CHOSEN: AND CALLED.
Desire Ledwith found nobody at home at Mr. Vireo's. The maid-servant
said that she could not tell when they would return. Mrs. Vireo was
at her mother's, and she believed they would not come back to tea.
Desire knew that it was one of the minister's chapel nights. She
went away, up Savin Street, disappointed; wishing that she could
have sent instant help to Mary Moxall, who, she thought, could not
withstand the evangel of Hilary Vireo's presence. It is so sure that
nothing so instantly brings the heavenly power to bear upon a soul
as contact with a humanity in which it already abides and rules. She
wanted this girl to touch the hem of a garment of earthly living,
with which it had clothed itself to do a work in the world. For the
Christ still finds and puts such garments on to walk the earth; the
seamless robes of undivided consecration to Himself.
As Desire crossed to Borden Street, and went on up the hill, there
came suddenly to her mind recollection of the Sunday noon, years
since, when she had walked over that same sidewalk with Kenneth
Kincaid; when he had urged her to take up Mission work, and she had
answered him with her girlish bluffness, that "she thought he did
not approve of brokering business; it was all there, why should they
not take it for themselves? Why should she set up to go between?"
She thought how she had learned, since, the beautiful links of
endless ministry; the prismatic law of mediation,--that there is no
tint or shade of spiritual being, no angle at which any soul catches
the Divine beam, that does not join and melt into the next above and
the next below; that the farther apart in the spectrum of humanity
the red of passion and the violet of peace, the more place and need
for every subdivided ray, to help translate the whole story of the
pure, whole whiteness.
She remembered what she had said another time about "seeing blue,
and living red." She was thinking out by the type the mystery of
difference,--the broken refractions that God lets his Spirit fall
into,--when, looking up as she was about to pass some person, she
met the face of Christopher Kirkbright.
He had not been at home of late; he had been busy up at Brickfield
Farms.
For nearly four months past, Cone Hill and the Clay Pits had been
his by purchase and legal transfer. He had lost no time in making
his offer to his brother-in-law. Ten words by the Atlantic cable had
done it, and the instructions had come back by the first mail
steamer. Repairing and building had been at once begun; an odd,
rambling wing, thrown out eastward, slanting off at a wholly
unarchitectural angle from the main house, and climbing the terraced
rock where it found best space and foothold, already made the quaint
structure look more like a great two-story Chinese puzzle than ever,
and covered in space for an ample, airy, sunny work-saloon above a
range of smaller rooms calculated for individual and home occupancy.
But the details of the plan at Brickfields would make a long story
within a story; we may have further glimpses of it, on beyond; we
must not leave our friends now standing in the street.
Mr. Kirkbright held out his hand to Desire, as he stopped to speak
with her.
"I am going down to Vireo's," he said. "I have come to a place in my
work where I want him."
"So have I," said Desire. "But he is not at home. I was going next
to Miss Euphrasia."
"And you and I are sent to stop each other. My sister is away, at
Milton, for two days."
Desire turned round. "Then I must go home again," she said.
Mr. Kirkbright moved on, down the hill beside her.
"Can I do anything for you?" he inquired.
"Yes," returned Desire, pausing, and looking gravely up at him. "If
you could go down to Luclarion Grapp's,--the Neighbors, you
know,--and carry some kind of a promise to a poor thing who has just
been brought there, and who thinks there is no promise in the world;
a woman who tried to kill her baby to get him out of it, and who
says that the world is hell, and people don't know they've got into
it. Go and tell her some of the things you told me, that morning up
at Brickfields."
"You have been to her? What have you told her yourself, already?"
"I told her that it was not all badness when one could feel the
misery of the badness. That her pain at it was God's pain for her.
That if He had done with her, she would be dead."
"Would she believe you? Did she seem to begin to believe?"
"I do not think she believes anything. She can't until the things to
believe in come to her. Mr. Vireo--or you--would make her see. I
told her I would send somebody who had more for her than I."
"You have told her the first message,--that the kingdom is at hand.
