Faith Gartney's girlhood

Front matter

REFERENCE LIBRARY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

2 Park Street, Boston

NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM THE SHELYV ES” EXCEPT BY PERMISSION OF THE LIBRARIAN d |

Preface To First Edition

I BEGAN this story for young girls. It has grown, as they grow, to womanhood. It makes no artistic pretension. It is a simple record of something of the thought and life that lies between fourteen and twenty.

I dedicate it, as it is, to these young girls, who dream, and wish, and strive, and err; and find, perhaps, little help to interpret their own spirits to them- _ selves. I believe and hope that there is nothing in it which shall hinder them in what is noblest and truest.

May there be something that shall lift them — though by ever so little — up!

A. D. T. W.

Preface To Edition Of 1893

Tuirty years ago I wrote the foregoing little pre-

face. _ Faith Gartney — “if she be anywhere upon the earth ” — must now be fifty years old. And yet she has been young all the time. Here, between the covers of the volume that tells her early story, she has been a girl among girls ever since. And the mothers write me now, that they “grew up on Faith Gartney, and that their daughters have done so after them.” I am happy that I helped them to the companionship ; and I receive thankfully as answer to my first wish in the work, the possible large interpretation of the word, — they have “grown wp.”

The best thing of all is to find that there are so many Faith Gartneys in the world, of whom I only drew the imagination of one; for it is like, always, that welcomes like; and only a true, sweet girlhood eould ever have cared for this. So I send the simple narrative forth again, with its flavor of an older time, trusting that the grand-daughters may find in it, even with the different touch of circumstance that has passed by, the same blessed secret of life that is in all circumstance, for those who will take Faith’s oracle and carry it forward into their own purpose and doing.

Contents

A “Leaping” , “ 4 4 ;

° Pav ° ° e e s e e °

PRESSURE ‘ . > “ < e

Chapter I. “money, Money! ”

“ Shoe the horse, and shoe the mare, And let the little colt go bare.”

East or West, it matters not where, — the story may, doubtless, indicate something of latitude and longitude as it proceeds, —in the city of Mishaumok, lived Henderson Gartney, Esq., one of those American gentlemen of whom, if she were ever canonized, Martha of Bethany must be the patron saint, —if again, feminine celestials, sainthood once achieved through the weary experience of earth, don’t know better than to assume such charge of wayward men, — born, as they are, seemingly, to the life-destiny of being ever “careful and troubled about many things.”

We have all of us, as little girls, read “ Rosamond.” Now, one of Rosamond’s early worries suggests a key to half the worries, early and late, of grown men and women. The silver paper won’t cover the basket.

Mr. Gartney had spent his years, from twenty-five to forty, in sedulously tugging at the corners. He had had his share of silver paper, too, — only the basket was a little too big.

In a pleasant apartment, half library, half pilGr, and used in the winter months as a breakfast room, beside a table still covered with the remnants of the morning meal, sat Mrs. Gartney and her young daughter, Faith; the latter with a somewhat disconcerted, not to say rueful, expression of face. _

A pair of slippers on the hearth and the morning paper thrown down beside an armchair, gave hint of the recent presence of the master of the house.

“Then I suppose I can’t go,” remarked the young lady.

x I’m sure I don’t know,” answered the elder, in a helpless, worried sort of tone. “It doesn’t seem really right to ask your father for the money. I did just speak of your wanting some things for a party, but I suppose he has forgotten it; and, to-day, I hate to trouble him with reminding. Must you really have new gloves and slippers, both? ”

Faith held up her little foot for answer, shod with a partly worn bronze kid, reduced to morning service.

“These are the best I’ve got. And my gloves have been cleaned over and over, till you said yourself, last time, they would hardly do to wear again. If it were any use, I should say I must have a new dress; but I thought at least I should freshen up with the ‘little fixings,’ and perhaps have something left for a few natural flowers for my hair.”

“IT know. But your father looked annoyed when I told him we should want fresh marketing to-day. He is really pinched, just now, for ready money, — and he is so discouraged about the times. He told me only last night of a man who owed him five hundred dollars, and came to say he did n’t know as he could pay acent. It doesn’t seem to be a time to afford gloves and shoes and flowers. And then there ’ll be the carriage, too.”

