"I want to do something. I should like to go and live with
Luclarion, I think, down there in Neighbor Street. I should like to
take hold of some other lives,--little children's, perhaps,"--and
here Desire's voice softened,--"that don't seem to have any business
to be, either, and see if I could help or straighten anything. Then
I feel is if I should know."
"Then--according to the Scripture--you _would_ know. But--that's
undertaking a good deal. Luclarion Grapp has got there; but she has
been fifty-odd years upon the road. And she has been doing real
things all the time. That's what has brought her there. You can't
boss the world's hard jobs till you've been a journeyman at the easy
ones."
"And I've missed my apprenticeship!" said Desire, with changed voice
and face, falling back into her disheartenment again.
"No!" Uncle Oldways almost shouted. "Not if you come to the Master
who takes in the eleventh hour workers. And it isn't the eleventh
hour with you,--_child_!"
He dwelt on that word "child," reminding her of her short mistaking
and of the long retrieval. Her nineteen years and the forever and
ever contrasted themselves before her suddenly, in the light of
hope.
She turned sharply, though, to look at her duty. Her journeyman's
duty of easy things.
"Must I go to Europe with my mother?" she asked again, the
conversation coming round to just that with which it had begun.
"I'll talk with your mother," said Uncle Oldways, getting up and
looking into his hat, as a man always does when he thinks of putting
it on presently. "Good-night. I suppose you are tired enough now.
I'll come again and see you."
Desire stood up and gave him her hand.
"I thank you, Uncle Titus, with all my heart."
He did not answer her a word; but he knew she meant it.
He did not stop that night to see his niece. He went home, to think
it over. But as he walked down Borden Street, swinging his big
stick, he said to himself,--
"Next of kin! Old Marmaduke Wharne was right. But it takes more than
the Family Bible to tell you which it is!"
Two days after, he had a talk with Mrs. Ledwith which relieved both
their minds.
From the brown-and-apricot drawing-room,--from among the things
that stood for nothing now, and had never stood for home,--he went
straight up, without asking, and knocked at Desire's third-story
door.
"Come in!" she said, without a note of expectation in her voice.
She had had a dull morning. Helena had brought her a novel from
Loring's that she could not read. Novels, any more than life, cannot
be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides
surface. Why do critics--some of them--make such short, smart
work,--such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with
religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,--a thing with sentence
of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,--that needs not
their trouble, save to name it as it is? Why, that is, if religion
stand for the relation of things to spirit, which I suppose it
should? Somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of
"spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." That was bright and
funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry
short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth
made up of? And are novels to be pictures of human experience, or
not?
This has nothing to do with present matters, however, except that
Desire found nothing real in her novel, and so had flung it aside,
and was sitting rather listlessly with her crochet which she never
cared much for, when Uncle Oldways entered.
Her face brightened instantly as he came in. He sat down just where
he had sat the other night. Mr. Oldways had a fashion of finding the
same seat a second time when he had come in once; he was a man who
took up most things where he left them off, and this was an
unconscious sign of it.
"Your mother has decided to sell the house on the 23d, it seems," he
said.
"Yes; I have been out twice. I shall be able to go away by then; I
suppose that is all she has waited for."
"Do you think you could be contented to come and live with me?"
"Come and _live_?"
"Yes. And let your mother and Helena go to Europe."
"O, Uncle Oldways! I think I could _rest_ there! But I don't want
only to rest, you know. I must do something. For myself, to begin
with. I have made up my mind not to depend upon my mother. Why
should I, any more than a boy? And I am sure I cannot depend on
anybody else."
These were Desire Ledwith's thanks; and Mr. Oldways liked them. She
did not say it to please him; she thought it seemed almost
ungrateful and unwilling; but she was so intent on taking up life
for herself.
"You must have a place to do in,--or from," said Mr. Oldways. "And
it is better you should be under some protection. You must consent
to that for your mother's sake. How much money have you got?"
"Two hundred and fifty dollars a year. Of my own."
This was coming to business and calculation and common sense. Desire
was encouraged. Uncle Oldways did not think her quite absurd.
