Real Folks Part 5

"Why, I wear it to church, with my white Swiss mantle," answered Laura. "Or taking tea, or anything. I've a black silk _visite_ for cool days. That looks nice with it. And see here,--I've a pink sunshade. They don't have them much yet, even in New York. Mr.

Pemberton Oferr brought these home from Paris, for Gerry and Alice, and me. Gerry's is blue. See! it tips back." And Laura set the dashy little thing with its head on one side, and held it up coquettishly.

"They used them in carriages in Paris, he said, and in St.

Petersburg, driving out on the Nevskoi Prospekt."

"But where are your common things?"

"Down at the bottom; I haven't come to them. They were put in first, because they would bear squeezing. I've two French calicoes, with pattern tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs; and a lilac jaconet, with ruffles, open down the front."

Laura wore long dresses now; and open wrappers were the height of the style.

Laura astonished Homesworth the first Sunday of this visit, with her rose-colored toilet. Bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds and a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted over two starched petticoats; even her pink belt had gay little borders of tiny buds and leaves, and her fan had a pink ta.s.sel.

"They're the things I wear; why shouldn't I?" she said to Frank's remonstrance.

"But up here!" said Frank. "It would seem nicer to wear something--stiller."

So it would; a few years afterward Laura herself would have seen that it was more elegant; though Laura Shiere was always rather given to doing the utmost--in apparel--that the occasion tolerated.

Fashions grew stiller in years after. But this June Sunday, somewhere in the last thirties or the first forties, she went into the village church like an Aurora, and the village long remembered the resplendence. Frank had on a white cambric dress, with a real rose in the bosom, cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her "cottage straw" was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed over the crown.

"Do you feel any better?" asked Aunt Oldways of Laura, when they came home to the country tea-dinner.

"Better--how?" asked Laura, in surprise.

"After all that 'wear' and _stare_," said Aunt Oldways, quietly.

Aunt Oldways might have been astonished, but she was by no means awestruck, evidently; and Aunt Oldways generally spoke her mind.

Somehow, with Laura Shiere, pink was pinker, and ribbons were more rustling than with most people. Upon some quiet unconscious folks, silk makes no spread, and color little show; with Laura every gleam told, every fibre a.s.serted itself. It was the live Aurora, bristling and tingling to its farthest electric point. She did not toss or flaunt, either; she had learned better of Signor Pirotti how to carry herself; but she was in conscious _rapport_ with every thing and st.i.tch she had about her. Some persons only put clothes on to their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put them on to their souls.

Laura Shiere came up to Homesworth three years later, with something more wonderful than a pink embossed muslin:--she had a lover.

Mrs. Oferr and her daughters were on their way to the mountains; Laura was to be left with the Oldways. Grant Ledwith accompanied them all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to Boston.

"I can't think of anything but that pink sunshade she used to carry round canted all to one side over her shoulder," said Aunt Oldways, looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went away. Laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel, leaning on Grant Ledwith's arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh, graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with, and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of eternity that she called her life. Mr. Ledwith was not so much a man who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had "got a beau."

She had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told Frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people wore ever so many skirts now, at a time. She had been to a party a little while ago where she wore _seven_.

There were deep French embroidery bands around some of these white skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses. Geraldine Oferr was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid; Gerry had a white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace veil. She had three dozen of everything, right through. They had gone to housekeeping up town, in West Sixteenth Street. Frank would have to come to New York next winter, or in the spring, to be _her_ bridesmaid; then she would see; then--who knew!

Frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in Homesworth among the hills; she had not "seen," but she had her own little secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that "Who"

_didn't_ know.

Laura waited a year for Grant Ledwith's salary to be raised to marrying point; he was in a wholesale woolen house in Boston; he was a handsome fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address,--capital, this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up to two thousand dollars within that twelvemonth. Upon this, in the spring, they married; took a house in Filbert Street, down by the river, and set up their little G.o.ds. These were: a sprinkle of black walnut and brocatelle in the drawing-room, a Sheffield-plate tea-service, and a crimson-and-giltedged dinner set that Mrs. Oferr gave them; twilled turkey-red curtains, that looked like thibet, in the best chamber; and the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses, and whatever corresponded to them on the bride-groom's part, in their wardrobes.

All that was left of Laura's money, and all that was given them by Grant Ledwith's father, and Mr. t.i.tus Oldways' astounding present of three hundred dollars, without note or comment,--the first reminder they had had of him since Edward Shiere's funeral, "and goodness knew how he heard anything now," Aunt Oferr said,--had gone to this outfit. But they were well set up and started in the world; so everybody said, and so they, taking the world into their young, confident hands for a plaything, not knowing it for the perilous loaded sh.e.l.l it is, thought, merrily, themselves.

Up in Homesworth people did not have to wait for two thousand dollar salaries. They would not get them if they did.

Oliver Ripwinkley, the minister's son, finished his medical studies and city hospital practice that year, and came back, as he had always said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor. Old Doctor Parrish, the parson's friend of fifty years, with no child of his own, kept the place for Oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned saddle-bags in the garret the very day the young man came home. He was there to be "called in," however, and with this backing, and the perforce of there being n.o.body else, young Doctor Ripwinkley had ten patients within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man who "appeared to know pretty well what he was about."

