Part 6

What a day Monday was! She was busy all the morning, “helping,” and she found it good fun. In the afternoon she wrote a long letter to Sophie, and she had so much to tell that she filled three sheets. In the evening she read aloud to her mother, and her father listened, after he read his paper, and said it was a “jolly good book.”

When she left the room to go to bed, she said, “Good night!” Usually she forgot it. She was careful to remember “thank you,” and “please.”

It was not her turn to iron. To-morrow would be a long, hot ironing day, and there were so many starched things this week. Lottie was in a hurry to finish the pink muslin she was making for herself. If she should offer to iron two hours, and let Lottie sew—but how she hated to iron!

Still, she could only stay with these people two weeks—and there was nothing else Lottie would like so much; she and Lottie had not been very good friends lately, and this would “make up.” She was the one to make up, for she had been cross and had refused to do her work in order to let Lottie go to the picnic. Minnie did it, and let Lottie go, and Jean had felt mean ever since.

But she was only fourteen, and it was vacation. But Mrs. Lane said—and now she wished she hadn’t!—that nobody ever had a vacation from doing kind things.

She could help iron next week. This was her week.

“I guess it’s God’s week!” This was one of Jean’s new thoughts. Going into your own home like a new somebody was very hard work; she almost wished she were not a summer boarder, that she had stayed at home! And this last thought was so funny that the people down-stairs heard her laughing.

“Jean is a happy child,” said her mother.

“Yes, she seems to have a new kink,” replied her father. “She is taking a sudden interest in everything. I used to think she hated the farm and everything about it. The farm is all I’ve got to give my girls, and it hurts me to have them care nothing about it.”

“It’s vacation, and she’s more rested,” said Minnie. “She loves books better than any of us, and studies harder.”

“I don’t know what the secret is, but I’m glad of it,” her father replied.

With a brave heart the next morning Jean asked Lottie if she might iron two hours and let her sew on her pink muslin.

“You blessed child!” cried Lottie. “I had thought I must sit up all night to get it done for tomorrow. Two hours will be a great lift.”

Ironing was hot and hard work, beside being extremely unpleasant work to Jean; but she pushed the two hours into three, and never was so happy in her life as when her oldest sister gave her an unaccustomed kiss, which was even better than her words: “I won’t forget this, Jeanie.”

Wednesday morning Jean remembered that, as a stranger, she must learn something about the village and the village people. Bensalem was a pretty village with one long street, two churches, one store, a post-office, and an old school-house. She had another thought to-day; this, too, grew out of something Mrs. Lane said at Sunday-school. “Bind something, if you can; make some good thing fast, like forming a little society.”

How she would like to do that! She counted over the girls she liked best. There were nine, and ten would form a society, bound fast together. This she regarded as a very promising new thought. But what should it be for? Jean pondered a great deal, but she could think of nothing but her “outing.”

Her outing! Why shouldn’t it be an Outing Society—not to get up real vacations for people, but to get them out of themselves, and into the way of helping things along, and beginning right at home. For that was the curious part of it—that you didn’t have to go away anywhere. It seemed to come to you.

Jean resolved to call on the girls and tell them about it, and ask them to come to her house and talk it over. She knew now what she would call it: The Outing Ten.

First she would call at the Parsonage and tell Miss Marion about it, and ask her what to do first and next.

But she could not tell Miss Marion about it all herself; perhaps Judith Mackenzie would go; Judith knew Miss Marion better than any of the girls. She was always staying at the Parsonage “for company” for Miss Marion.

XII. A SECRET ERRAND.

“Say not ‘small event’! Why ‘small’? Costs it more pain than this, ye call A ‘great event,’ should come to pass, Than that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed!”

—Robert Browning.

On the lounge in the sitting-room, Judith lay cuddled up with a rare ailment for her, a throbbing headache; Aunt Affy had brought a pillow from her own entry bedroom, and bathed her forehead with Florida water; then brushed her hair for a long time and told her a story about her far-away girlhood, “when Becky and Cephas and I had our good times. Not that we don’t have good times now; Becky has hers up yonder, and poor Cephas and I do the best we can for each other down here.”

Judith wondered why she should say “poor Cephas”; he had laughing eyes, and a merry laugh, and everything that happened to him seemed just the very best thing that could happen.

