Sunshine Jane

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"What are you doing?" Madeleine asked Jane.

"Making waffles. I thought it would be fun to eat them hot right now."

Susan fairly shrieked with joy. "I ain't so much as smelt one since husband died. Waffles in the morning, and I'm so awful hungry, too. Oh, Jane, the Lord will surely set a crown of glory on your head the minute He sees it. Your feet won't be into heaven when the crown goes on. How did you ever think of it?"

Jane brought out the iron, laughing as she did so. "Why, Auntie, it's part of my training."

"Cooking waffles in the morning?"

"No. Giving joy. If I think of any way to give pleasure and don't do it, I count it a sin. To make more happiness is all the work of a Sunshine Nurse."

"Isn't that splendid?" Susan appealed to Madeleine.

Madeleine's great, beautiful eyes were lifted towards the other girl's face with an expression mysterious in its longing. "Teach me the gift," she said; "I want to make more happiness, too."

"We'll be her class," exclaimed Susan, "just you and me."

"The first lesson is eating waffles," Jane announced solemnly.

"And me, too," cried a voice in the kitchen window, and there was Lorenzo Rath back for his second call that day, and it not yet ten o'clock. "I've been to Mrs. Cowmull's and eaten breakfast, and I'm as hungry as a wolf." He came in through the window as he spoke.

"Oh, a young man!" cried Susan. "I ain't seen a young man since the last time the pump broke. Oh, my! Ain't this jolly? Ain't this fun?"

"You show Madeleine where to find plates and forks and knives, Auntie," said Jane. "Here, Mr. Rath, I'll break two more eggs and you can beat them. I haven't made enough batter, if there's a man to eat, too."

"I feel as if I'd leave Mrs. Cowmull's to-morrow and come here to board," said Lorenzo. "Could I?" His tone was very earnest.

"No, you couldn't," said Jane firmly.

"Oh, let him," exclaimed Susan, from the pantry, where she was getting out plates. "It'll make Mrs. Cowmull so mad, and I ain't made any one mad for years and years. I'd so revel to be human again. And it would be so nice having a man about, too."

"I couldn't think of it," said Jane, getting very crimson.

Madeleine looked at the artist.

"Then I shall leave Mrs. Cowmull's, anyway," said Lorenzo, decidedly; "I shall look up another place at once. Why, that woman would drive me mad. She says something ridiculous every time she opens her mouth. She asked me this morning if I'd ever climbed to the top of the Kreutzer Sonata."

"What did you say?" Madeleine asked.

"I told her no, but I'd been to the bottom of the Campanile and seen them getting out coal from the mine there."

"Well, that showed you'd seen some sights, anyhow," said Susan, placidly.

"The waffles are done!" Jane announced. They all drew up round the table.

"This is living," the invalid exclaimed. "If my sister would only never come back!"

"Maybe she won't!" suggested Lorenzo.

"I wouldn't like her to die," said Susan, gravely. "I'm sensitive over feeling people better off dead. But if she'd marry, it would be nice."

"For the man?" queried Lorenzo.

"For us all," said Susan, gravely.

"Just exactly the right thing is going to happen to her and everybody," said Jane, firmly – dividing the waffles as she spoke.

"Are you so sure?" the artist asked, looking a little amused.

Susan noticed the look. "She's a Sunshine Nurse," she explained quickly. "It's her religion to be like that. She can't help it. She's promised."

CHAPTER V

A CHANGE IN THE FEEL OF THINGS

IT didn't take long for the town to wake up to the fact that some new element had entered into its composition.

"I can't get over it, Susan Ralston's being up and about," Miss Debby Vane said distressedly to Mrs. Mead. "Why, she was 'most dead!"

"Matilda ought not to have gone away," Mrs. Mead said sternly. "Sick folks in bed can't bear a change. A new face gives them a little spurt of strength, and then when they see the old face again, they kind of give up hope and drop right off."

"Yes, I know that," said Miss Debby; "my father had a cousin die that way. There was a doctor going about in a wagon, pulling teeth and giving shocks, and he said he'd give Cousin Hannah a shock and cure her. So they took him up-stairs, and there she was dead of heart disease. They thought of prosecuting him, but the funeral coming right on they hadn't time, and then he was gone to another place, and it seemed too much bother."

"That girl is just the same kind, I believe," said Mrs. Mead; "that dreadful way of making you feel that after all what she says is pretty sensible, maybe. My Emily is awfully took with her, and Father's just crazy about her. He come down on the stage with her, and then he went out to see her. She knows how to get around men; she was frying doughnuts."

"Yes, and Mrs. Cowmull's artist was out there, and they had waffles in the middle of the morning. That's a funny kind of new religion."

"Has she got a new religion?" Miss Debby looked frightened. "I hadn't heard of it."

"Why, yes; Emily says she's got the funniest religion you ever heard of. Whatever she wants to do or don't want to do, she says it's her religion."

