Was there ever anybody who handled the bare facts of life so graciously as this Miss Euphrasia? She did it by taking right hold of them, by their honest handles,--as they were meant to be taken hold of.
"You like your home? You haven"t grown tired of being a village girl?" she said, as she and Sylvie sat down on a great flat projecting rock in the shaded walk beside the railroad track. They had just missed one car; there would not be another for twenty minutes.
"O, yes. No; I haven"t got tired; but I don"t feel as if I had quite _been it_, yet. I don"t think I am exactly that, or anything, now.
That is the worst of it. People don"t understand. They won"t take us in,--all of them. It"s just as hard to get into a village, if you weren"t born in it, as it is to get into upper-ten-dom. Mrs.
Knoxwell called, and looked round all the time with her nose up in a sort of a way,--well, it _was_ just like a dog sniffing round for something. And she went off and told about mother"s poor, dear, old, black silk dress, that I made into a cool skirt and jacket for her.
"Some folks must be always set up in silk, she _sposed_." Everybody isn"t like the Ingrahams."
"No garment of _this_ life fits exactly. There was only one seamless robe. But we mustn"t take thought for raiment, you see. The body is more. And at last,--somehow, sometime,--we shall be all clothed perfectly--with his righteousness."
This was too swift and light in its spiritual touching and linking for Sylvie to follow. She had to ask, as the disciples did, for a meaning.
"It isn"t clothes that I am thinking of, or that trouble me; or any outside. And I know it isn"t actual clothes you mean. Please tell me plainer, Miss Euphrasia."
"I mean that I think He meant by "raiment," not _clothes_ so much as _life_; what we put on or have put on to us; what each soul wears and moves in, to feel itself by and to be manifest; history, circ.u.mstance. "Raiment,"--"garment,"--the words always stand for this, beyond their temporary and technical sense. "He laid aside his _garment_,"--He gave up his own life that He might have been living,--to come and wash our feet!"
"And the people cast their garments before Him, when He rode into Jerusalem," Sylvie said presently.
"Yes; that is the way He must come into his kingdom, and lead us with Him. We are to give up our old ways, and the selfish things we lived in once, and not think about our own raiment any more. He will give it to us, as He gives it to the lilies; and the glory of it will be something that we could not in any way spin for our selves.
And by and by it will come to be full and right, all through; we shall be clothed with his righteousness. What is righteousness but rightness?"
"I thought it only meant goodness. That we hadn"t any goodness of our own; that we mustn"t trust in it, you know?"
"But that his, by faith, is to cover us? That is the old letter-doctrine, which men didn"t look through to see how graciously true it is, and how it gives them all things. For it _is things_ they want, all the time; realities, of experience and having. They talk about an abstract "justification by faith," and struggle for an abstract experience; not seeing how good G.o.d is to tell them plainly that his "justifying" is _setting everything right_ for them, and round them, and in them: his _rightness_ is sufficient for them; they need not go about, worrying, to establish their own. The minute they give up their wrongness, and fall into its line, it works for them as no working of their own could do. G.o.d doesn"t forgive a soul ideally, and leave it a mere clean, naked consciousness; He brings forth the best robe and puts it on; a ring for the hand, and shoes for the feet. People try painfully to achieve a ghostly sort of regeneration that strips them and leaves them half dead. The Lord heals and binds up, and puts his own garment upon us; He _knows_ that we have _need_," Miss Kirkbright repeated, earnestly.
"Salvation is a real having; not an escape without anything, as people run for their lives from fire or flood."
Sylvie had listened with a shining face.
"You get it all from that one word,--"raiment." Your words--the words you find out, Miss Kirkbright--are living things."
"Yes, words _are_ living things," Miss Kirkbright answered. "G.o.d does not give us anything dead. But the life of them is his spirit, and his spirit is an instant breath. You can take them as if they were dead, if you do not inspire. Men who wrote these words, inspired. We talk about their _being_ inspired, as if it were a pa.s.sive thing; and quarrel about it, and forget to breathe ourselves. It is all there, just as live as it ever was; it is given over again every time we go for it; when we find it so, we never need trouble any more about authority. We shall only thank G.o.d that He has kept in the world the records of his talk with men; and the more we talk with Him ourselves, the deeper we shall understand their speech."
