Margaretta

“ But the thought of his wife's second marriage was one he could not endure, so he had ordered matters otherwise, and the girl was with her grim old kinswoman.
"Thorley," said Lady Longridge, after Margaretta's arrival, "we have caged our bird once more, and we shall keep her safely, never fear. The thought of having the charge of her for—let me see—six years to come, will help to keep me alive. I dare say her mother will count my years and say, 'She will not last till Margaretta is of age.' But plenty of people live to eighty-seven, and why not I. I come of a long-lived race ”

“ Moffat's affection for Margaretta kept her much more at the Cottage. When she left it for a few weeks she would fain have taken the girl with her. But to this Lady Longridge would never consent, though she would have had nothing to pay for her granddaughter.
"Where I stay, Margaretta, remains also. I cannot go elsewhere, so she must content herself at Northbrook. I will never part with her whilst I live. If I die before she is of age, that will be another matter, though I do not think I shall. My head is clear, my memory good—oh yes, very good; too good sometimes, is it not, Thorley?" ”

“ Margaretta became distinguished after the war, in New York fashionable society, as a gifted and accomplished woman, although her married life was rendered unhappy by a profligate husband. After his death in 1798, she assisted in a female academy in New Brunswick ”

“ Margaretta shuddered.
“Would you have your house kept clean if it were so dark that you couldn’t see the dirty corners?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” said Margaretta, decidedly, “but who owns those dreadful places?”
“You do,” said Berty, shortly.
“I do!” said Margaretta, aghast.
“Yes—some of them. Roger holds property down there in your name. All the rich people in the city like to invest in River Street tenements. They’re always packed.”
“I won’t have it,” said Margaretta. “Roger shall sell out.”
“Don’t sell—improve your property, and get some of the stain off your soul. ”

“ It is a dreadful trial for an old woman like me to be burdened with the charge of a girl. But Philip would not leave her to the tender mercies of a stepfather, and that devoted wife of his would not keep single for the sake of her 'darling child.' Oh no."
It was always the same. No kind word fur any one, no messenger sent to bring the lonely girl into the presence of a visitor who might have been inclined to make her life a little brighter.
Yet Margaretta was not wholly friendless. She had, after a time, three persons on whose affection she could rely, and all within her reach at Northbrook. ”

“ She rather liked to meet her match sometimes, and the thought of having made a good bargain, even at the cost of sixty pounds a year, put her into a good humour for the time being. She was eager for Margaretta to begin her studies, but as the morrow would be Friday, it was decided that the girl should go to Clough Cottage on the Monday morning following.
How Thorley and the little seamstress rejoiced in the success of their innocent plan needs not be told, or with what impatience Margaretta counted the hours that must intervene before she should once more touch a piano worthy the name. ”

“ Women should ask their husbands where they invest their money. Good old Mrs. Darlway, the temperance worker, owns a building with a saloon in it.”
“Oh, misery!” exclaimed Margaretta, “she doesn’t know it, of course.”
“No—tell her.”
“How have you found all this out, Berty?”
[84]
“I’ve talked to the women.”
“What—the women of the tin can episode?”
“Oh, they’re all over that now—they understand Grandma and me—and what a lot of things they’ve told me. Haven’t you always thought that policemen were noble, kind creatures, like soldiers?”
“Yes,” said Margaretta, innocently, “aren’t they?” ”

“ I am going to keep my boat and canoe. The launch will have to go.”
Margaretta suppressed a smile. “How about the neighbourhood?”
“Don’t like it, but we shall keep to ourselves.”
“And keep the family together,” said Margaretta.
“Yes,” said Berty, soberly. “Trust Grandma to do that. I wish you and Roger could live with us.”
“Bless your heart,” said Margaretta, affectionately throwing an arm around her.
“LEANING OVER THE STAIR RAILING”
“But you’ll come to see us often?” ”

“ I want to talk—I came out of our house one morning, Margaretta; there were three pitiful little children on the door-step. ‘Children, do get out of this,’ I said. ‘We may have callers, and you look like imps.’”
“Have you had any more callers?” asked Margaretta, eagerly.
“Yes, the Everests, and Brown-Gardners, and Mrs. Darley-James.”
“Mrs. Darley-James!”
“Yes, Mrs. Darley-James, that fastidious dame. [86] I’ve read that when you get poor, your friends forsake you, but ours have overwhelmed us with attentions.”
“Grandma is an exceptional woman,” said Margaretta, proudly. ”

“ Macbride declared that he had suspected something of the truth all through. But I doubt it. She had been "playing" at being the Princess Margaretta--to think of that minx's brazen impudence! Every one got back his own again. I even got back the contents of my purse. But when he was presented with the bill at the hotel that grocer must have stared.
To my mind Beachington has never been the same since the incident of the Princess Margaretta.
IX THE END OF HIS HOLIDAY
I
"That's a fine girl!" ”

“ He only has his proper share of love. My Meg has hers, and with interest. It only seems to accumulate during absence, and, darling, I trust you, though no line has come from your dear hand to say, 'Mother, I have not changed, I love you always.'"
"I do not ask you to write now, as we shall be travelling slowly homeward, but I shall lose no time in coming to Northbrook and clasping my darling to my heart.—Yours," etc.
With what mingled feelings Margaretta read these words cannot be described. Her joy and thankfulness on the one hand, her indignation at her grandmother's cruelty on the other. ”

“ Arming themselves with firearms, pitchforks, and axes, and throwing a small stock of provisions into the sloop, these spirited freemen made sail on their craft, with a light breeze at northwest. When the Margaretta observed the approach of the sloop, she weighed and crowded sail to avoid a conflict that was every way undesirable,—her commander not yet being apprised of all the facts that had occurred near Boston. In jibing, the schooner carried away her main-boom, but, continuing to stand on, she ran into Holmes' Bay, and took a spar out of a vessel that was lying there. ”