"That will clothe you,--without much fuss and feathers?"
"I have done with fuss and feathers,"--Desire said with a grave
smile, glancing at her plain white wrapper and the black shawl that
was folded around her.
"Then come where is room for you and a welcome, and do as much more
as you please, and can, for yourself, or for anybody else. I won't
give you a cent; you shall have something to do for me, if you
choose. I am an old man now, and want help. Perhaps what I want as
much as anything is what I've been all my life till lately, pretty
obstinate in doing without."
Uncle Oldways spoke short, and drew his breath in and puffed it out
between his sentences, in his bluff way; but his eyes were kind, as
he sat looking at the young girl over his hat and cane.
She thought of the still, gray parlor; of Rachel Froke and her face
of peace; and the Quaker meeting and the crumbs last year; of Uncle
Oldways' study, and his shelves rich with books; of the new
understanding that had begun between herself and him, and the faith
she had found out, down beneath his hard reserves; of the beautiful
neighborhood, Miss Craydocke's Beehive, Aunt Franks' cheery home and
the ways of it, and Hazel's runnings in and out. It seemed as if the
real things had opened for her, and a place been made among them in
which she should have "business to be," and from which her life
might make a new setting forth.
"And mamma knows?" she said, inquiringly, after that long pause.
"Yes. I told you I would talk with her. That is what we came to. It
is only for you to say, now."
"I will come. I shall be glad to come!" And her face was full of
light as she looked up and said it.
* * * * *
Desire never thought for a moment of what her mother could not help
thinking of; of what Mrs. Megilp thought and said, instantly, when
she learned it three weeks later.
It is wonderful how abiding influence is,--even influence to which
we are secretly superior,--if ever we have been subjected to, or
allowed ourselves to be swayed by it. The veriest tyranny of
discipline grows into one's conscience, until years after, when life
has got beyond the tyranny, conscience,--or something superinduced
upon it,--keeps up the echo of the old mandates, and one can take no
comfort in doing what one knows all the time one has a perfect
right, besides sound reason, to do. It was a great while before our
grandmothers' daughters could peaceably stitch and overcast a seam,
instead of over-sewing and felling it. I know women who feel to this
moment as if to sit down and read a book of a week-day, in the
daytime, were playing truant to the needle, though all the
sewing-machines on the one hand, and all the demand and supply of
mental culture on the other, of this present changed and bettered
time, protest together against the absurdity.
Mrs. Ledwith had heard the Megilp precepts and the Megilp
forth-putting of things, until involuntarily everything showed
itself to her in a Megilp light. The Megilp "sense of duty,"
therefore, came up as she unhesitatingly assented to Uncle Oldways'
proposal and request. He wanted Desire; of course she could not say
a word; she owed him something, which she was glad she could so make
up; and secretly there whispered in her mind the suggestion which
Mrs. Megilp, on the other side of the water, spoke right out.
"If he wants her, he must mean something by her. He is an old man;
he might not live to give her back into her mother's keeping; what
would she do there, in that old house of his, if he should die,
unless--he _does_ mean something? He has taken a fancy to her; she
is odd, as he is; and he isn't so queer after all, but that his
crotchets have a good, straightforward sense of justice in them.
Uncle Titus knows what he is about; and what's more, just what he
ought to be about. It is a good thing to have Desire provided for;
she is uncomfortable and full of notions, and she isn't likely ever
to be married."
So Desire was given up, easily, she could not help feeling; but she
knew she had been a puzzle and a vexation to her mother, and that
Mrs. Ledwith had never had the least idea what to do with her; least
of all had she now, what she should do with her abroad.
"It was so much better for her that Uncle Titus had taken her home."
With these last words Mrs. Ledwith reassured herself and cheered her
child.
Perhaps it would have been the same--it came into Desire's head,
that would conceive strange things--if the angels had taken her.
Mrs. Ledwith went to New York; she stayed a few days with Mrs.
Macmichael, who wanted her to buy lace for her in Brussels and
Bohemian glass in Prague; then a few days more with her cousin,
Geraldine Raxley; and then the _City of Antwerp_ sailed.