The Perkins horse and wagon rumbled along over the dusty country road, and after a discreet silence, maintained as long as human flesh could endure, Rebecca remarked sedately:
“It's a sad errand for such a shiny morning, isn't it, Mr. Perkins?”
“Plenty o' trouble in the world, Rebecky, shiny mornin's an' all,” that good man replied. “If you want a bed to lay on, a roof over your head, an' food to eat, you've got to work for em. If I hadn't a' labored early an' late, learned my trade, an' denied myself when I was young, I might a' be'n a pauper layin' sick in a loggin' cabin, stead o' bein' an overseer o' the poor an' selectman drivin' along to take the pauper to the poor farm.”
“People that are mortgaged don't have to go to the poor farm, do they, Mr. Perkins?” asked Rebecca, with a shiver of fear as she remembered her home farm at Sunnybrook and the debt upon it; a debt which had lain like a shadow over her childhood.
“Bless your soul, no; not unless they fail to pay up; but Sal Perry an' her husband hadn't got fur enough along in life to BE mortgaged. You have to own something before you can mortgage it.”
Rebecca's heart bounded as she learned that a mortgage represented a certain stage in worldly prosperity.
“Well,” she said, sniffing in the fragrance of the new-mown hay and growing hopeful as she did so; “maybe the sick woman will be better such a beautiful day, and maybe the husband will come back to make it up and say he's sorry, and sweet content will reign in the humble habitation that was once the scene of poverty, grief, and despair. That's how it came out in a story I'm reading.”
“I hain't noticed that life comes out like stories very much,” responded the pessimistic blacksmith, who, as Rebecca privately thought, had read less than half a dozen books in his long and prosperous career.
A drive of three or four miles brought the party to a patch of woodland where many of the tall pines had been hewn the previous winter. The roof of a ramshackle hut was outlined against a background of young birches, and a rough path made in hauling the logs to the main road led directly to its door.
As they drew near the figure of a woman approached—Mrs. Lizy Ann Dennett, in a gingham dress, with a calico apron over her head.
“Good morning, Mr. Perkins,” said the woman, who looked tired and irritable. “I'm real glad you come right over, for she took worse after I sent you word, and she's dead.”
Dead! The word struck heavily and mysteriously on the children's ears. Dead! And their young lives, just begun, stretched on and on, all decked, like hope, in living green. Dead! And all the rest of the world reveling in strength. Dead! With all the daisies and buttercups waving in the fields and the men heaping the mown grass into fragrant cocks or tossing it into heavily laden carts. Dead! With the brooks tinkling after the summer showers, with the potatoes and corn blossoming, the birds singing for joy, and every little insect humming and chirping, adding its note to the blithe chorus of warm, throbbing life.
“I was all alone with her. She passed away suddenly jest about break o' day,” said Lizy Ann Dennett.
“Her soul passed upward to its God Just at the break of day.”
These words came suddenly into Rebecca's mind from a tiny chamber where such things were wont to lie quietly until something brought them to the surface. She could not remember whether she had heard them at a funeral or read them in the hymn book or made them up “out of her own head,” but she was so thrilled with the idea of dying just as the dawn was breaking that she scarcely heard Mrs. Dennett's conversation.
“I sent for Aunt Beulah Day, an' she's be'n here an' laid her out,” continued the long suffering Lizy Ann. “She ain't got any folks, an' John Winslow ain't never had any as far back as I can remember. She belongs to your town and you'll have to bury her and take care of Jacky—that's the boy. He's seventeen months old, a bright little feller, the image o' John, but I can't keep him another day. I'm all wore out; my own baby's sick, mother's rheumatiz is extry bad, and my husband's comin' home tonight from his week's work. If he finds a child o' John Winslow's under his roof I can't say what would happen; you'll have to take him back with you to the poor farm.”
“I can't take him up there this afternoon,” objected Mr. Perkins.
“Well, then, keep him over Sunday yourself; he's good as a kitten. John Winslow'll hear o' Sal's death sooner or later, unless he's gone out of the state altogether, an' when he knows the boy's at the poor farm, I kind o' think he'll come and claim him. Could you drive me over to the village to see about the coffin, and would you children be afraid to stay here alone for a spell?” she asked, turning to the girls.
“Afraid?” they both echoed uncomprehendingly.
Lizy Ann and Mr. Perkins, perceiving that the fear of a dead presence had not entered the minds of Rebecca or Emma Jane, said nothing, but drove off together, counseling them not to stray far away from the cabin and promising to be back in an hour.
There was not a house within sight, either looking up or down the shady road, and the two girls stood hand in hand, watching the wagon out of sight; then they sat down quietly under a tree, feeling all at once a nameless depression hanging over their gay summer-morning spirits.
It was very still in the woods; just the chirp of a grasshopper now and then, or the note of a bird, or the click of a far-distant mowing machine.
“We're WATCHING!” whispered Emma Jane. “They watched with Gran'pa Perkins, and there was a great funeral and two ministers. He left two thousand dollars in the bank and a store full of goods, and a paper thing you could cut tickets off of twice a year, and they were just like money.”
“They watched with my little sister Mira, too,” said Rebecca. “You remember when she died, and I went home to Sunnybrook Farm? It was winter time, but she was covered with evergreen and white pinks, and there was singing.”
“There won't be any funeral or ministers or singing here, will there? Isn't that awful?”
“I s'pose not; and oh, Emma Jane, no flowers either. We might get those for her if there's nobody else to do it.”
