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."