Part 19 (1/2)
”O, a real little _home_--to take care of,” said Bel. ”Not fine, nor fussy; but real sweet and pleasant. Sunny windows and flowers, and a pretty carpet, and white curtains, and one of those chromos of little round, yellow chickens. A best china tea-set, and a real trig little kitchen; pies to make for Sundays and Thanksgivings; just enough work to do in the mornings, and time in the afternoons to sit and sew, and--somebody to read to you out loud in the evenings! I think I'd do anything--that wasn't wicked--to come to live just like that!”
”There isn't anybody that does live so nowadays,” said Kate.
”There's nothing between horrid little stivey places, and a regular scrub and squall and slop all the week round, and silk and snow and ordering other folks about. You've got to be top or bottom; and if it's all the same to you, I mean to be top if I can; even if”--
Kate was a great deal better than her pretences, after all. She did not finish the bad sentence.
”I'll tell you what I do wonder at,” said Bel Bree. ”So many great, beautiful homes in this city, and so few people to live in them. All the rest crowded up, and crowded out. When I go round through Hero Street, and Pilgrim Street, and past all the little crammy courts and places, out into the big avenues where all the houses stand back from each other with such a grand politeness, I want to say, Move up a little, can't you? There's such small room for people in there, behind!”
”Say it, why don't you? I'll tell you who'd listen. Was.h.i.+ngton, sitting on his big bronze horse, pawing in the air at Commonwealth Avenue!”
”Well--Was.h.i.+ngton _would_ listen, if he wasn't bronze. And its grand for _everybody_ to look at him there. I shouldn't really want the houses to move up, I suppose. It's good to have grandness somewhere, or else n.o.body would have any place to stretch in. But there must be some sort of moving up that could be, to make things evener, if we only knew!”
Poor little Bel Bree, just dropped down out of New Hamps.h.i.+re! What a problem the great city was already to her!
Miss Tonker put her sub-aristocratic face in at the door. It is a curious kind of reflected majesty that these important functionaries get, who take at first hand the magnificent orders, and sustain temporary relations of silk-and-velvet intimacy with Spreadsplendid Park.
The hour was up. Mary Pinfall slid her romance into the pocket of her waterproof; Matilda Meane swallowed her last mouthful of the four cream-cakes which she had valorously demolished without a.s.sistance, and hastily washed her hands at the faucet; Kate and Elise and Grace brushed by her with a sniff of generous contempt.
In two minutes, the wheels and feeds were buzzing and clicking again. What did they say, and emphasize, and repeat, in the ears that bent over them? Mechanical time-beats say something, always.
They force in and in upon the soul its own pulses of thought, or memory, or purpose; of imagination or desire. They weld and consolidate our moods, our elements. Twenty miles of musing to the rhythmic throbbings of a railroad train, who does not know how it can shape and deepen and confirm whatever one has started with in mind or heart?
CHAPTER XI.
CRISTOFERO.
A September morning on the deck of a steamer bound into New York, two days from her port.
A fair wind; waves gleaming as they tossed landward, with the white crests and the grand swell that told of some mid-Atlantic storm, which had given them their impulse days since, and would send them breaking upon the American capes and beaches, in splendid tumult of foam, and roar, and plunge; ”white horses,” wearing rainbows in their manes.
The blue heaven full of suns.h.i.+ne; the air full of sea-tingle; a morning to feel the throb and spring of the vessel under one's feet, as an answer to the throb and spring of one's own life and eagerness; the leap of strength in the veins, and the homeward haste in the heart.
Two gentlemen, who had talked much together in the nine days of their s.h.i.+p-companions.h.i.+p, stood together at the taffrail.
One was the Reverend Hilary Vireo, minister of Mavis Place Chapel, Boston,--coming back to his work in glorious renewal from his eight weeks' holiday in Europe. The other was Christopher Kirkbright, younger partner of the house of Ferguson, Ramsay, and Kirkbright, tea and silk merchants, Hong Kong. Christopher Kirkbright had gone out to China from Glasgow, at the age of twenty-one, pledged to a ten years' stay. For five years past, he had had a share in the business for himself; for the two last, he had represented also the interest of Grahame Kirkbright, his uncle, third partner; had inherited, besides, half of his estate; the other half had come to our friend at home, his sister, Miss Euphrasia.
”I had no right to stay out there any longer, making my tools; multiplying them, without definite purpose. It was time to put them to their use; and I have come home to find it. A man may take till thirty-one to get ready, mayn't he, Mr. Vireo?”
”The man who took up the work of the world's salvation, began to be about thirty years of age when he came forth to public ministry,”
returned Mr. Vireo.
”I never thought of that before. I wonder I never did. It has come home to me, in many other parts of that Life, how full it is of scarcely recognized a.n.a.logy to prevailing human experience. That 'driving into the Wilderness!' What an inevitable interval it is between the realizing of a special power and the finding out of its special purpose! I am in the Wilderness,--or was,--Vireo; but I knew my way lay through it. I have been pausing--thinking--striving to know. The temptations may not have been wanting, altogether, either.
There are so many things one can do easily; considering one's self, largely, in the plan. My whole life has waited, in some chief respects, till the end of these ten pledged years. What was I to do with it? Where was I to look for, and find most speedily, all that a man begins to feel the desire to establish for himself at thirty years old? Home, society, sphere; I can tell you it is a strange feeling to take one's fortune in one's hand and come forth from such a business exile, and choose where one will make the first link,--decide the first condition, which may draw after all the rest. Happily, I had my sister to come home to; and I had the remembrance of the little story my mother told me--about my name. I think she looked forward for the boy who could know so little then of the destiny partly laid out for him already.”
”About your name?” reminded Mr. Vireo. He always liked to hear the whole of a thing; especially a thing that touched and influenced spiritually.
”Yes. The story of Saint Cristofero. The strong man, Offero, who would serve the strongest; who served a great king, till he learned that the king feared Satan; who then sought Satan and served him, till he found that Satan feared the Cross; who sought for Jesus, then, that he might serve Him, and found a hermit who bade him fast and pray. But he would not fast, since from his food came his strength to serve with; nor pray, because it seemed to him idle; but he went forth to help those who were in danger of being swept away, as they struggled to cross the deep, wide River. He bore them through upon his shoulders,--the weak, the little, the weary. At last, he bore a little child who entreated him, and the child grew heavy, and heavier, till, when they reached the other side, Offero said,--'I feel as if I had borne the world upon my shoulders!' And he was answered,--'Thou may'st say that; for thou hast borne Him who made the world.' And then he knew that it was the Lord; and he was called no more 'Offero,' but 'Cristofero.' My mother told me that when I was a little child; and the story has grown in me. The Christ has yet to be borne on men's shoulders.”
Hilary Vireo stood and listened with gleaming eyes. Of course, he knew the old saint-legend; of course, Christopher Kirkbright supposed it; but these were men who understood without the saying, that the verities are forever old and forever new. A mother's wise and tender tale,--a child's life growing into a man's, and sanctifying itself with a purpose,--these were the informing that filled afresh every sentence of the story, and made its repet.i.tion a most fair and sweet origination.
”And so,”--