Chapter 19

"I'll tell you what it's like," Hazel said, when she came in and up-stairs the first Saturday afternoon with Desire, and showed and explained to her proudly all Luclarion's ways and blessed inventions. "It's like your mother and mine throwing crumbs to make the pigeons come, when they were little girls, and lived in Boston,--I mean _here_!"

Hazel waked up at the end of her sentence, suddenly, as we all do sometimes, out of talking or thinking, to the consciousness that it was _here_ that she had mentally got round to.

Desire had never heard of the crumbs or the pigeons. Mrs. Ledwith had always been in such a hurry, living on, that she never stopped to tell her children the sweet old tales of how she _had_ lived. Her child-life had not ripened in her as it had done in Frank.

Desire and Hazel went up-stairs and looked at the empty room. It was light and pleasant; dormer windows opened out on a great area of roofs, above which was blue sky; upon which, poor clothes fluttered in the wind, or cats walked and stretched themselves safely and lazily in the sun.

"I always _do_ like roofs!" said Hazel. "The nicest thing in 'Mutual Friend' is Jenny Wren up on the Jew's roof, being dead. It seems like getting up over the world, and leaving it all covered up and put away."

"Except the old clothes," said Desire.

"They're _washed_" answered Hazel, promptly; and never stopped to think of the meaning.

Then she jumped down from the window, along under which a great beam made a bench to stand on, and looked about the chamber.

"A swing to begin with," she said. "Why what is that? Luclarion's got one!"

Knotted up under two great staples that held it, was the long loop of clean new rope; the notched board rested against the chimney below.

"It's all ready! Let's go down and catch one! Luclarion, we've come to tea," she announced, as they reached the sitting-room. "There's the shop bell!"

In the shop was a woman with touzled hair and a gown with placket split from gathers to hem, showing the ribs of a dirty skeleton skirt. A child with one garment on,--some sort of woolen thing that had never been a clean color, and was all gutter-color now,--the woman holding the child by the hand here, in a safe place, in a way these mothers have who turn their children out in the street dirt and scramble without any hand to hold. No wonder, though, perhaps; in the strangeness and unfitness of the safe, pure place, doubtless they feel an uneasy instinct that the poor little vagabonds have got astray, and need some holding.

"Give us a four-cent loaf!" said the woman, roughly, her eyes lowering under crossly furrowed brows, as she flung two coins upon the little counter.

Luclarion took down one, looked at it, saw that it had a pale side, and exchanged it for another.

"Here is a nice crusty one," she said pleasantly, turning to wrap it in a sheet of paper.

"None o' yer gammon! Give it here; there's your money; come along, Crazybug!" And she grabbed the loaf without a wrapper, and twitched the child.

Hazel sat still. She knew there was no use. But Desire with her point-black determination, went right at the boy, took hold of his hand, dirt and all; it was disagreeable, therefore she thought she must do it.

"Don't you want to come and swing?" she said.

"---- yer swing! and yer imperdence! Clear out! He's got swings enough to home! Go to ----, and be ----, you ---- ---- ----!"

Out of the mother's mouth poured a volley of horrible words, like a hailstorm of hell.

Desire fell back, as from a blinding shock of she knew not what.

Luclarion came round the counter, quite calmly.

"Ma'am," she said, "those words won't hurt _her_. She don't know the language. But you've got God's daily bread in your hand; how can you talk devil's Dutch over it?"

The woman glared at her. But she saw nothing but strong, calm, earnest asking in the face; the asking of God's own pity.

She rebelled against that, sullenly; but she spoke no more foul words. I think she could as soon have spoken them in the face of Christ; for it was the Christ in Luclarion Grapp that looked out at her.

"You needn't preach. You can order me out of your shop, if you like. I don't care."

"I don't order you out. I'd rather you would come again. I don't think you will bring that street-muck with you, though."

There was both confidence and command in the word like the "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." It detached the street-muck from the woman. It was not _she_; it was defilement she had picked up, when perhaps she could not help it. She could scrape her shoes at the door, and come in clean.

