The Maid’s voice broke upon the appealing cry. This change rung upon Victoria had served as a rally-word before, but evidently there was “little fire” left in the Victory girl now.
And, worst of all, Olive, the captaining Maid, the Torch-Bearer, felt as if, at the moment, she could give forth no fuel from her own spirit to feed the waning spark.
“If--if I don’t ‘pucker’ up--if I’m not true to my service-pin--the day is lost.” She glanced down at the red, white, and blue button upon her overalls. “Mercy! it is hot--getting hotter. We’re none of us in the mood for work; our legs are telling us that it’s time to fall in for a march back to camp, when it isn’t. If I can’t rally ‘the light that’s in me,’ pass it on to others, what good am I as a leader?... Hitherto I have not been a slacker!”
The feathery luxuriance of the carrot-plants, bending like green foam before the sea-wind, the far-off rows of sweet-corn, tall beans, taller than herself--Kentucky wonders--potatoes, and even the “giggling” beets, did a rural dance around her, to support that claim of the young soul.
And, yet--and yet--Olive knew that the “Joan” fire, with which she started out, had gone from her eyes, the Joan fervor from her heart.
For, after all, she was no hero-souled peasant Maid of middle ages, but a fun-loving, by nature ease-loving, girl, reared, as Sara had once said, “in cotton-wool,”--in padded luxury--who, occasionally, rebelliously felt, as now, that the shadow cast by the Great War and its burden of responsibility had fallen unnaturally upon her youth, as upon the otherwise care-free girlhood around her, making her old before her time.
While her feet trod the struggling soil of the war-garden she was aware of a secret garden within her, beckoning them; a garden of indolence--of ephemeral do-as-you-please delights--in which, indeed, she had rarely lingered since she became a Camp Fire Girl.
How was she to avoid its tempting gate now--how carry on at the task that “pinched”?
And the answer was, as it was to the Maid, Joan, of old, in her sunny orchard, the whispering voices, bidding her look beyond herself--above!
“Our Father!” breathed Olive Deering softly, with a rush of tears to her wide dark eyes, which gazed away from her followers, out over land and sea. “Great Spirit in Whom I live and move and have my being--invisible--Whom, yet, as it were, I have seen--strengthen me now; don’t let me shamefully weaken; help me to--carry--on!