Perhaps some may read allusions to a sacred Parable underlying this little story. If so, I hope they will not think it an irreverent mode of applying the lesson.
Four girls were together in a pleasant cottage room with a large window, over which fluttered some dry sticks, which would in due time bear clematis and Virginia creeper leaves.
Three of them were Miss Lee's apprentices, and this room had been built out at the back of the baker's shop for them. The place was the property of the Lee family themselves, and nobody in Langley was more respected than they were. Ambrose Lee, whose name was over the baker's shop, and who kept a horse and cart, was always called Mr. Lee.
He had married a pretty, delicate young girl, who had soon fallen into such hopeless ill-health, that his sister Charlotte was obliged to live at home to attend to her and to the shop. And when young Mrs. Lee died, leaving three small children, another sister, Rose, gave up her place to help in the care of her old father and the little ones.
Rose Lee had been a sewing maid, and, being clever, had become a very fair dressmaker; so she took in needlework from the first, and when good old master Lee died, and the children had grown old enough to be more off her hands, she became the dressmaker and sempstress of the place, since there was no doubt that all she took in hand would be thoroughly well turned out of hand, from a child's under garment up to Mrs. and Miss Manners's dresses. "For," as her sister Charlotte proudly said of her, "the ladies had everything made down here, except one or two dresses from London for the fashion." Her nephews were both from home, one as a pupil-teacher, the other at a baker's with a superior business, and her niece, Amy, the only girl of the family, had begun as a pupil-teacher, but she had such bad headaches at the end of her first year that her father was afraid to let her go on studying for examinations, and cancelled her engagement, and thus she became an assistant to her aunt. Then Jessie Hollis, from the shop, came home from her aunt's, unwilling to go to service, and begged Miss Lee to take her and teach her dressmaking; and, having thus begun, she consented, rather less willingly, to take likewise Florence Cray from the Manners Arms, chiefly because she had known her mother all her life, and believed her to be careful of the girl; besides which, it was a very respectable house.
As plain work, as well as dressmaking, was done, there was quite enough employment for all the hands, as well as for the sewing machine, at which Amy, a fair, delicate-looking girl, was whirring away, while Jessie was making the button-holes of a long princesse dress, and Florence tacking in some lining; or rather each was pausing a little in her work to answer Grace Hollis, Jessie's sister, a businesslike-looking young person, dressed in her town-going hat and jacket, who had stepped in, on her way to meet the Minsterham omnibus, to ask whether Miss Lee wanted to have anything done for her, and likewise how many yards of narrow black velvet would be wanted for the trimming of her own and Jessie's spring dresses.
Miss Lee was gone up to the house for a grand measuring of all the children for their new frocks; but Amy began to calculate and ask questions about the width and number of rows, and Jessie presently said—
"After all, I think mine will look very well without any round the skirt."
"Why, Jessie, I thought you said the dress you saw looked so genteel with the three rows——"
"Yes," said Jessie; "but I have thought since—" and she hesitated and blushed.
Amy got up from the machine, came towards her, and, laying her hand on her, said, gently—
"I know, Jessie."
"And I know, though you wanted to keep it a secret!" cried Florence. "I was at church too last night!"
"Oh, yes, I saw you, Florence; and wasn't it beautiful?" said Amy, earnestly.
"Most lovely! It is worth something to have a stranger here sometimes to get a fresh hint from!" said Florence.
"I call that more than a hint," said Jessie, in a low voice. "I am so glad you felt it as I did, Flossy."
"Felt it! You don't mean that you got hold of it? Then you can tell whether it was cut on the bias, and how the little puffs were put on!"
"Why, what are you thinking of, Flossy?" exclaimed Amy. "Bias—puffs! One would think you were talking of a dress!"
"Well, of course I was. Of that lovely self-trimming on that cashmere dress of the lady that came with Miss Manners. What—what are you laughing at, Grace?"
"Oh! Florence," said Amy, in a disappointed tone; "we thought you meant the sermon."
"The sermon?" said Florence, half annoyed, half puzzled; "well, it was a very good one; but——"
"It did make one feel—oh, I don't know how!" said Jessie, much too eager to share her feelings with the other girls, even to perceive that Florence wanted to go off to the trimming.
"Wasn't it beautiful—most beautiful—when he said it was not enough only just not to be weeds, or to be only flowers, gay and lovely to the eye?" said Amy.
"Yes," went on Jessie; "he said that we might see there were some flowers just for beauty, all double, and with no fruit or good at all in them, but dying off into a foul mass of decay."
"Ay," said Grace; "I thought of your dahlias, that, what with the rain and the frost, were—pah!—the nastiest mess at last."
"Then he said," proceeded Jessie, "that there were some fair and comely, some not, but only bringing forth just their own seeds, not doing any real good, like people that keep themselves to themselves, and think it is enough to be out of mischief and do good to themselves and their families."
"And didn't you like it," broke in Amy, "when he said that was not what God asked of us? He wanted us to be like the wheat, or the vine, or the apple, or the strawberry, some plain in blossom, some fair and lovely to look at, but valued for the fruit they bring forth, not selfishly, just to keep up their own stock, but for the support and joy and blessing of all!"
