The Other Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (free novels to read TXT) 📗

Frank Sunderline's deepest, unspoken apprehension of most beautiful things, in Ray Ingraham's aspect as she said these words. The man in him suddenly perceived, though vaguely, something of what God meant when He made the woman. Power shone through the beauty in her face; but power ready to lay itself aside; ready to help, not lead. Made the most tender, because most perfect outcome and blossom of humanity, woman accepts her conditions, as God Himself accepts his own, when He hides Himself away under limitations, that the secret force may lie ready to the work man thinks he does upon the earth and with it. In dumb, waiting nature, his own very Self bides subject; yes, and in the things of the Spirit, He gives his Son in the likeness of a servant. He lays _help_ upon him; He lays help for man upon the woman. He took her nearest to Himself when He made her to be a help meet in all things to his Adam-child. To "_help_" is to do the work of the world.

Ray's face shone with the splendor of self-forgetting, when she said that she would "help, somewhere."

What made him suddenly think of his own work? What made him say, with a flash in his eyes,--

"I've got a job of my own, Ray, at last. Did you know it?"

"I'm _very_ glad," said Ray, earnestly. "What is it?"

"A house at Pomantic. Rather a shoddy kind of house,--flashy, I mean, and ridiculously grand; but it's work; and somebody has to build all sorts, you know. When I build _my_ house--well, never mind! Holder has put this contract right into my hands to carry out. He'll step over and look round, once in a while, but I'm to have the care of it straight through,--stock, work, and all; and I'm to have half the profits. Isn't that high of Holder? He has his hands full, you know, at River Point. There's no end of building there, this year a whole street going up--with Mansard roofs, of course. Everything is going into this house that _can_ go into a house; and to see that it gets in right will be--practice, anyhow."

Sunderline chattered on like a boy; almost like a girl, telling Ray what he was so glad of. And Ray listened, her cheek glowing; she was so glad to be told.

He had not said a word of this to Marion Kent that afternoon, when she had stopped him at her window, going by. He had stood there a few minutes, leaning against the white fence, and looking across the little door-yard, to answer the questions she asked him; about the Ingrahams, the questions were; but he did not offer to come nearer.

Marion was sewing on a rich silk dress, sea-green in color; it glistened as she shifted it with busy fingers under the light; it contrasted exquisitely with her fair, splendid hair, and the cream and rose of her full blonde complexion. It was a "platform dress," she told him, laughing; she was going with the Leverings on a reading and musical tour; they had got a little company together, and would give entertainments in the large country towns; perhaps go to some of the fashionable springs, or up among the mountain places; folks liked their amusements to come after them, from the cities; they were sure of audiences where people had nothing to do.

Marion was in high spirits. She felt as if she had the world before her. She would travel, at any rate; whether there were anything else left of it or not, she would have had that; that, and the sea-green dress. While she talked, her mother was ironing in the back room. The dress was owed for. She could not pay for it till she began to get her own pay.

What was the use of telling a girl like that--all flushed with beauty and vanity, and gay expectation--about his having a house to build? What would it seem to her,--his busy life all spring and summer among the chips and shavings, hammering, planing, fitting, chiseling, buying screws, and nails, and patent fastenings, tiles and pipes; contriving and hurrying, working out with painstaking in laborious detail an agreement, that a new rich man might get into his new rich house by October? When she had only to make herself lovely and step out among the lights before a gay assembly, to be applauded and boqueted, to be stared at and followed; to live in a dream, and call it her profession? When Frank Sunderline knew there was nothing real in it all; nothing that would stand, or remain; only her youth, and prettiness, and forwardness, and the facility of people away from home and in by-places to be amused with second-rate amusement, as they manage to feed on second-rate fare?

It was no use to say this to her, either; to warn her as he had done before. She must wear out her illusions, as she would wear out her glistening silk dress. He must leave her now, with the shimmer of them all about her imagination, bewildering it, as the lovely, lustrous heap upon her lap threw a bewilderment about her own very face and figure, and made it for the moment beautiful with all enticing, outward complement and suggestion.

He told Ray Ingraham; and he said what a pity it was; what a mistake.

Ray did not answer for a minute; she had a little struggle with herself; a little fight with that in her heart which made itself manifest to her in a single quick leap of its pulses.

Was she glad? Glad that Marion Kent was living out, perversely, this poor side of her--making a mistake? Losing, perhaps, so much?

