Chapter XXIII: Voices

“The love for me once crucified,
Is not a love to leave my side,
But waiteth ever to divide
Each smallest care of mine.”

The three were in the study that Sunday afternoon that the Meadow Centre minister exchanged with Roger Kenney; the minister, the hostess, and the girl at boarding-school. The boarding-school girl had a book in her lap with her finger between the leaves, listening.

“Mr. King talks as though he had never had any one to talk to before,” Judith thought as she watched the two and listened.

His conversation was filled with bits of information, with incident, with a thought now and then, absorbingly interesting to a school-girl.

Roger loved people better than he loved books; Judith had not outgrown her books, and grown into loving people. The Meadow Centre minister was a chapter in a most fascinating book; he was the hero of a story; he was not a being of flesh and blood like Roger. She was afraid every moment the book would shut and she would read no more of his story; “to be continued” would end this chapter, and then she might never see the end of the book.

“‘Conversation is not the road leading to the house,’” he quoted, “‘but a by-path where people walk with pleasure.’”

“I think it leads to the house,” replied Judith, quickly, “if people are real and sincere. What _does_ lead to the house if conversation does not?”

“Deeds,” suggested Marion.

“But we can’t do deeds every minute,” persisted Judith; “how could we do deeds sitting here this afternoon.”

“We have done them,” said Mr. King; “we are resting in a by-path.”

“But we want to get to the house,” insisted Judith.

“Loitering by the way is pleasant; through the by-way we may learn the way to the house.”

“Marion, that reminds me of Cousin Don,” Judith said, suddenly; “we know him only through by-ways.”

“Tell me about Cousin Don,” said the minister, interestedly.

Cousin Don was a story Judith loved to tell.

“You expect to find him unchanged after all these years—the time in his life when a man changes?” he inquired, astonished. “Is that the way you understand human nature?”

“Perhaps I do not understand human nature at all. But I have his letters.”

“By-ways—they do not lead to the house,” he replied.

“But they can,” said Judith, vexed.

“Oh, yes, they _can_.”

“And I know they do; don’t you, Marion?”

“In this case, I hope so,” Marion answered; “I don’t see how people can help being like their letters.”

“Or their letters like them?” corrected Judith.

“Then how is it we are disappointed in people?” Mr. King questioned; “is it only our lack of insight?”

“People change,” said Marion, with slow emphasis; “if we were with them all the time we would see the little changes that lead the way to the great changes. People are even disappointed in themselves; I am.”

“So am I,” he answered sincerely; “I fall below my own ideal often enough; if anybody cared enough for me to be disappointed in me they would have reason enough.”

“I don’t believe they would,” thought Judith.

“Mr. King,” Marion began doubtfully, “do not answer me if my question is intrusive; but I would like to know how you read the Bible for yourself.”

“That _is_ a coincidence,” exclaimed Mr. King; “as I was driving along this morning a question came to me that I never thought of asking myself before: suppose someone asks you to-day how you study the Bible _for yourself_, what will you say?”

“How wonderful,” both girls said in the same breath.

“So I told myself what I would say. One of my ways when I am in special need of a word from my heavenly Father is to ask him to give it to me, and then I am sure to find it in my reading. Often I open and find it; often and often I find it in the chapter that comes next in my daily reading. Asking the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to see his special word to you in that special need is the safest way and the quickest for me. I am assured then that I shall learn that day’s lesson in that day’s place. The truth I need most has never failed to come.”

“That is a very simple way,” Marion said. “As simple as a child asking his mother for something she has promised. The only hindrance is self-will.”

“Oh, dear, that hinders everything,” sighed Judith, who was battling with the suggestion from within herself that perhaps her boarding-school days were over and she _ought_ to go back and help nurse Aunt Rody. The aunts had been so kind to her mother when she was a homeless little girl, and to herself when she was a homeless little girl. She had kept it out of her prayers ever since she had thought of it. If only she had not thought of it. Aunt Affy would never ask her to give up her studies and her happy home to bury herself with three old people.

“Are you far enough along in life to know that?” asked Mr. King, giving the girl of eighteen a glance of keen interest.

“I think I was born knowing it,” said Judith. “Do you know about anybody who wanted to do right and had a will of his own—”

“Oh, yes; they are plenty of us. Three of us in this room,” he laughed.

“But I meant some one in the Bible, for then we can know certainly what happened to him.”

