Stepping Heavenward Part 33

'How terribly in earnest you are! she said. It is plain that to you, at any rate, life is indeed no humbug."

I thought of my dear ones, of Ernest, of my children, of mother, and of James, and I thought of my love to them and of theirs to me. And I thought of Him who alone gives reality to even such joys as these. My face must have been illuminated by the thought, for she dropped the bantering tone she had used hitherto, and asked, with real earnestness:

"What is it you know, and that I do not know, that makes you so satisfied, while I am so dissatisfied?"

I hesitated before I answered, feeling as I never felt before how ignorant, how unfit to lead others, I really am. Then I said:

"Perhaps you need to know G.o.d, to know Christ?"

She looked disappointed and tired. So I came away, first promising, at her request, to go to see her again. I found Ernest just driving up, and told him what had pa.s.sed. He listened in his usual silence, and I longed to have him say whether I had spoken wisely and well.

JUNE 1.-I have been to see Miss Clifford again and made mother go with me. Miss Clifford took a fancy to her at once.

"Ah!" she said, after one glance at the dear, loving face, "n.o.body need tell me that you are good and kind. But I am a little afraid of good people. I fancy they are always criticising me and expecting me to imitate their perfection."

"Perfection does not exact perfection," was mother's answer. "I would rather be judged by an angel than by a man." And then mother led her on, little by little, and most adroitly, to talk of herself and of her state of health. She is an orphan and lives in this great, stately house alone with her servants. Until she was laid aside by the state pf her health, she lived in the world and of it. Now she is a prisoner, and prisoners have time to think.

"Here I sit," she said, "all day .long. I never was fond of staying at home, or of reading, and needlework I absolutely hate. In fact, I do not know how to sew."

"Some such pretty, feminine work might beguile you of a few of the long hours of these long days," said mother. "One can't be always reading."

"But a lady came to see me, a Mrs. Goodhue, one of your good sort, I suppose, and she preached me quite a sermon on the employment of time. She said I had a solemn admonition of Providence, and ought to devote myself entirely to religion. I had just begun to he interested in a bit of embroidery, but she frightened me out of it. But I can't bear such dreadfully good people, with faces a mile long."

Mother made her produce the collar, or whatever it was, showed her how to hold her needle and arrange her pattern, and they both got so absorbed in it that I had leisure to look at some of the beautiful things with which the room was full.

"Make the object of your life right," I heard mother say, at last, "and these little details will take care of themselves."

"But I haven't any object," Miss Clifford objected, "unless it is to get through these tedious days somehow. Before I was taken ill my chief object was to make myself attractive to the people I met And the easiest way to do that was to dress becomingly and make myself look as well as I could."

"I suppose," said mother, "that most girls could say the same. They have an instinctive desire to please, and they take what they conceive to be the shortest and easiest road to that end. It requires no talent, no education, no thought to dress tastefully; the most empty-hearted frivolous young person can do it, provided she has money enough. Those who can't get the money make up for it by fearful expenditure of precious time. They plan, they cut, they fit, they rip, they trim till they can appear in society looking exactly like everybody else. They think of nothing, talk of nothing but how this shall be fas.h.i.+oned and that be trimmed; and as to their hair, Satan uses it as his favorite net, and catches them in it every day of their lives."

"But I never cut or trimmed," said Miss Clifford.

"No, because you could afford to have it done for you. But you acknowledge that you spent a great deal of time in dressing because you thought that the easiest way of making yourself attractive. But it does not follow that the easiest way is the best way, and sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home."

"For instance?"

"Well, let us imagine a young lady, living in the world as you say you lived. She has never seriously reflected on any subject one half hour in her life. She has been borne on by the current and let it take her where it would. But at last some influence is brought to bear upon her which leads her to stop to look about her and to think.

She finds herself in a world of serious, momentous events. She see she cannot live in it, was not meant to live in it forever, and that her whole unknown future depends on what she is, not on how she looks. She begins to cast about for some plan of life, and this leads---"

"A plan of life?" Miss Clifford interrupted. "I never heard of such a thing."

"Yet you would smile at an architect, who having a n.o.ble structure to build, should begin to work on it in a haphazard way, putting in a brick here and a stone there, weaving in straws and sticks if they come to hand, and when asked on what work he was engaged, and what manner of building he intended to erect, should reply he had no plan, but thought something would come of it."

Miss Clifford made no reply. She sat with her head resting on her band, looking dreamily before her, a truly beautiful, but unconscious picture.. I too, began to reflect, that while I had really aimed to make the most out of life, I had not done it methodically or intelligently.

We are going to try to stay in town this summer. Hitherto Ernest would not listen to my suggestion of what an economy this would be.

He always said this would turn out anything but an economy in the end. But now we have no teething baby; little Raymond is a strong, healthy child, and Una remarkably well for her, and money is so slow to come in and so fast to go out. What discomforts we suffer in the country it would take a book to write down, and here we shall have our own home, as usual. I shall not have to be separated from Ernest, and shall have leisure to devote to two very interesting people who must stay in town all the year round, no matter who goes out of it. I mean dear Mrs. Campbell and Miss Clifford, who both attract me, though in such different ways.

Chapter 22

XXII.

OCTOBER.