The Christ-errand must be done next. The full errand of _help_. That
was what was sent to the world, after the voice had cried in the
wilderness. It isn't Mr. Vireo or I,--but the helping hand; the
righting of condition; the giving of the new chance. We must not
leave all that to death and the angels. Miss Desire, this woman must
go to our mountain-refuge; to our sanatorium of souls. I have a good
deal to tell you about that."
They had walked on again, as they talked; they had come to the foot
of Borden Street. They must now turn two different ways.
They were standing a moment at the corner, as Mr. Kirkbright spoke.
When he said "our refuge,--our sanatorium,"--Desire blushed again as
she had blushed at Brickfields.
She was provoked at herself; why need personal pronouns come in at
all? Why, if they did, need they remind her of herself and him,
instead of merely the thoughts that they had had together, the
intent of which was high above them both? Why need she be pleased
and shy in her selfhood,--ashamed lest he should detect the thought
of pleasure in her at his sharing with her his grand purpose,
recognizing in her the echo of his inspiration? What made it so
different that Christopher Kirkbright should discover and
acknowledge such a sympathy between them, from her meeting it, as
she had long done, in Miss Euphrasia?
She would not let it be different; she would not be such a fool.
It was twilight, and her little lace veil was down. She took
courage behind it, and in her resolve,--for she knew that to be very
determined would make her pale, not red; and the next time she would
be on her guard, and very determined.
She gave him the hand he held out his own for, and bade him good
evening, with her head lifted just imperceptibly higher than was its
wont, and her face turned full toward him. Her eyes met his with an
honest calmness; she had summoned herself back.
He saw strength and earnestness; a flush of feeling; the face of a
woman made to look nobleness and enthusiasm into the soul of a man.
* * * * *
She sat in the library that evening at nine o'clock.
She had drawn up her large chair to the open fire; her feet were
resting on the low fender; her eyes were watching shapes in the
coals.
Mrs. Lewes's "Middlemarch" lay on her lap; she had just begun to
read it. Her hands, crossed upon each other, had fallen upon the
page; she had found something of herself in those first chapters.
Something that reminded of her old longings and hindrances; of the
shallowness and half-living that had been about her, and the chafe
of her discontent in it.
She did not wonder that Dorothea was going to marry Mr. Casaubon.
Into some dream-trap just such as that she might have fallen, had a
Mr. Casaubon come in her way.
Instead, had come pain and mistake; a keen self-searching; a
learning to bear with all her might, to work, and to wait.
She had not been waiting for any making good in God Providence of
that special happiness which had passed her by. If she had, she
would not have been doing the sort of work she had taken into her
hands. When we wait for one particular hope, and will not be
satisfied with any other, the whole force of ourselves bends toward
it; we dictate to life, and wrest its tendencies at every turn.
The thing comes. Ask,--with the real might of whatever asking there
is in you,--and it shall be given you. But when you have got it, it
may not be the thing you thought it would be. Whosoever will have
his life shall lose it.
No; Desire Ledwith had rather turned away from all special hope,
thinking it was over for her. But she came to believe that all the
good in God's long years was not over; that she had not been
hindered from one thing, save to be kept for some other that He saw
better. She was willing to wait for his better,--his best. When she
paused to look at her life objectively, she rejoiced in it as the
one thread--a thread of changing colors--in God's manifold work,
that He was letting her follow alone with Him, and showing her the
secret beauty of. Up and down, in and out, backward and forward, she
wrought it after his pattern, and discerned continually where it
fell into combinations that she had never planned,--made surprises
for her of effects that were not her own. There is much ridicule of
mere tapestry and broidery work, as a business for women's fingers;
but I think the secret, uninterpreted charm of it, to the silliest
sorters of colors and counters of stitches, is beyond the fact, as
the beauty of children's plays is the parable they cannot help
having in them. Patient and careful doing, after a law and
rule,--and the gradual apparition of result, foreseen by the deviser
of the law and rule; it is life measured out upon a canvas. Who
knows how,--in this spiritual Kindergarten of a world,--the
rudiments of all small human devices were set in human faculty and
aptness for its own object-teaching toward a perfect heavenly
enlightenment?