“Yes, I find a king who leagued himself with another king to go to war; but he was not satisfied that he was in the way of obedience, and he said to the other king, ‘Inquire, I pray thee, at the word of the Lord to-day,’ and the other king gathered four hundred men, his own prophets, and inquired of them what he should do. With one voice they said, ‘Go up; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hands of the king.’ Four hundred answers to his prayer; the Lord’s command four hundred strong. But the king who believed in the true God had not had his answer; it was the will of the true God he sought. He said, ‘Is there not here, besides, a prophet of the Lord that we might inquire of him?’ The answer was, ‘There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord.’ If there is one way of knowing the Lord’s will, there is no excuse for us; we may know it. Four hundred voices of self-will are no reason, and no excuse, for not knowing it. This king who believed in God heard the one voice of God—and disobeyed it. He joined himself in battle with the king who trusted in the four hundred voices of his self-will. And the battle went against him; God had told him so. He believed God afterward; so will you and I if we disobey. He went to battle as though God had not spoken.”

“Was he _killed_?” asked Judith, fearful some trouble might fall upon her if she listened to the voice of self-will.

“No, he cried out, and the Lord helped him, and moved his enemies to depart from him. As he returned to his house in peace, a seer met him, and said, ‘For this thing wrath is upon thee from the Lord.’”

“‘For this thing,’” repeated Judith. “For inquiring of the Lord, learning his will, and then believing the voice of the four hundred who gave him his own way. Oh, dear, I wish those four hundred would _never_ speak.”

“There is but one way to silence them; listen to God’s voice above them all.”

“But it is so _hard_,” cried Judith, impetuously.

“Do not choose the easy way of obedience. Choose God’s way, and let me tell you one of his secrets; _his way is always easier than we think_.”

To hide the tears which would not be kept back Judith hastily left the study; he did not know, nobody could know, what obedience would cost her; life at the parsonage was so different; Roger and Marion were _young_ with her, and Aunt Rody and Aunt Affy, and Uncle Cephas were so _old_; they had lived their lives, and their days went on with a long-drawn-out sameness; nothing ever happened to them, they were not looking forward to anything, there would be no study, no new books, no music, no getting near the loveliest things in the world; it was barrenness and dreariness, it was like death; the parsonage was hope, and youth, and love and life, with the best things yet to come. “It will stifle me to go back; I shall die of homesickness, I shall choke to death.”

Cousin Don had a right to her, he was her guardian cousin. Would he not have a right to come and take her away? But her mother—what would her mother choose for her to do?

They had been so kind to her mother.

“I will go and stay—a week,” she resolved, tears rushing afresh; “but I miss Marion when I stay one single night.”

At the supper-table she announced with reddened eyelids and a voice that would not be steady that she thought she would go to Aunt Affy’s before evening service and stay over night; Uncle Cephas had told her that morning that Aunt Affy was very tired.

“Must you go?” asked Marion. “But I know they need you. Mrs. Evans said they couldn’t get any one, and Aunt Rody was in bed to-day.”

“Perhaps I’ll find it easier than I think,” said Judith.

“As soon as they find a nurse you will come back,” encouraged Marion.

During the walk through the village and to the Sparrow place Judith’s courage all oozed away; she grew so faint-hearted that she thought she was faint; she stopped for a glass of water at the well where the lilies had come, and went upstairs a moment to talk to Nettie, still helpless in her invalid chair.

“The minister came to see me this afternoon,” Nettie greeted her; “he read and prayed and told me things. Has he told you anything?”

“Yes, and I almost wish he had not. I _have_ to do right things—whether I want to or not.”

“Are you doing one now? One new one. You look so.”

“I am on the way to it.”

“Where are you going?”

“Literally and figuratively I am on the way to it. I am giving up study and everything else to go and take care of Aunt Rody.”

“How splendid of you. I knew you would do something _real_ some day,” Nettie said with enthusiasm. “You haven’t been my ideal for nothing. Mother has kept telling me I might be disappointed in you; but I _knew_ I never should.”

After that how could she feel faint-hearted?

“O, Judith,” said Aunt Affy, meeting her on the piazza, “how did you know I couldn’t do without you any longer? Joe has gone for the doctor; Rody has had another spell.”

In her own little room that night the girl knelt on the strip of rag carpet, and, with her head buried in the pink and white quilt, prayed that the voices of her self-will might be lost in the voice of the Holy Spirit. The coming back was even harder than she feared; Mr. King had not told her God’s truth when he said: “_His way is always easier than we think_.”

The thought that she was bravely doing a hard thing did not brace her to the bearing of it; she was not bearing it at all; she was living through it.

