MORNING GLORIES
And Desire?
Do you think I have passed her over
lightly in her troubles? Or do you think I am
making her out to have herself passed over them lightly?
Do you think it is hardly to be believed
that she should have turned round from these shocks
and pains that bore down so heavily and all at once
upon her, and taken kindly to the living with old Uncle
Titus and Rachel Froke in the Greenley Street house,
and going down to Luclarion Grapp’s to help
wash little children’s faces, and teach them
how to have innocent good times? Do you think
there is little making up in all that for her, while
Rosamond Kincaid is happy in her new home, and Ruth
and Dakie Thayne are looking out together over the
world, which can be nowhere wholly sad to
them, since they are to go down into it together, and
planning how to make long arms with their wealth,
to reach the largest neighborhood they can? In
the first place, do you know how full the world is,
all around you, of things that are missed by those
who say nothing, but go on living somehow without
them? Do you know how large a part of life, even
young life, is made of the days that have never been
lived? Do you guess how many girls, like Desire,
come near something that they think they might have
had, and then see it drift by just beyond their reach,
to fall easily into some other hand that seems hardly
put out to grasp it?
And do you see, or feel, or guess
how life goes on, incompleteness and all, and things
settle themselves one way, if not another, simply
because the world does not stop, but keeps turning,
and tossing off days and nights like time-bubbles
just the same?
Do you ever imagine how different
this winter’s parties are from last, or this
summer’s visit or journey from those of the summer
gone, to many a maiden who has her wardrobe
made up all the same, and takes her German or her
music lessons, and goes in and out, and has her ticket
to the Symphony Concerts, and is no different to look
at, unless perhaps with a little of the first color-freshness
gone out of her face, while secretly it
seems to her as if the sweet early symphony of her
life were all played out, and had ended in a discord?
We begin, most of us, much as we are
to go on. Real or mistaken, the experiences of
eighteen initiate the lesson that those of two and
three score after years are needed to unfold and complete.
What is left of us is continually turning round, perforce,
to take up with what is left of the world, and make
the best of it.
Thus much for what does happen, for
what we have to put up with, for the mere philosophy
of endurance, and the possibility of things being
endured. We do live out our years, and get and
bear it all. And the scars do not show much outside;
nay, even we ourselves can lay a finger on the place,
after a little time, without a cringe.
Desire Ledwith did what she had to
do; there was a way made for her, and there was still
life left.
But there is a better reading of the
riddle. There is never a “Might-have-been”
that touches with a sting, but reveals also to us
an inner glimpse of the wide and beautiful “May
Be.” It is all there; somebody else has
it now while we wait; but the years of God are full
of satisfying, each soul shall have its turn; it is
His good pleasure to give us the kingdom.
There is so much room, there are such thronging possibilities,
there is such endless hope!
To feel this, one must feel, however
dimly, the inner realm, out of which the shadows of
this life come and pass, to interpret to us the laid
up reality.
“The real world is the inside world.”
Desire Ledwith blessed Uncle Oldways
in her heart for giving her that word.
It comforted her for her father.
If his life here had been hard, toilsome, mistaken
even; if it had never come to that it might have come
to; if she, his own child, had somehow missed the reality
of him here, and he of her, was he not
passed now into the within? Might she not find
him there; might they not silently and spiritually,
without sign, but needing no sign, begin to understand
each other now? Was not the real family just beginning
to be born into the real home?
Ah, that word real! How
deep we have to go to find the root of it! It
is fast by the throne of God; in the midst.
Hazel Ripwinkley talked about “real
folks.” She sifted, and she found out instinctively
the true livers, the genuine neahburs, nigh-dwellers;
they who abide alongside in spirit, who shall find
each other in the everlasting neighborhood, when the
veil falls.
But there, behind, how
little, in our petty outside vexations or gladnesses,
we stop to think of or perceive it! is the
actual, even the present, inhabiting; there is the
kingdom, the continuing city, the real heaven and
earth in which we already live and labor, and build
up our homes and lay up our treasure and the loving
Christ, and the living Father, and the innumerable
company of angels, and the unseen compassing about
of friends gone in there, and they on this earth who
truly belong to us inwardly, however we and they may
be bodily separated, are the Real Folks!
What matters a little pain, outside?
Go in, and rest from it!
There is where the joy is, that we
read outwardly, spelling by parts imperfectly, in
our own and others’ mortal experience; there
is the content of homes, the beauty of love, the delight
of friendship, not shut in to any one or
two, but making the common air that all souls breathe.
No one heart can be happy, that all hearts may not
have a share of it. Rosamond and Kenneth, Dakie
and Ruth, cannot live out obviously any sweetness
of living, cannot sing any notes of the endless, beautiful
score, that Desire Ledwith, and Luclarion Grapp, and
Rachel Froke, and Hapsie Craydocke, and old Miss Arabel
Waite, do not just as truly get the blessed grace
and understanding of; do not catch and feel the perfect
and abounding harmony of. Since why? No lip
can sound more than its own few syllables of music;
no life show more than its own few accidents and incidents
and groupings; the vast melody, the rich, eternal
satisfying, are behind; and the signs are for us all!
