CHAPTER IX.
INHERITANCE.
Do you remember somebody else who lives in Boston? Have you heard of the old house in Greenley Street, and Uncle Titus Oldways, and Desire Ledwith, who came home with him after her mother and sisters went off to Europe, and something had touched her young life that had left for a while an ache after it? Do you know Rachel Froke, and the little gray parlor, and the ferns, and the ivies, and the canary,—and the old, dusty library, with its tall, crowded shelves, and the square table in the midst, where Uncle Oldways sat? All is there still, except Uncle Oldways. The very year that had been so busy elsewhere, with its rushing minutes that clashed out events and changes as moving atoms clash out heat—that had brought to pass all that it has taken more than a hundred pages for me to tell,—that had drawn toward one centre and focus, whither, as into a great whirling maelstrom of life, so many human affairs and interests are continually drifting, the far-apart persons that were to be the persons of one little history,—this same year had lifted Uncle Titus up. Out of his old age, out of his old house,—out from among his books, where he thought and questioned and studied, into the youth and vigor to which, underneath the years, he had been growing; into the knowledges that lie behind and beyond all books and Scriptures; into the house not made with hands, the Innermost, the Divine. Not away; I do not believe that. Lifted up, in the life of the spirit, if only taken within.
Outside,—just a little outside, for she loved him, and her life had grown into his and into his home,—Desire remained, in this home that he had given her.
People talked about her, eagerly, curiously. They said she was a great heiress. Her mother and Mrs. Megilp had written letters to her overflowing with a mixture of sentiment and congratulation, condolence and delight. They wanted her to come abroad at once, now, and join them. What was there, any longer, to prevent?
Desire wrote back to them that she did not think they understood. There was no break, she said; there was to be no beginning again. She had come into Uncle Titus's living with him; he had let her do that, and he had made it so that she could stay. She was not going to leave him now. She would as soon have robbed him of his money and run away, while the handling of his money had been his own. It was but mere handling that made the difference. Himself was not dependent on his breath. And it was himself that she was joined with. "How can people turn their backs on people so?" She broke off with that, in her old, odd, abrupt, blindly significant fashion.
No: they could not understand. "Desire was just queerer than ever," they said. "It was such a pity, at her age. What would she be if she lived to be as old as Uncle Titus himself?" Mrs. Megilp sighed, long-sufferingly.
Mrs. Froke lived on in the gray parlor; Hazel Ripwinkley ran in and out; she hardly knew which was most home now, Greenley or Aspen Street. She and Desire were together in everything; in the bakery and laundry and industrial asylum that Luclarion Grapp's missionary work was taking shape in; in Chapel classes and teachers meetings; in a Wednesday evening Read-and-Talk, as they called it, that they had gathered some dozen girls and young women into, for which the dear old library was open weekly; in walks to and fro about the city "on errands;" in long plans and consultations, now, since so much power had been laid on their young heads and hands.
Uncle Oldways had made "the strangest will that ever was," if that were not said almost daily of men's last disposals. Out of the two sister's families, the Ripwinkleys and the Ledwiths, he had chosen these two girls,—children almost,—whom he declared his "next of kin, in a sense that the Lord and they would know;" and to them he left, in not quite equal shares, the bulk of his large property; the income of each portion to be severally theirs,—Desire's without restriction, Hazel's under her mother's guardianship, until each should come to the age of twenty-five years. If either of the two should die before that age, her share should devolve upon the other; if neither should survive it,—then followed a division among persons and charities, such, as he said, with his best knowledge, and the Lord's help, he felt himself at the moment of devising moved to direct. At twenty-five he counseled each heir to make, promptly, her own legal testament, searching, meanwhile, by the light given her in the doing of her duty, for whom or whatsoever should be shown her to be truly, and of the will of God—not man, her own "next of kin."
"For needful human form," he said, in conclusion, "I name Frances Ripwinkley executrix of this my will; but the Lord Himself shall be executor, above and through all; may He give unto you a right judgment in all things, and keep us evermore in his holy comfort!"
Some people even laughed at such a document as this, made as if the Almighty really had to do with things, and were surer than trustees and cunning law-conditions.
"Two girls!" they said, "who will marry—the Lord knows whom—and do, the Lord knows what, with it all!"
That was exactly what Titus Oldways believed. He believed the Lord did know. He had shown him part; enough to go by to the end of his beat; the rest was his. "Everything escheats to the King, at last."
And so Desire Ledwith and Hazel Ripwinkley sat in the old house together, and made their pure, young, generous plans; so they went in and out, and did their work, blessedly; and Uncle Titus's arm-chair stood there, where it always had, at the library table; and the Book of the Gospels, with its silver cross, lay in its silken cover where it always lay; and nothing had gone but the bent old form from which the strength had risen and the real presence loosened itself; and Uncle Titus's grand, beautiful life passed over to them continually; for hands on earth, he had their hands; for feet, their feet. There was no break, as Desire had said; it was the wonderful "fellowship of the mystery" which God meant, in the manifold wisdom that they know in heavenly places, when He ordained the passing over. We call it death; we make it death; a separation. We leave off there. We gather up the tools that loved ones drop, and use them to carve out, selfishly, our own pleasures; we let their life go, as if it were no matter to keep it up upon the earth. We turn our backs, and go our ways, and leave saints' hands outstretched invisibly in vain.
