“There is nothing which faith does not overcome; nothing
which it will not accept.”
—Bishop Huntington.
“Roger,” began Judith, doubtfully.
“Begin again, I don’t like that tone.”
“I was afraid you were thinking—”
“I should be sorry not to be.”
“I was afraid you were thinking too deeply to be disturbed.”
“Then I shouldn’t be disturbed; my mind would be absent from my ear and I should not hear that doubtful appeal. The doubt is what I object to.”
Marion and her mother had not returned from their drive to Meadow Centre, where Mrs. Kenney had a school friend. They intended to “spend an old-fashioned day,” Mrs. Kenney remarked at the breakfast table; it was five o’clock in the November afternoon and the old-fashioned day was not yet ended.
Judith and her fancy work, covers for Nettie’s bureau, had taken possession of the light in the bay window; as the light faded, she sat thinking with her work in her lap. Roger entered and threw himself upon the lounge, clasping his hands above his head; his thinking was weaving itself in and out of a suggestion of his mother’s that she should take Judith home for the winter.
To the suggestion he had replied nothing at all.
“Then the doubt is gone,” answered Judith, brightly. “I do not know how to put my thought.”
“Isn’t that rather a new experience?”
“It is the experience of every day,” she answered, unmindful of his teasing. “I wonder why God keeps us so much in the dark.”
“Perhaps we keep ourselves in the dark.”
“That is what I wanted to know.”
“Can you tell me exactly what you mean? Are you in the dark about anything?”
“About everything,” she exclaimed with such energy that his only reply was a laugh.
“Just now I mean one special thing that I cannot tell you about.”
“O, Judith, are you growing up to have secrets?” he groaned.
“I am growing up with secrets. Aunt Rody used to exasperate me by telling me I would ‘outgrow’ something, when all the time I knew I was growing into something.”
“Growing into a new thing is the best way to outgrow an old thing.”
“Then I am satisfied about something.”
Roger wished that he could be—about something.
“I wish I could tell you. But I don’t know why I shouldn’t. I’m afraid Marion doesn’t care for Mr. King, and I want her to so much.”
In the twilight she could not see the illumination in the face across the room on the lounge.
He was satisfied about something.
“What are you getting down into?” he asked jubilantly.
“Why,” pricking her work with her needle, “I think he—cares a great deal, and he is so splendid that I want her to care. How they would work together. Bensalem has been getting her ready.”
“Well, I declare!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.
“Are you displeased?”
“There’s nothing to be displeased about. Is this the way girls plot against each other? No wonder we men have to tread softly.”
“It isn’t plotting exactly. It’s only hoping.”
“Is that your secret?”
“Yes, and don’t you tell,” she said, alarmed.
“No; it shall be my secret; yours and mine. Now what are we going to do about it?”
“We cannot do anything. She admires him around the edges, somehow. And he’s as shy of her as he can be. I seem to be always interpreting them to each other.”
He laughed, greatly amused.
“In spite of my selecting the most innocent love-stories for you, you have grown up to the depth, or height, of this. I’ll never dare put a finger in a girl’s education again.”
“But, Roger—”
“Don’t ask me to help you out.”
“Marion will not. She doesn’t seem to understand anything.”
“No wonder,” thought Roger, remembering her early experience; “she has been a burnt child; she’ll never play with that kind of fire again.”
Aloud he replied: “She needs a wise head like yours. What would you advise her to do?”
“To be natural; just her own self, and she isn’t. I believe she’s afraid.”
“So will you be when you are as old as she is.”
“I don’t know what to be afraid of.”
“May you never know. Is that all you are in the dark about?” he questioned, seating himself in his study chair, and wheeling around to face the girl in the bay window.
A girl in blue, as she was when she sat in the bay window in Summer Avenue and wrote letters to Aunt Affy; the same trustful eyes, loving mouth, and yellow head.
Now, as then, she did not know what to be afraid of. It was only this last month that she had brought her questions to Roger. Marion had not grown ahead of her to answer her. And Aunt Affy had been so absorbed in Aunt Rody this last year that she had feared to trouble her with questions.
“I have a book-full of questions laid up for you; rather the answers would be a book-full. Life seems full of questions. There’s always something to ask about everything I read.”
