BRICKFIELD FARMS.
It was a rainy, desolate day.
It had rained the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and half
cleared up last night; then this morning it had sullenly and
tiresomely begun again.
All the forenoon it grew worse; in the afternoon, heavy, pelting,
streaming showers came down, filling the Kiln Hollow with mist, and
hiding the tops of the hills about it with low, rolling,
ever-gathering and resolving clouds.
It seemed as if all the autumn joy were over; as if the pleasant
days were done with till another year. After this, the cold would
set in.
Mrs. Jeffords had a bright fire built in Mrs. Argenter's room,
another in the family sitting-room. It looked cosy; but it reminded
the sojourners that they had not simply to draw themselves into
winter-quarters, and be comfortable; their winter-quarters were yet
to seek.
Sylvie had been cracking a plateful of butternuts; picking out
meats, I mean, from the cracked nuts, to make a plateful; and that,
if you know butternuts, you know is no small task. She brought them
to her mother, with some grated maple sugar sprinkled among and over
them.
"This is what you liked so much at the Shakers' in Lebanon," she
said. "See if it isn't as nice as theirs, I think it is fresher.
Here is a tiny little pickle-fork, to eat with."
Mrs. Argenter took the offered dainty.
"You are a dear child," she said. "Come and eat some too."
"O, I ate as I went along. Now, I'll read to you." And she took up
"Blindpits," which her mother had laid down.
"If it only wouldn't storm so," said Mrs. Argenter. "Mrs. Jeffords
says there will be a freshet. The roads will be all torn up. We
shall never be able to get home."
"O yes, we shall," said Sylvie, cheerily; putting down the wonder
that arose obtrusively in her own mind as to where the home would be
that they should go to.
"Did Mrs. Jeffords tell you about last year's freshet? And the
apples?"
"She said they had an awful flood. The brooks turned into rivers,
and the rivers swallowed up everything."
"O, she didn't get to the funny part, then?" said Sylvie. "She
didn't tell you about the apples?"
"No. I think she keeps the funny parts for you, Sylvie."
"May be she does. She isn't sure that you feel up to them, always.
But I guess she means them to come round, when she tells them to me.
You see they had just been gathering their apples, in that great
lower orchard,--five acres of trees, and such a splendid crop! There
they were, all piled up,--can't you imagine? A perfect picture! Red
heaps, and yellow heaps; and greenings, and purple pearmains, and
streaked seek-no-furthers. Like great piles of autumn leaves! Well,
the flood came, and rose up over the flats, into the lower end of
the orchard. They went down over night, and moved all the piles
further up, The next day, they had to move them again. And the next
morning after that, when they woke up, the whole orchard was under
water, and every apple gone. Mr. Jeffords said he got down just in
time to see the last one swim round the corner. And when the flood
had fallen,--there, half a mile below, spread out over the meadow,
was three hundred barrels of apple sauce!"
Mrs. Argenter laughed a feeble little _expected_ laugh; her heart
was not free to be amused with an apple-story. No wonder Mrs.
Jeffords kept the funny parts for Sylvie. Mrs. Argenter quenched her
before she could possibly get to them. But was Sylvie's heart free
for amusement? What was the difference? The years between them? Mrs.
Jeffords was a far older woman than Mrs. Argenter, and had had her
cares and troubles; yet she and Sylvie laughed like two girls
together, over their work and their stories. That was it,--the work!
Sylvie was doing _all she could_. The cheerfulness of doing followed
irresistibly after, into the loops and intervals of time, and kept
out the fear and the repining.
"There was nothing that chippered you up so, as being real driving
busy," Mrs. Jeffords said.
Mrs. Argenter sat in her low easy-chair, watched away the time, and
worried about the time to come. It left no leisure for a laugh.
Perhaps the hardest thing that Sylvie did through the day, was the
setting to work to "chipper" her mother up. It was lifting up a
weight that continually dropped back again.
"Do they think this rain will ever be over?" asked Mrs. Argenter,
turning her face toward the dripping panes again.
"Why, yes, mother; rains always _have_ been over sometime. They
never knew one that wasn't, and they go by experience."
There was nothing more to be said upon the rain topic, after that
simple piece of logic.
"If there doesn't come Badgett up the hill in all the pour!"
Badgett drove the daily stage from Tillington up through Pemunk and
Sandon. He came round by Brickfields when there was anybody to
bring.
Badgett drove up over the turf door-yard, close to the porch. He
jumped off, unbuttoned the dripping canvas door, and flung it up.