"You know a darned lot about it, I suppose!" were the last words of defiance; softened down, however, you perceive, to that which can be printed.

Desire was pale, with a dry sob in her throat, when the woman had gone and Luclarion turned round.

"The angels in heaven know; why shouldn't you?" said Luclarion. "That's what we've got to help."

A child came in afterwards, alone; with an actual clean spot in the middle of her face, where a ginger-nut or an acid drop might go in. This was a regular customer of a week past. The week had made that clean spot; with a few pleasant and encouraging hints from Luclarion, administered along with the gingerbread.

Now it was Hazel's turn.

The round mouth and eyes, with expectation in them, were like a spot of green to Hazel, feeling with her witch-wand for a human spring. But she spoke to Desire, looking cunningly at the child.

"Let us go back and swing," she said.

The girl's head pricked itself up quickly.

"We've got a swing up-stairs," said Hazel, passing close by, and just pausing. "A new one. I guess it goes pretty high; and it looks out of top windows. Wouldn't you like to come and see?"

The child lived down in a cellar.

"Take up some ginger-nuts, and eat them there," said Luclarion to Hazel.

If it had not been for that, the girl would have hung back, afraid of losing her shop treat.

Hazel knew better than to hold out her hand, at this first essay; she would do that fast enough when the time came. She only walked on, through the sitting-room, to the stairs.

The girl peeped, and followed.

Clean stairs. She had never trodden such before. Everything was strange and clean here, as she had never seen anything before in all her life, except the sky and the white clouds overhead. Heaven be thanked that they are held over us, spotless, always!

Hazel heard the little feet, shuffling, in horrible, distorted shoes, after her, over the steps; pausing, coming slowly but still starting again, and coming on.

Up on the high landing, under the skylight, she opened the door wide into the dormer-windowed room, and went in; she and Desire, neither of them looking round.

Hazel got into the swing. Desire pushed; after three vibrations they saw the ragged figure standing in the doorway, watching, turning its head from side to side as the swing passed.

"Almost!" cried Hazel, with her feet up at the window. "There!" She thrust them out at that next swing; they looked as if they touched the blue.

"I can see over all the chimneys, and away off, down the water! Now let the old cat die."

Out again, with a spring, as the swinging slackened, she still took no notice of the child, who would have run, like a wild kitten, if she had gone after her. She called Desire, and plunged into a closet under the eaves.

"I wonder what's here!" she exclaimed.

"Rats!"

The girl in the doorway saw the dark, into which the low door opened; she was used to rats in the dark.

"I don't believe it," says Hazel; "Luclarion has a cut, a great big buff one with green eyes. She came in over the roofs, and she runs up here nights. I shouldn't wonder if there might be kittens, though,--one of these days, at any rate. Why! what a place to play 'Dare' in! It goes way round, I don't know where! Look here, Desire!"

She sat on the threshold, that went up a step, over the beam, and so leaned in. She had one eye toward the girl all the time, out of the shadow. She beckoned and nodded, and Desire came.

At the same moment, the coast being clear, the girl gave a sudden scud across, and into the swing. She began to scuff with her slipshod, twisted shoes, pushing herself.

Hazel gave another nod behind her to Desire. Desire stood up, and as the swing came back, pushed gently, touching the board only.

The girl laughed out with the sudden thrill of the motion. Desire pushed again.

Higher and higher, till the feet reached up to the window.

"There!" she cried; and kicked an old shoe off, out over the roof. "I've lost my shoe!"

"Never mind; it'll be down in the yard," said Hazel.

Thereupon the child, at the height of her sweep again, kicked out the other one.

Desire and Hazel, together, pushed her for a quarter of an hour.

"Now let's have ginger-cakes," said Hazel, taking them out of her pocket, and leaving the "cat" to die.

Little Barefoot came down at that, with a run; hanging to the rope at one side, and dragging, till she tumbled in a sprawl upon the floor.

"You ought to have waited," said Desire.

"Poh! I don't never wait!" cried the ragamuffin rubbing her elbows. "I don't care."

"But it isn't nice to tumble round," suggested Hazel.