“Ask the next book.”
“The next book doesn’t always know.”
“The next person may not always know.”
“I can easily find out,” she laughed.
Then she became grave, and, after a moment’s silence, said: “I wish I knew why we couldn’t have an idea, as we pray a long time for something, whether it were going to be given us or not.”
“Something that you have no special promise for?”
“Yes; something in the ‘what-so-ever.’ It does seem so hard to have it grow darker and harder, and not to know whether you may keep on or not; whether giving up would be in faith—or despair.”
“Judith, you’ve touched a sensitive point in many a heart that keeps on praying.”
“Do you know?” she asked.
“I can tell you a story.”
His story was all she desired.
“You know when Jairus came to the Lord to plead for his daughter, he fell at his feet and besought him greatly, saying: ‘My little daughter lieth at the point of death.’ Then Jesus went with him. We do not know what he said, but he went with him. Then, as they went together, the crowd came to a stand-still that the Lord might perform a miracle and answer the prayer of a touch. But, by this time, Jesus had been so long on the way that news came of the death of the little daughter. It was too late. She was dead. They said to the father: ‘Why troublest thou the Master any further?’ He might as well go home to his dead child, the Master had not cared to hasten—this woman was not at the point of death, she might have been healed another day. But think of the comfort: as soon as Jesus heard the message, he said to the father: ‘Be not afraid; only believe.’ Is he not saying that every hour to us who are fainting because he is so long on the way?”
“Yes,” said Judith, “but he did not say he would raise her from the dead. Perhaps the ruler did not know he had power to raise from the dead.”
“No; he only said: Be not afraid: only believe. Is not that assurance enough for you?”
“Now, don’t think I am dreadfully wicked, but I know I am; I want him to say: ‘Be not afraid, I know she is dead, but I have power enough for that; believe I can do that. He did not tell him what to believe.”
“He told him to believe in the sympathy and power that had just healed this woman who had been incurable twelve years, all the years his daughter had been living.”
“But,” persisted Judith, “he might believe that, for he had just seen it; but to raise from the dead was beyond everything he had seen, and Christ gave him no promise for that.”
“Perhaps he believed that the Master had power in reserve—he surely knew he was going to his house for something—he did not bid him believe, and then turn back; he went on with him to his house.”
“Now you have said what I wanted. It was the going on with him that kept up his faith. As long as Jesus kept on going his way he couldn’t but believe. He gave him something even better than his word to believe in. I shouldn’t think he would be afraid of anything then.”
“Then don’t you be afraid of anything. Not until the Master turns and goes the other way.”
“He will never do that,” Judith said to herself.
The clock on the mantel struck the half hour: half-past five. Judith rolled up her work and went out to the kitchen. The tea kettle was singing on the range; everything was ready for the supper, biscuits and cake of her own making, jelly and fruit that she and Marion had put up together in the long summer days, to which she would add an omelet and creamed potatoes, for Roger was always hungry after a walk, and then coffee, for Mrs. Kenney would like coffee after her drive.
“I don’t mind now if my prayers do get stopped in the middle,” she thought as she arranged the pretty cups and saucers on the supper table, “if Jesus goes all the way with me—he will take care of the rest of it, and next year—if something dies this year, he can bring it to life next year. If He wants to; and I don’t want Him to, if He doesn’t want to.”
Roger came out into the kitchen to watch her as she moved about, and, to his own surprise, found himself asking her the question he had intended not to ask at all.
“Would you like to go back home with mother for the winter? You may have a music teacher, you have had none but Marion, and take lessons in anything and everything. Mother would like it very much,” he said, noting the gladness and gratitude in her face; “Martha will take your place here with Marion.”
“Oh, yes, I would like it,” she answered, doubtfully. “Did she propose it?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure you didn’t suggest it, even,” she questioned, still doubtfully.
“I am not unselfish enough for that,” he answered, dryly.
“But who would pay for it?” she questioned, with a flush of shame. “No; I will not go—until I earn money myself.”
“A letter came last night from your Cousin Don—I really believe I forgot to tell you—perhaps I was jealous of his right to spend money for you. He asked me to decide what would be best for you, from my knowledge of yourself, and said any amount would be forthcoming that your plans needed. His heart is in his native land still. He will never come home to stay as long as his wife”—“lives” in his thought was instantly changed to “objects” upon his lips.
