Real Folks by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (polar express read aloud txt) 📕

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, nobody, 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-passengers 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. Titus Oldways was interested, not personally, but Wharne fashion. Now, reader, you know something about Mr. Titus Oldways, which up to this moment, only God, and Marmaduke Wharne, and Rachel Froke, who kept Mr. Oldways' house, and wore a Friend's drab dress and white cap, and said "Titus," 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 Hell" and "Arcana Celestia," and Lowell's "Sir Launfal," and Dickens'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 God 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 Titus 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 scrap 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 nobody 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, Titus 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, Titus 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 circumlocutions. Neither will I--afterwards. And how is my money going to work on?"

"_Your_ money?"

"Well,--God'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 God 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 pass 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."

"And the youngest life might drop, the day after your own. You can't take it out of God's hand."

"I must either let it go by law, or will it--here and there. I know enough whom it would help; but I want to invest, not spend it; to invest it in a life--or lives--that will carry it on from where I leave it. How shall I know?"

"He giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him," quoted Marmaduke Wharne, thoughtfully. "I am English, you know, Oldways; I can't help reverencing the claims of next of kin. Unless one is plainly shown otherwise, it seems the appointment. How can we set aside his ways until He clearly points us out his own exception?"

"My 'next' are two women whom I don't know, my niece's children. She died thirty years ago."

"Perhaps you ought to know them."

"I know _about_ them; I've kept the run; but I've held clear of family. They didn't need me, and I had no right to put it into their heads they did, unless I fully meant"--

He broke off.

"They're like everybody else, Wharne; neither better nor worse, I dare say; but the world is full of just such women. How do I know this money would be well in their hands--even for themselves?"

"Find out."

"One of 'em was brought up by an Oferr woman!"

The tone in which he _commonized_ the name to a satiric general term, is not to be written down, and needed not to be interpreted.

"The other is well enough," he went on, "and contented enough. A doctor's widow, with a little property, a farm and two children,--her older ones died very young,--up in New Hampshire. I might spoil _her_; and the other,--well, you see as I said, I _don't know_."

"Find out," said Marmaduke Wharne, again.

"People are not found out till they are tried."

"Try 'em!"

Mr. Oldways had been sitting with his head bent, thoughtfully, his eyes looking down, his hands on the two stiff, old-fashioned arms of his chair. At this last spondaic response from Marmaduke, he lifted his eyes and eyebrows,--not his head,--and raised himself slightly with his two hands pressing on the chair arms; the keen glance and the half-movement were impulsively toward his friend.

"Eh?" said he.

"Try 'em," repeated Marmaduke Wharne. "Give God's way a chance."

Mr. Oldways, seated back in his chair again, looked at him intently; made a little vibration, as it were, with his body, that moved his head up and down almost imperceptibly, with a kind of gradual assenting apprehension, and kept utterly silent.

So, their talk being palpably over for this time, Marmaduke Wharne got up presently to go. They nodded at each other, friendlily, as he looked back from the door.

Left alone, Mr. Titus Oldways turned in his swivel-chair, around to his desk beside which he was sitting.

"Next of kin?" he repeated to himself. "God's way?--Well! Afterwards is a long time. A man must give it up somewhere. Everything escheats to the king at last."

And he took a pen in his hand and wrote a letter.


V.

HOW THE NEWS CAME TO HOMESWORTH.

"I wish I lived in the city, and had a best friend," said Hazel Ripwinkley to Diana, as they sat together on the long, red, sloping kitchen roof under the arches of the willow-tree, hemming towels for their afternoon "stent." They did this because their mother sat on the shed roof under the fir, when she was a child, and had told them of it. Imagination is so much greater than fact, that these children, who had now all that little Frank Shiere had dreamed of with the tar smell and the gravel stones and the one tree,--who might run free in the wide woods and up the breezy hillsides,--liked best of all to get out on the kitchen roof and play "old times," and go back into their mother's dream.

"I wish I lived in a block of houses, and could see across the corner into my best friend's room when she got up in the morning!"

"And could have that party!" said Diana.

"Think of the clean, smooth streets, with red sidewalks, and people living all along, door after door! I like things set in rows, and people having places, like the desks at school. Why, you've got to go way round Sand Hill to get to Elizabeth Ann Dorridon's. I should like to go up steps, and ring bells!"

"I don't know," said Diana, slowly. "I think birds that build little nests about anywhere in the cunning, separate places, in the woods, or among the bushes, have the best time."

"Birds, Dine! It ain't birds, it's people! What has that to do with it?"

"I mean I think nests are better than martin-boxes."

"Let's go in and get her to tell us that story. She's in the round room."

The round room was a half ellipse, running in against the curve of the staircase. It was a bit of a place, with the window at one end, and the bow at the other. It