Part 19 (1/2)
”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 s.h.i.+eres!”
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 s.h.i.+ere, 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 t.i.tus; 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 t.i.tus'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, t.i.tus,” 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 t.i.tus 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 fas.h.i.+on of putting to rights. Books were tucked in beside each other as if they had been picked up and bestowed anyhow; between ”Heaven and h.e.l.l” 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 t.i.tus 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 t.i.tus'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 s.h.i.+ne 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 b.u.t.toned; 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.