“Would you dare put them on to her?” asked Emma Jane, in a hushed voice.
“I don't know; I can't tell; it makes me shiver, but, of course, we COULD do it if we were the only friends she had. Let's look into the cabin first and be perfectly sure that there aren't any. Are you afraid?”
“N-no; I guess not. I looked at Gran'pa Perkins, and he was just the same as ever.”
At the door of the hut Emma Jane's courage suddenly departed. She held back shuddering and refused either to enter or look in. Rebecca shuddered too, but kept on, drawn by an insatiable curiosity about life and death, an overmastering desire to know and feel and understand the mysteries of existence, a hunger for knowledge and experience at all hazards and at any cost.
Emma Jane hurried softly away from the felt terrors of the cabin, and after two or three minutes of utter silence Rebecca issued from the open door, her sensitive face pale and woe-begone, the ever-ready tears raining down her cheeks. She ran toward the edge of the wood, sinking down by Emma Jane's side, and covering her eyes, sobbed with excitement:
“Oh, Emma Jane, she hasn't got a flower, and she's so tired and sad-looking, as if she'd been hurt and hurt and never had any good times, and there's a weeny, weeny baby side of her. Oh, I wish I hadn't gone in!”
Emma Jane blenched for an instant. “Mrs. Dennett never said THERE WAS TWO DEAD ONES! ISN'T THAT DREADFUL? But,” she continued, her practical common sense coming to the rescue, “you've been in once and it's all over; it won't be so bad when you take in the flowers because you'll be used to it. The goldenrod hasn't begun to bud, so there's nothing to pick but daisies. Shall I make a long rope of them, as I did for the schoolroom?”
“Yes,” said Rebecca, wiping her eyes and still sobbing. “Yes, that's the prettiest, and if we put it all round her like a frame, the undertaker couldn't be so cruel as to throw it away, even if she is a pauper, because it will look so beautiful. From what the Sunday school lessons say, she's only asleep now, and when she wakes up she'll be in heaven.”
“THERE'S ANOTHER PLACE,” said Emma Jane, in an orthodox and sepulchral whisper, as she took her ever-present ball of crochet cotton from her pocket and began to twine the whiteweed blossoms into a rope.
“Oh, well!” Rebecca replied with the easy theology that belonged to her temperament. “They simply couldn't send her DOWN THERE with that little weeny baby. Who'd take care of it? You know page six of the catechism says the only companions of the wicked after death are their father the devil and all the other evil angels; it wouldn't be any place to bring up a baby.”
“Whenever and wherever she wakes up, I hope she won't know that the big baby is going to the poor farm. I wonder where he is?”
“Perhaps over to Mrs. Dennett's house. She didn't seem sorry a bit, did she?”
“No, but I suppose she's tired sitting up and nursing a stranger. Mother wasn't sorry when Gran'pa Perkins died; she couldn't be, for he was cross all the time and had to be fed like a child. Why ARE you crying again, Rebecca?”
“Oh, I don't know, I can't tell, Emma Jane! Only I don't want to die and have no funeral or singing and nobody sorry for me! I just couldn't bear it!”
“Neither could I,” Emma Jane responded sympathetically; “but p'r'aps if we're real good and die young before we have to be fed, they will be sorry. I do wish you could write some poetry for her as you did for Alice Robinson's canary bird, only still better, of course, like that you read me out of your thought book.”
“I could, easy enough,” exclaimed Rebecca, somewhat consoled by the idea that her rhyming faculty could be of any use in such an emergency. “Though I don't know but it would be kind of bold to do it. I'm all puzzled about how people get to heaven after they're buried. I can't understand it a bit; but if the poetry is on her, what if that should go, too? And how could I write anything good enough to be read out loud in heaven?”
“A little piece of paper couldn't get to heaven; it just couldn't,” asserted Emma Jane decisively. “It would be all blown to pieces and dried up. And nobody knows that the angels can read writing, anyway.”
“They must be as educated as we are, and more so, too,” agreed Rebecca. “They must be more than just dead people, or else why should they have wings? But I'll go off and write something while you finish the rope; it's lucky you brought your crochet cotton and I my lead pencil.”
In fifteen or twenty minutes she returned with some lines written on a scrap of brown wrapping paper. Standing soberly by Emma Jane, she said, preparing to read them aloud: “They're not good; I was afraid your father'd come back before I finished, and the first verse sounds exactly like the funeral hymns in the church book. I couldn't call her Sally Winslow; it didn't seem nice when I didn't know her and she is dead, so I thought if I said friend' it would show she had somebody to be sorry.
“This friend of ours has died and gone
From us to heaven to live.
If she has sinned against Thee, Lord,
We pray Thee, Lord, forgive.
“Her husband runneth far away
And knoweth not she's dead.
Oh, bring him back—ere tis too late—
To mourn beside her bed.
“And if perchance it can't be so,
Be to the children kind;
The weeny one that goes with her,
The other left behind.”
“I think that's perfectly elegant!” exclaimed Emma Jane, kissing Rebecca fervently. “You are the smartest girl in the whole State of Maine, and it sounds like a minister's prayer. I wish we could save up and buy a printing machine. Then I could learn to print what you write and we'd be partners like father and Bill Moses. Shall you sign it with your name like we do our school compositions?”
“No,” said Rebecca soberly. “I certainly shan't sign it, not knowing where it's going or who'll read it. I shall just hide it in the flowers, and whoever finds it will guess that there wasn't any minister or singing, or gravestone, or anything, so somebody just did the best they could.”