Part 24 (1/2)
”I've thought of something new. If you sang or painted or wrote,--not a little, but beautifully, you know,--wouldn't the doing of it, just as much as you wanted, give you the rose of joy?”
”It might if it was a real talent,” answered Emma Jane, ”though I don't like it so well as love. If you have another thought, Becky, keep it till morning.”
”I did have one more inspiration,” said Rebecca when they were dressing next morning, ”but I didn't wake you. I wondered if the rose of joy could be sacrifice? But I think sacrifice would be a lily, not a rose; don't you?”
The journey southward, the first glimpse of the ocean, the strange new scenes, the ease and delicious freedom, the intimacy with Miss Maxwell, almost intoxicated Rebecca. In three days she was not only herself again, she was another self, thrilling with delight, antic.i.p.ation, and realization. She had always had such eager hunger for knowledge, such thirst for love, such pa.s.sionate longing for the music, the beauty, the poetry of existence! She had always been straining to make the outward world conform to her inward dreams, and now life had grown all at once rich and sweet, wide and full. She was using all her natural, G.o.d-given outlets; and Emily Maxwell marveled daily at the inexhaustible way in which the girl poured out and gathered in the treasures of thought and experience that belonged to her. She was a lifegiver, altering the whole scheme of any picture she made a part of, by contributing new values. Have you never seen the dull blues and greens of a room changed, transfigured by a burst of suns.h.i.+ne? That seemed to Miss Maxwell the effect of Rebecca on the groups of people with whom they now and then mingled; but they were commonly alone, reading to each other and having quiet talks. The prize essay was very much on Rebecca's mind. Secretly she thought she could never be happy unless she won it. She cared nothing for the value of it, and in this case almost nothing for the honor; she wanted to please Mr. Aladdin and justify his belief in her.
”If I ever succeed in choosing a subject, I must ask if you think I can write well on it; and then I suppose I must work in silence and secret, never even reading the essay to you, nor talking about it.”
Miss Maxwell and Rebecca were sitting by a little brook on a sunny spring day. They had been in a stretch of wood by the sea since breakfast, going every now and then for a bask on the warm white sand, and returning to their shady solitude when tired of the sun's glare.
”The subject is very important,” said Miss Maxwell, ”but I do not dare choose for you. Have you decided on anything yet?”
”No,” Rebecca answered; ”I plan a new essay every night. I've begun one on What is Failure? and another on He and She. That would be a dialogue between a boy and girl just as they were leaving school, and would tell their ideals of life. Then do you remember you said to me one day, 'Follow your Saint'? I'd love to write about that. I didn't have a single thought in Wareham, and now I have a new one every minute, so I must try and write the essay here; think it out, at any rate, while I am so happy and free and rested. Look at the pebbles in the bottom of the pool, Miss Emily, so round and smooth and s.h.i.+ning.”
”Yes, but where did they get that beautiful polish, that satin skin, that lovely shape, Rebecca? Not in the still pool lying on the sands.
It was never there that their angles were rubbed off and their rough surfaces polished, but in the strife and warfare of running waters.
They have jostled against other pebbles, dashed against sharp rocks, and now we look at them and call them beautiful.”
”If Fate had not made somebody a teacher, She might have been, oh! such a splendid preacher!”
rhymed Rebecca. ”Oh! if I could only think and speak as you do!” she sighed. ”I am so afraid I shall never get education enough to make a good writer.”
”You could worry about plenty of other things to better advantage,”
said Miss Maxwell, a little scornfully. ”Be afraid, for instance, that you won't understand human nature; that you won't realize the beauty of the outer world; that you may lack sympathy, and thus never be able to read a heart; that your faculty of expression may not keep pace with your ideas,--a thousand things, every one of them more important to the writer than the knowledge that is found in books. AEsop was a Greek slave who could not even write down his wonderful fables; yet all the world reads them.”
”I didn't know that,” said Rebecca, with a half sob. ”I didn't know anything until I met you!”
”You will only have had a high school course, but the most famous universities do not always succeed in making men and women. When I long to go abroad and study, I always remember that there were three great schools in Athens and two in Jerusalem, but the Teacher of all teachers came out of Nazareth, a little village hidden away from the bigger, busier world.”
”Mr. Ladd says that you are almost wasted on Wareham,” said Rebecca thoughtfully.
”He is wrong; my talent is not a great one, but no talent is wholly wasted unless its owner chooses to hide it in a napkin. Remember that of your own gifts, Rebecca; they may not be praised of men, but they may cheer, console, inspire, perhaps, when and where you least expect.
The br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s that overflows its own rim moistens the earth about it.”
”Did you ever hear of The Rose of Joy?” asked Rebecca, after a long silence.
”Yes, of course; where did you see it?”
”On the outside of a book in the library.”
”I saw it on the inside of a book in the library,” smiled Miss Maxwell.
”It is from Emerson, but I'm afraid you haven't quite grown up to it, Rebecca, and it is one of the things impossible to explain.”
”Oh, try me, dear Miss Maxwell!” pleaded Rebecca. ”Perhaps by thinking hard I can guess a little bit what it means.”