It was ever so bright and cheerful in this house into which death—that was such a birth—had come. These children were brimming over with happy thankfulness that Uncle Titus had loved and trusted them so. They never solemnized their looks or lengthened their accent when they spoke of him; he had come a great deal nearer to them in departing than he had ever known how to come, or they to approach him, before. Something young in his nature that had been hidden by gray hairs and slowness of years, sprang to join itself to their youth on which he had laid his bequest of the Lord's work. They ran lightly up and down where he had walked with measured gravity; they chatted and laughed, for they knew he was gladder than either; they sat in Desire's large, bright chamber at their work, or they went down to find out things in books in the library; and here, though nothing fell with any chill upon their spirits, they handled reverently the volumes he had loved,—they used tenderly the appliances that had been his daily convenience. With an unspoken consent, they never sat in the seat that had been his. The young heiresses of his place and trust made each a place for herself at opposite ends of the large writing-table, and left his chair before his desk as if he himself had just left it and might at any moment come in and sit again there with them. They always kept a vase of flowers beside the desk, at the left hand.
One day, that summer, they were up-stairs, sewing. Rachel Froke was busy below; they could hear some light movement now and then, in the stillness; or her voice came up through the open windows as she spoke to Frendely, the dear old serving woman, helping her dust and sort over glasses and jars for the yearly preserving.
I cannot tell you what an atmosphere of things and relations that had grown and sweetened and mellowed there was about this old home; what a lovely repose of stability, in the midst of the domestic ferments that are all about us in the changing households of these changing days. Frendely, who had served her maiden apprenticeship in a country family of England, said it was like the real old places there.
"Hazel," said Desire, suddenly,—(she did her thinking deeply and slowly, but she had never got over her old suddenness in speech; it was like the way a good old seamstress I knew used to advise with the needle,—"Take your stitch deliberate, but pull out your thread as quick as you can,")—"Hazel! I think I may go to Europe after all."
"Desire!"
"And more than that, Hazie, you are to go with me."
"Desire Ledwith!"
"Yes, those are my names. I haven't any more; so your surprise can't expend itself any further in that direction. Now, listen. It's all to be done in our Wednesday evening Read-and-Talks. See?"
"O!"
"Very well; begin on interjections; they'll last some time. What I mean is, an idea that I got from Mrs. Hautayne, when I saw her last spring at the Schermans'. She says she always travelled so much on paper; and that paper travelling is very much like paper weddings; you can get all sorts of splendid things into it. There are books, and maps, and gazetteers, and pictures, and stereoscopes. Friends' letters and art galleries. I took it right up into my mind, silently, for my class, sometime. And pretty soon, I think we'll go."
"O, Desire, how nice!"
"That's it! One new word, or two, every time, and repeat. 'Now say the five?' as Fay's Geography used to tell us."
"O, Desire Ledwith, how nice!"
"Good girl. Now, don't you think that Mrs. Geoffrey and Miss Kirkbright would lend us pictures and things?"
"How little we seem to have seen of the Geoffreys lately! I mean, all this spring, even before they went down to Beverly," said Hazel, flying off from the subject in hand at the mention of their names. "I wonder why it is fixed so, Des', that the best people—those you want to get nearest to—are so busy being the best that you don't get much chance?"
"Perhaps the chance is laid up," said Desire, thoughtfully. "I think a good many things are. But to keep on, Hazel, about my plan. You know those two beautiful girls who came in Sunday before last, and joined Miss Kirkbright's class? Not beautiful, I don't mean exactly,—though one of them was that, too; but real"—
"Splendid!" filled out Hazel. "Real ready-made sort of girls. As if they'd had chapel all their lives, somehow. Not like first-Sunday girls at all."
"One of them was a chapel girl. Miss Kirkbright told me. She grew up there till she was sixteen years old; then she went to live in the country. Now I must have those two in, you see. I don't know but Mr. Vireo would say it was making a feast for friends and neighbors, if I pick out the ready-made. But this sort of thing—you must have some reliance, you know; then there's something for the rest to come to, and grow to. I think I shall begin about it before vacation, while they're all together and alive to things. It takes so long to warm up to the same point after the break. We might have one meeting, just to organize, and make it a settled thing. O, how good it will be when Mr. Vireo comes home!"
If I had not so many things to tell before my story can be at all complete, I should like nothing better than to linger here in Desire Ledwith's room, where there was so really "a beautiful east window, and the morning had come in." I should like to just stay in the sunshine of it, and show what the stir of it was, and what it had come to with these two; what a brightness, day by day, they lived in. I should be glad to tell their piece of the story minutely; but I should not be able to get at it to tell. We may touch such lives, and feel the lovely pleasantness; but to enter in, and have the whole—that may only be done in one way; by going and doing likewise.