Roger had not once told her she was brave, Marion was not more than usually sympathetic; the neighbors were taking her coming back as a matter of course—something to be expected; they would have blamed her if she had not come; Aunt Rody every day was less fretful toward her, more satisfied with her nursing; Aunt Affy busy in kitchen and dairy, with the new importance of her marriage, and being for the first time mistress in her own house, seemed forgetful that the girl had come from any brighter life, forgetful that she had ever left the old place and its homespun ways, and, most discouraging of all, forgetful that any other help in household or sick-room was desired or might be had by searching and for money. For the first time in her life Aunt Affy was selfish. In her own contentment she forgot, or did not think it possible that the girl of eighteen could be discontented.

Judith remembered that Harriet Hosmer had said she could be happy anywhere with good health and a bit of marble.

But suppose she had not had her bit of marble?

These days were the history of her summer of stories.

The doctor told them that Aunt Rody might be helpless in bed for months; she might gain strength and sit in her chair again. He had known such instances. That was in the first week; in the second week he gave them no hope.

The stricken old woman was alive; that was all she was to Judith: an old woman who was not dead yet.

Judith was pitiful; she loved her with a compassionate tenderness as she would have loved any helpless, stricken thing; but she was hardly “Aunt Rody” any longer.

She was as helpless as a baby, with none of a baby’s innocence, or loveliness or lovingness; there was no hope for this gray-haired, wrinkled mass of human flesh, but in casting off this veil of the flesh, no hope but in death. It was as if death were alive before Judith’s eyes, and within touch of her hand.

She had no memory of Aunt Rody as the others had, to give affection to; there was only _this_. There was scarcely any memory for her gratitude to cling to.

There was one comfort left; she was not afraid of her now.

If she had stayed with her, instead of being at home at the parsonage, she might have grown up to love and understand her; instead she had grown away from love and understanding.

She dared not think of release coming through Aunt Rody’s _death_. That would be desiring her death. Desiring one’s death in one’s heart was—.

There was no hope but in Cousin Don.

XXIV. “I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU CARED.”

“‘What is it thou knowest, sweet voice?’ I cried,
‘A hidden hope,’ the voice replied.”

—Tennyson.

“Judith, don’t stay in this little close entry when all out-doors is calling to you,” said Aunt Affy.

“But I thought she might stir and want something,” replied Aunt Rody’s nurse; “she looks up so patient and pitiful when she wants something.”

“My work is all done; I’ll sit here; you are losing your color, child. What will your Cousin Don say to me when he comes home to claim you?”

“He will not come home to do that,” said Judith, rising reluctantly to give Aunt Affy her low chair. “I have a foreboding that something is happening to him. He never forgot me before.”

“Forebodings come out of tired head and feet and back. I am allowing you to do too much. This is Saturday afternoon and your play time. The baking is done, and now that we are rid of churning—what _would_ poor Rody say to me for selling the milk and making no butter? I feel that I am ‘deceiving’ her at every turn about the house. Run up stairs and put on the blue muslin you look so cool in, and go out in the hammock and forget the responsibility that takes away your appetite and gives you big eyes. Dear child, death must come. It is the voice of the Lord calling Rody. You know what George MacDonald says: Death is only going to sleep when one is downright sleepy. Rody _is_ downright sleepy. Think how she sleeps half the time, poor old soul.”

“Do you think she is glad to be ‘downright sleepy’?”

“Aren’t you, always, when your night comes?”

“But, Aunt Affy, she hasn’t been—she wasn’t—I did not think she cared.”

“Her light has almost gone out, sometimes, I do believe. But it’s there, burning. She has a spark of real faith that never went out. She wasn’t as loving in her ways as she was in her heart. Now, don’t stand another minute. I want you to go to church to-morrow, too. John Kenney is out on the piazza waiting for you; he’s come to the parsonage to spend Sunday.”

In an instant Judith was all light and color. John Kenney was the kind of a friend that no one else in the world was; as grave as the minister himself, at times, as book loving, and yet as full of fun and frolic as a boy; he was taller than Roger, and handsome; Roger was fine, but he was not handsome; she had no fear or reverence for John, he stood beside her, and walked beside her; they were boy and girl together; John was nearly three years older; he would be twenty-one in the winter. She stood still radiant.

“You look rested enough now,” remarked Aunt Affy.

“I was not so tired, I was only blue; I was thinking about Don. John has been away all summer; he has not been in Bensalem since my birthday.”

“Did he come for that?” inquired Aunt Affy, keeping any suggestion out of her voice. She would not put ideas into the child’s head.

“He said so. And to say good-bye to the parsonage. We agreed not to write to each other while he was out west.”

“What for,” questioned Aunt Affy, suspiciously. “Had you ever written to each other before?”

