New Chronicles of Rebecca (1907)

Eleventh Chronicle. ABIJAH THE BRAVE AND THE FAIR EMMAJANE

Peeping from behind the muslin curtains, she waited until Emma Jane was on the very threshold and then began singing her version of an old ballad, made that morning while she was dressing. The ballad was a great favorite of hers, and she counted on doing telling execution with it in the present instance by the simple subterfuge of removing the original hero and heroine, Alonzo and Imogene, and substituting Abijah the Brave and the Fair Emmajane, leaving the circumstances in the first three verses unaltered, because in truth they seemed to require no alteration.

Her high, clear voice, quivering with merriment, floated through the windows into the still summer air:

"'A warrior so bold and a maiden so bright Conversed as they sat on the green. They gazed at each other in tender delight. Abijah the Brave was the name of the knight, And the maid was the Fair Emmajane.'"

"Rebecca Randall, stop! Somebody'll hear you!"

"No, they won't—they're making jelly in the kitchen, miles away."

"'Alas!' said the youth, since tomorrow I go To fight in a far distant land, Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow, Some other will court you, and you will bestow On a wealthier suitor your hand.'"

"Rebecca, you can't THINK how your voice carries! I believe mother can hear it over to my house!"

"Then, if she can, I must sing the third verse, just to clear your reputation from the cloud cast upon it in the second," laughed her tormentor, going on with the song:

"'Oh, hush these suspicions!' Fair Emmajane said, 'So hurtful to love and to me! For if you be living, or if you be dead, I swear, my Abijah, that none in your stead, Shall the husband of Emmajane be!'"

After ending the third verse Rebecca wheeled around on the piano stool and confronted her friend, who was carefully closing the parlor windows:—

"Emma Jane Perkins, it is an ordinary Thursday afternoon at four o'clock and you have on your new blue barege, although there is not even a church sociable in prospect this evening. What does this mean? Is Abijah the Brave coming at last?"

"I don't know certainly, but it will be some time this week."

"And of course you'd rather be dressed up and not seen, than seen when not dressed up. Right, my Fair Emmajane; so would I. Not that it makes any difference to poor me, wearing my fourth best black and white calico and expecting nobody.

"Oh, well, YOU! There's something inside of you that does instead of pretty dresses," cried Emma Jane, whose adoration of her friend had never altered nor lessened since they met at the age of eleven. "You know you are as different from anybody else in Riverboro as a princess in a fairy story. Libby Moses says they would notice you in Lowell, Massachusetts!"

"Would they? I wonder," speculated Rebecca, rendered almost speechless by this tribute to her charms. "Well, if Lowell, Massachusetts, could see me, or if you could see me, in my new lavender muslin with the violet sash, it would die of envy, and so would you!"

"If I had been going to be envious of you, Rebecca, I should have died years ago. Come, let's go out on the steps where it's shady and cool."

"And where we can see the Perkins front gate and the road running both ways," teased Rebecca, and then, softening her tone, she said: "How is it getting on, Emmy? Tell me what's happened since I've been in Brunswick."

"Nothing much," confessed Emma Jane. "He writes to me, but I don't write to him, you know. I don't dare to, till he comes to the house."

"Are his letters still in Latin?" asked Rebecca, with a twinkling eye.