On Wednesday evenings, Mrs. Scherman always managed it that they should both go to Desire Ledwith's, for the Read-and-Talk.

You may say Jerusalem is not taken yet, after all; there are plenty of "hard places," where girls like Kate Sencerbox and Bel Bree would not stay a week; there are hundreds of women, heads of houses, who would not be bothered with so much superfluous intelligence,--with refinements so nearly on a level with their own.

Granted: but it is the first steps that cost. Do you not think--do you not _know_--that a real good, planted in the world,--in social living,--_must_ spread, from point to point where the circ.u.mstance is ready, where it is the "next thing?" If you do not believe this, you do not practically believe in the kingdom ever coming at all.

There is a rotation of crops in living and in communities, as well as in the order of vegetation of secret seeds that lie in the earth's bosom.

We shall not always be rank with noisome weeds and thistles; here and there, the better thought is swelling toward the germination; the cotyledons of a fairer hope are rising through the mould.

CHAPTER XXIX.

WINTERGREEN.

To tell of what has been happening with Sylvie Argenter's thread of our story, we must go back some weeks and pages to the time just after the great fire.

As it was with the spread of the conflagration itself, so it proved also with the results,--of loss, and deprivation, and change. Many seemed at first to stand safely away out on the margin, mere lookers-on, to whom presently, with more or less direct advance, the great red wave of ruin reached, touching, scorching, consuming.

It was a week afterward that Sylvie Argenter learned that the Manufacturers' Insurance Company, in which her mother had, at her persuasion, invested the little actual, tangible remnant of her property, had found itself swallowed up in its enormous debt; must reorganize, begin again, with fresh capital and new stockholders.

They had nothing to reinvest. The money in the Continental Bank would just about last through the winter, paying the seven dollars a week for Mrs. Argenter, and spending as nearly nothing for other things as possible. Unless something came from Mr. Farron Saftleigh before the spring, that would be the end.

Thus far they had heard nothing from these zealous friends since they had parted from them at Sharon, except one sentimental letter from Mrs. Farron Saftleigh to Mrs. Argenter, written from Newport in September.

Early in December, another just such missive came this time from Denver City. Not a word of business; a pure woman's letter, as Mrs.

Farron Saftleigh chose to rank a woman's thought and sympathy; nothing practical, nothing that had to do with coa.r.s.e topics of bond and scrip; taking the common essentials of life for granted, referring to the inignorable catastrophe of the fire as a grand elemental phenomenon and spectacle, and soaring easily away and beyond all fact and literalness, into the tender vague, the rare empyrean.

Mrs. Argenter read it over and over, and wished plaintively that she could go out to Denver, and be near her friend. She should like a new place; and such appreciation and affection were not be met with everywhere, or often in a lifetime.

Sylvie read the letter once, and had great necessity of self-restraint not to toss it contemptuously and indignantly into the fire.

She made up her mind to one thing, at least; that if, at the end of the six months, nothing were heard from Mr. Saftleigh himself, she would write to him upon her own responsibility, and demand some intelligence as to her mother's investments in the Latterend and Donnowhair road, the reason why a dividend was not forthcoming, and a statement in regard to actual or probable sales of land, which he had given them reason to expect would before that time have been made.

One afternoon she had gone down with Desire and Hazel among the shops; Desire and the Ripwinkleys were very busy about Christmas; they had ever so many "notches to fill in" in their rather mixed up and mutable memoranda. Sylvie only accompanied them as far as Winter Street corner, where she had to buy some peach-colored double-zephyr for her mother; then she bade them good-by, saying that two were bad enough dragging each other about with their two shopping lists, but that a third would extinguish fatally both time and s.p.a.ce and taking her little parcel in her hand, and wondering how many more such she could ever buy, she returned home over the long hill alone. So it happened that on reaching Greenley Street, she had quite to herself a surprise and pleasure which she found there.

She went straight to the gray room first of all.

Mrs. Argenter was asleep on the low sofa near the fire, her crochet stripe-work fallen by her side upon the carpet, her book laid face down with open leaves upon the cushion.