Desire was thinking to-night, how impossible it is, as the pattern
of life grows, to help seeing a little of the shapes it may be
taking; to refrain from a looking forward that becomes eager with a
hint of possible unfolding.
Once, a while ago, she had thought that she discerned a green beauty
springing out from the dull, half-filled background; tender leaves
forming about a bare and awkward shoot; but suddenly there were no
more stitches in that direction that she could set; the leaves
stopped short in half-developed curves that never were completed.
The pattern set before her--given but one bit at a time, as life
patterns are, like part etchings of a picture in which you know not
how the spaces are to be filled up and related--changed; the place,
and the tint of the thread, changed also; she had to work on in a
new part, and in a different way. She could not discover then, that
these abortive leaves were the slender claspings of a calyx, in
whose midst might sometime fit the rose-bloom of a wonderful joy.
Was she discovering it now? For browns and grays,--generous and
strong, tender and restful,--was a flush of blossom hues that she
had not looked for, coming to be woven in? Was the empty calyx
showing the first shadowy petal-shapes of a most perfect flower?
It might be the flower of a gracious friendship only a joining of
hands in work for the kingdom-building; she did not let herself go
farther than this. But it was a friendship across which there lay
no bar and somehow, while she put from herself the thought that it
might ever be so promised to her as to be hers of all the world and
to the world's exclusion,--while she resented in herself that
foolish girl's blush, and resolved that it should never come
again,--she sat here to-night thinking how grand and perfect a thing
for a woman a grand man's friendship is; how it is different from
any, the most pure and sweet, of woman-tenderness; how the crossing
of her path with such a path as Christopher Kirkbright's, if it were
only once a day, or once a week, or once a month, would be a thing
to reckon joy and courage from; to live on from, as she lived on
from her prayers.
An hour had come in her life which gathered about her realities of
heaven, whether the earthly correspondence should concur, or no. A
noble influence which had met and moved her, seemed to come and
abide about her,--a thought-presence.
And a thought-presence was precisely what it was. A thousand
circumstances may stretch that hyphen which at once links
and separates the sign-syllables of the wonderful fact; an
impossibility, of physical conditions, may be between; but the fact
subsists--and in rare moments we know it--when that which belongs to
us comes invisibly and takes us to itself; when we feel the
footsteps afar off which may or may not be feet of the flesh turned
toward us. Yet even this conjunction does happen, now and again; the
will--the blessed purpose--is accomplished at once on earth and in
heaven.
When many minutes after the city bells had ceased to sound for nine
o'clock, the bell of her own door rang with a clear, strong stroke,
Desire Ledwith thought instantly of Mr. Kirkbright with a singular
recall,--that was less a change than a transfer of the same
perception,--from the inward to the actual. She had no reason to
suppose it,--no ordinary reason why,--but she was suddenly persuaded
that the friend who in the last hour had stood spiritually beside
her, stood now, in reality, upon her door-stone.
She did not even wonder for what he could have come. She did not
move from her chair; she did not lift her crossed hands from off her
open book. She did not break the external conditions in which unseen
forces had been acting. If she had moved,--pushed back her
chair,--put by her book,--it would have begun to seem strange, she
would have been back in a bond of circumstance which would have
embarrassed her; she would have been receiving an evening call at an
unusual hour. But to have the verity come in and fill the
dream,--this was not strange. And yet Christopher Kirkbright had
scarcely been in that house ten times before.
She heard him ask if Miss Ledwith were still below; if he might see
her. She heard Frendely close the outer door, and precede him toward
the door of the library. He entered, and she lifted her eyes.
"Don't move," he said quickly. "I have been seeing you sitting like
that, all the evening. It is a reverie come true. Only I have walked
out of my end of it, and into yours. May I stay a little while?"
Her face answered him in a very natural way. There was a wonder in
her eyes, and in the smile that crept over her lips; there were
wonder and waiting in the silence which she kept, answering in her
face only, at the first, that peculiar greeting. Perhaps any woman,
who had had no dream, would have found other response as difficult.
