Eunice.

by Margaret Murray Robertson.

CHAPTER ONE.

GOING HOME.

One fair morning, a good many years ago, a number of schoolgirls were waiting at a little wayside station on the banks of the Connecticut River. They had crossed the river in a ferry-boat and were waiting for more of their number who were coming after them.

They were waiting patiently enough. It was a good place in which to wait, for the scene around them was very lovely. They were standing at the foot of Mount Tom, glorious in the morning sunshine, and looking over on the shadows which still lingered on the face of Mount Holyoke.

From the far north flows the Connecticut River broadening on its way, as Green Mountain and White send down on either hand, from melting snow-drifts and hidden springs, their tribute to its waters. Through forests and broken hill country, through meadows, sometimes broad and sometimes narrow, past town and village and lonely farmhouse, it flows before it makes a bend to pa.s.s between Mounts Tom and Holyoke, but in all its course it flows through no fairer landscape than that which spreads itself around the base of these two historic mountains.

Over all the land lay the promise of spring in the glory of cloudless sunshine. Only the promise as yet. The mountains were still bare and brown, with patches of snow lingering in hollow and crevice; and the great elms that were everywhere--in the village streets, along the roads that wound between the hills, and around the white farmhouses--showed no tinge of green as yet, but their brown buds were ready and waiting to burst; the meadows were growing green and the catkins were large and full on the willows by the brooks that hastened through them to the river. There was a soft tinge, half green, half golden, on earlier trees growing in sheltered places; and the promise of the spring was everywhere--more joyfully welcomed after a long winter than spring in the full glory of leaf and blossom.

They were thinking and speaking of other things--these waiting schoolgirls. Some of them walked about, softly speaking last words to each other, and some of them were watching the coming of the boat over the swollen waters of the river. But the beauty around them, the sweetness of the spring morning, the restful quiet on mountain and valley, were present with them all.

"Nellie Austin," said a voice from the group that watched the boat, "do you see? Your 'Faithful' is coming after all."

"My Faithful!"--and a young girl sprang forward as the boat touched the bank.

A slender girl, very plainly dressed, stepped out first--a girl with grave dark eyes and a firm mouth, which yet trembled a little as she answered her companion's greeting.

"Faithful! my Faithful! you are coming home with me after all?"

"No, dear; I am going home to my Eunice. I thought I had better."

"Have you heard again? Is she not well?"

"I have not heard again; but she is not very well, I am afraid. I must go and see."

"But you will come back again? You will never, never think of not coming back!"

"Oh, yes, I hope so! I think so--unless she is really sick."

"Oh, she is not so very sick, or you would have heard! What should I ever do without you? Now you must sit with me as far as I go. Here are the cars!"

There was no time to lose. The "cars" had come which were to carry the schoolgirls home for a fortnight's rest and holiday. From the windows a good many people looked out with interest on the group of girls, and one said to his friend--

"They are from the seminary over the river yonder. We saw it as we came on."

"Schoolgirls? No; they don't look like schoolgirls. The greater part of them must be out of their teens, I should say."

"Possibly, but all the same they are schoolgirls, though there may be a teacher or two among them."

"Well, friend, after all that you have been telling me about your wonderful common school system, I should have supposed that the education of these sedate young persons might have been finished before the age of twenty."

"Oh, I have no doubt that these young persons have had the benefit of common school and high school too, before they aspired to a place in the seminary over yonder; and the chances are that some of them since then have earned, either with hands or head, the means to carry them further on; and for these there can be no better place than the plain brick seminary on the other side of the river!"

"Well," said his friend, "I can only repeat what I have said to you more than once already--you are a curious people in some ways--with your boys who are men, and your prim grave-faced young women who are schoolgirls.

I should like to put a question or two to some of them, if I might."

His friend shook his head.

"You may have a chance to do so before you leave the country, but not to-day, I think. You have no grown-up schoolgirls in _Old_ England?

Out of _New_ England I don't suppose we have so very many even in this country; and there are probably more in the seminary over there than in schools generally among us. It was built by special means for a special purpose. A woman built it--a woman who never owned a dollar that she had not first earned--a great and good woman. She gave herself, body, soul, and spirit, to the work of helping her countrywomen--her sisters, she called them all--who were hungering and thirsting, as she herself in her youth had hungered and thirsted, for knowledge."

"With a view to making learned ladies of them all?"

"Learned ladies? Well, yes, perhaps--as a means to an end. You may think it strange, as others have thought; but this woman really believed His word who said, 'Ye are not your own. Ye are bought with a price.'

'None of us liveth to himself.'"

"In a way, we all believe them, I suppose."

"Yes, in a way. Well, she believed them in another way. She believed them and lived them all her life long. Learned ladies! Yes; but the keynote of all her teaching was this: 'Not your own, but His who bought you. His for service or for suffering, for watching or warfare, for life or death.'"

"Well?" said his friend, as the speaker paused.

"Well, she is dead, and 'her works do follow her.'"

There was no time for more. The train stopped, and several of the "schoolgirls" rose to leave. The travellers heard one "Good-bye"

spoken.

"Oh, if you would come with me even yet, dear Faithful!"

"Another time I hope to go with you; but not this time."

"Well, good-bye, my Faithful, good-bye. No, I am not going to cry, but I _will_ kiss you, whatever any one may think about it."

And then the speaker was gone. No one saw her companion's face for some time after that. Nor did she see the receding mountains on which she seemed to be gazing. Her eyes were dim with tears which must not be allowed to fall.

"Fidelia Marsh," said her companion at last, "what are you thinking about? Not little Nellie Austin all this time, surely?"

The young girl turned round. "I was trying to think how it would seem if I were never to see her or any of you all again;" and then she turned her face to the window, and sat silent till her turn had come to say "Good-bye."

"Yes, this is my stopping-place."

She smiled and nodded to those who were not within reach of her hand, and seemed to be cheerful enough in her good-bye, but she did not linger near the window when she reached the platform, as Nellie Austin and her friend had done.

It was a dreary little station, standing at the foot of a broken stony slope, with only one unfurnished house in sight. One lank official moved about at his leisure, and one embryo trader hastened to display his boxes of lozenges, and his basket of unwholesome peanuts and last year's apples. There were doubtless prosperous villages along the wide road that crossed the railway, and pleasant farmhouses amid the high pastures and moist meadow lands hid away among the hills beyond; but the dingy house and the dull little station were all that could be seen from the windows of the cars, and Fidelia's companions said to one another that the place looked forlorn.

"And poor dear Fidelia! Does she not look forlorn as well?"

They had time to watch her as she went to claim her trunk, and they saw her shake hands with the leisurely official, who was evidently an acquaintance. But when she turned at last to the window she did not look "forlorn." A beautiful face looked up from under a big bonnet--a rarely beautiful face, delicate yet strong. There were slight hollows and a darkened shade beneath the lovely grey eyes set wide apart under a low broad forehead, and the pale rose-tint on her cheeks might have been deeper with advantage. The look of delicacy was due to the hard work she had been doing, but the strength was real, and she would last through harder work than ever she was likely to have at school.

Forlorn? No. Her face was radiant! The solemn-looking station-master had wrought the change.