Spring came on early, with heavy rains and freshets in many parts of the country.
It was a busy time at Z——.
Two things had happened there that were to give Kenneth Kincaid more work, and would keep him where he was all summer.
Just before he went to Z——, there had been a great fire at West Hill. All Mr. Roger Marchbanks's beautiful place was desolate. House, conservatories, stables, lovely little vine-covered rustic buildings, exquisitely tended shrubbery,—all swept over in one night by the red flames, and left lying in blackness and ashes.
For the winter, Mr. Marchbanks had taken his family to Boston; now he was planning eagerly to rebuild. Kenneth had made sketches; Mr. Marchbanks liked his ideas; they had talked together from time to time. Now, the work was actually in hand, and Kenneth was busy with drawings and specifications.
Down at the river, during the spring floods, a piece of the bridge had been carried away, and the dam was broken through. There were new mill buildings, too, going up, and a block of factory houses. All this business, through Mr. Marchbanks directly or indirectly, fell also into Kenneth's hands.
He wrote blithe letters to Dorris; and Dorris, running in and out from her little spring cleanings that Hazel was helping her with, told all the letters over to the Ripwinkleys.
"He says I must come up there in my summer vacation and board with his dear old Miss Waite. Think of Kentie's being able to give me such a treat as that! A lane, with ferns and birches, and the woods,—pinewoods!—and a hill where raspberries grow, and the river!"
Mrs. Ledwith was thinking of her summer plans at this time, also. She remembered the large four-windowed room looking out over the meadow, that Mrs. Megilp and Glossy had at Mrs. Prendible's, for twelve dollars a week, in And. She could do no better than that, at country boarding, anywhere; and Mr. Ledwith could sleep at the house in Shubarton Place, getting his meals down town during the week, and come up and spend his Sundays with them. A bedroom, in addition, for six dollars more, would be all they would want.
The Ripwinkleys were going up to Homesworth by and by for a little while, and would take Sulie Praile with them. Sulie was ecstatically happy. She had never been out of the city in all her life. She felt, she said, "as if she was going to heaven without dying." Vash was to be left at Mrs. Scarup's with her sister.
Miss Craydocke would be away at the mountains; all the little life that had gathered together in the Aspen Street neighborhood, seemed about to be broken up.
Uncle Titus Oldways never went out of town, unless on business. Rachel Froke stayed, and kept his house; she sat in the gray room, and thought over the summers she had had.
"Thee never loses anything out of thy life that has been in," she said. "Summer times are like grains of musk; they keep their smell always, and flavor the shut-up places they are put away in."
For you and me, reader, we are to go to Z—— again. I hope you like it.
But before that, I must tell you what Luclarion Grapp has done.
Partly from the principle of her life, and partly from the spirit of things which she would have caught at any rate, from the Ripwinkley home and the Craydocke "Beehive,"—for there is nothing truer than that the kingdom of heaven is like leaven,—I suppose she had been secretly thinking for a good while, that she was having too easy a time here, in her first floor kitchen and her garden bedroom; that this was not the life meant for her to live right on, without scruple or question; and so began in her own mind to expect some sort of "stump;" and even to look about for it.
"It isn't as it was when Mrs. Ripwinkley was a widow, and poor,—that is, comparative; and it took all her and my contrivance to look after the place and keep things going, and paying, up in Homesworth; there was something to buckle to, then; but now, everything is eased and flatted out, as it were; it makes me res'less, like a child put to bed in the daytime."
Luclarion went down to the North End with Miss Craydocke, on errands of mercy; she went in to the new Mission, and saw the heavenly beauty of its intent, and kindled up in her soul at it; and she came home, time after time, and had thoughts of her own about these things, and the work in the world there was to do.
She had cleaned up and set things going at Mrs. Scarup's; she learned something in doing that, beyond what she knew when she set about it; her thoughts began to shape themselves to a theory; and the theory took to itself a text and a confirmation and a command.
"Go down and be a neighbor to them that have fallen among thieves."
Luclarion came to a resolution in this time of May, when everybody was making plans and the spring-cleaning was all done.
She came to Mrs. Ripwinkley one morning, when she was folding away winter clothes, and pinning them up in newspapers, with camphor-gum; and she said to her, without a bit of preface,—Luclarion hated prefaces,—
"Mrs. Ripwinkley, I'm going to swarm!"
Mrs. Ripwinkley looked up in utter surprise; what else could she do?
"Of course 'm, when you set up a Beehive, you must have expected it; it's the natural way of things; they ain't good for much unless they do. I've thought it all over; I'll stay and see you all off, first, if you want me to, and then—I'll swarm."
"Well," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, assenting in full faith, beforehand; for Mrs. Ripwinkley, if I need now to tell you of it, was not an ordinary woman, and did not take things in an ordinary selfish way, but grasped right hold of the inward right and truth of them, and believed in it; sometimes before she could quite see it; and she never had any doubt of Luclarion Grapp. "Well! And now tell me all about it."
"You see," said Luclarion, sitting down in a chair by the window, as Mrs. Ripwinkley suspended her occupation and took one by the bedside, "there's places in this town that folks leave and give up. As the Lord might have left and give up the world, because there was dirt and wickedness in it; only He didn't. There's places where it ain't genteel, nor yet respectable, to live; and so those places grow more disrespectable and miserable every day. They're left to themselves. What I think is, they hadn't ought to be. There's one clean spot down there now, in the very middle of the worst dirt. And it ain't bad to live in.That'sstarted. Now, what I think is, that somebody ought to start another, even if its only a little one. Somebody ought to just go there andlive, and show 'em how, just as I took and showed Mrs. Scarup, and she's been living ever since, instead of scratching along. If some of them folks had a clean, decent neighbor to go to see,—to drink tea with, say,—and was to catch an idea of her fixings and doings, why, I believe there'd be more of 'em,—cleaned up, you know. They'd get some kind of an ambition and a hope. Tain't enough for ladies—though I bless 'em in my soul for what I've seen 'em do—to come down there of a Fridays, and teach and talk awhile, and then go home to Summit Street and Republic Avenue, and take uptheirlife again where they left it off, that is just as different as heaven is from 'tother place; somebody's got to come right downoutof heaven, and bring the life in, and live it amongst them miserable folks, as the Lord Jesus Christ came and did! And it's borne in upon me, strong and clear, that that's what's got to be before all's righted. And so—for a little piece of it, and a little individual stump—I'm going to swarm, and settle, and see what'll come."