"Isn"t all that about "inner meanings,"--that words in the Bible stand for,--Swedenborgian, Miss Kirkbright?"
"Well?" Miss Kirkbright smiled.
"Are you a Swedenborgian?" Sylvie asked the question timidly.
"I believe in the New Church," answered Miss Euphrasia. "But I don"t believe in it as standing apart, locked up in a system. I believe in it as a leaven of all the churches; a life and soul that is coming into them. I think a separate body is a mistake; though I like to worship with the little family with which I find myself most kin. We should do that without any name. The Lord gave a great deal to Swedenborg: but when his time comes, He doesn"t give all in any one place, or to any one soul; his coming is as the lightening from the one part to the other part under heaven. _Lightening_--not lightning; it is wrongly printed so, I think. He set the sun in the sky, once and forever, when He came in his Christ; since then, day after day dawns, everywhere, and uttereth speech; and even night after night showeth knowledge. I believe in the fuller, more inward dispensation. Swedenborg ill.u.s.trated it,--received it, wonderfully; but many are receiving the same at this hour, without ever having heard of Swedenborg. For that reason, we may never be afraid about the truth. It is not here or there. This or that may fail or pa.s.s away, but the Word shall never pa.s.s away."
"What a long talk we have had! How did we get into it?"
The car was coming up the slope, half a mile off. They could see the red top of it rising, and could hear the tinkle of the bell.
"I wish we didn"t need to get out!" said Sylvie. "I wish I could tell it to my mother!"
"Can"t you?"
"I"m afraid it wouldn"t keep alive,--with me," Sylvie answered, with a little sigh and shadow. "Not even as these flowers will that I am taking to her. I can take,--but I can"t give, and I always feel so that I ought to. Mother needs the comfort of it. Why don"t you come and talk to her, Miss Kirkbright?"
"Talk on purpose never does. You and I "got into it," as you say.
Perhaps your mother and I might. But I have got over feeling about such sort of giving--in words--as a duty. Even with people whom I work among sometimes, who need the very first gift of truth, so much! We can only keep near and dear to each other, Sylvie, and near and dear to the Lord. Then there are the two lines; and things that are equal--or similarly related--to the same thing, are related to one another. He can make the mark that proves and joins, any time.
Did you know there was Bible in geometry, Sylvie? I very often go to my old school Euclid for a heavenly comfort."
"I think you go to everything for it--and to everybody with it,"
said Sylvie, squeezing her friend"s hand as he left her on the car-step.
Nothing comes much before we need it. This talk stayed by Sylvie through months afterwards, if not the word of it, always the subtle cheer and strength of it, that nestled into her heart underneath all her upper thinkings and cares of day by day, and would not quite let them settle down upon the living core of it with a hopeless pressure.
For the real stress of her new life was bearing upon her heavily.
The first poetry, the first fresh touches with which she had made pleasant signs about their altered condition, were pa.s.sed into established use, and dulled into wornness and commonness. The difficulties--the grapples--came thick and forceful about her. At the same time, her reliances seemed slipping away from her.
She had hardly known, any more than her mother, how much the countenance and friendliness of the Sherrett family had done in upholding her. It was a link with the old things--the very best of the old things,--that stood as a continual a.s.surance that they themselves were not altered--lowered in any way--by their alterings.
This came to Sylvie with an interior confirmation, as it did to Mrs.
Argenter exteriorly. So long as Miss Kirkbright and the Sherretts indorsed anything, it could not harm them much, or fence them out altogether from what they had been. Amy Sherrett and Miss Kirkbright thought well of the Ingrahams, and maintained all their dealings with them in a friendly--even intimate--fashion. If Sylvie chose to sit with them of an afternoon, it was no more than Miss Euphrasia did. Also, the old Miss Goodwyns, who lived up the Turn behind the maples, were privileged to offer Miss Kirkbright a cup of tea when she went in there, as she would often for an hour"s talk over knitting work and books that had been lent and read. Sylvie might well enough do the same, or go to them for hints and helps in her window-gardening and little ingenuities of housekeeping. Mrs.
