Chapter III.
A Difference in Hearts
“I don’ know as I cal’lated to be the makin’ of any child,” Miranda had said as she folded Aurelia’s letter and laid it in the light-stand drawer. “I s’posed, of course, Aurelia would send us the one we asked for, but it’s just like her to palm off that wild young one on somebody else.”
“You remember we said that Rebecca or even Jenny might come, in case Hannah couldn’t,” interposed Jane.
“I know we did, but we hadn’t any notion it would turn out that way,” grumbled Miranda.
“She was a mite of a thing when we saw her three years ago,” ventured Jane; “she’s had time to improve.”
“And time to grow worse!”
“Won’t it be kind of a privilege to put her on the right track?” asked Jane timidly.
“I don’ know about the privilege part; it’ll be considerable of a chore, I guess. If her mother hain’t got her on the right track by now, she won’t take to it herself all of a sudden.”
This depressed and depressing frame of mind had lasted until the eventful day dawned on which Rebecca was to arrive.
“If she makes as much work after she comes as she has before, we might as well give up hope of ever gettin’ any rest,” sighed Miranda as she hung the dish towels on the barberry bushes at the side door.
“But we should have had to clean house, Rebecca or no Rebecca,” urged Jane; “and I can’t see why you’ve scrubbed and washed and baked as you have for that one child, nor why you’ve about bought out Watson’s stock of dry goods.”
“I know Aurelia if you don’t,” responded Miranda. “I’ve seen her house, and I’ve seen that batch o’ children, wearin’ one another’s clothes and never carin’ whether they had ‘em on right sid’ out or not; I know what they’ve had to live and dress on, and so do you. That child will like as not come here with a passel o’ things borrowed from the rest o’ the family. She’ll have Hannah’s shoes and John’s undershirts and Mark’s socks most likely. I suppose she never had a thimble on her finger in her life, but she’ll know the feelin’ o’ one before she’s ben here many days. I’ve bought a piece of unbleached muslin and a piece o’ brown gingham for her to make up; that’ll keep her busy. Of course she won’t pick up anything after herself; she probably never see a duster, and she’ll be as hard to train into our ways as if she was a heathen.”
“She’ll make a dif’rence,” acknowledged Jane, “but she may turn out more biddable ‘n we think.”
“She’ll mind when she’s spoken to, biddable or not,” remarked Miranda with a shake of the last towel.
Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood. She was just, conscientious, economical, industrious; a regular attendant at church and Sunday-school, and a member of the State Missionary and Bible societies, but in the presence of all these chilly virtues you longed for one warm little fault, or lacking that, one likable failing, something to make you sure she was thoroughly alive. She had never had any education other than that of the neighborhood district school, for her desires and ambitions had all pointed to the management of the house, the farm, and the dairy. Jane, on the other hand, had gone to an academy, and also to a boarding-school for young ladies; so had Aurelia; and after all the years that had elapsed there was still a slight difference in language and in manner between the elder and the two younger sisters.
Jane, too, had had the inestimable advantage of a sorrow; not the natural grief at the loss of her aged father and mother, for she had been content to let them go; but something far deeper. She was engaged to marry young Tom Carter, who had nothing to marry on, it is true, but who was sure to have, some time or other. Then the war broke out. Tom enlisted at the first call. Up to that time Jane had loved him with a quiet, friendly sort of affection, and had given her country a mild emotion of the same sort. But the strife, the danger, the anxiety of the time, set new currents of feeling in motion. Life became something other than the three meals a day, the round of cooking, washing, sewing, and church going. Personal gossip vanished from the village conversation. Big things took the place of trifling ones,—sacred sorrows of wives and mothers, pangs of fathers and husbands, self-denials, sympathies, new desire to bear one another’s burdens. Men and women grew fast in those days of the nation’s trouble and danger, and Jane awoke from the vague dull dream she had hitherto called life to new hopes, new fears, new purposes. Then after a year’s anxiety, a year when one never looked in the newspaper without dread and sickness of suspense, came the telegram saying that Tom was wounded; and without so much as asking Miranda’s leave, she packed her trunk and started for the South. She was in time to hold Tom’s hand through hours of pain; to show him for once the heart of a prim New England girl when it is ablaze with love and grief; to put her arms about him so that he could have a home to die in, and that was all;—all, but it served.
It carried her through weary months of nursing—nursing of other soldiers for Tom’s dear sake; it sent her home a better woman; and though she had never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between, and had grown into the counterfeit presentment of her sister and of all other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it was something of a counterfeit, and underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heart-beat of her girlhood. Having learned the trick of beating and loving and suffering, the poor faithful heart persisted, although it lived on memories and carried on its sentimental operations mostly in secret.
“You’re soft, Jane,” said Miranda once; “you allers was soft, and you allers will be. If ‘t wa’n’t for me keeping you stiffened up, I b’lieve you’d leak out o’ the house into the dooryard.”
It was already past the appointed hour for Mr. Cobb and his coach to be lumbering down the street.
“The stage ought to be here,” said Miranda, glancing nervously at the tall clock for the twentieth time. “I guess everything ‘s done. I’ve tacked up two thick towels back of her washstand and put a mat under her slop-jar; but children are awful hard on furniture. I expect we sha’n’t know this house a year from now.”
Jane’s frame of mind was naturally depressed and timorous, having been affected by Miranda’s gloomy presages of evil to come. The only difference between the sisters in this matter was that while Miranda only wondered how they could endure Rebecca, Jane had flashes of inspiration in which she wondered how Rebecca would endure them. It was in one of these flashes that she ran up the back stairs to put a vase of apple blossoms and a red tomato-pincushion on Rebecca’s bureau.
The stage rumbled to the side door of the brick house, and Mr. Cobb handed Rebecca out like a real lady passenger. She alighted with great circumspection, put the bunch of faded flowers in her aunt Miranda’s hand, and received her salute; it could hardly be called a kiss without injuring the fair name of that commodity.
“You needn’t ‘a’ bothered to bring flowers,” remarked that gracious and tactful lady; “the garden ‘s always full of ‘em here when it comes time.”
Jane then kissed Rebecca, giving a somewhat better imitation of the real thing than her sister. “Put the trunk in the entry, Jeremiah, and we’ll get it carried upstairs this afternoon,” she said.
“I’ll take it up for ye now, if ye say the word, girls.”
“No, no; don’t leave the horses; somebody’ll be comin’ past, and we can call ‘em in.”
“Well, good-by, Rebecca; good-day, Mirandy ‘n’ Jane. You’ve got a lively little girl there. I guess she’ll be a first-rate company keeper.”
Miss Sawyer shuddered openly at the