Mrs. Ripwinkley was looking very intently at Luclarion. Her breath went and came hurriedly, and her face turned pale with the grand surprise of such a thought, such a plan and purpose, so simply and suddenly declared. Her eyes were large and moist with feeling.
"Do youknow, Luclarion," she exclaimed at last, "do you realize what this is that you are thinking of; what a step it would be to take,—what a work it would be to even hope to begin to do? Do you know how strange it is,—how almost impracticable,—that it is not even safe?"
"'Twasn'tsafefor Him—when He came into the world," Luclarion answered.
"Not to say I think there's any comparison," she began again, presently, "or that I believe there's anything to be really scared of,—except dirt; and youcanclean a place round you, as them Mission people have done. Why, there ain't a house in Boston nicer, or sweeter, or airier even, than that one down in Arctic Street, with beautiful parlors and bedrooms, and great clean galleries leading round, and skylighted,—skylighted! for you see the blue heaven is above all, and youcanlet the skylight in, without any corruption coming in with it; and if twenty people can do that much, or a hundred,—one can do something. 'Taint much, either, to undertake; only to be willing to go there, and make a clean place for yourself, and a home; and live there, instead of somewheres else that's ready made; and let it spread. And you know I've always looked forrud to some kind of a house-keep of my own, finally."
"But, Luclarion, I don't understand! All alone? And you couldn't use a whole house, you know. Your neighbors would beinmates. Why, it seems to me perfectly crazy!"
"Now, ma'am, did you ever know me to go off on a tangent, without some sort of a string to hold on to? I ain't goin' to swarm all alone! I never heard of such a thing. Though if I couldn'tswarm, and the thing was to be done, I say I'd try it. But Savira Golding is going to be married to Sam Gallilee, next month; and he's a stevedore, and his work is down round the wharves; he's class-leader in our church, and a first-rate, right-minded man, or else Savira wouldn't have him; for if Savira ain't a clear Christian, and a doing woman, there ain't one this side of Paradise. Now, you see, Sam Gallilee makes money; he runs a gang of three hundred men. He can afford a good house, and a whole one, if he wants; but he's going in for a big one, and neighbors. They mean to live nice,—he and Savira; and she has pretty, tasty ways; there'll be white curtains, and plants blooming in her windows, you may make sure; she's always had 'em in that little up-stairs dress-making room of hers; and boxes of mignonette and petunias on the ledges; and birds singing in a great summer cage swung out against the wall. She's one of the kind that reaches out, and can't be kept in; and she knows her gifts, and is willing to go and let her light shine where it will help others, and so glorify; and Sam, he's willing too, and sees the beauty of it. And so,—well, that's the swarm."
"And the 'little round Godamighty in the middle of it,'" said Mrs. Ripwinkley, her face all bright and her eyes full of tears.
"Ma'am!"
Then Mrs. Ripwinkley told her Miss Craydocke's story.
"Well," said Luclarion, "there's something dear and right-to-the-spot about it; but it does sound singular; and it certainly ain't a thing to say careless."
Desire Ledwith grew bright and excited as the summer came on, and the time drew near for going to Z——. She could not help being glad; she did not stop to ask why; summer-time was reason enough, and after the weariness of the winter, the thought of Z—— and the woods and the river, and sweet evenings and mornings, and gardens and orchards, and road-side grass, was lovely to her.
"It is so pleasant up there!" she would keep saying to Dorris; and somehow she said it to Dorris oftener than to anybody else.
There was something fitful and impetuous in her little outbursts of satisfaction; they noticed it in her; the elder ones among them noticed it with a touch of anxiety for her.
Miss Craydocke, especially, read the signs, matching them with something that she remembered far back in the life that had closed so peacefully, with white hairs and years of a serene content and patience, over all unrest and disappointment, for herself. She was sorry for this young girl, for whom she thought she saw an unfulfilled dream of living that should go by her like some bright cloud, just near enough to turn into a baptism of tears.
She asked Desire, one day, if she would not like to go with her, this summer, to the mountains.
Desire put by the suggestion hastily.
"O, no, thank you, Miss Craydocke, I must stay with mamma and Helena. And besides," she added, with the strict, full truth she always demanded of herself, "Iwantto go to Z——."
"Yes," said Miss Craydocke.
There was something tender, like a shade of pity, in her tone.
"But you would enjoy the mountains. They are full of strength and rest. One hardly understands the good the hills do one. David did, looking out into them from Jerusalem. 'I will look to the hills, from whence cometh my strength.'"
"Some time," said Desire. "Some time I shall need the hills, and—be ready for them. But this summer—I want a good, gay, young time. I don't know why, except that I shall be just eighteen this year, and it seems as if, after that, I was going to be old. And I want to be with people I know. Icanbe gay in the country; there is something to be gay about. But I can't dress and dance in the city. That is all gas-light and get-up."
"I suppose," said Miss Craydocke, slowly, "that our faces are all set in the way we are to go. Even if it is—" She stopped. She was thinking of one whose face had been set to go to Jerusalem. Her own words had led her to something she had not foreseen when she began.
Nothing of such suggestion came to Desire. She was in one of her rare moods of good cheer.