This talk of theirs gives one link; it shows you how easily and naturally they came to have to do with the Ingrahams; how they belonged in one sphere and drew to one centre; how simply things happen, after all, when they have any business to happen.
Somebody speaks of the ascent of a lofty church spire, as giving such a wonderful glimpse of the unity of a great city; showing its converging movements, its net-work of connection,—its human currents swayed and turned by intelligible drifts of purpose; all which, when one is down among them, seem but whirls of a confusing and distracting medley; a heaping and a rushing together of many things and much conflicting action; where the wonder is that it stays together at all, or that one part plays and fits in with any other to harmony of service. If we could climb high enough, and see deep enough, to read a spiritual panorama in like manner, we should look into the mystery of the intent that builds the worlds and works with "birth and death and infinite motion" to evolve the wonders of all human and angelic history. We should only marvel, then, at what we, with our little bit of wayward free will, hinder; not at what God gently and mightily forecasts and brings to pass.
To find another link, we must go away and look in elsewhere.
CHAPTER X.
FILLMER AND BYLLES.
It was a hot morning in the heart of summer. The girls, coming in to their work, after breakfasts of sour rolls, cheap, raw, bitter coffee and blue milk, with a greasy relish, perhaps, of sausage, bacon, fried potatoes, or whatever else was economical and untouchable,—with the world itself frying in the fervid blaze of a sun rampant for fifteen hours a day,—saw in the windows early peaches, cool salads, and fresh berries; yellow and red bananas in mellow, heavy clusters; morning bouquets lying daintily on wet mosses; pale, beryl-green, transparent hothouse grapes hanging their globes of sweet, refrigerant juices before toil-parched, unsatisfied, feverish lips.
Let us hope that it did them good; it is all we can do now about it.
Up in the work-room of a great dress-making establishment were heaps of delicate cambric, Victoria lawn, piqués, muslins, piles of frillings, Hamburg edgings, insertions, bands. Machines were tripping and buzzing; cutters were clipping at the tables; the forewoman was moving about, directing here, hurrying there, reproving now and then for some careless tension, rough fastening, or clumsy seam. Out of it all were resulting lovely white suits; delicate, cloud-like, flounced robes of bewitching tints; graceful morning wrappers,—perfect toilets of all kinds for girls at watering-places and in elegant summer homes.
Orders kept coming down from the mountains, up from the sea-beaches, in from the country seats, where gay, friendly circles were amusing away the time, and making themselves beautiful before each others' eyes.
For it was fearfully hot again this year.
Bel Bree did not care. It all amused her. She had not got worn down yet, and she did not live in a cheap, working-girls' boarding-house. She had had radishes that morning with her bread and butter, and a little of last year's fruit out of a tin can for supper the night before. That was the way Miss Bree managed about peaches. I believe that was the way she thought the petition in the Litany was answered,—"Preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth, that in due time we may enjoy them;" after the luckier people have had their fill, and begun on the new, and the cans are cheap. There are ways of managing things, even with very little money. If you pay for the managing, you have to do without the things. Bel and her aunt together, with their united earnings and their nice, cosy ways, were very far from being uncomfortable. Bel said she liked the pinch,—what there was of it. She liked "a little bit brought home in a paper and made much of."
Bel had been just a fortnight in the city. She had gone right to work with her aunt at Fillmer & Bylles, she was bright and quick, knew how to run a "Wilcox & Gibbs," and had "some perception," the forewoman said, grimly; with a delicate implication that some others had not. Miss Tonker's praises always pared off on one side what they put on upon another.
It had taken Bel a fortnight to feel her ground, and to get exactly the "lay of the land." Then she went to work, unhesitatingly, to set some small things right.
This morning she had hurried herself and her aunt, come early, and put Miss Bree down, resolutely, against all her disclaimers, in a corner of the very best window in the room. To do this, she moved Matilda Meane's sewing-machine a little.
When Matilda Meane came in, she looked as though she thought the world was moved. She did not exactly dare to order Miss Bree up; but she elbowed about, she pushed her machine this way and that; she behaved like a hen hustled off her nest and not quite making up her mind whether she would go back to it or not. Miss Bree's nose grew apprehensive; it drew itself up with a little, visible, trembling gasp,—her small eyes glanced timidly from under the drawn, puckered lids, it was evidently all she could do to hold her ground. But Bel had put her there, and loyalty to Bel kept her passive. It is so much harder for some poor meek things ever to take anything, than it is forever to go without. Only for love and gratefulness can they ever be made to assume their common human rights.
Presently it had to come out.
Bel was singing away, as she gathered her work together in an opposite quarter of the room, keeping a glance out at her right eye-corner, expectantly.
"Who moved this machine?" asked Matilda Meane, stopping short in her endeavors to make it take up the middle of the window without absolutely rolling it over Aunt Blin's toes.