“So you would really like to go back to city life?”
“Yes,” said Judith with slow decision.
Why should she not go home with John Kenney’s mother, she argued, as she stood silent before Roger. He was studying medicine in New York; he had written her once, only once, and then to tell her that he had decided upon the medical course: “If I cannot have something else I want I will have this. Life has got to have something for me.”
A week later Lottie Kindare had written one of her infrequent letters; the burden of the letter seemed to be a twenty-mile drive with John Kenney and an engagement to go to see pictures with him.
“I have always liked John, you know—John with the crimson name.” She was glad of both letters; they both revealed something she had no other way of learning. She had not hurt John beyond recovery, and Lottie would have something she wished for most.
“Don will be glad to take the responsibility of you. You give him another reason for staying alive.”
“Hasn’t he reasons enough—without me?”
“He ought to have,” was the serious reply. “Everybody should have, excepting yourself.”
“Myself appears to be the chief reason to me.”
“Take as much time as you like to decide—and remember, you go of your own free will.”
“Roger, you know it isn’t that I choose to go—” she began, earnestly.
“Oh, no,” he said, as he turned away, “not Caesar less, but Rome more.”
He went into the study and shut the door.
“The child, the child,” he groaned, “she has no more thought of me than—Uncle Cephas.”
When his mother and sister returned, and the supper bell rang, he opened the door to say to Marion that he would have no supper, he had work to do.
“Yes,” he thought grimly, “I have work to do—to fight myself into shape.”
“Like a blind spinner in the sun,
I tread my days;
I know that all the threads will run
Appointed ways;
I know each day will bring its task,
And, being blind, no more I ask.”
—H. H.
“I wish you would tell Judith Mackenzie all you know about women’s doings,” said Jean Draper Prince one morning late in November.
“I am ready to give the Bensalem girls a lecture upon what women outside of Bensalem are doing,” said the lady in the bamboo rocker with her knitting. “All the ambitious girls, all the discouraged girls.”
The bamboo rocker was Jean’s wedding present from Judith Mackenzie; Jean had told Mrs. Lane that the broad blue ribbon bow tied upon it was exactly the color of Judith’s eyes.
Mrs. Lane had not visited Bensalem since the summer she gave Jean Draper the inspiration of her outing; but many letters had kept alive her interest in the Bensalem girl, and kept growing the love and admiration of the village girl for the lady who lived in the world and knew all about it.
Jean said her loveliest wedding present was the week Mrs. Lane came to Bensalem to give to her. The loveliest wedding present was shared with Judith Mackenzie.
Jean’s husband was the village blacksmith; his new, pretty house was next door to his shop. It was not all paid for, and Jean was helping to pay for it by saving all the money she could out of her housekeeping. If she only might earn money, she sighed, but her husband laughed at the idea, saying his two strong hands were to be forever at her service.
The small parlor was in its usual pretty order; in the sitting-room were a flower stand, and a canary’s cage; Mrs. Lane preferred the sitting-room, but with her instinct that “company” should have the best room, Jean had urged her into the parlor, drawing down the shades a little that the sunlight should not fade the roses in the new carpet.
“Judith is the craziest girl about doing things,” replied Jean; “she is ambitious, and she thinks she must earn money. I told her you wrote for a paper that was full of business for women, and could tell her what to do.”
“What does she wish to do?”
“Study, and write—she writes the dearest little stories,—or anything else, if she cannot do that. She has ideas,” said Jean, gravely; “she is a rusher into new things. I wish she would be married and have a nice little home and care how the bread rises and the pudding comes out of the oven.”
“Isn’t she interested in housekeeping?”
“Oh, yes. But it is Miss Marion’s. Not her own. It is the own that makes the difference,” replied the girl-wife contentedly, nodding and smiling out the window to the man in shirt-sleeves and leather apron who stood in the doorway of the shop talking to the minister on horseback.
How could she ever tell Judith that Bensalem was gossiping about her staying at the parsonage?
“Your work is your own; it comes to be your own, whatever it is. Every girl cannot marry a blacksmith, Jean, and have a small home of her own.”
“I know it. I wish they could. What I wish most for Judith is for her to go back to Aunt Affy’s.”