"I suppose so," she said, heedlessly. And then, taking up a thought of her own suddenly,—"Miss Craydocke! Don't you think people almost always live out their names? There's Sin Scherman; there'll always be a little bit of mischief and original naughtiness in her,—with the harm taken out of it; and there's Rosamond Holabird,—they couldn't have called her anything better, if they'd waited for her to grow up; and Barbwassharp; and our little Hazel is witchy and sweet and wild-woodsy; and Luclarion,—isn't that shiny and trumpety, and doesn't she do it? And then—there's me. I shall always be stiff and hard and unsatisfied, except in little bits of summer times that won't come often. They might as well have christened me Anxiety. I wonder why they didn't."
"That would have been very different. There is a nobleness in Desire. You will overlive the restless part," said Miss Craydocke.
"Was there ever anything restless in your life, Miss Craydocke? And how long did it take to overlive it? It doesn't seem as if you had ever stubbed your foot against anything; and I'malwaysstubbing."
"My dear, I have stubbed along through fifty-six years; and the years had all three hundred and sixty-five days in them. There were chances,—don't you think so?"
"It looks easy to be old after it is done," said Desire. "Easy and comfortable. But to be eighteen, and to think of having to go on to be fifty-six; I beg your pardon,—but I wish it was over!"
And she drew a deep breath, heavy with the days that were to be.
"You are not to take it all at once, you know," said Miss Craydocke.
"But I do, every now and then. I can't help it. I am sure it is the name. If they had called me 'Hapsie,' like you, I should have gone along jolly, as you do, and not minded. You see you have tohearit all the time; and it tunes you up to its own key. You can't feel like a Dolly, or a Daisy, when everybody says—De-sire!"
"I don't know how I came to be called 'Hapsie,'" said Miss Craydocke. "Somebody who liked me took it up, and it seemed to get fitted on. But that wasn't when I was young."
"What was it, then?" asked Desire, with a movement of interest.
"Keren-happuch," said Miss Craydocke, meekly. "My father named me, and he always called me so,—the whole of it. He was a severe, Old-Testament man, andhisname was Job."
Desire was more than half right, after all. There was a good deal of Miss Craydocke's story hinted in those few words and those two ancient names.
"But I turned into 'Miss Craydocke' pretty soon, and settled down. I suppose it was very natural that I should," said the sweet old maid, serenely.
The evening train came in through the little bend in the edge of the woods, and across the bridge over the pretty rapids, and slid to its stopping-place under the high arches of the other bridge that connected the main street of Z—— with its continuation through "And."
There were lights twinkling in the shops, where they were making change, and weighing out tea and sugar, and measuring calico, although outside it was not yet quite dark.
The train was half an hour late; there had been a stoppage at some draw or crossing near the city.
Mr. Prendible was there, to see if his lodgers were come, and to get his evening paper; the platform was full of people. Old Z—— acquaintances, many of them, whom Desire and her mother were pleased, and Helena excited to see.
"There's Kenneth Kincaid!" she exclaimed, quite loudly, pulling Desire's sleeve.
"Hush!" said Desire, twitching away. "How can you, Helena?"
"He's coming,—he heard me!" cried Helena, utterly impenitent.
"I should think he might!" And Desire walked off a little, to look among the trunks that were being tumbled from the baggage car.
She had seen him all the time; he had been speaking to Ruth Holabird, and helping her up the steps with her parcels. Mr. Holabird was there with the little Westover carryall that they kept now; and Kenneth put her in, and then turned round in time to hear Helena's exclamation and to come down again.
"Can I help you? I'm very glad you are come," he said, cordially.
Well; he might have said it to anybody. Again, well; it was enough to say to anybody. Why should Desire feel cross?
He took Helena's bag; she had a budget beside; Mr. Prendible relieved Mrs. Ledwith; Desire held on valiantly to her own things. Kenneth walked over the bridge with them, and down the street to Mr. Prendible's door; there he bade them good-by and left them.
It was nice to be in Z——; it was very sweet here under the blossoming elms and locusts; it was nice to see Kenneth Kincaid again, and to think that Dorris was coming by and by, and that the lanes were green and full of ferns and vines, and that there was to be a whole long summer; but there were so many people down there on the platform,—there was such a muss always; Ruth Holabird was a dear little thing, but there were always so many Ruths about! and there was only one cross, stiff, odd, uncomfortable Desire!
But the very next night Kenneth came down and stayed an hour; there was a new moon glistening through the delicate elm-tips, and they sat out on the piazza and breathed in such an air as they had not had in their nostrils for months and months.
The faint, tender light from the golden west in which the new moon lay, showed the roof and tower of the little church, Kenneth's first beautiful work; and Kenneth told them how pleasant it was up at Miss Arabel's, and of the tame squirrels that he fed at his window, and of the shady pasture-path that led away over the brook from the very door, and up among pines and into little still nooks where dry mossy turf and warm gray rocks were sheltered in by scraggy cedars and lisping birches, so that they were like field-parlors opening in and out from each other with all sorts of little winding and climbing passages, between clumps of bayberry bushes and tall ferns; and that the girls from Z—— and Westover made morning picnics there, since Lucilla Waters had grown intimate with Delia Waite and found it out; and that Delia Waite and even Miss Arabel carried their dressmaking down there sometimes in a big white basket, and stayed all day under the trees. They had never used to do this; they had stayed in the old back sitting room with all the litter round, and never thought of it till those girls had come and showed them how.
"I think there is the best and sweetest neighborliness and most beautiful living here in Z——, that I ever knew in any place," said Kenneth Kincaid; "except that little piece of the same thing in Aspen Street."
Kenneth had found out how Rosamond Holabird recognized Aspen Street as a piece of her world.
Desire hated, as he spoke, her spitefulness last night; what she had said to herself of "so many Ruths;" why could not she not be pleased to come into this beautiful living and make a little part of it?
