Real Folks Part 39

Then it was over, and she was half ashamed, thinking it was of no use, and he would not understand; perhaps that he would only set the whole down to nerves and fidgets and contrariness, and give her no common sense that she wanted, after all.

But Uncle t.i.tus spoke, slowly; much as if he, too, were speaking out involuntarily, without thought of his auditor. People do so speak, when the deep things are stirred; they speak into the deep that answereth unto itself,--the deep that reacheth through all souls, and all living, whether souls feel into it and know of it or not.

"The real things are inside," he said. "The real world is the inside world. _G.o.d_ is not up, nor down, but in the _midst_."

Then he looked up at Desire.

"What is real of your life is living inside you now. That is something. Look at it and see what it is."

"Discontent. Misery. Failure."

"_Sense_ of failure. Well. Those are good things. The beginning of better. Those are _live_ things, at any rate."

Desire had never thought of that.

Now _she_ sat still awhile.

Then she said,--"But we can't _be_ much, without doing it. I suppose we are put into a world of outsides for something."

"Yes. To find out what it means. That's the inside of it. And to help make the outside agree with the in, so that it will be easier for other people to find out. That is the 'kingdom come and will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' Heaven is the inside,--the truth of things."

"Why, I never knew"--began Desire, astonished. She had almost finished aloud, as her mother had done in her own mind. She never knew that Uncle Oldways was "pious."

"Never knew that was what it meant? What else can it mean? What do you suppose the resurrection was, or is?"

Desire answered with a yet larger look of wonder, only in the dim light it could not be wholly seen.

"The raising up of the dead; Christ coming up out of the tomb."

"The coming out of the tomb was a small part of it; just what could not help being, if the rest was. Jesus Christ rose out of dead _things_, I take it, into these very real ones that we are talking of, and so lived in them. The resurrection is a man's soul coming alive to the soul of creation--G.o.d's soul. _That_ is eternal life, and what Jesus of Nazareth was born to show. Our coming to that is our being 'raised with Him;' and it begins, or ought to, a long way this side the tomb. If people would only read the New Testament, expecting to get as much common sense and earnest there as they do among the new lights and little 'progressive-thinkers' that are trying to find it all out over again, they might spare these gentlemen and themselves a great deal of their trouble."

The exclamation rose half-way to her lips again,--"I never knew you thought like this. I never heard you talk of these things before!"

But she held it back, because she would not stop him by reminding him that he _was_ talking. It was just the truth that was saying itself. She must let it say on, while it would.

"Un--"

She stopped there, at the first syllable. She would not even call him "Uncle t.i.tus" again, for fear of recalling him to himself, and hus.h.i.+ng him up.

"There is something--isn't there--about those who _attain_ to that resurrection; those who are _worthy_? I suppose there must be some who are just born to this world, then, and never--'born again?'"

"It looks like it, sometimes; who can tell?"

"Uncle Oldways,"--it came out this time in her earnestness, and her strong personal appeal,--"do you think there are some people--whole families of people--who have no business in the reality of things to be at all? Who are all a mistake in the world, and have nothing to do with its meaning? I have got to feeling sometimes lately, as if--_I_--had never had any business to be."

She spoke slowly--awe-fully. It was a strange speech for a girl in her nineteenth year. But she was a girl in this nineteenth century, also; and she had caught some of the thoughts and questions of it, and mixed them up with her own doubts and unsatisfactions which they could not answer.

"The world is full of mistakes; mistakes centuries long; but it is full of salvation and setting to rights, also. 'The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.' You have been _allowed_ to be, Desire Ledwith. And so was the man that was born blind. And I think there is a colon put into the sentence about him, where a comma was meant to be."

Desire did not ask him, then, what he meant; but she turned to the story after he had gone, and found this:--

"Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of G.o.d should be manifest in him."

You can see, if you look also, where she took the colon out, and put the comma in.

Were all the mistakes--the sins, even--for the very sake of the pure blessedness and the more perfect knowledge of the setting right?

Desire began to think that Uncle Oldways' theology might help her.

What she said to him now was,--

"I want to do something. I should like to go and live with Luclarion, I think, down there in Neighbor Street. I should like to take hold of some other lives,--little children's, perhaps,"--and here Desire's voice softened,--"that don't seem to have any business to be, either, and see if I could help or straighten anything. Then I feel is if I should know."

"Then--according to the Scripture--you _would_ know. But--that's undertaking a good deal. Luclarion Grapp has got there; but she has been fifty-odd years upon the road. And she has been doing real things all the time. That's what has brought her there. You can't boss the world's hard jobs till you've been a journeyman at the easy ones."

"And I've missed my apprentices.h.i.+p!" said Desire, with changed voice and face, falling back into her disheartenment again.

"No!" Uncle Oldways almost shouted. "Not if you come to the Master who takes in the eleventh hour workers. And it isn't the eleventh hour with you,--_child_!"

He dwelt on that word "child," reminding her of her short mistaking and of the long retrieval. Her nineteen years and the forever and ever contrasted themselves before her suddenly, in the light of hope.

She turned sharply, though, to look at her duty. Her journeyman's duty of easy things.

"Must I go to Europe with my mother?" she asked again, the conversation coming round to just that with which it had begun.

"I'll talk with your mother," said Uncle Oldways, getting up and looking into his hat, as a man always does when he thinks of putting it on presently. "Good-night. I suppose you are tired enough now.

I'll come again and see you."

Desire stood up and gave him her hand.

"I thank you, Uncle t.i.tus, with all my heart."

He did not answer her a word; but he knew she meant it.

He did not stop that night to see his niece. He went home, to think it over. But as he walked down Borden Street, swinging his big stick, he said to himself,--

"Next of kin! Old Marmaduke Wharne was right. But it takes more than the Family Bible to tell you which it is!"

Two days after, he had a talk with Mrs. Ledwith which relieved both their minds.

From the brown-and-apricot drawing-room,--from among the things that stood for nothing now, and had never stood for home,--he went straight up, without asking, and knocked at Desire's third-story door.

"Come in!" she said, without a note of expectation in her voice.

She had had a dull morning. Helena had brought her a novel from Loring's that she could not read. Novels, any more than life, cannot be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides surface. Why do critics--some of them--make such short, smart work,--such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,--a thing with sentence of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,--that needs not their trouble, save to name it as it is? Why, that is, if religion stand for the relation of things to spirit, which I suppose it should? Somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of "spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." That was bright and funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth made up of? And are novels to be pictures of human experience, or not?

This has nothing to do with present matters, however, except that Desire found nothing real in her novel, and so had flung it aside, and was sitting rather listlessly with her crochet which she never cared much for, when Uncle Oldways entered.

Her face brightened instantly as he came in. He sat down just where he had sat the other night. Mr. Oldways had a fas.h.i.+on of finding the same seat a second time when he had come in once; he was a man who took up most things where he left them off, and this was an unconscious sign of it.