That afternoon as the three sat together in the blacksmith’s parlor, Jean with towels she was hemming for her mother, and the other two with idle hands and work upon their laps, Jean suddenly asked Mrs. Lane to tell them about women and their doings.
“As I waited in the station for my train the day I came here,” began Mrs. Lane in the conversational tone of one prepared for a long talk, “a lady sat near me, also waiting, with a bag in her hand. I had a bag in my hand, but there was nothing unusual in mine; she told me she was going to Dunellen to take care of ladies’ finger-nails. She had a good business in Dunellen and the suburbs in summer, when the people were in their country homes; there were a few ladies who expected her that day.”
“I wouldn’t like to do that,” declared Jean, “although I would do almost anything to pay off our mortgage.”
“In Buffalo is a woman who runs a street-cleaning bureau; in Kansas City a woman is at the head of a fire department.”
“Worse and worse,” laughed Jean.
“A Louisville lady makes shopping trips to Paris.”
“Splendid,” exclaimed Jean, who still dreamed of outings.
“A lady in New York makes flat-furnishing a business.”
“That is making a home for other people,” said Jean.
“But her own at the same time,” answered Judith.
“New Hampshire has a woman president of a street railway company; and in Chicago is a woman who embalms—”
“Dead people,” interrupted Jean; “oh, dear me!”
“The world is learning the resources of the nineteenth century woman. A Swiss woman has invented a watch for the blind. The hours on the dial are indicated by pegs, which sink in, one every hour.”
“That is worth doing,” observed Judith; “I want to do real work. I know I do not mean my work to end with myself.”
“Lady Somebody has classified her husband’s books, with a catalogue—his papers fill five rooms; think of the work before her.”
“But that is not for herself,” demurred Judith.
“I believe Judith would like to be famous,” said Jean with a laugh. “Bensalem is such a little spot to her.”
“A lady is about to translate King Oscar of Sweden’s works into English; would you like to do that, Judith?” asked Mrs. Lane, who felt that she had been a friend of Judith MacKenzie’s ever since Jean Draper had known her and written of their girlhood together.
“Not exactly that,” said Judith.
“The first woman rabbi in the world is in California. She has been trained in a Hebrew College; Rabbi Moses, the celebrated Jewish divine in Chicago, urges her to take a congregation.”
“Then how can the men give thanks in their prayers that they are not born women?” asked Judith quickly.
“Do the Jews do that?” inquired Jean.
“Yes. But I don’t believe old Moses did, or this Rabbi Moses,” said Judith.
“A lady has received the degree of electrical engineer,” continued Mrs. Lane, who appeared to both her listeners to be a Cyclopedia of Information Concerning Women.
“Judith doesn’t mean such things,” explained Jean; “I don’t believe she wants David to teach her to be a blacksmith. But there is a woman in Dunellen who has a sick husband, and she is doing his work in the butcher’s shop.”
“Would you rather go to Washington, that city of opportunities for girls? The government offices are filled with women, and young women. Those who pass the civil service examination must be over twenty. Many states of the Union are represented. As the departments close at four in the afternoon, some of the girls take time for other employments, or for study. One I read of attends medical lectures at night. Some, who love study, belong to the Chautauqua Circle. French women, as a rule, have a good business education. In the common schools they are taught household bookkeeping. The French woman is expected to help her husband in his business.”
“Not if he is a blacksmith,” interjects the blacksmith’s wife.
“Harper has published a series called the Distaff Series: all the mechanical work, type-setting, printing, binding, covering, and designing was all done by women.”
“I think I would rather make the inside of a book,” said Judith. “But think of the women that do that and every kind of a book.”
“A lady took the four hundred dollar prize mathematical scholarship at Cornell University. There were twelve applicants; nine were women.”
“That is hard work,” acknowledged Judith, to whom Arithmetic and Algebra were never a success. She had even shed tears over Geometry, and how Roger had laughed at her.
“There’s a lady on Long Island who has a farm of five hundred acres; they call the farm, ‘Old Brick.’”
“Horrid name,” interrupted Jean, turning carefully the narrow hem of the coarse towel.