Argenter deluded herself agreeably with the notion that the relations in each case were identical. But what with the Sherretts and Miss Kirkbright were mere kindly incidents of living, apart somewhat from the crowd of daily demand and absorption, were to Sylvie the essential resource and relaxation of a living that could find little other.
Sylvie let her mother"s reading pa.s.s, not knowing how far Mrs.
Argenter was able actually to believe in it herself, but clearly and thankfully recognizing, on her own part the reality,--that she had these friends and resources to brighten what would else be, after all, pretty hard to endure.
The Knoxwells and the Kents and old Mrs. Sunderline were hardly neighbors, as she had meant to neighbor with them. The Knoxwells and the Kents were a little jealous and suspicious of her overtures, as she had said, and would not quite let her in. Besides, she did not draw toward Marion Kent, who came to church with French gilt bracelets on, and a violently trimmed polonaise, as she did toward Dot and Ray.
Old Mrs. Sunderline was as nice and cosy as could be but she never went out herself, and her whole family consisted of herself, her sister,--Aunt Lora, the tailoress,--and her son, the young carpenter, whom Sylvie could not help discerning was much noted and discussed among the womenkind, old and young, as a village--what shall I say, since I cannot call my honest, manly Frank Sunderline a village beau? A village _desirable_ he was, at any rate. Of course, Sylvie Argenter could not go very much to his home, to make a voluntary intimacy. And all these, if she and they had cared mutually ever so much, would hare been under Mrs. Argenter"s proscription as mere common work-and-trade people whom n.o.body knew beyond their vocations. There was this essential difference between the baker"s daughters whom the Sherrett family noticed exceptionally and the blacksmith"s and carpenter"s households, the woman who "took in fine washing," and her forward, dressy, ambitious girl. Though the baker"s daughters and the good Miss Goodwyns themselves knew all these in their turn, quite well, and belonged among them. The social "laying on of hands" does not hold out, like the apostolic benediction, all the way down.
I began these last long paragraphs with saying, that neither Sylvie nor her mother had known how far their comfort and acquiescence in their new life had depended on the "backing up" of the Sherretts.
This they found out when the Sherretts went away that autumn. Amy was married in October and sailed for England; Rodney was at Cambridge, and when the country house at Roxeter was closed, Miss Euphrasia took rooms in Boston for the winter, where her winter work all lay, and Mr. Sherrett, who was a Representative to Congress, went to Washington for the session. There were no more calls; no more pleasant spending of occasional days at the Sherrett Place; no more ridings round and droppings in of Rodney at the village. All that seemed suddenly broken up and done with, almost hopelessly.
Sylvie could not see how it was ever to begin again. Next year Rodney was to graduate, and his father was to take him abroad. These plans had come out in the talks over Amy"s marriage and her leaving home.
Sylvie was left to her village; she could only go in to the Miss Goodwyns and down to the bakery; and now that her condescensions were unlinked from those of Miss Kirkbright, and just dropped into next-door matter of course, Mrs. Argenter fretted. Marion Kent would come calling, too, and talk about Mrs. Browning, and borrow patterns, and ask Sylvie "how she hitched up her Marguerite."
[In case this story should ever be read after the fashion I allude to shall have disappeared from the catalogues of b.u.t.terick and Demorest, to be never more mentioned or remembered, I will explain that it is a style of upper dress most eminently un-daisy-like in expression and effect, and reminding of no field simplicities whatsoever, unless possibly of a hay-load; being so very much pitch-forked up into heaps behind.]
