Children's Book Classics - Kate Douglas Wiggin Edition: 11 Novels & 120+ Short Stories for Children. Kate Douglas Wiggin
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beyond her strength, and when Minnie took her seat among them asked, “Is your headache better, Minnie? Let me wipe off that strawberry jam over your mouth.”
There was no jam there as a matter of fact, but the guilty Minnie’s handkerchief went to her crimson face in a flash.
Rebecca confessed to Emma Jane that same afternoon that she felt ashamed of her prank. “I do hate her ways,” she exclaimed, “but I’m sorry I let her know we ‘spected her; and so to make up, I gave her that little piece of broken coral I keep in my bead purse; you know the one?”
“It don’t hardly seem as if she deserved that, and her so greedy,” remarked Emma Jane.
“I know it, but it makes me feel better,” said Rebecca largely; “and then I’ve had it two years, and it’s broken so it wouldn’t ever be any real good, beautiful as it is to look at.”
The coral had partly served its purpose as a reconciling bond, when one afternoon Rebecca, who had stayed after school for her grammar lesson as usual, was returning home by way of the short cut. Far ahead, beyond the bars, she espied the Simpson children just entering the woodsy bit. Seesaw was not with them, so she hastened her steps in order to secure company on her homeward walk. They were speedily lost to view, but when she had almost overtaken them she heard, in the trees beyond, Minnie Smellie’s voice lifted high in song, and the sound of a child’s sobbing. Clara Belle, Susan, and the twins were running along the path, and Minnie was dancing up and down, shrieking:—
“‘What made the sleigh love Simpson so?’
The eager children cried;
‘Why Simpson loved the sleigh, you know,’
The teacher quick replied.”
The last glimpse of the routed Simpson tribe, and the last futter of their tattered garments, disappeared in the dim distance. The fall of one small stone cast by the valiant Elijah, known as “the fighting twin,” did break the stillness of the woods for a moment, but it did not come within a hundred yards of Minnie, who shouted “Jail Birds” at the top of her lungs and then turned, with an agreeable feeling of excitement, to meet Rebecca, standing perfectly still in the path, with a day of reckoning plainly set forth in her blazing eyes.
Minnie’s face was not pleasant to see, for a coward detected at the moment of wrongdoing is not an object of delight.
“Minnie Smellie, if ever—I—catch—you—singing—that—to the Simpsons again—do you know what I’ll do?” asked Rebecca in a tone of concentrated rage.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Minnie jauntily, though her looks belied her.
“I’ll take that piece of coral away from you, and I THINK I shall slap you besides!”
“You wouldn’t darst,” retorted Minnie. “If you do, I’ll tell my mother and the teacher, so there!”
“I don’t care if you tell your mother, my mother, and all your relations, and the president,” said Rebecca, gaining courage as the noble words fell from her lips. “I don’t care if you tell the town, the whole of York county, the state of Maine and—and the nation!” she finished grandiloquently. “Now you run home and remember what I say. If you do it again, and especially if you say ‘Jail Birds,’ if I think it’s right and my duty, I shall punish you somehow.”
The next morning at recess Rebecca observed Minnie telling the tale with variations to Huldah Meserve. “She THREATENED me,” whispered Minnie, “but I never believe a word she says.”
The latter remark was spoken with the direct intention of being overheard, for Minnie had spasms of bravery, when well surrounded by the machinery of law and order.
As Rebecca went back to her seat she asked Miss Dearborn if she might pass a note to Minnie Smellie and received permission. This was the note:—
Of all the girls that are so mean There’s none like Minnie Smellie. I’ll take away the gift I gave And pound her into jelly.
P. S. Now do you believe me? R. Randall.
The effect of this piece of doggerel was entirely convincing, and for days afterwards whenever Minnie met the Simpsons even a mile from the brick house she shuddered and held her peace.
Chapter VIII.
Color of Rose
On the very next Friday after this “dreadfullest fight that ever was seen,” as Bunyan says in Pilgrim’s Progress, there were great doings in the little schoolhouse on the hill. Friday afternoon was always the time chosen for dialogues, songs, and recitations, but it cannot be stated that it was a gala day in any true sense of the word. Most of the children hated “speaking pieces;” hated the burden of learning them, dreaded the danger of breaking down in them. Miss Dearborn commonly went home with a headache, and never left her bed during the rest of the afternoon or evening; and the casual female parent who attended the exercises sat on a front bench with beads of cold sweat on her forehead, listening to the all-too-familiar halts and stammers. Sometimes a bellowing infant who had clean forgotten his verse would cast himself bodily on the maternal bosom and be borne out into the open air, where he was sometimes kissed and occasionally spanked; but in any case the failure added an extra dash of gloom and dread to the occasion. The advent of Rebecca had somehow infused a new spirit into these hitherto terrible afternoons. She had taught Elijah and Elisha Simpson so that they recited three verses of something with such comical effect that they delighted themselves, the teacher, and the school; while Susan, who lisped, had been provided with a humorous poem in which she impersonated a lisping child. Emma Jane and Rebecca had a dialogue, and the sense of companionship buoyed up Emma Jane and gave her self-reliance. In fact, Miss Dearborn announced on this particular Friday morning that the exercises promised to be so interesting that she had invited the doctor’s wife, the minister’s wife, two members of the school committee, and a few mothers. Living Perkins was asked to decorate one of the black-boards and Rebecca the other. Living, who was the star artist of the school, chose the map of North America. Rebecca liked better to draw things less realistic, and speedily, before the eyes of the enchanted multitude, there grew under her skillful fingers an American flag done in red, white, and blue chalk, every star in its right place, every stripe fluttering in the breeze. Beside this appeared a figure of Columbia, copied from the top of the cigar box that held the crayons.
Miss Dearborn was delighted. “I propose we give Rebecca a good hand-clapping for such a beautiful picture—one that the whole school may well be proud of!”
The scholars clapped heartily, and Dick Carter, waving his hand, gave a rousing cheer.
Rebecca’s heart leaped for joy, and to her confusion she felt the tears rising in her eyes. She could hardly see the way back to her seat, for in her ignorant lonely little life she had never been singled out for applause, never lauded, nor crowned, as in this wonderful, dazzling moment. If “nobleness enkindleth nobleness,” so does enthusiasm beget enthusiasm, and so do wit and talent enkindle wit and talent. Alice Robinson proposed that the school should sing Three Cheers for the Red, White, and Blue! and when they came to the chorus, all point to Rebecca’s flag. Dick Carter suggested that Living Perkins and Rebecca Randall should sign their names to their pictures, so that the visitors would know who drew them. Huldah Meserve asked permission to cover the largest holes in the plastered walls with boughs and fill the water pail with wild flowers. Rebecca’s mood was above and beyond all practical details. She sat silent, her heart so full of grateful joy that she could hardly remember the words of her dialogue. At recess she bore herself modestly, notwithstanding her great triumph, while in the general atmosphere of good will the Smellie-Randall hatchet was buried and Minnie gathered maple boughs and covered the ugly stove with them, under Rebecca’s direction.
Miss Dearborn dismissed the morning session at quarter to twelve, so that those who lived near enough could