Aunt Rody had brewed a bowl of bitter stuff and stood threateningly near while Judith lifted her dizzy head and forced herself to taste it.

“More,” urged Aunt Rody.

She tasted again.

“More,” insisted Aunt Rody.

She tasted several times with a look of pitiful appeal that Aunt Rody resisted.

“More,” commanded Aunt Rody.

“I can’t,” sobbed Judith, but she obeyed, and Aunt Rody set the yellow bowl on a chair by the sofa, that she might taste it whenever she felt like it.

Homesick Judith hid her face in the small pillow as soon as she was left alone, and cried; she cried for her mother not a year dead, for her father whom she scarcely remembered, for the pretty room she had with her mother in her own city home, for her picture of the Madonna with the child, that Aunt Rody declared popish and would not suffer, even in Judith’s own room; then she cried because Miss Kenney had not come yesterday, as she half promised, and then because Aunt Rody had made Cephas say that she should not run about in the fields with him, but stay in the house these wonderful days and sew carpet rags; and then, if she cried about anything she cried in her sleep; a soft step was in the room, the lightest touch covered her with Aunt Affy’s fleecy white shawl.

“Sit down,” whispered Aunt Affy’s voice, “she is fast asleep; she is a good sleeper, we shall not disturb her; I shouldn’t wonder if she had fits of home-sickness; she never tells; we are all old folks; Rody thinks she doesn’t need any more schooling because she can do sums and writes such a handsome hand, so she doesn’t go to school—and doesn’t know many young folks. Rody never _did_ understand young folks, you know that.”

“I should think _you_ knew that,” replied the other whispering, indignant voice. “So Cephas is back again; he was gone five years, wasn’t he?”

“Five this last time, three the other time.”

Judith stirred, pushed the white wool away from her face, and listened.

“He was good to go,” replied the still indignant voice.

Judith made a soft rustle; Aunt Affy did not heed it.

“Yes, he _was_ good,” assented Aunt Affy’s sweet, old voice, “he is always ready to do the thing that’s happiest for me. He was so homesick and wrote such heart-rending letters that I couldn’t stand it. Rody sniffed, as she has always sniffed at us, but she said he might come back if we were both so set on it, so shamelessly set on it.”

Judith’s little protesting groan was not noticed; then she shut her eyes and listened, because she could not help it.

“It’s a burning shame, and the sister you have been to her, too. You took your money and bought your sisters out that you might keep the old place for Rody.”

“I wanted it for myself, too,” was Aunt Affy’s honest reply.

“But you could have taken your money and married Cephas—”

“But, you see, she never could bear the thought of my marrying at all; she doesn’t dislike Cephas so much, but she wants me all to herself. She doesn’t like men, I’ll allow that; she never had any kind of happy experience herself, unless it happened before I was born, and she doesn’t _know_. After Becky died, Cephas and I had to comfort each other; Rody never was a great hand at comforting, and the other girls were all dead or married. She had been a mother to me all my life; I was a two week’s old baby left in her care; and Becky was only two years old; we were her two babies.”

“You had whippings and scoldings enough thrown in, I’ll be bound,” was the visitor’s tart rejoinder.

“The scoldings are thrown in now,” said Aunt Affy, with the glimmer of a smile; “I am only a girl to her; I shall never grow up to her; not old enough to be married, sixty years old as I am. Cephas told her yesterday that he would fix up the old house with his own money, he has considerable laid by, and she dared him to pull off a shingle or drive a nail. He said she should always be the head of the house, and she said there was no need for him to tell her _that_. You see that we could not be happy in making her old age unhappy. She is so old that defiance might kill her; she is eighty-four.”

“I’d _let_ it kill her then,” said Miss Affy’s life-long friend.

“No, you wouldn’t. Your sister is your sister, and she is all the mother I ever knew. Cephas and I jog on together like two old married folks. She says we will be glad when she is under the sod and we can have our own way.”

“She might let you have it now, and then you wouldn’t be glad,” urged Jean Draper’s mother.

“She cannot let us have it; her own will is too strong for her; when she gives up to us she will die.”

“Then I’d do it anyway,” counselled the other voice.

“We did talk of that, but we are afraid to—she is so old,” whispered Aunt Affy, feeling faint with the very thought of it.