"I _ain't_ nice," answered the child, and settled the subject.

"Well, these ginger-nuts are," said Hazel. "Here!"

"Have you had a good time?" she asked when the last one was eaten, and she led the way to go down-stairs.

"Good time! That ain't nothin'! I've had a reg'lar bust! I'm comin' agin'; it's bully. Now I must get my loaf and my shoes, and go along back and take a lickin'."

That was the way Hazel caught her first child.

She made her tell her name,--Ann Fazackerley,--and promise to come on Saturday afternoon, and bring two more girls with her.

"We'll have a party," said Hazel, "and play Puss in the Corner. But you must get leave," she added. "Ask your mother. I don't want you to be punished when you go home."

"Lor! you're green! I ain't got no mother. An' I always hooks jack. I'm licked reg'lar when I gets back, anyway. There's half a dozen of 'em. When 'tain't one, it's another. That's Jane Goffey's bread; she's been a swearin' after it this hour, you bet. But I'll come,--see if I don't!"

Hazel drew a hard breath as she let the girl go. Back to her crowded cellar, her Jane Goffeys, the swearings, and the lickings. What was one hour at a time, once or twice a week, to do against all this?

But she remembered the clean little round in her face, out of which eyes and mouth looked merrily, while she talked rough slang; the same fun and daring,--nothing worse,--were in this child's face, that might be in another's saying prettier words. How could she help her words, hearing nothing but devil's Dutch around her all the time? Children do not make the language they are born into. And the face that could be simply merry, telling such a tale as that,--what sort of bright little immortality must it be the outlook of?

Hazel meant to try her hour.

* * * * *

This is one of my last chapters. I can only tell you now they began,--these real folks,--the work their real living led them up to. Perhaps some other time we may follow it on. If I were to tell you now a finished story of it, I should tell a story ahead of the world.

I can show you what six weeks brought it to. I can show you them fairly launched in what may grow to a beautiful private charity,--an "Insecution,"--a broad social scheme,--a millennium; at any rate, a life work, change and branch as it may, for these girls who have found out, in their girlhood, that there is genuine living, not mere "playing pretend," to be done in the world. But you cannot, in little books of three hundred pages, see things through. I never expected or promised to do that. The threescore years and ten themselves, do not do it.

It turned into regular Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Three girls at first, then six, then less again,--sometimes only one or two; until they gradually came up to and settled at, an average of nine or ten.

The first Saturday they took them as they were. The next time they gave them a stick of candy each, the first thing, then Hazel's fingers were sticky, and she proposed the wash-basin all round, before they went up-stairs. The bright tin bowl was ready in the sink, and a clean round towel hung beside; and with some red and white soap-balls, they managed to fascinate their dirty little visitors into three clean pairs of hands, and three clean faces as well.

The candy and the washing grew to be a custom; and in three weeks' time, watching for a hot day and having it luckily on a Saturday, they ventured upon instituting a whole bath, in big round tubs, in the back shed-room, where a faucet came in over a wash bench, and a great boiler was set close by.

They began with a foot-paddle, playing pond, and sailing chips at the same time; then Luclarion told them they might have tubs full, and get in all over and duck, if they liked; and children who may hate to be washed, nevertheless are always ready for a duck and a paddle. So Luclarion superintended the bath-room; Diana helped her; and Desire and Hazel tended the shop. Luclarion invented a shower-bath with a dipper and a colander; then the wet, tangled hair had to be combed,--a climax which she had secretly aimed at with a great longing, from the beginning; and doing this, she contrived with carbolic soap and a separate suds, and a bit of sponge, to give the neglected little heads a most salutary dressing.

Saturday grew into bath-day; soap-suds suggested bubbles; and the ducking and the bubbling were a frolic altogether.

Then Hazel wished they could be put into clean clothes each time; wouldn't it do, somehow?

But that would cost. Luclarion had come to the limit of her purse; Hazel had no purse, and Desire's was small.

"But you see they've _got_ to have it," said Hazel; and so she went to her mother, and from her straight to Uncle Oldways.

