New Chronicles of Rebecca

“I want to know! That’ll be grand, won’t it?” (Still not a sign of consciousness on the part of Abner.)

“I hope Mrs. Fogg will take Clara Belle, for it will be splendid to look at! Mr. Cobb is going to be Uncle Sam and drive us on the stage. Miss Dearborn—Clara Belle’s old teacher, you know—is going to be Columbia; the girls will be the States of the Union, and oh, Mr. Simpson, I am the one to be the State of Maine!” (This was not altogether to the point, but a piece of information impossible to conceal.)

Mr. Simpson flourished the whipstock and gave a loud, hearty laugh. Then he turned in his seat and regarded Rebecca curiously. “You’re kind of small, hain’t ye, for so big a state as this one?” he asked.

“Any of us would be too small,” replied Rebecca with dignity, “but the committee asked me, and I am going to try hard to do well.”

The tragic thought that there might be no occasion for anybody to do anything, well or ill, suddenly overcame her here, and putting her hand on Mr. Simpson’s sleeve, she attacked the subject practically and courageously.

“Oh, Mr. Simpson, dear Mr. Simpson, it’s such a mortifying subject I can’t bear to say anything about it, but please give us back our flag! Don’t, DON’T take it over to Acreville, Mr. Simpson! We’ve worked so long to make it, and it was so hard getting the money for the bunting! Wait a minute, please; don’t be angry, and don’t say no just yet, till I explain more. It’ll be so dreadful for everybody to get there tomorrow morning and find no flag to raise, and the band and the mayor all disappointed, and the children crying, with their muslin dresses all bought for nothing! O dear Mr. Simpson, please don’t take our flag away from us!”

The apparently astonished Abner pulled his mustaches and exclaimed: “But I don’t know what you’re drivin’ at! Who’s got yer flag? I hain’t!”

Could duplicity, deceit, and infamy go any further, Rebecca wondered, and her soul filling with righteous wrath, she cast discretion to the winds and spoke a little more plainly, bending her great swimming eyes on the now embarrassed Abner, who looked like an angle-worm, wriggling on a pin.

“Mr. Simpson, how can you say that, when I saw the flag in the back of your wagon myself, when you stopped to water the horse? It’s wicked of you to take it, and I cannot bear it!” (Her voice broke now, for a doubt of Mr. Simpson’s yielding suddenly darkened her mind.) “If you keep it, you’ll have to keep me, for I won’t be parted from it! I can’t fight like the boys, but I can pinch and scratch, and I WILL scratch, just like a panther—I’ll lie right down on my star and not move, if I starve to death!”

“Look here, hold your hosses n’ don’t cry till you git something to cry for!” grumbled the outraged Abner, to whom a clue had just come; and leaning over the wagon-back he caught hold of a corner of white sheet and dragged up the bundle, scooping off Rebecca’s hat in the process, and almost burying her in bunting.

She caught the treasure passionately to her heart and stifled her sobs in it, while Abner exclaimed: “I swan to man, if that hain’t a flag! Well, in that case you’re good n’ welcome to it! Land! I seen that bundle lyin’ in the middle o’ the road and I says to myself, that’s somebody’s washin’ and I’d better pick it up and leave it at the post-office to be claimed; n’ all the time it was a flag!”

This was a Simpsonian version of the matter, the fact being that a white-covered bundle lying on the Meserves’ front steps had attracted his practiced eye, and slipping in at the open gate he had swiftly and deftly removed it to his wagon on general principles; thinking if it were clean clothes it would be extremely useful, and in any event there was no good in passing by something flung into your very arms, so to speak. He had had no leisure to examine the bundle, and indeed took little interest in it. Probably he stole it simply from force of habit, and because there was nothing else in sight to steal, everybody’s premises being preternaturally tidy and empty, almost as if his visit had been expected!

Rebecca was a practical child, and it seemed to her almost impossible that so heavy a bundle should fall out of Mrs. Meserve’s buggy and not be noticed; but she hoped that Mr. Simpson was telling the truth, and she was too glad and grateful to doubt anyone at the moment.

“Thank you, thank you ever so much, Mr. Simpson. You’re the nicest, kindest, politest man I ever knew, and the girls will be so pleased you gave us back the flag, and so will the Dorcas Society; they’ll be sure to write you a letter of thanks; they always do.”

“Tell em not to bother bout any thanks,” said Simpson, beaming virtuously. “But land! I’m glad twas me that happened to see that bundle in the road and take the trouble to pick it up.” (“Jest to think of it’s bein’ a flag!” he thought; “if ever there was a pesky, wuthless thing to trade off, twould be a great, gormin’ flag like that!”)

