LETTERS AND LINKS.
That same September morning, Miss Euphrasia, sitting in her pretty
corner room at Mrs. Georgeson's,--just returned to her city life
from the rest and sweetness of a country summer,--had letters
brought to her door.
The first was in a thin, strong, blue envelope, with London and
Liverpool postmarks, and "per Steamer Calabria," written up in the
corner, business-wise, with the date, and a dash underneath. This
she opened first, for the English postmarks, associated with that
handwriting, gave her a sudden thrill of bewildered surprise:--
"MY DEAR SISTER,--Within a very few days after this
will reach you, I hope myself to land in America, and to see
if, after all these years, you and I can do something about a
home together. We learn one good of long separations, by what
we get of them in this world. We can't help beginning again,
if not actually where we left off, at least with the thought
we left off at, 'live and fresh in our hearts. The thought, I
mean, as regards each other; we have both got some thoughts
uppermost by this time, doubtless, that we had not lived to
then. At any rate, I have, who had ten years ago only the
notions and dreams of twenty-one. I come straight to you with
them, just as I went from you, dear elder sister, with your
love and blessing upon me, into the great, working world.
"Send a line to meet me in New York at Frazer and
Doubleday's, and let me know your exact whereabouts. I found
Sherrett here, and had a run to Manchester with him to see
Amy. That's the sort of thing I can't believe when I do see
it,--Mary's baby married and housekeeping! I'm glad you are my
elder, Effie; I shall not see much difference in you.
Thirty-one and forty-three will only have come nearer
together. And you are sure to be what only such fresh-souled
women as you _can_ be at forty-three."
With this little touch of loving compliment the letter ended.
Miss Euphrasia got up and walked over to her toilet-glass. Do you
think, with all her outgoing goodness, she had not enough in her
for this, of that sweet woman-feeling that desires a true
beauty-blossoming for each good season of life as it comes? A pure,
gentle showing, in face and voice and movement, of all that is
lovely for a woman to show, and that she tells one of God's own
words by showing, if only it be true, and not a putting on of
falseness?
If Miss Euphrasia had not cared what she would seem like in the eyes
as well as to the heart of this brother coming home, there would
have been something wanting to her of genuine womanhood. Yet she had
gone daily about her Lord's business, thinking of that first; not
stopping to watch the graying or thinning of hairs, or the gathering
of life-lines about eyes and mouth, or studying how to replace or
smooth or disguise anything. She let her life write itself; she only
made all fair, according to the sense of true grace that was in her;
fair as she could with that which remained. She had neither
neglected, nor feverishly contrived and worried; and so at forty
three she was just what Christopher, with his Scotch second-sight,
beheld her; what she beheld herself now as she went to look at her
face in the glass, and to guess what he would think of it.
She saw a picture like this:--
Soft, large eyes, with no world-harass in them; little curves
imprinted at the corners that may be as beautiful in later age as
lip-dimples are in girlhood; a fair, broad forehead, that had never
learned to frown; lines about mouth and chin, in sweet, honest
harmony with the record of the eyes; no strain, no distortion of
consciousness grown into haggard wornness; a fine, open, contented
play of feature had wrought over all like a charm of sunshine, to
soften and brighten continually. Her hair had been golden-brown;
there was plenty of it still; it had kept so much of the gold that
it was now like a tender mist through which the light flashes and
smiles. Of all color-changes, this is the rarest.
Miss Euphrasia smiled at her own look. "It is the home-face, I
guess; Christie will know it." Smiling, she showed white edges of
perfect teeth.
"What a silly old thing I am!" she said, softly; and she blushed up
and looked prettier yet.
"Why, I _will_ not be such a fool!" she exclaimed, then, really
indignant; and sat down to read her second letter, which she had
half forgotten:--
"BRICKFIELD FARMS, (near Tillington), Maine.
"DEAR MISS EUPHRASIA,--I have not written to you
since we left Conway, because there seemed so little really to
trouble you with; but your kind letter coming the other day
made me feel as if I must have a talk with you, and perhaps
tell you something which I did not fully tell you before. We
left our address with Mr. Dill, although except you, I hardly
know of anybody from whom a letter would be likely to come.
Isn't it strange, how easily one may slip aside and drop out
of everything? We heard of this place from some people who bad
been to Sebago Lake and Pleasant Mountain, and up from there
across the country to Gorham, and so round to Conway through
the Glen.