“It was a dairy farm, but she found milk not profitable enough, and gave it up and made a study of live stock. She has made a reputation as a stock raiser; she raises trotters and road horses,” said Mrs. Lane, watching the effect of her words upon Judith.
Judith colored and looked displeased. Was this all Mrs. Lane, Jean’s ideal lady, had to tell her of women’s brave work?
“In Italy nearly two millions of women are employed in industrial pursuits, cotton, silk, linen, and jute. Three million women are busy in agriculture. You might try agriculture here in Bensalem.”
“What do their homes do?” inquired Jean, the home-maker.
“Oh, they do woman’s work, beside.”
“It is all woman’s work, I suppose, if women do it,” answered Judith, discouraged.
“Judith, who is the sweetest woman you know?” asked Mrs. Lane, touched by the droop of the girl’s head and the trouble in her eyes.
“I know ever so many. No one could be sweeter than my mother. And my Aunt Affy is strong and sweet, and doing good to everybody. And Mrs. Kenney, Marion’s mother, she is in things, busy and bright always.”
“I have told you some things women may do; now I’ll tell you some things a woman—one woman—may not do. She cannot do—is not allowed to do—some things a washer-woman in Bensalem may do—But I’ll read you the slip; I have it in my pocket-book.”
She took the cutting from her pocket-book and asked Judith to read it aloud.
Judith read: “Queen Victoria, not being born a queen, probably learned to read just like other persons. But after she became afflicted with royalty she found that a queen is not allowed to have a great many privileges that the humblest of her subjects can boast. For instance, she isn’t allowed to handle a newspaper of any kind, nor a magazine, nor a letter from any person except from her own family, and no member of the royal family or household is allowed to speak to her of any piece of news in any publication. All the information the queen is permitted must first be strained through the intellect of a man whose business it is to cut out from the papers each day what he thinks she would like to know. These scraps he fastens on a silken sheet with a gold fringe all about it, and presents to her unfortunate majesty. This silken sheet with gold fringe is imperative for all communications to the queen.
“Any one who wishes to send the queen a personal poem or a communication of any kind (except a personal letter, which the poor lady isn’t allowed to have at all) must have it printed in gold letters on one side of these silk sheets with a gold fringe, just so many inches wide and no wider, all about it. These gold trimmings will be returned to him in time, as they are expensive, and the queen is kindly and thrifty; but for the queen’s presents they are imperative. The deprivations of the queen’s life are pathetically illustrated by an incident which occurred not long ago. An American lad sent her majesty an immense collection of the flowers of this country, pressed and mounted. The queen was delighted with the collection and kept it for three months, turning over the leaves frequently with great delight. At the end of that time, which was as long as she was allowed by the court etiquette to keep it, she had it sent back with a letter saying that, being queen of England, she was not allowed to have any gifts, and that she parted from them with deep regret.”
“Well,” exclaimed Jean, with an energy that brought a laugh from her small audience, “I would rather be the Bensalem blacksmith’s wife.”
“I wish I could take this to Nettie,” said Judith; “she thinks sometimes she would like to be a queen.”
“She is, in her small province,” replied Mrs. Lane. “I have something for her; I think I can help her step out into as wide a world as she cares to live in. No; don’t ask me; it is to be her secret and my own. Now, Judith, tell me, what is the secret of the happy and useful lives you know?”
“I don’t know,” replied Judith, truthfully. “But they are all married. I am thinking of girls—like me. Their work came to them.”
“As mine did,” said Jean, contentedly, with a glance from her work out the window where the blacksmith was shoeing a horse.
“Your Aunt Affy was not married—”
“No, she was not. She had her work. It was in her home. She was born among her work. But I have not a home like that,” Judith answered in short, sharp sentences.
“Why, Judith,” reproached Jean, “what would Aunt Affy say to that?”
“It would hurt her. She would look sorry. I do not know what gets into me, sometimes. She would adopt me and be like my own mother.”
“Do you resist such a sweet mothering as that?” rebuked Mrs. Lane. “I think I lost some of the sermon Sunday morning by looking at her face.”
“I do not mean to resist her,” said Judith, not able to keep the tears back.
“She told mother her heart ached to have you back,” persuaded Jean, “since her sister died she had so longed for her little girl.”
