So far as he had spoken, she had answered.
"I want you there, by my side, to help me make a real human home around which other homes may grow. There ought to be a heart in it, and I cannot do it alone. Could you--_will_ you--come? Will you be to me the one woman of the world, and out of your purity and strength help me to help your sisters?"
He had risen and walked the few steps across the distance that was between them. He stopped before her, and bending toward her, held out his hands.
Desire stood up and laid hers in them.
"It must be right. You have come for me. I cannot possibly do otherwise than this."
The deep, gracious, divine fact had a.s.serted itself. A house here, or a house there could not change or bind it. They belonged together. There was a new love in the world, and the world would have to arrange itself around it. Around it and the Will that it was to be wedded to do.
They stood together, hands in hands. Christopher Kirkbright leaned over and laid his lips against her forehead.
He whispered her name, set in other syllables that were only for him to say to her. I shall not say them over on this page to you.
But there is a line in the blessed Scripture that we all know, and G.o.d had fulfilled it to his heart.
Strangely--more strangely than any story can contrive--are the happenings of life put side by side.
As they sat there a little longer in the quiet library, forgetting the late evening hour, because it was morning all at once to them; forgetting Sylvie Argenter and her mother as they were at just this moment in the next room; only remembering them among those whom this new relation and joining of purpose must make surer and safer, not less carefully provided for in the changes that would occur,--the door of the gray parlor opened; a quick step fell along the pa.s.sage, and Sylvie unlatched the library door, and stood in the entrance wide-eyed and pale.
"Desire! Come!"
"Sylvie! _What_, dear?" cried Desire, quickly, as she sprang to meet her, her voice chording responsive to Sylvie"s own, catching in it the indescribable tone that tells so much more than words. She did not need the further revelation of her face to know that something deep and strange had happened.
Sylvie said not a syllable more, but turned and hurried back along the hall.
Desire and Mr. Kirkbright followed her.
Mrs. Argenter was sitting in the deep corner of her broad, low sofa, against the two large pillows.
"A minute ago," said Sylvie, in the same changed voice, that spoke out of a different world from the world of five minutes before, "she was _here_! She gave me her plate to put away on the sideboard, and _now_,--when I turned round,"--
She was _There_.
The plate, with its bits of orange-rind, and an untasted section of the fruit, stood upon the sideboard. The book she had been reading fifteen minutes since lay, with her eye-gla.s.ses inside it, at the page where she had stopped, upon the couch; her left hand had fallen, palm upward, upon the cushioned seat; her life had gone instantly and without a sign, out from her mortal body.
Mrs. Argenter had died of that disease which lets the spirit free like the uncaging of a bird.
Hypertrophy of the heart. The gradual thickening and hardening of those mysterious little gates of life and the walls in which they are set; the slower moving of them on their palpitating hinges, till a moment comes when they open or close for the last time, and in that pause ajar the soul flits out, like some curious, unwary thing, over a threshold it may pa.s.s no more again, forever.
CHAPTER x.x.xII.
EASTER LILIES.
Bright, soft days began to come; days in which windows stood open, and pots of plants were set out on the window-sills; days alternating as in the long, New England spring they always do, with bleak intervals of sharp winds and cold sea-storms; yet giving sweet antic.i.p.ation tenderly, as a mother gives beforehand that which she cannot find in her heart to keep back till the birthday. That is the charm of Nature with us; the motherliness in her that offsets, and breaks through with loving impulse, her rule of rigidness. The year comes slowly to its growth, but she relaxes toward it with a kind of pity, and says, "There, take this! It isn"t time for it, but you needn"t wait for everything till you"re grown up!"
People feel happy, in advance of all their hopes and realizations, on such days; the ripeness of the year, in whatever good it may be making for them, touches them like the soft air that blows up from the south. There is a new look on men"s and women"s faces as you meet them in the street; a New Jerusalem sort of look; the heavens are opened upon them, and the divineness of sunshine flows in through sense and spirit.