“Can I get out now, please?” asked Rebecca. “I want to go back, for Mrs. Meserve will be dreadfully nervous when she finds out she dropped the flag, and she has heart trouble.”

“No, you don’t,” objected Mr. Simpson gallantly, turning the horse. “Do you think I’d let a little creeter like you lug that great heavy bundle? I hain’t got time to go back to Meserve’s, but I’ll take you to the corner and dump you there, flag n’ all, and you can get some o’ the men-folks to carry it the rest o’ the way. You’ll wear it out, huggin’ it so!”

“I helped make it and I adore it!” said Rebecca, who was in a high-pitched and grandiloquent mood. “Why don’t YOU like it? It’s your country’s flag.”

Simpson smiled an indulgent smile and looked a trifle bored at these frequent appeals to his extremely rusty higher feelings.

“I don’ know’s I’ve got any partic’lar int’rest in the country,” he remarked languidly. “I know I don’t owe nothin’ to it, nor own nothin’ in it!”

“You own a star on the flag, same as everybody,” argued Rebecca, who had been feeding on patriotism for a month; “and you own a state, too, like all of us!”

“Land! I wish’t I did! or even a quarter section!” sighed Mr. Simpson, feeling somehow a little more poverty-stricken and discouraged than usual.

As they approached the corner and the watering-trough where four cross-roads met, the whole neighborhood seemed to be in evidence, and Mr. Simpson suddenly regretted his chivalrous escort of Rebecca; especially when, as he neared the group, an excited lady, wringing her hands, turned out to be Mrs. Peter Meserve, accompanied by Huldah, the Browns, Mrs. Milliken, Abijah Flagg, and Miss Dearborn.

“Do you know anything about the new flag, Rebecca?” shrieked Mrs. Meserve, too agitated, at the moment, to notice the child’s companion.

“It’s right here in my lap, all safe,” responded Rebecca joyously.

“You careless, meddlesome young one, to take it off my steps where I left it just long enough to go round to the back and hunt up my door-key! You’ve given me a fit of sickness with my weak heart, and what business was it of yours? I believe you think you OWN the flag! Hand it over to me this minute!”

Rebecca was climbing down during this torrent of language, but as she turned she flashed one look of knowledge at the false Simpson, a look that went through him from head to foot, as if it were carried by electricity.

He had not deceived her after all, owing to the angry chatter of Mrs. Meserve. He had been handcuffed twice in his life, but no sheriff had ever discomfited him so thoroughly as this child. Fury mounted to his brain, and as soon as she was safely out from between the wheels he stood up in the wagon and flung the flag out in the road in the midst of the excited group.

“Take it, you pious, passimonious, cheese-parin’, hair-splittin’, back-bitin’, flag-raisin’ crew!” he roared. “Rebecca never took the flag; I found it in the road, I say!”

“You never, no such a thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Meserve. “You found it on the doorsteps in my garden!”

“Mebbe twas your garden, but it was so chock full o’ weeks I THOUGHT twas the road,” retorted Abner. “I vow I wouldn’t a’ given the old rag back to one o’ YOU, not if you begged me on your bended knees! But Rebecca’s a friend o’ my folks and can do with her flag’s she’s a mind to, and the rest o’ ye can go to thunder—n’ stay there, for all I care!”

So saying, he made a sharp turn, gave the gaunt white horse a lash and disappeared in a cloud of dust, before the astonished Mr. Brown, the only man in the party, had a thought of detaining him.

“I’m sorry I spoke so quick, Rebecca,” said Mrs. Meserve, greatly mortified at the situation. “But don’t you believe a word that lyin’ critter said! He did steal it off my doorstep, and how did you come to be ridin’ and consortin’ with him! I believe it would kill your Aunt Miranda if she should hear about it!”

The little school-teacher put a sheltering arm round Rebecca as Mr. Brown picked up the flag and dusted and folded it.

“I’m willing she should hear about it,” Rebecca answered. “I didn’t do anything to be ashamed of! I saw the flag in the back of Mr. Simpson’s wagon and I just followed it. There weren’t any men or any Dorcases to take care of it and so it fell to me! You wouldn’t have had me let it out of my sight, would you, and we going to raise it tomorrow morning?”