"Mother was not well at Conway; indeed, dear Miss Euphrasia,
she is more ill, perhaps, than I dare to think. She is very
weak; I dread another move, and the winter is so near! May be
the pleasant October weather will build her up; at any rate,
we must stay here until she is much better. We have found such
good, kind, plain people! I will tell you presently how nice
it is for us, and the plans I have been able to make for the
present. It has been a very expensive summer; we have moved
about so much; and in all the places where we have been
before, the board has been so high. At Lebanon and Sharon it
was dreadful; I really had to worry mother to get away; and
then Stowe was not much better, and at Jefferson the air was
too bracing. At Crawford's it was lovely, but the bill was
fearful! So we drifted down, till we finished August in
Conway, and heard of this. I wish we had known of it at the
beginning; but then I suppose it would not have suited mother
for all summer.
"I had a great worry at Sharon, Miss Euphrasia, and it has
grown worse since. I can't help being afraid mother has been
dreadfully cheated. We got acquainted with some people there;
a Mr. and Mrs. Farron Saftleigh, rich Westerners, who made a
good deal of show of everything; money, and talk, and conjugal
devotion, and friendship. Mrs. Saftleigh came a great deal to
mother's room, and gave her all the little chat of the
place,--I'm afraid I don't amuse mother myself as much as I
ought, but some things do seem so tiresome to tell over, when
you've seen more than enough of them yourself,--and she used
to take her out to drive nearly every day.
"Well, it seemed that Mr. Saftleigh had gone out West only six
years ago, and had made all his money since, in land and
railroad business. Mrs. Saftleigh said that 'whatever Farron
touched was sure to double.' She _meant_ money; but I thought
of our perplexities when she said it, and he certainly has
managed to double _them_. He went to New York two or three
times while we were at the Springs; he was transacting
railroad business; getting stock taken up in the new piece of
road laid out from Latterend to Donnowhair; and he was at the
head of a company that had bought up all the land along the
route. 'Sure to sell at enormous profits any time after the
railroad was opened.' Poor mother got so feverish about it!
She didn't see why our little money shouldn't be doubled as
well as other people's. And then she cried so about being left
a widow, with nobody out in the world to get a share of
anything for her; and Mrs. Saftleigh used to tell her that
such work was just what friends were made for, and it was so
providential that she had met her here just now; and she was
always calling her 'sweet Mrs. Argenter.'
"Nobody could help it; mother worried herself sick, when I
begged her to wait till we could come home and consult some
friend we knew. 'The chance would be lost forever,' she said;
'and who could be kinder than the Saftleighs, or could know
half so much? Mr. Farron Saftleigh risked his own money in
it.' And at last, she wrote home and had her Dorbury mortgage
sold, and paid eight thousand dollars of it to Mr. Saftleigh,
for shares in the railroad, and land in Donnowhair. And, dear
Miss Euphrasia, that is all we've got now, except just a few
hundred dollars on deposit in the Continental, and the other
four thousand of the mortgage, that mother put into
Manufacturers' Insurance stock, to pacify me. If the land
_doesn't_ sell out there in six months, as Mr. Saftleigh says
it will, I don't know where any more income for us is to come
from.
"I am saving all I can here, for the winter _must_ cost. You
would laugh if you knew how I am saving! I am helping Mrs.
Jeffords do her work, and she doesn't charge me any board, and
so I lay up the money without letting mother know it. I don't
feel as if that were quite right,--or comfortable, at least;
but after all, why shouldn't she be cheated a little bit the
other way, if it is possible? That is why I hope we shall be
here all through October.
"We are having lovely weather now; not a sign of frost.
Although this place is so far north, it is sheltered by great
hills, and seems to lie under the lee, both ways, of high
mountain ranges, so that the cold does not really set in very
early. It is a curious place. I wish I had left room to tell
you more about it. There is a great level basin, around which
slope the uplands, rising farther and farther on every side
except the south, until you get among the real mountain
regions. On these slopes are the farms; the Jeffords', and the
Applebees', and the Patchons', and the Stilphins'. Aren't they
quaint, comfortable old country names? I think they only have
such names among farmers. The name of the place,--or rather
neighborhood, for I don't know where the _place_ actually
is--there are three places, and they are all four or five
miles off--Mill Village, and Pemunk, and Sandon; the name of
the neighborhood,--Brickfield Farms, comes from there having
been brickmaking done here at one time; but it was given up.
