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.