"I did, a little," answered Bel, promptly. "There was plenty of room for two; and if there hadn't been, Aunt Blin must have a good light, and have it over her left shoulder, at that. She's the oldest person in the room, Miss Meane!"
"She was spoken to yesterday about her buttonholes," she added, in a lower tone, to Eliza Mokey, as she settled herself in her own seat next that young lady. "And it was all because she could hardly see."
"Buttonholes or not," answered Eliza, who preferred to be called "Elise," "I'm glad somebody has taken Mat Meane down at last. She needed it. I wish you could take her in hand everywhere. If you boarded at our house"—
"I shouldn't," interrupted Bel, decisively. "Not under any circumstances, from what you tell of it."
"That's all very well to say now; you're in clover, comparatively. 'Chaters' and real tea,—and a three-ply carpet!"
Miss Mokey had gone home with Bel and Aunt Blin, one evening lately, when there had been work to finish and they had made a "bee" of it.
"See if you could help yourself if you hadn't Aunt Blin."
"Why couldn't I help myself as well as she? She had a nice place all alone, before I came."
"She must have half starved herself to keep it, then. Stands to reason. Dollar and a quarter a day, and five dollars a week for your room. Where's your muffins, and your Oolong? Or else, where's your shoes?—Where's that Hamburg edging?"
"We don't have any Hamburg edging," said Bel, laughing.
"Nonsense. You know what I mean. O, here it is, under all that piqué! For mercy's sake, won't Miss Tonker blow?—Now I get my nine dollars a week, and out of it I pay six for my share of that miserable sky-parlor, and my ends of the crusts and the cheese-parings. No place to myself for a minute. Why, I feel mixed up sometimes to that degree that I'd almost like to die, and begin again, to find out who I am!"
"Well, I wouldn't live so. And Aunt Blin wouldn't. I'm afraid she didn't have other things quite so—corresponding—when she was by herself; but she had the home comfort. And, truly, now, I shouldn't wonder if there was real nourishment in just looking round,—at a red carpet and things,—when you've got 'em all just to your own mind. You can piece out with—peace!"
For two or three minutes, there was nothing heard after that in Bel and Elise's corner, but the regular busy click of the machines, as the tucks ran evenly through. Miss Tonker was hovering in the neighborhood. But presently, as she moved off, and Elise had a spool to change, Bel began again.
"Why don't you get up something different? Why couldn't a dozen, or twenty, take a flat, or a whole house, and have a housekeeper, and live nice? I believe I could contrive."
Bel was a born contriver. She was a born reformer, as all poets are; only she did not know yet that she was either. That had been the real trouble up in New Hampshire. She had her ideals, and she could not carry them out; so she sat and dreamed of what she would do if she could. If she might in any way have moulded her home to her own more delicate instincts, it may be that her step-mother need not have had to complain that "there was no spunk or snap to her about anything." It was not in her to "whew round" among tubs and whey,—to go slap-dash into soapmaking, or the coarse Monday's washing, when all nicer cares were evaded or forbidden, when chairs were shoved back against each other into corners, table-cloths left crooked, and dragging and crumby, drawing the flies,—mantel ornaments of uncouth odds and ends pushed all awry and one side during a dusting, and left so,—carpets rough and untidy at the corners; no touch of prettiness or pleasantness, nothing but clear, necessary work anywhere. She would have made home home; then she would have worked for it.
Aunt Blin was like her. She would rather sit behind her blinds in her neat, quiet room of a Sunday, too tired to go to church, but with a kind of sacred rest about her, and a possible hushed thought of a presence in a place that God had let her make that He might abide with her in it,—than to live as these girls did,—even to have been young like them; to have put on fine, gay things, bought with the small surplus of her weekly earnings after the wretched board was paid, and parade the streets, or sit in a pew, with a Sunday-consciousness of gloves and new bonnet upon her.
"O, faugh!" said Elise Mokey, impatiently, to Bel's "I could contrive." "I should like to see you, with girls like Matilda Meane. You've got to get your dozen or twenty, first, and make them agree."
Miss Mokey had very likely never heard of Mrs. Glass, or of the "catching your hare," which is the impracticable hitch at the start of most delicious things that might otherwise be done.
"I think this world is a kind of single-threaded machine, after all. There's always something either too tight or too loose the minute you double," she said, changing her tension-screw as she spoke. "No; we've just got to make it up with cracker-frolics, the best way we can; and that takes one more of somebody's nine dollars, every time. There's some fun in it, after all, especially to see Matilda Meane come to the table. I do believe that girl would sell her soul if she could have a Parker House dinner every day. When it's a little worse, or a little better than usual, when the milk gives out, or we have a yesterday's lobster for tea,—I wish you could just see her. She's so mad, or she's so eager. She will have claw-meat; it is claw-meat with her, sure enough; and if anybody else gets it first, or the dish goes round the other way and is all picked over,—she looks! Why, she looks as if she desired the prayers of the congregation, and nobody would pray!"