The man who owned it got in debt, and failed, I believe; and
nobody has taken hold of it again, because it is so far from
lines of transportation; but there are some cottages about the
foot of Cone Hill, where the laborers used to live; and a big
queer, old red brick house, that looks as if it were walking
up stairs,--built on flat, natural steps of the rock, and so
climbing up, room behind room, with steps inside to
correspond. I have liked so much to go through it, and imagine
stories about it, though all the story there is, is that of
Mr. Flavius Josephus Browne, the man of the brick enterprise,
who built it in this odd way, and probably imagined a story
for himself that he never lived out in it, because his money
and his business came to an end. How strange it is that work
doesn't always make money, and that it takes so much
combination to make anything worth while! I wonder that even
men know just what to do. And as for women,--why, when they
take to elbowing men out, what will it all come to?
"I have written on, until I have written off some of my heavy
feelings that I began with. If I could only _talk_ to you,
dear Miss Euphrasia, I think they would all go. But I will not
trouble you any longer now; I am quite ashamed of the great
packet this will make when it is folded up. But you told me to
let you know all about myself, and I can't help minding such
an injunction as that!
"Yours gratefully and affectionately always,
"SYLVIE ARGENTER."
Miss Kirkbright had not read this straight through without a pause.
Two or three times she had let her hands drop to her lap with the
letter in them, and sat thinking. When she came to what Sylvie said
about her "laughing to know how she had been saving," Miss Euphrasia
stopped, not to laugh, but to wipe tears from her eyes.
"The poor, dear, brave little soul!" she said to herself. "And that
blessed Mrs. Jeffords,--to let her think she is earning her board
with ironing sheets, perhaps, and washing dishes! Km!"
That last unspellable sound was a half choke and half chuckle, that
Miss Euphrasia surprised herself in making out of the sudden, mixed
impulse to sob, and laugh, and to catch somebody in her arms and
kiss that wasn't there.
"If I were an angel, I suppose I _could_ wait," she went on saying
to herself after that. "But even for them, it must be hard work some
times. And so,--how the great Reasons Why flash upon one out of
one's own little experience!--of that wonderful, blessed Day, when
all shall be made right, the angels in heaven know not, neither the
Son, but the Father only! The Lord cannot even trust the pure human
that is in Himself to dwell, separately, upon that End which is to
be, but may not be yet!"
I do not suppose anything whatever could come into Miss Euphrasia's
life, or touch her with its circumstance, that she did not
straightway read in it the wider truth beyond the letter. She was a
Swedenborgian, not after Swedenborg, but by the living gift itself.
Her insight was no separate thing, taken up and used now and then,
of a purpose. It was as different from that as eyes are from
spectacles. She could not help her little sermons. They preached
themselves to her and in her, continually. So, if we go along with
her, we must take her with her interpretations. Some friend said of
her once, that she was a life with marginal notes; and the notes
were the larger part of it.
But Miss Euphrasia found a postscript, presently, to Sylvie's
letter, written hurriedly on the other side of the last leaf; as if
she had made haste, before she should lose courage and change her
mind about saying it:--
"Do you think it would be possible to find any sort of place in
Boston where I could do something to help pay, this winter,--and
will you try for me? I could sew, or do little things about a house,
or read or write for somebody. I could help in a nursery, or teach,
some hours in a day,--hours when mother likes to be quiet; and she
would not know."
This was essential. "Mother must not know."
The finding of this postscript drove out of Miss Euphrasia's mind
another thought that had suddenly come into it as she turned the
letter over in her fingers. It was some minutes before she went back
to it; minutes in which she was quite absorbed with simple
suggestions and peradventures in Sylvie's behalf.
But--"Brickfield Farms? Sandon? Josephus Browne." When had she heard
those names before? What hopeless piece of property was it she had
heard her brother-in-law speak of long ago,--somewhere down
East,--where there were old kilns and clay-pits? Something that had
come into or passed through his hands for a debt?
"There is a great tangling of links here. What are they shaken into
my fingers for, I wonder? What is there here to be tied, or to be
unraveled?"
For she believed firmly, always, that things did not happen in a
jumble, however jumbled they might seem. Though she could scarcely
keep two thoughts together of the many crowded ones that had come to
her, one upon another, this strange morning, she was sure the Lord
knew all about it, and that He had not sent them upon her in any
real confusion. She knew that there was no precipitance--no
inconsequence--with Him.
"They are threads picked out for some work that He will do," she
said, as she tucked her brother's letter into a low, broad basket
beside the white and rose and violet wools with which she was at odd
minutes crocheting a dainty footspread for an invalid friend, and
put the other in her pocket.
"Now I will tie my bonnet on, and go, as I had meant, to see Desire.
That, also, is a piece of this same morning."
Miss Kirkbright, likewise, watched and learned a story that told and
repeated itself as it went along, of a House that was building bit
by bit, and of life that lay about it. Only hers was the house the
Lord builds; and the stories of it, and all the sentences of the
story, were the things He daily puts together.