Mrs. Jeffords was in the entry on the instant; surprised, puzzled,
but all ready to be hospitable, to she didn't know whom. Relations
from Indiana, as likely as not. That is the way people arrive in the
country; and a whole houseful to stay over night does not startle
the hostess as an unexpected guest to dinner may a city one.
But the persons who alighted from the clumsy stage-wagon were Mr.
Christopher Kirkbright, Miss Euphrasia, and Desire Ledwith.
"Didn't you get our letter?" said Miss Euphrasia, as Sylvie, from
her mother's door-way, saw who she was, and sprang forward.
"Why, no, we didn't get no letter," said Mrs. Jeffords. "Father
hasn't been to the office for two days, it's stormed so continual.
But you're just as welcome, exactly. Step right in here." And she
flung open the door of her best parlor, where the new boughten
carpet was, for the damp feet and the dripping waterproof.
"No, indeed; not there; we couldn't have the conscience."
"'Tain't very comfortable either, after all," said Mrs. Jeffords,
changing her own mind in a bustle. "It's been kinder shut up. Come
right out to the sittin'-room-fire finally."
Mr. Kirkbright and Miss Ledwith followed her; Miss Euphrasia went
right into Mrs. Argenter's room, after she had taken off her
waterproof in the hall.
As she came in at the door, a great flash of sunshine streamed from
under the western clouds, in at the parlor window, followed her
across the hall and enveloped her in light as she entered.
"Why, the storm's over!" cried Sylvie, joyfully. "You come in on a
sunbeam, like the Angel Gabriel. But you always do. How came you to
come?"
"I came to answer your letter. You know I don't like to write very
well. And I've brought my brother, and a dear friend of mine whom I
want you to know. It did not rain in Boston when we started, but it
came on again before noon, and all the afternoon it has been a
splendid down-pour. Something really worth while to be out in, you
know; not a little exasperating drizzle. That's the kind of rain one
can't bear, and catches cold in. How the showers swept round the
hills, and the cascades thundered and flashed as we came by! What a
lovely region you have discovered!"
"It's so beautiful that you're here! We'll go down to the cascades
to-morrow. Won't you just come and introduce me to the others, and
then come back to mother?"
The others were in the family-room, which was also dining-room. In
the kitchen beyond, Mrs. Jeffords' stove was roaring up for an early
tea, and she was whipping griddle-cakes together.
"My brother, Mr. Kirkbright--Miss Argenter. Miss Desire
Ledwith--Sylvie."
The two girls shook hands, and looked in each others faces.
"How clear, and strong, and trusty!" Sylvie thought.
"You dear little spirit!" thought Desire, seeing the delicate face,
and the brave sweetness through it.
This was the second real introduction Miss Euphrasia had made within
ten days. It was a great deal, of that sort, to happen in such space
of time.
"If it hadn't been for the storm, we might have hurried down and
missed you. Mother was beginning to dread the coming on of the
cold," said Sylvie. "But the rain came and settled it, for just now.
That rested me. A real good 'can't help' is such a comfort."
"The Father's No. Shutting us in with its grand, gentle forbiddance.
Many a rain-storm is that. I always feel so safe when I am shut up
by really impossible weather."
After the tea, they were still in time for the whole sunset,
wonderful after the storm.
Desire had gone from the table to the half-glazed door which opened
from the room into a broad porch, looking out directly across the
hollow, along a valley-line of side-hills, to the distant blue
peaks.
"O, come!" she cried back to the others, as she hastened out upon
the platform. "It is marvelous!"
Heavy lines of clouds lay banked together in the west, black with
the remnant and recoil of tempest; between these, through rifts and
breaks, poured down the sunlight across bright spaces into the
bosoms of the hills lighting them up with revelations. The sloping
outlines shone golden green with lingering summer color, and
discovered each separate wave and swell of upland. The searching
shafts fell upon every tree and bush and spire, moving slowly over
them and illuminating point after point, making each suddenly seem
distinct and near. What had been a mere margin of distant woods,
stood eliminated and relieved in bough and stem and leafage, with a
singular pre-Raphaelitic individuality. It was the standing-out of
all things in the last radiance; called up, one by one under the
flash of judgment--beautiful, clear, terrible.
Then the clouds themselves, as the sun dropped down, drank in the
splendor. They turned to rose and crimson; they floated, and spread,
and broke, and drifted up the valley, against the hills on right and
left. Rags and shreds of them, trailing gorgeous with color, clung
where the ridges caught them, and streamed like fragments of
heavenly banners. The sky repeated the October woods,--the woods the
sky,--in vivid numberless hues.