“Well, it’s an old folks’ romance, and I didn’t know old folks had any,” said the woman who was married at sixteen.

But the girl on the lounge with her face in the pillow had listened; she had listened and learned something Aunt Affy would not have told her for the world.

How could she ever look into Aunt Affy’s face again? And, oh, how could she ever love Aunt Rody?

She groaned, and Aunt Affy came to her and asked if she felt worse. The neighbor went out on tiptoe; Aunt Rody came from the kitchen to stand threateningly near while Aunt Affy coaxed mouthful by mouthful the draining of the bitter bowl.

While Aunt Rody was taking her nap that afternoon Jean Draper knocked on the open kitchen door. Judith and Aunt Affy were washing dishes together at the kitchen sink; Judith gave a cry of pleased surprise at the sound of the knock and the vision of the girl in the doorway.

“O, Jean, I _wished_ for you,” she said, with the longing for young companionship in her heart.

“And I wanted you. I am going to see Miss Marion on a secret errand, and I can’t do it without you. Can you spare her, Miss Affy?”

“If her head will let her go,” began Miss Affy, doubtfully.

“Oh, that’s well,” cried Judith, joyfully, “but what will Aunt Rody say?” she questioned in dismay.

“I will take care of that,” promised Aunt Affy, anticipating with dread the half hour’s scolding the permission would bring upon herself.

“You are making her a gad-about just like yourself,” the monologue would begin.

“Are you _sure_, Aunt Affy, dear?” asked Judith, anxiously.

“Yes, sure. Run away and put on your new gingham.”

XIII. THE TWO BLESSED THINGS.

“In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths.”

—_Prov._ iii. 6.

“How excellent a thought to me Thy loving-kindness then shall be! Thus in the shadow of Thy wings I’ll hide me from all troublous things.”

“My life is like Africa; there are no paths anywhere,” said Marion. She was not petulant; the tone was not petulant; Marion knew she thought she was bearing her life bravely. The study was cool and darkened that August afternoon; she lay idly upon the lounge, a fresh magazine in her lap, and a pile of books on the carpet within reach of her idle hands.

A year ago she thought she loved books—and music, and life.

Roger liked to have her near him while he wrote and studied, but he did not like her idle moods. This latest one had lasted two days.

He pushed his large volume away, and taking up an ivory paper cutter began to run its sharp edges across his fingers. Marion was easily hurt; he could not advise work as he did yesterday.

“If your life were like Africa,” he began in an unsuggestive tone, “you would have a beaten track wherever you turned; no unmapped country in the world is better supplied with paths than this same Africa that your hedged-in life is like. Every village is connected with some other village by a path; you can follow ziz-zag paths from Zanzibar to the Atlantic; they are beaten as hard as adamant; they are made by centuries of native traffic.”

“I have learned something about Africa,” she answered, demurely, “if not about my life.”

“Which are you the more interested in?”

“Oh, Africa, just now. I am not interested in my life at all.”

“Marion, dear, is Bensalem a failure?”

“Yes, as far as I am concerned. Not for you, dear old boy; it is splendid for you, and for Bensalem. Even Judith listens in church.”

“I know she does. I write my sermons for her.”

“For a girl? How do you expect to reach other people, then?” she inquired, surprised.

“The inspiration came to me, that Sunday she told me she was sorry for not listening, to begin all over again—to look at life from a fresh standpoint, from the standpoint of youth, ardent, hungry, sensation-loving youth—”

“Sensation—”

“Not in its usual acceptation; truth cannot but give you a sensation; I knew it would not hurt the old people and the middle-aged to begin again; to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child, and I have attempted to teach the children in the Kingdom of Heaven; to talk simply about the grand old truths; to keep that girl before me as I thought out my sermons—a thoughtful girl who has had some experience in life, and when a thought or the expression of it was over her head, I struck it out.”

“Now I know your secret. ‘Simplicity and strength’ are your characteristics, David Prince, our literary blacksmith, who wrote Bensalem up for the Dunellen _News_, was pleased to say. Shall you keep this up?”

“Until I find a better way,” he said, contentedly.

“Everybody listens.”

“Even Miss Rody,” he said, smiling at the memory of Miss Rody’s face.

“And all the other old folks. Old folks and children. What about the young men and maidens?”

