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; Ive kept the run; but Ive
held clear of family. They didnt 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.