She was pleased; she would be; she found it very easy when Kenneth said to her in that frank intimate way,—"I wish you and your mother would come over and see what Dorris will want, and help me a little about that room of hers. I told Miss Waite not to bother; just to let the old things stand,—I knew Dorris would like them,—and anything else I would get for her myself. I mean Dolly shall take a long vacation this year; from June right through to September; and its 'no end of jolly,' as those English fellows say, that you have come too!"
Kenneth Kincaid was fresher and pleasanter and younger himself, than Desire had ever seen him before; he seemed to have forgotten that hard way of looking at the world; he had found something so undeniably good in it. I am afraid Desire had rather liked him for his carping, which was what he least of all deserved to be liked for. It showed how high and pure his demands were; but his praise and admissions were better; it is always better to discern good than to fret at the evil.
"I shall see you every day," he said, when he shook hands at parting; "and Helena, if you want a squirrel to keep in your pocket next winter, I'll begin training one for you at once."
He had taken them right to himself, as if they belonged to him; he spoke as if he were very glad that he should see them every day.
Desire whistled over her unpacking; she could not sing, but she could whistle like a blackbird. When her father came up on Saturday night, he said that her eyes were brighter and her cheeks were rounder, for the country air; she would take to growing pretty instead of strong-minded, if she didn't look out.
Kenneth came round on Monday, after tea, to ask them to go over to Miss Waite's and make acquaintance.
"For you see," he said, "you will have to be very intimate there, and it is time to begin. It will take one call to be introduced, and another, at least, to get up-stairs and see that beautiful breezy old room that can't be lived in in winter, but is to be a delicious sort of camping-out for Dolly, all summer. It is all windows and squirrel-holes and doors that won't shut. Everything comes in but the rain; but the roof is tight on that corner. Even the woodbine has got tossed in through a broken upper pane, and I wouldn't have it mended on any account. There are swallows' nests in the chimneys, and wrens under the gable, and humming-birds in the honeysuckle. When Dolly gets there, it will be perfect. It just wants her to take it all right into her heart and make one piece of it.Theydon't know,—the birds and the squirrels,—it takes the human. There has to be an Adam in every garden of Eden."
Kenneth really chattered, from pure content and delight.
It did not take two visits to get up-stairs. Miss Arabel met them heartily. She had been a shy, timid old lady, from long neglect and humble living; but lately she had "come out in society," Delia said. Society had come after her, and convinced her that she could make good times for it.
She brought out currant wine and gave them, the first thing; and when Kenneth told her that they were his and Dorris's friends, and were coming next week to see about getting ready for her, she took them right round through all four of the ground rooms, to the queer corner staircase, and up into the "long west chamber," to show them what a rackety old place it was, and to see whether they supposed it could be made fit.
"Why it's like the Romance of the Forest!" said Helena, delighted. "I wishwehad come here. Don't you have ghosts, or robbers, or something, up and down those stairs, Miss Waite?" For she had spied a door that led directly out of the room, from beside the chimney, up into the rambling old garret, smelling of pine boards and penny-royal.
"No; nothing but squirrels and bees, and sometimes a bat," answered Miss Arabel.
"Well, it doesn't want fixing. If you fix it, you will spoil it. I shall come here and sleep with Dorris,—see if I don't."
The floor was bare, painted a dark, marbled gray. In the middle was a great braided rug, of blue and scarlet and black. The walls were pale gray, with a queer, stencilled scroll-and-dash border of vermilion and black paint.
There was an old, high bedstead, with carved frame and posts, bare of drapery; an antiquated chest of drawers; and a half-circular table with tall, plain, narrow legs, between two of the windows. There was a corner cupboard, and a cupboard over the chimney. The doors of these, and the high wainscot around the room, were stained in old-fashioned "imitation mahogany," very streaky and red. The wainscot was so heavily finished that the edge running around the room might answer for a shelf.
"Just curtains, and toilet covers, and a little low rocking chair," said Mrs. Ledwith. "That is all you want."
"But the windows are so high," suggested Desire. "A low chair would bury her up, away from all the pleasantness. I'll tell you what I would have, Mr. Kincaid. A kind of dais, right across that corner, to take in two windows; with a carpet on it, and a chair, and a little table."
"Just the thing!" said Kenneth. "That is what I wanted you for, Miss Desire," he said in a pleased, gentle way, lowering his tone to her especial hearing, as he stood beside her in the window.
And Desire was very happy to have thought of it.
Helena was spurred by emulation to suggest something.
"I'd have a—hammock—somewhere," she said.
"Good," said Kenneth. "That shall be out under the great butternut."
The great butternut walled in one of the windows with a wilderness of green, and the squirrels ran chattering up and down the brown branches, and peeping in all day. In the autumn, when the nuts were ripe, they would be scrambling over the roof, and in under the eaves, to hide their stores in the garret, Miss Arabel told them.
"Why doesn't everbody have an old house, and let the squirrels in?" cried Helena, in a rapture.
In ten days more,—the first week of June,—Dorris came.
Well,—"That let in all the rest," Helena said, and Desire, may be, thought. "We shan't have it to ourselves any more."
The girls could all come down and call on Dorris Kincaid, and they did.
But Desire and Helena had the first of it; nobody else went right up into her room; nobody else helped her unpack and settle. And she was so delighted with all that they had done for her.
The dais was large enough for two or three to sit upon at once, and it was covered with green carpet of a small, mossy pattern, and the window was open into the butternut on one side, and into the honeysuckle on the other, and it was really a bower.
"I shall live ten hours in one," said Dorris.
"And you'll let me come and sleep with you some night, and hear the bats," said Helena.
The Ledwiths made a good link; they had known the Kincaids so well; if it had been only Dorris, alone, with her brother there, the Westover girls might have been shy of coming often. Since Kenneth had been at Miss Waite's, they had already grown a little less free of the beautiful woods that they had just found out and begun fairly to enjoy last autumn.
But the Ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by; there were plans continually.
