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

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 space 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 passed 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 circumstance, 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. Mr. Farron Saftleigh had simply destroyed the letter, of no consequence at all as coming from a person not primarily concerned or authorized, and set off from Denver City the same day for a business visit to San Francisco.

Sylvie saw the plain fact; that they were penniless. And this could not be told to her mother.

She went to Desire Ledwith, and asked her what she could do.

"I would go into a household anywhere, as Dot Ingraham and Bel Bree have done, to earn board and wages, and spend my money for my mother; but I can't leave her. And there's no sewing work to get, even if I could do it at night and in honest spare time. I know, as it is, that my service isn't worth what you give me in return, and of course I cannot stay here any longer now."

"Of course you can stay where God puts you, dear," answered Desire Ledwith. "Let your side of it alone for a minute, and think of mine. If you were in my place,--trying to live as one of the _large household_, remember, and looking for your opportunities,--what would you say,--what would you plainly hear said to you,--about this?"

Sylvie was silent.

"Tell me truly, Sylvie. Put it into words. What would it be? What would you hear?"

"Just what you do, I suppose," said Sylvie, slowly "But I _don't_ hear it on my side. My part doesn't seem to chord."

"Your part just pauses. There are no notes written just here, in your score. Your part is to wait. Think, and see if it isn't. The Dakie Thaynes are going out West again. Mr. Thayne knows about lands, and such things. He would do something, and let you know. A real business man would make this Saftleigh fellow afraid." The Thaynes--Mrs. Dakie Thayne is our dear little old friend Ruth Holabird, you know--had been visiting in Boston; staying partly here, and partly at Mrs. Frank Scherman's. At Asenath's they were real "comfort-friends;" Asenath had the faculty of gathering only such about her. She felt no necessity, with them, for grand, late dinners, or any show; there was no trouble or complication in her household because of them. Ruth insisted upon the care of her own room; it was like the "cooeperative times" at Westover. Mrs. Scherman said it was wonderful, when your links were with the right people, how simple you could make your art of living, you could actually be "quite Holabird-y," even in Boston! But this digresses.

"I shall speak to Mr. Thayne about it," said Desire. "And now, dear, if you could just mark these towels this morning?"

Sylvie sat marking the towels, and Desire passed to and fro, gathering things which were to go to Neighbor Street in the afternoon.

"Do you see," she said, stopping behind Sylvie a while after, and putting her fingers upon her hair with a caressing little touch,--"the sun has got round from the east to the south. It shines into this window now. And you have been keeping quiet, just doing your own little work of the moment. The world is all alive, and changing. Things are working--away up in the heavens--for us all. When people don't know which way to turn, it is very often good not to turn at all; if they are _driven_, they do know. Wait till you are driven, or see; you will be shown, one way or the other. It is almost always when things are all blocked up and impossible, that a happening comes. It has to. A dead block can't last, any more than a vacuum. If you are sure you are looking and ready, that is all you need. God is turning the world round all the time."

Desire did not say one word about the ninety-eight dollars which lay in one of the locked drawers of her writing desk, in precisely the shape in which every two or three weeks she had let Sylvie put the money into her hands. There would be a right time for that. She would force nothing. Sylvie would come near enough, yet, for that perfect understanding in which those bits of stamped paper would cease to be terrible between their hands, _either_ way.


CHAPTER XXX.

NEIGHBOR STREET AND GRAVES ALLEY.

Rodney Sherrett had heard of the Argenters' losses by the fire; what would have been the good of his correspondence with Aunt Euphrasia, and how would she have expected to keep him pacified up in Arlesbury, if he could not get, regularly, all she knew? Of course he ferreted out of her, likewise, the rest of the business, as fast as she heard it.

"It's really a dreadful thing to be so confided in, all round!" she said to Desire Ledwith, when they had been talking one morning. "People don't know half the ways in which everything that gets poured into my mind concerns everything else. As an intelligent human being, to say nothing of sympathies, I _can't_ act as if they weren't there. I feel like a kind of Judas with a bag of secrets to keep, and playing the traitor with every one of them!"

"What a nice world it would be if there were only plenty more just such Judases to carry the bags!" Desire answered, buttoning on her Astrachan collar, and picking up her muff to go.

Whereupon five minutes