Desire Ledwith was, at this epoch, a perplexity and a worry,--even a
positive terror sometimes,--to her mother.
It was not a case of the hen hatching ducks, it was rather as if a
hen had got a hawk in her brood.
Desire's demurs and questions,--her dissatisfactions, sittings and
contempts,--threatened now and then to swoop down upon the family
life and comfort with destroying talons.
"She'll be an awful, strong-minded, radical, progressive,
overturning woman," Laura said, in despair, to her friend Mrs.
Megilp. "And Greenley Street, and Aspen Street, and that everlasting
Miss Craydocke, are making her worse. And what can I do? Because
there's Uncle."
Right before Desire,--not knowing the cloud of real bewilderment
that was upon her young spiritual perceptions, getting their first
glimpse of a tangled and conflicting and distorted world,--she drew
wondering comparisons between her elder children and this odd,
anxious, restless, sharp-spoken girl.
"I don't understand it," she would say. "It isn't a bit like a child
of mine. I always took things easy, and got the comfort of them
somehow; I think the world is a pretty pleasant place to live in,
and there's lots of satisfaction to be had; and Agatha and Florence
take after me; they are nice, good-natured, contented girls;
managing their allowances,--that I wish were more,--trimming their
own bonnets, and enjoying themselves with their friends,
girl-fashion."
Which was true. Agatha and Florence were neither fretful nor
dissatisfied; they were never disrespectful, perhaps because Mrs.
Ledwith demanded less of deferential observance than of a kind of
jolly companionship from her daughters; a go-and-come easiness in
and out of what they called their home, but which was rather the
trimming-up and outfitting place,--a sort of Holmes' Hole,--where
they put in spring and fall, for a thorough overhaul and rig; and at
other times, in intervals or emergencies, between their various and
continual social trips and cruises. They were hardly ever
all-togetherish, as Desire had said, if they ever were, it was over
house cleaning and millinery; when the ordering was complete,--when
the wardrobes were finished,--then the world was let in, or they let
themselves out, and--"looked."
"Desire is different," said Mrs. Ledwith. "She's like Grant's
father, and her Aunt Desire,--pudgicky and queer."
"Well, mamma," said the child, once, driven to desperate logic for
defense, "I don't see how it can be helped. If you _will_ marry into
the Ledwith family, you can't expect to have your children all
Shieres!"
Which, again, was very true. Laura laughed at the clever sharpness
of it, and was more than half proud of her bold chick-of-prey, after
all.
Yet Desire remembered that her Aunt Frances was a Shiere, also; and
she thought there might easily be two sides to the same family; why
not, since there were two sides still further back, always? There
was Uncle Titus; who knew but it was the Oldways streak in him after
all?
Desire took refuge, more and more, with Miss Craydocke, and Rachel
Froke, and the Ripwinkleys; she even went to Luclarion with
questions, to get her quaint notions of things; and she had ventured
into Uncle Titus's study, and taken down volumes of Swedenborg to
pry into, while he looked at her with long keen regards over his
spectacles, and she did not know that she was watched.
"That young girl, Desire, is restless, Titus," Rachel Froke said to
him one day. "She is feeling after something; she wants something
real to do; and it appears likely to me that she will do it, if they
don't take care."
After that, Uncle Titus fixed his attention upon her yet more
closely; and at this time Desire stumbled upon things in a strange
way among his bookshelves, and thought that Rachel Froke was growing
less precise in her fashion of putting to rights. Books were tucked
in beside each other as if they had been picked up and bestowed
anyhow; between "Heaven and Hell" and the "Four Leading Doctrines,"
she found, one day, "Macdonald's Unspoken Sermons," and there was a
leaf doubled lengthwise in the chapter about the White Stone and the
New Name. Another time, a little book of poems, by the same author,
was slid in, open, over the volumes of Darwin and Huxley, and the
pages upon whose outspread faces it lay were those that bore the
rhyme of the blind Bartimeus:--
"O Jesus Christ! I am deaf and blind;
Nothing comes through into my mind,
I only am not dumb:
Although I see Thee not, nor hear,
I cry because Thou mayst be near
O Son of Mary! come!"
