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

mother for all summer.

"I had a great worry at Sharon, Miss Euphrasia, and it has grown worse since. I can't help being afraid mother has been dreadfully cheated. We got acquainted with some people there; a Mr. and Mrs. Farron Saftleigh, rich Westerners, who made a good deal of show of everything; money, and talk, and conjugal devotion, and friendship. Mrs. Saftleigh came a great deal to mother's room, and gave her all the little chat of the place,--I'm afraid I don't amuse mother myself as much as I ought, but some things do seem so tiresome to tell over, when you've seen more than enough of them yourself,--and she used to take her out to drive nearly every day.

"Well, it seemed that Mr. Saftleigh had gone out West only six years ago, and had made all his money since, in land and railroad business. Mrs. Saftleigh said that 'whatever Farron touched was sure to double.' She _meant_ money; but I thought of our perplexities when she said it, and he certainly has managed to double _them_. He went to New York two or three times while we were at the Springs; he was transacting railroad business; getting stock taken up in the new piece of road laid out from Latterend to Donnowhair; and he was at the head of a company that had bought up all the land along the route. 'Sure to sell at enormous profits any time after the railroad was opened.' Poor mother got so feverish about it! She didn't see why our little money shouldn't be doubled as well as other people's. And then she cried so about being left a widow, with nobody out in the world to get a share of anything for her; and Mrs. Saftleigh used to tell her that such work was just what friends were made for, and it was so providential that she had met her here just now; and she was always calling her 'sweet Mrs. Argenter.'

"Nobody could help it; mother worried herself sick, when I begged her to wait till we could come home and consult some friend we knew. 'The chance would be lost forever,' she said; 'and who could be kinder than the Saftleighs, or could know half so much? Mr. Farron Saftleigh risked his own money in it.' And at last, she wrote home and had her Dorbury mortgage sold, and paid eight thousand dollars of it to Mr. Saftleigh, for shares in the railroad, and land in Donnowhair. And, dear Miss Euphrasia, that is all we've got now, except just a few hundred dollars on deposit in the Continental, and the other four thousand of the mortgage, that mother put into Manufacturers' Insurance stock, to pacify me. If the land _doesn't_ sell out there in six months, as Mr. Saftleigh says it will, I don't know where any more income for us is to come from.

"I am saving all I can here, for the winter _must_ cost. You would laugh if you knew how I am saving! I am helping Mrs. Jeffords do her work, and she doesn't charge me any board, and so I lay up the money without letting mother know it. I don't feel as if that were quite right,--or comfortable, at least; but after all, why shouldn't she be cheated a little bit the other way, if it is possible? That is why I hope we shall be here all through October.

"We are having lovely weather now; not a sign of frost. Although this place is so far north, it is sheltered by great hills, and seems to lie under the lee, both ways, of high mountain ranges, so that the cold does not really set in very early. It is a curious place. I wish I had left room to tell you more about it. There is a great level basin, around which slope the uplands, rising farther and farther on every side except the south, until you get among the real mountain regions. On these slopes are the farms; the Jeffords', and the Applebees', and the Patchons', and the Stilphins'. Aren't they quaint, comfortable old country names? I think they only have such names among farmers. The name of the place,--or rather neighborhood, for I don't know where the _place_ actually is--there are three places, and they are all four or five miles off--Mill Village, and Pemunk, and Sandon; the name of the neighborhood,--Brickfield Farms, comes from there having been brickmaking done here at one time; but it was given up. The man who owned it got in debt, and failed, I believe; and nobody has taken hold of it again, because it is so far from lines of transportation; but there are some cottages about the foot of Cone Hill, where the laborers used to live; and a big queer, old red brick house, that looks as if it were walking up stairs,--built on flat, natural steps of the rock, and so climbing up, room behind room, with steps inside to correspond. I have liked so much to go through it, and imagine stories about it, though all the story there is, is that of Mr. Flavius Josephus Browne, the man of the brick enterprise, who built it in this odd way, and probably imagined a story for himself that he never lived out in it, because his money and his business came to an end. How strange it is that work doesn't always make money, and that it takes so much combination to make anything worth while! I wonder that even men know just what to do. And as for women,--why, when they take to elbowing men out, what will it all come to?

"I have written on, until I have written off some of my heavy feelings that I began with. If I could only _talk_ to you, dear Miss Euphrasia, I think they would all go. But I will not trouble you any longer now; I am quite ashamed of the great packet this will make when it is folded up. But you told me to let you know all about myself, and I can't help minding such an injunction as that!

"Yours gratefully and affectionately always, "SYLVIE ARGENTER."

Miss Kirkbright had not read this straight through without a pause. Two or three times she had let her hands drop to her lap with the letter in them, and sat thinking. When she came to what Sylvie said about her "laughing to know how she had been saving," Miss Euphrasia stopped, not to laugh, but to wipe tears from her eyes.

"The poor, dear, brave little soul!" she said to herself. "And that blessed Mrs. Jeffords,--to let her think she is earning her board with ironing sheets, perhaps, and washing dishes! Km!"

That last unspellable sound was a half choke and half chuckle, that Miss Euphrasia surprised herself in making out of the sudden, mixed impulse to sob, and laugh, and to catch somebody in her arms and kiss that wasn't there.

"If I were an angel, I suppose I _could_ wait," she went on saying to herself after that. "But even for them, it must be hard work some times. And so,--how the great Reasons Why flash upon one out of one's own little experience!--of that wonderful, blessed Day, when all shall be made right, the angels in heaven know not, neither the Son, but the Father only! The Lord cannot even trust the pure human that is in Himself to dwell, separately, upon that End which is to be, but may not be yet!"

I do not suppose anything whatever could come into Miss Euphrasia's life, or touch her with its circumstance, that she did not straightway read in it the wider truth beyond the letter. She was a Swedenborgian, not after Swedenborg, but by the living gift itself. Her insight was no separate thing, taken up and used now and then, of a purpose. It was as different from that as eyes are from spectacles. She could not help her little sermons. They preached themselves to her and in her, continually. So, if we go along with