WELL, I had my own way, and I am afraid it has been an unwise one, for though I have enjoyed the leisure afforded by everybody being out of town, and the opportunity it has given me to devote myself to the very sweetest work on earth, the care of my darling little ones, the heat and the stifling atmosphere have been trying for me and for them. My pretty Rose went last May, to bloom in a home of her own, so I thought I would not look for a nurse, but take the whole care of them myself. This would not be much of a task to a strong person, but I am not strong, and a great deal of the time just dressing them and taking them out to walk has exhausted me. Then all the mending and other sewing must be done, and with the over-exertion creeps in the fretful tone, the impatient word. Yet I never can be as impatient with little children as I should be but for the remembrance that I should count it only a joy to minister once more to my darling boy, cost what weariness it might.

But now new cares are at hand, and I have been searching for a person to whom I can safely trust my children when I am laid aside. Thus far I have had, in this capacity, three different Temptations in human form.

The first, a smart, tidy-looking woman, informed me at the outset that she was perfectly competent to take the whole charge of the children, and should prefer my attending to my own affairs while she attended to hers.

I replied that my affairs lay chiefly in caring for and being with my children; to which she returned that she feared I should not suit her, as she had her own views concerning the training of children.

She added, with condescension, that at all events she should expect in any case of difference (of judgment)between us, that I, being the younger and least experienced of the two, should always yield to her.

She then went on to give me her views on the subject of nursery management.

"In the first place," she said, "I never pet or fondle children. It makes them babyish and sickly."

"Oh, I see you will not suit me," I cried. "You need go no farther. I consider love the best educator for a little child."

"Indeed, I think I shall suit you perfectly," she replied, nothing daunted. "I have been in the business twenty years, and have always suited wherever I lived. You will be surprised to see how much sewing I shall accomplish, and how quiet I shall keep the children."

"But I don't want them kept quiet," I persisted. "I want them to be as merry and cheerful as crickets, and I care a great deal more to have them amused than to have the sewing done, though that is important, I confess."

"Very well, ma'am, I will sit and rock them by the hour if you wish it."

"But I don't wish it," I cried, exasperated at the coolness which gave her such an advantage over me. "Let us say no more about it; you do not suit me, and the sooner we part the better. I must be mistress of my own house, and I want no advice in relation to my children."

"I shall hardly leave you before you will regret parting with me,"

she returned, in a placid, pitying, way.

I was afraid I had not been quite dignified in my interview with this person, with whom I ought to have had no discussion, and my equanimity was not restored by her shaking hands with me a patronizing way at parting, and expressing the hope that I should one day "be a green tree in the Paradise of G.o.d." Nor was it any too great a consolation to find that she had suggested to my cook that my intellect was not quite sound.

Temptation the second confessed that she knew nothing, but was willing to be taught. Yes, she might be willing, but she could not be taught. She could not see why Herbert should not have everything he chose to cry for, nor why she should not take the children to the kitchens where her friends abode, instead of keeping them out in the air. She could not understand why she must not tell Una every half hour that she was as fair as a lily, and that the little angels in heaven cried for such hair as hers. And there was no rhyme or reason, to her mind, why she could not have her friends visit in her nursery, since, as she declared, the cook would hear all her secrets if she received them in the kitchen. Her a.s.surance that she thought me a very nice lady, and that there never were two such children as mine, failed to move my hard heart, and I was thankful when I got her out of the house.

Temptation the third appeared, for a time, the perfection of a nurse.

She kept herself and the nursery and the children in most refres.h.i.+ng order; she amused Una when she was more than usually unwell with a perfect fund of innocent stories; the work flew from her nimble fingers as if by magic. I boasted everywhere of my good luck, and sang her praises in Ernest's ears till he believed in her with all his heart. But one night we were out late; we had been spending the evening at Aunty's, and came in with Ernest's night-key as quietly as possible, in order not to arouse the children. I stole softly to the nursery to see if all was going on well there. Bridget, it seems, had taken the opportunity to wash her clothes in the nursery, and they hung all about the room drying, a hot fire raging for the purpose. In the midst of them, with a candle and prayer-book on a chair, Bridget knelt fast asleep, the candle within an inch of her sleeve. Her a.s.surance when I aroused her that she was not asleep, but merely rapt in devotion, did not soften my hard heart, nor was I moved by the representation that she was a saint, and always wore black on that account. I packed her off in anything but a saintly frame, and felt that a fourth Temptation would scatter what little grace I possessed to the four winds. These changes upstairs made discord; too, below.

My cook was displeased at so much coming and going, and made the kitchen a sort of a purgatory which I dreaded to enter. At last, when her temper fairly ran away with her, and she became impertinent to the last degree, I said, coolly:

"If any lady should speak to me in this way I should resent it. But no lady would so far forget herself. And I overlook your rudeness on the ground that you do not know better than to use of such expressions."

This capped the climax! She declared that she had never been told before that she was no and did not know how to behave, and gave warning at once.

I wish I could help running to tell Ernest all -these annoyances. It does no good, and only worries him. But how much of a woman's life is made up of such trials and provocations! and how easy is when on one's knees to bear them aright, and how far easier to bear them wrong when one finds the coal going too fast, the b.u.t.ter out just as sitting down to breakfast, the potatoes watery and the bread sour or heavy! And then when one is well nigh desperate, does one's husband fail to say, in bland tones:

"My dear, if you would just speak to Bridget, I am sure she would improve."

Oh, that there were indeed magic in a spoken word!