"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, until they think they have no longer any need of Christ. G.o.d is Love, they tell us; not recognizing that the Christ _is_ that very Love of G.o.d. He will not cast us into h.e.l.l, they say; there _is_ no pit of burning torment. But they know there is something that follows after sin; they know that G.o.d is not weak, but abides by his own truth. Therefore, when they have made out G.o.d to be Love, and blotted away the old, literal h.e.l.l, they turn back and declare pitilessly,--'There is _Law_. Law punishes; and Law is inexorable. G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l? Isn't there the same need as ever crying up from hearts of suffering men for a Saviour? Of a side of G.o.d 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 G.o.d to help you against the Law of G.o.d that you have put in the place of the h.e.l.l 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, G.o.d 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 compa.s.sion.

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 G.o.d'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.

CHAPTER XIX.

BLOSSOMING FERNS.

The minister's covered carryall was borrowed from two miles off, to take Mrs. Argenter down to Tillington.

All she knew about the winter plan was that Miss Ledwith was a friend of Miss Kirkbright's, had a large, old-fashioned house, and scarcely any household, and would be glad to have herself and Sylvie take rooms with her for several months. She had a vague idea that Miss Ledwith might be somewhat restricted in her means, and that to receive lodgers in a friendly way would be an "object" to her. She talked, indeed, with a gentle complaisance to Miss Kirkbright, about its not being exactly what they had intended,--they had thought of rooms at Hotel Pelham or Boylston, so central and so near the Libraries; but after all, what she needed most was quiet and no stairs; and she had a horror of elevators, and a dread of fire; so that this was really better, perhaps; and Miss Ledwith was a very sweet person.

Miss Euphrasia smiled; "sweet," especially in the silvery tone in which Mrs. Argenter uttered it, was the last monosyllabic epithet she would have selected as applying to grave, earnest, downright Desire.

At East Keaton, the train stopped for five minutes.

Sylvie had begged Mr. Kirkbright beforehand to get her mother's foot-warmer filled with hot water at the station, and he had just returned with it. She was busily arranging it under Mrs. Argenter's feet again, and wrapping the rug about her, kneeling beside her chair to do so, when some one entered the drawing-room car in which the party was, and came up behind her.

She thought she was in the way of some stranger, and hastily arose.

"I beg your pardon," she said, instinctively, and turned as she spoke.

"What for?" asked Rodney Sherrett, holding out both hands, and grasping hers before she was well aware.

There were morning stars in her eyes, and a beautiful sunrise crimsoned her cheek. These two had not seen each other all summer.

Aunt Euphrasia looked from one face to the other.

"Not to say anything for two years!" she thought, recalling inwardly her brother's wise injunction. "It says itself, though; and it was made to!"

"How do you do, Mrs. Argenter? I hope you are feeling better for your country summer? Aunt Effie! _You're_ not surprised to see me?

Did you think I would let you go down without?"

No; Aunt Effie, when she had written him that regular little Sunday afternoon note from Brickfield, telling him that they were all to come down on Tuesday, had thought no such thing. And she was at this moment, with wise forethought, packed in behind all the others, in the most inaccessible corner of the car.

"You're not going down to the city?"

But he was. Rodney's eyes sparkled as he told her.

"Your own doctrine exemplified. Things always happen, you say.

One of the mills is stopped for just this very day of all others,--repairing machinery. I'm off work, for the first time in four months. There has been no low water all summer. Regular header, straight through. Don't you see I'm perfectly emaciated with the confinement? I've breathed in wool-stuffing till I feel like a pincushion."

"An emaciated wool-stuffed pincushion! Yes, I think you do look a little like it!" Aunt Euphrasia talked nonsense just as he did, because she was so pleased she could not help it.

They paired, naturally. Miss Kirkbright and Mrs. Argenter, facing each other in the corner, were eating tongue sandwiches out of the same basket; and Sylvie had poured out for her mother the sugared claret and water with which her little travelling flask had been filled. Mr. Kirkbright had monopolized Desire, sitting upon the opposite side of the car, with another long talk, about brick and tile making, and the compatibility of a paper manufactory and a House of Refuge.

"I will not have it called that, though. It shall not be stamped with any stereotyped name. It shall not even be a Home,--except _my_ home; and I'll just take them in: I and Euphrasia."

There was nothing for Rodney to do, but to sit down beside Sylvie, with three hours before him, which he had earned by four months among the wheels and cranks and wool-fluff.

Of all these four months there has been no chance to tell you anything before as concerning him.

He had been at Arlesbury; learning to be a manufacturer; beginning at the beginning with the belts and rollers, spindles, shuttles, and harnesses; finding out the secrets of satinets and doeskins and kerseys; _driving_, as he had wanted to do; taking hold of something and making it go.

"It isn't exactly like trotting tandem," he told Sylvie, "but there's a something living in it, too; a creature to bit and manage; that's what I like about it. But I hate the oil, and the noise, and the dust. Why, _this_ is pin-drop silence to it! I hope it won't make me deaf,--and dumb! Father will feel bad if it does," he said, with an indescribably pathetic demureness.

"Was it your father's plan?" asked Sylvie, laughing merrily.

"Well,--yes! At least I told him to take me and set me to work; or I should pretty soon be good for nothing; and so he looked round in a great fright and hurry, as you may imagine, and put me into the first thing he could think of, and that was this. I'm to stay at it for two years, before I--ask him for anything else. I think I shall have a good right then, don't you? I'm thinking all the time about my Three Wishes. I suppose I may wish three times when I begin? They always do."

What could he talk but nonsense? Earnestness had been forbidden him; he had to cover it up with the absurdity of a boy.

But what a blessing that it made no manner of difference! That in all things of light and speech, the gracious law is that the flash should go so much farther, as well as faster than the sound!

Something between them unspoken told the story that words, though they be waited for, never tell half so well. She knew that she had to do with his being in earnest. She knew that she had to do with his being at play, this moment, laughing and joking the time away beside her on this railroad trip. He had come to join Aunt Euphrasia? Yes, indeed, and there sat Aunt Euphrasia in her corner, reading the "Vicar's Daughter," and between times talking a little with Mrs. Argenter. Not ten sentences did aunt and nephew exchange, all the way from East Keaton down to Cambridge. When Mrs. Argenter grew tired as the day wore on, and a sofa was vacated, Rodney helped Sylvie to move the shawls and the foot-warmer, and the rug, and improvise cushions, and make her mother comfortable; then, as Mrs.

Argenter fell asleep, they sat near her and chatted on.

And Aunt Euphrasia read her book, and considered herself escorted and attended to, which is just such a convenience as a judicious and amiably disposed female relative appreciates the opportunity for making of herself.