“Aren’t ‘simplicity and strength’ good enough for them?” he inquired, seriously.

“It’s good enough for me.”

“Not quite,” he answered.

“Why?”

“You listen, of course.”

“But I do not grow fast enough? Roger, I’ve stopped growing. I knew something was the matter with me, and that’s it.”

“A pretty serious _it_.”

“I know that better than you can tell me. I wish Judith Grey Mackenzie—how Aunt Rody brings that out—would give _me_ an inspiration.”

“Bring her here for a week and I’ll promise that she will.”

“Aunt Affy could not spare her. Her yellow head is the sunshine of that old house. But I’ll have her some day. I wish I _owned_ her.”

“I wish you did. I would buy her myself if I had money enough.”

“I wonder who _does_ own her,” said Marion; “I forgot that she does not belong to anybody.”

“She does belong to somebody. Her mother gave her to Aunt Affy.”

Perhaps she belonged somewhat to her “Cousin Don.”

Roger never talked about Don. He never read aloud to her the foreign letters she saw so often on the study table.

A sigh came of itself before she could stifle it; the idle fingers opened the magazine; Roger’s pen began to race across the paper. Voices on the piazza brought Marion to her feet; Judith’s voice was in the hall.

“O, Miss Marion, we came to tell you—” began Judith.

“And to ask you how—” continued Jean.

“To make an Outing Ten,” finished Judith.

At the tea-table Marion told Roger the story of how Jean had an outing.

“I wish you might have heard the unconscious way she told it. My life _is_ like Africa: all beaten tracks. I am to be the President of the Outing Ten. All Bensalem is to be my own special private outing, but nobody is to know it.”

“Then, Marion dear, you will have the two most blessed things on the earth.”

“What are they?”

“Don’t you know?”

“You think work is one,” she said doubtfully.

“So you think. And companionship is the other.”

“Roger, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t given you companionship; I’ve been stupid, self-absorbed, idle—”

“Anything else?”

“But you have been desolate, sometimes.”

“My work has been my companionship.”

“Then there is only one blessed thing to you,” she said, merrily. “May you get it.”

“I am getting it every day.”

“Then you do not inwardly fret against the limitations of this bit of a village—” she began, frightened at herself for the suggestion: “I thought, perhaps, you were _bearing_ Bensalem.”

“So I am, I hope,” he answered, gravely, “in my heart, and in my prayers.”

“I beg your pardon,” she returned, flushing under the “splendid purpose in his eyes.” “I might have known you were too broad to feel narrowed, as I do.”

“You remember what Lowell says: ‘There are few brains that would not be better for living for a while on their own fat.’”

“And that is better than the fat of the land—which you will never get in Bensalem.”

“I think I started from my new standpoint without worldly ambition. Think of Paul writing the Epistle to the Romans from a literary point of view.”

“Well, then,” with a laugh that was half a grumble, “I despair of you, if you ‘take pleasure’ as he did in all sorts of infirmities and limitations—I was beginning to be ambitious for you. You spent all the afternoon last week with Agnes Trembly’s mother, reading to her, and telling her stories—you do not take time to _study_ as you used to study. You were such a student. Now all you care for is people—and the Bible,” she ran on, discontentedly; “What does Don think of you?” she asked, with a sudden flush.

“He is in despair,” he replied, thinking of Don’s latest letter of angry expostulation.

“He is ambitious,” said Marion, reproachfully.

“So am I,” he answered, smiling at the reproach.

“But in such a way. I like ambition. I would like to do something in the world myself.”

“The man, or woman, or child, who does the will of God is every day doing something in the world,” he said, seriously.

For a moment she was silenced, then urged by her own discontent she burst out:—

“But five hundred or a thousand people might as well listen to you, and be influenced by your ‘strength and simplicity,’ as this handful of Bensalem.”

“The perfect Teacher was more than once content with but one listener.”

“Yes; but his sermon was written and handed down to all the ages,” she answered, in a flash.

“If one life here in Bensalem is moved, and another life moved by that, who can tell how far down the ages the influence may go? Beside, that is not my care,” he said, in his rested voice.

“But _wouldn’t_ you, now, candidly, rather influence ten hundred lives than one hundred?”

“Candidly, I would.”

“And, yet, you have refused a call to Maverick, and stay stupidly here.”

