Faith Gartney's Girlhood by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (people reading books TXT) 📕

between the windows. Hendie's blocks and picture books were stowed in a corner cupboard. Mr. Gartney's newspapers and pamphlets, as they came, found room in a deep drawer below; and so, through the wintry drifts and gales, they were "close hauled" and comfortable.

Faith was happy; yet she thought, now and then, when the whistling wind broke the stillness of the dark evenings, of light and music elsewhere; and how, a year ago, there had always been the chance of a visitor or two to drop in, and while away the hours. Nobody lifted the old-fashioned knocker, here at Cross Corners.

By day, even, it was scarcely different. Kinnicutt was hibernating. Each household had drawn into its shell. And the huge drifts, lying defiant against the fences in the short, ineffectual winter sunlight, held out little hope of reanimation. Aunt Faith, in her pumpkin hood, and Rob Roy cloak, and carpet moccasins, came over once in two or three days, and even occasionally stayed to tea, and helped make up a rubber of whist for Mr. Gartney's amusement; but, beyond this, they had no social excitement.

January brought a thaw; and, still further to break the monotony, there arose a stir and an anxiety in the parish.

Good Mr. Holland, its minister of thirty years, whose health had been failing for many months, was at last compelled to relinquish the duties of his pulpit for a time; and a supply was sought with the ultimate probability of a succession. A new minister came to preach, who was to fill the pastor's place for the ensuing three months. On his first Sunday among them, Faith heard a wonderful sermon.

I indicate thus, not the oratory, nor the rhetoric; but the _sermon_, of which these were the mere vehicle--the word of truth itself--which was spoken, seemingly, to her very thought.

So also, as certainly, to the long life-thought of one other. Glory McWhirk sat in Miss Henderson's corner pew, and drank it in, as a soul athirst.

A man of middle age, one might have said, at first sight--there was, here and there, a silver gleam in the dark hair and beard; yet a fire and earnestness of youth in the deep, beautiful eye, and a look in the face as of life's first flush and glow not lost, but rather merged in broader light, still climbing to its culmination, belied these tokens, and made it as if a white frost had fallen in June--rising up before the crowded village congregation, looked round upon the upturned faces, as One had looked before who brought the bread of Life to men's eager asking; and uttered the selfsame simple words.

It was a certain pause and emphasis he made--a slight new rendering of punctuation--that sent home the force of those words to the people who heard them, as if it had been for the first time, and fresh from the lips of the Great Teacher.

* * * * *

"'Blessed are the poor: _in spirit_: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

"Herein Christ spoke, not to a class, only, but to the world! A world of souls, wrestling with the poverty of life!

"In that whole assemblage--that great concourse--that had thronged from cities and villages to hear His words upon the mountainside--was there, think you, _one satisfied nature_?

"Friends--are _ye_ satisfied?

. . . . .

"Or, does every life come to know, at first or at last, how something--a hope, or a possibility, or the fulfillment of a purpose--has got dropped out of it, or has even never entered, so that an emptiness yawns, craving, therein, forever?

"How many souls hunger till they are past their appetite! Go on--down through the years--needy and waiting, and never find or grasp that which a sure instinct tells them they were made for?

"This, this is the poverty of life! These are the poor, to whom God's Gospel was preached in Christ! And to these denied and waiting ones the first words of Christ's preaching--as I read them--were spoken in blessing.

"Because, elsewhere, he blesses the meek; elsewhere and presently, he tells us how the lowly in spirit shall inherit the earth; so, when I open to this, his earliest uttered benediction upon our race, I read it with an interpretation that includes all humanity:

"'Blessed, in spirit, are the poor. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'

. . . . .

"What is this Kingdom of Heaven? 'It is within you.' It is that which you hold, and live in spiritually; the _real_, of which all earthly, outward being and having are but the show. It is the region wherein little children 'do always behold the Face of my Father which is in Heaven.' It is where we are when we shut our eyes and pray in the words that Christ taught us.

. . . . .

"What matters, then, where your feet stand, or wherewith your hands are busy? So that it is the spot where God has put you, and the work He has given you to do? Your real life is within--hid in God with Christ--ripening, and strengthening, and waiting, as through the long, geologic ages of night and incompleteness waited the germs of all that was to unfold into this actual, green, and bounteous earth!