They counted up,--she and Desire, and Diana; two little common suits, of stockings, underclothes, and calico gowns, apiece; somebody to do a washing once a week, ready for the change; and then--"those horrid shoes!"

"I don't see how you can do it," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "The things will be taken away from them, and sold. You would have to keep doing, over and over, to no purpose, I am afraid."

"I'll see to that," said Luclarion, facing her "stump." "We'll do for them we can do for; if it ain't ones, it will be tothers. Those that don't keep their things, can't have 'em; and if they're taken away, I won't sell bread to the women they belong to, till they're brought back. Besides, the _washing_ kind of sorts 'em out, beforehand. 'Taint the worst ones that are willing to come, or to send, for that. You always have to work in at an edge, in anything, and make your way as you go along. It'll regulate. I'm _living_ there right amongst 'em; I've got a clew, and a hold; I can follow things up; I shall have a 'circle;' there's circles everywhere. And in all the wheels there's a moving _spirit_; you ain't got to depend just on yourself. Things work; the Lord sees to it; it's _His_ business as much as yours."

Hazel told Uncle Titus that there were shoes and stockings and gowns wanted down in Neighbor Street; things for ten children; they must have subscriptions. And so she had come to him.

The Ripwinkleys had never given Uncle Titus a Christmas or a birthday present, for fear they should seem to establish a mutual precedent. They had never talked of their plans which involved calculation, before him; they were terribly afraid of just one thing with him, and only that one,--of anything most distantly like what Desire Ledwith called "a Megilp bespeak." But now Hazel went up to him as bold as a lion. She took it for granted he was like other people,--"real folks;" that he would do--what must be done.

"How much will it cost?"

"For clothes and shoes for each child, about eight dollars for three months, we guess," said Hazel. "Mother's going to pay for the washing!"

"_Guess_? Haven't you calculated?"

"Yes, sir. 'Guess' and 'calculate' mean the same thing in Yankee," said Hazel, laughing.

Uncle Titus laughed in and out, in his queer way, with his shoulders going up and down.

Then he turned round, on his swivel chair, to his desk, and wrote a check for one hundred dollars.

"There. See how far you can make that go."

"That's good," said Hazel, heartily, looking at it; "that's splendid!" and never gave him a word of personal thanks. It was a thing for mutual congratulations, rather, it would seem; the "good" was just what they all wanted, and there it was. Why should anybody in particular be thanked, as if anybody in particular had asked for anything? She did not say this, or think it; she simply did not think about it at all.

And Uncle Oldways--again--liked it.

There! I shall not try, now, to tell you any more; their experiences, their difficulties, their encouragements, would make large material for a much larger book. I want you to know of the idea, and the attempt. If they fail, partly,--if drunken fathers steal the shoes, and the innocent have to forfeit for the guilty,--if the bad words still come to the lips often, though Hazel tells them they are not "nice,"--and beginning at the outside, they are in a fair way of learning the niceness of being nice,--if some children come once or twice, and get dressed up, and then go off and live in the gutters again until the clothes are gone,--are these real failures? There is a bright, pure place down there in Neighbor Street, and twice a week some little children have there a bright, pure time. Will this be lost in the world? In the great Ledger of God will it always stand unbalanced on the debit side?

If you are afraid it will fail,--will be swallowed up in the great sink of vice and misery, like a single sweet, fresh drop, sweet only while it is falling,--go and do likewise; rain down more; make the work larger, stronger; pour the sweetness in faster, till the wide, grand time of full refreshing shall have come from the presence of the Lord!

Ada Geoffrey went down and helped. Miss Craydocke is going to knit scarlet stockings all winter for them; Mr. Geoffrey has put a regular bath-room in for Luclarion, with half partitions, and three separate tubs; Mrs. Geoffrey has furnished a dormitory, where little homeless ones can be kept to sleep. Luclarion has her hands full, and has taken in a girl to help her, whose board and wages Rachel Froke and Asenath Scherman pay. A thing like that spreads every way; you have only to be among, and one of--Real Folks.

* * * * *

Desire, besides her work in Neighbor Street, has gone into the Normal School. She wants to make herself fit for any teaching; she wants also to know and to become a companion of earnest, working girls.