"What are you two laughing at?" broke in Kate Sencerbox, leaning over from her table beyond. "Bel Bree, where are your crimps?"
In the ardor of her work, or talk, or both, Bel's hair, as usual, had got pushed recklessly aside.
"O, I only have a little smile in my hair early in the morning," replies quick, cheery Bel. "It never crimps decidedly, and it all gets straightened out prim enough as the day's work comes on. It's like the grass of the field, and a good many other things; in the morning it is fresh and springeth up; in the evening it giveth up, and is down flat."
"I guess you'll find it so," said Elise Mokey, splenetically.
"Was that what you were laughing at?" asked Kate. "Seems to me you choose rather aggravating subjects."
"Aggravations are as good as anything to laugh at, if you only know how," Bel Bree said.
"They're always handy, at any rate," said Elise.
"I thought 'aggravate' meant making worse than it is," said quiet little Mary Pinfall.
"Just it, Molly!" answered Bel Bree, quick as a flash. "Take a plague, make it out seven times as bad as it is, so that it's perfectly ridiculous and impossible, and then laugh at it. Next time you put your finger on it, as the Irishman said of the flea, it isn't there."
"That's hommerpathy," said Miss Proddle. "Hommerpathy cures by aggravating."
Miss Proddle was tiresome; she always said things that had been said before, or that needed no saying. Miss Proddle was another of those old girls who, like Miss Bree among the young ones, have outlived and lost their Christian names, with their vivacity. Never mind; it is the Christian name, and the Lord knows them by it, as He did Martha and Mary.
"Reductio ad absurdum," put in Grace Toppings, who had been at a High School, and studied geometry.
"Grace Toppings!" called out Kate Sencerbox, shortly, "you've stitched that flounce together with a twist in it!"
Miss Tonker heard, and came round again.
"Gyurls!" she said, with elegantly severe authority, "I will not have this talking over the work. Miss Toppings, this whole skirt is an unmitigated muddle. Head-tucks half an inch too near the bottom! No room for your flounce. If you can't keep to your measures, you'd better not undertake piece-work. Take that last welt out, and put it in over the top. And make no more blunders, if you please, unless you want to be put to plain yard-stitching."
"Eight inches and a half is some room for a flounce, I guess, if it ain't nine inches," muttered the mathematical Grace, as she began the slow ripping of the lock-stitched tucking, that would take half an hour out of the value of her day.
"That's a comfort, ain't it?" whispered mischievous, sharp, good-natured Kate. "Look here; I'll help, if you won't talk any more Latin, or Hottentot."
It was of no use to tell those girls not to talk over their work. The more work they had in them, the more talk; it was a test, like a steam-gauge. Only the poor, pale, worn-out ones, like Emma Hollen, who coughed and breathed short, and could not spend strength even in listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and wheels,—and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on the tops of their bent heads,—kept time with silent thoughts to the beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the thimble-ends.
Elise Mokey stretched up her back slowly, and drew her shoulders painfully out of their steady cramp.
"There! I went round without stopping! I put a sign on it, and I've got my wish! I'd rather sweep a room, though, than do it again."
"You might sweep a room, instead," said Emma Hollen, in her low, faint tone, moved to speak by some echo in that inward rhythm of her thinking. "I partly wish I had, before now."
"O, you goose! Be a kitchen-wolloper!"
"May be I sha'n't be anything, very long. I should like to feel as if I could stir round."
"I wouldn't care if anybody could see what it came to, or what there was left of it at the year's end," said Elise Mokey.
"I'd sweep a room fast enough if it was my own," said Kate Sencerbox. "But you won't catch me sweeping up other folks' dust!"
"I wonder what other folks' dust really is, when you've sifted it, and how you'd pick out your own," said Bel.
"I'd have my own place, at any rate," responded Kate, "and the dust that got into it would go for mine, I suppose."
Bel Bree tucked away. Tucked away thoughts also, as she worked. Not one of those girls who had been talking had anything like a home. What was there for them at the year's end, after the wearing round and round of daily toil, but the diminishing dream of a happier living that might never come true? The fading away out of their health and prettiness into "old things like Miss Proddle and Aunt Blin,"—to take their turn then, in being snubbed and shoved aside? Bel liked her own life here, so far; it was pleasanter than that which she had left; but she began to see how hundreds of other girls were going on in it without reward or hope; unfitting themselves, many of them utterly, by the very mode of their careless, rootless existence,—all of them, more or less, by the narrow specialty of their monotonous drudgery,—for the bright, capable, adaptive many-sidedness of a happy woman's living in the love and use and beauty of home.
Some of her thoughts prompted the fashion in which she recurred to the subject during the hour's dinner-time.
They were grouped together—the same half dozen—in a little ante-room, with a very dusty window looking down into an alley-way, or across it rather, since unless they really leaned out from their fifth story, the line of vision could not strike the base of the opposite buildings, a room used for the manifold purposes of clothes-hanging, hand-washing, brush and broom stowing, and luncheon eating.