The sunset rolled up and around the watchers as they gazed. They
were _in_ it; it lay at their very feet, and beside them at either
hand. Below, the sheet of water in the "Clay-Pits," gleamed like
burnished gold. Here and there, from among the tree-tops, came up
the smoke of little cascades, reaching for baptism into the
pervading glory.
It was chilly, and they had to go in; but they kept coming back to
window and door, looking out through the closed sashes, and calling,
"Now! now! O, was there ever anything like that?"
At last it turned into a heavenly vision of still, far, shining
waters; the earth and the pools upon it darkened, and the sky
gathered up into itself the glory, and disclosed its own wider and
diviner beauty.
A great rampart of gray, blue, violet clouds lay jagged, grand, like
rocks along a shore. Up over them rushed light, crimson surf,
foaming, tossing. Beyond, a rosy sea. In it, little golden boats
floated. The flamy light flung itself up into the calm zenith; there
it met the still heaven-color, and the sky was tender with
saffron-touched blue.
So the tempest of trouble met the tempest of love in the end of the
day, and the world rolled on into the night under the glory and
peace of their rushing and melting together.
After all that, they came back by a step and a word--these mortal
observers,--to practical consultation such as mortals must have, and
especially if they be upon their travels; to questions about
bestowal, and the homely, kindly, funny little details of Mrs.
Jeffords' hospitality.
"Where should she put them? Why, she was _always_ ready. To be sure,
the _front_ upper room had had the carpets taken up since the summer
company went, and the beds were down; but, la, there was room
enough!"
"There's the east down-stairs bedroom, and the little west-room over
the sittin'-room, and there's _my_ room! I ain't never put out!"
"But you are; out of your room; and you ought not to be."
"Don't _care_!" said Mrs. Jeffords, triumphantly. "There's the
kitchen bedroom, that I keep apurpose to camp down in. It's all
right. Don't you worry."
"You never care; that's the reason I do worry," said Sylvie.
"I've learnt not to care," said Mrs. Jeffords. "'Tain't no use. You
must take things as they are. They will be so, and you can't help
it. If they fall right side up, well and good; if they're wrong side
up, let 'em lay. And they ain't wrong side up yet, I can tell you.
You just go and sit down and enjoy yourselves."
Mrs. Argenter was brighter this evening than she had been for a
long while. "It was nice to be among people again," she said, when
the evening was over.
"So it is," said Sylvie. "But somehow I didn't feel the difference
the other way. I think I always _am_ among people. At least it never
seems to me as if they were very far off. Next door mayn't be
exactly alongside, but it is next door for all that, and it is in
the world. And the world wakes up all together every morning,--that
is, as fast as the morning gets round."
With her "mayn't be's" and her "is'es," Sylvie was unconsciously
making a habit of the trick of Susan Nipper, but with a kindlier
touch to her antitheses than pertained to those of that acerb
damsel.
Mrs. Argenter wanted tangible presences. She had not reached so far
as her child into that inner living where all feel each other,
knowing that "these same tribulations"--and joys also--are
accomplished among the brotherhood that is in all the earth;
knowing, too,--ah! that is the blessedness when we come to it,--that
we may walk, already, in the heavenly places with all them that are
alive unto each other in the Lord.
The next morning after deep rains in a hill-country is a morning of
wonders; if you can go out among them, and know where to find them.
Down the ravines, from the far back, greater heights, rush and
plunge the streams whitened with ecstasy, turned to sweet wild
harmonies as they go. It is a day of glory for the water-drops that
are born to make a part of it.
Sylvie knew the way down through the glen, from fall to fall, half a
mile apart. She and Bob Jeffords had come down to them, time and
again; after nearly every little summer shower; for with all the
heat, the night rains had been plentiful and frequent, and the
water-courses had been kept full. The brick-fields, that looked so
near from the farms, were really more than two miles away; and it
was a constant descent, from brow to brow, over the range of uplands
between the Jeffords' place and the Basin.
"The First Cataracts are in here," said Sylvie, gleefully, leading
the way in by a bar-place upon a very wet path, the wetness of which
nobody minded, all having come defended with rubbers and
waterproofs, and tucked up their petticoats boot-high. Great bosks
of ferns grew beside, and here and there a bush burning with autumn
color. Everything shone and dripped; the very stones glittered.
