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Faith Gartney's Girlhood

by A. D. T. Whitney · English · Gutenberg #18896 · 463,611 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Faith Gartney's Girlhood

Author: A. D. T. Whitney


        
Release date: July 22, 2006 [eBook #18896]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18896

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAITH GARTNEY'S GIRLHOOD ***


E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)



FAITH GARTNEY'S GIRLHOOD

by

MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY

Author of "The Gayworthy's," "A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life,"
"Footsteps on the Seas," etc.







New York
The New York Book Company
1913




CONTENTS

       I.   "Money, Money!"                            1
      II.   Sortes.                                    4
     III.   Aunt Henderson.                            6
      IV.   Glory McWhirk.                            10
       V.   Something Happens.                        15
      VI.   Aunt Henderson's Girl Hunt.               26
     VII.   Cares; And What Came Of Them.             31
    VIII.   A Niche In Life, And A Woman To Fill It.  34
      IX.   Life Or Death?                            37
       X.   Rough Ends.                               40
      XI.   Cross Corners.                            43
     XII.   A Reconnoissance.                         49
    XIII.   Development.                              54
     XIV.   A Drive With The Doctor.                  59
      XV.   New Duties.                               65
     XVI.   "Blessed Be Ye, Poor."                    68
    XVII.   Frost-Wonders.                            75
   XVIII.   Out In The Snow.                          79
     XIX.   A "Leading."                              85
      XX.   Paul.                                     89
     XXI.   Pressure.                                 94
    XXII.   Roger Armstrong's Story.                  99
   XXIII.   Question And Answer.                     103
    XXIV.   Conflict.                                112
     XXV.   A Game At Chess.                         116
    XXVI.   Lakeside.                                120
   XXVII.   At The Mills.                            124
  XXVIII.   Locked In.                               127
    XXIX.   Home.                                    135
     XXX.   Aunt Henderson's Mystery.                140
    XXXI.   Nurse Sampson's Way Of Looking At It.    147
   XXXII.   Glory Mcwhirk's Inspiration.             152
  XXXIII.   Last Hours.                              157
   XXXIV.   Mrs. Parley Gimp.                        160
    XXXV.   Indian Summer.                           164
   XXXVI.   Christmastide.                           169
  XXXVII.   The Wedding Journey.                     177




FAITH GARTNEY'S GIRLHOOD

CHAPTER I.

"MONEY, MONEY!"

"Shoe the horse and shoe the mare,
And let the little colt go bare."


East or West, it matters not where--the story may, doubtless, indicate
something of latitude and longitude as it proceeds--in the city of
Mishaumok, lived Henderson Gartney, Esq., one of those American
gentlemen of whom, if she were ever canonized, Martha of Bethany must be
the patron saint--if again, feminine celestials, sainthood once achieved
through the weary experience of earth, don't know better than to assume
such charge of wayward man--born, as they are, seemingly, to the life
destiny of being ever "careful and troubled about many things."

We have all of us, as little girls, read "Rosamond." Now, one of
Rosamond's early worries suggests a key to half the worries, early and
late, of grown men and women. The silver paper won't cover the basket.

Mr. Gartney had spent his years, from twenty-five to forty, in
sedulously tugging at the corners. He had had his share of silver paper,
too--only the basket was a little too big.

In a pleasant apartment, half library, half parlor, and used in the
winter months as a breakfast room, beside a table still covered with the
remnants of the morning meal, sat Mrs. Gartney and her young daughter,
Faith; the latter with a somewhat disconcerted, not to say rueful,
expression of face.

A pair of slippers on the hearth and the morning paper thrown down
beside an armchair, gave hint of the recent presence of the master of
the house.

"Then I suppose I can't go," remarked the young lady.

"I'm sure I don't know," answered the elder, in a helpless, worried sort
of tone. "It doesn't seem really right to ask your father for the money.
I did just speak of your wanting some things for a party, but I suppose
he has forgotten it; and, to-day, I hate to trouble him with
reminding. Must you really have new gloves and slippers, both?"

Faith held up her little foot for answer, shod with a partly worn bronze
kid, reduced to morning service.

"These are the best I've got. And my gloves have been cleaned over and
over, till you said yourself, last time, they would hardly do to wear
again. If it were any use, I should say I must have a new dress; but I
thought at least I should freshen up with the 'little fixings,' and
perhaps have something left for a few natural flowers for my hair."

"I know. But your father looked annoyed when I told him we should want
fresh marketing to-day. He is really pinched, just now, for ready
money--and he is so discouraged about the times. He told me only last
night of a man who owed him five hundred dollars, and came to say he
didn't know as he could pay a cent. It doesn't seem to be a time to
afford gloves and shoes and flowers. And then there'll be the carriage,
too."

"Oh, dear!" sighed Faith, in the tone of one who felt herself
checkmated. "I wish I knew what we really _could_ afford! It always
seems to be these little things that don't cost much, and that other
girls, whose fathers are not nearly so well off, always, have, without
thinking anything about it." And she glanced over the table, whereon
shone a silver coffee service, and up at the mantel where stood a French
clock that had been placed there a month before.

"Pull at the bobbin and the latch will fly up." An unspoken suggestion,
of drift akin to this, flitted through the mind of Faith. She wondered
if her father knew that this was a Signal Street invitation.

Mr. Gartney was ambitious for his children, and solicitous for their
place in society.

But Faith had a touch of high-mindedness about her that made it
impossible for her to pull bobbins.

So, when her father presently, with hat and coat on, came into the room
again for a moment, before going out for the day, she sat quite silent,
with her foot upon the fender, looking into the fire.

Something in her face however, quite unconsciously, bespoke that the
world did not lie entirely straight before her, and this catching her
father's eye, brought up to him, by an untraceable association, the
half-proffered request of his wife.

"So you haven't any shoes, Faithie. Is that it?"

"None nice enough for a party, father."

"And the party is a vital necessity, I suppose. Where is it to be?"

The latch string was put forth, and while Faith still stayed her hand,
her mother, absolved from selfish end, was fain to catch it up.

"At the Rushleighs'. The Old Year out and the New Year in."

"Oh, well, we mustn't 'let the colt go bare,'" answered Mr. Gartney,
pleasantly, portemonnaie in hand. "But you must make that do." He handed
her five dollars. "And take good care of your things when you have got
them, for I don't pick up many five dollars nowadays."

And the old look of care crept up, replacing the kindly smile, as he
turned and left the room.

"I feel very much as if I had picked my father's pocket," said Faith,
holding the bank note, half ashamedly, in her hand.

Henderson Gartney, Esq., was a man of no method in his expenditure. When
money chanced to be plenty with him it was very apt to go as might
happen--for French clocks, or whatsoever; and then, suddenly, the silver
paper fell short elsewhere, and lo! a corner was left uncovered.

The horse and the mare were shod. Great expenses were incurred; money
was found, somehow, for grand outlays; but the comfort of buying, with a
readiness, the little needed matters of every day--this was foregone.
"Not let the colt go bare!" It was precisely the thing he was
continually doing.

Mrs. Gartney had long found it to be her only wise way to make her hay
while the sun was shining--to buy, when she could buy, what she was sure
would be most wanted--and to look forward as far as possible, in her
provisions, since her husband scarcely seemed to look forward at all.

So she exemplified, over and over again in her life, the story of
Pharaoh and his fat and lean kine.

That night, Faith, her little purchases and arrangements all complete,
and flowers and carriage bespoken for the next evening, went to bed to
dream such dreams as only come to the sleep of early years.

At the same time, lingering by the fireside below for a half hour's
unreserved conversation, Mr. Gartney was telling his wife of another
money disappointment.

"Blacklow, at Cross Corners, gives up the lease of the house in the
spring. He writes me he is going out to Indiana with his son-in-law. I
don't know where I shall find another such tenant--or any at all, for
that matter."




CHAPTER II.

SORTES.

"How shall I know if I do choose the right?"

"Since this fortune falls to you,
Be content, and seek no new."
                         MERCHANT OF VENICE.


"Now, Mahala Harris," said Faith, as she glanced in at the nursery door,
which opened from her room, "don't let Hendie get up a French Revolution
here while I'm gone to dinner."

"Land sakes! Miss Faith! I don't know what you mean, nor whether I can
help it. I dare say he'd get up a Revolution of '76, over again, if he
once set out. He does train like 'lection, fact, sometimes."

"Well, don't let him build barricades with all the chairs, so that I
shall have to demolish my way back again. I'm going to lay out my dress
for to-night."

And very little dinner could her young appetite manage on this last day
of the year. All her vital energy was busy in her anticipative brain,
and glancing thence in sparkles from her eyes, and quivering down in
swift currents to her restless little feet. It mattered little that
there was delicious roast beef smoking on the table, and Christmas pies
arrayed upon the sideboard, while upstairs the bright ribbon and tiny,
shining, old-fashioned buckles were waiting to be shaped into rosettes
for the new slippers, and the lace hung, half basted, from the neck of
the simple but delicate silk dress, and those lovely greenhouse flowers
stood in a glass dish on her dressing table, to be sorted for her hair,
and into a graceful breast knot. No--dinner was a very secondary and
contemptible affair, compared with these.

There were few forms or faces, truly, that were pleasanter to look upon
in the group that stood, disrobed of their careful outer wrappings, in
Mrs. Rushleigh's dressing room; their hurried chat and gladsome
greetings distracted with the drawing on of gloves and the last
adjustment of shining locks, while the bewildering music was floating up
from below, mingled with the hum of voices from the rooms where, as
children say, "the party had begun" already.

And Mrs. Rushleigh, when Faith paid her timid respects in the
drawing-room at last, made her welcome with a peculiar grace and
_empressement_ that had their own flattering weight and charm; for the
lady was a sort of St. Peter of fashion, holding its mystic keys, and
admitting or rejecting whom she would; and culled, with marvelous tact
and taste, the flower of the up-growing world of Mishaumok to adorn "her
set."

After which, Faith, claimed at once by an eager aspirant, and beset with
many a following introduction and petition, was drawn to and kept in the
joyous whirlpool of the dance, till she had breathed in enough of
delight and excitement to carry her quite beyond the thought even of
ices and oysters and jellies and fruits, and the score of unnamable
luxuries whereto the young revelers were duly summoned at half past ten
o'clock.

Four days' anticipation--four hours' realization--culminated in the
glorious after-supper midnight dance, when, marshaled hither and thither
by the ingenious orders of the band, the jubilant company found itself,
just on the impending stroke of twelve, drawn out around the room in one
great circle; and suddenly a hush of the music, at the very poising
instant of time, left them motionless for a moment to burst out again in
the age-honored and heartwarming strains of "Auld Lang Syne." Hand
joining hand they sang its chorus, and when the last note had
lingeringly died away, one after another gently broke from their places,
and the momentary figure melted out with the dying of the Year, never
again to be just so combined. It was gone, as vanishes also every other
phase and grouping in the kaleidoscope of Time.

"Now is the very 'witching hour' to try the Sortes!"

Margaret Rushleigh said this, standing on the threshold of a little
inner apartment that opened from the long drawing-room, at one end.

She held in her hand a large and beautiful volume--a gift of Christmas
Day.

"Here are Fates for everybody who cares to find them out!"

The book was a collection of poetical quotations, arranged by numbers,
and to be chosen thereby, and the chance application taken as an oracle.

Everything like fortune telling, or a possible peering into the things
of coming time, has such a charm! Especially with them to whom the past
is but a prelude and beginning, and for whom the great, voluminous
Future holds enwrapped the whole mystic Story of Life!

"No, no, this won't do!" cried the young lady, as circle behind circle
closed and crowded eagerly about her. "Fate doesn't give out her
revelations in such wholesale fashion. You must come up with proper
reverence, one by one."

As she spoke, she withdrew a little within the curtained archway, and,
placing the crimson-covered book of destiny upon an inlaid table,
brought forward a piano stool, and seated herself thereon, as a
priestess upon a tripod.

A little shyly, one after another, gaining knowledge of what was going
on, the company strayed in from without, and, each in turn hazarding a
number, received in answer the rhyme or stanza indicated; and who shall
say how long those chance-directed words, chosen for the most part with
the elastic ambiguity of all oracles of any established authority,
lingered echoing in the heads and hearts of them to whom they were
given--shaping and confirming, or darkening with their denial many an
after hope and fear?

Faith Gartney came up among the very last.

"How many numbers are there to choose from?" she asked.

"Three hundred and sixty-five. The number of days in the year."

"Well, then, I'll take the number of the day; the last--no, I
forgot--the first of all."

Nobody before had chosen this, and Margaret read, in a clear, gentle
voice, not untouched with the grave beauty of its own words, and the
sweet, earnest, listening look of the young face that bent toward her to
take them in:

  "Rouse to some high and holy work of love,
    And thou an angel's happiness shalt know;
  Shalt bless the earth while in the world above;
    The good begun by thee while here below
    Shall like a river run, and broader flow."

Ten minutes later, and all else were absorbed in other things
again--leave-takings, parting chat, and a few waltzing a last measure to
a specially accorded grace of music. Faith stood, thoughtfully, by the
table where the book was closed and left. She quietly reopened it at
that first page. Unconscious of a step behind her, her eyes ran over the
lines again, to make their beautiful words her own.

"And that was your oracle, then?" asked a kindly voice.

Glancing quickly up, while the timid color flushed her cheek, she met a
look as of a wise and watchful angel, though it came through the eye and
smile of a gray-haired man, who laid his hand upon the page as he said:

"Remember--it is _conditional_."




CHAPTER III.

AUNT HENDERSON.

"I never met a manner more entirely without frill."
                                      SYDNEY SMITH.


Late into the morning of the New Year, Faith slept. Through her half
consciousness crept, at last, a feeling of music that had been
wandering in faint echoes among the chambers of her brain all those
hours of her suspended life.

Light, and music, and a sense of an unexamined, half-remembered joy,
filled her being and embraced her at her waking on this New Year's Day.
A moment she lay in a passive, unthinking delight; and then her first,
full, and distinct thought shaped itself, as from a sweet and solemn
memory:

  "Rouse to some high and holy work of love,
    And thou an angel's happiness shalt know."

An impulse of lofty feeling held her in its ecstasy; a noble longing and
determination shaped itself, though vaguely, within her. For a little,
she was touched in her deepest and truest nature; she was uplifted to
the threshold of a great resolve. But generalities are so grand--details
so commonplace and unsatisfying. _What_ should she do? What "high and
holy work" lay waiting for her?

And, breaking in upon her reverie--bringing her down with its rough and
common call to common duty--the second bell for breakfast rang.

"Oh, dear! It is no use! Who'll know what great things I've been wishing
and planning, when I've nothing to show for it but just being late to
breakfast? And father hates it so--and New Year's morning, too!"

Hurrying her toilet, she repaired, with all the haste possible, to the
breakfast room, where her consciousness of shortcoming was in nowise
lessened when she saw who occupied the seat at her father's right
hand--Aunt Henderson!

Aunt Faith Henderson, who had reached her nephew's house last evening
just after the young Faith, her namesake, had gone joyously off to
"dance the Old Year out and the New Year in." Old-fashioned Aunt
Faith--who believed most devoutly that "early to bed and early to rise"
was the _only_ way to be "healthy, wealthy, or wise!" Aunt Faith, who
had never quite forgiven our young heroine for having said, at the
discreet and positive age of nine, that "she didn't see what her father
and mother had called her such an ugly name for. It was a real old
maid's name!" Whereupon, having asked the child what she would have
preferred as a substitute, and being answered, "Well--Clotilda, I guess;
or Cleopatra," Miss Henderson had told her that she was quite welcome to
change it for any heathen woman's that she pleased, and the worse
behaved perhaps the better. She wouldn't be so likely to do it any
discredit!

Aunt Henderson had a downright and rather extreme fashion of putting
things; nevertheless, in her heart she was not unkindly.

So when Faithie, with her fair, fresh face--a little apprehensive
trouble in it for her tardiness--came in, there was a grim bending of
the old lady's brows; but, below, a half-belying twinkle in the eye,
that, long as it had looked out sharply and keenly on the things and
people of this mixed-up world, found yet a pleasure in anything so young
and bright.

"Why, auntie! How do you do?" cried Faith, cunning culprit that she was,
taking the "bull by the horns," and holding out her hand. "I wish you a
Happy New Year! Good morning, father, and mother! A Happy New Year! I'm
sorry I'm so late."

"Wish you a great many," responded the great-aunt, in stereotyped
phrase. "It seems to me, though, you've lost the beginning of this one."

"Oh, no!" replied Faithie, gayly. "I had that at the party. We danced
the New Year in."

"Humph!" said Aunt Henderson.

Breakfast over, and Mr. Gartney gone to his counting room, the parlor
girl made her appearance with her mop and tub of hot water, to wash up
the silver and china.

"Give me that," said Aunt Henderson, taking a large towel from the
girl's arm as she set down her tub upon the sideboard. "You go and find
something else to do."

Wherever she might be--to be sure, her round of visiting was not a large
one--Aunt Henderson never let anyone else wash up breakfast cups.

This quiet arming of herself, with mop and towel, stirred up everybody
else to duty. Her niece-in-law laughed, withdrew her feet from the
comfortable fender, and departed to the kitchen to give her household
orders for the day. Faith removed cups, glasses, forks, and spoons from
the table to the sideboard, while the maid, returning with a tray,
carried off to the lower regions the larger dishes.

"I haven't told you yet, Elizabeth, what I came to town for," said Aunt
Faith, when Mrs. Gartney came back into the breakfast room. "I'm going
to hunt up a girl."

"A girl, aunt! Why, what has become of Prudence?"

"Mrs. Pelatiah Trowe. That's what's become of her. More fool she."

"But why in the world do you come to the city for a servant? It's the
worst possible place. Nineteen out of twenty are utterly good for
nothing."

"I'm going to look out for the twentieth."

"But aren't there girls enough in Kinnicutt who would be glad to step in
Prue's place?"

"Of course there are. But they're all well enough off where they are.
When I have a chance to give away, I want to give it to somebody that
needs it."

"I'm afraid you'll hardly find any efficient girl who will appreciate
the chance of going twenty miles into the country."

"I don't want an efficient girl. I'm efficient myself, and that's
enough."

"Going to _train_ another, at your time of life, aunt?" asked Mrs.
Gartney, in surprise.

"I suppose I must either train a girl, or let her train me; and, at my
time of life, I don't feel to stand in need of that."

"How shall I go to work to inquire?" resumed Aunt Henderson, after a
pause.

"Well, there are the Homes, and the Offices, and the Ministers at Large.
At a Home, they would probably recommend you somebody they've made up
their minds to put out to service, and she might or might not be such as
would suit you. Then at the Offices, you'll see all sorts, and mostly
poor ones."

"I'll try an Office, first," interrupted Miss Henderson. "I _want_ to
see all sorts. Faith, you'll go with me, by and by, won't you, and help
me find the way?"

Faith, seated at a little writing table at the farther end of the room,
busied in copying into her album, in a clear, neat, but rather stiff
schoolgirl's hand, the oracle of the night before, did not at once
notice that she was addressed.

"Faith, child! don't you hear?"

"Oh, yes, aunt. What is it?"

"I want you to go to a what-d'ye-call-it office with me, to-day."

"An intelligence office," explained her mother. "Aunt Faith wants to
find a girl."

"'_Lucus a non lucendo_,'" quoted Faith, rather wittily, from her little
stock of Latin. "Stupidity offices, _I_ should call them, from the
specimens they send out."

"Hold your tongue, chit! Don't talk Latin to me!" growled Aunt
Henderson.

"What are you writing?" she asked, shortly after, when Mrs. Gartney had
again left her and Faith to each other. "Letters, or Latin?"

Faith colored, and laughed.

"Only a fortune that was told me last night," she replied.

"Oh! 'A little husband,' I suppose, 'no bigger than my thumb; put him in
a pint pot, and there bid him drum.'"

"No," said Faith, half seriously, and half teased out of her
seriousness. "It's nothing of that sort. At least," she added, glancing
over the lines again, "I don't think it means anything like that."

And Faith laid down the book, and went upstairs for a word with her
mother.

Aunt Henderson, who had been brought up in times when all the doings of
young girls were strictly supervised, and who had no high-flown
scruples, because she had no mean motives, deliberately walked over and
fetched the elegant little volume from the table, reseated herself in
her armchair--felt for her glasses, and set them carefully upon her
nose--and, as her grandniece returned, was just finishing her perusal
of the freshly inscribed lines.

"Humph! A good fortune. Only you've got to earn it."

"Yes," said Faith, quite gravely. "And I don't see how. There doesn't
seem to be much that I can do."

"Just take hold of the first thing that comes in your way. If the Lord's
got anything bigger to give you, he'll see to it. There's your mother's
mending basket brimful of stockings."

Faith couldn't help laughing. Presently she grew grave again.

"Aunt Henderson," said she, abruptly, "I wish something would happen to
me. I get tired of living sometimes. Things don't seem worth while."

Aunt Henderson bent her head slightly, and opened her eyes wide over the
tops of her glasses.

"Don't say that again," said she. "Things happen fast enough. Don't you
dare to tempt Providence."

"Providence won't be tempted, nor misunderstand," replied Faith, an
undertone of reverence qualifying her girlish repartee. "He knows just
what I mean."

"She's a queer child," said Aunt Faith to herself, afterwards, thinking
over the brief conversation. "She'll be something or nothing, I always
said. I used to think 'twould be nothing."