“Rebecca’s perfectly right, Mrs. Meserve!” said Miss Dearborn proudly. “And it’s lucky there was somebody quick-witted enough to ride and consort’ with Mr. Simpson! I don’t know what the village will think, but seems to me the town clerk might write down in his book, THIS DAY THE STATE OF MAINE SAVED THE FLAG!’”

Sixth Chronicle. THE STATE O’ MAINE GIRL

I

The foregoing episode, if narrated in a romance, would undoubtedly have been called “The Saving of the Colors,” but at the nightly conversazione in Watson’s store it was alluded to as the way little Becky Randall got the flag away from Slippery Simpson.

Dramatic as it was, it passed into the limbo of half-forgotten things in Rebecca’s mind, its brief importance submerged in the glories of the next day.

There was a painful prelude to these glories. Alice Robinson came to spend the night with Rebecca, and when the bedroom door closed upon the two girls, Alice announced here intention of “doing up” Rebecca’s front hair in leads and rags, and braiding the back in six tight, wetted braids.

Rebecca demurred. Alice persisted.

“Your hair is so long and thick and dark and straight,” she said, “that you’ll look like an Injun!”

“I am the State of Maine; it all belonged to the Indians once,” Rebecca remarked gloomily, for she was curiously shy about discussing her personal appearance.

“And your wreath of little pine-cones won’t set decent without crimps,” continued Alice.

Rebecca glanced in the cracked looking-glass and met what she considered an accusing lack of beauty, a sight that always either saddened or enraged her according to circumstances; then she sat down resignedly and began to help Alice in the philanthropic work of making the State of Maine fit to be seen at the raising.

Neither of the girls was an expert hairdresser, and at the end of an hour, when the sixth braid was tied, and Rebecca had given one last shuddering look in the mirror, both were ready to weep with fatigue.

The candle was blown out and Alice soon went to sleep, but Rebecca tossed on her pillow, its goose-feathered softness all dented by the cruel lead knobs and the knots of twisted rags. She slipped out of bed and walked to and fro, holding her aching head with both hands. Finally she leaned on the window-sill, watching the still weather-vane on Alice’s barn and breathing in the fragrance of the ripening apples, until her restlessness subsided under the clear starry beauty of the night.

At six in the morning the girls were out of bed, for Alice could hardly wait until Rebecca’s hair was taken down, she was so eager to see the result of her labors.

The leads and rags were painfully removed, together with much hair, the operation being punctuated by a series of squeaks, squeals, and shrieks on the part of Rebecca and a series of warnings from Alice, who wished the preliminaries to be kept secret from the aunts, that they might the more fully appreciate the radiant result.

Then came the unbraiding, and then—dramatic moment—the “combing out;” a difficult, not to say impossible process, in which the hairs that had resisted the earlier stages almost gave up the ghost.

The long front strands had been wound up from various angles and by various methods, so that, when released, they assumed the strangest, most obstinate, most unexpected attitudes. When the comb was dragged through the last braid, the wild, tortured, electric hairs following, and then rebounding from it in a bristling, snarling tangle. Massachusetts gave one encompassing glance at the State o’ Maine’s head, and announced her intention of going home to breakfast! She was deeply grieved at the result of her attempted beautifying, but she felt that meeting Miss Miranda Sawyer at the morning meal would not mend matters in the least, so slipping out of the side door, she ran up Guide Board hill as fast as her legs could carry her.

The State o’ Maine, deserted and somewhat unnerved, sat down before the glass and attacked her hair doggedly and with set lips, working over it until Miss Jane called her to breakfast; then, with a boldness born of despair, she entered the dining room, where her aunts were already seated at table. To “draw fire” she whistled, a forbidden joy, which only attracted more attention, instead of diverting it. There was a moment of silence after the grotesque figure was fully taken in; then came a moan from Jane and a groan from Miranda.

“What have you done to yourself?” asked Miranda sternly.

“Made an effort to be beautiful and failed!” jauntily replied Rebecca, but she was too miserable to keep up the fiction. “Oh, Aunt Miranda, don’t scold. I’m so unhappy! Alice and I rolled up my hair to curl it for the raising. She said it was so straight I looked like an Indian!”

“Mebbe you did,” vigorously agreed Miranda, “but ‘t any rate you looked like a Christian Injun, ‘n’ now you look like a heathen Injun; that’s all the difference I can see. What can we do with her, Jane, between this and nine o’clock?”

“We’ll all go out to the pump just as soon as we’re through breakfast,” answered Jane soothingly. “We can accomplish consid’rable with water and force.”