They climbed up rocky slopes, on which the short gray moss grew,
cushiony. They followed the line of maples and alders and evergreens
that sentineled and hid away the shouting stream, spreading their
skirts and intertwining their arms to shelter it, like the privacy
of some royal child at play, and to keep back from the pilgrims the
beautiful surprise. Upon a rough table-ledge, they came to it at
last; the place where they could lean in between the trees, and
overlook and underlook the shining tumult,--the shifting, yet
enduring apparition of delight.
It came in two leaps, down a winding channel, through which it
seemed to turn and spring, like some light, graceful, impetuous
living creature. You _felt_ it reach the first rock-landing; you
were conscious of the impetus which forced it on to take the second
spring which brought it down beneath your feet. And it kept
coming--coming. It was an eternal moment; a swift, vanishing, yet
never over-and-done movement of grace and splendor. That is the
magic of a waterfall. Something exquisite by very suggestion of
evanescence, caught _in transitu_, and held for the eye and mind to
dwell on.
They were never tired of looking. The chance would not come,--that
ought to be a pause,--for them to turn and go away.
"But there are more," Sylvie said at length, admonishing them. "And
the Second Cataract is grander than this."
"You number them going down," said Mr. Kirkbright.
"Yes. People always number things as they come to them, don't they?
Our first is somebody's else last, I suppose, always."
"What a little spirit that is!" said Christopher Kirkbright to Miss
Euphrasia, dropping back to help his sister down a rocky plunge.
"A little spirit waked up by touch of misfortune," said Miss
Euphrasia. "She would have gone through life blindfolded by purple
and fine linen, if things had been left as they were with her."
Desire and Sylvie walked on together.
"Leave them alone," said Miss Kirkbright to her brother. And she
stopped, and began to gather handfuls of the late ferns.
Now she had the chance given her, Desire said it straight out, as
she said everything.
"I came up here after you, Miss Argenter. Did you know it?"
"No. After me? How?" asked Sylvie.
"To see if you and your mother would come and make your home with us
this winter,--pretty much as you do with Mrs. Jeffords. I can say
_us_, because Hazel Ripwinkley, my cousin, is with me nearly all
the time; but for the rest of it, I am all the family there really
is, now that Rachel Froke has gone away; unless you came to call my
dear old Frendely 'family,' as I do; seeing that next to Rachel, she
is root and spring of it. You could help me; you could help her; and
I think you would like my work. I should be glad of you; and your
mother could have Rachel Froke's gray parlor. It is a one-sided
proposition, because, you see, I know all about you already, from
Miss Euphrasia. You will have to take me at hazard, and find out by
trying."
"Do you think the old proverb isn't as true of good words as of
mischief,--that a dog who will fetch a bone will carry a bone?" said
Sylvie, laughing with the same impulse by which clear drops stood
suddenly in her eyes, and a quick rosiness came into her face. "Do
you suppose Miss Euphrasia hasn't told me of you?"
"I never thought I was one of the people to be told about," said
Desire, simply. "Do you think you could come? Miss Euphrasia
believed it would be what you wanted. There is plenty of room, and
plenty of work. I want you to know that I mean to keep you honestly
busy, because then you will understand that things come out honestly
even."
"Even! Dear Miss Ledwith!"
"Then you'll try it?"
"I don't know how to thank Miss Euphrasia or you."
"There are no thanks in the bargain," said Desire, smiling. "I want
you; if you want me, it is a Q.E.D. If we _do_ dispute about
anything, we'll leave it out to Miss Euphrasia. She knows how to
make everything right. She shall be our broker. It is a good thing
to have one, in some kinds of trade."
They had come around the curve in the road now, that brought them
alongside the shady gorge at the foot of Cone Hill. Here was the
little group of brick-makers' houses; empty, weather-beaten, their
door-yards overgrown with brakes and mulleins. Beyond, up the ledge,
to which a rough drive-way, long disused, led off, was the quaint,
rambling edifice that with its feet of stone and brick went "walking
up" the mountain.
"You must go in and see it," Sylvie said. "But first,--this is the
way to the cascade."
Another bar-place let them in again to another narrow, wild,
bush-grown path around the edge of the cliff, the lower spur of the
great hill; and down over shelving rocks, a long, gradual descent,
to the foot of the fall.
The water foamed and rippled to their feet, as they walked along its
varying edge-line on the smooth, sloping stone that stretched back
against the perpendicular rampart of the cliff. The fall itself was
hidden in the turn around which, above, they had followed the
tangled pathway.
At the farthest projection of the platform they were now treading,
they came upon it; beneath it, rather, they looked back and up at
its showery silver sheet, falling in sweet, continual thunder into
the dark, hollow, rock-encircled pool, thence to tumble away
headlong, from point to point, lower and lower yet, by a thousand
little breaks and plunges, till it came out into a broad meadow
stretch miles and miles away.