Sylvie pa.s.sed softly into her own chamber, took off her outside things, and returned with careful steps through her mother's room to the hall, and into the library, to find a book which she wanted.

On the table, at the side which had come of late to be considered hers, lay an express parcel directed to herself. She knew the writing,--the capital "S" made with a quick, upward, slanting line, and finished with a swell and curl upon itself like a portly figure "5" with the top-pennant left off; the round sweep after final letters,--the "t's" crossed backward from their roots, and the stroke stopped short like a little rocket just in poise of bursting.

She knew it all by heart, though she had never received but one sc.r.a.p of it before,--the card that had been tied to the ivy-plant, with Rodney Sherrett's name and compliments.

She had heard nothing now of Rodney for two months. She was glad to be alone to wonder at this, to open it with fingers that trembled, to see what he could possibly have put into it for her.

Within the brown wrapper was a square white box. Up in the corner of its cover was a line of writing in the same hand; the letters very small, and a delicate dash drawn under them. How neatly special it looked!

"A message from the woods for 'Sylvia.'"

She lifted it off, as if she were lifting it from over a thought that it concealed, a something within all, that waited for her to see, to know.

Inside,--well, the thought was lovely!

It was a mid-winter wreath; a wreath of things that wait in the heart of the woodland for the spring; over which the snows slowly gather, keeping them like a secret which must not yet be told, but which peeps green and fresh and full of life at every melting, in soft sunny weather, such as comes by spells beforehand; that must have been gathered by somebody who knew the hidden places and had marked them long ago.

It was made of cl.u.s.ters, here and there, of the glossy daphne-like wintergreen, and most delicate, tiny, feathery plumes of princess-pine; of stout, brave, constant little shield-ferns and spires of slender, fine-notched spleenwort, such as thrust themselves up from rough rock-crevices and tell what life is, that though the great stones are rolled against the doors of its sepulchre, yet finds its way from the heart of things, somehow, to the light. Mitch.e.l.la vines, with thread-like, wandering stems, and here and there a gleaming scarlet berry among small, round, close-lying waxy leaves; breaths of silvery moss, like a frosty vapor; these flung a grace of lightness over the closer garlanding, and the whole lay upon a bed of exquisitely curled and laminated soft gray lichen.

A message. Yes, it was a simple thing, an unostentatious remembrance; no breaking, surely, of his father's conditions. Rodney loyally kept away and manfully stuck to his business, but every spire and frond and leaf of green in this winter wreath shed off the secret, magnetic meaning with which it was charged. Heart-light flowed from them, and touching the responsive sensitivity, made photographs that pictured the whole story. It was a fuller telling of what the star-leaved ferns had told before.

Rodney was not to "offer himself" to Sylvie Argenter till the two years were over; he was to let her have her life and its chances; he was to prove himself, and show that he could earn and keep a little money; he was to lay by two thousand dollars. This was what he had undertaken to do. His father thought he had a right to demand these two years, even extending beyond the term of legal freedom, to offset the half-dozen of boyish, heedless extravagance, before he should put money into his son's hands to begin responsible work with, or consent approvingly to his making of what might be only a youthful attraction, a tie to bind him solemnly and unalterably for life.

But the very stones cry out. The meaning that is repressed from speech intensifies in all that is permitted. You may keep two persons from being nominally "engaged," but you cannot keep two hearts, by any mere silence, from finding each other out; and the inward betrothal in which they trust and wait,--that is the most beautiful time of all. The blessedness of acknowledgment, when it comes, is the blessedness of owning and looking back together upon what has already been.

Sylvie made a s.p.a.ce for the white box upon a broad old bureau-top in her room. She put its cover on again over the message in green cipher; she would only care to look at it on purpose, and once in a while; she would not keep it out to the fading light and soiling touch of every day. She spread across the cover itself and its written sentence her last remaining broidered and laced handkerchief. The wreath would dry, she knew; it must lose its first glossy freshness with which it had come from under the snows; but it should dry there where Rodney put it, and not a leaf should fall out of it and be lost.

