“But Lily has such taste,” was the reluctant answer. “And she may be displeased if we do not ask her.”
“Our Lady thinks more of devotion than of taste, Annette,” Miss Pembroke said earnestly. “It seems to me that every flower ought to be placed there by the hand of faith and love.”
The other yielded. People always did yield when Miss Pembroke urged. And Miss Carthusen, fortunately, saved them the embarrassment of declining her assistance by walking on, engrossed in a gay conversation with the German. When she recollected, they were already far apart. She and her companion were close to the town, and the others had stopped where the three paths met.
The children gathered about Miss Ferrier, and began piling their Mayflowers and green wreaths into her arms; for the flowers were all to decorate the altar of Mary in the beautiful church of S. John the Evangelist. These children were not half of them Catholic; but that made no difference in Crichton, where the people prided themselves on being liberal. Moreover, Miss Ferrier was a person of influence, and could reward those who obliged her.
Then they scattered, dropping into different roads, one by one, and two by two, till only three, heavily laden with their fragrant spoil, were left walking slowly up South Avenue, into which the unfinished road expanded when it reached the city. They were to take tea at Mrs. Ferrier’s, and afterward go to the church; for this was the last day of a warm and forward April, and on the next morning the exercises of the Month of Mary were to begin. At the most commanding spot on the crown of the hill stood Mrs. Ferrier’s house; and one has but to glance at it to understand at once why mademoiselle is a person of influence.
Seventeen years before, those who knew them would have imagined almost any change of fortune sooner than that the Ferriers should become people of wealth. There was Mr. Ferrier, a stout, dull, uneducated, hard-working man, who had not talent nor ambition enough to learn any trade, but passed his life in drudging for any one who would give him a day’s work. A man of obtuse intelligence, and utterly uncultivated tastes, but for the spark of faith left in that poor soul of his, he would have been a clod. But there the spark was, like a lamp in a tomb, showing, with its faint but steady light, the wreck of the beautiful, and the noble, and the sublime that was man as God made him; showing the dust of lost powers and possibilities, and the dust of much accumulated dishonor; showing the crumbling skeleton of a purpose that had started perfect; and showing also, carven deep, but dimly seen, the word of hope, Resurgam!
Those human problems meet us often, staggering under the primal curse, ground down to pitiless labor from the cradle to the grave, losing in their sordid lives, little by little, first, the strength and courage to look abroad, then the wish, and, at last, the power, the soul in them shining with only an occasional flicker through the débris of their degraded natures. But if faith be there buried with the soul in that earthy darkness, the word of hope is still for them Resurgam!
There was Mrs. Ferrier, a very different sort of person, healthy, thrifty, cheerful, with a narrow vein of stubborn good sense that was excellent as far as it went, and with a kind heart and a warm temper. The chief fault in her was a common fault: she wished to shape and measure the world by her own compasses; and, since those were noticeably small, the impertinence was very apparent. She was religiously obedient to her husband when he raised his fist; but, in most matters, she ruled the household, Mr. Ferrier being authoritative only on the subject of his three meals, his pipe and beer, and his occasional drop of something stronger.
And there were five or six young ones, new little souls in very soiled bodies, the doors of life still open for them, their eyes open also to see, and their wills free to choose. These little ones, happy in their rags, baked mud pies, squabbled and made up twenty times a day, ate and slept like the healthy animals they were, their greatest trial being when their faces were washed and their hair combed, on which occasion there was an uproar in the family. These occasions were not frequent.