CHAPTER IV.

GLORY McWHIRK.

"There's beauty waiting to be born,
  And harmony that makes no sound;
And bear we ever, unawares,
  A glory that hath not been crowned."


Shall I try to give you a glimpse of quite another young life than Faith
Gartney's? One looking also vaguely, wonderingly, for "something to
happen"--that indefinite "something" which lies in everybody's future,
which may never arrive, and yet which any hour may bring?

Very little likelihood there has ever seemed for any great joy to get
into such a life as this has been, that began, or at least has its
earliest memory and association, in the old poorhouse at Stonebury.

A child she was, of five years, when she was taken in there with her
old, crippled grandmother.

Peter McWhirk was picked up dead, from the graveled drive of a
gentleman's place, where he had been trimming the high trees that shaded
it. An unsound limb--a heedless movement--and Peter went straight down,
thirty feet, and out of life. Out of life, where he had a trim,
comfortable young wife--one happy little child, for whom skies were as
blue, and grass as green, and buttercups as golden as for the little
heiress of Elm Hill, who was riding over the lawn in her basket wagon,
when Peter met his death there--the hope, also, of another that was to
come.

Rosa McWhirk and her baby of a day old were buried the week after,
together; and then there was nothing left for Glory and her helpless
grandmother but the poorhouse as a present refuge; and to the one death,
that ends all, and to the other a life of rough and unremitting work to
look to for by and by.

When Glory came into this world where wants begin with the first breath,
and go on thickening around us, and pressing upon us until the last one
is supplied to us--a grave--she wanted, first of all, a name.

"Sure what'll I call the baby?" said the proud young mother to the
ladies from the white corner house, where she had served four faithful
years of her maidenhood, and who came down at once with comforts and
congratulations. "They've sint for the praist, an' I've niver bethought
of a name. I made so certain 'twould be a boy!"

"What a funny bit of a thing it is!" cried the younger of the two
visitors, turning back the bedclothes a little from the tiny, red,
puckered face, with short, sandy-colored hair standing up about the
temples like a fuzz ball.

"I'd call her Glory. There's a halo round her head like the saints in
the pictures."

"Sure, that's jist like yersilf, Miss Mattie!" exclaimed Rosa, with a
faint, merry little laugh. "An' quare enough, I knew a lady once't of
the very name, in the ould country. Miss Gloriana O'Dowd she was; an'
the beauty o' County Kerry. My Lady Kinawley, she came to be. 'Deed, but
I'd like to do it, for the ould times, an' for you thinkin' of it! I'll
ask Peter, anyhow!"

And so Glory got her name; and Mattie Hyde, who gave her that, gave her
many another thing that was no less a giving to the mother also, before
she was two years old. Then Mrs. Hyde and the young lady, having first
let the corner house, went away to Europe to stay for years; and when a
box of tokens from the far, foreign lands came back to Stonebury a while
after, there was a grand shawl for Rosa, and a pretty braided frock for
the baby, and a rosary that Glory keeps to this hour, that had been
blessed by the Pope. That was the last. Mattie and her mother sailed out
upon the Mediterranean one day from the bright coast of France for a far
eastern port, to see the Holy Land. God's Holy Land they did see,
though they never touched those Syrian shores, or climbed the hills
about Jerusalem.

Glory remembered--for the most part dimly, for some special points
distinctly--her child life of three years in Stonebury poorhouse. How
her grandmother and an old countrywoman from the same county "at home"
sat knitting and crooning together in a sunny corner of the common room
in winter, or out under the stoop in summer; how she rolled down the
green bank behind the house; and, when she grew big enough to be trusted
with a knife, was sent out to dig dandelions in the spring, and how an
older girl went with her round the village, and sold them from house to
house. How, at last, her old grandmother died, and was buried; and how a
woman of the village, who had used to buy her dandelions, found a place
for her with a relative of her own, in the ten-mile distant city, who
took Glory to "bring up"--"seeing," as she said, "there was nobody
belonging to her to interfere."

Was there a day, after that, that did not leave its searing impress upon
heart and memory, of the life that was given, in its every young pulse
and breath, to sordid toil for others, and to which it seemed nobody on
earth owed aught of care or service in return?

It was a close little house--one of those houses where they have fried
dinners so often that the smell never gets out in Budd Street--a street
of a single side, wedged in between the back yards of more pretentious
mansions that stood on fair parallel avenues sloping down from a hilltop
to the waterside, that Mrs. Grubbling lived in.

Here Glory McWhirk, from eight years old to nearly fifteen, scoured
knives and brasses, tended doorbell, set tables, washed dishes, and
minded the baby; whom, at her peril, she must "keep pacified"--i. e.,
amused and content, while its mother was otherwise busy. For her, poor
child--baby that she still, almost, was herself--who amused, or
contented her? There are humans with whom amusement and content have
nothing to do. What will you? The world must go on.

Glory curled the baby's hair, and made him "look pretty." Mrs. Grubbling
cut her little handmaid's short to save trouble; so that the very
determined yellow locks which, under more favoring circumstances of
place and fortune, might have been trained into lovely golden curls,
stood up continually in their restless reaching after the fairer destiny
that had been meant for them, in the old fuzz-ball fashion; and Glory
grew more and more to justify her name.

Do you think she didn't know what beauty was--this child who never had a
new or pretty garment, but who wore frocks "fadged up" out of old, faded
breadths of her mistress's dresses, and bonnets with brims cut off and
topknots taken down, and coarse shoes, and stockings cut out of the
legs of those whereof Mrs. Grubbling had worn out the extremities? Do
you think she didn't feel the difference, and that it wasn't this that
made her shuffle along so with her toes in, when she sped along the
streets upon her manifold errands, and met gentle-people's children
laughing and skipping their hoops upon the sidewalks?

Out of all lives, actual and possible, each one of us appropriates
continually into his own. This is a world of hints only, out of which
every soul seizes to itself what it needs.

This girl, uncherished, repressed in every natural longing to be and to
have, took in all the more of what was possible; for God had given her
this glorious insight, this imagination, wherewith we fill up life's
scanty outline, and grasp at all that might be, or that elsewhere, is.
In her, as in us all, it was often--nay, daily--a discontent; yet a
noble discontent, and curbed with a grand, unconscious patience. She
scoured her knives; she shuffled along the streets on hasty errands; she
went up and down the house in her small menial duties; she put on and
off her coarse, repulsive clothing; she uttered herself in her common,
ignorant forms of speech; she showed only as a poor, low, little Irish
girl with red hair and staring, wondering eyes, and awkward movements,
and a frightened fashion of getting into everybody's way; and yet,
behind all this, there was another life that went on in a hidden beauty
that you and I cannot fathom, save only as God gives the like, inwardly,
to ourselves.

When Glory's mistress cut her hair, there were always tears and
rebellion. It was her one, eager, passionate longing, in these childish
days, that these locks of hers should be let to grow. She thought she
could almost bear anything else, if only this stiff, unseemly crop might
lengthen out into waves and ringlets that should toss in the wind like
the carefully kempt tresses of children she met in the streets. She
imagined it would be a complete and utter happiness just once to feel it
falling in its wealth about her shoulders or dropping against her
cheeks; and to be able to look at it with her eyes, and twist her
fingers in it at the ends. And so, when it got to be its longest, and
began to make itself troublesome about her forehead, and to peep below
her shabby bonnet in her neck, she had a brief season of wonderful
enjoyment in it. Then she could "make believe" it had really grown out;
and the comfort she took in "going through the motions"--pretending to
tuck behind her ears what scarcely touched their tips, and tossing her
head continually, to throw back imaginary masses of curls, was truly
indescribable, and such as I could not begin to make you understand.

"Half-witted monkey!" Mrs. Grubbling would ejaculate, contemptuously,
seeing, with what she conceived marvelous penetration, the half of her
little servant's thought, and so pronouncing from her own half wit. Then
the great shears came out, and the instinct of grace and beauty in the
child was pitilessly outraged, and her soul mutilated, as it were, in
every clip of the inexorable shears.

She was always glad--poor Glory--when the springtime came. She took
Bubby and Baby down to the Common, of a May Day, to see the processions
and the paper-crowned queens; and stood there in her stained and
drabbled dress, with the big year-and-a-half-old baby in her arms, and
so quite at the mercy of Master Herbert Clarence, who defiantly skipped
oft down the avenues, and almost out of her sight--she looking after him
in helpless dismay, lest he should get a splash or a tumble, or be
altogether lost; and then what would the mistress say? Standing there
so--the troops of children in their holiday trim passing close beside
her--her young heart turned bitter for a moment, as it sometimes would;
and her one utterance of all that swelled her martyr soul broke forth:

"Laws a me! Sech lots of good times in the world, and I ain't in 'em!"

Yet, that afternoon, when Mrs. Grubbling went out shopping, and left her
to her own devices with the children, how jubilantly she trained the
battered chairs in line, and put herself at the head, with Bubby's
scarlet tippet wreathed about her upstart locks, and made a May Day!

I say, she had the soul and essence of the very life she seemed to miss.

There were shabby children's books about the Grubbling domicile, that
had been the older child's--Cornelia's--and had descended to Master
Herbert, while yet his only pastime in them was to scrawl them full of
pencil marks, and tear them into tatters. These, one by one, Glory
rescued, and hid away, and fed upon, piecemeal, in secret. She could
read, at least--this poor, denied unfortunate. Peter McWhirk had taught
his child her letters in happy, humble Sundays and holidays long ago;
and Mrs. Grubbling had begun by sending her to a primary school for a
while, irregularly, when she could be spared; and when she hadn't just
torn her frock, or worn out her shoes, or it didn't rain, or she hadn't
been sent of an errand and come back too late--which reasons, with a
multitude of others, constantly recurring, reduced the school days in
the year to a number whose smallness Mrs. Grubbling would have
indignantly disputed, had it been calculated and set before her; she
being one of those not uncommon persons who regard a duty continually
evaded as one continually performed, it being necessarily just as much
on their minds; till, at last, Herbert had a winter's illness, and in
summer it wasn't worth while, and the winter after, baby came, so that
of course she couldn't be spared at all; and it seemed little likely now
that she ever again would be. But she kept her spelling book, and read
over and over what she knew, and groped her way slowly into more, till
she promoted herself from that to "Mother Goose"--from "Mother Goose" to
"Fables for the Nursery"--and now, her ever fresh and unfailing feast
was the "Child's Own Book of Fairy Tales," and an odd volume of the
"Parents' Assistant." She picked out, slowly, the gist of these, with a
lame and uncertain interpretation. She lived for weeks with Beauty and
the Beast--with Cinderella--with the good girl who worked for the witch,
and shook her feather bed every morning; till at last, given leave to go
home and see her mother, the gold and silver shower came down about her,
departing at the back door. Perhaps she should get her pay, some time,
and go home and see her mother.

Meanwhile, she identified herself with--lost herself utterly in,--these
imaginary lives. She was, for the time, Cinderella; she was Beauty; she
was above all, the Fair One with Golden Locks; she was Simple Susan
going to be May Queen; she dwelt in the old Castle of Rossmore, with the
Irish Orphans. The little Grubbling house in Budd Street was peopled all
through, in every corner, with her fancies. Don't tell me she had
nothing but her niggardly outside living there.

And the wonder began to come up in her mind, as it did in Faith
Gartney's, whether and when "something might happen" to her.




CHAPTER V.

SOMETHING HAPPENS.

"Athirst! athirst! The sandy soil
  Bears no glad trace of leaf or tree;
No grass-blade sigheth to the heaven
  Its little drop of ecstasy.

"Yet other fields are spreading wide
  Green bosoms to the bounteous sun;
And palms and cedars shall sublime
  Their rapture for thee,--waiting one!"


"Take us down to see the apple woman," said Master Herbert, going out
with Glory and the baby one day when his school didn't keep, and Mrs.
Grubbling had a headache, and wanted to get them all off out of the way.

Bridget Foye sat at her apple stand in the cheery morning sunlight, red
cheeks and russets ranged fair and tempting before her, and a pile of
roasted peanuts, and one of delicate molasses candy, such as nobody but
she knew how to make, at either end of the board.

Bridget Foye was the tidiest, kindliest, merriest apple woman in all
Mishaumok. Everybody whose daily path lay across that southeast corner
of the Common, knew her well, and had a smile, and perhaps a penny for
her; and got a smile and a God-bless-you, and, for the penny, a rosy or
a golden apple, or some of her crisp candy in return.

Glory and the baby, sitting down to rest on one of the benches close by,
as their habit was, had one day made a nearer acquaintance with blithe
Bridget. I think it began with Glory--who held the baby up to see the
passing show of a portion of a menagerie in the street, and heard two
girls, stopping just before her to look, likewise, say they'd go and see
it perform next day--uttering something of her old soliloquy about "good
times," and why she "warn't ever in any of 'em." However it was, Mrs.
Foye, in her buxom cheeriness, was drawn to give some of it forth to the
uncouth-looking, companionless girl, and not only began a chat with her,
after the momentary stir in the street was over, and she had settled
herself upon her stool, and leaning her back against a tree, set
vigorously to work again at knitting a stout blue yarn stocking, but
also treated Bubby and Baby to some bits of her sweet merchandise, and
told them about the bears and the monkeys that had gone by, shut up in
the gay, red-and-yellow-painted wagons.

So it became, after this first opening, Glory's chief pleasure to get
out with the children now and then, of a sunny day, and sit here on the
bench by Bridget Foye, and hear her talk, and tell her, confidentially,
some of her small, incessant troubles. It was one more life to draw
from--a hearty, bright, and wholesome life, besides. She had, at last,
in this great, tumultuous, indifferent city, a friendship and a
resource.

But there was a certain fair spot of delicate honor in Glory's nature
that would not let her bring Bubby and Baby in any apparent hope of what
they might get, gratuitously, into their mouths. She laid it down, a
rule, with Master Herbert, that he was not to go to the apple stand with
her unless he had first put by a penny for a purchase. And so
unflinchingly she adhered to this determination, that sometimes weeks
went by--hard, weary weeks, without a bit of pleasantness for her; weeks
of sore pining for a morsel of heart food--before she was free of her
own conscience to go and take it.

Bridget told stories to Herbert--strange, nonsensical fables, to be
sure--stuff that many an overwise mother, bringing up her children by
hard rule and theory, might have utterly forbidden as harmful trash--yet
that never put an evil into his heart, nor crowded, I dare to say, a
better thought out of his brain. Glory liked the stories as well,
almost, as the child. One moral always ran through them all. Troubles
always, somehow, came to an end; good creatures and children got safe
out of them all, and lived happy ever after; and the fierce, and
cunning, and bad--the wolves, and foxes, and witches--trapped themselves
in their own wickedness, and came to deplorable ends.

"Tell us about the little red hen," said Herbert, paying his money, and
munching his candy.

"An' thin ye'll trundle yer hoop out to the big tree, an' lave Glory an'
me our lane for a minute?"

"Faith, an' I will that," said the boy--aping, ambitiously, the racy
Irish accent.

"Well, thin, there was once't upon a time, away off in the ould country,
livin' all her lane in the woods, in a wee bit iv a house be herself, a
little rid hin. Nice an' quite she was, and nivir did no kind o' harrum
in her life. An' there lived out over the hill, in a din o' the rocks, a
crafty ould felly iv a fox. An' this same ould villain iv a fox, he laid
awake o' nights, and he prowled round shly iy a daytime, thinkin' always
so busy how he'd git the little rid hin, an' carry her home an' bile her
up for his shupper. But the wise little rid hin nivir went intil her bit
iv a house, but she locked the door afther her, an' pit the kay in her
pocket. So the ould rashkill iv a fox, he watched, an' he prowled, an'
he laid awake nights, till he came all to skin an' bone, on' sorra a
ha'porth o' the little rid hin could he git at. But at lasht there came
a shcame intil his wicked ould head, an' he tuk a big bag one mornin',
over his shouldher, and he says till his mother, says he, 'Mother, have
the pot all bilin' agin' I come home, for I'll bring the little rid hin
to-night for our shupper.' An' away he wint, over the hill, an' came
craping shly and soft through the woods to where the little rid hin
lived in her shnug bit iv a house. An' shure, jist at the very minute
that he got along, out comes the little rid hin out iv the door, to pick
up shticks to bile her taykettle. 'Begorra, now, but I'll have yees,'
says the shly ould fox, and in he shlips, unbeknownst, intil the house,
an' hides behind the door. An' in comes the little rid hin, a minute
afther, with her apron full of shticks, an' shuts to the door an' locks
it, an' pits the kay in her pocket. An' thin she turns round--an' there
shtands the baste iv a fox in the corner. Well, thin, what did she do,
but jist dhrop down her shticks, and fly up in a great fright and
flutter to the big bame acrass inside o' the roof, where the fox
couldn't get at her?

"'Ah, ha!' says the ould fox, 'I'll soon bring yees down out o' that!'
An' he began to whirrul round, an' round, an' round, fashter an' fashter
an' fashter, on the floor, after his big, bushy tail, till the little
rid hin got so dizzy wid lookin', that she jist tumbled down off the
bame, and the fox whipped her up and popped her intil his bag, and
shtarted off home in a minute. An' he wint up the wood, an' down the
wood, half the day long, with the little rid hin shut up shmotherin' in
the bag. Sorra a know she knowd where she was, at all, at all. She
thought she was all biled an' ate up, an' finished, shure! But, by an'
by, she renumbered herself, an' pit her hand in her pocket, and tuk out
her little bright schissors, and shnipped a big hole in the bag behind,
an' out she leapt, an' picked up a big shtone, an' popped it intil the
bag, an' rin aff home, an' locked the door.

"An' the fox he tugged away up over the hill, with the big shtone at his
back thumpin' his shouldhers, thinkin' to himself how heavy the little
rid hin was, an' what a fine shupper he'd have. An' whin he came in
sight iv his din in the rocks, and shpied his ould mother a-watchin' for
him at the door, he says, 'Mother! have ye the pot bilin'?' An' the ould
mother says, 'Sure an' it is; an' have ye the little rid hin?' 'Yes,
jist here in me bag. Open the lid o' the pot till I pit her in,' says
he.

"An' the ould mother fox she lifted the lid o' the pot, and the rashkill
untied the bag, and hild it over the pot o' bilin' wather, an' shuk in
the big, heavy shtone. An' the bilin' wather shplashed up all over the
rogue iv a fox, an' his mother, an' shcalded them both to death. An' the
little rid hin lived safe in her house foriver afther."

"Ah!" breathed Bubby, in intense relief, for perhaps the twentieth time.
"Now tell about the girl that went to seek her fortune!"

"Away wid ye!" cried Bridget Foye. "Kape yer promish, an' lave that till
ye come back!"

So Herbert and his hoop trundled off to the big tree.

"An' how are yees now, honey?" says Bridget to Glory, a whole catechism
of questions in the one inquiry. "Have ye come till any good times yit?"

"Oh, Mrs. Foye," says Glory, "I think I'm tied up tight in the bag, an'
I'll never get out, except it's into the hot water!"

"An' havint ye nivir a pair iv schissors in yer pocket?" asks Bridget.

"I don't know," says poor Glory, hopelessly. And just then Master
Herbert comes trundling back, and Bridget tells him the story of the
girl that went to seek her fortune and came to be a queen.

Glory half thinks that, some day or other, she, too, will start off and
seek her fortune.

The next morning, Sunday--never a holiday, and scarcely a holy day to
her--Glory sits at the front window, with the inevitable baby in her
arms.

Mrs. Grubbling is upstairs getting ready for church. After baby has his
forenoon drink, and is got off to sleep--supposing he shall be
complaisant, and go--Glory is to dust up, and set table, and warm the
dinner, and be all ready to bring it up when the elder Grubbling shall
have returned.

Out at the Pembertons' green gate she sees the tidy parlor maid come, in
her smart shawl and new, bright ribbons; holding up her pretty printed
mousseline dress with one hand, as she steps down upon the street, and
so revealing the white hem of a clean starched skirt; while the other
hand is occupied with the little Catholic prayer book and a folded
handkerchief. Actually, gloves on her hands, too. The gate closes with a
cord and pulley after her, and somehow the hem of the fresh,
outspreading crinoline gets caught in it, as it shuts. So she turns half
round, and takes both hands to push it open and release herself. Doing
so, something slips from between the folds of her handkerchief, and
drops upon the ground. A bright half dollar, which was going to pay some
of her little church dues to-day. And she hurries on, never missing it
out of her grasp, and is halfway down the side street before Glory can
set the baby suddenly on the carpet, rush out at the front door,
regardless that Mrs. Grubbling's chamber window overlooks her from
above, pick up the coin, and overtake her.

"I saw you drop it by the gate," is all she says, as she puts it into
Katie Ryan's hand.

Katie stares with surprise, turning round at the touch upon her
shoulder, and beholding the strange figure, and the still stranger
evidence of honesty and good will.

"Indeed, and I'm thoroughly obliged to ye," says she, barely in time,
for the odd figure is already retreating up the street. "It's the
red-headed girl over at Grubbling's," she continues to herself. "Well,
anyhow, she's an honest, kind-hearted crature, and I'll not forget it of
her."

Glory has made another friend.

