both.”

“Yes, the women worked pretty things for the Tabernacle,” I said. (For I love to make pretty things.)

“But she did know how to knit, and she knit stockings a yard long for her father as long as he lived. She studied while she knit, as I used to do when I was a little girl. When she was a little girl how she did read! Before she was ten years old she read through Rollin’s Ancient History.

“One night in October, 1847, she was gazing through her telescope, and what do you think she saw? An unknown comet. She was afraid it was an old story. Frederick VI., King of Denmark, sixteen years before, had offered a gold medal to the person who should discover a telescopic comet. And the little Nantucket girl, who had knitted stockings a yard long, and washed endless dishes, discovered the telescopic comet, and to her was awarded the gold medal. And now the scientific journals announced Miss Mitchell’s comet. In England she was eagerly welcomed by Sir John and Lady Herschel, and Alexander Von Humboldt took her beside him on a sofa and talked to her about everybody he knew and everything he knew. And, oh! the other great people who were glad to see her. She saw in Rome Frederika Bremer, of whose comical, interesting, sad girlhood I must tell you some day. But I musn’t forget the little house Maria bought for her father before she went to the observatory of Vassar College. It cost sixteen hundred and fifty dollars, and she saved the money out of her yearly salary of one hundred dollars, and what she could earn in government work.”

“I don’t think I mind washing dishes so much now,” declared Nan.

And we all laughed.

“Good,” exclaimed Judith’s listener. “Keep on with the dozen, and salt them down. When I Was a Boy series will be a good thing for you. Judith, honest, now, would you rather go away to school this winter, or read and write with Marion and me?”

“Study with you,” was the quick decision; “I can think of nothing in the world I would like so well.”

“Then that is settled,” he replied with satisfaction; “I feared you would be restless. You are at the frisky and restless age. Marion was sure you would not be.”

“But—” Judith hesitated and colored painfully, “if I am to teach by and by, would it be better for me to go to school? I can borrow the money and then earn it by teaching and repay Aunt Affy.”

“We are not making a teacher of you; we are making an educated woman—”

“But, Roger,” she persisted, “unless I go back to Aunt Affy I must support myself. I am not willing to be dependent upon any one except Aunt Affy.”

“Upon whom are you dependent now? Are you not earning your board by being co-operative housekeeper?”

“If you and Marion think so.”

“Ask Marion.”

“But I would like to ask you, too?”

“I thought my little sister had more delicacy of feeling than to ask such a question.”

“Roger, don’t be a goose,” she said, indignantly, “that was all very well when I was a child. You forget that I am grown up.”

“You will not let me forget it.”

“I wish you not to forget it. In the spring, on my nineteenth birthday, I shall decide upon my future. Just think, I have a future,” she laughed. “I am only too glad of the study and music this winter. Then I shall go out into the world, or go back to Aunt Affy. I do not mean to be too proud—” with a quiver of the lip.

“Only just proud enough. You are exactly that. Let us live in peace this winter, and then your nineteenth birthday may do its worst for us all.”

“You will not be serious,” she answered, with vexed tears; “my life is a great deal to me.”

“It is a great deal to us all, dear. Work and be patient, and you will have as happy an ending as any story you write.”

“My children end as children,” she said, with a quick laugh. “I shouldn’t know what to do with them if they grew up.”

“There is One who does know what to do with his children when they grow up,” said Roger, bending as he stood beside her and touching her lips with his own. It was the first time he had ever kissed her. She took the kiss as gravely and simply as it was given. Something was sealed between them. She would never be proud with him again.

“I will not kiss you again,” said Roger to himself, “until you promise to be my wife.”

That afternoon Roger asked Marion to drive to Meadow Centre.

“I am glad you did not ask Judith,” replied Marion, with something in her voice.

“Why not?” he asked, indignantly, “why shouldn’t I ask Judith to drive with me?”

“My point was not driving with you, but driving to Meadow Centre.”

“I confess I do not understand you.”

“I knew you didn’t. Men are blind creatures.”

“Then open the eyes of one blind creature.”

“Haven’t you seen that Mr. King is interested in Judith?” she asked, somewhat impatiently.

“We are all interested in Judith.”

“Not just as he is. You are not,” looking straight into his frank, smiling eyes.

“You don’t mean—”

“Yes, I do mean—”

“What about her?” he asked with the color hot in his face. But Marion was a “blind creature” then and did not see.

“I don’t know about her. She isn’t grown up enough to think. But I know he is wonderfully attractive to her.”

“He’s a good fellow. I will not stand in his way.”

“For pity’s sake, Roger, don’t think you must do anything,” cried Marion, dismayed; “let her alone. He will take care of himself.”

“I shall certainly let her alone. He is so artless that he will be taken care of. It is like him to stumble into the best thing in the universe and then wonder how he ever got it.”

“I hope you don’t call Meadow Centre one of the best things,” retorted Marion.

“It’s a good place for a man to make something of himself; he is writing sermons that will make a stir somewhere. Meadow Centre is to him what Paul’s three years in Arabia were to him.”

“Then we must do our best to make Judith ready—”

“What a plotter you are,” he exclaimed, angrily; then, more quietly: “But we will make Judith ready,” and he walked off with a laugh that was a mixture of things.

This day, in which God’s daily bread and his daily will were given to Judith as upon all the other days, was one of the very happiest days of her happy life.

Roger’s kiss gave her an undefined sense of safety and protection; if she were not wise enough to decide when the time came she would take refuge in that safety and protection, and—another kiss.

That evening Joe came for her, saying Aunt Rody was worse. She went home with him, and “watched” with Aunt Affy, until poor Aunt Rody passed away from the home she had toiled so unceasingly for and taken so little comfort in. One week she stayed with Aunt Affy: “I miss her so,” wept Aunt Affy broken-heartedly; “I never was in the world without her before.”

“I suppose we musn’t keep you, Judith,” Uncle Cephas remarked one evening behind his newspaper.

“Not yet,” said Judith. “I want to be as busy as a bee this winter to get ready for something.”

“Then we will have to adopt Joe; we must have some young thing about the house.”

Judith’s first words to Roger and Marion as they went out to welcome her on the piazza were in a burst: “I do think those two old people growing old together is the loveliest thing I ever saw.”

“How young must two people begin to grow old together?” inquired Roger, comically.

“As soon as they think about growing old,” said Marion.

“Then I will not begin to think until my birthday,” said Judith. “Marion, I am too happy in having two homes. Some better girl than I should have them.”

“You forget your third home in England,” remarked Roger, seriously.

“Oh, poor Don. Roger, I am afraid Don isn’t happy,” she said, with slow emphasis.

What Roger thought he did not say.

Don’s letters were brief, constrained; Judith’s letter to her “new, dear Cousin Florence” had met with no response—that Judith knew.