"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.