“Stupidly is your own interpretation. I will be content to move one man if I might choose the man. I am determined to learn what can be done in a village by one man who stays for the ‘fat of the land,’ the youth. From Drummond’s standpoint, only the boy himself and the young man understand the boy. My outlook just now is from the standpoint of that big-eyed, sensitive-lipped Joe, and your Judith. Men and women are but boys and girls grown tall. I find out the boy; you are helping me to the girl.”

“I am glad I can help,” said Marion, satisfied.

XIV. AN AFTERNOON WITH AN ADVENTURE IN IT.

“Lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”

—_Luke_ xi. 4.

“Lord, Thou knowest all things: Thou knowest that I love Thee.”

—_John_ xxi. 17.

It was rag-carpet afternoon; it was also another kind of an afternoon, an afternoon with an adventure in it, and Judith longed for adventures; but, of course, all she knew, at first, was the rag-carpet; the adventure was to happen in the kitchen, and the rag-carpet ball was happening in Aunt Affy’s room.

Judith was a working member of the Outing Ten, but if her outing meant this rag-carpet ball it was very discouraging, and if it were not for the pleasure of telling the President about the rag-carpet, she thought she would resign and become member of a ten that had more fun in it.

But then, Miss Marion was doing this kind of thing herself, things she did not like to do about the house, for she had sent away her servant and was doing all the work excepting washing and ironing, and, perhaps, in the village, too, she was doing uncongenial errands; but, of course, she would never tell the Outing Ten about that; she was going out to tea and making calls, as she had said she never _would_ do when she came to Bensalem, and she was taking her music back and practicing hours every day, and reading solid books, instead of novels; she had let books and music go for a while, Judith had heard her say to Aunt Affy, and that Jean Draper’s outing had been the blessing of her life. It was Nettie’s blessing, too; she told Marion she had an “outing” every day; she was patching a quilt and studying history.

The history study was a part of Marion’s outing, but the Ten did not know that.

Aunt Affy, wearing a calico loose gown of lilac and white, was seated in a rocker at the window combing her long gray hair: her hair was soft and thick, she twisted it into a coil, and behind her each ear she brushed a long curl.

Judith liked to twist these curls around her fingers when she talked to Aunt Affy.

“Only a little more to do,” encouraged Aunt Affy, giving her coil a firm twist.

Sitting on the matting at Aunt Affy’s feet the little girl began her weary work again.

“Aunt Affy! How did you get your name?” she inquired with the eagerness of something new to talk about.

“How did you get yours?” asked Aunt Affy, seriously.

“But mine is a real name.”

“Isn’t mine?”

“I never heard it before.”

“Some people have never heard of Judith.”

“That is true. Nettie never had.”

“Mine is in the Bible. So is Rody’s.”

“_Is_ it? Well, I’ve never read the Bible through.”

“I will show it to you.”

“Aunt Affy, you and Aunt Rody never look in the glass when you comb your hair. You sit anywhere. It’s very funny.”

“When you have combed your hair sixty and eighty years you will not need to look in the glass,” was the serious reply.

“It isn’t sixty,” said literal Judith. “You did not do it when you were a baby.”

Taking her New Testament in large type from the small table near her, Aunt Affy found the place and laid it on the arm of her chair; Judith lifted herself and read where Aunt Affy’s finger pointed: “And to our beloved Apphia—but that isn’t Affy,” said astonished Judith.

“It grew down to it when I was a girl, and has never grown up. Shall I find Rody?”

Again Aunt Affy found the place, and Judith read. “‘And as Peter knocked at the door of the gate, a damsel came to hearken named Rhoda.’ That’s very funny,” she said, settling down among her rags.

“There were eight of us girls, and we all had Bible names: Rody, Dark, that was Dorcas, Mary, Marthy, Deborah, that’s your mother’s mother, Hanner, it is really Hannah, Becky, and Affy the youngest, is eight. Rody and I only are left. They were all married but Rody and Becky and me. Cephas was engaged to poor Becky, and she died; he went away after that, went South, went West, and at last came here; I wrote to him to come and finish his days with me. Rody wasn’t exactly pleased.”

“Why?” asked Judith, excited over the old folks’ romance.

“She doesn’t like new happenings, and she never _had_ liked Cephas.”