Since Leslie Goldthwaite and Barbara Holabird were married and gone, and the Roger Marchbankses were burned out, and had been living in the city and travelling, the Hobarts and the Haddens and Ruth and Rosamond and Pen Pennington had kept less to their immediate Westover neighborhood than ever; and had come down to Lucilla's, and to Maddy Freeman's, and the Inglesides, as often as they had induced them to go up to the Hill.
Maud Marchbanks and the Hendees were civil and neighborly enough at home, but they did not care to "ramify." So it came to pass that they were left a good deal to themselves. Olivia and Adelaide, when they came up to Westover, to their uncle's, wondered "that papa cared to build again; there really wasn't anything to come for; West Hill was entirely changed."
So it was; and a very good thing.
I came across the other day, reading over Mr. Kingsley's "Two Years Ago," a true word as to social needs in England, that reminded me of this that the Holabirds and the Penningtons and the Inglesides have been doing, half unconsciously, led on from "next" to next, in Z——.
Mr. Kingsley, after describing a Miss Heale, and others of her class,—the middle class, with no high social opportunities, and with time upon their hands, wasted often in false dreams of life and unsatisfied expectations, "bewildering heart and brain with novels," for want of a nobler companionship, says this: "Till in country villages, the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will recollect that the farmers' and tradesmens' daughters are just as much in want of their influence as the charity children and will yield a far richer return for their labor, so long will England be full of Miss Heales."
If a kindly influence and fellowship are the duty of the aristocratic girls of England toward their "next," below, how far more false are American girls to the spirit of their country, and the blessed opportunities of republican sympathies and equalities, when they try to draw invisible lines between themselves and those whose outer station differs by but so little, and whose hearts and minds, under the like culture with their own, crave, just as they do, the best that human intercourse can give. Social science has something to do, before—or at least simultaneously with—reaching down to the depths where all the wrongs and blunders and mismanagements of life have precipitated their foul residuum. A master of one of our public schools, speaking of the undue culture of the brain and imagination, in proportion to the opportunities offered socially for living out ideas thus crudely gathered, said that his brightest girls were the ones who in after years, impatient of the little life gave them to satisfy the capacities and demands aroused and developed during the brief period of school life, and fed afterwards by their own ill-judged and ill-regulated reading, were found fallen into lives of vice. Have our women, old or young, who make and circumscribe the opportunities of social intercourse and enjoyment, nothing to search out here, and help, as well, or as soon as, to get their names put on committee lists, and manage these public schools themselves, which educate and stimulate up to the point of possible fierce temptation, and then have nothing more that they can do?
It was a good thing for Desire Ledwith to grow intimate, as she did, with Rosamond Holabird. There were identical points of character between the two. They were both so real.
"You don't want toplayanything," Barbara Holabird had said to Rosamond once, in some little discussion of social appearances and pretensions. "And that's the beauty of you!"
It was the beauty of Desire Ledwith also; only, with Rosamond, her ambitions had clothed themselves with a grace and delicateness that would have their own perfect and thorough as far as it went; and with Desire, the same demands of true living had chafed into an impatience with shams and a blunt disregard of and resistance to all conventionalisms.
"You are a good deal alike, you two," Kenneth Kincaid said to them one day, in a talk they all three happened to have together.
And he had told Rosamond afterward that there was "something grand in Desire Ledwith; only grand things almost always have to grow with struggles."
Rosamond had told this again to Desire.
It was not much wonder that she began to be happier; to have a hidden comfort of feeling that perhaps the "waiting with all her might" was nearly over, and the "by and by" was blossoming for her, though the green leaves of her own shy sternness with herself folded close down about the sweetening place, and she never parted them aside to see where the fragrance came from.
They were going to have a grand, large, beautiful supper party in the woods.
Mrs. Holabird and Mrs. Hobart were the matrons, and gave out the invitations.
"I don't think I could possibly spend a Tuesday afternoon with a little 't,'" said Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks laughing, and tossing down poor, dear, good Mrs. Hobart's note upon her table. "It israthermore than is to be expected!"
"Doctor and Mrs. Hautayne are here, and Dakie Thayne is home from West Point. It will be rather a nice party."
"The Holabirds seem to have got everything into their own hands," said Mrs. Marchbanks, haughtily. "It is always a pity when people take the lead who are not exactly qualified. Mrs. Holabirdwillnot discriminate!'
"I think the Holabirds are splendid," spoke up Lily, "and I don't think there's any fun in sticking up by ourselves! I can't bear to be judicious!"
Poor little Lily Marchbanks had been told a tiresome many times that she must be "judicious" in her intimacies.
"You can bepleasantto everybody," said mother and elder sister, with a salvo of Christian benignity.
But it is so hard for little children to be pleasant with fence and limitation.
"Where must I stop?" Lily had asked in her simplicity. "When they give me a piece of their luncheon, or when they walk home from school, or when they say they will come in a little while?"
But there came a message back from Boston by the eleven o'clock train on the morning of the Tuesday with a little "t," from Mr. Marchbanks himself, to say that his brother and Mr. Geoffrey would come up with him to dinner, and to desire that carriages might be ready afterward for the drive over to Waite's grove.
Mrs. Marchbanks marveled, but gave her orders. Arthur came out early, and brought with him his friend Archie Mucklegrand, and these two were bound also for the merry-making.
Now Archie Mucklegrand was the identical youth of the lavender pantaloons and the waxed moustache, whom Desire, as "Miss Ledwith," had received in state a year and a half ago.
So it was an imposing cavalcade, after all, from West Hill, that honored the very indiscriminate pleasure party, and came riding and driving in at about six o'clock. There were the barouche and the coupé; for the ladies and elder gentlemen, and the two young men accompanied them on horseback.