"I am going back to Brickfields to-morrow. I am more eager than
ever to get the home finished there, for those who are waiting for
its shelter. I have had a busy day,--a busy evening; it has not been
a _still_ reverie in which I have seen you. In this last half hour,
I have been with Vireo. He has found a woman for me who can be a
directress of work; can manage the sewing-room. A good woman, too,
who will _mother_--not 'matron'--the girls. I have bought five
machines. They will make their own garments first; then they will
work for pay, some hours each day, or a day or two every week,--in
turn. That money will be their own. The rest of the time will be due
to the commonwealth. There will be a farm-kitchen, where they will
cook--and learn to cook well--for the farm hands; they will wash and
iron; they will take care of fruit and poultry. As they learn the
various employments, they will take their place as teachers to
new-comers; we shall keep them busy, and shall make a life around
them, that will be worth their laboring for; as God makes all the
beauty of the world for us to live in, in compensation for the
little that He leaves it needful for us to do. There is where I
think our privilege comes in, after the similitude of his; to
supplement broadly that which shall not hinder honest and
conditional exertion. I have been longing to tell you about it; I
have had a vision of you in the midst of my work and talk; I have
had a feeling of you this evening, waiting just so and there; I had
to come. I went to see your Mary Moxall, Miss Desire."
"In the midst of all you had to do!"
"Was it not a part? 'All in the day's work' is a good proverb."
"What did you say to her?"
"I asked her if she would come up into the country with my sister,
to a home among great, still, beautiful hills, and take care of her
baby, and some flowers."
"It was like asking her to come home--to God!"
"Yes,--I think it was asking her God's way. How can we, standing
among all the helps and harmonies of our lives, ask them to come
straight up to Him,--His invisible unapproachable Self,--out of the
terrible darkness and chaos of theirs? There are no steps."
"Tell me more about the steps you have been making--in the hills.
You said 'flowers.'"
"Yes; there will be a conservatory. I must have them all the year
through; the short summer gardening would not be ministry enough.
Beyond the Chapel Rock runs back a large new wing, with sewing and
living rooms; they only wait good weather for finishing. A dozen
women can live and work there. As they grow fit and willing, and
numerous enough to colonize off, there are little houses to be built
that they can move into, set up homes, earn their machines, and at
last, in cases where it proves safe and wise, their homes
themselves. I shall provide a depot for their needlework in the
city; and as the village grows it will create a little demand of its
own. Mr. Thayne is going to build the cottages, and he and I have
contracted for the seven miles of railroad to Tillington, as a
private enterprise. The brickmaking is to begin at once; we shall do
something for the building of the new, fire-proof Boston. Your
thought is growing into a fact, Miss Desire; and I think I have not
forgotten any particular of it. Now, I have come back to you for
more,--a great deal more, if I can get it. First, a name. We can't
_call_ it a City of Refuge, beautiful as such a city is--to _be_.
Neither will I call it a Home, or an Asylum. The first thing Mary
Moxall said to me was,--'I won't go to no Refuges nor Sile'ums. I
don't want to be raked up, mud an' all, into a heap that everybody
knows the name of. If the world was big enough for me to begin
again,--in a clean place; but there ain't no clean places!' And then
I asked her to come home with me and my sister."
"You mean, of course, a neighborhood name, for the settlement, as it
grows?"
"Exactly. 'Brickfield Farms' belongs to the outlying husbandry and
homesteads. And 'Clay Pits!' It is _out_ of the pit and the miry
clay that we want to bring them. The suggestion of that is too much
like Mary Moxall's 'heap that everybody knows the name of.'"
"Why not call it 'Hill-hope'? 'The hills, whence cometh our
strength;' 'the mountain of the height of Israel where the Lord will
plant it, and the dry tree shall flourish'?"
"Thank you," said Mr. Kirkbright, heartily. "That is the right word.
It is named."