"What a hurry it is in, to get down where it is wanted," said
Desire.
She had seated herself beside the curling edge of the swift stream,
where it seemed to trace and keep by its own will its boundary upon
the nearly level rock, and was gazing up where the white radiance
poured itself as if direct from out the blue above.
Mr. Kirkbright stood behind her.
"Most things come to us at last so quietly," he said. "It is good to
feel and see what a rush it starts with,--out of that heart of
heaven."
Desire had not said that; but it was just what she had been feeling.
Eager to get to us; coming in a hurry. Was that God's impulse toward
us?
"Making haste to help and satisfy the world," Mr. Kirkbright said
again.
"A river of clear water of life, coming down out of the throne,"
said Miss Euphrasia. "What a sign it is!"
Mr. Kirkbright walked along the margin of the ledge, farther and
farther down. He tried with his stick some stones that lay across
the current at a narrow point where beneath the opposite cliff it
bent and turned away, losing itself from their sight as they stood
here. Then he sprang across; crept, stooping, along the narrow
foothold under the projecting rock, until he could follow with his
eye the course of the rapid water, falling continually to its lower
level as it sped on and on, all its volume gathered in one deep,
rocky, unchangeable bed.
"What a waiting power!" he exclaimed, springing safely back, and
coming up toward them. "What a stream for mills! And it turns
nothing but the farmers' grists, till it gets to Tillington."
Desire was a very little disappointed at this utilitarianism. She
had been so glad and satisfied with the reading of its type; the
type of its far-back impulse.
"If there had been mills here, we should not have seen that," she
said; forgetting to explain what.
But Christopher Kirkbright knew.
"What was it that we did see?" he asked, coming beside her.
"The gracious hurry," she answered, with a half-vexed surprise in
her eyes.
"And what is the next thing to seeing that? Isn't it to partake? To
be in a gracious hurry also, if we can?"
A smile came up now in Desire's face, and effaced gently the
vexation and the surprise.
"Do you know what a legible face you have?" asked Mr. Kirkbright,
seating himself near her on a step of rock.
Desire was a little disturbed again by this movement. The others had
begun to walk on, up the ledge, toward the old brick house;
gathering as they went, ferns that had escaped the frost, others
that had delicately whitened in it, and gorgeous maple-leaves, swept
from topmost, inaccessible branches,--where the most glorious color
always hangs,--by last night's rain and wind.
It was so foolish of her to have sat there until he came and did
this. Now she could not get right up and go away. This feeling,
coming simultaneously with his question about her legible face, was
doubly uncomfortable. But she had to answer. She did it briefly.
"Yes. It is a great bother. I don't like coarse print."
"Nor I. But my eyes are good; and the fine print is clear. I should
like very much to tell you of something that I have to do, Miss
Ledwith. I should like your thoughts upon it. For, you see, I have
hardly yet got acquainted with my ground. From what my sister tells
me, I think your work leads naturally up to mine. I should like to
find out whether it is quite ready for the join."
"I haven't much work," said Desire. "Luclarion Grapp has; and Miss
Kirkbright, and Mr. Vireo. I only help,--with some money that
belongs to it."
"And I have more money that belongs to it," said Mr. Kirkbright.
It was a curious way for a rich man and a rich woman to talk to each
other, about their money. But I do not believe it ought to be
curious.
"Don't you often come across people who cannot be helped much just
where they are? Don't you feel, sometimes, that there ought to be a
place to send them to, away, out of their old tracks, where they
could begin again; or even hide a while, in shame and repentance,
before they _dare_ to begin again?"
"I _know_ Luclarion does," said Desire, earnestly.
She would have it, still, that there was no work in her own name for
him to ask about.
"I must see this Luclarion of yours," said Mr. Kirkbright.
"Meanwhile, since I have got you to talk to, pray tell me all you
can, whoever found it out. Isn't there a need for a City of Refuge?
And suppose a place like this, away from the towns, where God's
beautiful water is coming down in a hurry, with a cry of power in
every leap,--where there is a great lake-basin full of material for
work, just stored away against men's need for their earning and
their building,--suppose this place taken and used for the giving of
a new chance of life to those who have failed and gone wrong, or
have perhaps hardly ever had any right chances. Do you think we
could manage it so as to _keep_ it a place of refuge and new
beginning, and not let it spoil itself?"
"With the right people at each end, why not?" said Desire. "But O,
Mr. Kirkbright! how can I tell you! It is such a great idea; and I
don't know anything."