Archie Mucklegrand had been at West Hill often before. He and Arthur had just graduated at Harvard, and the Holabirds had had cards to their grand spread on Class Day. Archie Mucklegrand had found out what a pretty girl—and a good deal more than merely pretty—Rosamond Holabird was; and although he might any day go over to his big, wild Highland estate, and take upon himself the glory of "Sir Archibald" there among the hills and moors,—and though any one of a good many pretty girls in Spreadsplendid Park and Republic Avenue might be induced, perhaps, if he tried, to go with him,—all this did not hinder him from perceiving that up here in Z—— was just the most bewitching companionship he had ever fallen in with, or might ever be able to choose for himself for any going or abiding; that Rosamond Holabird was just the brightest, and sweetest, and most to his mind of any girl that he had ever seen, and most like "the woman" that a man might dream of. I do not know that he quite said it all to himself in precisely that way; I am pretty sure that he did not, as yet; but whatever is off-hand and young-mannish and modern enough to express to one's self without "sposhiness" an admiration and a preference like that, he undoubtedly did say. At any rate after his Christmas at Z—— with Arthur, and some charade parties they had then at Westover, and after Class Day, when everybody had been furious to get an introduction, and all the Spreadsplendid girls and their mothers had been wondering who that Miss Holabird was and where she came from, and Madam Mucklegrand herself—not having the slightest recollection of her as the Miss Holabird of that early-morning business call, whose name she had just glanced at and dropped into an Indian china scrap-jar before she went down-stairs—had asked him the same questions, and pronounced that she was "an exceedingly graceful little person, certainly,"—after all this, Archie had made up his—mind, shall I say? at least his inclination, and his moustache—to pursue the acquaintance, and be as irresistible as he could.
But Rosamond had learned—things do so play into our lives in a benign order—just before that Christmas time and those charades, in one of which Archie Mucklegrand had sung to her, so expressively, the "Birks of Aberfeldy,"—that Spreadsplendid Park was not, at least his corner of it,—a "piece of her world;" and she did not believe that Aberfeldy would be, either, though Archie's voice was beautiful, and—
"Bonnie lassie, will ye go?"
sounded very enticing—in a charade.
So she was quite calm when the Marchbanks party came upon the ground, and Archie Mucklegrand, with white trousers and a lavender tie, and the trim, waxed moustache, looking very handsome in spite of his dapperness, found her out in the first two minutes, and attached himself to her forthwith in a most undetachable and determined manner, which was his way of being irresistible.
They were in the midst of their tea and coffee when the West Hill party came. Miss Arabel was busy at the coffee-table between the two oaks, pouring out with all her might, and creaming the fragrant cups with a rich lavishness that seemed to speak of milky mothers without number or limit of supply; and Rosamond, as the most natural and hospitable thing to do, conducted the young gentleman as soon as she could to that lady, and commended him to her good offices.
These were not to be resisted; and as soon as he was occupied, Rosamond turned to attend to others coming up; and the groups shifting, she found herself presently a little way off, and meanwhile Mrs. Marchbanks and her son had reached the table and joined Archie.
"I say, Arthur! O, Mrs. Marchbanks! You never got such coffee as this, I do believe! The open air has done something to it, or else the cream comes from some supernal cows! Miss Holabird!"
Rosamond turned round.
"I don't see,—Mrs. Marchbanks ought to have some of this coffee, but where is your good woman gone?" For Miss Arabel had stepped round behind the oak-tree for a moment, to see about some replenishing.
In her prim, plain dress, utterly innocent of style orbias, and her zealous ministry, good Miss Arabel might easily be taken for some comfortable, superior old servant; but partly from a sudden sense of fun,—Mrs. Marchbanks standing there in all her elegant dignity,—and partly from a jealous chivalry of friendship, Rosamond would not let it pass so.
"Good woman? Hush! she is one of our hostesses, the owner of the ground, and a dear friend of mine. Here she is. Miss Waite, let me introduce Mr. Archibald Mucklegrand. Mrs. Marchbanks will like some coffee, please."
Which Mrs. Marchbanks took with a certain look of amazement, that showed itself subtilely in a slight straightening of the lips and an expansion of the nostrils. She did notsniff; she was a great deal too much a lady; she was Mrs. Marchbanks, but if she had been Mrs. Higgin, and had felt just so, she would have sniffed.
Somebody came up close to Rosamond on the other side.
"That was good," said Kenneth Kincaid. "Thank you for that, Miss Rosamond."
"Will you have some more?" asked Rosamond, cunningly, pretending to misunderstand, and reaching her hand to take his empty cup.
"One mustn't ask for all one would like," said Kenneth, relinquishing the cup, and looking straight in her eyes.
Rosamond's eyes fell; she had no rejoinder ready; it was very well that she had the cup to take care of, and could turn away, for she felt a very foolish color coming up in her face.
She made herself very busy among the guests. Archie Mucklegrand stayed by, and spoke to her every time he found a chance. At last, when people had nearly done eating and drinking, he asked her if she would not show him the path down to the river.
"It must be beautiful down there under the slope," he said.
She called Dorris and Desire, then, and Oswald Megilp, who was with them. He was spending a little time here at the Prendibles, with his boat on the river, as he had used to do. When he could take an absolute vacation, he was going away with a pedestrian party, among the mountains. There was not much in poor Oswald Megilp, but Desire and Rosamond were kind to him now that his mother was away.
As they all walked down the bank among the close evergreens, they met Mr. Geoffrey and Mr. Marchbanks, with Kenneth Kincaid, coming up. Kenneth came last, and the two parties passed each other single file, in the narrow pathway.
Kenneth paused as he came close to Rosamond, holding back a bough for her.
"I have something very nice to tell you," he whispered, "by and by. But it is a secret, as yet. Please don't stay down there very long."
Nobody heard the whisper but Rosamond; if they could have done so, he would not have whispered. Archie Mucklegrand was walking rather sulkily along before; he had not cared for a party to be made up when he asked Rosamond to go down to the river with him. Desire and Dorris had found some strange blossom among the underbrush, and were stopping for it; and Oswald Megilp was behind them. For a few seconds, Kenneth had Rosamond quite to himself.