She told Uncle Titus this, after she had been with him a month, and had thought it over; and Uncle Titus agreed, quite as if it were no real concern of his, but a very proper and unobjectionable plan for her, if she liked it.

One day, though, when Marmaduke Wharne--who had come this fall again to stay his three days, and talk over their business,--sat with him in his study, just where they had sat two years and a little more ago, and Hazel and Desire ran up and down stairs together, in and out upon their busy Wednesday errands,--Marmaduke said to Titus,--

"Afterwards is a long time, friend; but I mistrust you have found the comfort, as well as the providence, of 'next of kin?'"

"Afterwards _is_ a long time," said Titus Oldways, gravely; "but the Lord's line of succession stretches all the way through."

And that same night he had his other old friend, Miss Craydocke, in; and he brought two papers that he had ready, quietly out to be signed, each with four names: "Titus Oldways," by itself, on the one side; on the other,--

"RACHEL FROKE, MARMADUKE WHARNE, KEREN-HAPPUCH CRAYDOCKE."

And one of those two papers--which are no further part of the present story, seeing that good old Uncle Titus is at this moment alive and well, as he has a perfect right, and is heartily welcome to be, whether the story ever comes to a regular winding up or not--was laid safely away in a japanned box in a deep drawer of his study table; and Marmaduke Wharne put the other in his pocket.

He and Titus knew. I myself guess, and perhaps you do; but neither you nor I, nor Rachel, nor Keren-happuch, know for certain; and it is no sort of matter whether we do or not.

The "next of kin" is a better and a deeper thing than any claim of law or register of bequest can show. Titus Oldways had found that out; and he had settled in his mind, to his restful and satisfied belief, that God, to the last moment of His time, and the last particle of His created substance, can surely care for and order and direct His own.

Is that end and moral enough for a two years' watchful trial and a two years' simple tale?

XXI.

THE HORSESHOE.

They laid out the Waite Place in this manner:--

Right into the pretty wooded pasture, starting from a point a little way down the road from the old house, they projected a roadway which swept round, horseshoe fashion, till it met itself again within a space of some twenty yards or so; and this sweep made a frontage--upon its inclosed bit of natural, moss-turfed green, sprinkled with birch and pine and oak trees, and with gray out-croppings of rock here and there--for the twenty houses, behind which opened the rest of the unspoiled, irregular, open slope and swell and dingle of the hill-foot tract that dipped down at one reach, we know, to the river.

The trees, and shrubs, and vines, and ferns, and stones, were left in their wild prettiness; only some roughness of nature's wear and tear of dead branches and broken brushwood, and the like, were taken away, and the little footpaths cleared for pleasant walking.

There were all the little shady, sweet-smelling nooks, just as they had been; all the little field-parlors, opening with their winding turns between bush and rock, one into another. The twenty households might find twenty separate places, if they all wanted to take a private out-door tea at once.

The cellars were dug; the frames were up; workmen were busy with brick and mortar, hammer and plane; two or three buildings were nearly finished, and two--the two standing at the head of the Horseshoe, looking out at the back into the deepest and pleasantest wood-aisle, where the leaves were reddening and mellowing in the early October frost, and the ferns were turning into tender transparent shades of palest straw-color--were completed, and had dwellers in them; the cheeriest, and happiest, and coziest of neighbors; and who do you think these were?

Miss Waite and Delia, of course, in one house; and with them, dividing the easy rent and the space that was ample for four women, were Lucilla Waters and her mother. In the other, were Kenneth and Rosamond Kincaid and Dorris.

Kenneth and Rosamond had been married just three weeks. Rosamond had told him she would begin the world with him, and they had begun. Begun in the simple, true old-fashioned way, in which, if people only would believe it, it is even yet not impossible for young men and women to inaugurate their homes.

They could not have had a place at Westover, and a horse and buggy for Kenneth to go back and forth with; nor even a house in one of the best streets of Z----; and down at East Square everything was very modern and pretentious, based upon the calculation of rising values and a rush of population.