Desire said nothing. She looked quietly into the fire with a flush
of deep pleasure on her face. Mr. Kirkbright remained silent also
for a few minutes.
He looked at her as she sat there, in this room that was her own;
that was filled with home-feeling and association for her; where a
solemnly tender commission and opportunity had been given her, and
had centred, and he almost doubted whether the thing that was urging
itself with him to be asked for last and greatest of all, were right
to ask; whether it existed for him, and a way could be made for it
to be given him. Yet the question was in him, strong and earnest; a
question that had never been in him before to ask of any woman. Why
had it been put there if it might not at least be spoken? If there
were not possibly, in this woman's keeping, the ordained and perfect
answer?
While he sat and scrupled about it, it sprang, with an impulse that
he did not stop to scruple at, to his lips.
"I shall want to ask you questions every day, dear friend! What are
we to do about it?"
Desire's eyes flashed up at him with a happiness in them that waited
not to weigh anything; that he could not mistake. The color was
bright upon her cheek; her lips were soft and tremulous. Then the
eyes dropped gently away again; she answered nothing,--with words.
So far as he had spoken, she had answered.
"I want you there, by my side, to help me make a real human home
around which other homes may grow. There ought to be a heart in it,
and I cannot do it alone. Could you--_will_ you--come? Will you be
to me the one woman of the world, and out of your purity and
strength help me to help your sisters?"
He had risen and walked the few steps across the distance that was
between them. He stopped before her, and bending toward her, held
out his hands.
Desire stood up and laid hers in them.
"It must be right. You have come for me. I cannot possibly do
otherwise than this."
The deep, gracious, divine fact had asserted itself. A house here,
or a house there could not change or bind it. They belonged
together. There was a new love in the world, and the world would
have to arrange itself around it. Around it and the Will that it was
to be wedded to do.
They stood together, hands in hands. Christopher Kirkbright leaned
over and laid his lips against her forehead.
He whispered her name, set in other syllables that were only for
him to say to her. I shall not say them over on this page to you.
But there is a line in the blessed Scripture that we all know, and
God had fulfilled it to his heart.
Strangely--more strangely than any story can contrive--are the
happenings of life put side by side.
As they sat there a little longer in the quiet library, forgetting
the late evening hour, because it was morning all at once to them;
forgetting Sylvie Argenter and her mother as they were at just this
moment in the next room; only remembering them among those whom this
new relation and joining of purpose must make surer and safer, not
less carefully provided for in the changes that would occur,--the
door of the gray parlor opened; a quick step fell along the passage,
and Sylvie unlatched the library door, and stood in the entrance
wide-eyed and pale.
"Desire! Come!"
"Sylvie! _What_, dear?" cried Desire, quickly, as she sprang to meet
her, her voice chording responsive to Sylvie's own, catching in it
the indescribable tone that tells so much more than words. She did
not need the further revelation of her face to know that something
deep and strange had happened.
Sylvie said not a syllable more, but turned and hurried back along
the hall.
Desire and Mr. Kirkbright followed her.
Mrs. Argenter was sitting in the deep corner of her broad, low sofa,
against the two large pillows.
"A minute ago," said Sylvie, in the same changed voice, that spoke
out of a different world from the world of five minutes before, "she
was _here_! She gave me her plate to put away on the sideboard, and
_now_,--when I turned round,"--
She was _There_.
The plate, with its bits of orange-rind, and an untasted section of
the fruit, stood upon the sideboard. The book she had been reading
fifteen minutes since lay, with her eye-glasses inside it, at the
page where she had stopped, upon the couch; her left hand had
fallen, palm upward, upon the cushioned seat; her life had gone
instantly and without a sign, out from her mortal body.
Mrs. Argenter had died of that disease which lets the spirit free
like the uncaging of a bird.
Hypertrophy of the heart. The gradual thickening and hardening of
those mysterious little gates of life and the walls in which they
are set; the slower moving of them on their palpitating hinges, till
a moment comes when they open or close for the last time, and in
that pause ajar the soul flits out, like some curious, unwary thing,
over a threshold it may pass no more again, forever.