The slight delay had increased the separation between her and Archie Mucklegrand, for he had kept steadily on in his little huff.
"I do not think we shall be long," said Rosamond, glancing after him, and looking up, with her eyes bright. She was half merry with mischief, and half glad with a quieter, deeper pleasure, at Kenneth's words.
He would tell her something in confidence; something that he was glad of; he wanted her to know it while it was yet a secret; she had not the least guess what it could be; but it was very "nice" already. Rosamond always did rather like to be told things first; to have her friends confide in and consult with her, and rely upon her sympathy; she did not stop to separate the old feeling which she was quite aware of in herself, from something new that made it especially beautiful that Kenneth Kincaid should so confide and rely.
Rosamond was likely to have more told her to-night than she quite dreamed of.
"Desire!"
They heard Mrs. Ledwith's voice far back among the trees.
Desire answered.
"I want you, dear!"
"Something about shawls and baskets, I suppose," said Desire, turning round, perhaps a little the more readily that Kenneth was beside her now, going back also.
Dorris and Oswald Megilp, finding there was a move to return, and being behind Desire in the pathway, turned also, as people will who have no especial motive for going one way rather than another; and so it happened that after all Rosamond and Archie Mucklegrand walked on down the bank to the river together, by themselves.
Archie's good humor returned quickly.
"I am glad they are gone; it was such a fuss having so many," he said.
"We shall have to go back directly; they are beginning to break up," said Rosamond.
And then, coming out to the opening by the water, she began to talk rather fast about the prettiness of the view, and to point out the bridge, and the mills, and the shadow of East Hill upon the water, and the curve of the opposite shore, and the dip of the shrubs and their arched reflections. She seemed quite determined to have all the talk to herself.
Archie Mucklegrand played with his stick, and twisted the end of his moustache. Men never ought to allow themselves to learn that trick. It always comes back upon them when it makes them look most foolish.
Archie said nothing, because there was so much he wanted to say, and he did not know how to begin.
He knew his mother and sister would not like it,—as long as they could help it, certainly,—therefore he had suddenly made up his mind that there should be no such interval. He could do as he pleased; was he not Sir Archibald? And there was his Boston grandfather's property, too, of which a large share had been left outright to him; and he had been twenty-one these six months. There was nothing to hinder; and he meant to tell Rosamond Holabird that he liked her better than any other girl in the world. Somebody else would be telling her so, if he didn't; he could see how they all came round her; perhaps it might be that tall, quiet, cheeky looking fellow,—that Kincaid. He would be before him, at any rate.
So he stood and twisted his moustache, and said nothing,—nothing, I mean, except mere little words of assent and echo to Rosamond's chatter about the pretty view.
At last,—"You are fond of scenery, Miss Holabird?"
Rosamond laughed.
"O yes, I suppose I am; but we don't call this scenery. It is just pleasantness,—beauty. I don't think I quite like the word 'scenery.' It seems artificial,—got up for outside effect. And the most beautiful things do not speak from the outside, do they? I never travelled, Mr. Mucklegrand. I have just lived here, until I have livedintothings, or they into me. I rather think it is travelling, skimming about the world in a hurry, that makes people talk about 'scenery.' Isn't it?"
"I dare say. I don't care for skimming, myself. But I like to go to nice places, and stay long enough to get into them, as you say. I mean to go to Scotland next year. I've a place there among the hills and lochs, Miss Rosamond."
"Yes. I have heard so. I should think you would wish to go and see it."
"I'll tell you what I wish, Miss Holabird!" he said suddenly, letting go his moustache, and turning round with sufficient manfulness, and facing her. "I suppose there is a more gradual and elegant way of saying it; but I believe straightforward is as good as any. I wish you cared for me as I care for you, and then you would go with me."
Rosamond was utterly confounded. She had not imagined that it could be hurled at her, this fashion; she thought she could parry and put aside, if she saw anything coming. She was bewildered and breathless with the shock of it; she could only blindly, and in very foolish words, hurl it back.
"O, dear, no!" she exclaimed, her face crimson. "I mean—I don't—I couldn't! I beg your pardon, Mr. Mucklegrand; you are very good; I am very sorry; but I wish you hadn't said so. We had better go back."
"No," said Archie Mucklegrand, "not yet. I've said it now. I said it like a moon calf, but I mean it like a man. Won't you—can't you—be my wife, Rosamond? I must know that."
"No, Mr. Mucklegrand," answered Rosamond, quite steadily now and gently. "I could not be. We were never meant for each other. You will think so yourself next year,—by the time you go to Scotland."
"I shall never think so."
Of course he said that; young men always do; they mean it at the moment, and nothing can persuade them otherwise.
"I told you I had lived right here, and grown into these things, and they into me," said Rosamond, with a sweet slow earnestness, as if she thought out while she explained it; and so she did; for the thought and meaning of her life dawned upon her with a new perception, as she stood at this point and crisis of it in the responsibility of her young womanhood. "And these, and all the things that have influenced me, have given my life its direction; and I can see clearly that it was never meant to be your way. I do not know what it will be; but I know yours is different. It would be wrenching mine to turn it so."
"But I would turn mine for you," said Archie.
"You couldn't. Livesgrowtogether. They join beforehand, if they join at all. You like me, perhaps,—just what you see of me; but you do not know me, nor I you. If it—this—were meant, we should."
"Should what?"
"Know. Be sure."
"I am sure of what I told you."
"And I thank you very much; but I do not—I never could—belong to you."
What made Rosamond so wise about knowing and belonging?
She could not tell, herself; she had never thought it out before; but she seemed to see it very clearly now. She did not belong to Archie Mucklegrand, nor he to her; he was mistaken; their lives had no join; to make them join would be a force, a wrenching.