"Girls! What would you do most for in this world? What would you have for your choice, if you could get it?"
"Stories to read, and theatre tickets every night," said Grace Toppings.
"Something decent to eat, as often as I was hungry," said Matilda Meane, speaking thick through a big mouthful of cream-cake.
"To be married to Lord Mortimer, and go and live in an Abbey," said Mary Pinfall, who sat on a box with a cracker in one hand, and the third volume of her old novel in the other.
The girls shouted.
"That means you'd like a real good husband,—a Tom, or a Dick, or a Harry," said Kate Sencerbox. "Lord Mortimers don't grow in this country. We must take the kind that do. And so we will, every one of us, when we can get 'em. Only I hope mine will keep a store of his own, and have a house up in Chester Park!"
"If I can ever see the time that I can have dresses made for me, instead of working my head and feet off making them for other people, I don't care where my house is!" said Elise Mokey.
"Or your husband either, I suppose," said Kate, sharply.
"Wouldn't I just like to walk in here some day, and order old Tonker round?" said Elise, disregarding. "I only hope she'll hold out till I can! Won't I have a black silk suit as thick as a board, with fifteen yards in the kilting? And a violet-gray, with a yard of train and Yak-flounces!"
"That isn't my sort," said Kate Sencerbox, emphatically. "It's played out, for me. People talk about our being in the way of temptation, always seeing what we can't have. It isn't that would ever tempt me; I'm sick of it. I know all the breadth-seams, and the gores, and the gathers, and the travelling round and round with the hems and trimmings and bindings and flouncings. If I could get out of it, and never hear of it again, and be in a place of my own, with my time to myself! Wouldn't I like to get up in the morning and choose what I would do?—when it wasn't Fast Day, nor Fourth of July, nor Washington's Birthday, nor any day in particular? I think, on the whole, I'd choose not to get up. A chance to be lazy; that's my vote, after all, Bel Bree!"
"O, dear!" cried Bel, despairingly. "Why don't some of you wish for nice, cute little things?"
"Tell us what," said Kate. "I think we have wished for all sorts, amongst us."
"O, a real little home—to take care of," said Bel. "Not fine, nor fussy; but real sweet and pleasant. Sunny windows and flowers, and a pretty carpet, and white curtains, and one of those chromos of little round, yellow chickens. A best china tea-set, and a real trig little kitchen; pies to make for Sundays and Thanksgivings; just enough work to do in the mornings, and time in the afternoons to sit and sew, and—somebody to read to you out loud in the evenings! I think I'd do anything—that wasn't wicked—to come to live just like that!"
"There isn't anybody that does live so nowadays," said Kate. "There's nothing between horrid little stivey places, and a regular scrub and squall and slop all the week round, and silk and snow and ordering other folks about. You've got to be top or bottom; and if it's all the same to you, I mean to be top if I can; even if"—
Kate was a great deal better than her pretences, after all. She did not finish the bad sentence.
"I'll tell you what I do wonder at," said Bel Bree. "So many great, beautiful homes in this city, and so few people to live in them. All the rest crowded up, and crowded out. When I go round through Hero Street, and Pilgrim Street, and past all the little crammy courts and places, out into the big avenues where all the houses stand back from each other with such a grand politeness, I want to say, Move up a little, can't you? There's such small room for people in there, behind!"
"Say it, why don't you? I'll tell you who'd listen. Washington, sitting on his big bronze horse, pawing in the air at Commonwealth Avenue!"
"Well—Washington would listen, if he wasn't bronze. And its grand for everybody to look at him there. I shouldn't really want the houses to move up, I suppose. It's good to have grandness somewhere, or else nobody would have any place to stretch in. But there must be some sort of moving up that could be, to make things evener, if we only knew!"
Poor little Bel Bree, just dropped down out of New Hampshire! What a problem the great city was already to her!
Miss Tonker put her sub-aristocratic face in at the door. It is a curious kind of reflected majesty that these important functionaries get, who take at first hand the magnificent orders, and sustain temporary relations of silk-and-velvet intimacy with Spreadsplendid Park.
The hour was up. Mary Pinfall slid her romance into the pocket of her waterproof; Matilda Meane swallowed her last mouthful of the four cream-cakes which she had valorously demolished without assistance, and hastily washed her hands at the faucet; Kate and Elise and Grace brushed by her with a sniff of generous contempt.
In two minutes, the wheels and feeds were buzzing and clicking again. What did they say, and emphasize, and repeat, in the ears that bent over them? Mechanical time-beats say something, always. They force in and in upon the soul its own pulses of thought, or memory, or purpose; of imagination or desire. They weld and consolidate our moods, our elements. Twenty miles of musing to the rhythmic throbbings of a railroad train, who does not know how it can shape and deepen and confirm whatever one has started with in mind or heart?
CHAPTER XI.
CRISTOFERO.
A September morning on the deck of a steamer bound into New York, two days from her port.