"Well, Glory McWhirk, this is very pretty doings indeed!" began Mrs.
Grubbling, meeting the little handmaiden at the parlor door. "So this is
the way, is it, when my back is turned for a minute? That poor baby
dumped down on the floor, to crawl up to the hot stove, or do any other
horrid thing he likes, while you go flacketting out, bareheaded, into
the streets, after a topping jade like that? You can't have any
high-flown acquaintances while you live in my house, I tell you now,
once and for all. Are you going to take up that baby or not?" Mrs.
Grubbling had been thus far effectually heading Glory off, by standing
square in the parlor doorway. "Or perhaps, I'd better stay at home and
take care of him myself," she added, in a tone of superlative irony.

Poor Glory, meekly murmuring that it was only to give back some money
the girl had dropped, slid past her mistress submissively, like a sentry
caught off his post and warned of mortal punishment, and shouldered arms
once more; that is, picked up the baby, who, as if taking the cue from
his mother, and made conscious of his grievance, had at this moment
begun to cry.

Glory had a good cry of her own first, and then, "killing two birds with
one stone," pacified herself and the baby "all under one."

After this, Katie Ryan never came out at the green gate, of a Sunday on
the way to church, or of a week day to run down the little back street
of an errand, but she gave a glance up at the Grubblings' windows; and
if she caught sight of Glory's illumined head, nodded her own, with its
pretty, dark-brown locks, quite pleasant and friendly. And between these
chance recognitions of Katie's, and the good apple woman's occasional
sympathy, the world began to brighten a little, even for poor Glory.

Still, good times went on--grand, wonderful good times--all around her.
And she caught distant glimpses, but "wasn't in 'em."

One day, as she hurried home from the grocer's with half-a-dozen eggs
and two lemons, Katie ran out from the gate, and met her halfway down
Budd Street.

"I've been watchin' for ye," said she. "I seen ye go out of an errand,
an' I've been lookin' for ye back. There's to be a grand party at our
house to-morrow night, an' I thought maybe ye'd like to get lave, an'
run over to take a peep at it. Put on yer best frock, and make yer hair
tidy, an' I'll see to yer gettin' a good chance."

Poor Glory colored up, as Mrs. Grabbling might have done if the
President's wife had bidden her. Not so, either. With a glow of feeling,
and an oppression of gratitude, and a humility of delight, that Mrs.
Grubbling, under any circumstances whatever, could have known nothing
about.

"If I only can," she managed to utter, "and, anyhow, I'm sure I'm
thankful to ye a thousand times."

And that night she sat up in her little attic room, after everybody else
was in bed, mending, in a poor fashion, a rent in the faded "best
frock," and sewing a bit of cotton lace in the neck thereof that she had
picked out of the ragbag, and surreptitiously washed and ironed.

Next morning, she went about her homely tasks with an alacrity that Mrs.
Grubbling, knowing nothing of the hope that had been let in upon her
dreariness, attributed wholly to the salutary effect of a "good
scolding" she had administered the day before. The work she got out of
the girl that Thursday forenoon! Never once did Glory leave her
scrubbing, or her dusting, or her stove polishing, to glance from the
windows into the street, though the market boys, and the waiters, and
the confectioners' parcels were going in at the Pembertons' gate, and
the man from the greenhouse, even, drove his cart up, filled with
beautiful plants for the staircase.

She waited, as in our toils we wait for Heaven--trusting to the joy that
was to come.

After dinner, she spoke, with fear and trembling. Her lips turned quite
white with anxiety as she stood before Mrs. Grubbling with the baby in
her arms.

"Please, mum," says Glory, tremulously, "Katie Ryan asked me over for a
little while to-night to look at the party."

Mrs. Grubbling actually felt a jealousy, as if her poor, untutored
handmaid were taking precedence of herself.

"What party?" she snapped.

"At the Pembertons', mum. I thought you knew about it."

"And what if I do? Maybe I'm going, myself."

Glory opened her eyes wide in mingled consternation and surprise.

"I didn't think you was, mum. But if you is----"

"You're willing, I suppose," retorted her mistress, laughing, in a
bitter way. "I'm very much obliged. But I'm going out to-night, anyhow,
whether it's there or not, and you can't be spared. Besides, you needn't
think you're going to begin with going out evenings yet a while. At your
age! A pretty thing! There--go along, and don't bother me."

Glory went along; and only the baby--of mortal listeners--heard the
suffering cry that went up from her poor, pinched, and chilled, and
disappointed heart.

"Oh, baby, baby! it was _too_ good a time! I'd ought to a knowed I
couldn't be in it!"

Only a stone's throw from those brightly lighted windows of the
Pembertons'! Their superfluous radiance pouring out lavishly across the
narrow street, searched even through the dim panes behind which Glory
sat, resting her tired arms, after tucking away their ordinary burden in
his crib, and answering Herbert's wearisome questions, who from his
trundle bed kept asking, ceaselessly:

"What are they doing now? Can't you see, Glory?"

"Hush, hush!" said Glory, breathlessly, as a burst of brilliant melody
floated over to her ear. "They're making music now. Don't you hear?"

"No. How can I, with my head in the pillow? I'm coming there to sit with
you, Glory." And the boy scrambled from his feed to the window.

"No, no! you'll ketch cold. Besides, you'd oughter go to sleep.
Well--only for a little bit of a minute, then," as Herbert persisted,
and climbing upon her lap, flattened his face against the window pane.

Glory gathered up her skirt about his shoulders and held him for a
while, begging him uneasily, over and over, to "be a good boy, and go
back to bed." No; he wouldn't be a good boy, and he wouldn't go back to
bed, till the music paused. Then, by dint of promising that if it began
again she would open the window a "teenty little crack," so that he
might hear it better, she coaxed him to the point of yielding, and
tucked him, chilly, yet half unwilling, in the trundle.

Back again, to look and listen. And, oh, wonderful and unexpected
fortune! A beneficent hand has drawn up the white linen shade at one of
the back parlor windows to slide the sash a little from the top. It was
Katie, whom her young mistress, standing with her partner at that corner
of the room, had called in from the hall to do it.

"No, no," whispered the young lady, hastily, as her companion moved to
render her the service she desired, "let Katie come in. She'll get such
a good look down the room at the dancers." There was no abated
admiration in the young man's eye, as he turned back to her side, and
allowed her kindly intention to be fulfilled.

Did Katie surmise, in her turn, with the freemasonry of her class, how
it was with her humble friend over the way--that she couldn't get let
out for the evening, and that she would be sure to be looking and
listening from her old post opposite? However it was, the linen shade
was not lowered again, and there between the lace and crimson curtains
stood revealed the graceful young figure of Edith Pemberton, in her
floating ball robes, with the wreath of morning-glories in her hair.

"Oh, my sakes and sorrows! Ain't she just like a princess? Ain't it a
splendid time? And I come so near to be in it! But I ain't; and I s'pose
I shan't ever get a chance again. Maybe Katie'd get me over of a common
workday though, some time, to help her a bit or so. Wouldn't I be glad
to?"

"Oh, for gracious, child! Don't ever come here again. You'll catch your
death. You'll have the croup and whooping cought, and everything
to-morrow." This to Herbert, who had of course tumbled out of bed again
at Glory's first rapturous exclamation.

"No, I won't!" cried the boy, rebelliously; "I'll stay as long as I
like. And I'll tell my ma how you was a-wantin' to go away and be the
Pembertons' girl. Won't she lam you when she hears that?"

"You can tell wicked lies if you want to, Master Herbert; but you know I
never said such a word, nor ever thought of it. Of course I couldn't if
I wanted to ever so bad."

"Couldn't live there? I guess not. Think they'd have a girl like you?
What a lookin' you'd be, a-comin' to the front door answerin' the bell!"

Here the doorbell rang suddenly and sharply, and Master Herbert
fancying, as did Glory, that it was his mother come back, scrambled
into his bed again and covered himself up, while the girl ran down to
answer the summons.

It was Katie Ryan, with cakes and sweetmeats.

"I've jist rin in to fetch ye these. Miss Edith gave 'em me, so ye
needn't be feared. I knows ye're sich an honest one. An' it's a tearin'
shame, if ever there was, that ye couldn't come over for a bit of
diversion. Why don't ye quit this?"

"Oh, hush!" whispered Glory, with a gesture up the staircase, where she
had just left the little pitcher with fearfully long ears. "And thank
you kindly, over and over, I'm sure. It's real good o' you to think o'
me so--oh!" And Glory couldn't say anything more for a quick little sob
that came in her throat, and caught the last word up into a spasm.

"Pooh! it's just nothing at all. I'd do something better nor that if I
had the chance; an' I'd adwise ye to get out o' this if ye can. Good-by.
I've set the parlor windy open, an' the shade's up. I knew it would jist
be a conwenience."

Glory ran up the back stairs to the top of the house, and hid away the
sweet things in her own room to "make a party" with next day. And then
she went down and tented over the crib with an old woolen shawl, and set
a high-backed rocking chair to keep the draft from Herbert, and opened
the window "a teenty crack." In five minutes the slight freshening of
the air and the soothing of the music had sent the boy to sleep, and
watchful Glory closed the window and set things in their ordinary
arrangement once more.

Next morning Herbert made hoarse complaint.

"What did you let him do, Glory, to catch such a cold?" asked Mrs.
Grabbling.

"Nothing, mum, only he would get out of bed to hear the music," replied
the girl.

"Well, you opened the window, you know you did, and Katie Ryan came over
and kept the front door open. And you said how you wished you could go
over there and do their chores. I told you I'd tell."

"It's wicked lies, mum," burst out Glory, indignant.

"Do you dare to tell him he lies, right before my face, you
good-for-nothing girl?" shrieked the exasperated mother. "Where do you
expect to go to?"

"I don't expect to go nowheres, mum; and I wouldn't say it was lies if
he didn't tell what wasn't true."

"How should such a thing come into his head if you didn't say it?"

"There's many things comes into his head," answered Glory, stoutly, "and
I think you'd oughter believe me first, when I never told you a lie in
my life, and you did ketch Master Herbert fibbing, jist the other day,
but."

Somehow, Glory had grown strangely bold in her own behalf since she had
come to feel there was a bit of sympathy somewhere for her in the world.

"I know now where he learns it," retorted the mistress, with persistent
and angry injustice.

Glory's face blazed up, and she took an involuntary step to the woman's
side at the warrantless accusation.

"You don't mean that, mum, and you'd oughter take it back," said she,
excited beyond all fear and habit of submission.

Mrs. Grubbling raised her hand passionately, and struck the girl upon
the cheek.

"I mean _that_, then, for your impudence! Don't answer me up again!"

"No, mum," said Glory, in a low, strange tone; quite white now, except
where the vindictive fingers had left their crimson streaks. And she
went off out of the room without another word.

Over the knife board she revolved her wrongs, and sharpened at length
the keen edge of desperate resolution.

"Please, mum," said she, in the old form of address, but with quite a
new manner, that, in the little dependant of less than fifteen, startled
the hard mistress, "I ain't noways bound to you, am I?"

She propounded her question, stopping short in her return toward the
china closet through the sitting room.

"Bound? What do you mean?" parried Mrs. Grubbling, dimly foreshadowing
to herself what it would be if Glory should break loose, and go.

"To stay, mum, and you to keep me, till I'm growed up," answered Glory,
briefly.

"There's no binding about it," replied the mistress. "Of course I
wouldn't be held to anything of that sort. I shan't keep you any longer
than you behave yourself."

"Then, if you please, mum, I think I'll go," said Glory. And she burst
into a passion of tears.

"Humph! Where?" asked Mrs. Grubbling.

"I don't know, yet," said Glory, the sarcasm drying her tears. "I s'pose
I can go to a office."

"And where'll you get your meals and your lodgings till you find a
place?" The cat thought she had her paw on the mouse, now, and could
play with her as securely and cruelly as she pleased.

"If you go away at all," continued Mrs. Grubbling, with what she deemed
a finishing stroke of policy, "you go straight off. I'll have no dancing
back and forth to offices from here."

"Do you mean right off, this minute?" asked Glory, aghast.

"Yes just that. Pack up and go, or else let me hear no more about it."

The next thing in Glory's programme of duty was to lay the table for
dinner. But she went out of the room, and slowly off, upstairs.

Pretty soon she came down again, with her eyes very tearful, and her
shabby shawl and bonnet on.

"I'm going, mum," said she, as one resolved to face calmly whatever
might befall. "I didn't mean it to be sudden, but it are. And I wouldn't
never a gone, if I'd a thought anybody cared for me the leastest bit
that ever was. I wouldn't mind bein' worked and put upon, and not havin'
any good times; but when people hates me, and goes to say I doesn't tell
the truth"--here Glory broke down, and the tears poured over her stained
cheeks again, and she essayed once more to dry them, which reminded her
that her hands again were full.

"It's some goodies--from the party, mum"--she struggled to say between
short breaths and sobs, "that Katie Ryan give me--an' I kept--to make a
party--for the children, with--to-day, mum--when the chores was
done--and I'll leave 'em--for 'em--if you please."

Glory laid her coals of fire upon the table as she spoke. Master Herbert
eyed them, as one utterly unconscious of a scorch.

"I s'pose I might come back and get my bundle," said Glory, standing
still in the hope of one last kindly or relenting word.

"Oh, yes, if you get a place," said her mistress, dryly, affecting to
treat the whole affair as a childish, though unwonted burst of
petulance.

But Glory, not daring, unbidden, even to kiss the baby, went steadily
and sorrowfully out into the street, and drew the door behind her, that
shut with a catch lock, and fastened her out into the wide world.

Not stopping to think, she hurried on, up Budd and down Branch Street,
and across the green common path to the apple stand and Bridget Foye.

"I've done it! I've gone! And I don't know what to do, nor where to go
to!"

"Arrah, poor little rid hin! So, ye've found yer schiasors, have ye, an'
let yersel' loose out o' the bag? Well, it's I that is glad, though I
wouldn't pit ye up till it," says Bridget Foye.

Poor little red hen. She had cut a hole, and jumped out of the bag, to
be sure; but here she was, "all alone by herself" once more, and the
foxes--Want and Cruelty--ravening after her all through the great,
dreary wood!

This day, at least, passed comfortably enough, however, although with an
undertone of sadness--in the sunshine, by Bridget's apple stand,
watching the gay passers-by, and shaping some humble hopes and plans for
the future. For dinner, she shared Mrs. Foye's plain bread and cheese,
and made a dessert of an apple and a handful of peanuts. At night
Bridget took her home and gave her shelter, and the next day she started
her off with a "God bless ye and good luck till ye," in the charge of an
older girl who lodged in the same building, and who was also "out after
a place."




CHAPTER VI.

AUNT HENDERSON'S GIRL HUNT.

"Black spirits and white,
  Red spirits and gray;
Mingle, mingle, mingle,
  You that mingle may."
                    MACBETH.


It was a small, close, dark room--Mrs. Griggs's Intelligence Office--a
little counter and show case dividing off its farther end, making a
sanctum for Mrs. Griggs, who sat here in rheumatic ponderosity,
dependent for whatever involved locomotion on the rather alarming
alacrity of an impish-looking granddaughter who is elbowing her way
through the throng of applicants for places and servants. She paid no
heed to the astonishment of a severe-looking, elderly lady, who, by her
impetuous onset, has been rudely thrust back into the very arms of a
fat, unsavory cook with whom she had a minute before been quite
unwillingly set to confer by the high priestess of the place.

Aunt Henderson grasped Faith's hand as if she felt she had brought her
into a danger, and held her close to her side while she paused a moment
to observe, with the strange fascination of repulsion, the manifestation
of a phase of human life and the working of a vocation so utterly and
astoundingly novel to herself.

"Well, Melindy," said Mrs. Griggs, salutatorily.

"Well, grandma," answered the girl, with a pert air of show off and
consequence, "I found the place, and I found the lady. Ain't I been
quick?"

"Yes. What did she say?"

"Said the girl left last Saturday. Ain't had anybody sence. Wants you to
send her a first-rate one, right off. Has Care'_line_ been here after
me?"

"No. Did you get the money?"

"She never said a word about it. Guess she forgot the month was out."

"Didn't you ask her?"

"Me? No. I did the arrant, and stood and looked at her--jest as
pious--! And when she didn't say nothin', I come away."

"Winny M'Goverin," said Mrs. Griggs, "that place'll suit you. Leastways,
it must, for another month. You'd better go right round there."

"Where is it?" asked the fat cook, indifferently.

"Up in Mount Pleasant Street, Number 53. First-class place, and plenty
of privileges. Margaret McKay," she continued, to another, "you're too
hard to please. Here's one more place"--handing her a card with
address--"and if you don't take that, I won't do nothing more for you,
if you _air_ Scotch and a Protestant! Mary McGinnis, it's no use your
talking to that lady from the country. She can't spare you to come down
but twice or so a year."

"Lord!" ejaculated Mary McGinnis, "I wouldn't live a whole year with no
lady that ever was, let alone the country!"

"Come out, Faith!" said Miss Henderson, in a deep, ineffable tone of
disgust.

"If _that's_ a genteel West End Intelligence Office," cried Aunt Faith,
as she touched the sidewalk, "let's go downtown and try some of the
common ones."

A large hall--where the candidates were ranged on settees under order
and restraint, and the superintendent, or directress, occupied a desk
placed upon a platform near the entrance--was the next scene whereon
Miss Henderson and Faith Gartney entered. Things looked clean and
respectable. System obtained here. Aunt Faith felt encouraged. But she
made no haste to utter her business. Tall, self-possessed, and
dignified, she stood a few paces inside the door, and looked down the
apartment, surveying coolly the faces there, and analyzing, by a shrewd
mental process, their indications.

Her niece had stopped a moment on the landing outside to fasten her boot
lace.

Miss Henderson did not wear hoops. Also, the streets being sloppy, she
had tucked up her plain, gray merino dress over a quilted black alpaca
petticoat. Her boots were splashed, and her black silk bonnet was
covered with a large gray barége veil, tied down over it to protect it
from the dripping roofs. Judging merely by exterior, one would hardly
take her at a glance, indeed, for a "fust-class" lady.

The directress--a busy woman, with only half a glance to spare for
anyone--moved toward her.

"Take a seat, if you please. What kind of a place do you want?"

Aunt Faith turned full face upon her, with a look that was prepared to
be overwhelming.

"I'm looking for a place, ma'am, where I can find a respectable girl."

Her firm, emphatic utterance was heard to the farthest end of the hall.

The girls tittered.

Faith Gartney came in at this moment, and walked up quietly to Miss
Henderson's side. There was visibly a new impression made, and the
tittering ceased.

"I beg pardon, ma'am. I see. But we have so many in, and I didn't fairly
look. General housework?"

"Yes; general and particular--both. Whatever I set her to do."

The directress turned toward the throng of faces whose fire of eyes was
now all concentrated on the unflinching countenance of Miss Henderson.

"Ellen Mahoney!"

A stout, well-looking damsel, with an expression that seemed to say she
answered to her name, but was nevertheless persuaded of the utter
uselessness of the movement, half rose from her seat.

"You needn't call up that girl," said Aunt Faith, decidedly; "I don't
want her."

Ellen Mahoney had giggled among the loudest.

"She knows what she _does_ want!" whispered a decent-appearing young
woman to a girl at her side with an eager face looking out from a friz
of short curly hair, "and that's more than half of 'em do."

"Country, did you say, ma'am? or city?" asked the directress once more
of Miss Henderson.

"I didn't say. It's country, though--twenty miles out."

"What wages?"

"I'll find the girl first, and settle that afterwards."

"Anybody to do general housework in the country, twenty miles out?"

The prevailing expression of the assemblage changed. There was a
settling down into seats, and a resumption of knitting and needlework.

One pair of eyes, however, looked on, even more eagerly than before. One
young girl--she with the short curly hair who hadn't seen the country
for six years and more--caught her breath, convulsively, at the word.

"I wish I dar'st! I've a great mind!" whispered she to her tidy
companion.

While she hesitated, a slatternly young woman, a few seats farther
forward, moved, with a "don't care" sort of look, to answer the summons.

"Oh, dear!" sighed the first. "I'd ought to a done it!"

"I don't think she would take a young girl like you," replied her
friend.

"That's the way it always is!" exclaimed the disappointed voice, in
forgetfulness and excitement uttering itself aloud. "Plenty of good
times going, but they all go right by. I ain't never in any of 'em!"

"Glory McWhirk!" chided the directress, "be quiet! Remember the rules,
or leave the room."

"Call that red-headed girl to me," said Miss Henderson, turning square
round from the dirty figure that was presenting itself before her, and
addressing the desk. "She looks clean and bright," she added, aside, to
Faith, as Glory timidly approached. "And poor. And longing for a chance.
I'll have her."

A girl with a bonnet full of braids and roses, and a look of general
knowingness, started up close at Miss Henderson's side, and interposed.

"Did you say twenty miles, mum? How often could I come to town?"

"You haven't been asked to go _out_ of town, that I know of," replied
Miss Henderson, frigidly, abashing the office _habitué_, who had not
been used to find her catechism cut so summarily short, and moving aside
to speak with Glory.

"What was it I heard you say just now?"

"I didn't mean to speak out so, mum. It was only what I mostly thinks.
That there's always lots of good times in the world, only I ain't never
in 'em."

"And you thought it would be good times, did you, to go off twenty miles
into the country, to live alone with an old woman like me?"

Miss Henderson's tone softened kindly to the rough, uncouth girl, and
encouraged her to confidence.

"Well, you see, mum, I should like to go where things is green and
pleasant. I lived in the country once--ever so long ago--when I was a
little girl."

