The Other Girls Part 28

"They train nurses, regular, there. Learn them, so that they can go anywhere. Then you might some time have a chance to go to somebody that needed great care; some sick woman or child, or a sick mother, with little children round her"--

"And every day send up some good turn by them to mother and little Sue!"

So they bound up her wounds for her, and poured in the oil and wine; so they put her on their own beast of service, and set her in their own way, and brought her to a place of abiding.

Three weeks afterward, she went in as housemaid for the children's ward to the Hospital; the beautiful charity which stands, a token of the real best growth of Boston, in that new quarter of her fast enlarging borders, where the tide of her wealth and her life is reaching out southward, toward the pure country pleasantness.

We must leave her there, now; at rest from her ambitions; reaching into a peace they could never have given her; doing daily work that comes to her as a sign and pledge of acceptance and forgiveness.

She sat by a child's bed one Sunday; the bed of a little girl ten years old, whom she had singled out to do by for Susie's sake. She had taken the place of a nurse, to-day, who was ill with an ague.

She read to Maggie the Bible story of Joseph, out of a little book for children that had been Sue's.

After the child had fallen asleep, Marion fetched her Bible, to look back after something in the Scripture words.

It had come home to her,--that betrayal and desertion of the boy by his brethren; it stood with her now for a type of her own selfish unfaithfulness; it thrust a rebuke and a pain upon her, though she knew she had repented.

She wanted to see exactly how it was, when, in the Land beyond the Desert, his brethren came face to face again with Joseph.

"Now, therefore, be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither; for G.o.d did send me before you to preserve life....

To save your lives with a great deliverance. So it was not you that sent me hither, but G.o.d.... And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen, and thou shalt be near unto me."

A great throb of thankfulness, of gladness, came rus.h.i.+ng up in her; it filled her eyes with light; it flushed her cheeks with tender color. The tears sprung s.h.i.+ning; but they did not fall. Peace stayed them. It was such an answer!

"How pretty you are!" said Maggie, awakening. "Please, give me a drink of water."

It was as if Susie thought of it, and gave her the chance! She read secret, loving meanings now, in things that had their meanings only for her. She believed in spirit-communication,--for she knew it came; but in its own beautiful, soul-to-soul ways; not by any outward spells.

She went for the water; she found a piece of ice and put in it. She came and raised the little head tenderly,--the child was hurt in the back, and could not be lifted up,--and held the goblet to the gentle lips; lips patient, like Sue's!

"O, you move me so nice! You give me the drink so handy!"

The beauty was in Marion's face still, warm with an inward joy; the child's eyes followed her as she rose from bending over her.

"Real pretty," she said again, softly, liking to look at her. And "real" was beginning to be the word, at last, for Marion Kent.

The glory of that poem she had read, thinking only of her own petty triumph, came suddenly over her thought by some a.s.sociation,--she could not trace out how. Its grand meaning was a meaning, all at once, for her. With a changed phrasing, like a heavenly inspiration, the last line sprang up in her mind, as if somebody stood by and spoke it:--

"These are the lambs of the sacrifice: _this_ is the court of the King!"

CHAPTER XVIII.

BRICKFIELD FARMS.

It was a rainy, desolate day.

It had rained the day before yesterday, and yesterday, and half cleared up last night; then this morning it had sullenly and tiresomely begun again.

All the forenoon it grew worse; in the afternoon, heavy, pelting, streaming showers came down, filling the Kiln Hollow with mist, and hiding the tops of the hills about it with low, rolling, ever-gathering and resolving clouds.

It seemed as if all the autumn joy were over; as if the pleasant days were done with till another year. After this, the cold would set in.

Mrs. Jeffords had a bright fire built in Mrs. Argenter's room, another in the family sitting-room. It looked cosy; but it reminded the sojourners that they had not simply to draw themselves into winter-quarters, and be comfortable; their winter-quarters were yet to seek.

Sylvie had been cracking a plateful of b.u.t.ternuts; picking out meats, I mean, from the cracked nuts, to make a plateful; and that, if you know b.u.t.ternuts, you know is no small task. She brought them to her mother, with some grated maple sugar sprinkled among and over them.

"This is what you liked so much at the Shakers' in Lebanon," she said. "See if it isn't as nice as theirs, I think it is fresher.

Here is a tiny little pickle-fork, to eat with."

Mrs. Argenter took the offered dainty.

"You are a dear child," she said. "Come and eat some too."

"O, I ate as I went along. Now, I'll read to you." And she took up "Blindpits," which her mother had laid down.

"If it only wouldn't storm so," said Mrs. Argenter. "Mrs. Jeffords says there will be a freshet. The roads will be all torn up. We shall never be able to get home."

"O yes, we shall," said Sylvie, cheerily; putting down the wonder that arose obtrusively in her own mind as to where the home would be that they should go to.

"Did Mrs. Jeffords tell you about last year's freshet? And the apples?"

"She said they had an awful flood. The brooks turned into rivers, and the rivers swallowed up everything."

"O, she didn't get to the funny part, then?" said Sylvie. "She didn't tell you about the apples?"

"No. I think she keeps the funny parts for you, Sylvie."

"May be she does. She isn't sure that you feel up to them, always.

But I guess she means them to come round, when she tells them to me.

You see they had just been gathering their apples, in that great lower orchard,--five acres of trees, and such a splendid crop! There they were, all piled up,--can't you imagine? A perfect picture! Red heaps, and yellow heaps; and greenings, and purple pearmains, and streaked seek-no-furthers. Like great piles of autumn leaves! Well, the flood came, and rose up over the flats, into the lower end of the orchard. They went down over night, and moved all the piles further up, The next day, they had to move them again. And the next morning after that, when they woke up, the whole orchard was under water, and every apple gone. Mr. Jeffords said he got down just in time to see the last one swim round the corner. And when the flood had fallen,--there, half a mile below, spread out over the meadow, was three hundred barrels of apple sauce!"

Mrs. Argenter laughed a feeble little _expected_ laugh; her heart was not free to be amused with an apple-story. No wonder Mrs.

Jeffords kept the funny parts for Sylvie. Mrs. Argenter quenched her before she could possibly get to them. But was Sylvie's heart free for amus.e.m.e.nt? What was the difference? The years between them? Mrs.

Jeffords was a far older woman than Mrs. Argenter, and had had her cares and troubles; yet she and Sylvie laughed like two girls together, over their work and their stories. That was it,--the work!

Sylvie was doing _all she could_. The cheerfulness of doing followed irresistibly after, into the loops and intervals of time, and kept out the fear and the repining.

"There was nothing that chippered you up so, as being real driving busy," Mrs. Jeffords said.

Mrs. Argenter sat in her low easy-chair, watched away the time, and worried about the time to come. It left no leisure for a laugh.

Perhaps the hardest thing that Sylvie did through the day, was the setting to work to "chipper" her mother up. It was lifting up a weight that continually dropped back again.

"Do they think this rain will ever be over?" asked Mrs. Argenter, turning her face toward the dripping panes again.

"Why, yes, mother; rains always _have_ been over sometime. They never knew one that wasn't, and they go by experience."