A fair wind; waves gleaming as they tossed landward, with the white crests and the grand swell that told of some mid-Atlantic storm, which had given them their impulse days since, and would send them breaking upon the American capes and beaches, in splendid tumult of foam, and roar, and plunge; "white horses," wearing rainbows in their manes.
The blue heaven full of sunshine; the air full of sea-tingle; a morning to feel the throb and spring of the vessel under one's feet, as an answer to the throb and spring of one's own life and eagerness; the leap of strength in the veins, and the homeward haste in the heart.
Two gentlemen, who had talked much together in the nine days of their ship-companionship, stood together at the taffrail.
One was the Reverend Hilary Vireo, minister of Mavis Place Chapel, Boston,—coming back to his work in glorious renewal from his eight weeks' holiday in Europe. The other was Christopher Kirkbright, younger partner of the house of Ferguson, Ramsay, and Kirkbright, tea and silk merchants, Hong Kong. Christopher Kirkbright had gone out to China from Glasgow, at the age of twenty-one, pledged to a ten years' stay. For five years past, he had had a share in the business for himself; for the two last, he had represented also the interest of Grahame Kirkbright, his uncle, third partner; had inherited, besides, half of his estate; the other half had come to our friend at home, his sister, Miss Euphrasia.
"I had no right to stay out there any longer, making my tools; multiplying them, without definite purpose. It was time to put them to their use; and I have come home to find it. A man may take till thirty-one to get ready, mayn't he, Mr. Vireo?"
"The man who took up the work of the world's salvation, began to be about thirty years of age when he came forth to public ministry," returned Mr. Vireo.
"I never thought of that before. I wonder I never did. It has come home to me, in many other parts of that Life, how full it is of scarcely recognized analogy to prevailing human experience. That 'driving into the Wilderness!' What an inevitable interval it is between the realizing of a special power and the finding out of its special purpose! I am in the Wilderness,—or was,—Vireo; but I knew my way lay through it. I have been pausing—thinking—striving to know. The temptations may not have been wanting, altogether, either. There are so many things one can do easily; considering one's self, largely, in the plan. My whole life has waited, in some chief respects, till the end of these ten pledged years. What was I to do with it? Where was I to look for, and find most speedily, all that a man begins to feel the desire to establish for himself at thirty years old? Home, society, sphere; I can tell you it is a strange feeling to take one's fortune in one's hand and come forth from such a business exile, and choose where one will make the first link,—decide the first condition, which may draw after all the rest. Happily, I had my sister to come home to; and I had the remembrance of the little story my mother told me—about my name. I think she looked forward for the boy who could know so little then of the destiny partly laid out for him already."
"About your name?" reminded Mr. Vireo. He always liked to hear the whole of a thing; especially a thing that touched and influenced spiritually.
"Yes. The story of Saint Cristofero. The strong man, Offero, who would serve the strongest; who served a great king, till he learned that the king feared Satan; who then sought Satan and served him, till he found that Satan feared the Cross; who sought for Jesus, then, that he might serve Him, and found a hermit who bade him fast and pray. But he would not fast, since from his food came his strength to serve with; nor pray, because it seemed to him idle; but he went forth to help those who were in danger of being swept away, as they struggled to cross the deep, wide River. He bore them through upon his shoulders,—the weak, the little, the weary. At last, he bore a little child who entreated him, and the child grew heavy, and heavier, till, when they reached the other side, Offero said,—'I feel as if I had borne the world upon my shoulders!' And he was answered,—'Thou may'st say that; for thou hast borne Him who made the world.' And then he knew that it was the Lord; and he was called no more 'Offero,' but 'Cristofero.' My mother told me that when I was a little child; and the story has grown in me. The Christ has yet to be borne on men's shoulders."
Hilary Vireo stood and listened with gleaming eyes. Of course, he knew the old saint-legend; of course, Christopher Kirkbright supposed it; but these were men who understood without the saying, that the verities are forever old and forever new. A mother's wise and tender tale,—a child's life growing into a man's, and sanctifying itself with a purpose,—these were the informing that filled afresh every sentence of the story, and made its repetition a most fair and sweet origination.
"And so,"—
"And so, I must earn my name," said Christopher Kirkbright, simply.
"Lift them up, and take them across," said Hilary Vireo, as if thinking it over to himself. The old story had quickened him. A grand perception came to him for his friend, who had begged him to think for and advise him. "Lift them up and take them across!" he repeated, looking into Mr. Kirkbright's face, and speaking the words to him with warm energy. "They are waiting—so many of them! They are sinking down—so many! They want to be lifted through. They want—and they want terribly—a place of safety on the other side. Go down into the river of temptation, and hardship, and sin, and help them up out of it, Christopher. Take them up out of their cruel conditions; make a place for some of them to begin over again in; for some of them to rest in, once in a while, and take courage. Why shouldn't there be cities of refuge, now, Kirkbright? Men are mapping out towns for their own gain, all over the land, wherever a water power or a railroad gives the chance for one to grow; why not build a Hope for the hopeless? Nowhere on earth could that be done as it could in our own land!"