So that when he gave further proof of the same, by asking, within the week that followed, the prettiest girl in Homesworth, Frances Shiere, to come and begin the world with him at Mile Hill village, n.o.body, not even Frank herself, was astonished.

She bought three new gowns, a shawl, a black silk mantle, and a straw bonnet. She made six each of every pretty white garment that a woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in September, they took their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded little corner room in the old "Rankin house;" a bigger place than they really wanted yet, and not all to be used at first; but rented "reasonable," central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad sidegreen of the village street, and running back, with its field and meadow belongings, away to the foot of great, gray, sheltering Mile Hill.

And the vast, solemn globe, heedless of what lit here or there upon its breadth, or took up this or that life in its little freckling cities, or between the imperceptible foldings of its hills,--only carrying way-pa.s.sengers for the centuries,--went plunging on its track, around and around, and swept them all, a score of times, through its summer and its winter solstices.

IV.

AFTERWARDS IS A LONG TIME.

Old Mr. Marmaduke Wharne had come down from Outledge, in the mountains, on his way home to New York. He had stopped in Boston to attend to some affairs of his own,--if one can call them so, since Marmaduke Wharne never had any "own" affairs that did not chiefly concern, to their advantage, somebody else,--in which his friend Mr.

t.i.tus Oldways was interested, not personally, but Wharne fashion.

Now, reader, you know something about Mr. t.i.tus Oldways, which up to this moment, only G.o.d, and Marmaduke Wharne, and Rachel Froke, who kept Mr. Oldways' house, and wore a Friend's drab dress and white cap, and said "t.i.tus," and "Marmaduke" to the two old gentlemen, and "thee" and "thou" to everybody,--have ever known. In a general way and relation, I mean; separate persons knew particular things; but each separate person thought the particular thing he knew to be a whimsical exception.

Mr. Oldways did not belong to any church: but he had an English Prayer-book under his Bible on his study table, and Baxter and Fenelon and a Kempis and "Wesley's Hymns," and Swedenborg's "Heaven and h.e.l.l" and "Arcana Celestia," and Lowell's "Sir Launfal," and d.i.c.kens's "Christmas Carol," all on the same set of shelves,--that held, he told Marmaduke, his religion; or as much of it as he could get together. And he had this woman, who was a Friend, and who walked by the Inner Light, and in outer charity, if ever a woman did, to keep his house. "For," said he, "the blessed truth is, that the Word of G.o.d is in the world. Alive in it. When you know that, and wherever you can get hold of his souls, then and there you've got your religion,--a piece at a time. To prove and sort your pieces, and to straighten the tangle you might otherwise get into, there's _this_," and he laid his hand down on the Four Gospels, bound in white morocco, with a silver cross upon the cover,--a volume that no earthly creature, again, knew of, save t.i.tus and Marmaduke and Rachel Froke, who laid it into a drawer when she swept and dusted, and placed it between the crimson folds of its quilted silken wrapper when she had finished, burnishing the silver cross gently with a sc.r.a.p of chamois leather cut from a clean piece every time. There was nothing else delicate and exquisite in all the plain and grim establishment; and the crimson wrapper was comfortably worn, and n.o.body would notice it, lying on the table there, with an almanac, a directory, the big, open Worcester's Dictionary, and the scattered pamphlets and newspapers of the day.

Out in the world, t.i.tus Oldways went about with visor down.

He gave to no fairs nor public charities; "let them get all they could that way, it wasn't his way," he said to Rachel Froke. The world thought he gave nothing, either of purse or life.

There was a plan they had together,--he and Marmaduke Wharne,--this girls' story-book will not hold the details nor the idea of it,--about a farm they owned, and people working it that could go nowhere else to work anything; and a mill-privilege that might be utilized and expanded, to make--not money so much as safe and honest human life by way of making money; and they sat and talked this plan over, and settled its arrangements, in the days that Marmaduke Wharne was staying on in Boston, waiting for his other friend, Miss Craydocke, who had taken the River Road down from Outledge, and so come round by Z----, where she was staying a few days with the Goldthwaites and the Inglesides. Miss Craydocke had a share or two in the farm and in the mill.

And now, t.i.tus Oldways wanted to know of Marmaduke Wharne what he was to do for Afterwards.

It was a question that had puzzled and troubled him. Afterwards.

"While I live," he said, "I will do what I can, and _as_ I can. I will hand over my doing, and the wherewith, to no society or corporation. I'll pay no salaries nor circ.u.mlocutions. Neither will I--afterwards. And how is my money going to work on?"

"_Your_ money?"

"Well,--G.o.d's money."

"How did it work when it came to you?"

Mr. Oldways was silent.

"He chose to send it to you. He made it in the order of things that it should come to you. You began, yourself, to work for money. You did not understand, then, that the money would be from G.o.d and was for Him."

"He made me understand."

"Yes. He looked out for that part of it too. He can look out for it again. His word shall not return unto him void."

"He has given me this, though, to pa.s.s on; and I will not put it into a machine. I want to give some living soul a body for its living. Dead charities are dead. It's of no use to will it to you, Marmaduke; I'm as likely to stay on, perhaps, as you are."