Miss Henderson could not help a smile that was half amused, and wholly
pitiful, as she looked in the face of this creature of fourteen, so
strange and earnest, with its outline of fuzzy, cropped hair, and heard
her talk of "ever so long ago."

"Are you strong?"

"Yes'm. I ain't never sick."

"And willing to work?"

"Yes'm. Jest as much as I know how."

"And want to learn more?"

"Yes'm. I don't know as I'd know enough hardly, to begin, though."

"Can you wash dishes? And sweep? And set table?"

To each of these queries Glory successively interposed an affirmative
monosyllable, adding, gratuitously, at the close, "And tend baby, too,
real good." Her eyes filled, as she thought of the Grubbling baby with
the love that always grows for that whereto one has sacrificed oneself.

"You won't have any babies to tend. Time enough for that when you've
learned plenty of other things. Who do you belong to?"

"I don't belong to anybody, mum. Father, and mother, and grandmother is
all dead. I've done the chores and tended baby up at Mrs. Grubbling's
ever since. That's in Budd Street. I'm staying now in High Street, with
Mrs. Foye. Number 15."

"I'll come after you to-morrow. Have your things ready to go right off."

"I'm so glad you took her, auntie," said Faith, as they went out. "She
looks as if she hadn't been well treated. Think of her wanting so to go
into the country! I should like to do something for her."

"That's my business," answered Aunt Faith, curtly, but not crossly.
"You'll find somebody to do for, if you look out. If your mother's
willing, though, you might mend up one of your old school dresses for
her. 'Tisn't likely she's got anything to begin with." And so saying,
Aunt Faith turned precipitately into a drygoods store, where she bought
a large plaid woolen shawl, and twelve yards of dark calico. Coming out,
she darted as suddenly, and apparently unpremeditatedly, across the
street into a milliner's shop, and ordered home a brown rough-and-ready
straw bonnet, and four yards of ribbon to match.

"And that you can put on, too," she said to Faith.

That evening, Faith was even unwontedly cheery and busy, taking a burned
half breadth out of a dark cashmere dress, darning it at the armhole,
and pinning the plain ribbon over the brown straw bonnet.

At the same time, Glory went up across the city to Budd Street, with a
mingled heaviness and gladness at her heart, and, after a kindly
farewell interview with Katie Ryan at the Pembertons' green gate, rang,
with a half-guilty feeling at her own independence, at the Grubblings'
door. Bubby opened it.

"Why, ma!" he shouted up the staircase, "it's Glory come back!"

"I've come to get my bundle," said the girl.

Mrs. Grubbling had advanced to the stair head, somewhat briskly, with
the wakeful baby in her arms. Two days' "tending" had greatly mollified
her sentiments toward the offending Glory.

"And she's come to get her bundle," added the young usher, from below.

Mrs. Grubbling retreated into her chamber, and shut herself and the baby
in.

Poor Glory crept upstairs to her little attic.

Coming down again, she set her bundle on the stairs, and knocked.

"What is it?" was the ungracious response.

"Please, mum, mightn't I say good-by to the baby?"

The latch had slipped, and the door was already slightly ajar. Baby
heard the accustomed voice, and struggled in his mother's arms.

"A pretty time to come disturbing him to do it!" grumbled she.
Nevertheless, she set the baby on the floor, who tottled out, and was
seized by Glory, standing there in the dark entry, and pressed close in
her poor, long-wearied, faithful arms.

"Oh, baby, baby! I'm in it now! And I don't know rightly whether it's a
good time or not!"




CHAPTER VII.

CARES; AND WHAT CAME OF THEM.

"To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires."
                                          SPENCER.


Two years and more had passed since the New Year's dance at the
Rushleighs'.

The crisis of '57 and '58 was approaching its culmination. The great
earthquake that for months had been making itself heard afar off by its
portentous rumbling was heaving to the final crash. Already the weaker
houses had fallen and were forgotten.

When a great financial trouble sweeps down upon a people, there are
three general classes who receive and feel it, each in its own peculiar
way.

There are the great capitalists--the enormously rich--who, unless a
tremendous combination of adversities shall utterly ruin here and there
one, grow the richer yet for the calamities of their neighbors. There
are also the very poor, who have nothing to lose but their daily labor
and their daily bread--who may suffer and starve; but who, if by any
little saving of a better time they can manage just to buy bread, shall
be precisely where they were, practically, when the storm shall have
blown over. Between these lies the great middle class--among whom, as on
the middle ground, the world's great battle is continually waging--of
persons who are neither rich nor poor; who have neither secured
fortunes to fall back upon, nor yet the independence of their hands to
turn to, when business and its income fail. This is the class that
suffers most. Most keenly in apprehension, in mortification, in after
privation.

Of this class was the Gartney family.

Mr. Gartney was growing pale and thin. No wonder; with sleepless nights,
and harassed days, and forgotten, or unrelished meals. His wife watched
him and waited for him, and contrived special comforts for him, and
listened to his confidences.

Faith felt that there was a cloud upon the house, and knew that it had
to do with money. So she hid her own little wants as long as she could,
wore her old ribbons, mended last year's discarded gloves, and yearned
vaguely and helplessly to do something--some great thing if she only
could, that might remedy or help.

Once, she thought she would learn Stenography. She had heard somebody
speak one day of the great pay a lady shorthand writer had received at
Washington, for some Congressional reports. Why shouldn't she learn how
to do it, and if the terrible worst should ever come to the worst, make
known her secret resource, and earn enough for all the family?

Something like this--some "high and holy work of love"--she longed to
do. Longed almost--if she were once prepared and certain of herself--for
even misfortune that should justify and make practicable her generous
purpose.

She got an elementary book, and set to work, by herself. She toiled
wearily, every day, for nearly a month; despairing at every step, yet
persevering; for, beside the grand dream for the future, there was a
present fascination in the queer little scrawls and dots.

It cannot be known how long she might have gone on with the attempt, if
her mother had not come to her one day with some parcels of cut-out
cotton cloth.

"Faithie, dear," said she, deprecatingly, "I don't like to put such work
upon you while you go to school; but I ought not to afford to have Miss
McElroy this spring. Can't you make up some of these with me?"

There were articles of clothing for Faith, herself. She felt the present
duty upon her; and how could she rebel? Yet what was to become of the
great scheme?

By and by would come vacation, and in the following spring, at farthest,
she would leave school, and then--she would see. She would write a book,
maybe. Why not? And secretly dispose of it, for a large sum, to some
self-regardless publisher. Should there never be another Fanny Burney?
Not a novel, though, or any grown-up book, at first; but a juvenile, at
least, she could surely venture on. Look at all the Cousin Maries, and
Aunt Fannies, and Sister Alices, whose productions piled the
booksellers' counters during the holiday sales, and found their way,
sooner or later, into all the nurseries, and children's bookcases! And
think of all the stories she had invented to amuse Hendie with! Better
than some of these printed ones, she was quite sure, if only she could
set them down just as she had spoken them under the inspiration of
Hendie's eager eyes and ready glee.

She made two or three beginnings, during the summer holidays, but always
came to some sort of a "sticking place," which couldn't be hobbled over
in print as in verbal relation. All the links must be apparent, and
everything be made to hold well together. She wouldn't have known what
they were, if you had asked her--but the "unities" troubled her. And
then the labor loomed up so large before her! She counted the lines in a
page of a book of the ordinary juvenile size, and the number of letters
in a line, and found out the wonderful compression of which manuscript
is capable. And there must be two hundred pages, at least, to make a
book of tolerable size.

There seemed to be nothing in the world that she could do. She could not
give her time to charity, and go about among the poor. She had nothing
to help them with. Her father gave, already, to ceaseless applications,
more than he could positively spare. So every now and then she
relinquished in discouragement her aspirations, and lived on, from day
to day, as other girls did, getting what pleasure she could; hampered
continually, however, with the old, inevitable tether, of "can't
afford."

"If something only would happen!" If some new circumstance would creep
into her life, and open the way for a more real living!

Do you think girls of seventeen don't have thoughts and longings like
these? I tell you they do; and it isn't that they want to have anybody
else meet with misfortune, or die, that romantic combinations may
thereby result to them; or that they are in haste to enact the everyday
romance--to secure a lover--get married--and set up a life of their own;
it is that the ordinary marked-out bound of civilized young-lady
existence is so utterly inadequate to the fresh, vigorous, expanding
nature, with its noble hopes, and its apprehension of limitless
possibilities.

Something did happen.

Winter came on again. After a twelvemonth of struggle and pain such as
none but a harassed man of business can ever know or imagine, Mr.
Gartney found himself "out of the wood."

He had survived the shock--his last mote was taken up--he had labored
through--and that was all. He was like a man from off a wreck, who has
brought away nothing but his life.

He came home one morning from New York, whither he had been to attend a
meeting of creditors of a failed firm, and went straight to his chamber
with a raging headache.

The next day, the physician's chaise was at the door, and on the
landing, where Mrs. Gartney stood, pale and anxious, gazing into his
face for a word, after the visit to the sick room was over, Dr. Gracie
drew on his gloves, and said to her, with one foot on the stair:
"Symptoms of typhoid. Keep him absolutely quiet."




CHAPTER VIII.

A NICHE IN LIFE, AND A WOMAN TO FILL IT.

"A Traveller between Life and Death."
                             WORDSWORTH.


Miss Sampson was at home this evening. It was not what one would have
pictured to oneself as a scene of home comfort or enjoyment; but Miss
Sampson was at home. In her little room of fourteen feet square, up a
dismal flight of stairs, sitting, in the light of a single lamp, by her
air-tight stove, whereon a cup of tea was keeping warm; that, and the
open newspaper on the little table in the corner, being the only things
in any way cheery about her.

Not even a cat or a canary bird had she for companionship. There was no
cozy arrangement for daily feminine employment; no workbasket, or litter
of spools and tapes; nothing to indicate what might be her daily way of
going on. On the broad ledges of the windows, where any other woman
would have had a plant or two, there was no array of geraniums or
verbenas--not even a seedling orange tree or a monthly rose. But in one
of them lay a plaid shawl and a carpet bag, and in the other that
peculiar and nearly obsolete piece of feminine property, a paper
bandbox, tied about with tape.

Packed up for a journey?

Reader, Miss Sampson was _always_ packed up. She was that much-enduring,
all-foregoing creature, a professional nurse.

There would have been no one to feed a cat, or a canary bird, or to
water a rose bush, if she had had one. Her home was no more to her than
his station at the corner of the street is to the handcart man or the
hackney coachman. It was only the place where she might receive orders;
whence she might go forth to the toilsomeness and gloom of one sick room
after another, returning between each sally and the next to her
cheerless post of waiting--keeping her strength for others, and living
no life of her own.

There was nothing in Miss Sampson's outer woman that would give you, at
first glance, an idea of her real energy and peculiar force of
character. She was a tall and slender figure, with no superfluous weight
of flesh; and her long, thin arms seemed to have grown long and wiry
with lifting, and easing, and winding about the poor wrecks of mortality
that had lost their own vigor, and were fain to beg a portion of hers.
Her face was thin and rigid, too--molded to no mere graces of
expression--but with a strong outline, and a habitual compression about
the mouth that told you, when you had once learned somewhat of its
meaning, of the firm will that would go straight forward to its object,
and do, without parade or delay, whatever there might be to be done.
Decision, determination, judgment, and readiness were all in that
habitual look of a face on which little else had been called out for
years. But you would not so have read it at first sight. You would
almost inevitably have called her a "scrawny, sour-looking old maid."

A creaking step was heard upon the stair, and then a knock of decision
at Miss Sampson's door.

"Come in!"

And as she spoke, Miss Sampson took her cup and saucer in her hand. That
was to be kept waiting no longer for whatever visitor it might chance to
be. She was taking her first sip as Dr. Gracier entered.

"Don't move, Miss Sampson; don't let me interrupt."

"I don't mean to! What sends you here?"

"A new patient."

"Humph! Not one of the last sort, I hope. You know my kind, and 'tain't
any use talking up about any others. Any old woman can make gruel, and
feed a baby with catnip tea. Don't offer me any more such work as that!
If it's work that _is_ work, speak out!"

"It's work that nobody else can do for me. A critical case of typhoid,
and nobody in the house that understands such illness. I've promised to
bring you."

"You knew I was back, then?"

"I knew you would be. I only sent you at the pinch. I warned them you'd
go as soon as things were tolerably comfortable."

"Of course I would. What business should I have where there was nothing
wanted of me but to go to bed at nine o'clock, and sleep till daylight?
That ain't the sort of corner I was cut out to fill."

"Well, drink your tea, and put on your bonnet. There's a carriage at the
door."

"Man? or woman?" asked Miss Sampson.

"A man--Mr. Henderson Gartney, Hickory Street."

"Out of his head?"

"Yes--and getting more so. Family all frightened to death."

"Keep 'em out of my way, then, and let me have him to myself. One crazy
patient is enough, at a time, for any one pair of hands. I'm ready."

In fifteen minutes more, they were in Hickory Street; and the nurse was
speedily installed, or rather installed herself, in her office. Dr.
Gracie hastened away to another patient, promising to call again at
bedtime.

"Now, ma'am," said Miss Sampson to Mrs. Gartney, who, after taking her
first to the bedside of the patient, had withdrawn with her to the
little dressing room adjoining, and given her a _résumé_ of the
treatment thus far followed, with the doctor's last directions to
herself--"you just go downstairs to your supper. I know, by your looks,
you ain't had a mouthful to-day. That's no way to help take care of sick
folks."

Mrs. Gartney smiled a little, feebly; and an expression of almost
childlike rest and relief came over her face. She felt herself in strong
hands.

"And you?" she asked. "Shall I send you something here?"

"I've drunk a cup of tea, before I started. If I see my way clear, I'll
run down for a bite after you get through. I don't want any special
providings. I take my nibbles anyhow, as I go along. You needn't mind,
more'n as if I wasn't here. I shall find my way all over the house. Now,
you go."

"Only tell me how he seems to you."

"Well--not so terrible sick. Just barely bad enough to keep me here. I
don't take any easy cases."

The odd, abrupt manner and speech comforted, while they somewhat
astonished Mrs. Gartney.

"Leave the bread and butter and cold chicken on the table," said she,
when the tea things were about to be removed; "and keep the chocolate
hot, downstairs. Faithie--sit here; and if Miss Sampson comes down by
and by, see that she is made comfortable."

It was ten o'clock when Miss Sampson came down, and then it was with Dr.
Gracie.

"Cheer up, little lady!" said the doctor, meeting Faith's anxious,
inquiring glance. "Not so bad, by any means, as we might be. The only
difficulty will be to keep Nurse Sampson here. She won't stay a minute,
if we begin to get better too fast. Yes--I will take a bit of chicken, I
think; and--what have you there that's hot?" as the maid came in with
the chocolate pot, in answer to Faith's ring of the bell. "Ah, yes!
Chocolate! I missed my tea, somehow, to-night." The "somehow" had been
in his kindly quest of the best nurse in Mishaumok.

"Sit down, Miss Sampson. Let me help you to a scrap of cold chicken.
What? Drumstick! Miss Faithie--here is a woman who makes it a principle
to go through the world, choosing drumsticks! She's a study; and I set
you to finding her out."

Last night, as he had told Miss Sampson, the family had been "frightened
to death." He had found Faith sitting on the front stairs, at midnight,
when he came in at a sudden summons. She was pale and shivering, and
caught him nervously by both hands.

"Oh, doctor!"

"And oh, Miss Faithie! This is no place for you. You ought to be in
bed."

"But I can't. Mother is all alone, except Mahala. And I don't dare stay
up there, either. What _shall_ we do?"

For all answer, the doctor had just taken her in his arms, and carried
her down to the sofa in the hall, where he laid her, and covered her
over with his greatcoat. There she stayed, passively, till he came back.
And then he told her kindly and gravely, that if she could be _quite_
quiet, and firm, she might go and lie on the sofa in her mother's
dressing room for the remainder of the night, to be at hand for any
needed service. To-morrow he would see that they were otherwise
provided.

And so, to-night, here was Miss Sampson eating her drumstick.

Faith watched the hard lines of her face as she did so, and wondered
what, and how much Dr. Gracie had meant by "setting her to find her
out."

"I'm afraid you haven't had a vary nice supper," said she, timidly. "Do
you like that best?"

"Somebody must always eat drumsticks," was the concise reply.

And so, presently, without any further advance toward acquaintance, they
went upstairs; and the house, under the new, energetic rule, soon
subsided into quiet for the night.




CHAPTER IX.

LIFE OR DEATH?

"With God the Lord belong the issues from death."--Ps. 68; 18.


The nursery was a corner room, opening both into Faith's and her
mother's. Hendie and Mahala Harris had been removed upstairs, and the
apartment was left at Miss Sampson's disposal. Mrs. Gartney's bed had
been made up in the little dressing room at the head of the front entry,
so that she and the nurse had the sick room between them.

Faith came down the two steps that led from her room into the nursery,
the next night at bedtime, as Miss Sampson entered from her father's
chamber to put on her night wrapper and make ready for her watch.

"How is he, nurse? He will get well, won't he? What does the doctor
say?"

"Nothing," said Miss Sampson, shortly. "He don't know, and he don't
pretend to. And that's just what proves he's good for something. He
ain't one of the sort that comes into a sick room as if the Almighty had
made him a kind of special delegit, and left the whole concern to him.
He knows there's a solemner dealing there than his, whether it's for
life or death."

"But he can't help _thinking_," said Faith, tremblingly. "And I wish I
knew. What do _you_--?" But Faith paused, for she was afraid, after all,
to finish the question, and to hear it answered.

"I don't think. I just keep doing. That's my part. Folks that think too
much of what's a-coming, most likely won't attend to what there is."

Faith was finding out--a little of Miss Sampson, and a good deal of
herself. Had she not thought too much of what might be coming? Had she
not missed, perhaps, some of her own work, when that work was easier
than now? And how presumptuously she had wished for "something to
happen!" Was God punishing her for that?

"You just keep still, and patient--and wait," said Miss Sampson, noting
the wistful look of pain. "That's your work, and after all, maybe it's
the hardest kind. And I can't take it off folks' shoulders," added she
to herself in an under voice; "so I needn't set up for the _very_
toughest jobs, to be sure."

"I'll try," answered Faith, submissively, with quivering lips, "only if
there _should_ be anything that I could do--to sit up, or
anything--you'll let me, won't you?"

"Of course I will," replied the nurse, cheerily. "I shan't be squeamish
about asking when there's anything I really want done."

Faith moved toward the door that opened to her father's room. It was
ajar. She pushed it gently open, and paused. "I may go in, mayn't I,
nurse, just for a good-night look?"

The sick man heard her voice, though he did not catch her words.

"Come in, Faithie," said he, with one of his half gleams of
consciousness, "I'll see you, daughter, as long as I live."

Faith's heart nearly broke at that, and she came, tearfully and
silently, to the bedside, and laid her little, cool hand on her father's
fevered one, and looked down on his face, worn, and suffering, and
flushed--and thought within herself--it was a prayer and vow
unspoken--"Oh, if God will only let him live, I will _find_ something
that I can do for him!"

And then she lifted the linen cloth that was laid over his forehead, and
dipped it afresh in the bowl of ice water beside the bed, and put it
gently back, and just kissed his hair softly, and went out into her own
room.

Three nights--three days--more, the fever raged. And on the fourth night
after, Faith and her mother knew, by the scrupulous care with which the
doctor gave minute directions for the few hours to come, and the
resolute way in which Miss Sampson declared that "whoever else had a
mind to watch, she should sit up till morning this time," that the
critical point was reached; that these dark, silent moments that would
flit by so fast, were to spell, as they passed by, the sentence of life
or death.

Faith would not be put by. Her mother sat on one side of the bed, while
the nurse busied herself noiselessly, or waited, motionless, upon the
other. Down by the fireside, on a low stool, with her head on the
cushion of an easy-chair, leaned the young girl--her heart full, and
every nerve strained with emotion and suspense.

She will never know, precisely, how those hours went on. She can
remember the low breathing from the bed, and the now and then
half-distinct utterance, as the brain wandered still in a dreamy,
feverish maze; and she never will forget the precise color and pattern
of the calico wrapper that Nurse Sampson wore; but she can recollect
nothing else of it all, except that, after a time, longer or shorter,
she glanced up, fearfully, as a strange hush seemed to have come over
the room, and met a look and gesture of the nurse that warned her down
again, for her life.

And then, other hours, or minutes, she knows not which, went by.

And then, a stir--a feeble word--a whisper from Nurse Sampson--a low
"Thank God!" from her mother.

The crisis was passed. Henderson Gartney lived.




CHAPTER X.

ROUGH ENDS.

                 "So others shall
Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand,
From thy hand and thy heart, and thy brave cheer,
And God's grace fructify through thee to all."
                                      MRS. BROWNING.


"M. S. What does that stand for?" said little Hendie, reading the white
letters painted on the black leather bottom of nurse's carpetbag. He got
back, now, often, in the daytime, to his old nursery quarters, where his
father liked to hear his chatter and play, for a short time
together--though he still slept, with Mahala, upstairs. "Does that mean
'Miss Sampson'?"

Faith glanced up from her stocking mending, with a little fun and a
little curiosity in her eyes.

"What does 'M.' stand for?" repeated Hendie.

The nurse was "setting to rights" about the room. She turned round at
the question, from hanging a towel straight over the stand, and looked a
little amazed, as if she had almost forgotten, herself. But it came out,
with a quick opening and shutting of the thin lips, like the snipping of
a pair of scissors--"Mehitable."