These words, that she happened to say, brought back to her--by one
of those little lightning threads that hold things together, and
flash and thrill our recollections through us--the rainy morning
when she went round in the storm to her Aunt Ripwinkley's, because
she could not sit in the bay-window at home, and wonder whether "it
was all finished," or whether anybody had got to contrive anything
more, "before they could sit behind plate-glass and let it rain."
She remembered it all by those same words that she had spoken then
to Rachel Froke,--"Behold, we know not anything,--Tennyson and I!"
Nonsense stays by us, often, in stickier fashion than sense does;
that is the good of nonsense, perhaps; it sticks, and draws the
sense along after it.
"I think one thing is certain," said Mr. Kirkbright. "Human
creatures are made for 'moving on.' I believe the Swedenborgians are
right in this,--that the places above, or below, are filled from the
human race, or races; and that the Lord Himself couldn't do much
with beings made as He has made us, without places to _move us
into_. New beginnings,--evenings and mornings; the very planet
cannot go on its way without making them for itself. Life bound down
to poor conditions,--and all conditions are poor in the sense of
being limited while the life is resistlessly expanding,--festers;
fevers; breaks out in violence and disease. I believe we want new
places more than anything. I came up here on purpose to see if I
could not begin one."
"How happened you to come just here?" questioned Desire. "What could
you know of this, beforehand?"
"My sister had Miss Argenter's letter; and at once she remembered
the name of the place and its story. That is the way things come
together, you know. My brother-in-law, Mr. Sherrett, owns, or did
own, this whole property. A 'dead stick,' he thought it. Well,
Aaron's rod was another dead stick. But he laid it up before the
Lord, and it blossomed."
Desire sat silent, looking at the white water in its gracious hurry.
Pouring itself away, unused,--unheeded; yet waiting there, pouring
always. The tireless impulse of the divine help; vehement; eager,
with a human eagerness; yet so patient, till men's hands should
reach out and lay hold of it!
She dreamed out a whole dream of life that might grow up beside this
help; of work that might be done there. She forgot that she was
lingering, and keeping Mr. Kirkbright lingering, behind the others.
"You would have to live here yourself, I should think," she said at
length, speaking out of her vision of the things that might be, and
so--would have to be. She had got drawn in to the contemplation of
the scheme, and had begun to weigh and arrange, involuntarily, its
details, forgetting that she "knew not anything."
Mr. Kirkbright smiled.
"Yes, I see where you are," he said, "I had arrived at precisely the
same point myself. But the 'right people at the other end?' Who
should they be? Who shall send me my villagers,--my workers? Who
shall discriminate for me, and keep things true and unconfused at
the source?"
"Your sister, Mr. Vireo, Luclarion Grapp," Desire repeated,
promptly.
"And yourself?"
"Yes; I and Hazel, all we can. We help them. And now there will be
Miss Argenter. As Hazel said,--'We all of us know the Muffin-man.'
How queer that that ridiculous play should come to mean so much with
us! Luclarion Grapp is actually a muffin-woman, you know?"
"I'm afraid I don't know the Muffin-_man_ literally, except what I
can guess of him by your application," said Mr. Kirkbright,
laughing. "I've no doubt I ought to, and that it would do me good."
"You will have to come to Greenley Street, and find him out. Hazel
and Miss Craydocke manage all the introductions, as having a kind of
proprietorship; 'and quite proper, I'm sure'--Why, where are Miss
Kirkbright and Miss Argenter?"
Coming back to light common speech, she came back also to the
present circumstance; reminded also, perhaps, by her "quite proper"
quotation.
"If I may come to Greenley Street, I may learn a good deal beside
the Muffin-man," said Mr. Kirkbright, giving her his hand to help
her up a steep, slippery place.
Desire foolishly blushed. She knew it, and knew that her hat did not
defend her in the least. She could not take it back now; she had
invited him. But what would he think of her blushing about it?
"You can learn what we all learn. I am only a scholar," she said,
shortly. And then she stood accused before her own truthfulness of
having covered up her blush by a disclaimer that had nothing to do
with it. She was conscious that she had colored like any silly girl,
at she hardly knew what. She was provoked with herself, for letting
the shadow of such things touch her. She hurried on, up the rough
bank, before Mr. Kirkbright. When she reached the top, she turned
round and faced him; this time with a determinedly cool cheek.
"I don't know why I said that. I did not suppose you thought you
could learn anything of me," she said. "I was confused to think I
had asked you in that offhand way to my house. I have not been very
long used to being the head of a house."