Do you think a girl of seventeen may not be feeling out into the
spiritual dark,--may not be stretching helpless hands, vaguely,
toward the Hands that help? Desire Ledwith laid the book down again,
with a great swelling breath coming up slowly out of her bosom, and
with a warmth of tears in her earnest little eyes. And Uncle Titus
Oldways sat there among his papers, and never moved, or seemed to
look, but saw it all.
He never said a word to her himself; it was not Uncle Titus's way to
talk, and few suspected him of having anything to say in such
matters; but he went to Friend Froke and asked her,--
"Haven't you got any light that might shine a little for that child,
Rachel?"
And the next Sunday, in the forenoon, Desire came in; came in,
without knowing it, for her little light.
She had left home with the family on their way to church; she was
dressed in her buff silk pongee suit trimmed with golden brown bands
and quillings; she had on a lovely new brown hat with tea roses in
it; her gloves and boots were exquisite and many buttoned; Agatha
and Florence could not think what was the matter when she turned
back, up Dorset Street, saying suddenly, "I won't go, after all."
And then she had walked straight over the hill and down to Greenley
Street, and came in upon Rachel, sitting alone in a quiet gray
parlor that was her own, where there were ferns and ivies in the
window, and a little canary, dressed in brown and gold like Desire
herself, swung over them in a white wire cage.
When Desire saw how still it was, and how Rachel Froke sat there
with her open window and her open book, all by herself, she stopped
in the doorway with a sudden feeling of intrusion, which had not
occurred to her as she came.
"It's just what I want to come into; but if I do, it won't be
there. I've no right to spoil it. Don't mind, Rachel. I'll go away."
She said it softly and sadly, as if she could not help it, and was
turning back into the hall.
"But I do mind," said Rachel, speaking quickly. "Thee will come in,
and sit down. Whatever it is thee wants, is here for thee. Is it the
stillness? Then we will be still."
"That's so easy to say. But you can't do it for me. _You_ will be
still, and I shall be all in a stir. I want so to be just hushed
up!"
"Fed, and hushed up, in somebody's arms, like a baby. I know," said
Rachel Froke.
"How does she know?" thought Desire; but she only looked at her with
surprised eyes, saying nothing.
"Hungry and restless; that's what we all are," said Rachel Froke,
"until"--
"Well,--until?" demanded the strange girl, impetuously, as Rachel
paused. "I've been hungry ever since I was born, mother says."
"Until He takes us up and feeds us."
"Why don't He?--Mrs. Froke, when does He give it out? Once a month,
in church, they have the bread and the wine? Does that do it?"
"Thee knows we do not hold by ordinances, we Friends," said Rachel.
"But He gives the bread of life. Not once a month, or in any place;
it is his word. Does thee get no word when thee goes to church? Does
nothing come to thee?"
"I don't know; it's mixed up; the church is full of bonnets; and
people settle their gowns when they come in, and shake out their
hitches and puffs when they go out, and there's professional music
at one end, and--I suppose it's because I'm bad, but I don't know;
half the time it seems to me it's only Mig at the other. Something
all fixed up, and patted down, and smoothed over, and salted and
buttered, like the potato hills they used to make on my plate for me
at dinner, when I was little. But it's soggy after all, and has an
underground taste. It isn't anything that has just grown, up in the
light, like the ears of corn they rubbed in their hands. Breakfast
is better than dinner. Bread, with yeast in it, risen up new. They
don't feed with bread very often."
"The yeast in the bread, and the sparkle in the wine they are the
life of it; they are what make the signs."
"If they only gave it out fresh, and a little of it! But they keep
it over, and it grows cold and tough and flat, and people sit round
and pretend, but they don't eat. They've eaten other things,--all
sorts of trash,--before they came. They've spoiled their appetites.
Mine was spoiled, to-day. I felt so new and fussy, in these brown
things. So I turned round, and came here."