Part 14

“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.

“Lord, teach us to pray.”

—_Luke_ xi. 1.

“O Thou, by whom we come to God, The Life, the Truth, the Way! The path of prayer Thyself hast trod; Lord, teach me to pray.”

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.

“Our eyes see all around, in gloom or glow, Hues of their own fresh borrowed from the heart.”

—Keble.

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.