Part 13

Roger had not once told her she was brave, Marion was not more than usually sympathetic; the neighbors were taking her coming back as a matter of course—something to be expected; they would have blamed her if she had not come; Aunt Rody every day was less fretful toward her, more satisfied with her nursing; Aunt Affy busy in kitchen and dairy, with the new importance of her marriage, and being for the first time mistress in her own house, seemed forgetful that the girl had come from any brighter life, forgetful that she had ever left the old place and its homespun ways, and, most discouraging of all, forgetful that any other help in household or sick-room was desired or might be had by searching and for money. For the first time in her life Aunt Affy was selfish. In her own contentment she forgot, or did not think it possible that the girl of eighteen could be discontented.

Judith remembered that Harriet Hosmer had said she could be happy anywhere with good health and a bit of marble.

But suppose she had not had her bit of marble?

These days were the history of her summer of stories.

The doctor told them that Aunt Rody might be helpless in bed for months; she might gain strength and sit in her chair again. He had known such instances. That was in the first week; in the second week he gave them no hope.

The stricken old woman was alive; that was all she was to Judith: an old woman who was not dead yet.

Judith was pitiful; she loved her with a compassionate tenderness as she would have loved any helpless, stricken thing; but she was hardly “Aunt Rody” any longer.

She was as helpless as a baby, with none of a baby’s innocence, or loveliness or lovingness; there was no hope for this gray-haired, wrinkled mass of human flesh, but in casting off this veil of the flesh, no hope but in death. It was as if death were alive before Judith’s eyes, and within touch of her hand.

She had no memory of Aunt Rody as the others had, to give affection to; there was only _this_. There was scarcely any memory for her gratitude to cling to.

There was one comfort left; she was not afraid of her now.

If she had stayed with her, instead of being at home at the parsonage, she might have grown up to love and understand her; instead she had grown away from love and understanding.

She dared not think of release coming through Aunt Rody’s _death_. That would be desiring her death. Desiring one’s death in one’s heart was—.

There was no hope but in Cousin Don.

XXIV. “I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU CARED.”

“‘What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?’ I cried, ‘A hidden hope,’ the voice replied.”

—Tennyson.

“Judith, don’t stay in this little close entry when all out-doors is calling to you,” said Aunt Affy.

“But I thought she might stir and want something,” replied Aunt Rody’s nurse; “she looks up so patient and pitiful when she wants something.”

“My work is all done; I’ll sit here; you are losing your color, child. What will your Cousin Don say to me when he comes home to claim you?”

“He will not come home to do that,” said Judith, rising reluctantly to give Aunt Affy her low chair. “I have a foreboding that something is happening to him. He never forgot me before.”

“Forebodings come out of tired head and feet and back. I am allowing you to do too much. This is Saturday afternoon and your play time. The baking is done, and now that we are rid of churning—what _would_ poor Rody say to me for selling the milk and making no butter? I feel that I am ‘deceiving’ her at every turn about the house. Run up stairs and put on the blue muslin you look so cool in, and go out in the hammock and forget the responsibility that takes away your appetite and gives you big eyes. Dear child, death must come. It is the voice of the Lord calling Rody. You know what George MacDonald says: Death is only going to sleep when one is downright sleepy. Rody _is_ downright sleepy. Think how she sleeps half the time, poor old soul.”

“Do you think she is glad to be ‘downright sleepy’?”

“Aren’t you, always, when your night comes?”

“But, Aunt Affy, she hasn’t been—she wasn’t—I did not think she cared.”

“Her light has almost gone out, sometimes, I do believe. But it’s there, burning. She has a spark of real faith that never went out. She wasn’t as loving in her ways as she was in her heart. Now, don’t stand another minute. I want you to go to church to-morrow, too. John Kenney is out on the piazza waiting for you; he’s come to the parsonage to spend Sunday.”

In an instant Judith was all light and color. John Kenney was the kind of a friend that no one else in the world was; as grave as the minister himself, at times, as book loving, and yet as full of fun and frolic as a boy; he was taller than Roger, and handsome; Roger was fine, but he was not handsome; she had no fear or reverence for John, he stood beside her, and walked beside her; they were boy and girl together; John was nearly three years older; he would be twenty-one in the winter. She stood still radiant.

“You look rested enough now,” remarked Aunt Affy.

“I was not so tired, I was only blue; I was thinking about Don. John has been away all summer; he has not been in Bensalem since my birthday.”

“Did he come for that?” inquired Aunt Affy, keeping any suggestion out of her voice. She would not put ideas into the child’s head.

“He said so. And to say good-bye to the parsonage. We agreed not to write to each other while he was out west.”