"A City of Refuge'" Kirkbright repeated the words gravely, earnestly; like those of some message of an angel of the Lord, that sounded with self-attested authority in his ears.
After a pause, in which his thought followed out the word of suggestion into a swift dream of possible fulfillment, he said to his companion,—
"I believe there was nothing in that old Jewish economy, Vireo, that was not given as a 'pattern of things' that should be. That whole Old Testament is a type and prophecy of the kingdom coming. Only it was but the first Adam. It was given right into the very conditions that illustrated its need. It would have meant nothing, given into a society of angels. Yet because men were not angels, but very mortal and sinful men, we of to-day must fling contempt upon the Myth of the Salvation of God! It will stand, for all that,—that history of God's intimacy with men. It was lived, not told as a vision, that it might stand! It was lived, to show how near, in spite of sin, God came, and stayed. The second coming shall be without sin unto salvation."
"I'm not sure, Kirkbright, but you ought to be a minister."
"Not to stand in a pulpit. God helping me, I mean to be a minister. Wouldn't a preacher be satisfied to have studied a week upon a sermon, if he knew that on Sunday, preaching it, he had sent it, live, into one living soul? Fifty-two souls a year, to reach and save,—would not that be enough? Well, then, every day a man might be giving the Lord's word out somewhere, in some fashion, I think. He needn't wait for the Sundays. Everybody has a congregation in the course of the week. I don't doubt the week-day service is often you preachers' best."
"I know it is," Hilary Vireo replied.
"Come down into the cabin with me," said Mr. Kirkbright. "I want to look up that old pattern. It will tell me something."
Down in the cabin they seated themselves together where they had had many a talk before, at a corner table near Mr. Kirkbright's state-room door. Out of the state-room he had brought his Bible.
He got hold of one word in that old ordination,—"unawares."
"'He that doeth it unawares," he repeated, holding the Bible with his finger between the half-shut leaves, at that thirty-fifth chapter of Numbers. "How that reminds of, and connects with, the Atoning Prayer,—'Forgive them, for they know not what they do!' 'Sins, negligences, ignorances;' how they shade and change into each other! If all the mistakes could be forgiven and set right, how much evil, virulent and unmixed, would there be left in the world, do you suppose?"
"Not more than there was before the mistakes began," replied Vireo. "Like the Arabian genie, the monster would be drawn down from its horrible expansion to a point again,—the point of a possibility; the serpent suggestion of evil choice. When God has done his work of forgiving, there is where it will be, I think; and the Son of the woman shall set his heel upon its head."
"I wish I could see what lies behind this," said Mr. Kirkbright. "'He shall abide in it unto the death of the high-priest,' and after that, 'the slayer shall return into the land of his possession.' That might almost seem to point to the old sacrificial idea; the atonement by death. I cannot rest in that. I wish I could see its whole meaning,—for meaning it must have, and a meaning of life."
"A temporary ministry; a limited exile; the one the measure of the other," sail Hilary Vireo, slowly thinking it out, and taking the book from the hand of his friend, to look over the words themselves, as he did so.
"The glory is in the promise: 'he shall return into the land of his possession.' His life shall be given back to him,—all that it was meant to be. It shall be kept open for him, till the time of his banishment is over. Meanwhile, over even this period is a holy providing, an anointed commission of grace."
"But hear this," he continued, turning to the Epistle to the Hebrews, "and put the suggestions alongside. All but God's final and eternal best is transitional. 'They truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death. But this man, because He continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore He is able also to save them to the uttermost, that come to God by Him.' Did it ever occur to you to think about that saving to the uttermost? Not a scrap of blessed possibility forfeited, lost? All gathered up, restored, put into our hands again, from the redeeming hands of Christ? Backward and forward, through all that was irretrievable to us; sought, and traced, and found, and brought back with rejoicing; the whole house swept, until not one silver piece is missing. That is the return into the land of our possession. That is God's salvation, and his gospel! That is what shall come to pass. Not yet; not while we are only under the lesser ministry; but when that priesthood over the time of our waiting ends, and we have believed unto the full appearing of the Lord!"
The speaker's face flushed and glowed; Hilary Vireo, always glad and strong in look and bearing, was grandly joyful when the power of the gospel he had to preach came upon him; the gospel of a full, perfect, and unstinted hope.
"Is that what you tell your simple people?" asked Christopher Kirkbright, fixing deeply eager eyes upon him.
"Yes; just that. In simplest words, changed and repeated often. It is the whole burden of my message. What other message is there, to men's souls? 'Repent, and receive the remission of your sins!' Build your city of refuge, Mr. Kirkbright, and show them a beginning of the fulfillment."
Whist and euchre tables not far off were breaking up, just before lunch, with laughter and raised voices. Ladies were coming down from the deck. In the stir, Mr. Vireo rose and went away. Christopher Kirkbright carried his Bible back into his state-room, and shut the door.