Rebecca nibbled her corn-cake, her tearful eyes cast on her plate and her chin quivering.

“Don’t you cry and red your eyes up,” chided Miranda quite kindly; “the minute you’ve eat enough run up and get your brush and comb and meet us at the back door.”

“I wouldn’t care myself how bad I looked,” said Rebecca, “but I can’t bear to be so homely that I shame the State of Maine!”

Oh, what an hour followed this plaint! Did any aspirant for literary or dramatic honors ever pass to fame through such an antechamber of horrors? Did poet of the day ever have his head so maltreated? To be dipped in the rain-water tub, soused again and again; to be held under the spout and pumped on; to be rubbed furiously with rough roller towels; to be dried with hot flannels! And is it not well-nigh incredible that at the close of such an hour the ends of the long hair should still stand out straight, the braids having been turned up two inches by Alice, and tied hard in that position with linen thread?

“Get out the skirt-board, Jane,” cried Miranda, to whom opposition served as a tonic, “and move that flat-iron on to the front o’ the stove. Rebecca, set down in that low chair beside the board, and Jane, you spread out her hair on it and cover it up with brown paper. Don’t cringe, Rebecca; the worst’s over, and you’ve borne up real good! I’ll be careful not to pull your hair nor scorch you, and oh, HOW I’d like to have Alice Robinson acrost my knee and a good strip o’ shingle in my right hand! There, you’re all ironed out and your Aunt Jane can put on your white dress and braid your hair up again good and tight. Perhaps you won’t be the hombliest of the states, after all; but when I see you comin’ in to breakfast I said to myself: I guess if Maine looked like that, it wouldn’t never a’ been admitted into the Union!’”

When Uncle Sam and the stagecoach drew up to the brick house with a grand swing and a flourish, the goddess of Liberty and most of the States were already in their places on the “harricane deck.”

Words fail to describe the gallant bearing of the horses, their headstalls gayly trimmed and their harnesses dotted with little flags. The stage windows were hung in bunting, and from within beamed Columbia, looking out from the bright frame as if proud of her freight of loyal children. Patriotic streamers floated from whip, from dash-board and from rumble, and the effect of the whole was something to stimulate the most phlegmatic voter.

Rebecca came out on the steps and Aunt Jane brought a chair to assist in the ascent. Miss Dearborn peeped from the window, and gave a despairing look at her favorite.

What had happened to her? Who had dressed her? Had her head been put through a wringing-machine? Why were her eyes red and swollen? Miss Dearborn determined to take her behind the trees in the pine grove and give her some finishing touches; touches that her skillful fingers fairly itched to bestow.

The stage started, and as the roadside pageant grew gayer and gayer, Rebecca began to brighten and look prettier, for most of her beautifying came from within. The people, walking, driving, or standing on their doorsteps, cheered Uncle Sam’s coach with its freight of gossamer-muslined, fluttering-ribboned girls, and just behind, the gorgeously decorated haycart, driven by Abijah Flagg, bearing the jolly but inharmonious fife-and-drum corps.

Was ever such a golden day! Such crystal air! Such mellow sunshine! Such a merry Uncle Sam!

The stage drew up at an appointed spot near a pine grove, and while the crowd was gathering, the children waited for the hour to arrive when they should march to the platform; the hour toward which they seemed to have been moving since the dawn of creation.

As soon as possible Miss Dearborn whispered to Rebecca: “Come behind the trees with me; I want to make you prettier!”

Rebecca thought she had suffered enough from that process already during the last twelve hours, but she put out an obedient hand and the two withdrew.

Now Miss Dearborn was, I fear, a very indifferent teacher. Dr. Moses always said so, and Libbie Moses, who wanted her school, said it was a pity she hadn’t enjoyed more social advantages in her youth. Libbie herself had taken music lessons in Portland; and spent a night at the Profile House in the White Mountains, and had visited her sister in Lowell, Massachusetts. These experiences gave her, in her own mind, and in the mind of her intimate friends, a horizon so boundless that her view of smaller, humbler matters was a trifle distorted.

Miss Dearborn’s stock in trade was small, her principal virtues being devotion to children and ability to gain their love, and a power of evolving a schoolroom order so natural, cheery, serene, and peaceful that it gave the beholder a certain sense of being in a district heaven. She was poor in arithmetic and weak in geometry, but if you gave her a rose, a bit of ribbon, and a seven-by-nine looking-glass she could make herself as pretty as a pink in two minutes.