“What for,” questioned Aunt Affy, suspiciously. “Had you ever written to each other before?”

“No,” laughed Judith, softly, “and we agreed not to begin.”

“What for?” asked Aunt Affy, again.

“For fun, I think, as much as anything. I think we had no real reason.”

“Two such reasonable creatures, too. Judith, you _had_ a reason or he had. Why should the question come up?” Aunt Affy asked severely.

“Oh, questions are always coming up. He asked me if I would write and I refused.”

“And that’s how you agreed together. What was _your_ reason?”

“I think,” began Judith slowly, “I was afraid Roger wouldn’t like it. Or Marion. Marion is particular about such things. I’m afraid she had something to trouble her once—she never will tease anybody about anybody, even.”

“Well, be off, and dress. I told John you would not be out for some time.”

“I’ll go in this dress. I haven’t seen him for months.”

Whether the haste augured well or ill for John, Aunt Affy could not decide; she went into Aunt Rody’s bedroom, touched her forehead and spoke to her.

“Are you sleepy, Rody?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like anything?”

“No.”

Aunt Affy, with her mending for her husband and for Joe, kept watch in the entry, lighted by the open back door, all the afternoon.

After half an hour on the piazza, Judith gave John Aunt Affy’s latest magazine to amuse himself with, and went up to her small chamber, to braid her tumbled hair and to array herself in the fresh, blue muslin.

In the cracked glass over the old bureau she met the reflection of a girl with joyful eyes and cheeks like pink roses. She knew that was not the girl that had watched Aunt Rody in the entry.

Her summer companion had come back; he was her vacation friend; perhaps she had missed him; perhaps her loneliness had not all been for her Cousin Don. He was still in her world; across the continent had not been in her world. He had not sent her one message through letters to Marion or Roger. She had not dared write to him. But he was home again, just as grave, and just as bright, with no reproach in his eyes, and he was planning to stay a week. He had come to talk to Roger and decide his choice of business in life; his father wished to take him into his own business, the jeweller’s, either in the factory or store, but he had no taste for making jewelry, or selling it, he said; he would rather study; he was “not good enough” to be a minister; he would like to study medicine.

Judith made herself as fresh and pretty as girls love to be, pondering the while John’s choice of work in life. She would choose for him to be like Roger, and do Roger’s work, but if he did not believe himself to be “called” like Roger, that would not be acceptable work; was not healing a part of Christ’s work; was not John gentle, sympathetic, and in love with every human creature? He had a copy of something of Drummond’s in his pocket; he said Drummond was making a man of him. The beginning of his manhood was in joining a Boy’s Brigade while he was away at boarding school up the Hudson. When she came back to the piazza he said he would read to her Drummond’s address to a Boy’s Brigade.

He had grown more grave since he went away; he told her the weight of what to do and what not to do was heavy upon him night and day.

“And he has such laughing brown eyes,” she said, almost aloud, to the girl in blue muslin, reflected in the cracked mirror.

“What are _you_ going to do?” he inquired as he pushed a piazza chair near the hammock for her, and stretched himself in the hammock that he might look up at her and watch her as he talked.

“Must I do something?”

“You are old enough to decide. Girls are always deciding. Martha and Lou are forever taking up something new. They are not satisfied to be housekeepers. How Marion has settled down since she came to Bensalem! To be Roger’s housekeeper and a deaconess in his church has come to be her only ambition. Is that yours, too?”

“Which?” she asked with serious lips and dancing eyes.

“Both.”

“My Cousin Don thinks he has my future in his right hand. But I’m afraid his right hand is finding business he likes better.”

“Tell me true, what do you wish most to do?”

“If you cannot decide for yourself, how can you expect me to decide for myself?”

“I do know. I have decided. I am simply waiting for Roger’s judgment to confirm my choice. I want him to talk father over. Father wants one of his sons in the business, and Maurice declares he will not go in—he wants to be an architect. He has decided talent; as I have not, but am only commonplace and a drudgery sort of a fellow; I may take business instead of medicine to please father and help Maurice out. Mother beseeches me to please father; she almost put it ‘obey’ my father. What do _you_ advise me?”

“O, John, is it like that? I thought there was nothing in the way but your own choice.”

“There is not. Father will give a grudging consent. I think he gave me my California trip to give me time to think—perhaps to think of his wishes. He went into the business to please his father.”

“He has not regretted it.”

“Far from it. He congratulates himself. I know a fellow whose father gave him a ‘thrashing’ to make him go to college; his grandfather had given his father a ‘thrashing’ and made him go.”

“Did he go?”

“The fellow I know? No; he ran away.”

“Do you want to run away?”

“I ran away to Bensalem to ask Roger.”

“I think Roger will urge you to please your father.”