. . . . .

"The narrower your daily round, the wider, maybe, the outreach. Isolated upon a barren mountain peak, you may take in river and lake--forest, field, and valley. A hundred gardens and harvests lift their bloom and fullness to your single eye.

"There is a sunlight that contracts the vision; there is a starlight that enlarges it to take in infinite space.

"'God sets some souls in shade, alone.
They have no daylight of their own.
Only in lives of happier ones
They see the shine of distant suns.

"'God knows. Content thee with thy night.
Thy greater heaven hath grander light,
To-day is close. The hours are small.
Thou sit'st afar, and hast them all.

"'Lose the less joy that doth but blind;
Reach forth a larger bliss to find.
To-day is brief: the inclusive spheres
Rain raptures of a thousand years.'"

Faith could not tell what hymn was sung, or what were the words of the prayer that followed the sermon. There was a music and an uplifting in her own soul that made them needless, but for the pause they gave her.

She hardly knew that a notice was read as the people rose before the benediction, when the minister gave out, as requested, that "the Village Dorcas Society would meet on Wednesday of the coming week, at Mrs. Parley Gimp's."

She was made aware that it had fallen upon her ears, though heard unconsciously, when Serena Gimp caught her by the sleeve in the church porch.

"Ain't it awful," said she, with a simper and a flutter of importance, "to have your name called right out so in the pulpit? I declare, if it hadn't been for seeing the new minister, I wouldn't have come to meeting, I dreaded it so! Ain't he handsome? He's old, though--thirty-five! He's broken-hearted, too! Somebody died, or something else, that he was going to be married to, ever so many years ago; and they say he hasn't hardly spoken to a lady since. That's so romantic! I don't wonder he preaches such low-spirited kind of sermons. Only I wish they warn't quite so. I suppose it's beautiful, and heavenly minded, and all that; but yet I'd rather hear something a little kind of cheerful. Don't you think so? But the poetry was elegant--warn't it? I guess it's original, too. They say he puts things in the _Mishaumok Monthly_. Come Wednesday, won't you? We shall depend, you know."

To Miss Gimp, the one salient point, amidst the solemnities of the day, had been that pulpit notice. She had put new strings to her bonnet for the occasion. Mrs. Gimp, being more immediately and personally affected, had modestly remained away from church.

Glory McWhirk went straight through the village, home; and out to her little room in the sunny side of the low, sloping roof. This was her winter nook. She had a shadier one, looking the other way, for summer.

"I wonder if it's all true!" she cried, silently, in her soul, while she stood for a minute with bonnet and shawl still on, looking out from her little window, dreamily, over the dazzle of the snow, even as her half-blinded thought peered out from its own narrowness into the infinite splendor of the promise of God--"I wonder if God will ever make me beautiful! I wonder if I shall ever have a real, great joyfulness, that isn't a make believe!"

Glory called her fancies so. They followed her still. She lived yet in an ideal world. The real world--that is, the best good of it--had not come close enough to her, even in this, her widely amended condition, to displace the other. Remember--this child of eighteen had missed her childhood; had known neither father nor mother, sister nor brother.

Don't think her simple, in the pitiful meaning of the word; but she still enacted, in the midst of her plain, daily life, wonderful dreams that nobody could have ever suspected; and here, in her solitary chamber, called up at will creatures of imagination who were to her what human creatures, alas! had never been. Above all, she had a sister here, to whom she told all her secrets. This sister's name was Leonora.


CHAPTER XVII.

FROST-WONDERS.

"No hammers fell, no ponderous axes rung; Like some tall palm, the mystic fabric sprung. Majestic silence!"
HEBER.

The thaw continued till the snow was nearly gone. Only the great drifts against the fences, and the white folds in the rifts of distant hillsides lingered to tell what had been. Then came a day of warm rain, that washed away the last fragment of earth's cast-off vesture, and bathed her pure for the new adornment that was to be laid upon her. At night, the weather cooled, and the rain changed to a fine, slow mist, congealing as it fell.

Faith stood next morning by a small round table in the sitting-room window, and leaned lovingly over her jonquils and hyacinths that were coming into