Part 14 (2/2)

”Mr. Rollin,” I said; ”if I had come to Wallencamp merely in search of my own pleasure and diversion, I should doubtless find it very easy to do some things which I do not consider harmful in themselves, but which it is wrong for me to do under the circ.u.mstances. I may tell you that I have been very reckless, very thoughtless in my life, but I came here resolving to devote myself to an earnest, serious work. I hoped to do these people good. They do seem to believe in me. They trust me. I cannot bear that they should think me in any way unworthy of their trust. When you asked me to drive this evening,--it was just as it used to be--I did not think. You were very kind. It was pleasant, and I thank you,--but I ought not to have gone--don't you see? I believe, now, that it would have been so much better if I had not.”

”I don't see,” said Mr. Rollin; ”why should you leave _me_ out altogether? Don't I believe in you? Don't I need to be done some good to?”

At this last childishly whimsical appeal I was in sore danger of being diverted from the serious channel of my thoughts. Then the door of the Ark softly opened a little way, and there, nightcapped in white, like a full, benignant moon, appeared the head of Grandma Keeler, as she peered blindly out into the night.

”Poor old soul!” I said. ”She has probably been 'waiting and watching.'

Don't you see already one of the results of my sinning? Good night,” I said, extending my hand to the fisherman, who had fixed on that innocent and unconscious nightcap a darkly withering gaze.

”Oh, never mind me,” he muttered, turning abruptly. ”Only take care of this infernal old nest of Hoosiers, and respectable people may go to the devil!”

CHAPTER VI.

BECKY AND THE CRADLEBOW.

”Teacher's got Beck's beau!”

”Teacher's got Beck's beau!” I heard it whispered among the school children. Rebecca heard, too, and paled a little, but looked up at me and smiled as frankly as ever.

Seeing her alone afterwards, I took occasion to remark, incidentally, ”how kind it was of her friend, Mr. Rollin, to bring me home from church.

f.a.n.n.y was so slow! And I thought he was a very pleasant young man, but even the most estimable people, you know,” I added, laughing, with an undertone of studied significance; ”are not just fitted to enjoy each other's society always.”

Then I blushed under the girl's clear, trustful gaze.

”You don't think I mind what the children talk!” she said.

Every day Rebecca appealed more and more, unconsciously, to what was most generous and grave and heedful in my nature. She seemed to be demanding of me, with mute, gentle importunity, to make real my ideal of life, to be what I knew she believed me to be. Her faith in my superior wisdom and goodness, her slow, timid way of confiding in me, with tears and blushes even; it was all very flattering, very captivating to one who had but so lately risen to occupy the pedestal of a moral instructress, and ”my child,” ”my dear child,” I said to her in many private discourses, with more than the tranquil grace and dignity with which such terms had been applied to me, only a year before, by the august princ.i.p.al of Mt. B---- Seminary.

Rebecca read my books, and I drew her out to talk with me about them. She prepared her lessons, with me, out of school. She knew that she might come whenever she chose to my little room at the Ark, which the chimney kept comfortably warm, and often I heard her footsteps on the stairs and her gentle knock at the door.

If I was troubled or perplexed on any account, Rebecca always seemed to understand in that quiet, un.o.btrusive way of hers, and followed my movements with a grave, restful sympathy in her eyes. On several occasions I had asked her, playfully, to walk up the lane with me after school. So it became a matter of course that she should wait for me.

Often we took longer walks, for it was an ”open winter,” with only one or two light falls of snow.

Then I believed the ”Tempter” came to me, in the form of another invitation to drive, from Mr. Rollin.

Occupied with my duties in the school-room, one afternoon, I was startled to observe these characters as suddenly and mysteriously raised as if by the unseen hand of a modern sibyl on the blackboard:--

”teecher's Bo is a setting On the Fens.”

Involuntarily raising my eyes to the window, I was unable to discover on the fence opposite anything of the nature indicated in those words. I concluded that the whole was to be taken as one of those deeply allegorical expressions in which the Wallencamp tongue abounded.

Shortly afterward, a boy who had been playing truant and the Jews' harp at the same time, in a subdued and melancholy way under the window, and who had, doubtless, been bribed to undertake his present commission through some extraordinary means, entered the school-room, and laid on my desk a note from the auburn-haired fisherman. It was hastily scrawled in lead pencil, on a leaf torn from a memorandum.

The fisherman confessed to all the meekness and long suffering, without the cheerful intrepidity of Mary's little lamb! He would do all his waiting outside. Mr. Levi was down from West Wallen to-day, and said that he had heard somebody say that there were four letters came for the teacher in last night's mail. Would I like to drive over to West Wallen and get them. The fisherman did not believe that I had been in earnest in the prudish and unreasonable notions I had propounded when he left me the other evening.

”Prudis.h.!.+” In my newly-acquired elevation of mind, I hugged the term with a deep, intense, and mysterious delight. Oh, if my mother could only know--if my elder sister could only know that I had actually been accused of prudishness! It was in the glow and inspiration of this idea that I indited the answer to Mr. Rollin's missive: ”Why would he make it unpleasant and disagreeable for me to do what seemed so plainly my duty?”--and dispatched the same by the pensive and unpunished truant, who was soon heard again revelling in the stolen sweets of his Jews' harp beneath the window.

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