"Marion has something better in her than that," she made herself say, when she replied. "Perhaps it will come out again, some day."

"I think she has. Perhaps it will. You have always been good and generous to her, Ray."

What did he say that for? Why did he make it impossible for her to let it go so?

"Don't!" she exclaimed. "I am not generous to her this minute! I couldn't help, when you said it, being satisfied--that you should see. I don't know whether it is mean or true in me, that I always do want people to see the truth."

She covered it up with that last sentence. The first left by itself, might have shown him more. It was certainly so; that there was a little severity in Ray Ingraham, growing out of her clear perception and her very honesty. When she could see a thing, it seemed as if everybody ought to see it; if they did not, as if she ought to show them, that they might fairly understand. A half understanding made her restless, even though the other half were less kind and comfortable.

"You show the truth of yourself, too," said Frank. "And that is grand, at any rate."

"You need not praise me," said Ray, almost coldly. "It is impossible to be _quite_ true, I think. The nearer you try to come to it, the more you can't"--and then she stopped.

"How many changes there have been among us!" she began again, suddenly, at quite a different point, "All through the village there have been things happening, in this last year. Nobody is at all as they were a year ago. And another year"--

"Will tell another year's story," said Frank Sunderline. "Don't you like to think of that sometimes? That the story isn't done, ever? That there is always more to tell, on and on? And that means more to _do_. We are all making a piece of it. If we stayed right still, you see,--why, the Lord might as well shut up the book!"

He was full of life, this young man, and full of the delight of living. There was something in his calling that made him rejoice in a confident strength. He was born to handle tools; hammer and chisel were as parts of him. He builded; he believed in building; in something coming of every stroke. Real work disposes and qualifies a man to believe in a real destiny,--a real God. A carpenter can see that nails are never driven for nothing. It is the sham work, perhaps, of our day, that shakes faith in purpose and unity; a scrambling, shifty living of men's own, that makes to their sight a chance huddle and phantasm of creation.

Mrs. Ingraham came down into the room where they were, at this moment, and Dot presently followed. They began to talk of their plans. They were going, now, to live with the grandmother in Boston, in Pilgrim Street.

It was a comfortable, plain old house, in a little strip of neighborhood long since left of fashion, and not yet demanded of business; so Mrs. Rhynde could afford to occupy it. She had used, for many years, to let out a part of her rooms,--these that the Ingrahams would take,--in a tenement, as people used to say, making no ambitious distinctions; now, it might be spoken of as "a flat," or "apartments." Everything is "apartments" that is more than a foothold.

The rooms were large, but low. At the back, they were sunny and airy; they looked through, overlapping a court-way, into Providence Square. It was a real old Boston homestead, of which so few remain. There were corner beams and wainscots, some tiled chimney-pieces, even. It made you think of the pre-Revolutionary days of tea-drinkings, before the tea was thrown overboard. The step into the front passage was a step down from the street.

Ray and Dot told these things; beguiled into reminiscences of pleasant childish visiting days; Ray, of long domestication in still later years. It would be a going home, after all.

Leicester Place was only a stone's throw from Pilgrim Street. From old Mr. Sparrow's attic window, you could look across to the Pilgrim Street roofs, and see women hanging out clothes there upon the flat tops of one or two of the houses. But what of that, in a great city? Will the Ingrahams ever come across Aunt Blin and bright little Bel Bree?

In the book that binds up this story, there is but the turn of a leaf between them. A great many of us may be as near as that to each other in the telling of the world's story, who never get the leaf turned over, or between whom the chapters are divided, with never a connecting word.

The Ingrahams moved into Boston in the early summer. It was July when Bel came down from the hill-country with Aunt Blin.


CHAPTER IX.

INHERITANCE.

Do you remember somebody else who lives in Boston? Have you heard of the old house in Greenley Street, and Uncle Titus Oldways, and Desire Ledwith, who came home with him after her mother and sisters went off to Europe, and something had touched her young life that had left for a while an ache after it? Do you know Rachel Froke, and the little gray parlor, and the ferns, and the ivies, and the canary,--and the old, dusty library, with its tall, crowded shelves, and the square table in the midst, where Uncle Oldways sat? All is there still, except Uncle Oldways. The very year that had been so busy elsewhere, with its rushing minutes that clashed out events and changes as moving atoms clash out heat--that had brought to pass all that it has taken more than a hundred pages for me to tell,--that had drawn toward one centre and focus, whither, as into a great whirling maelstrom of life, so many