Safely sheltered behind the pines, Miss Dearborn began to practice mysterious feminine arts. She flew at Rebecca’s tight braids, opened the strands and rebraided them loosely; bit and tore the red, white, and blue ribbon in two and tied the braids separately. Then with nimble fingers she pulled out little tendrils of hair behind the ears and around the nape of the neck. After a glance of acute disapproval directed at the stiff balloon skirt she knelt on the ground and gave a strenuous embrace to Rebecca’s knees, murmuring, between her hugs, “Starch must be cheap at the brick house!”

This particular line of beauty attained, there ensued great pinchings of ruffles, her fingers that could never hold a ferrule nor snap children’s ears being incomparable fluting-irons.

Next the sash was scornfully untied and tightened to suggest something resembling a waist. The chastened bows that had been squat, dowdy, spiritless, were given tweaks, flirts, bracing little pokes and dabs, till, acknowledging a master hand, they stood up, piquant, pert, smart, alert!

Pride of bearing was now infused into the flattened lace at the neck, and a pin (removed at some sacrifice from her own toilette) was darned in at the back to prevent any cowardly lapsing. The short white cotton gloves that called attention to the tanned wrist and arms were stripped off and put in her own pocket. Then the wreath of pine-cones was adjusted at a heretofore unimagined angle, the hair was pulled softly into a fluffy frame, and finally, as she met Rebecca’s grateful eyes she gave her two approving, triumphant kisses. In a second the sensitive face lighted into happiness; pleased dimples appeared in the cheeks, the kissed mouth was as red as a rose, and the little fright that had walked behind the pine-tree stepped out on the other side Rebecca the lovely.

As to the relative value of Miss Dearborn’s accomplishments, the decision must be left to the gentle reader; but though it is certain that children should be properly grounded in mathematics, no heart of flesh could bear to hear Miss Dearborn’s methods vilified who had seen her patting, pulling, squeezing Rebecca from ugliness into beauty.

The young superintendent of district schools was a witness of the scene, and when later he noted the children surrounding Columbia as bees a honeysuckle, he observed to Dr. Moses: “She may not be much of a teacher, but I think she’d be considerable of a wife!” and subsequent events proved that he meant what he said!

II

Now all was ready; the moment of fate was absolutely at hand; the fife-and-drum corps led the way and the States followed; but what actually happened Rebecca never knew; she lived through the hours in a waking dream. Every little detail was a facet of light that reflected sparkles, and among them all she was fairly dazzled. The brass band played inspiring strains; the mayor spoke eloquently on great themes; the people cheered; then the rope on which so much depended was put into the children’s hands, they applied superhuman strength to their task, and the flag mounted, mounted, smoothly and slowly, and slowly unwound and stretched itself until its splendid size and beauty were revealed against the maples and pines and blue New England sky.

Then after cheers upon cheers and after a patriotic chorus by the church choirs, the State of Maine mounted the platform, vaguely conscious that she was to recite a poem, though for the life of her she could not remember a single word.

“Speak up loud and clear, Rebecky,” whispered Uncle Sam in the front row, but she could scarcely hear her own voice when, tremblingly, she began her first line. After that she gathered strength and the poem “said itself,” while the dream went on.

She saw Adam Ladd leaning against a tree; Aunt Jane and Aunt Miranda palpitating with nervousness; Clara Belle Simpson gazing cross-eyed but adoring from a seat on the side; and in the far, far distance, on the very outskirts of the crowd, a tall man standing in a wagon—a tall, loose-jointed man with red upturned mustaches, and a gaunt white horse headed toward the Acreville road.

Loud applause greeted the state of Maine, the slender little white-clad figure standing on the mossy boulder that had been used as the centre of the platform. The sun came up from behind a great maple and shone full on the star-spangled banner, making it more dazzling than ever, so that its beauty drew all eyes upward.

Abner Simpson lifted his vagrant shifting gaze to its softy fluttering folds and its splendid massing of colors, thinking:

“I don’t know’s anybody’d ought to steal a flag—the thunderin’ idjuts seem to set such store by it, and what is it, anyway? Nothin; but a sheet o’ buntin!”

Nothing but a sheet of bunting? He looked curiously at the rapt faces of the mothers, their babies asleep in their arms; the parted lips and shining eyes of the white-clad girls; at Cap’n Lord, who had been in Libby prison, and Nat Strout, who had left an arm at Bull Run; at the friendly, jostling crowd of farmers, happy, eager, absorbed, their throats ready to burst with cheers. Then the breeze served, and he heard Rebecca’s clear voice saying: