WINTERGREEN.
To tell of what has been happening with Sylvie Argenter's thread of
our story, we must go back some weeks and pages to the time just
after the great fire.
As it was with the spread of the conflagration itself, so it proved
also with the results,--of loss, and deprivation, and change. Many
seemed at first to stand safely away out on the margin, mere
lookers-on, to whom presently, with more or less direct advance, the
great red wave of ruin reached, touching, scorching, consuming.
It was a week afterward that Sylvie Argenter learned that the
Manufacturers' Insurance Company, in which her mother had, at her
persuasion, invested the little actual, tangible remnant of her
property, had found itself swallowed up in its enormous debt; must
reorganize, begin again, with fresh capital and new stockholders.
They had nothing to reinvest. The money in the Continental Bank
would just about last through the winter, paying the seven dollars a
week for Mrs. Argenter, and spending as nearly nothing for other
things as possible. Unless something came from Mr. Farron Saftleigh
before the spring, that would be the end.
Thus far they had heard nothing from these zealous friends since
they had parted from them at Sharon, except one sentimental letter
from Mrs. Farron Saftleigh to Mrs. Argenter, written from Newport in
September.
Early in December, another just such missive came this time from
Denver City. Not a word of business; a pure woman's letter, as Mrs.
Farron Saftleigh chose to rank a woman's thought and sympathy;
nothing practical, nothing that had to do with coarse topics of bond
and scrip; taking the common essentials of life for granted,
referring to the inignorable catastrophe of the fire as a grand
elemental phenomenon and spectacle, and soaring easily away and
beyond all fact and literalness, into the tender vague, the rare
empyrean.
Mrs. Argenter read it over and over, and wished plaintively that she
could go out to Denver, and be near her friend. She should like a
new place; and such appreciation and affection were not be met with
everywhere, or often in a lifetime.
Sylvie read the letter once, and had great necessity of
self-restraint not to toss it contemptuously and indignantly into
the fire.
She made up her mind to one thing, at least; that if, at the end of
the six months, nothing were heard from Mr. Saftleigh himself, she
would write to him upon her own responsibility, and demand some
intelligence as to her mother's investments in the Latterend and
Donnowhair road, the reason why a dividend was not forthcoming, and
a statement in regard to actual or probable sales of land, which he
had given them reason to expect would before that time have been
made.
One afternoon she had gone down with Desire and Hazel among the
shops; Desire and the Ripwinkleys were very busy about Christmas;
they had ever so many "notches to fill in" in their rather mixed up
and mutable memoranda. Sylvie only accompanied them as far as Winter
Street corner, where she had to buy some peach-colored double-zephyr
for her mother; then she bade them good-by, saying that two were bad
enough dragging each other about with their two shopping lists, but
that a third would extinguish fatally both time and space and taking
her little parcel in her hand, and wondering how many more such she
could ever buy, she returned home over the long hill alone. So it
happened that on reaching Greenley Street, she had quite to herself
a surprise and pleasure which she found there.
She went straight to the gray room first of all.
Mrs. Argenter was asleep on the low sofa near the fire, her crochet
stripe-work fallen by her side upon the carpet, her book laid face
down with open leaves upon the cushion.
Sylvie passed softly into her own chamber, took off her outside
things, and returned with careful steps through her mother's room to
the hall, and into the library, to find a book which she wanted.
On the table, at the side which had come of late to be considered
hers, lay an express parcel directed to herself. She knew the
writing,--the capital "S" made with a quick, upward, slanting line,
and finished with a swell and curl upon itself like a portly figure
"5" with the top-pennant left off; the round sweep after final
letters,--the "t's" crossed backward from their roots, and the
stroke stopped short like a little rocket just in poise of bursting.
She knew it all by heart, though she had never received but one
scrap of it before,--the card that had been tied to the ivy-plant,
with Rodney Sherrett's name and compliments.
She had heard nothing now of Rodney for two months. She was glad to
be alone to wonder at this, to open it with fingers that trembled,
to see what he could possibly have put into it for her.
Within the brown wrapper was a square white box. Up in the corner
of its cover was a line of writing in the same hand; the letters
very small, and a delicate dash drawn under them. How neatly special
it looked!
"A message from the woods for 'Sylvia.'"
She lifted it off, as if she were lifting it from over a thought
that it concealed, a something within all, that waited for her to
see, to know.
Inside,--well, the thought was lovely!
It was a mid-winter wreath; a wreath of things that wait in the
heart of the woodland for the spring; over which the snows slowly
gather, keeping them like a secret which must not yet be told, but
which peeps green and fresh and full of life at every melting, in
soft sunny weather, such as comes by spells beforehand; that must
have been gathered by somebody who knew the hidden places and had
marked them long ago.
It was made of clusters, here and there, of the glossy daphne-like
wintergreen, and most delicate, tiny, feathery plumes of
princess-pine; of stout, brave, constant little shield-ferns and
spires of slender, fine-notched spleenwort, such as thrust
themselves up from rough rock-crevices and tell what life is, that
though the great stones are rolled against the doors of its
sepulchre, yet finds its way from the heart of things, somehow, to
the light. Mitchella vines, with thread-like, wandering stems, and
here and there a gleaming scarlet berry among small, round,
close-lying waxy leaves; breaths of silvery moss, like a frosty
vapor; these flung a grace of lightness over the closer garlanding,
and the whole lay upon a bed of exquisitely curled and laminated
soft gray lichen.
A message. Yes, it was a simple thing, an unostentatious
remembrance; no breaking, surely, of his father's conditions. Rodney
loyally kept away and manfully stuck to his business, but every
spire and frond and leaf of green in this winter wreath shed off the
secret, magnetic meaning with which it was charged. Heart-light
flowed from them, and touching the responsive sensitivity, made
photographs that pictured the whole story. It was a fuller telling
of what the star-leaved ferns had told before.
Rodney was not to "offer himself" to Sylvie Argenter till the two
years were over; he was to let her have her life and its chances; he
was to prove himself, and show that he could earn and keep a little
money; he was to lay by two thousand dollars. This was what he had
undertaken to do. His father thought he had a right to demand these
two years, even extending beyond the term of legal freedom, to
offset the half-dozen of boyish, heedless extravagance, before he
should put money into his son's hands to begin responsible work
with, or consent approvingly to his making of what might be only a
youthful attraction, a tie to bind him solemnly and unalterably for
life.
But the very stones cry out. The meaning that is repressed from
speech intensifies in all that is permitted. You may keep two
persons from being nominally "engaged," but you cannot keep two
hearts, by any mere silence, from finding each other out; and the
inward betrothal in which they trust and wait,--that is the most
beautiful time of all. The blessedness of acknowledgment, when it
comes, is the blessedness of owning and looking back together upon
what has already been.
Sylvie made a space for the white box upon a broad old bureau-top in
her room. She put its cover on again over the message in green
cipher; she would only care to look at it on purpose, and once in a
while; she would not keep it out to the fading light and soiling
touch of every day. She spread across the cover itself and its
written sentence her last remaining broidered and laced
handkerchief. The wreath would dry, she knew; it must lose its first
glossy freshness with which it had come from under the snows; but it
should dry there where Rodney put it, and not a leaf should fall out
of it and be lost.
She was happier in these subtle signs that revealed inward relation
than she would have been just now in an outspokenness that demanded
present, definite answer and acceptance of outward tie. It might
come to be: who could tell? But if she had been asked now to let it
be, there would have been her troubles to give, with her affection.
How could she burden anybody doubly? How could she fling all her
needs and anxieties into the life of one she cared for?
There was a great deal for Sylvie to do between now and any
marriage. Her worry soon came back upon her with a dim fear, as the
days passed on, touching the very secret hope and consciousness that
she was happy in. What might come to be her plain duty, now, very
shortly? Something, perhaps, that would change it all; that would
make it seem strange and unsuitable for Rodney Sherrett ever to
interpret that fair message into words. Something that would put
social distance between them.
Her mother, above all, must be cared for; and her mother's money was
so nearly gone!
Desire Ledwith was kind, but she must not live on anybody's
kindness. As soon as she possibly could, she must find something to
do. There must be no delay, no lingering, after the little need
there was of her here now, should cease. Every day of willing
waiting would be a day of dishonorable dependence.
It was now three months since Mrs. Froke had gone away; and letters
from her brought the good tidings of successful surgical treatment
and a rapid gaining of strength. She might soon be able to come
back. Sylvie knew that Desire could either continue to contrive work
for her a while longer, or spare her to other and more full
employment, could such be found. She watched the "Transcript" list
of "Wants," and wished there might be a "Want" made expressly for
her.
How many anxious eyes scan those columns through with a like
longing, every night!
If she could get copying to do,--if she could obtain a situation
in the State House, that paradise of well paid female scribes!
If she could even learn to set up type, and be employed in a
printing-office? If there were any chance in a library? Even work of
this sort would take her away from her mother in the daytime; she
would have to provide some attendance for her. She must furnish her
room nicely, wherever it was; that she could do from the remnants of
their household possessions stored at Dorbury; and her mother must
have a delicate little dinner every day. For breakfast and tea--she
could see to those before and after work; and her own dinners could
be anything,--anywhere. She must get a cheap rooms where some tidy
lodging woman would do what was needful; and that would take,--oh,
dear! she _couldn't_ say less than six or seven dollars a week, and
where were food and clothes to come from? At any rate, she must
begin before their present resources were utterly exhausted, or what
would become of her mother's cream, and fruit, and beef-tea?
Mingled with all her troubled and often-reviewed calculations, would
intrude now and then the thought,--shouldn't she have to be willing
to wear out and grow ugly, with hard work and insufficient
nourishing? And she would have so liked to keep fresh and pretty for
the time that might have come!
In the days when these things were keeping her anxious, the winter
wreath was also slowly turning dry.
She found herself hemmed in and headed at every turn by the pitiless
hedge and ditch of circumstance, at which girls and women in our
time have to chafe and wait; and from which there seems to be no way
out. Yet there are ways out from this, as from all things. One
way--the way of thorough womanly home-helpfulness--was not clear to
her; there are many to whom it is not clear. Yet if those to whom it
is, or might be, would take it,--if those who might give it, in many
forms, _would give_,--who knows what relief and loosening would come
to others in the hard jostle and press?
There is another way out of all puzzle and perplexity and hardness;
it is the Lord's special way for each one, that we cannot foresee,
and that we never know until it comes. Then we discern that there
has never been impossibility; that all things are open before his
eyes; and that there is no temptation,--no trying of us,--to which
He will not provide some end or escape.
In the first week of January, Sylvie acted upon her resolve of
writing to Mr. Farron Saftleigh. She asked brief and direct
questions; told him that she was obliged to request an answer
without the least delay; and begged that he would render them a
clear statement of all their affairs. She reminded him that he had
_told_ them that he would be responsible for their receiving a
dividend of at least four per cent, at the end of the six months.
Mr. Farron Saftleigh "told" people a great many things in his
genial, exhilarating business talks, which he was a great deal too
wise ever to put down on paper.
Sylvie waited ten days; a fortnight; three weeks; no answer came.
Mr. Farron Saftleigh had simply destroyed the letter, of no
consequence at all as coming from a person not primarily concerned
or authorized, and set off from Denver City the same day for a
business visit to San Francisco.
Sylvie saw the plain fact; that they were penniless. And this could
not be told to her mother.
She went to Desire Ledwith, and asked her what she could do.
"I would go into a household anywhere, as Dot Ingraham and Bel Bree
have done, to earn board and wages, and spend my money for my
mother; but I can't leave her. And there's no sewing work to get,
even if I could do it at night and in honest spare time. I know, as
it is, that my service isn't worth what you give me in return, and
of course I cannot stay here any longer now."
"Of course you can stay where God puts you, dear," answered Desire
Ledwith. "Let your side of it alone for a minute, and think of mine.
If you were in my place,--trying to live as one of the _large
household_, remember, and looking for your opportunities,--what
would you say,--what would you plainly hear said to you,--about
this?"
Sylvie was silent.
"Tell me truly, Sylvie. Put it into words. What would it be? What
would you hear?"
"Just what you do, I suppose," said Sylvie, slowly "But I _don't_
hear it on my side. My part doesn't seem to chord."
"Your part just pauses. There are no notes written just here, in
your score. Your part is to wait. Think, and see if it isn't. The
Dakie Thaynes are going out West again. Mr. Thayne knows about
lands, and such things. He would do something, and let you know. A
real business man would make this Saftleigh fellow afraid."
The Thaynes--Mrs. Dakie Thayne is our dear little old friend Ruth
Holabird, you know--had been visiting in Boston; staying partly
here, and partly at Mrs. Frank Scherman's. At Asenath's they were
real "comfort-friends;" Asenath had the faculty of gathering only
such about her. She felt no necessity, with them, for grand, late
dinners, or any show; there was no trouble or complication in her
household because of them. Ruth insisted upon the care of her own
room; it was like the "coöperative times" at Westover. Mrs. Scherman
said it was wonderful, when your links were with the right people,
how simple you could make your art of living, you could actually be
"quite Holabird-y," even in Boston! But this digresses.
"I shall speak to Mr. Thayne about it," said Desire. "And now, dear,
if you could just mark these towels this morning?"
Sylvie sat marking the towels, and Desire passed to and fro,
gathering things which were to go to Neighbor Street in the
afternoon.
"Do you see," she said, stopping behind Sylvie a while after, and
putting her fingers upon her hair with a caressing little
touch,--"the sun has got round from the east to the south. It shines
into this window now. And you have been keeping quiet, just doing
your own little work of the moment. The world is all alive, and
changing. Things are working--away up in the heavens--for us all.
When people don't know which way to turn, it is very often good not
to turn at all; if they are _driven_, they do know. Wait till you
are driven, or see; you will be shown, one way or the other. It is
almost always when things are all blocked up and impossible, that a
happening comes. It has to. A dead block can't last, any more than a
vacuum. If you are sure you are looking and ready, that is all you
need. God is turning the world round all the time."
Desire did not say one word about the ninety-eight dollars which lay
in one of the locked drawers of her writing desk, in precisely the
shape in which every two or three weeks she had let Sylvie put the
money into her hands. There would be a right time for that. She
would force nothing. Sylvie would come near enough, yet, for that
perfect understanding in which those bits of stamped paper would
cease to be terrible between their hands, _either_ way.