"One's heart just burnt within one," continued Jessie, "when he bade us each one to go home and think what we could do to bring forth fruit for the Master, some thirty, some sixty, some an hundredfold. Not only just keeping oneself straight, but doing something for Christ through His members."
"Only think of its being for Christ Himself," said Amy softly.
"Well," said Grace, "I thought we might take turns to go to Miss Manners's missionary working parties. I never gave in to them before, but I shall not be comfortable now unless I do something. And was that what you meant about the velvet trimming, Jessie? It will save—"
"Fifteen pence," said Jessie.
"Very well—or you may say threepence more. So we can put that into the box, if you like. I must be going now, and look sharp if I'm to catch the bus. So good-bye, all of you."
"Oh! but won't you have the self-trimming," broke in Florence. "Perhaps she'll be there on Friday night, and then we might amongst us make out how it is done."
"Florence Cray, for shame!" said Grace. "I do believe you minded nothing but that dress all through that sermon."
"Well," said Florence, who was a good-humoured girl, "there was no helping it, when there it was just opposite in the aisle, and I'd never seen one like it; and as to the sermon, you've just given it to me over again, you've got it so pat; and I'll go to the missionary work meeting too, Grace, and very like the young lady will be there, and I can see her trimming."
"If you go for that, I would go to a fashion-book at once," said Grace; "but I must really be off now, I've not another minute to stop."
"Oh dear, I forgot," cried Florence, jumping up, "I was to ask you to call for our best tea-pot at Bilson's. And my mother wants a dozen—" and there her voice was lost as she followed Grace out of the room through the shop, and even along the road, discoursing on her commissions.
Amy and Jessie were left together, and Amy stood up and said:
"Dear, I am so glad you felt it as I did!"
"One could not help it, if one listened at all," said Jessie. "Amy, I must be doing something for His sake. I can't rest now without it. You teach at the Sunday school. Don't you think I might?"
Amy meditated a little.
"I think they would make up a class for you. When Miss Pemberton's niece goes away, the class she takes has to be joined to her aunt's, and that makes a large one."
"Then will you speak to Miss Manners for me?" asked Jessie. "Are they little girls or big ones?"
"Oh, that's the second class. They would be sure not to give you that," said Amy, as if she thought the aspiration very high, not to say presumptuous. "Perhaps Margaret Roller, the pupil-teacher, you know, may take that. Then I should have hers and you mine. They are dear little girls, some of them, only Susan Bray always wants a tight hand over her, Polly Smithers is so stupid, and Fanny Morris is so sly, one always has to be on the watch."
"Here she comes," said Florence, who was the nearest to the window, and the entrance of Aunt Rose, a brisk, fair little woman, young looking for her age, recalled all her "young ladies," as Florence and Jessie, and perhaps Amy likewise, preferred being called, to recollect that stitching was, at that moment at least, the first thing to be attended to.
Perhaps Amy's business-like tone about the school classes fell a little flat upon Jessie's ear. She had not been to a Sunday school in her childhood. Her father had been a prosperous upholsterer's foreman in Minsterham, and Grace and Jessie had gone to an "academy" till, when they were sixteen and fourteen years old, their father died of a fever, and their mother, who had a cottage of her own at Langley, resolved on coming back and setting up a small shop there for all sorts of wares, with Clementina Hollis over the door.
Jessie was about eighteen, two years younger than her sister. She had always been a bright, quick, lively girl, but never very thoughtful, and much too inquisitive, till her curiosity had brought on her a terrible accident, which had kept her laid up in a hospital for many weeks. She had come home quite well at last, and much improved. A fellow patient, and likewise a lady who had visited her and lent her books, had both made much impression on her. She cared about right and wrong as she had never done before, was more useful at home, and tried to restrain her inclination to find out all about everything; she said her prayers more carefully, went to Church more often, and heeded more what she heard; and altogether she was what her mother called an altered girl. This was Lent, and a clergyman was staying with Mr. Somers to preach a course of sermons on the Friday evenings, and it was one of these that had so much struck these young girls, and had put into their minds for the first time, with any real force, the full sense that the true Christian must seek to work for the good of the household of Christ as well as his own household, and that "bringing forth good fruit" does not simply mean taking care of oneself, and trying to save one's own soul.
The language had been beautiful and stirring, and there was a burning desire in more than one heart to be doing something for Christ's sake. The first thing that Jessie thought of was the Sunday school. She had read books about it, and her fellow patient was full of ardour about "training little lambs," as she called it, so that it seemed the most beautiful and suitable task she could undertake.
Amy Lee, on the other hand, hardly knew how to spend a Sunday without the school. She had been a scholar there until she had quite outgrown the first class, and had been more than a year confirmed, and then she had become a teacher of the little ones. She liked the employment, and was fond of the children; she would have been sorry to drop the connection with Miss Manners or with Miss Joy, the mistress, and the rest of the school staff; she was pleased to work for and with Mr. Somers and Miss Manners, and she had been trained to be reverent and attentive; but it had never occurred to her to think of it as more than a nice and good thing to do, or to look on it as a work undertaken for Christ's sake.