“No,” laughed Judith, softly, “and we agreed not to begin.”

“What for?” asked Aunt Affy, again.

“For fun, I think, as much as anything. I think we had no real reason.”

“Two such reasonable creatures, too. Judith, you _had_ a reason or he had. Why should the question come up?” Aunt Affy asked severely.

“Oh, questions are always coming up. He asked me if I would write and I refused.”

“And that’s how you agreed together. What was _your_ reason?”

“I think,” began Judith slowly, “I was afraid Roger wouldn’t like it. Or Marion. Marion is particular about such things. I’m afraid she had something to trouble her once—she never will tease anybody about anybody, even.”

“Well, be off, and dress. I told John you would not be out for some time.”

“I’ll go in this dress. I haven’t seen him for months.”

Whether the haste augured well or ill for John, Aunt Affy could not decide; she went into Aunt Rody’s bedroom, touched her forehead and spoke to her.

“Are you sleepy, Rody?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like anything?”

“No.”

Aunt Affy, with her mending for her husband and for Joe, kept watch in the entry, lighted by the open back door, all the afternoon.

After half an hour on the piazza, Judith gave John Aunt Affy’s latest magazine to amuse himself with, and went up to her small chamber, to braid her tumbled hair and to array herself in the fresh, blue muslin.

In the cracked glass over the old bureau she met the reflection of a girl with joyful eyes and cheeks like pink roses. She knew that was not the girl that had watched Aunt Rody in the entry.

Her summer companion had come back; he was her vacation friend; perhaps she had missed him; perhaps her loneliness had not all been for her Cousin Don. He was still in her world; across the continent had not been in her world. He had not sent her one message through letters to Marion or Roger. She had not dared write to him. But he was home again, just as grave, and just as bright, with no reproach in his eyes, and he was planning to stay a week. He had come to talk to Roger and decide his choice of business in life; his father wished to take him into his own business, the jeweller’s, either in the factory or store, but he had no taste for making jewelry, or selling it, he said; he would rather study; he was “not good enough” to be a minister; he would like to study medicine.

Judith made herself as fresh and pretty as girls love to be, pondering the while John’s choice of work in life. She would choose for him to be like Roger, and do Roger’s work, but if he did not believe himself to be “called” like Roger, that would not be acceptable work; was not healing a part of Christ’s work; was not John gentle, sympathetic, and in love with every human creature? He had a copy of something of Drummond’s in his pocket; he said Drummond was making a man of him. The beginning of his manhood was in joining a Boy’s Brigade while he was away at boarding school up the Hudson. When she came back to the piazza he said he would read to her Drummond’s address to a Boy’s Brigade.

He had grown more grave since he went away; he told her the weight of what to do and what not to do was heavy upon him night and day.

“And he has such laughing brown eyes,” she said, almost aloud, to the girl in blue muslin, reflected in the cracked mirror.

“What are _you_ going to do?” he inquired as he pushed a piazza chair near the hammock for her, and stretched himself in the hammock that he might look up at her and watch her as he talked.

“Must I do something?”

“You are old enough to decide. Girls are always deciding. Martha and Lou are forever taking up something new. They are not satisfied to be housekeepers. How Marion has settled down since she came to Bensalem! To be Roger’s housekeeper and a deaconess in his church has come to be her only ambition. Is that yours, too?”

“Which?” she asked with serious lips and dancing eyes.

“Both.”

“My Cousin Don thinks he has my future in his right hand. But I’m afraid his right hand is finding business he likes better.”

“Tell me true, what do you wish most to do?”

“If you cannot decide for yourself, how can you expect me to decide for myself?”

“I do know. I have decided. I am simply waiting for Roger’s judgment to confirm my choice. I want him to talk father over. Father wants one of his sons in the business, and Maurice declares he will not go in—he wants to be an architect. He has decided talent; as I have not, but am only commonplace and a drudgery sort of a fellow; I may take business instead of medicine to please father and help Maurice out. Mother beseeches me to please father; she almost put it ‘obey’ my father. What do _you_ advise me?”

“O, John, is it like that? I thought there was nothing in the way but your own choice.”

“There is not. Father will give a grudging consent. I think he gave me my California trip to give me time to think—perhaps to think of his wishes. He went into the business to please his father.”

“He has not regretted it.”

“Far from it. He congratulates himself. I know a fellow whose father gave him a ‘thrashing’ to make him go to college; his grandfather had given his father a ‘thrashing’ and made him go.”

“Did he go?”

“The fellow I know? No; he ran away.”

“Do you want to run away?”