“I’m afraid I am not doing right,” confessed Judith, “but I was almost homesick there, when Aunt Rody was sick. And then, I think I must learn to support myself, and not be dependent.”
“Oh, you American girl,” said Mrs. Lane.
“And with Aunt Affy for your mother,” added Jean; “I told Mrs. Lane you had ideas.”
“I should think I had,” said Judith, laughing to keep the tears back. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten Aunt Affy. She loves two people in me, she says; my mother and me. I don’t know what has possessed me.”
“Ambition, perhaps,” Mrs. Lane suggested, taking up her knitting,—a long black stocking for her only grandchild.
“Not just that,” Judith reasoned; “it is more making something of myself for myself. Culture for its own sake,” she quoted from Roger, who had warned her against her devotion to self-culture; “and I give it a self-sacrificing name; the desire to be independent. I do not know why I should not be dependent on Aunt Affy. My mother was—and loved it.”
“No service could be more acceptable than serving her,” said Mrs. Lane; “the world is only a larger Bensalem.”
“It isn’t the world I wanted,” replied Judith, impatiently.
When Judith went away Jean walked down the street with her. “Are you disappointed in Mrs. Lane?” she asked.
“She did not tell me what I hoped and expected. She told me something better. I think I can study at Aunt Affy’s,” in the tone of one having made a sacrifice.
“And go to the parsonage every day,” said Jean eagerly, and yet afraid of pressing her point.
“Yes—if I wish to,” replied Judith slowly, surprising herself by coming to a decision.
“Bensalem is such a place for talk,” Jean ventured, not that she was confident of success. “Everybody knows everybody’s business and is interested in it.”
“But it is kindly talk,” said Judith, whom gossip had touched lightly.
“Yes, sometimes—not always,” Jean hesitated; “people will misjudge.”
“Jean Draper, what do you mean?” asked Judith, blazing angrily; “are you trying to tell me something?”
“No,” replied Jean, startled at Judith’s unusual vehemence. “I only want you to understand that Aunt Affy is talked about for letting you stay so much at the parsonage.”
“How could it hurt anybody?”
“They say Aunt Affy is—scheming,” she said, watching the effect of her words.
“Scheming. What about? What does she gain?” asked Judith, provoked.
“The gain is for you,” said Jean, at last, desperately; “they say she wants to marry you to the minister.”
Now she had said it. She stood still, frightened. Judith left her without another word, going straight on to the parsonage. After a moment Jean turned and went home.
What would Judith do? She looked angry enough to do anything. But she had shielded her from further talk. Bensalem should have no more to say.
Judith went on dazed. Now she understood it all; Martha was coming that she might go; they did not like to tell her to go; they were all too kind. As if Aunt Affy could plot like that. As if Aunt Affy cared for that: Aunt Affy who wanted to keep her always.
Had Marion heard the talk? And Roger? Was he glad to send her away with his mother? She would fly to Aunt Affy that very night; the old house would be her refuge. She would go back to Aunt Affy—and her mother’s home. Roger, her saint, her hero, her ideal—he could never think of her—like that.
She opened the door and went in. Marion had taken her mother for a drive. The study door was shut, the usual signal when Roger was busy. But she often ventured; the shut door had never barred her out. Nothing had ever kept her away from Roger. She tapped; Roger called: “Come in.”
He was writing and did not lift his eyes.
She waited; he looked up and smiled.
“Can you stop one minute?” she asked, faintly.
“One and a half.”
“I came to tell you that I have thought it over; I would rather not go home with Mrs. Kenney.”
“Stay then, with all my heart.”
“But not with all my heart. I am going to Aunt Affy’s instead. She wants me,” she said, quietly, with a quiver of the lip.
“I should think she would.”
“I did not know how much. She herself would not tell me. Jean Draper told me. Aunt Affy told her mother.”
“That will not change our plans of study at all.”
“No; it need not.”
“It shall not.”
“I think I can get on alone awhile. You have taught me how to use books. You have shown me that they are tools. I can write by myself. You have been to me like Maria Edgeworth’s father. Perhaps it is time for Maria to stand alone.”
“You are tired of my teaching.”
“Oh, no; I am not tired of anything—excepting Bensalem. I hate Bensalem,” she burst out with anger and contrition.
“What has Bensalem done now?”