Faith had been greatly drawn to this odd, efficient woman. Beside that
her skillful, untiring nursing had humanly, been the means of saving her
father's life, which alone had warmed her with an earnest gratitude that
was restless to prove itself, and that welled up in every glance and
tone she gave Miss Sampson, there were a certain respect and interest
that could not withhold themselves from one who so evidently worked on
with a great motive that dignified her smallest acts. In whom
self-abnegation was the underlying principle of all daily doing.

Miss Sampson had stayed on at the Gartneys', notwithstanding the
doctor's prediction, and her usual habit. And, in truth, her patient did
not "get well _too_ fast." She was needed now as really as ever, though
the immediate danger which had summoned her was past, and the fever had
gone. The months of overstrained effort and anxiety that had culminated
in its violent attack were telling upon him now, in the scarcely less
perilous prostration that followed. And Mrs. Gartney had quite given out
since the excessive tension of nerve and feeling had relaxed. She was
almost ill enough to be regularly nursed herself. She alternated between
her bed in the dressing room and an easy-chair opposite her husband's,
at his fireside. Miss Sampson knew when she was really wanted, whether
the emergency were more or less obvious. She knew the mischief of a
change of hands at such a time. And so she stayed on, though she did
sleep comfortably of a night, and had many an hour of rest in the
daytime, when Faith would come into the nursery and constitute herself
her companion.

Miss Sampson was to her like a book to be read, whereof she turned but a
leaf or so at a time, as she had accidental opportunity, yet whose every
page rendered up a deep, strong--above all, a most sound and healthy
meaning.

She turned over a leaf, one day, in this wise.

"Miss Sampson, how came you, at first, to be a sick nurse?"

The shadow of some old struggle seemed to come over Miss Sampson's face,
as she answered, briefly:

"I wanted to find the very toughest sort of a job to do."

Faith looked up, surprised.

"But I heard you tell my father that you had been nursing more than
twenty years. You must have been quite a young woman when you began. I
wonder--"

"You wonder why I wasn't like most other young women, I suppose. Why I
didn't get married, perhaps, and have folks of my own to take care of?
Well, I didn't; and the Lord gave me a pretty plain indication that He
hadn't laid out that kind of a life for me. So then I just looked around
to find out what better He had for me to do. And I hit on the very work
I wanted. A trade that it took all the old Sampson grit to follow. I
made up my mind, as the doctor says, that _somebody_ in the world had
got to choose drumsticks, and I might as well take hold of one."

"But don't you ever get tired of it all, and long for something to rest
or amuse you?"

"Amuse! I couldn't be amused, child. I've been in too much awful earnest
ever to be much amused again. No, I want to die in the harness. It's
hard work I want. I couldn't have been tied down to a common, easy sort
of life. I want something to fight and grapple with; and I'm thankful
there's been a way opened for me to do good according to my nature. If I
hadn't had sickness and death to battle against, I should have got into
human quarrels, maybe, just for the sake of feeling ferocious."

"And you always take the very worst and hardest cases, Dr. Gracie says."

"What's the use of taking a tough job if you don't face the toughest
part of it? I don't want the comfortable end of the business.
_Somebody's_ got to nurse smallpox, and yellow fever, and
raving-distracted people; and I _know_ the Lord made me fit to do just
that very work. There ain't many that He _does_ make for it, but I'm
one. And if I shirked, there'd be a stitch dropped."

"Yellow fever! where have you nursed that?"

"Do you suppose I didn't go to New Orleans? I've nursed it, and I've
_had_ it, and nursed it again. I've been in the cholera hospitals, too.
I'm seasoned to most everything."

"Do you think everybody ought to take the hardest thing they can find,
to do?"

"Do you think everybody ought to eat drumsticks? We'd have to kill an
unreasonable lot of fowls to let 'em! No. The Lord portions out breasts
and wings, as well as legs. If He puts anything into your plate, take
it."

Dr. Gracie always had a word for the nurse, when he came; and, to do her
justice, it was seldom but she had a word to give him back.

"Well, Miss Sampson," said he gayly, one bright morning, "you're as
fresh as the day. What pulls down other folks seems to set you up. I
declare you're as blooming as--twenty-five."

"You--fib--like--sixty! It's no such thing! And if it was, I'd ought to
be ashamed of it."

"Prodigious! as your namesake, the Dominie, would say. Don't tell me a
woman is ever ashamed of looking young, or handsome!"

"Now, look here, doctor!" said Miss Sampson, "I never was handsome; and
I thank the Lord He's given me enough to do in the world to wear off my
young looks long ago! And any woman ought to be ashamed that gets to be
thirty and upward, to say nothing of forty-five, and keeps her baby face
on! It's a sign she ain't been of much account, anyhow."

"Oh, but there are always differences and exceptions," persisted the
doctor, who liked nothing better than to draw Miss Sampson out. "There
are some faces that take till thirty, at least, to bring out all their
possibilities of good looks, and wear on, then, till fifty. I've seen
'em. And the owners were no drones or do-nothings, either. What do you
say to that?"

"I say there's two ways of growing old. And growing old ain't always
growing ugly. Some folks grow old from the inside, out; and some from
the outside, in. There's old furniture, and there's growing trees!"

"And the trunk that is roughest below may branch out greenest a-top!"
said the doctor.

The talk Faith heard now and then, in her walks from home, or when some
of "the girls" came in and called her down into the parlor--about pretty
looks, and becoming dresses, and who danced with who at the "German"
last night, and what a scrape Loolie Lloyd had got into with mixing up
and misdating her engagements at the class, and the last new roll for
the hair--used to seem rather trivial to her in these days!

Occasionally, when Mr. Gartney had what nurse called a "good" day, he
would begin to ask for some of his books and papers, with a thought
toward business; and then Miss Sampson would display her carpetbag, and
make a show of picking up things to put in it. "For," said she, "when
you get at your business, it'll be high time for me to go about mine."

"But only for half an hour, nurse! I'll give you that much leave of
absence, and then we'll have things back again as they were before."

"I guess you will! And _further_ than they were before. No, Mr. Gartney,
you've got to behave. I _won't_ have them vicious-looking accounts
about, and it don't signify."

"If it don't, why not?" But it ended in the accounts and the carpetbag
disappearing together.

Until one morning, some three weeks from the beginning of Mr. Gartney's
illness, when, after a few days' letting alone the whole subject, he
suddenly appealed to the doctor.

"Doctor," said he, as that gentleman entered, "I must have Braybrook up
here this afternoon. I dropped things just where I stood, you know. It's
time to take an observation."

The doctor looked at his patient gravely.

"Can't you be content with simply picking up things, and putting them
by, for this year? What I ought to tell you to do would be to send
business to the right about, and go off for an entire rest and change,
for three months, at least."

"You don't know what you're talking about, doctor!"

"Perhaps not, on one side of the subject. I feel pretty certain on the
other, however."

Mr. Gartney did not send for Braybrook that afternoon. The next morning,
however, he came, and the tabooed books and papers were got out.

In another day or two, Miss Sampson _did_ pack her carpetbag, and go
back to her air-tight stove and solitary cups of tea. Her occupation in
Hickory Street was gone.




CHAPTER XI.

CROSS CORNERS.

"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
bitterly to the Gods for a kingdom, wherein to rule and create,
know this of a truth, the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!"--CARLYLE.


"It is of no use to talk about it," said Mr. Gartney, wearily. "If I
live--as long as I live--I must do business. How else are you to get
along?"

"How shall we get along if you do _not_ live?" asked his wife, in a low,
anxious tone.

"My life's insured," was all Mr. Gartney's answer.

"Father!" cried Faith, distressfully.

Faith had been taken more and more into counsel and confidence with her
parents since the time of the illness that had brought them all so close
together. And more and more helpful she had grown, both in word and
doing, since she had learned to look daily for the daily work set before
her, and to perform it conscientiously, even although it consisted only
of little things. She still remembered with enthusiasm Nurse Sampson and
the "drumsticks," and managed to pick up now and then one for herself.
Meantime she began to see, indistinctly, before her, the vision of a
work that must be done by some one, and the duty of it pressed hourly
closer home to herself. Her father's health had never been fully
reëstablished. He had begun to use his strength before and faster than
it came. There was danger--it needed no Dr. Gracie, even, to tell them
so--of grave disease, if this went on. And still, whenever urged, his
answer was the same. "What would become of his family without his
business?"

Faith turned these things over and over in her mind.

"Father," said she, after a while--the conversation having been dropped
at the old conclusion, and nobody appearing to have anything more to
say--"I don't know anything about business; but I wish you'd tell me how
much money you've got!"

Her father laughed; a sad sort of laugh though, that was not so much
amusement as tenderness and pity. Then, as if the whole thing were a
mere joke, yet with a shade upon his face that betrayed there was far
too much truth under the jest, after all, he took out his portemonnaie
and told her to look and see.

"You know I don't mean that, father! How much in the bank, and
everywhere?"

"Precious little in the bank, now, Faithie. Enough to keep house with
for a year, nearly, perhaps. But if I were to take it and go off and
spend it in traveling, you can understand that the housekeeping would
fall short, can't you?"

Faith looked horrified. She was bringing down her vague ideas of money
that came from somewhere, through her father's pocket, as water comes
from Lake Kinsittewink by the turning of a faucet, to the narrow point
of actuality.

"But that isn't all, I know! I've heard you talk about railroad
dividends, and such things."

"Oh! what does the Western Road pay this time?" asked his wife.

"I've had to sell out my stock there."

"And where's the money, father?" asked Faith.

"Gone to pay debts, child," was the answer.

Mrs. Gartney said nothing, but she looked very grave. Her husband
surmised, perhaps, that she would go on to imagine worse than had really
happened, and so added, presently:

"I haven't been obliged to sell _all_ my railroad stocks, wifey. I held
on to some. There's the New York Central all safe; and the Michigan
Central, too. That wouldn't have sold so well, to be sure, just when I
was wanting the money; but things are looking better, now."

"Father," said Faithie, with her most coaxing little smile, "please just
take this bit of paper and pencil, and set down these stocks and things,
will you?"

The little smile worked its way; and half in idleness, half in
acquiescence, Mr. Gartney took the pencil and noted down a short list of
items.

"It's very little, Faith, you see." They ran thus:

     New York Central Railroad             20 shares.
     Michigan Central    "                 15   "
     Kinnicutt Branch    "                 10   "
     Mishaumok Insurance Co.               15   "
     Merchants Bank                        30   "

"And now, father, please put down how much you get a year in dividends."

"Not always the same, little busybody."

Nevertheless he noted down the average sums. And the total was between
six and seven hundred dollars.

"But that isn't all. You've got other things. Why, there's the house at
Cross Corners."

"Yes, but I can't let it, you know."

"What used you to get for it?"

"Two hundred and fifty. For house and land."

"And you own this house, too, father?"

"Yes. This is your mother's."

"How much rent would this bring?"

Mr. Gartney turned around and looked at his daughter. He began to see
there was a meaning in her questions. And as he caught her eye, he read,
or discerned without fully reading, a certain eager kindling there.

"Why, what has come over you, Faithie, to set you catechising so?"

Faith laughed.

"Just answer this, please, and I won't ask a single question more
to-night."

"About the rent? Why, this house ought to bring six hundred, certainly.
And now, if the court will permit, I'll read the news."

About a week after this, in the latter half of one of those spring days
that come with a warm breath to tell that summer is glowing somewhere,
and that her face is northward, Aunt Faith Henderson came out upon the
low, vine-latticed stoop of her house in Kinnicutt.

Up the little footpath from the road--across the bit of greensward that
lay between it and the stoop--came a quick, noiseless step, and there
was a touch, presently, on the old lady's arm.

Faith Gartney stood beside her, in trim straw bonnet and shawl, with a
black leather bag upon her arm.

"Auntie! I've come to make you a tiny little visit! Till day after
to-morrow."

"Faith Gartney! However came you here? And in such a fashion, too,
without a word of warning, like--an angel from Heaven!"

"I came up in the cars, auntie! I felt just like it! Will you keep me?"

"Glory! Glory McWhirk!" Like the good Vicar of Wakefield, Aunt Henderson
liked often to give the whole name; and calling, she disappeared round
the corner of the stoop, without ever a word of more assured welcome.

"Put on the teapot again, and make a slice of toast." The good lady's
voice, going on with further directions, was lost in the intricate
threading of the inner maze of the singular old dwelling, and Faith
followed her as far as the first apartment, where she set down her bag
and removed her bonnet.

It was a quaint, dim room, overbrowed and gloomed by the roofed
projection of the stoop; low-ceiled, high-wainscoted and paneled. All in
oak, of the natural color, deepened and glossed by time and wear. The
heavy beams that supported the floor above were undisguised, and left
the ceiling in panels also, as it were, between. In these highest
places, a man six feet tall could hardly have stood without bending. He
certainly would not, whether he could or no. Even Aunt Faith, with her
five feet, six-and-a-half, dropped a little of her dignity, habitually,
when she entered. But then, as she said, "A hen always bobs her head
when she comes in at a barn door." Between the windows stood an old,
old-fashioned secretary, that filled up from floor to ceiling; and over
the fireplace a mirror of equally antique date tilted forward from the
wall. Opposite the secretary, a plain mahogany table; and eight
high-backed, claw-footed chairs ranged stiffly around the room.

Aunt Henderson was proud of her old ways, her old furniture, and her
house, that was older than all.

Some far back ancestor and early settler had built it--the beginning of
it--before Kinnicutt had even become a town; and--rare exception to the
changes elsewhere--generation after generation of the same name and line
had inhabited it until now. Aunt Faith, exultingly, told each curious
visitor that it had been built precisely two hundred and ten years. Out
in the back kitchen, or lean-to, was hung to a rafter the identical gun
with which the "old settler" had ranged the forest that stretched then
from the very door; and higher up, across a frame contrived for it, was
the "wooden saddle" fabricated for the back of the placid, slow-moving
ox, in the time when horses were as yet rare in the new country, and
used with pillions, to transport I can't definitely say how many of the
family to "meeting."

Between these--the best room and the out-kitchen--the labyrinth of
sitting room, bedrooms, kitchen proper, milk room, and pantry,
partitioned off, or added on, many of them since the primary date of the
main structure, would defy the pencil of modern architect.

In one of these irregularly clustered apartments that opened out on
different aspects, unexpectedly, from their conglomerate center, Faith
sat, some fifteen minutes after her entrance into the house, at a little
round table between two corner windows that looked northwest and
southwest, and together took in the full radiance of the evening sky.

Opposite sat her aunt, taking care of her as regarded tea, toast, and
plain country loaf cake, and watching somewhat curiously, also, her
face.

Faith's face had changed a little since Aunt Henderson had seen her
last. It was not the careless girl's face she had known. There was a
thought in it now. A thought that seemed to go quite out from, and
forget the self from which it came.

Aunt Henderson wondered greatly what sudden whim or inward purpose had
brought her grandniece hither.

When Faith absolutely declined any more tea or cake, Miss Henderson's
tap on the table leaf brought in Glory McWhirk.

A tall, well-grown girl of eighteen was Glory, now--quite another Glory
than had lightened, long ago, the dull little house in Budd Street, and
filled it with her bright, untutored dreams. The luminous tresses had
had their way since then; that is, with certain comfortable bounds
prescribed; and rippled themselves backward from a clear, contented
face, into the net that held them tidily.

Faith looked up, and remembered the poor office girl of three years
since, half clad and hopeless, with a secret amaze at what "Aunt Faith
had made of her."

"You may give me some water, Glory," said Miss Henderson.

Glory brought the pitcher, and poured into the tumbler, and gazed at
Faith's pretty face, and the dark-brown glossy rolls that framed it,
until the water fairly ran over the table.

"There! there! Why, Glory, what are you thinking of?" cried Miss
Henderson.

Glory was thinking her old thoughts--wakened always by all that was
beautiful and _beyond_.

She came suddenly to herself, however, and darted off, with her face as
bright a crimson as her hair was golden; flashing up so, as she did most
easily, into as veritable a Glory as ever was. Never had baby been more
aptly or prophetically named.

Coming back, towel in hand, to stop the freshet she had set flowing, she
dared not give another glance across the table; but went busily and
deftly to work, clearing it of all that should be cleared, that she
might make her shy way off again before she should be betrayed into
other unwonted blundering.

"And now, Faith Gartney, tell me all about it! What sent you here?"

"Nothing. Nobody. I came, aunt. I wanted to see the place, and you."

The rough eyebrows were bent keenly across the table.

"Hum!" breathed Aunt Henderson.

There was small interior sympathy between her ideas and those that
governed the usual course of affairs in Hickory Street. Fond of her
nephew and his family, after her fashion, notwithstanding Faith's old
rebellion, and all other differences, she certainly was; but they went
their way, and she hers. She felt pretty sure theirs would sooner or
later come to a turning; and when that should happen, whether she should
meet them round the corner, or not, would depend. Her path would need to
bend a little, and theirs to make a pretty sharp angle, first.

But here was Faith cutting across lots to come to her! Aunt Henderson
put away her loaf cake in the cupboard, set back her chair against the
wall in its invariable position of disuse, and departed to the milk room
and kitchen for her evening duty and oversight.

Glory's hands were busy in the bread bowl, and her brain kneading its
secret thoughts that no one knew or intermeddled with.

Faith sat at the open window of the little tea room, and watched the
young moon's golden horn go down behind the earth rim among the purple,
like a flamy flower bud floating over, and so lost.

And the three lives gathered in to themselves, separately, whatsoever
the hour brought to each.

At nine o'clock Aunt Faith came in, took down the great leather-bound
Bible from the corner shelf, and laid it on the table. Glory appeared,
and seated herself beside the door.

For a few moments, the three lives met in the One Great Life that
overarches and includes humanity. Miss Henderson read from the sixth
chapter of St. John.

They were fed with the five thousand.




CHAPTER XII.

A RECONNOISSANCE.

"Then said his Lordship, 'Well God mend all!' 'Nay, Donald, we must
help him to mend it,' said the other."--Quoted by CARLYLE.

"Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God's work in
simplicity and singleness of heart!"--MISS NIGHTINGALE.


"Auntie," said Faith, next morning, when, after some exploring, she had
discovered Miss Henderson in a little room, the very counterpart of the
one she had had her tea in the night before, only that this opened to
the southeast, and hailed the morning sun. "Auntie, will you go over
with me to the Cross Corners house, after breakfast? It's empty, isn't
it?"

"Yes, it's empty. But it's no great show of a house. What do you want to
see it for?"

"Why, it used to be so pretty, there. I'd like just to go into it. Have
you heard of anybody's wanting it yet?"

"No; and I guess nobody's likely to, for one while. Folks don't make
many changes, out here."

"What a bright little breakfast room this is, auntie! And how grand you
are to have a room for every meal!"

"It ain't for the grandeur of it. But I always did like to follow the
sun round. For the most part of the year, at any rate. And this is just
as near the kitchen as the other. Besides, I kind of hate to shut up any
of the rooms, altogether. They were all wanted, once; and now I'm all
alone in 'em."

For Miss Henderson, this was a great opening of the heart. But she
didn't go on to say that the little west room had been her young
brother's, who long ago, when he was just ready for his Master's work in
this world, had been called up higher; and that her evening rest was
sweeter, and her evening reading holier for being holden there; or that
here, in the sunny morning hours, her life seemed almost to roll back
its load of many years, and to set her down beside her mother's knee,
and beneath her mother's gentle tutelage, once more; that on the little
"light stand" in the corner by the fireplace stood the selfsame basket
that had been her mother's then--just where she had kept it, too, when
it was running over with little frocks and stockings that were always
waiting finishing or mending--and now held only the plain gray knitting
work and the bit of sewing that Aunt Faith might have in hand.

A small, square table stood now in the middle of the floor, with a fresh
brown linen breakfast cloth upon it; and Glory, neat and fresh, also,
with her brown spotted calico dress and apron of the same, came in
smiling like a very goddess of peace and plenty, with the steaming
coffeepot in one hand, and the plate of fine, white rolls in the other.
The yellow print of butter and some rounds from a brown loaf were
already on the table. Glory brought in, presently, the last addition to
the meal--six eggs, laid yesterday, the water of their boiling just
dried off, and modestly took her own seat at the lower end of the board.

Aunt Faith, living alone, kept to the kindly old country fashion of
admitting her handmaid to the table with herself. "Why not?" she would
say. "In the first place, why should we keep the table about, half an
hour longer than we need? And I suppose hot cakes and coffee are as much
nicer than cold, for one body as another. Then where's the sense? We
take Bible meat together. Must we be more dainty about 'meat that
perisheth'?" So her argument climbed up from its lower reason to its
climax.

Glory had little of the Irish now about her but her name. And all that
she retained visibly of the Roman faith she had been born to, was her
little rosary of colored shells, strung as beads, that had been blessed
by the Pope.

Miss Henderson had trained and fed her in her own ways, and with such
food as she partook herself, physically and spiritually. Glory sat,
every Sunday, in the corner pew of the village church, by her mistress's
side. And this church-going being nearly all that she had ever had, she
took in the nutriment that was given her, to a soul that recognized it,
and never troubled itself with questions as to one truth differing from
another, or no. Indeed, no single form or theory could have contained
the "credo" of her simple, yet complex, thought. The old Catholic
reverence clung about her still, that had come with her all the way from
her infancy, when her mother and grandmother had taught her the prayers
of their Church; and across the long interval of ignorance and neglect
flung a sort of cathedral light over what she felt was holy now.