"Dear me, but I should think that that would be very convenient," said Miss Debby, much impressed. "Why, my religion is always just the opposite of what I want to do or don't want to do. It says so every Sunday, you know, – 'we have done those things,' and so forth."

"Hers is different," said Mrs. Mead.

"Well, I declare," repeated Miss Debby; then, suddenly, "I remember now that Madeleine said that they had waffles because Jane said that she thought waffles would taste good, and it was her religion to do whatever you thought of right off. Well, I declare!"

Both ladies stared in solemn amazement at one another.

"This'll be a nice town to live in, if she sets everybody to doing whatever you like, because it's right," Mrs. Mead said finally. "Father won't put on his coat again this summer."

"It'll make a great difference in the feeling of the town," said Miss Debby, mysteriously, "a great difference. Well, I hope it won't change Madeleine any way her family won't approve. Madeleine's in love, and I suppose it's Mr. Rath. They knew each other before, and her family don't want it. I've pieced it all out of scraps."

"Oh, dear!" said Emily Mead's mother, her face falling; "my, I hadn't heard but what he was a free man."

"Oh, no," said Miss Debby, "your sister isn't sure. But everybody else is. My own view of artists is they're deluders and snares. I give an artist a picture and a dollar once to enlarge, and that was the last I ever heard of them both – of all three."

"I wonder if Emily knows Mr. Rath's engaged," said Mrs. Mead, sadly. "Dear me, I never thought of that."

"Not engaged, but in love," corrected Miss Debby.

"Perhaps he's a real artist and changeable," suggested Mrs. Mead.

"There's no comfort in that for any one, 'cause if he'll change once, he'll change right along."

Mrs. Mead sighed very heavily. "Well, I must keep up for Father and Emily," she remarked, not tracing any very clear connection between word and deed.

"Yes," said Miss Debby, "you must, and we'll all keep a sharp eye on these new kind of ways of looking at things, for we don't know where they'll end."

The "new way of looking at things" had already been very efficacious in the house at the other end of the street. It had assumed an utterly new appearance, both outside and in.

"And I never felt nothing like the change in the feel of it," Susan exclaimed that afternoon, as she re-arranged her belongings in her own room. "Oh, you Sunshine Jane, you, you've just sunshone into every room, and I'm so happy turning my things about I don't know what to do. Matilda wouldn't never let me turn a china cow other end to, and I've lived with some of the ornaments facing wrong for the whole of these five long years."

"It isn't me, Auntie," said Jane, washing shelves with the hearty and happy energy which she threw into every task in which she engaged; "it's the opening of the windows and the letting in of God and His sunshine together. I'll soon have time to clean the whole house, and then we'll have fun re-arranging every room. You've such pretty things, and they must be rubbed up and given a chance to play a part in the world. God never meant anything to be idle, – not even a brass andiron. If it can't work, it can shine and be cheerful, anyway. What can't smile ought to shine, you know."

"I wonder why rubbing things makes 'em bright," said Susan, opening her bonnet-box and hitting her bonnet a smart cuff to knock dust out of the folds. "I never could understand that."

"It's your individuality that you transfer till the poor dull things get enough of it to shine alone, without anybody's help."

"What a good reason," said Susan. "My, to think maybe I'll go to church again in this bonnet! Matilda was always wanting to rip it up, but something made me cling to it. It's a kind of souvenir. I wore it to husband's funeral and my last picnic, and there are lots of other pleasant memories inside it."

"I'll freshen it up with a cloth dipped in ammonia," said Jane. "Dear me, how I do enjoy washing shelves. I love to sop the soapy water over and mop the corners, and dry the whole, and fit a clean newspaper in, and then see the closet in perfect order."

"You like to do everything, seems to me," said Susan.

"Yes, I do. I've been led to see that doing things well is about the finest way in which one can pass one's time. And I'm crazy over doing things well. If I fold a towel, I like to fold it just square, and if I make a bed, I want the fold in the spread and the fold in the sheet to meet even."

"You'll make a fine wife, Jane," said Susan, gravely, "only no man'll ever appreciate the folds lying straight."

Jane laughed merrily. "I'm never going to marry; I'm one of the new sex, the creatures who are born to live alone and lend a hand anywhere. Didn't you know that?"

"That's nonsense," said Susan; "no woman's made so."

"No. It's a big fact. One of the newest facts in the world. The New Woman, you know!"

"Mercy on us," said Susan, "don't you go in for any of that nonsense. The idea of a girl like you deciding not to marry! I never heard of such a thing!"

"It's so, though," said Jane, smiling brightly; "you see, my little Order is a kind of Sisterhood. We're taught to want to help in so many homes and to never even think of a home of our own. We're taught to love all children so dearly that we mustn't limit ourselves to one family of little ones. We're trained to be so fond of the best in every man that we see more good to be done as sisters to men than as wives."

"I don't believe Mr. Rath will agree with you," said Susan, "nor any other real nice fellow."

Jane was cutting paper for the shelves. "Yes, he will," she said, nodding confidently; "men are so scarce nowadays that they are ready to agree with any one."