“Nothing unusual. Will you tell Marion I am going—home to stay to-night? Martha will come and help her in the housekeeping.”
“Judith, has any one hurt you?”
“No,” said Judith, smiling with the tears starting; “you are all too kind.”
“Is it for Aunt Affy you are going? Judith, you cannot deceive me.”
“No; I do not think I can. I am going for Aunt Affy’s sake, Roger.”
“Because she misses you?”
“Yes, because she misses me, and needs me. People think and say—she is not taking good care of me. I wish to prove to them that she is.”
“That is sheer nonsense,” he exclaimed, angrily.
“It is not nonsense that she misses me now that her sister is gone. I never had any sister excepting Marion, but I know it was dreadful for Aunt Affy to lose her sister. If you haven’t helped me to study alone, to depend upon myself, you have been very little help to me.”
“That is true,” he laughed, “but the studying is only a part of what the parsonage is to you.”
“It was my reason for coming, and staying,” she said, simply, flushing and trembling.
“True; I had forgotten that. Yes; it is better for you to go; best for you to go. Come to-morrow and talk it over to Marion and my mother. I will tell them only that you have gone—home, to spend the night.”
He took up his pen, it trembled in his grasp; Judith went out and shut the door that he might not be disturbed.
“I am giving it all up,” she thought, as she pressed a few things into a satchel; “all I was going away to get; perhaps this is the way my prayer for work is being answered.”
They were at supper when she stood in the doorway; Aunt Affy at the head of the table behind the tea-pot and the cups and saucers; her husband opposite her, genial, handsome, satisfied, and Joe, at one side of the round table, tall, fine-looking, with his gray, thoughtful eyes, refined lips, and modest manner. Joe was a son to be proud of, the old people sometimes said to each other.
There was no chair opposite Joe, no plate, and knife and fork and napkin. Uncle Cephas liked a hot supper; they had chicken stew to-night, and boiled rice. It was like home, the faces, the things on the supper-table. She was homesick enough to long for some place “like” home. The parsonage could never be her home again, with Martha in her place; perhaps Martha had been wishing to come for years; perhaps her selfishness had kept Martha away.
John would be married, Martha would be in her place at the parsonage,—Don was too far away to know, and too absorbed in his wife to care; Mrs. Kenney did not really want her, she had only asked her to go home with her to get her away from the parsonage; the only home she had a right to was this home where her mother had been a little girl.
“Why, Judith,” cried Aunt Affy, rising, “dear child, what is the matter?”
“I wanted to come home,” said Judith.
“That only which we have within can we see without.”
—Emerson.
Judith stood at the sitting-room window looking out into the March snow-storm. There had been many snow-storms since that November night she came to the threshold and stood looking in at the happy supper-table. Aunt Affy had opened her arms and heart anew and folded her close: “My lamb has come back,” she said.
“To stay back,” Judith whispered, hiding her face on Aunt Affy’s shoulder.
That night was nearly two years ago; she would be twenty in April. She was not “twenty in April” to Aunt Affy; she was still her “lamb” and her “little girl.”
In her dark blue cloth dress, and with her yellow head and rose-tinted cheeks, she did not look as grown-up as she felt; she had taken life, not only with both hands, but with heart, brain, and spirit, and with all her might. There was nothing in her that she had not put into her life; her simple, Bensalem life.
“Aunt Affy,” she said, as Aunt Affy’s step paused on the threshold between kitchen and sitting-room, “Come and rest awhile in this fire-light. This fire on the hearth to-night reminds me of the glow of the grate in Summer Avenue when I used to tell pictures to mother.”
Aunt Affy pulled down the shades; Judith drew Aunt Affy’s chair to the home-made rug—Aunt Rody’s rug,—to the hearth, and then sat down on the hassock at her feet, and looked into the fire, not the curly-headed girl in Summer Avenue, but the girl grown up.
“Aunt Affy, tell me a picture,” she coaxed.
“What about?”
“About myself. I’m afraid I am too full of myself. I cannot understand something. I can tell you about it, for it is past, and I can look at it as something in the past. You know those years I was at the parsonage, at my boarding-school, I was crammed full with one hope.”