Not that Sylvie dressed herself with a pitchfork; she had been growing more sensible than that for a long time, to say nothing of her quiet mourning; though for that matter, I have seen bombazine and c.r.a.pe so voluminously bundled and ma.s.sed as to remind one of the slang phrase "piling on the agony." But Marion Kent came to Sylvie for the first idea of her light loops and touches: then she developed it, as her sort do, tremendously; she did grandly by the yard, what Sylvie Argenter did modestly by the quarter; she had a soul beyond mere nips and pinches. But this was small vexation, to be caricatured by Miss Kent. Sylvie"s real troubles came closer and harder.
Sabina Bowen went away.
She had not meant to be married until the spring; but she and the cabinet-maker had had their eyes upon a certain half-house,--neat and pretty, with clean brown paint and a little enticing gingerbread work about the eaves and porch,--which was to be vacated at that time; and it happened that, through some unforeseen circ.u.mstances, the family occupying it became suddenly desirous to get rid of the remainder of their lease, and move this winter. John came to Sabina eagerly one evening with the news.
Sabina thought of the long winter evenings, and the bright double-burner kerosene she had saved up money for; of a little round table with a red cloth, and John one side of it and she the other; of sitting together in a pew, and going every Sunday in her bride-bonnet, instead of getting her every-other-Sunday forenoon and hurrying home to frica.s.see Mrs. Argenter"s chicken or sweet-bread, and boil her cauliflower; and so she gave warning the next morning when she was emptying Mrs. Argenter"s bath and picking up the towels. She steeled herself wisely with choice of time and person; it would have been hard to tell Miss Sylvie when she came down to dust the parlor, or into the kitchen to make the little dessert for dinner.
And now poor Sylvie fell into and floundered in that slough of despond, the lower stratum of the Irish kitchen element, which if one once meddles with, it is almost hopeless to get out of; and one very soon finds that to get out of it is the only hope, forlorn as it may be.
She had one girl who made sour bread for a fortnight, and then flounced off on a Monday morning, leaving the clothes in the tubs, because "her bread was never faulted before, an" faith, she wudn"t pit up biscuits of a Sunday night no more for annybody!" The next one disposed of all the dish towels in four days, behind barrels and in the corners of the kettle closet, and complained insolently of ill furnishing; a third kindled her fire with the clothes-pins; a fourth wore Mrs. Argenter"s cambric skirts on Sunday, "for a finish, jist to make "em worth while for the washin"," and trod out the heels of three pairs of Sylvie"s best stockings, for a like considerate and economical reason. Another declined peremptorily the use of a flat-iron stand, and burnt out triangular pieces from the ironing sheet and blanket; and when Sylvie remonstrated with her about the skirt-board, which she had newly covered, finding her using it as a cleaning cloth after she had heated her "flats" upon the coals, she was met with a torrent of abuse, and the a.s.surance that she "might get somebody else to save her old rags with their apurns, an" iron five white skirts and tin pairs o" undersleeves a week for two women, at three dollars an" a half. She had heard enough about the place or iver she kim intil it, an" the bigger fool she iver to iv set her fut inside the dooers."
That was it. It came to that pa.s.s, now. They "heard about the place before iver they kim intil it." The Argenter name was up. There was no getting out of the bog-mire. Sylvie ran the gauntlet of the village refuse, and had to go to Boston to the intelligence offices.
By this time she hadn"t a kitchen or a bedroom fit to show a decent servant into. They came, and looked, and went away; half-dozens of them. The stove was burnt out; there was a hole through into the oven; nothing but an entire new one would do, and a new one would cost forty dollars. Poor Sylvie toiled and worried; she went to Mrs.
Ingraham and the Miss Goodwyns, and Sabina Galvin, for advice; she made ash-paste and cemented up the breaches, she hired a woman by the day, put out washing, and bought bread at the bakehouse. All this time, Mrs. Argenter had her white skirts and her ruffled underclothing to be done up. "What could she do? She hadn"t any plain things, and she couldn"t get new, and she must be clean."
At New Year"s, they owed three hundred dollars that they could not pay, beside the quarter"s rent. They had to take it out of their little invested capital; they sold ten shares of railroad stock at a poor time; it brought them eight hundred and seventy-five dollars.