Rescued from her dim and servile city life--brought out into the light
and beauty she had mutely longed for--feeling care and kindliness about
her for the long-time harshness and oppression she had borne--she was
like a spirit newly entered into heaven, that needs no priestly
ministration any more. Every breath drew in a life and teaching purer
than human words.

And then the words she _did_ hear were Divine. Miss Henderson did no
preaching--scarcely any lip teaching, however brief. She broke the bread
of life God gave her, as she cut her daily loaf and shared it--letting
each soul, God helping, digest it for itself.

Glory got hold of some old theology, too, that she could but
fragmentarily understand but that mingled itself--as all we gather does
mingle, not uselessly--with her growth. She found old books among Miss
Henderson's stores, that she read and mused on. She trembled at the
warnings, and reposed in the holy comforts of Doddridge's "Rise and
Progress," and Baxter's "Saint's Rest." She traveled to the Holy City,
above all, with Bunyan's Pilgrim. And then, Sunday after Sunday, she
heard the simple Christian preaching of an old and simple Christian man.
Not terrible--but earnest; not mystical--but high; not lax--but liberal;
and this fused and tempered all.

So "things had happened" for Glory. So God had cared for this, His
child. So, according to His own Will--not any human plan or forcing--
she grew.

Aunt Faith washed up the breakfast cups, dusted and "set to rights" in
the rooms where, to the young Faith's eyes, there seemed such order
already as could not be righted, made up a nice little pudding for
dinner, and then, taking down her shawl and silk hood, and putting on
her overshoes, announced herself ready for Cross Corners.

"Though it's all cross corners to me, child, sure enough. I suppose it's
none of my business, but I can't think what you're up to."

"Not up to any great height, yet, auntie. But I'm growing," said Faith,
merrily, and with meaning somewhat beyond the letter.

They went out at the back door, which opened on a little footpath down
the sudden green slope behind, and stretched across the field,
diagonally, to a bar place and stile at the opposite corner. Here the
roads from five different directions met and crossed, which gave the
locality its name.

Opposite the stile at which they came out, across the shady lane that
wound down from the Old Road whereon Miss Henderson's mansion faced, a
gateway in a white paling that ran round and fenced in a grassy door
yard, overhung with pendent branches of elms and stouter canopy of
chestnuts, let them in upon the little "Cross Corners Farm."

"Oh, Aunt Faith! It's just as lovely as ever! I remember that path up
the hill, among the trees, so well! When I was a little bit of a girl,
and nurse and I came out to stay with you. I had my 'fairy house' there.
I'd like to go over this minute, only that we shan't have time. How
shall we get in? Where is the key?"

"It's in my pocket. But it mystifies me, what you want there."

"I want to look out of all the windows, auntie, to begin with."

Aunt Faith's mystification was not lessened.

The front door opened on a small, square hall, with doors to right and
left. The room on the left, spite of the bare floor and fireless
hearth, was warm with the spring sunshine that came pouring in at the
south windows. Beyond this, embracing the corner of the house
rectangularly, projected an equally sunny and cheery kitchen; at the
right of which, communicating with both apartments, was divided off a
tiny tea and breakfast room. So Faith decided, though it had very likely
been a bedroom.

From the entrance hall at the right opened a room larger than either of
the others--so large that the floor above afforded two bedrooms over
it--and having, besides its windows south and east, a door in the
farther corner beyond the chimney, that gave out directly upon the
grassy slope, and looked up the path among the trees that crossed the
ridge.

Faith drew the bolt and opened it, expecting to find a closet or a
passage somewhither. She fairly started back with surprise and delight.
And then seated herself plump upon the threshold, and went into a
midsummer dream.

"Oh, auntie!" she cried, at her waking, presently, "was ever anything so
perfect? To think of being let out so! Right from a regular, proper
parlor, into the woods!"

"Do you mean to go upstairs?" inquired Miss Henderson, with a vague
amaze in her look that seemed to question whether her niece had not
possibly been "let out" from her "regular and proper" wits!

Whereupon Faith scrambled up from her seat upon the sill, and hurried
off to investigate above.

Miss Henderson closed the door, pushed the bolt, and followed quietly
after.

It was a funny little pantomime that Faith enacted then, for the further
bewilderment of the staid old lady.

Darting from one chamber to another, with an inexplicable look of
business and consideration in her face, that contrasted comically with
her quick movements and her general air of glee, she would take her
stand in the middle of each one in turn, and wheeling round to get a
swift panoramic view of outlook and capabilities, would end by a
succession of mysterious and apparently satisfied little nods, as if at
each pause some point of plan or arrangement had settled itself in her
mind.

"Aunt Faith!" cried she, suddenly, as she came out upon the landing when
she had peeped into the last corner, and found Miss Henderson on the
point of making her descent--"what sort of a thing do you think it would
be for us to come here and live?"

Aunt Faith sat down now as suddenly, in her turn, on the stairhead.
Recovering, so, from her momentary and utter astonishment, and taking
in, during that instant of repose, the full drift of the question
propounded, she rose from her involuntarily assumed position, and
continued her way down--answering, without so much as turning her head,
"It would be just the most sensible thing that Henderson Gartney ever
did in his life!"

What made Faithie a bit sober, all at once, when the key was turned, and
they passed on, out under the elms, into the lane again?

Did you ever project a very wise and important scheme, that involves a
little self-sacrifice, which, by a determined looking at the bright side
of the subject, you had managed tolerably to ignore; and then, by the
instant and unhesitating acquiescence of some one to whose judgment you
submitted it, find yourself suddenly wheeled about in your own mind to
the standpoint whence you discerned only the difficulty again?

"There's one thing, Aunt Faith," said she, as they slowly walked up the
field path; "I couldn't go to school any more."

Faith had discontinued her regular attendance since the recommencement
for the year, but had gone in for a few hours on "French and German
days."

"There's another thing," said Aunt Faith. "I don't believe your father
can afford to send you any more. You're eighteen, ain't you?"

"I shall be, this summer."

"Time for you to leave off school. Bring your books and things along
with you. You'll have chance enough to study."

Faith hadn't thought much of herself before. But when she found her aunt
didn't apparently think of her at all, she began to realize keenly all
that she must silently give up.

"But it's a good deal of help, auntie, to study with other people. And
then--we shouldn't have any society out here. I don't mean for the sake
of parties, and going about. But for the improvement of it. I shouldn't
like to be shut out from cultivated people."

"Faith Gartney!" exclaimed Miss Henderson, facing about in the narrow
footway, "don't you go to being fine and transcendental! If there's one
word I despise more than another, in the way folks use it nowadays--it's
'Culture'! As if God didn't know how to make souls grow! You just take
root where He puts you, and go to work, and live! He'll take care of the
cultivating! If He means you to turn out a rose, or an oak tree, you'll
come to it. And pig-weed's pig-weed, no matter where it starts up!"

"Aunt Faith!" replied the child, humbly and earnestly, "I believe that's
true! And I believe I want the country to grow in! But the thing will
be," she added, a little doubtfully, "to persuade father."

"Doesn't he want to come, then? Whose plan is it, pray?" asked Miss
Henderson, stopping short again, just as she had resumed her walk, in a
fresh surprise.

"Nobody's but mine, yet, auntie! I haven't asked him, but I thought I'd
come and look."

Miss Henderson took her by the arm, and looked steadfastly in her dark,
earnest eyes.

"You're something, sure enough!" said she, with a sharp tenderness.

Faith didn't know precisely what she meant, except that she seemed to
mean approval. And at the one word of appreciation, all difficulty and
self-sacrifice vanished out of her sight, and everything brightened to
her thought, again, till her thought brightened out into a smile.

"What a skyful of lovely white clouds!" she said, looking up to the
pure, fleecy folds that were flittering over the blue. "We can't see
that in Mishaumok!"

"She's just heavenly!" said Glory to herself, standing at the back door,
and gazing with a rapturous admiration at Faith's upturned face. "And
the dinner's all ready, and I'm thankful, and more, that the custard's
baked so beautiful!"




CHAPTER XIII.

DEVELOPMENT.

"Sits the wind in that corner?"
                  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

"For courage mounteth with occasion."
                               KING JOHN.


The lassitude that comes with spring had told upon Mr. Gartney. He had
dyspepsia, too; and now and then came home early from the counting room
with a headache that sent him to his bed. Dr. Gracie dropped in,
friendly-wise, of an evening--said little that was strictly
professional--but held his hand a second longer, perhaps, than he would
have done for a mere greeting, and looked rather scrutinizingly at him
when Mr. Gartney's eyes were turned another way. Frequently he made some
slight suggestion of a journey, or other summer change.

"You must urge it, if you can, Mrs. Gartney," he said, privately, to the
wife. "I don't quite like his looks. Get him away from business, at
_almost any_ sacrifice," he came to add, at last.

"At _every_ sacrifice?" asked Mrs. Gartney, anxious and perplexed.
"Business is nearly all, you know."

"Life is more--reason is more," answered the doctor, gravely.

And the wife went about her daily task with a secret heaviness at her
heart.

"Father," said Faith, one evening, after she had read to him the paper
while he lay resting upon the sofa, "if you had money enough to live on,
how long would it take you to wind up your business?"

"It's pretty nearly wound up now! But what's the use of asking such a
question?"

"Because," said Faith, timidly, "I've got a little plan in my head, if
you'll only listen to it."

"Well, Faithie, I'll listen. What is it?"

And then Faith spoke it all out, at once.

"That you should give up all your business, father, and let this house,
and go to Cross Corners, and live at the farm."

Mr. Gartney started to his elbow. But a sudden pain that leaped in his
temples sent him back again. For a minute or so, he did not speak at
all. Then he said:

"Do you know what you are talking of, daughter?"

"Yes, father; I've been thinking it over a good while--since the night
we wrote down these things."

And she drew from her pocket the memorandum of stocks and dividends.

"You see you have six hundred and fifty dollars a year from these, and
this house would be six hundred more, and mother says she can manage on
that, in the country, if I will help her."

Mr. Gartney shaded his eyes with his hand. Not wholly, perhaps, to
shield them from the light.

"You're a good girl, Faithie," said he, presently; and there was
assuredly a little tremble in his voice.

"And so, you and your mother have talked it over, together?"

"Yes; often, lately. And she said I had better ask you myself, if I
wished it. She is perfectly willing. She thinks it would be good."

"Faithie," said her father, "you make me feel, more than ever, how much
I _ought_ to do for you!"

"You ought to get well and strong, father--that is all!" replied Faith,
with a quiver in her own voice.

Mr. Gartney sighed.

"I'm no more than a mere useless block of wood!"

"We shall just have to set you up, and make an idol of you, then!" cried
Faith, cheerily, with tears on her eyelashes, that she winked off.

There had been a ring at the bell while they were speaking; and now Mrs.
Gartney entered, followed by Dr. Gracie.

"Well, Miss Faith," said the doctor, after the usual greetings, and a
prolonged look at Mr. Gartney's flushed face, "what have you done to
your father?"

"I've been reading the paper," answered Faith, quietly, "and talking a
little."

"Mother!" said Mr. Gartney, catching his wife's hand, as she came round
to find a seat near him, "are you really in the plot, too?"

"I'm glad there is a plot," said the doctor, quickly, glancing round
with a keen inquiry. "It's time!"

"Wait till you hear it," said Mr. Gartney. "Are you in a hurry to lose
your patient?"

"Depends upon _how_!" replied the doctor, touching the truth in a jest.

"This is how. Here's a little jade who has the conceit and audacity to
propose to me to wind up my business (as if she understood the whole
process!), and let my house, and go to my farm at Cross Corners. What do
you think of that?"

"I think it would be the most sensible thing you ever did in your life!"

"Just exactly what Aunt Henderson said!" cried Faith, exultant.

"Aunt Faith, too! The conspiracy thickens! How long has all this been
discussing?" continued Mr. Gartney, fairly roused, and springing,
despite the doctor's request, to a sitting position, throwing off, as he
did so, the afghan Faith had laid over his feet.

"There hasn't been much discussion," said Faith. "Only when I went out
to Kinnicutt I got auntie to show me the house; and I asked her how she
thought it would be if we were to do such a thing, and she said just
what Dr. Gracie has said now. And, father, you _don't_ know how
beautiful it is there!"

"So you really want to go? and it isn't drumsticks?" queried the doctor,
turning round to Faith.

"Some drumsticks are very nice," said Faith.

"Gartney!" said Dr. Gracie, "you'd better mind what this girl of yours
says. She's worth attending to."

The wedge had been entered, and Faith's hand had driven it.

The plan was taken into consideration. Of course, such a change could
not be made without some pondering; but when almost the continual
thought of a family is concentrated upon a single subject, a good deal
of pondering and deciding can be done in three weeks. At the end of that
time an advertisement appeared in the leading Mishaumok papers, offering
the house in Hickory Street to be let; and Mrs. Gartney and Faith were
busy packing boxes to go to Kinnicutt.

Only a passing shade had been flung on the project which seemed to
brighten into sunshine, otherwise, the more they looked at it, when Mrs.
Gartney suddenly said, after a long "talking over," the second evening
after the proposal had been first broached:

"But what will Saidie say?"

Now Saidie--whom before it has been unnecessary to mention--was Faith's
elder sister, traveling at this moment in Europe, with a wealthy elder
sister of Mrs. Gartney.

"I never thought of Saidie," cried Faith.

Saidie was pretty sure not to like Kinnicutt. A young lady, educated at
a fashionable New York school--petted by an aunt who found nobody else
to pet, and who had money enough to have petted a whole asylum of
orphans--who had shone in London and Paris for two seasons past--was not
exceedingly likely to discover all the possible delights that Faith had
done, under the elms and chestnuts at Cross Corners.

But this could make no practical difference.

"She wouldn't like Hickory Street any better," said Faith, "if we
couldn't have parties or new furniture any more. And she's only a
visitor, at the best. Aunt Etherege will be sure to have her in New
York, or traveling about, ten months out of twelve. She can come to us
in June and October. I guess she'll like strawberries and cream,
and--whatever comes at the other season, besides red leaves."

Now this was kind, sisterly consideration of Faith, however little so it
seems, set down. It was very certain that no more acceptable provision
could be made for Saidie Gartney in the family plan, than to leave her
out, except where the strawberries and cream were concerned. In return,
she wrote gay, entertaining letters home to her mother and young sister,
and sent pretty French, or Florentine, or Roman ornaments for them to
wear. Some persons are content to go through life with such exchange of
sympathies as this.

By and by, Faith being in her own room, took out from her letter box the
last missive from abroad. There was something in this which vexed Faith,
and yet stirred her a little, obscurely.

All things are fair in love, war, and--story books! So, though she would
never have shown the words to you or me, we will peep over her shoulder,
and share them, "_en rapport_."

"And Paul Rushleigh, it seems, is as much as ever in Hickory Street!
Well--my little Faithie might make a far worse '_parti_' than that! Tell
papa I think he may be satisfied there!"

Faith would have cut off her little finger, rather than have had her
father dream that such a thing had been put into her head! But
unfortunately it was there, now, and could not be helped. She could
only--sitting there in her chamber window with the blood tingling to the
hair upon her temples, as if from every neighboring window of the
clustering houses about her, eyes could overlook and read what she was
reading now--"wish that Saidie would not write such things as that!"

For all that, it was one pleasant thing Faith would have to lose in
leaving Mishaumok. It was very agreeable to have him dropping in, with
his gay college gossip; and to dance the "German" with the nicest
partner in the Monday class; and to carry the flowers he so often sent
her. Had she done things greater than she knew in shutting her eyes
resolutely to all her city associations and enjoyments, and urging, for
her father's sake, this exodus in the desert?

Only that means were actually wanting to continue on as they were, and
that health must at any rate be first striven for as a condition to the
future enlargement of means, her father and mother, in their thought for
what their child hardly considered for herself, would surely have been
more difficult to persuade. They hoped that a summer's rest might enable
Mr. Gartney to undertake again some sort of lucrative business, after
business should have revived from its present prostration; and that a
year or two, perhaps, of economizing in the country, might make it
possible for them to return, if they chose, to the house in Hickory
Street.

There were leave takings to be gone through--questions to be answered,
and reasons to be given; for Mrs. Gartney, the polite wishes of her
visiting friends that "Mr. Gartney's health might allow them to return
to the city in the winter," with the wonder, unexpressed, whether this
were to be a final breakdown of the family, or not; and for Faith, the
horror and extravagant lamentations of her young _coterie_, at her
coming occultation--or setting, rather, out of their sky.

Paul Rushleigh demanded eagerly if there weren't any sober old minister
out there, with whom he might be rusticated for his next college prank.

Everybody promised to come as far as Kinnicutt "some time" to see them;
the good-bys were all said at last; the city cook had departed, and a
woman had been taken in her place who "had no objections to the country";
and on one of the last bright days of May they skimmed, steam-sped, over
the intervening country between the brick-and-stone-encrusted hills of
Mishaumok and the fair meadow reaches of Kinnicutt; and so disappeared
out of the places that had known them so long, and could yet, alas! do
so exceedingly well without them.

By the first of June nobody in the great city remembered, or remembered
very seriously to regard, the little gap that had been made in its
midst.




CHAPTER XIV.

A DRIVE WITH THE DOCTOR.

"And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays."
                                          LOWELL.

"All lives have their prose translation as well as their ideal
meaning."--CHARLES AUCHESTER.


But Kinnicutt opened wider to receive them than Mishaumok had to let
them go.

If Mr. Gartney's invalidism had to be pleaded to get away with dignity,
it was even more needed to shield with anything of quietness their
entrance into the new sphere they had chosen.

Faith, with her young adaptability, found great fund of entertainment in
the new social developments that unfolded themselves at Cross Corners.

All sorts of quaint vehicles drove up under the elms in the afternoon
visiting hours, day after day--hitched horses, and unladed passengers.
Both doctors and their wives came promptly, of course; the "old doctor"
from the village, and the "young doctor" from "over at Lakeside." Quiet
Mrs. Holland walked in at the twilight, by herself, one day, to explain
that her husband, the minister, was too unwell to visit, and to say her
pleasant, unpretentious words of welcome. Squire Leatherbee's daughters
made themselves fine in lilac silks and green Estella shawls, to offer
acquaintance to the new "city people." Aunt Faith came over, once or
twice a week, at times when "nobody else would be round under foot," and
always with some dainty offering from dairy, garden, or kitchen. At
other hours, Glory was fain to seize all opportunity of errands that
Miss Henderson could not do, and irradiate the kitchen, lingeringly,
until she herself might be more ecstatically irradiated with a glance
and smile from Miss Faith.

There was need enough of Aunt Faith's ministrations during these first,
few, unsettled weeks. The young woman who "had no objections to the
country," objected no more to these pleasant country fashions of
neighborly kindness. She had reason. Aunt Faith's "thirds bread," or
crisp "vanity cakes," or "velvet creams," were no sooner disposed of
than there surely came a starvation interval of sour biscuits, heavy
gingerbread, and tough pie crust, and dinners feebly cooked, with no
attempt at desserts, at all.

This was gloomy. This was the first trial of their country life.
Plainly, this cook was no cook. Mr. Gartney's dyspepsia must be
considered. Kinnicutt air and June sunshine would not do all the
curative work. The healthy appetite they stimulated must be wholesomely
supplied.

Faith took to the kitchen. To Glory's mute and rapturous delight, she
began to come almost daily up the field path, in her pretty round hat
and morning wrapper, to waylay her aunt in the tidy kitchen at the early
hour when her cookery was sure to be going on, to ask questions and
investigate, and "help a little," and then to go home and repeat the
operation as nearly as she could for their somewhat later dinner.

"Miss McGonegal seems to be improving," observed Mr. Gartney,
complacently, one day, as he partook of a simple, but favorite pudding,
nicely flavored and compounded; "or is this a charity of Aunt
Henderson's?"

"No," replied his wife, "it is home manufacture," and she glanced at
Faith without dropping her tone to a period. Faith shook her head, and
the sentence hung in the air, unfinished.

Mrs. Gartney had not been strong for years. Moreover, she had not a
genius for cooking. That is a real gift, as much as a genius for poetry
or painting. Faith was finding out, suddenly, that she had it. But she
was quite willing that her father should rest in the satisfactory belief
that Miss McGonegal, in whom it never, by any possibility, could be
developed, was improving; and that the good things that found their way
to his table had a paid and permanent origin. He was more comfortable
so, she thought. Meanwhile, they would inquire if the region round about
Kinnicutt might be expected to afford a substitute.

Dr. Wasgatt's wife told Mrs. Gartney of a young American woman who was
staying in the "factory village" beyond Lakeside, and who had asked her
husband if he knew of any place where she could "hire out." Dr. Wasgatt
would be very glad to take her or Miss Faith over there, of a morning,
to see if she would answer.

Faith was very glad to go.

Dr. Wasgatt was the "old doctor." A benign man, as old doctors--when
they don't grow contrariwise, and become unspeakably gruff and
crusty--are apt to be. A benign old doctor, a docile old horse, an
old-fashioned two-wheeled chaise that springs to the motion like a bough
at a bird flitting, and an indescribable June morning wherein to drive
four miles and back--well! Faith couldn't help exulting in her heart
that they wanted a cook.