“I ran away to Bensalem to ask Roger.”

“I think Roger will urge you to please your father.”

“Father was glad enough for Roger to study.”

“That was because of the choice of study.”

“I knew that. But my choice is no mean one.”

“I think a natural bent should be respected,” reasoned Judith.

“I don’t know that I _have_ a natural bent. A great English physician writes that he decided to study medicine when he was a boy because his father’s physician came to the house with a coat trimmed with gold lace. He was after the gold lace.”

“What are _you_ after?”

“Money, reputation—position—”

“I don’t believe it,” she answered, earnestly.

“Oh, I would like them thrown in,” he laughed.

“In the Boy’s Brigade you didn’t make them first.”

“What do you make first?”

“Aunt Rody, just now.”

“What second, then?”

“Talking to you, on the piazza.”

“Judith,” catching her hands and holding them fast, “decide for me. Shall I study medicine, or shall I please my father and mother?”

“I cannot decide for you,” she said, lightly, withdrawing her hands.

“You don’t care.”

“I do care.”

“Decide then.”

“I am not the one to decide.”

“You are; if I put the decision in your hands.”

“But I am only a girl.”

“That is why I ask you. Girls see clear. They do not love money, they are not ambitious.”

“I do not love money. I may be ambitious.”

“How are you ambitious?”

She flushed and would not reply.

“About your stories? Do you expect to write?”

“I expect to write. I cannot help it; it is _in_ me and will come out. Nothing much, perhaps; only little things, but I love them.”

“I do not think medicine is ‘in me’ like that. I simply like a profession better than the routine and drudgery of business.”

“That is not a great motive.”

“No; and that boy’s gold lace wasn’t; but he made a success.”

“Yes,” was all Judith said.

“You are displeased with me.”

“I am disappointed. I thought you _cared_.”

“I do; in a certain way.”

“But not in the best way.”

“Judith, I am not ‘great’ or ‘best.’”

“I thought you were; I want you to be.”

“That is a motive,” he said, catching her hands again. “Judith, if you will tell me you love me and will marry me, I will go home and tell my father I will make gold rings and sell them to the end of my days; but you must let me put one on your finger.”

“If you made it I’m afraid it wouldn’t fit,” she laughed, again withdrawing her hands.

“Will you, if it fits?”

“I cannot tell until I try.”

“Don’t play with me. It is neither ‘great’ nor ‘best’ for a girl to do that.”

“You frighten me,” she said, with a sound in her breath like a sob.

“I beg your pardon.”

“I cannot promise. I do not want to promise. I never thought of it.”

“You think I am only a boy.”

“I am only a girl.”

“I did not just think of it. You think I am too sudden and impulsive. I thought of you all the time I was gone. I have loved you ever since I knew you. How can anybody help loving you? You meant Bensalem to me more than Roger and Marion did. I have been afraid somebody would guess. I was afraid somebody would keep you away from me. Judith, don’t you care for me, at all?”

“Yes, John; but not like _that_. I couldn’t promise that. I never thought you cared like that.”

“How did you think I cared?” he asked, passionately; “in a grandfatherly way like Roger?”

“I do not know,” she answered sadly; “you were so good to me, and I liked you. I didn’t think.”

“Will you think now?” he asked, gently. “Will you think and tell me?”

“When?”

“As soon as you know yourself. I will wait years and years.”

“Yes, I will tell you as soon as I know myself,” she promised.

“Then I will wait. You are worth waiting for.”

“John, ought I to tell Marion?”

“No. Do not tell anybody. It is my secret. You haven’t any secret. Nobody need ever know, I will never be pitied.”

Judith pitied him then.

“I am not bound in any way. I haven’t promised, John.”

“No; you haven’t,” he said, touched by the sorrow in her face. “I am sorry to trouble you so; but I had to say it. I came to Bensalem to say it.”

“Are you sorry you came?”

“No; I had to have it out. Perhaps it will make a man of me. Something will have to. A man needs some kind of a fight.”

Judith thought that it was not only his “fight.”

“I am going home; I can’t stay here. I’ll tell Roger I decided not to stay over Sunday. I don’t care what he thinks. We talked till twelve o’clock last night. I know what he thinks. I’ll walk to Dunellen to the train, I’d like to start and walk around the world.”

“John.” Judith’s eyes were filled with tears.

“Don’t feel like that,” he answered, roughly; “it’s bad enough for me to feel for myself without feeling for you. I have always thought you cared.”

“I _do_ care.”

“That’s no way to care.”

He walked off, not turning for her low word of farewell.

She would have kept him had she dared.