The Other Girls, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

Ingraham had said to her just after she had brought her home. "The kind of comfort she finds for the most wicked and miserable,--people who have done such shocking things as you never dreamed of."

"I want to hear somebody talk to the very wickedest. If there's any chance for me, there's where I must find it. I can't listen with the pretty-good people, any longer. It doesn't belong to me, or do me any good."

"Come and hear the gospel then." And so Ray had taken her down to Neighbor Street, to Luclarion Grapp.

"But the sin stays. You can't wipe the fact out; and you've got to take the consequences," said Marion Kent to the strong, simple woman to whom she came as to a second-seer, to have her spiritual destinies revealed to her.

"Yes," said Luclarion, gravely, but very sweetly, "you have. But the consequences wear out. Everything wears out but the Lord's love. And these old worn-out consequences--why, He can turn them into blessings; and He means to, as they go along, and fade, and change; until, by and by, we may be safer and stronger, and fuller of everlasting life, than if we hadn't had them. I was vaccinated a while ago this summer; everybody was down here; and I had a pretty sick time. It took--ferocious! Well, I got over it, and then I thought about it. I'd got something out of my system forever, that might have come upon me, to destruction, all of a sudden; but now never will! It appears to me almost as if we were sent into this world, like a kind of hospital, to be vaccinated against the awful evil--in our souls; to suffer a little for it; to take it the easiest way we can take it, and so be safe. I don't know--and if you hadn't repented, I wouldn't put it into your head; but it's been put into my head, after I've repented, and I guess it's mainly true. See here!"

And she took down a big leather-bound Bible, and opened it to the fortieth chapter of Isaiah.

"Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and say unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins."

"The Old Testament is full of the New; men's wickedness,--it took wicked men to show the way of the Lord in the earth,--and God's forgiveness, and his leading it all round right, in spite of them all! Only He didn't turn the right side out all at once; it wasn't safe to let them see both sides then. But He _trusts_ us now; He gave his whole heart in Jesus Christ; He tells us, without any keeping back, what He means our very sins shall do for us, and He leaves it to us, after that, to take hold and help Him!"

"If it weren't for them! If I hadn't let them suffer and die!"

"Do you think He takes all this care of you,--lets them die for you even,--and don't take as much for them? Do you think they ain't glad and happy now? Do you think you could have hurt them, if you had tried,--and you didn't try, you only let them alone a little, forgetting? It says, 'If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He is the propitiation.' If we have somebody to take part with us against our sins, how much more against our mistakes,--our forgettings! and _they_ are the propitiation, too; their angels--the Christ of them--do always behold the face of the Father. Their interceding is a part of the Lord's interceding."

"If I could once more be let to do something for them--their very selves!"

"You can. You can pray, 'Lord give them some beautiful heavenly joy this day that thou knowest of, for my asking; because I cannot any more do for them on the earth.' And then you can turn round to their errands again."

Marion stood up on her feet.

"I will say that prayer for them every day! I shall believe in it, because you told me. If I had thought of it myself, I should not have dared. But He wouldn't send such a message by you if He didn't mean it; would He?"

She believed in the God of Luclarion Grapp, as the children of Israel believed in the God of Abraham.

"He never sends any message that He doesn't mean. He means the comfort, just as much as He does the blaming."

Another day, a while after, Marion came down to Neighbor Street with something very much on her mind to say, and to ask about. They had all waited for her own plans to suggest themselves, or rather for her work to be given her to do. No one had mentioned, or urged, or even asked anything as to what she should do next.

But now it came of itself.

"Couldn't I get a place in some asylum, or hospital, do you think, Miss Grapp? To be anything--an under nurse, or housemaid, or a cook to make gruels? So that I could do for poor women and little children? That would seem to come the very nearest. I'd come here, if you wanted me; but I think I should like best to take care of poor, good women, whose children had died, or gone away; who haven't any one to look after them except asylum people. I like to treat them as if they were all my mothers; and especially to wait on any little girls that might be sick."

Was this the same Marion Kent who had given her whole soul, a little while ago, to fine dressing and public appearing, and having her name on placards? Had all that life dropped off from her so easily?

Ah, you call it easily! _She_ knew, how, passing through the furnace, it had been burned away; shriveled and annihilated with the fierce, hot sweep of a spiritual flame before which all old, unworthy desire vanishes:--the living, awful breath of remorse.

"I've no doubt you can," said Luclarion. "I'll make inquiries. Mrs. Sheldon comes here pretty often; and she is one of the managers of the Women and Children's Hospital. They've just got into a great, new building, and there'll be people wanted."

"I'll begin with anything, remember; only to get in, and learn how. I'll do so they'll want to keep me, and give me more; more work, I mean. If I could come to nursing, and being depended on!"

"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 God 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 God.... And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen, and thou shalt be near unto me."

A great throb of thankfulness, of gladness, came rushing up in her; it filled her eyes with light; it flushed her cheeks with tender color. The tears sprung shining; 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 association,--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;