The way was very lovely toward Lakeside, and across to factory village.
It crossed the capricious windings of Wachaug two or three times within
the distance, and then bore round the Pond Road, which kept its old
traditional cognomen, though the new neighborhood that had grown up at
its farther bend had got a modern name, and the beautiful pond itself
had come to be known with a legitimate dignity as Lake Wachaug.

Graceful birches, with a spring, and a joyous, whispered secret in every
glossy leaf, leaned over the road toward the water; and close down to
its ripples grew wild shrubs and flowers, and lush grass, and lady
bracken, while out over the still depths rested green lily pads, like
floating thrones waiting the fair water queens who, a few weeks hence,
should rise to claim them. Back, behind the birches, reached the fringe
of woodland that melted away, presently, in the sunny pastures, and held
in bush and branch hundreds of little mother birds, brooding in a still
rapture, like separate embodied pulses of the Universal Love, over a
coming life and joy.

Life and joy were everywhere. Faith's heart danced and glowed within
her. She had thought, many a time before, that she was getting somewhat
of the joy of the country, when, after dinner and business were over,
she had come out from Mishaumok, in proper fashionable toilet, with her
father and mother, for an afternoon airing in the city environs. But
here, in the old doctor's "one-hoss shay," and with her round straw hat
and chintz wrapper on, she was finding out what a rapturously different
thing it is to go out into the bountiful morning, and identify oneself
therewith.

She had almost forgotten that she had any other errand when they turned
away from the lake, and took a little side road that wound off from it,
and struck the river again, and brought them at last to the Wachaug
Mills and the little factory settlement around them.

"This is Mrs. Pranker's," said the doctor, stopping at the third door in
a block of factory houses, "and it's a sister-in-law of hers who wants
to 'hire out.' I've a patient in the next row, and if you like, I'll
leave you here a few minutes."

Faith's foot was instantly on the chaise step, and she sprang to the
ground with only an acknowledging touch of the good doctor's hand,
upheld to aid her.

A white-haired boy of three, making gravel puddings in a scalloped tin
dish at the door, scrambled up as she approached, upset his pudding, and
sidled up the steps in a scared fashion, with a finger in his mouth, and
his round gray eyes sending apprehensive peeps at her through the linty
locks.

"Well, tow-head!" ejaculated an energetic female voice within, to an
accompaniment of swashing water, and a scrape of a bucket along the
floor; "what's wanting now? Can't you stay put, nohow?"

An unintelligible jargon of baby chatter followed, which seemed,
however, to have conveyed an idea to the mother's mind, for she
appeared immediately in the passage, drying her wet arms upon her apron.

"Mrs. Pranker?" asked Faith.

"That's my name," replied the woman, as who should say, peremptorily,
"what then?"

"I was told--my mother heard--that a sister of yours was looking for a
place."

"She hain't done much about _lookin'_," was the reply, "but she was
sayin' she didn't know but what she'd hire out for a spell, if anybody
wanted her. She's in the keepin' room. You can come in and speak to her,
if you're a mind to. The kitchen floor's wet. I'm jest a-washin' of it.
You little sperrit!" This to the child, who was amusing himself with the
floor cloth which he had fished out of the bucket, and held up,
dripping, letting a stream of dirty water run down the front of his red
calico frock. "If children ain't the biggest torments! Talk about Job!
His wife had to have more patience than he did, I'll be bound! And
patience ain't any use, either! The more you have, the more you're took
advantage of! I declare and testify, it makes me as cross as sin, jest
to think how good-natured I be!" And with this, she snatched the cloth
from the boy's hands, shook first him and then his frock, to get rid, in
so far as a shake might accomplish it, of original depravity and sandy
soapsuds, and carried him, vociferant, to the door, where she set him
down to the consolation of gravel pudding again.

Meanwhile Faith crossed the sloppy kitchen, on tiptoe, toward an open
door, that revealed a room within.

Here a very fat young woman, with a rather pleasant face, was seated,
sewing, in a rocking-chair.

She did not rise, or move, at Faith's entrance, otherwise than to look
up, composedly, and let fall her arms along those of the chair,
retaining the needle in one hand and her work in the other.

"I came to see," said Faith--obliged to say something to explain her
presence, but secretly appalled at the magnitude of the subject she had
to deal with--"if you wanted a place in a family."

"Take a seat," said the young woman.

Faith availed herself of one, and, doubtful what to say next, waited for
indications from the other party.

"Well--I _was_ calc'latin' to hire out this summer, but I ain't very
partic'ler about it, neither."

"Can you cook?"

"Most kinds. I can't do much fancy cookin'. Guess I can make bread--all
sorts--and roast, and bile, and see to common fixin's, though, as well
as the next one!"

"We like plain country cooking," said Faith, thinking of Aunt
Henderson's delicious, though simple, preparations. "And I suppose you
can make new things if you have direction."

"Well--I'm pretty good at workin' out a resate, too. But then, I ain't
anyways partic'ler 'bout hirin' out, as I said afore."

Faith judged rightly that this was a salvo put in for pride. The Yankee
girl would not appear anxious for a servile situation. All the while the
conversation went on, she sat tilting herself gently back and forth in
the rocking-chair, with a lazy touching of her toes to the floor. Her
very _vis inertiæ_ would not let her stop.

Faith's only question, now, was with herself--how she should get away
again. She had no idea that this huge, indolent creature would be at all
suitable as their servant. And then, her utter want of manners!

"I'll tell my mother what you say," said she, rising.

"What's your mother's name, and where d'ye live?"

"We live at Kinnicutt Cross Corners. My mother is Mrs. Henderson
Gartney."

"'M!"

Faith turned toward the kitchen.

"Look here!" called the stout young woman after her; "you may jest say
if she wants me she can send for me. I don't mind if I try it a spell."

"I didn't ask _your_ name," remarked Faith.

"Oh! my name's Mis' Battis!"

Faith escaped over the wet floor, sprang past the white-haired child at
the doorstep, and was just in time to be put into the chaise by Dr.
Wasgatt, who drove up as she came out. She did not dare trust her voice
to speak within hearing of the house; but when they had come round the
mills again, into the secluded river road, she startled its quietness
and the doctor's composure, with a laugh that rang out clear and
overflowing like the very soul of fun.

"So that's all you've got out of your visit?"

"Yes, that is all," said Faith. "But it's a great deal!" And she laughed
again--such a merry little waterfall of a laugh.

When she reached home, Mrs. Gartney met her at the door.

"Well, Faithie," she cried, somewhat eagerly, "what have you found?"

Faith's eyes danced with merriment.

"I don't know, mother! A--hippopotamus, I think!"

"Won't she do? What do you mean?"

"Why she's as big! I can't tell you how big! And she sat in a
rocking-chair and rocked all the time--and she says her name is Miss
Battis!"

Mrs. Gartney looked rather perplexed than amused.

"But, Faith!--I can't think how she knew--she must have been,
listening--Norah has been so horribly angry! And she's upstairs packing
her things to go right off. How _can_ we be left without a cook?"

"It seems Miss McGonegal means to demonstrate that we can! Perhaps--the
hippopotamus _might_ be trained to domestic service! She said you could
send if you wanted her."

"I don't see anything else to do. Norah won't even stay till morning.
And there isn't a bit of bread in the house. I can't send this
afternoon, though, for your father has driven over to Sedgely about some
celery and tomato plants, and won't be home till tea time."

"I'll make some cream biscuits like Aunt Faith's. And I'll go out into
the garden and find Luther. If he can't carry us through the
Reformation, somehow, he doesn't deserve his name."

Luther was found--thought Jerry Blanchard wouldn't "value lettin' him
have his old horse and shay for an hour." And he wouldn't "be mor'n that
goin'." He could "fetch her, easy enough, if that was all."

Mis' Battis came.

She entered Mrs. Gartney's presence with nonchalance, and "flumped"
incontinently into the easiest and nearest chair.

Mrs. Gartney began with the common preliminary--the name. Mis' Battis
introduced herself as before.

"But your first name?" proceeded the lady.

"My first name was Parthenia Franker. I'm a relic'."

Mrs. Gartney experienced an internal convulsion, but retained her
outward composure.

"I suppose you would quite as lief be called Parthenia?"

"Ruther," replied the relict, laconically.

And Mrs. Parthenia Battis was forthwith installed--_pro tem_.--in the
Cross Corners kitchen.

"She's got considerable gumption," was the opinion Luther volunteered,
of his own previous knowledge--for Mrs. Battis was an old schoolmate and
neighbor--"but she's powerful slow."




CHAPTER XV.

NEW DUTIES.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."--Ecc. 9:10.

"A servant with this clause
  Makes drudgery divine;--
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
  Makes that and the action fine."
                       GEORGE HERBERT.


Mis' Battis's "gumption" was a relief--conjoined, even, as it was, to a
mighty _inertia_--after the experience of Norah McGonegal's utter
incapacity; and her admission, _pro tempore,_ came to be tacitly looked
upon as a permanent adoption, for want of a better alternative. She
continued to seat herself, unabashed, whenever opportunity offered, in
the presence of the family; and invariably did so, when Mrs. Gartney
either sent for, or came to her, to give orders. She always spoke of Mr.
Gartney as "he," addressed her mistress as Miss Gartney, and ignored all
prefix to the gentle name of Faith. Mrs. Gartney at last remedied the
pronominal difficulty by invariably applying all remarks bearing no
other indication, to that other "he" of the household--Luther. Her own
claim to the matronly title she gave up all hope of establishing; for,
if the "relic'" abbreviated her own wifely distinction, how should she
be expected to dignify other people?

As to Faith, her mother ventured one day, sensitively and timidly, to
speak directly to the point.

"My daughter has always been accustomed to be called _Miss_ Faith," she
said, gently, in reply to an observation of Parthenia's, in which the
ungarnished name had twice been used. "It isn't a _very_ important
matter--still, it would be pleasanter to us, and I dare say you won't
mind trying to remember it?"

"'M! No--I ain't partic'ler. Faith ain't a long name, and 'twon't be
much trouble to put a handle on, if that's what you want. It's English
fashion, ain't it?"

Parthenia's coolness enabled Mrs. Gartney to assert, somewhat more
confidently, her own dignity.

"It is a fashion of respect and courtesy, everywhere, I believe."

"'M!" reëjaculated the relict.

Thereafter, Faith was "Miss," with a slight pressure of emphasis upon
the handle.

"Mamma!" cried Hendie, impetuously, one day, as he rushed in from a walk
with his attendant, "I _hate_ Mahala Harris! I wish you'd let me dress
myself, and go to walk alone, and send her off to Jericho!"

"Whereabouts do you suppose Jericho to be?" asked Faith, laughing.

"I don't know. It's where she keeps wishing I was, when she's cross, and
I want anything. I wish she was there!--and I mean to ask papa to send
her!"

"Go and take your hat off, Hendie, and have your hair brushed, and your
hands washed, and then come back in a nice quiet little temper, and
we'll talk about it," said Mrs. Gartney.

"I think," said Faith to her mother, as the boy was heard mounting the
stairs to the nursery, right foot foremost all the way, "that Mahala
doesn't manage Hendie as she ought. She keeps him in a fret. I hear them
in the morning while I am dressing. She seems to talk to him in a
taunting sort of way."

"What can we do?" exclaimed Mrs. Gartney, worriedly. "These changes are
dreadful. We might get some one worse. And then we can't afford to pay
extravagantly. Mahala has been content to take less wages, and I think
she means to be faithful. Perhaps if I make her understand how important
it is, she will try a different manner."

"Only it might be too late to do much good, if Hendie has really got to
dislike her. And--besides--I've been thinking--only, you will say I'm so
full of projects----"

But what the project was, Mrs. Gartney did not hear at once, for just
then Hendie's voice was heard again at the head of the stairs.

"I tell you, mother said I might! I'm going--down--in a nice--little
temper--to ask her--to send you--to Jericho!" Left foot foremost, a drop
between each few syllables, he came stumping, defiantly, down the
stairs, and appeared with all his eager story in his eyes.

"She plagues me, mamma! She tells me to see who'll get dressed first;
and if _she_ does, she says:

  "'The first's the best,
    The second's the same;
  The last's the worst
    Of all the game!'

"And if _I_ get dressed first--all but the buttoning, you know--she says:

  "'The last's the best,
    The second's the same;
  The first's the worst
    Of all the game!'

"And then she keeps telling me 'her little sister never behaved like me.'
I asked her where her little sister was, and she said she'd gone over
Jordan. I'm glad of it! I wish Mahala would go too!"

Mrs. Gartney smiled, and Faith could not help laughing outright.

Hendie burst into a passion of tears.

"Everybody keeps plaguing me! It's too bad!" he cried, with tumultuous
sobs.

Faith checked her laughter instantly. She took the indignant little
fellow on her lap, in despite of some slight, implacable struggle on his
part, and kissed his pouting lips.

"No, indeed, Hendie! We wouldn't plague you for all the world! And you
don't know what I've got for you, just as soon as you're ready for it!"

Hendie took his little knuckles out of his eyes.

"A bunch of great red cherries, as big as your two hands!"

"Where?"

"I'll get them, if you're good. And then you can go out in the front
yard, and eat them, so that you can drop the stones on the grass."

Hendie was soon established on a flat stone under the old chestnut
trees, in a happy oblivion of Mahala's injustice, and her little
sister's perfections.

"I'll tell you, mamma. I've been thinking we need not keep Mahala, if
you don't wish. She has been so used to do nothing but run round after
Hendie, that, really, she isn't much good about the house; and I'll take
Hendie's trundle bed into my room, and there'll be one less chamber to
take care of; and you know we always dust and arrange down here."

"Yes--but the sweeping, Faithie! And the washing! Parthenia never would
get through with it all."

"Well, somebody might come and help wash. And I guess I can sweep."

"But I can't bear to put you to such work, darling! You need your time
for other things."

"I have ever so much time, mother! And, besides, as Aunt Faith says, I
don't believe it makes so very much matter _what_ we do. I was talking
to her, the other day, about doing coarse work, and living a narrow,
common kind of life, and what do you think she said?"

"I can't tell, of course. Something blunt and original."

"We were out in the garden. She pointed to some plants that were coming
up from seeds, that had just two tough, clumsy, coarse leaves. 'What do
you call them?' said auntie. 'Cotyledons, aren't they?' said I. 'I don't
know what they are in botany,' said she; 'but I know the use of 'em.
They'll last a while, and help feed up what's growing inside and
underneath, and by and by they'll drop off, when they're done with, and
you'll see what's been coming of it. Folks can't live the best right
out at first, any more than plants can. I guess we all want some kind
of--cotyledons.'"

Mrs. Gartney's eyes shone with affection, and something that affection
called there, as she looked upon her daughter.

"I guess the cotyledons won't hinder your growing," said she.

And so, in a few days after, Mahala was dismissed, and Faith took upon
herself new duties.

It was a bright, happy face that glanced hither and thither, about the
house, those fair summer mornings; and it wasn't the hands alone that
were busy, as under their dexterous and delicate touch all things
arranged themselves in attractive and graceful order. Thought
straightened and cleared itself, as furniture and books were dusted and
set right; and while the carpet brightened under the broom, something
else brightened and strengthened, also, within.

It is so true, what the author of "Euthanasy" tells us, that exercise of
limb and muscle develops not only themselves, but what is in us as we
work.

"Every stroke of the hammer upon the anvil hardens a little what is at
the time the temper of the smith's mind."

"The toil of the plowman furrows the ground, and so it does his brow
with wrinkles, visibly; and invisibly, but quite as certainly, it
furrows the current of feeling, common with him at his work, into an
almost unchangeable channel."

Faith's life purpose deepened as she did each daily task. She had hold,
already, of the "high and holy work of love" that had been prophesied.

"I am sure of one thing, mother," said she, gayly; "if I don't learn
much that is new, I am bringing old knowledge into play. It's the same
thing, taken hold of at different ends. I've learned to draw straight
lines, and shape pictures; and so there isn't any difficulty in sweeping
a carpet clean, or setting chairs straight. I never shall wonder again
that a woman who never heard of a right angle can't lay a table even."




CHAPTER XVI.

"BLESSED BE YE, POOR."

"And so we yearn, and so we sigh,
  And reach for more than we can see;
And, witless of our folded wings,
  Walk Paradise, unconsciously."


October came, and brought small dividends. The expenses upon the farm
had necessarily been considerable, also, to put things in "good running
order." Mr. Gartney's health, though greatly improved, was not yet so
confidently to be relied on, as to make it advisable for him to think of
any change, as yet, with a view to business. Indeed, there was little
opportunity for business, to tempt him. Everything was flat. Mr. Gartney
must wait. Mrs. Gartney and Faith felt, though they talked of waiting,
that the prospect really before them was that of a careful, obscure
life, upon a very limited income. The house in Mishaumok had stood
vacant all the summer. There was hope, of course, of letting it now, as
the winter season came on, but rents were falling, and people were timid
and discouraged.

October was beautiful at Kinnicutt. And Faith, when she looked out over
the glory of woods and sky, felt rich with the great wealth of the
world, and forgot about economies and privations. She was so glad they
had come here with their altered plans, and had not struggled shabbily
and drearily on in Mishaumok!

It was only when some chance bit of news from the city, or a girlish,
gossipy note from some school friend found its way to Cross Corners,
that she felt, a little keenly, her denials--realized how the world she
had lived in all her life was going on without her.

It was the old plaint that Glory made, in her dark days of
childhood--this feeling of despondency and loss that assailed Faith now
and then--"such lots of good times in the world, and she not in 'em!"

Mrs. Etherege and Saidie were coming home. Gertrude Rushleigh, Saidie's
old intimate, was to be married on the twenty-eighth, and had fixed her
wedding thus for the last of the month, that Miss Gartney might arrive
to keep her promise of long time, by officiating as bridesmaid.

The family eclipse would not overshadow Saidie. She had made her place
in the world now, and with her aunt's aid and countenance, would keep
it. It was quite different with Faith--disappearing, as she had done,
from notice, before ever actually "coming out."

"It was a thousand pities," Aunt Etherege said, when she and Saidie
discussed with Mrs. Gartney, at Cross Corners, the family affairs. "And
things just as they were, too! Why, another year might have settled
matters for her, so that this need never have happened! At any rate, the
child shouldn't be moped up here, all winter!"

Mrs. Etherege had engaged rooms, on her arrival, at the Mishaumok House;
and it seemed to be taken for granted by her, and by Saidie as well,
that this coming home was a mere visit; that Miss Gartney would, of
course, spend the greater part of the winter with her aunt; and that
lady extended also an invitation to Mishaumok for a month--including
the wedding festivities at the Rushleighs'--to Faith.

Faith shook her head. She "knew she couldn't be spared so long."
Secretly, she doubted whether it would be a good plan to go back and get
a peep at things that might send her home discontented and unhappy.

But her mother reasoned otherwise. Faithie must go. "The child mustn't
be moped up." She would get on, somehow, without her. Mothers always
can. So Faith, by a compromise, went for a fortnight. She couldn't quite
resist her newly returned sister.

Besides, a pressing personal invitation had come from Margaret Rushleigh
to Faith herself, with a little private announcement at the end, that
"Paul was refractory, and utterly refused to act as fourth groomsman,
unless Faith Gartney were got to come and stand with him."

Faith tore off the postscript, and might have lit it at her cheeks, but
dropped it, of habit, into the fire; and then the note was at the
disposal of the family.

It was a whirl of wonderful excitement to Faith--that fortnight! So many
people to see, so much to hear, and in the midst of all, the gorgeous
wedding festival!

What wonder if a little dream flitted through her head, as she stood
there, in the marriage group, at Paul Rushleigh's side, and looked about
her on the magnificent fashion, wherein the affection of new relatives
and old friends had made itself tangible; and heard the kindly words of
the elder Mr. Rushleigh to Kate Livingston, who stood with his son
Philip, and whose bridal, it was well known, was to come next? Jewels,
and silver, and gold, are such flashing, concrete evidences of love! And
the courtly condescension of an old and world-honored man to the young
girl whom his son has chosen, is such a winning and distinguishing
thing!

Paul Rushleigh had finished his college course, and was to go abroad
this winter--between the weddings, as he said--for his brother Philip's
was to take place in the coming spring. After that--things were not
quite settled, but something was to be arranged for him meanwhile--he
would have to begin his work in the world; and then--he supposed it
would be time for him to find a helpmate. Marrying was like dying, he
believed; when a family once began to go off there was soon an end of
it!

Blushes were the livery of the evening, and Faith's deeper glow at this
audacious rattle passed unheeded, except, perhaps, as it might be
somewhat willfully interpreted.

There were two or three parties made for the newly married couple in the
week that followed. The week after, Paul Rushleigh, with the bride and
groom, was to sail for Europe. At each of these brilliant entertainments
he constituted himself, as in duty bound, Faith's knight and sworn
attendant; and a superb bouquet for each occasion, the result of the
ransack of successive greenhouses, came punctually, from him, to her
door. For years afterwards--perhaps for all her life--Faith couldn't
smell heliotrope, and geranium, and orange flowers, without floating
back, momentarily, into the dream of those few, enchanted days!

She stayed in Mishaumok a little beyond the limit she had fixed for
herself, to go, with the others, on board the steamer at the time of her
sailing, and see the gay party off. Paul Rushleigh had more significant
words, and another gift of flowers as a farewell.