Sylvie Argenter was very peaceful. She told Desire that she never would be afraid again in all her life; she _knew_ how things were measured, now. She was "so glad the money had almost all been spent while mother lived; that not a dollar that could buy her a comfort had been kept back."
She was quite content to stay now; at least till Rachel Froke should come; she was busily helping Desire with her wedding outfit.
She was willing to receive from her the fair wages of a seamstress, now that she could freely give her time, and there was no one to accept and use an invalid"s expensive luxuries.
Desire would not have thought it needful that hundreds of extra yards of cambric and linen should be made up for her, simply because she was going to be married, if it had not been that her marriage was to be so especially a beginning of new life and work, in which she did not wish to be crippled by any present care for self.
"I see the sense of it now, so far as concerns quant.i.ty; as for quality, I will have nothing different from what I have always had."
There was no trousseau to exhibit; there were only trunks-full of good plenishing that would last for years.
Sylvie cut out, and parceled. Elise Mokey, and one or two other girls who had had only precarious employment and Committee "relief"
since the fire, had the st.i.tching given them to do; and every tuck and hem was justly paid for. When the work came back from their hands, Sylvie finished and marked delicately.
She had the sunny little room, now, over the gray parlor, adjoining Desire"s own. The white box lay upon a round, damask-covered-stand in the corner, under her mother"s picture painted in the graceful days of the gray silks and llama laces; and around this, drooping and trailing till they touched the little table and veiled the box that held the beautiful secret,--seeming to say, "We know it too, for we are a part,"--wreathed the shining sprays of blossomy fern.
In these sunny days of early spring, Sylvie could not help being happy. The snows were gone now, except in deep, dark places, out of the woods; the ferns and vines and gra.s.ses were alive and eager for a new summer"s grace and fullness; their far-off presence made the air different, already, from the airs of winter.
Yet Rodney Sherrett had kept silence.
All these weeks had gone by, and Miss Euphrasia had had no answer from over the water. Of all the letters that went safely into mail bags, and of all the mail bags that went as they were bound, and of all the white messages that were scattered like doves when those bags were opened,--somehow--it can never be told how,--that particular little white, folded sheet got mishandled, mislaid, or missent, and failed of its errand; and at the time when Miss Euphrasia began to be convinced that it must be so, there came a letter from Mr. Sherrett to herself, written from London, where he had just arrived after a visit to Berlin.
"I have had no family news," he wrote, "of later date than January 20th. Trust all is well. Shall sail from Liverpool on the 9th."
The date of that was March 20th.
The fourteenth of April, Easter Monday, was fixed for Desire Ledwith"s marriage.
Rachel Froke came back on the Friday previous. Desire would have her in time, but not for any fatigues.
The gray parlor was all ready; everything just as it had been before she left it. The ivies had been carefully tended, and the golden and brown canary was singing in his cage. There was nothing to remind of the different life to which, the place had been lent, making its last hours restful and pleasant, or of the death that had stepped so noiselessly and solemnly in.
Desire had formally made over this house to her cousin and co-heiress, Hazel Ripwinkley.
"It must never be left waiting, a mere possible convenience, for anybody," she said. "There must be a real life in it, as long as we can order it so."
The Ripwinkleys were to leave Aspen Street, and come here with Hazel. Miss Craydocke, who never had half room enough in Orchard Street, was to "spill over" from the Bee-hive into the Mile-hill house. "She knew just whom to put there; people who would take care and comfort. Them shouldn"t be any hurt, and there would be lots of help."
There was a widow with three daughters, to begin with; "just as neat as a row of pins;" but who had had less and less to be neat with for seven years past; one of the daughters had just got a situation as compositor, and another as a book-keeper; between them, they could earn twelve hundred dollars a year. The youngest had to stay at home and help her mother do the work, that they might all keep together.
They could pay three hundred dollars for four rooms; but of course they could not get decent ones, in a decent neighborhood, for that.
That was what Bee-hives were for; houses that other people could do without.
Hazel had her wish; it came to pa.s.s that they also should make a bee-hive.
"And whenever I marry," Hazel said, "I hope he won"t be building a town of his own to take me to; for I shall _have_ to bring him here.