She was happier in these subtle signs that revealed inward relation than she would have been just now in an outspokenness that demanded present, definite answer and acceptance of outward tie. It might come to be: who could tell? But if she had been asked now to let it be, there would have been her troubles to give, with her affection.

How could she burden anybody doubly? How could she fling all her needs and anxieties into the life of one she cared for?

There was a great deal for Sylvie to do between now and any marriage. Her worry soon came back upon her with a dim fear, as the days pa.s.sed on, touching the very secret hope and consciousness that she was happy in. What might come to be her plain duty, now, very shortly? Something, perhaps, that would change it all; that would make it seem strange and unsuitable for Rodney Sherrett ever to interpret that fair message into words. Something that would put social distance between them.

Her mother, above all, must be cared for; and her mother's money was so nearly gone!

Desire Ledwith was kind, but she must not live on anybody's kindness. As soon as she possibly could, she must find something to do. There must be no delay, no lingering, after the little need there was of her here now, should cease. Every day of willing waiting would be a day of dishonorable dependence.

It was now three months since Mrs. Froke had gone away; and letters from her brought the good tidings of successful surgical treatment and a rapid gaining of strength. She might soon be able to come back. Sylvie knew that Desire could either continue to contrive work for her a while longer, or spare her to other and more full employment, could such be found. She watched the "Transcript" list of "Wants," and wished there might be a "Want" made expressly for her.

How many anxious eyes scan those columns through with a like longing, every night!

If she could get copying to do,--if she could obtain a situation in the State House, that paradise of well paid female scribes!

If she could even learn to set up type, and be employed in a printing-office? If there were any chance in a library? Even work of this sort would take her away from her mother in the daytime; she would have to provide some attendance for her. She must furnish her room nicely, wherever it was; that she could do from the remnants of their household possessions stored at Dorbury; and her mother must have a delicate little dinner every day. For breakfast and tea--she could see to those before and after work; and her own dinners could be anything,--anywhere. She must get a cheap rooms where some tidy lodging woman would do what was needful; and that would take,--oh, dear! she _couldn't_ say less than six or seven dollars a week, and where were food and clothes to come from? At any rate, she must begin before their present resources were utterly exhausted, or what would become of her mother's cream, and fruit, and beef-tea?

Mingled with all her troubled and often-reviewed calculations, would intrude now and then the thought,--shouldn't she have to be willing to wear out and grow ugly, with hard work and insufficient nourishing? And she would have so liked to keep fresh and pretty for the time that might have come!

In the days when these things were keeping her anxious, the winter wreath was also slowly turning dry.

She found herself hemmed in and headed at every turn by the pitiless hedge and ditch of circ.u.mstance, at which girls and women in our time have to chafe and wait; and from which there seems to be no way out. Yet there are ways out from this, as from all things. One way--the way of thorough womanly home-helpfulness--was not clear to her; there are many to whom it is not clear. Yet if those to whom it is, or might be, would take it,--if those who might give it, in many forms, _would give_,--who knows what relief and loosening would come to others in the hard jostle and press?

There is another way out of all puzzle and perplexity and hardness; it is the Lord's special way for each one, that we cannot foresee, and that we never know until it comes. Then we discern that there has never been impossibility; that all things are open before his eyes; and that there is no temptation,--no trying of us,--to which He will not provide some end or escape.

In the first week of January, Sylvie acted upon her resolve of writing to Mr. Farron Saftleigh. She asked brief and direct questions; told him that she was obliged to request an answer without the least delay; and begged that he would render them a clear statement of all their affairs. She reminded him that he had _told_ them that he would be responsible for their receiving a dividend of at least four per cent, at the end of the six months.

Mr. Farron Saftleigh "told" people a great many things in his genial, exhilarating business talks, which he was a great deal too wise ever to put down on paper.

Sylvie waited ten days; a fortnight; three weeks; no answer came.