She smiled one of those bits of smiles of hers; a mere relaxation of
the lips that showed the white tips of her front teeth and just
indicated the peculiar, pretty curve with which the others were set
behind them; feeling reassured and reinstated in her own
self-respect by her explanation. Then, without letting him answer,
she turned swiftly round again, and sprang up the rugged stairway of
the shelving rock.
But she had not uninvited him, after all.
They found Miss Kirkbright and Sylvie waiting for them at the red
house. It was a quaint structure, with a kind of old, foreign look
about it. It made you think either of an ancient family mansion in
some provincial French town, or of a convent for nuns.
It was of dark red brick,--the quality of which Mr. Kirkbright
remarked with satisfaction,--with high walls at the gable ends
carried above the slope of the roof. These were met and overclasped
at the corners by wide, massive eaves. A high, narrow door with a
fan-light occupied the middle of the end before which the party
stood. Windows above, with little balconies, were hung with old red
woolen damask, fading out in stripes; perishing, doubtless, with
moth and decay; in one was suspended a rusty bird-cage which had
once been gilt.
What an honest neighborhood this was, in which these things had
remained for years, and not even the panes of the windows had been
broken by little boys! But then the villages full of little boys
were miles away, and the single families at the nearer farms were
well ordered Puritan folk, fathered and mothered in careful, old
fashioned sort. There was some indefinite awe, also, of the lonely
place, and of the rich, far-off owner who might come any day to look
after his rights, and make a reckoning with them.
Up, from platform to platform of the terraced rock, as Sylvie had
said, climbed the successive sections of the dwelling. The front was
two and a half stories high; the last outlying projection was a
single square apartment with its own low roof; towards the back,
within, you went up flight after flight of short stairs from room to
room, from passage to passage. Once or twice, the few broad steps
between two apartments ran the whole width of the same.
"What a place for plays!"
"Or for a little children's school, ranged in rows, one above
another."
"The man who built it must have dreamt it first!"
These were the exclamations that they made to each other as they
passed through, exploring.
There was a great number of bedrooms, divided off here and there;
the upper front was one row of them with a gallery running across
the house, in whose windows toward the south hung the old red woolen
draperies and the bird-cage.
Below, at the back, the last room opened by a door upon a high, flat
table of the rock, around whose overhanging edge a light railing had
been run. Standing here, they looked up and down the beautiful
gorge, into the heart of the hill and the depth of its secret shaded
places on the one hand, and on the other into the rush and whirl of
the rapidly descending and broken torrent to where it flung itself
off the sudden brink, and changed into white mist and an everlasting
song.
"This last room ought to be a chapel," said Mr. Kirkbright. "Out
here could be open-air service in the beautiful weather, to the
sound of that continual organ."
"You have thought of it, too," exclaimed Desire.
"Of what?" asked Mr. Kirkbright, turning toward her.
"Of what you might make this place."
"What would you make of it?"
They were a little apart, by themselves, again. It kept happening
so. Miss Kirkbright and Sylvie had a great deal to say to each
other.
"I would make it a moral sanatorium. I would take people in here,
and nurse them up by beautiful living, till they were ready to begin
the world again; and then I would have the little new world, of work
and business, waiting just outside. I would have rooms for them
here, that they should feel the _own-ness_ of; flowers to tend;
ferneries in the windows; they could make them from these beautiful
woods, and send them away to the cities; that would be a business at
the very first! I would have all the lovely, natural ways of living
to win them back by,--to teach them pure things; yes,--and I would
have the chapel to teach them the real gospel in! That bird-cage in
the gallery window made me think of it all, I believe," she ended,
bringing herself back out of her enthusiasm with a recollection.
"I knew you could tell me how," said Mr. Kirkbright, quietly.
"How Hazel would rejoice in this place! It is a place to set any one
dreaming, I think; because, perhaps, as Miss Kirkbright said, the
man was in a dream when he planned it."
"I mean to try if one dream cannot be lived," said Christopher
Kirkbright. "At any rate, let us have the _vision_ out, while we are
about it! What do you think of brickmaking for the hard, rough
working men, with families, with those cottages and more like them
to live in; and paper-making, in mills down there, for others; for
the women and children, especially. Paper for hangings, say; then,
some time or other, the printing works, and the designing? Might it
not all grow? And then wouldn't we have a ladder all the way up, for
them to climb by,--out of the clay and common toil to art and
beauty?"
"You can dream delightfully, Mr. Kirkbright."