“ The placid glistening pools, the streams that flow
Through the red earth, left by the hurrying tide;
The ridge of mountain on the farther side
Shewing more black for many twinkling lights
That come and go about the gathering heights. ”

“ To be glad, she must feel herself part of this great springing, growing universe. That woman who has chosen herself a farm has done so that she may feel her head warmed by the life-giving sun and her feet firm in the fertile earth. ”

“ The clinging snow has enfolded all things. Every tree stands with white, shrouded branches. The berry thickets are softly furred with white. The dusky gray aisles of the roadside woods die to blackness in the near distance. ”

“ I have seen my hills deepest blue at the skyline, and below all ablaze, beneath the racing white clouds of October, when more than at any other time the winding roads bewitch my feet, and every blackberry thicket and slope and fence-row is flaunting its banners in my eyes ”

“ It is rather inspiring to be a woman, because it is so difficult. With the winds blowing from every direction at once, one must somehow steer a course that will reveal alike to the reader who knows one’s book and to the friend who knows one’s heart, a halcyon serenity. ”

“ At that unbearable sadness Murray Newbold cried out, “No, Bishop, no! If I have failed, it is not your failure! Faith such as yours, life such as yours,—it is impossible to men like me. It is not for us.” ”

“ I was made for life’s out-of-doors. I am a woman who wishes to walk this earth in all weathers, and indeed I have walked it in many, plucking by my homely hillpaths thoughts that are wayside flowers along a subtler way. ”

“ Yet hers is vital poetry, earth-warm and limpid as the song of the meadowlark. Curious how it is men who have best put women into words, men who have made the best bedtime lullabies for children; women have been much too happy to talk about it. Yet a happy woman with the gift of song, if she remembered,—if she could set to music the purring of her kettle on the hob, the lilt of her sewing-machine,—how the sunny words might twinkle on harder, stranger paths! ”

“ I pass by a porch that abuts close upon the road. A door flings open and a man and a woman come out, too temper-tossed to heed me. The woman’s face is set in impotent hate, the man’s mouth is wried with cursing; and the faces are not young, nor the graven bitterness a mere passing blight. Man and wife! Yet they loved once, I suppose, and went driving gayly back from the parson’s, his arm about her ribboned waist, and posies flaunting in her hat and in her cheeks—once!
It is given to us who trudge by in the road beyond the doors to pity often, but to envy rarely. ”

“ In unspoken kinship of loneliness must they draw near now, the man and the woman who had walked closest to him, to rear together his last wish. Deathless as dream should rise the House of Friendship, for, passing, the Bishop had found the way to give himself. It is only a little city where he offered the chalice of his spirit, and only a little space his whole bishopric, yet all the world is richer for the gift of his Christmas soul. ”

“ For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our costume,—our invincible frankness; for we would have our clothes the expression of our souls. With what fondness we cling to the frock that suits us! Such a bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too gross—a black coat and trousers an insincerity—for the hundred shades of shifting color and form that we are inside. Though it take half our life, let us be true to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and the lady a symphony of soul and silk. ”

“ It is out on the great back porch with its pump and its grapevine lattice, on this porch and on the slope to the big barns below, that things happen. There is no rose garden. Lady Two has flowers, it is true, in hearty democratic confusion and profusion; she loves them, too, but without subtlety, watering them and her tomato plants alike with the same splashing hand. ”

“ There seems no means of convincing a reader that in a writer’s head are constantly a thousand faces he has never seen or heard of, all subtle with story, all begging for a book, and all so real that they often make his daily waking seem a dream. ”

“ The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman’s life when dress becomes an ecstasy—as never afterwards. We always look in the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. ”

“ It is since then that Night and A Man have been my crown of terrors. A Man lurks in every darkened doorway, stretches an arm from every tree trunk, pursues me,—pat, pat, pat,—and fades into the common light of lamp and fire only when I am safely under my own roof-tree. Even in the daytime, A Man never deserts me: he haunts the solitary country lanes, lush and lovely with spring ”

“ Strange paradox that the first emotion of the baby soul should be bitterness against all those contrivances of decency, those hemstitched linens and embroidered flannels, through which the mother heart eased its brooding love. The little pink, squirming creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly incased in the wrappings of finite human care. That is why we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really are; all the clothes and the conventions were ready for us ”

“ Eternity seems the only thoroughly scientific explanation of soul. At a mere superficial reading each human life appears like a chapter from a serial rather than a complete volume or a fugitive page tossed on the wind. ”

“ I am half afraid of the woods; they have grown unearthly, so that I start at the eerie thud of the snow that drops from the branches. Gray-white, silent mystery,—and I should never have known or seen it, had I not laughed at life’s wild weather, and trudged forth to it in rubber boots, all alone.
Yet, whatever the shy comradeship of wayside groves, of busy secret streams and homely fields, always the human aspect of the road engages the woman who tramps with joy at the heart. ”

“ In the house of each heart that must perforce hold his memory like a shrine, there could never be any chamber for hate. Through the gift of his three years’ presence should the grandmother hold to her breast her baby’s baby, until love, overflowing, should enfold that black-mooded woman, her son’s wife, and both, being mothers, should learn the way of peace by guiding there the little feet of a little child. This, himself all unwitting, should be the Bishop’s immortal gift.
Even so, by divine largess of life given to life, should Murray Newbold become the Bishop’s spiritual son. ”

“ Why not have a little patience with ourselves, we poor devils who have to bear all the brunt of the transition from eternity to evanescence? If we promise not to corrupt advancing youth, if we promise not even to corrupt our own reason by any genuine faith, can’t we safely play that our life’s chapter is going to be continued? ”