Archie Mucklegrand did not care to have it put on such deep ground. He liked Rosamond; he wanted her to like him; then they should be married, of coarse, and go to Scotland, and have a good time; but this quiet philosophy cooled him somewhat. As they walked up the bank together, he wondered at himself a little that he did not feel worse about it. If she had been coquettish, or perverse, she might have been all the more bewitching to him. If he had thought she liked somebody else better, he might have been furiously jealous; but "her way of liking a fellow would be a slow kind of a way, after all." That was the gist of his thought about it; and I believe that to many very young men, at the age of waxed moustaches and German dancing, that "slow kind of a way" in a girl is the best possible insurance against any lasting damage that their own enthusiasm might suffer.
He had not been contemptible in the offering of his love; his best had come out at that moment; if it does not come out then, somehow,—through face and tone, in some plain earnestness or simple nobleness, if not in fashion of the spoken word as very well it may not,—it must be small best that the man has in him.
Rosamond's simple saying of the truth, as it looked to her in that moment of sure insight, was the best help she could have given him. Truth is always the best help. He did not exactly understand the wherefore, as she understood it; but the truth touched him nevertheless, in the way that he could perceive. They did not "belong" to each other.
And riding down in the late train that evening, Archie Mucklegrand said to himself, drawing a long breath,—"It would have been an awful tough little joke, after all, telling it to the old lady!"
"Are you too tired to walk home?" Kenneth Kincaid asked of Rosamond, helping her put the baskets in the carriage.
Dakie Thayne had asked Ruth the same question five minutes before, and they two had gone on already. Are girls ever too tired to walk home after a picnic, when the best of the picnic is going to walk home with them? Of course Rosamond was not too tired; and Mrs. Holabird had the carryall quite to herself and her baskets.
They took the River Road, that was shady all the way, and sweet now with the dropping scents of evening; it was a little longer, too, I think, though that is one of the local questions that have never yet been fully decided.
"How far does Miss Waite's ground run along the river?" asked Kenneth, taking Rosamond's shawl over his arm.
"Not far; it only just touches; it runs back and broadens toward the Old Turnpike. The best of it is in those woods and pastures."
"So I thought. And the pastures are pretty much run out."
"I suppose so. They are full of that lovely gray crackling moss."
"Lovely for picnics. Don't you think Miss Waite would like to sell?"
"Yes, indeed, if she could. That is her dream; what she has been laying up for her old age: to turn the acres into dollars, and build or buy a little cottage, and settle down safe. It is all she has in the world, except her dressmaking."
"Mr. Geoffrey and Mr. Marchbanks want to buy. They will offer her sixteen thousand dollars. That is the secret,—part of it."
"O, Mr. Kincaid! How glad,—howsorry, I can't help being, too! Miss Waite to be so comfortable! And never to have her dear old woods to picnic in any more! I suppose they want to make streets and build it all up."
"Not all. I'll tell you. It is a beautiful plan. Mr. Geoffrey wants to build a street of twenty houses,—ten on a side,—with just a little garden plot for each, and leave the woods behind for a piece of nature for the general good,—a real Union Park; a place for children to play in, and grown folks to rest and walk and take tea in, if they choose; but for nobody to change or meddle with any further. And these twenty houses to be let to respectable persons of small means, at rents that will give him seven per cent, for his whole outlay. Don't you see? Young people, and people like Miss Waite herself, who don't wantmuchhouse-room, but who want it nice and comfortable, and will keep it so, and whodowant a little of God's world-room to grow in, that they can't get in the crowded town streets, where the land is selling by the foot to be all built over with human packing-cases, and where they have to pay as much for being shut up and smothered, as they will out here to live and breathe. That Mr. Geoffrey is a glorious man, Rosamond! He is doing just this same thing in the edges of three or four other towns, buying up the land just before it gets too dear, to save for people who could not save it for themselves. He is providing for a class that nobody seems to have thought of,—the nice, narrow-pursed people, and the young beginners, who get married and take the world in the old-fashioned way."
He had no idea he had called her "Rosamond," till he saw the color shining up so in her face verifying the name. Then it flashed out upon him as he sent his thought back through the last few sentences that he had spoken.
"I beg your pardon," he said, suddenly. "But I was so full of this beautiful doing,—and I always think of you so! Is there a sin in that?"
Rosamond colored deeper yet, and Kenneth grew more bold. He had spoken it without plan; it had come of itself.
"I can't help it now. I shall say it again, unless you tell me not! Rosamond! I shall have these houses to build. I am getting ever so much to do. Could you begin the world with me, Rosamond?"
Rosamond did not say a word for a full minute. She only walked slowly by his side, her beautiful head inclined gently, shyly; her sweet face all one bloom, as faces never bloom but once.
Then she turned toward him and put out her hand.
"I will begin the world with you," she said.
And their world—that was begun for them before they were born—lifted up its veil and showed itself to them, bright in the eternal morning.
Desire Ledwith walked home all alone. She left Dorris at Miss Waite's, and Helena had teased to stay with her. Mrs. Ledwith had gone home among the first, taking a seat offered her in Mrs. Tom Friske's carriage to East Square; she had a headache, and was tired.
Desire felt the old, miserable questions coming up, tempting her.
Why?
Why was she left out,—forgotten? Why was there nothing, very much, in any of this, for her?
Yet underneath the doubting and accusing, something lived—stayed by—to rebuke it; rose up above it finally, and put it down, though with a thrust that hurt the heart in which the doubt was trampled.
Wait. Wait—with all your might!
Desire could do nothing very meekly; but she could evenwaitwith all her might. She put her foot down with a will, at every step.
"I was put here to be Desire Ledwith," she said, relentlessly, to herself; "not Rosamond Holabird, nor even Dolly. Well, I suppose I can stay put, andbe! If things would onlyletme be!"
But they will not. Things never do, Desire.
They are coming, now, upon you. Hard things,—and all at once.