You may not think this, or see it
so, in your first tussle and set-to with the disappointing
and eluding things that seem the real and only, missing
which you miss all. This chapter may be less to
you less for you, perhaps than
for your elders; the story may have ended, as to that
you care for, some pages back; but for all that, this
is certain; and Desire Ledwith has begun to find it,
for she is one of those true, grand spirits to whom
personal loss or frustration are most painful as they
seem to betoken something wrong or failed in the general
scheme and justice. This terrible “why
should it be?” once answered, once
able to say to themselves quietly, “It is all
right; the beauty and the joy are there; the song
is sung, though we are of the listeners; the miracle-play
is played, though but a few take literal part, and
many of us look on, with the play, like the song,
moving through our souls only, or our souls moving
in the vital sphere of it, where the stage is wide
enough for all;” once come to this,
they have entered already into that which is behind,
and nothing of all that goes forth thence into the
earth to make its sunshine can be shut off from them
forever.
Desire is learning to be glad, thinking
of Kenneth and Rosamond, that this fair marriage should
have been. It is so just and exactly best; Rosamond’s
sweet graciousness is so precisely what Kenneth’s
sterner way needed to have shine upon it; her finding
and making of all manner of pleasantness will be so
good against his sharp discernment of the wrong; they
will so beautifully temper and sustain each other!
Desire is so generous, so glad of
the truth, that she can stand aside, and let this
better thing be, and say to herself that it is
better.
Is not this that she is growing to
inwardly, more blessed than any marriage or giving
in marriage? Is it not a partaking of the heavenly
Marriage Supper?
“We two might have grumbled
at the world until we grumbled at each other.”
She even said that, calmly and plainly, to herself.
And then that manna was fed to her
afresh of which she had been given first to eat so
long a while ago; that thought of “the Lamb in
the midst of the Throne” came back to her.
Of the Tenderness deep within the Almightiness that
holds all earth and heaven and time and circumstance
in its grasp. Her little, young, ignorant human
heart begins to rest in that great warmth and gentleness;
begins to be glad to wait there for what shall arise
out of it, moving the Almightiness for her, even
on purpose for her, in the by-and-by; she
begins to be sure; of what, she knows not, but
of a great, blessed, beautiful something, that just
because she is at all, shall be for her; that she
shall have a part, somehow, even in the showing
of His good; that into the beautiful miracle-play she
shall be called, and a new song be given her, also,
to sing in the grand, long, perfect oratorio; she
begins to pray quietly, that, “loving the Lord,
always above all things, she may obtain His promises,
which exceed all that she can desire.”
And waiting, resting, believing, she
begins also to work. This beginning is even as
an ending and fore having, to any human soul.
I will tell you how she woke one morning;
of a little poem that wrote itself along her chamber
wall.
It was a square, pleasant old room,
with a window in an angle toward the east. A
great, old-fashioned mirror hung opposite, between
the windows that looked out north-westwardly; the
morning and the evening light came in upon her.
Beside the solid, quaint old furnishings of a long
past time, there were also around her the things she
had been used to at home; her own little old rocking-chair,
her desk and table, and her toilet and mantel ornaments
and things of use. A pair of candle-branches with
dropping lustres, that she had marveled
at and delighted in as a child, and had begged for
herself when they fell into disuse in the drawing-room, stood
upon the chimney along which the first sun-rays glanced.
Just in those days of the year, they struck in so
as to shine level through the clear prisms, and break
into a hundred little rainbows.
She opened her eyes, this fair October
morning, and lay and looked at the little scattered
glories.
All around the room, on walls, curtains,
ceiling, falling like bright soft jewels
upon table and floor, touching everything with a magic
splendor, were globes and shafts of colored
light. Softly blended from glowing red to tenderly
fervid blue, they lay in various forms and fragments,
as the beam refracted or the objects caught them.
Just on the edge of the deep, opposite
window-frame, clung one vivid, separate flash of perfect
azure, all alone, and farthest off of all.
Desire wondered, at first glance,
how it should happen till she saw, against a closet-door
ajar, a gibbous sphere of red and golden flame.
Yards apart the points were, and a shadow lay between;
but the one sure sunbeam knew no distance, and there
was no radiant line of the spectrum lost.
Desire remembered her old comparison
of complementary colors: “to see blue,
and to live red,” she had said, complaining.
But now she thought, “Foreshortening!
In so many things, that is all, if we could
only see as the Sun sees!”
One bit of our living, by itself,
all one deep, burning, bleeding color, maybe; but
the globe is white, the blue is somewhere.
And, lo! a soft, still motion; a little of the flame-tint
has dropped off; it has leaped to join itself to the
blue; it gives itself over; and they are beautiful
together, they fulfill each other; yet,
in the changing never a thread falls quite away into
the dark. Why, it is like love joining itself
to love again!
As God’s sun climbs the horizon,
His steadfast, gracious purpose, striking into earthly
conditions, seems to break, and scatter, and divide.
Half our heart is here, half there; our need and ache
are severed from their help and answer; the tender
blue waits far off for the eager, asking red; yet
just as surely as His light shines on, and our life
moves under it, so surely, across whatever gulf, the
beauty shall all be one again; so surely does it even
now move all together, perfect and close always under
His eye, who never sends a half ray anywhere.
She read her little poem, sent
to her; she read it through. She rose up glad
and strong; her room was full of glorious sunshine
now; the broken bits of color were all taken up in
one full pouring of the day.
She went down with the light of it
in her heart, and all about her.
Uncle Old ways met her at the foot
of the wide staircase. “Good-day, child!”
he said to her in his quaint fashion. “Why
it is good day! Your face shines.”
“You have given me a beautiful
east window, uncle,” said Desire, “and
the morning has come in!”
And from the second step, where she
still stood, she bent forward a little, put her hands
softly upon his shoulders, and for the first time,
kissed his cheek.