“Father was glad enough for Roger to study.”

“That was because of the choice of study.”

“I knew that. But my choice is no mean one.”

“I think a natural bent should be respected,” reasoned Judith.

“I don’t know that I _have_ a natural bent. A great English physician writes that he decided to study medicine when he was a boy because his father’s physician came to the house with a coat trimmed with gold lace. He was after the gold lace.”

“What are _you_ after?”

“Money, reputation—position—”

“I don’t believe it,” she answered, earnestly.

“Oh, I would like them thrown in,” he laughed.

“In the Boy’s Brigade you didn’t make them first.”

“What do you make first?”

“Aunt Rody, just now.”

“What second, then?”

“Talking to you, on the piazza.”

“Judith,” catching her hands and holding them fast, “decide for me. Shall I study medicine, or shall I please my father and mother?”

“I cannot decide for you,” she said, lightly, withdrawing her hands.

“You don’t care.”

“I do care.”

“Decide then.”

“I am not the one to decide.”

“You are; if I put the decision in your hands.”

“But I am only a girl.”

“That is why I ask you. Girls see clear. They do not love money, they are not ambitious.”

“I do not love money. I may be ambitious.”

“How are you ambitious?”

She flushed and would not reply.

“About your stories? Do you expect to write?”

“I expect to write. I cannot help it; it is _in_ me and will come out. Nothing much, perhaps; only little things, but I love them.”

“I do not think medicine is ‘in me’ like that. I simply like a profession better than the routine and drudgery of business.”

“That is not a great motive.”

“No; and that boy’s gold lace wasn’t; but he made a success.”

“Yes,” was all Judith said.

“You are displeased with me.”

“I am disappointed. I thought you _cared_.”

“I do; in a certain way.”

“But not in the best way.”

“Judith, I am not ‘great’ or ‘best.’”

“I thought you were; I want you to be.”

“That is a motive,” he said, catching her hands again. “Judith, if you will tell me you love me and will marry me, I will go home and tell my father I will make gold rings and sell them to the end of my days; but you must let me put one on your finger.”

“If you made it I’m afraid it wouldn’t fit,” she laughed, again withdrawing her hands.

“Will you, if it fits?”

“I cannot tell until I try.”

“Don’t play with me. It is neither ‘great’ nor ‘best’ for a girl to do that.”

“You frighten me,” she said, with a sound in her breath like a sob.

“I beg your pardon.”

“I cannot promise. I do not want to promise. I never thought of it.”

“You think I am only a boy.”

“I am only a girl.”

“I did not just think of it. You think I am too sudden and impulsive. I thought of you all the time I was gone. I have loved you ever since I knew you. How can anybody help loving you? You meant Bensalem to me more than Roger and Marion did. I have been afraid somebody would guess. I was afraid somebody would keep you away from me. Judith, don’t you care for me, at all?”

“Yes, John; but not like _that_. I couldn’t promise that. I never thought you cared like that.”

“How did you think I cared?” he asked, passionately; “in a grandfatherly way like Roger?”

“I do not know,” she answered sadly; “you were so good to me, and I liked you. I didn’t think.”

“Will you think now?” he asked, gently. “Will you think and tell me?”

“When?”

“As soon as you know yourself. I will wait years and years.”

“Yes, I will tell you as soon as I know myself,” she promised.

“Then I will wait. You are worth waiting for.”

“John, ought I to tell Marion?”

“No. Do not tell anybody. It is my secret. You haven’t any secret. Nobody need ever know, I will never be pitied.”

Judith pitied him then.

“I am not bound in any way. I haven’t promised, John.”

“No; you haven’t,” he said, touched by the sorrow in her face. “I am sorry to trouble you so; but I had to say it. I came to Bensalem to say it.”

“Are you sorry you came?”

“No; I had to have it out. Perhaps it will make a man of me. Something will have to. A man needs some kind of a fight.”

Judith thought that it was not only his “fight.”

“I am going home; I can’t stay here. I’ll tell Roger I decided not to stay over Sunday. I don’t care what he thinks. We talked till twelve o’clock last night. I know what he thinks. I’ll walk to Dunellen to the train, I’d like to start and walk around the world.”

“John.” Judith’s eyes were filled with tears.

“Don’t feel like that,” he answered, roughly; “it’s bad enough for me to feel for myself without feeling for you. I have always thought you cared.”

“I _do_ care.”

“That’s no way to care.”

He walked off, not turning for her low word of farewell.

She would have kept him had she dared.

XXV. COUSIN DON.

“If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow we had done.”

—Sir John Lubbuck.

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.

“If I could only surely know That all these things that tire me so Were noticed by my Lord.”

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?