Judith was looking at the fire; the eyes looking down at her were solicitous, tender. She had been afraid Judith “cared too much” for the young minister; but it must be over now, or she could not tell her about it so frankly.
“I dreamed it, I studied it, I wrote it, I prayed about it, I breathed it.”
“Oh,” said Aunt Affy, with a quick, heavy sigh.
“Don’t pity me. It was good for me, blessed for me, or it could not have happened, you know. I thought there was some great work for me to do—”
“Oh,” said Aunt Affy, with a quick, relieved cry.
“I was not sure whether it were to write a book, or to teach, or to go as a foreign missionary; I think I hoped it would be the foreign missionary, because that was the most self-sacrificing. The book was all one great joy. The teaching was absorbing, but I must go away to study. I was afraid to go away, I did not like to go away from Bensalem, I would miss my mother away from Bensalem, and you, and all the parsonage, and the whole village. But I thought I was called; as called as Roger was to preach, or any woman, saint, or heroine, who had done a great thing. You cannot think what it was to me. It made me old. I wanted God to speak out of Heaven and tell me what to do. It began to lose its selfishness, after that. The first thing that began to shake my confidence was something Mrs. Lane said that afternoon she talked to Jean and me about what women were doing and could do. She did not make woman’s work attractive; she took the heart out of me. I did not know why she should do that. I knew better all the time. I knew what women had done and were doing. I knew she was doing a noble work, literary work, work in prisons, temperance work; the instances she gave me seemed trivial, as if she were laughing at me. But something opened my eyes; I felt that I might be disobedient to my heavenly vision, that I was looking up into the heavens for my call, and the voice might be all the time in my ear. That was the night I came back here and found you so cozy and satisfied under your own roof-tree, with the voice in your ear, and the work in your hand. The world went away from me. I stayed. I am glad I stayed. My only trouble is, and it is a real trouble, that God did not care for my purpose, or my prayers; that he has let them go as if they never entered into his mind; I thought they were in his heart as well as mine.”
“They are, Deary,” said Aunt Affy, wiping her eyes; “He will not let one of them go.”
“But He did not do anything with them. He did not love my plan, and my prayers,” said Judith, wearily.
“Do you remember one time when Jesus was on the earth, a man, clothed and in his right mind, sat at Jesus’ feet? He had so much to be thankful for; no man ever had so much. And he sat at Jesus’ feet, near him because he loved him, and looked up into his face and listened. That was all he wanted on the earth, to be with Jesus; to follow him everywhere, to obey every word he said, to always see his face, to serve him. Did not the Lord care for such love when so many were scorning him and ashamed to be his disciples? When he came to his own, and his own received him not. When the man found that Jesus was going away, that his countrymen were sending him away, beseeching him to go, he besought Jesus, which was more than one asking, that he might go with him. That was all he wanted: just to go with him. Just as all you wanted was to be with him and do something he said, and be sure he said it. But Jesus sent this man away. He refused him; he denied his prayer.”
“That was very hard,” said Judith.
“Very hard. It was like giving him a glimpse of Heaven—it was Heaven, and then shutting the door in his face as he prayed.”
“Yes,” said Judith, who understood.
“But he did speak to him; he told him what to do: ‘Return to thine own house.’ If he had father, mother, brother, sister, wife, children, go back to them and tell them how good God had been to him. When I look at you, Deary, stepping about the house, so pretty and bright, I think of how glad your mother must be if she sees you. How glad to know the little girl she left was taken care of. And in church when you play the organ, and in Sunday School, and at the Lord’s own table, and doing errands all around the village, you are a blessing in your ‘own house.’”
Judith’s head went down on Aunt Affy’s knee.
“This man went through the ‘whole city’ beside; his own house grew into the whole city. Your life isn’t ended yet; to old folks like Uncle Cephas and me, it seems just begun. Your own house is only just the beginning of the whole city. I’ve only had my own house and Bensalem, but I seem to think there’s a whole city for you. The Lord knew about the whole city when he denied his prayer and sent him to his own house.”
Judith did not lift her head; her tears were tears of shame and penitence.
“Now, here come the men folks,” roused Aunt Affy, cheerily; “and supper they must have to keep them good-natured.”
“I am only in my ‘own house’ yet,” said Judith, as she moved about setting the supper table as she had done when she was a little girl.