When she carried these last to her own room, to put them in water, on
her return, something she had not noticed before glittered among their
stems. It was a delicate little ring, of twisted gold, with a
forget-me-not in turquoise and enamel upon the top.

Faith was half pleased, half frightened, and wholly ashamed.

Paul Rushleigh was miles out on the Atlantic. There was no help for it,
she thought. It had been cunningly done.

And so, in the short November days, she went back to Kinnicutt.

The east parlor had to be shut up now, for the winter. The family
gathering place was the sunny little sitting room; and with closed doors
and doubled windows, they began, for the first time, to find that they
were really living in a little bit of a house.

It was very pretty, though, with the rich carpet and the crimson
curtains that had come from Hickory Street, replacing the white muslin
draperies and straw matting of the summer; and the books and vases, and
statuettes and pictures, gathered into so small space, seemed to fill
the room with luxury and beauty.

Faith nestled her little workstand into a nook between the windows.
Hendie's blocks and picture books were stowed in a corner cupboard. Mr.
Gartney's newspapers and pamphlets, as they came, found room in a deep
drawer below; and so, through the wintry drifts and gales, they were
"close hauled" and comfortable.

Faith was happy; yet she thought, now and then, when the whistling wind
broke the stillness of the dark evenings, of light and music elsewhere;
and how, a year ago, there had always been the chance of a visitor or
two to drop in, and while away the hours. Nobody lifted the
old-fashioned knocker, here at Cross Corners.

By day, even, it was scarcely different. Kinnicutt was hibernating. Each
household had drawn into its shell. And the huge drifts, lying defiant
against the fences in the short, ineffectual winter sunlight, held out
little hope of reanimation. Aunt Faith, in her pumpkin hood, and Rob Roy
cloak, and carpet moccasins, came over once in two or three days, and
even occasionally stayed to tea, and helped make up a rubber of whist
for Mr. Gartney's amusement; but, beyond this, they had no social
excitement.

January brought a thaw; and, still further to break the monotony, there
arose a stir and an anxiety in the parish.

Good Mr. Holland, its minister of thirty years, whose health had been
failing for many months, was at last compelled to relinquish the duties
of his pulpit for a time; and a supply was sought with the ultimate
probability of a succession. A new minister came to preach, who was to
fill the pastor's place for the ensuing three months. On his first
Sunday among them, Faith heard a wonderful sermon.

I indicate thus, not the oratory, nor the rhetoric; but the _sermon_, of
which these were the mere vehicle--the word of truth itself--which was
spoken, seemingly, to her very thought.

So also, as certainly, to the long life-thought of one other. Glory
McWhirk sat in Miss Henderson's corner pew, and drank it in, as a soul
athirst.

A man of middle age, one might have said, at first sight--there was,
here and there, a silver gleam in the dark hair and beard; yet a fire
and earnestness of youth in the deep, beautiful eye, and a look in the
face as of life's first flush and glow not lost, but rather merged in
broader light, still climbing to its culmination, belied these tokens,
and made it as if a white frost had fallen in June--rising up before the
crowded village congregation, looked round upon the upturned faces, as
One had looked before who brought the bread of Life to men's eager
asking; and uttered the selfsame simple words.

It was a certain pause and emphasis he made--a slight new rendering of
punctuation--that sent home the force of those words to the people who
heard them, as if it had been for the first time, and fresh from the
lips of the Great Teacher.

       *       *       *       *       *

"'Blessed are the poor: _in spirit_: for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.'

"Herein Christ spoke, not to a class, only, but to the world! A world of
souls, wrestling with the poverty of life!

"In that whole assemblage--that great concourse--that had thronged from
cities and villages to hear His words upon the mountainside--was there,
think you, _one satisfied nature_?

"Friends--are _ye_ satisfied?

       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·

"Or, does every life come to know, at first or at last, how something--a
hope, or a possibility, or the fulfillment of a purpose--has got
dropped out of it, or has even never entered, so that an emptiness
yawns, craving, therein, forever?

"How many souls hunger till they are past their appetite! Go on--down
through the years--needy and waiting, and never find or grasp that which
a sure instinct tells them they were made for?

"This, this is the poverty of life! These are the poor, to whom God's
Gospel was preached in Christ! And to these denied and waiting ones the
first words of Christ's preaching--as I read them--were spoken in
blessing.

"Because, elsewhere, he blesses the meek; elsewhere and presently, he
tells us how the lowly in spirit shall inherit the earth; so, when I
open to this, his earliest uttered benediction upon our race, I read it
with an interpretation that includes all humanity:

"'Blessed, in spirit, are the poor. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·

"What is this Kingdom of Heaven? 'It is within you.' It is that which
you hold, and live in spiritually; the _real_, of which all earthly,
outward being and having are but the show. It is the region wherein
little children 'do always behold the Face of my Father which is in
Heaven.' It is where we are when we shut our eyes and pray in the words
that Christ taught us.

       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·

"What matters, then, where your feet stand, or wherewith your hands are
busy? So that it is the spot where God has put you, and the work He has
given you to do? Your real life is within--hid in God with
Christ--ripening, and strengthening, and waiting, as through the long,
geologic ages of night and incompleteness waited the germs of all that
was to unfold into this actual, green, and bounteous earth!

       ·       ·       ·       ·       ·

"The narrower your daily round, the wider, maybe, the outreach. Isolated
upon a barren mountain peak, you may take in river and lake--forest,
field, and valley. A hundred gardens and harvests lift their bloom and
fullness to your single eye.

"There is a sunlight that contracts the vision; there is a starlight
that enlarges it to take in infinite space.

  "'God sets some souls in shade, alone.
  They have no daylight of their own.
  Only in lives of happier ones
  They see the shine of distant suns.

  "'God knows. Content thee with thy night.
  Thy greater heaven hath grander light,
  To-day is close. The hours are small.
  Thou sit'st afar, and hast them all.

  "'Lose the less joy that doth but blind;
  Reach forth a larger bliss to find.
  To-day is brief: the inclusive spheres
  Rain raptures of a thousand years.'"

Faith could not tell what hymn was sung, or what were the words of the
prayer that followed the sermon. There was a music and an uplifting in
her own soul that made them needless, but for the pause they gave her.

She hardly knew that a notice was read as the people rose before the
benediction, when the minister gave out, as requested, that "the Village
Dorcas Society would meet on Wednesday of the coming week, at Mrs.
Parley Gimp's."

She was made aware that it had fallen upon her ears, though heard
unconsciously, when Serena Gimp caught her by the sleeve in the church
porch.

"Ain't it awful," said she, with a simper and a flutter of importance,
"to have your name called right out so in the pulpit? I declare, if it
hadn't been for seeing the new minister, I wouldn't have come to meeting,
I dreaded it so! Ain't he handsome? He's old, though--thirty-five! He's
broken-hearted, too! Somebody died, or something else, that he was going
to be married to, ever so many years ago; and they say he hasn't hardly
spoken to a lady since. That's so romantic! I don't wonder he preaches
such low-spirited kind of sermons. Only I wish they warn't quite so. I
suppose it's beautiful, and heavenly minded, and all that; but yet I'd
rather hear something a little kind of cheerful. Don't you think so? But
the poetry was elegant--warn't it? I guess it's original, too. They say
he puts things in the _Mishaumok Monthly_. Come Wednesday, won't
you? We shall depend, you know."

To Miss Gimp, the one salient point, amidst the solemnities of the day,
had been that pulpit notice. She had put new strings to her bonnet for
the occasion. Mrs. Gimp, being more immediately and personally affected,
had modestly remained away from church.

Glory McWhirk went straight through the village, home; and out to her
little room in the sunny side of the low, sloping roof. This was her
winter nook. She had a shadier one, looking the other way, for summer.

"I wonder if it's all true!" she cried, silently, in her soul, while she
stood for a minute with bonnet and shawl still on, looking out from her
little window, dreamily, over the dazzle of the snow, even as her
half-blinded thought peered out from its own narrowness into the
infinite splendor of the promise of God--"I wonder if God will ever make
me beautiful! I wonder if I shall ever have a real, great joyfulness,
that isn't a make believe!"

Glory called her fancies so. They followed her still. She lived yet in
an ideal world. The real world--that is, the best good of it--had not
come close enough to her, even in this, her widely amended condition, to
displace the other. Remember--this child of eighteen had missed her
childhood; had known neither father nor mother, sister nor brother.

Don't think her simple, in the pitiful meaning of the word; but she
still enacted, in the midst of her plain, daily life, wonderful dreams
that nobody could have ever suspected; and here, in her solitary
chamber, called up at will creatures of imagination who were to her what
human creatures, alas! had never been. Above all, she had a sister here,
to whom she told all her secrets. This sister's name was Leonora.




CHAPTER XVII.

FROST-WONDERS.

"No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung;
Like some tall palm, the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!"
                                            HEBER.


The thaw continued till the snow was nearly gone. Only the great drifts
against the fences, and the white folds in the rifts of distant
hillsides lingered to tell what had been. Then came a day of warm rain,
that washed away the last fragment of earth's cast-off vesture, and
bathed her pure for the new adornment that was to be laid upon her. At
night, the weather cooled, and the rain changed to a fine, slow mist,
congealing as it fell.

Faith stood next morning by a small round table in the sitting-room
window, and leaned lovingly over her jonquils and hyacinths that were
coming into bloom. Then, drawing the curtain cord to let in the first
sunbeam that should slant from the south upon her bulbs, she gave a
little cry of rapturous astonishment. It was a diamond morning!

Away off, up the lane, and over the meadows, every tree and bush was
hung with twinkling gems that the slight wind swayed against each other
with tiny crashes of faint music, and the sun was just touching with a
level splendor.

After that first, quick cry, Faith stood mute with ecstasy.

"Mother!" said she, breathlessly, at last, as Mrs. Gartney entered,
"look there! have you seen it? Just imagine what the woods must be this
morning! How can we think of buckwheats?"

Sounds and odors betrayed that Mis' Battis and breakfast were in the
little room adjoining.

"There is a thought of something akin to them, isn't there, under all
this splendor? Men must live, and grass and grain must grow."

Mr. Gartney said this, as he came up behind wife and daughter, and laid
a hand on a shoulder of each.

"I know one thing, though," said Faith. "I'll eat the buckwheats, as a
vulgar necessity, and then I'll go over the brook and up in the woods
behind the Pasture Rocks. It'll last, won't it?"

"Not many hours, with this spring balm in the air," replied her father.
"You must make haste. By noon, it will be all a drizzle."

"Will it be quite safe for her to go alone?" asked Mrs. Gartney.

"I'll ask Aunt Faith to let me have Glory. She showed me the walk last
summer. It is fair she should see this, now."

So the morning odds and ends were done up quickly at Cross Corners and
at the Old House, and then Faith and Glory set forth together--the
latter in as sublime a rapture as could consist with mortal cohesion.

The common roadside was an enchanted path. The glittering rime
transfigured the very cart ruts into bars of silver; and every coarse
weed was a fretwork of beauty.

"Bells on their toes" they had, this morning, assuredly; each footfall
made a music on the sod.

Over the slippery bridge--out across a stretch of open meadow, and then
along a track that skirted the border of a sparse growth of trees,
projecting itself like a promontory upon the level land--round its
abrupt angle into a sweep of meadow again, on whose farther verge rose
the Pasture Rocks.

Behind these rocks swelled up gently a slope, half pasture, half
woodland--neither open ground nor forest; but, although clear enough for
comfortable walking, studded pretty closely with trees that often
interlaced their branches overhead, and made great, pillared aisles,
among whose shade, in summer, wound delicious little footpaths that all
came out together, midway up, into--what you shall be told of presently.

Here, among and beyond the rocks, were oaks, and pines, and savins--each
needle-like leaf a shimmering lance--each clustering branch a spray of
gems--and the stout, spreading limbs of the oaks delineating themselves
against the sky above in Gothic frost-work.

Suddenly--before they thought it could be so near--they came up and out
into a broader opening. Between two rocks that made, as it were, a
gateway, and around whose bases were grouped sentinel evergreens, they
came into this wider space, floored with flat rock, the surface of a
hidden ledge, carpeted with crisp mosses in the summer, whose every cup
and hollow held a jewel now--and inclosed with lofty oaks and pines,
while, straight beyond, where the woods shut in again far closer than
below, rose a bold crag, over whose brow hung pendent birches that in
their icy robing drooped like glittering wings of cherubim above an
altar.

All around and underneath, this strange magnificence. Overhead, the
everlasting Blue, that roofed it in with sapphire. In front, the rough,
gigantic shrine.

"It is like a cathedral!" said Faith, solemnly and low.

"See!" whispered Glory, catching her companion hastily by the
arm--"there is the minister!"

A little way beyond them, at the right, out from among the clumps of
evergreen where some other of the little wood walks opened, a figure
advanced without perceiving them. It was Roger Armstrong, the new
minister. He held his hat in his hand. He walked, uncovered, as he would
have into a church, into this forest temple, where God's finger had just
been writing on the walls.

When he turned, slowly, his eye fell on the other two who stood there.
It lighted up with a quick joy of sympathy. He came forward. Faith
bowed. Glory stood back, shyly. Neither party seemed astonished at the
meeting. It was so plain _why_ they came, that if they had wondered at
all, it would have been that the whole village should not be pouring out
hither, also.

Mr. Armstrong led them to the center of the rocky space. "This is the
best point," said he. And then was silent. There was no need of words. A
greatness of thought made itself felt from one to the other.

Only, between still pauses, words came that almost spoke themselves.

"'Eye hath not seen, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive, that which God hath prepared for them that love him.' What a
commentary upon His promise is a glory like this!

"'And they shall all shine like the sun in the kingdom of my Father!'"

Faith stood by the minister's side, and glanced, when he spoke, from the
wonderful beauty before her to a face whose look interpreted it all.
There was something in the very presence of this man that drew others
who approached him into the felt presence of God. Because he stood
therein in the spirit. These are the true apostles whom Christ sends
forth.

Glory could have sobbed with an oppression of reverence, enthusiasm, and
joy.

"It is only a glimpse," said Mr. Armstrong, by and by. "It is going,
already."

A drip--drip--was beginning to be heard.

"You ought to get away from under the trees before the thaw comes fully
on," continued he. "A branch breaks, now and then, and the ice will be
falling constantly. I can show you a more open way than the one you came
by, I think."

And he gave his arm to Faith over the slope that even now was growing
wet and slippery in the sun. Faith touched it with a reverence, and
dropped it again, modestly, when they reached a safer foothold.

Glory kept behind. Mr. Armstrong turned now and then, with a kindly
word, and a thought for her safety. Once he took her hand, and helped
her down a sudden descent in the path, where the water had run over and
made a smooth, dangerous glare.

"I shall call soon to see your father and mother, Miss Gartney," said
he, when they reached the road again beyond the brook, and their ways
home lay in different directions. "This meeting, to-day, has given me
pleasure."

"How?" Faith wondered silently, as she kept on to the Cross Corners. She
had hardly spoken a word. But, then, she might have remembered that the
minister's own words had been few, yet her very speechlessness before
him had come from the deep pleasure that his presence had given to her.
The recognition of souls cares little for words. Faith's soul had been
in her face to-day, as Roger Armstrong had seen it each Sunday, also, in
the sweet, listening look she uplifted before him in the church. He bent
toward this young, pure life, with a joy in its gentle purity; the joy
of an elder over a younger angel in the school of God.

And Glory? she laid up in her own heart a beautiful remembrance of
something she had never known before. Of a near approach to something
great and high, yet gentle and beneficent. Of a kindly, helping touch, a
gracious smile, a glance that spoke straight to the mute aspiration
within her.

The minister had not failed, through all her humbleness and shyness, to
read some syllables of that large, unuttered life of hers that lay
beneath. He whose labor it is to save souls, learns always the insight
that discerns souls.

"I have seen the Winter!" cried Faith, glowing and joyous, as she came
in from her walk.

"It has been a beautiful time!" said Glory to her shadow sister, when
she went to hang away hood and shawl. "It has been a beautiful time--and
I've been really in it--partly!"




CHAPTER XVIII.

OUT IN THE SNOW.

                         "Sydnaein showers
Of sweet discourse, whose powers
Can crown old winter's head with flowers."
                                      CRASHAW.


Winter had not exhausted her repertory, however. She had more wonders to
unfold.

There came a long snowstorm.

"Faithie," said her father, coming in, wrapped up in furs from a visit
to the stable, "put your comfortables on, and we'll go and see the snow.
We'll make tracks, literally, for the hills. There isn't a road fairly
broken between here and Grover's Peak. The snow lies beautifully,
though; and there isn't a breath of wind. It will be a sight to see."

Faith brought, quickly, sontag, jacket, and cloak--hood and veil, and
long, warm snow boots, and in ten minutes was ready, as she averred, for
a sledge ride to Hudson's Bay.

Luther drove the sleigh close to the kitchen door, that Faith might not
have to cross the yard to reach it, and she stepped directly from the
threshold into the warm nest of buffalo robes; while Mis' Battis put a
great stone jug of hot water in beside her feet, asserting that it was
"a real comfortin' thing on a sleigh ride, and that they needn't be
afraid of its leakin', for the cork was druv in as tight as an eye
tooth!"

So, out by the barn, into the road, and away from the village toward the
hills, they went, with the glee of resonant bells and excited
expectation.

A mile, or somewhat more, along the Sedgely turnpike, took them into a
bit of woods that skirted the road on either side, for a considerable
distance. Away in, under the trees, the stillness and the whiteness and
the wonderful multiplication of snow shapes were like enchantment. Each
bush had an attitude and drapery and expression of its own, as if some
weird life had suddenly been spellbound in these depths. Cherubs, and
old women, and tall statue shapes like images of gods, hovered, and
bent, and stood majestic, in a motionless poise. Over all, the bent
boughs made marble and silver arches in shadow and light, and, far down
between, the vistas lengthened endlessly, still crowded with mystic
figures, haunting the long galleries with their awful beauty.

They went on, penetrating a lifeless silence; their horse's feet making
the first prints since early morning in the unbroken smoothness of the
way, and the only sound the gentle tinkle of their own bells, as they
moved pleasantly, but not fleetly, along.

So, up the ascent, where the land lay higher, toward the hills.

"I feel," said Faith, "as if I had been hurried through the Louvre, or
the Vatican, or both, and hadn't half seen anything. Was there ever
anything so strange and beautiful?"

"We shall find more Louvres presently," said her father. "We'll keep the
road round Grover's Peak, and turn off, as we come back, down Garland
Lane."

"That lovely, wild, shady road we took last summer so often, where the
grapevines grow so, all over the trees?"

"Exactly," replied Mr. Gartney. "But you mustn't scream if we thump
about a little, in the drifts up there. It's pretty rough, at the best
of times, and the snow will have filled in the narrow spaces between the
rocks and ridges, like a freshet. Shall you be afraid?"

"Afraid! Oh, no, indeed! It's glorious! I think I should like to go
everywhere!"

"There is a good deal of everywhere in every little distance," said Mr.
Gartney. "People get into cars, and go whizzing across whole States,
often, before they stop to enjoy thoroughly something that is very like
what they might have found within ten miles of home. For my part, I like
microscopic journeying."

"Leaving 'no stone unturned.' So do I," said Faith. "We don't half know
the journey between Kinnicutt and Sedgely yet, I think. And then, too,
they're multiplied, over and over, by all the different seasons, and by
different sorts of weather. Oh, we shan't use them up, in a long while!"

Saidie Gartney had not felt, perhaps, in all her European travel, the
sense of inexhaustible pleasure that Faith had when she said this.

Down under Grover's Peak, with the river on one side, and the
white-robed cedar thickets rising on the other--with the low afternoon
sun glinting across from the frosted roofs of the red mill buildings and
barns and farmhouses to the rocky slope of the Peak.

Then they came round and up again, over a southerly ridge, by beautiful
Garland Lane, that she knew only in its summer look, when the wild grape
festooned itself wantonly from branch to branch, and sometimes, even,
from side to side; and so gave the narrow forest road its name.

Quite into fairyland they had come now, in truth; as if, skirting the
dark peak that shut it off from ordinary espial, they had lighted on a
bypath that led them covertly in. Trailing and climbing vines wore their
draperies lightly; delicate shrubs bowed like veiled shapes in groups
around the bases of tall tree trunks, and slight-stemmed birches
quivered under their canopies of snow. Little birds hopped in and out
under the pure, still shelter, and left their tiny tracks, like magical
hieroglyphs, in the else untrodden paths.

"Lean this way, Faith, and keep steady!" cried Mr. Gartney, as the horse
plunged breast high into a drift, and the sleigh careened toward the
side Faith was on. It was a sharp strain, but they plowed their way
through, and came upon a level again. This by-street was literally
unbroken. No one had traversed it since the beginning of the storm. The
drifts had had it all their own way there, and it involved no little
adventurousness and risk, as Mr. Gartney began to see, to pioneer a
passage through. But the spirit of adventure was upon them both. On all,
I should say; for the strong horse plunged forward, from drift to drift,
as though he delighted in the encounter. Moreover, to turn was
impossible.

Faith laughed, and gave little shrieks, alternately, as they rose
triumphantly from deep, "slumpy" hollows, or pitched headlong into others
again. Thus, struggling, enjoying--just frightened enough, now and then,
to keep up the excitement--they came upon the summit of the ridge. Now
their way lay downward. This began to look really almost perilous. With
careful guiding, however, and skillful balancing--tipping, creaking,
sinking, emerging--they

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