"I will see if I cannot begin to turn it into fact, and make it
pay," he answered. "Pay itself, and keep itself going. I do not need
to look for my fortune from it. The fortune is to be put into it.
But I have no right to lose,--to throw away,--the fortune. It must
come by degrees, like all things. You know some people say that God
dreamed the heavens and the earth in those six wonderful days, and
then took his millions of years for the everlasting making, with the
Sabbath of his divine satisfaction between the two. If I cannot do
the whole, there may be others,--and if there are, we shall find
them,--who would help to build the city."
"I know who," said Desire, instantly. "Dakie Thayne, and Ruth! It is
just what they want."
"Will 'Dakie Thayne' build a railroad,--seven miles,--across to
Tillington,--for our transportation? We'll say he will. I have no
question it is Dakie Thayne, or somebody, who is waiting, and that
the right people are all linked together, ready to draw each other
in," said Mr. Kirkbright, giving rein to the very lightness of
gladness in the joy of the thought he was pursuing. "We don't know
how we stand leashed and looped, all over the world, until the Lord
begins to take us in hand, and bring us together toward his grand
intents. We shall want another Hilary Vireo to preach that gospel
here; and I don't doubt he is somewhere, though it would hardly seem
possible."
"Why don't we preach it ourselves?" said Desire, with inimitable
unwittingness. She was so utterly and wholly in the vision, that she
left her present self standing there on the rock with Christopher
Kirkbright, and never even thought of a reason why to blush before
him.
"I don't know why we shouldn't. In fact, we could not help it. It
would be _all_ gospel, wouldn't it? I know, at least, what I should
mean the whole thing to preach."
Saying this, he fell silent all at once.
"There is a great deal of wrong gospel preached in the world. If we
could only stop that, and begin again,--I think!" said Desire.
"Between the old, hopeless terrors and the modern smoothing away and
letting go, the real living help seems to have failed men. They
don't know where it is, or whether they need it, even."
"Yes, that is it," said Christopher Kirkbright, letting his silence
be broken through with the whole tide of his earnest, life-long,
pondered thought. "Men have put aside the old idea of the avenging
and punishing God, until they think they have no longer any need of
Christ. God is Love, they tell us; not recognizing that the Christ
_is_ that very Love of God. He will not cast us into hell, they say;
there _is_ no pit of burning torment. But they know there is
something that follows after sin; they know that God is not weak,
but abides by his own truth. Therefore, when they have made out God
to be Love, and blotted away the old, literal hell, they turn back
and declare pitilessly,--'There is _Law_. Law punishes; and Law is
inexorable. God Himself does not suspend or contradict his Law. You
have sinned; you must take the consequences.' Are you better off in
the clutch of that Law, than you were in the old hell? Isn't there
the same need as ever crying up from hearts of suffering men for a
Saviour? Of a side of God to be shown to them,--the forgiving side,
the restoring right hand? The power to grasp and curb his own law?
You must have Jesus again! You must have the Christ of God to help
you against the Law of God that you have put in the place of the
hell you will not believe in. Without a counteracting force, law
will run on forever. The impetus that sin started will bear on
downward, through the eternities! This is what threatens the sinner;
and you have sinned. Beyond and above and through the necessities
that He seems to have made, God reveals himself supreme in love, in
the Face of Jesus Christ. He comes in the very midst of the clouds,
with power and great glory! 'I have _provided_ a way,' He says,
'from the foundations,--for you to repent and for Me to take you
back. It was a part of my _plan_ to forgive. You have seen but half
the revolution of my wheel of Law. Fling yourself upon it; believe;
you shall be broken; but you shall _not_ be ground into powder. You
shall find yourselves lifted up into the eternal peace and safety;
you shall feel yourself folded in the arms of my tender compassion.
The bones that I have broken shall rejoice. Your life shall be set
right for you, notwithstanding the Law: yea, _by_ the law. _I have
provided_. Only believe.'
"This is the word,--the Christ,--on God's part This is repentance
and saving faith, on our part. It is the Gospel. And it came by the
mouth, and the interpreting and confirming acts, of Jesus. The
_power_ of the acts was little matter; the _expression_ of the acts
was everything. He proclaimed forgiveness,--He healed disease; He
reversed evil and turned it back. He changed death into
life,--taking away the sting--the implantation--of it, which is sin.
For evermore the might of the Redemption stands above the might of
the Law that was transgressed."
"You have dedicated your chapel, Mr. Kirkbright."
Desire Ledwith said it, with that emotion which makes the voice
sound restrained and deep; and as she said it, she turned to go back
into the house.