“Oh dear!” sighed Faith, in the tone of one who felt herself checkmated. “I wish I knew what we really could afford! It always seems to be these little things that don’t cost much, and that other girls, whose

“MONEY, MONEY!” 3 fathers are not nearly so well off, always have without thinking anything about it.” And she glanced over the table whereon shone a silver coffee-service, and up at the mantel where stood a French clock that had been placed there a month before.

“Pull at the bobbin and the latch will fly up.” An unspoken suggestion, of drift akin to this, flitted through the mind of Faith. She wondered if her father knew that this was a Signal Street invitation.

Mr. Gartney was ambitious for his children, and solicitous for their place in society.

But Faith had a touch of high-rhindedness about her that made it impossible for her to pull bobbins.

So when her father presently, with hat and coat on, came into the room again for a moment before going out for the day, she sat quite silent, with her foot upon the fender, looking into the fire.

Something in her face, however, quite unconsciously, bespoke that the world did not lie entirely straight before her, and this, catching her father’s eye, brought up to him, by an untraceable association, the half proffered request of his wife.

“So you have n’t any shoes, Faithie. Is that it? ”

“None nice enough for a party, father.”

“And the party is a vital necessity, I suppose. Where is it to be? ”

The latch-string was put forth, and while Faith still stayed her hand, her mother, absolved from selfish end, was fain to catch it up.

_“At the Rushleighs’. The Old Year out and the New Year in.”

“Oh, well, we mustn’t ‘let the colt go bare,’ ” answered Mr. Gartney pleasantly, portmonnaie in hand. “But you must make that do.” He handed her five dollars. “And take good care of your things when you have got them, for I don’t pick up many five dollars nowadays.”

And the old look of care crept up, replacing the kindly smile, as he turned and left the room.

“T feel very much as if I had picked my father’s pocket,” said Faith, holding the bank- note, half ashamedly, in her hand.

Henderson Gartney, Esquire, was a man of no method in his expenditure. When money chanced to be plénty with him, it was very apt to go as might happen, — for French clocks, or whatsoever; and then, suddenly, the silver paper fell short elsewhere, and lo! a corner was left uncovered.

The horse and the mare were shod. Great expenses were incurred; money was found, somehow, for grand outlays; but the comfort of buying, with a readiness, the little needed matters of every day, — this was foregone. “Not let the colt go bare!” It was precisely the thing he was continually doing.

Mrs. Gartney had long found it to be her only wise way to make her hay while the sun was shining, — to buy, when she could buy, what she was sure would be most wanted, — and to look forward as far as possible, in her provisions, since her husband scarcely seemed to look forward at all.

So she exemplified, over and over again in her life, the story of Pharaoh and his fat and lean kine.

That night, Faith, her little purchases and arrangements all complete, and flowers and carriage bespoken for the next evening, went to bed to dream such dreams as only come to the sleep of early years.

At the same time, lingering by the fireside below for a half hour’s unreserved conversation, Mr. Gartney was telling his wife of another money disappointment.

“Blacklow, at Cross Corners, gives up the lease of the house in the spring. He writes me he is going out to Indiana with his son-in-law. I don’t know where I shall find another such tenant, — or any at all, for that matter.”

Chapter II. Sortes

“ How shall I know if I do choose the right ?”

“Since this fortune falls to you, Be content, and seek no new.”

Merchant of Venice.

“Now, Mahala Harris,” said Faith, as she glanced in at the nursery door, which opened from her room, “don’t let Hendie get up a French Revolution here while [’m gone to dinner.”

“Land sakes, Miss Faith! I don’t know what you mean, nor whether I can help it. I dare say he’d get up a Revolution of ’76, over again, if he once set out. He does train like lection, fact, sometimes.”

“Well, don’t let him build barricades with all the chairs, so that I shall have to demolish my way back again. I’m going to lay out my dress for to-night.”

And very little dinner could her young appetite manage on this last day of the year. All her vital energy was busy in her anticipative brain, and glancing thence in sparkles from her eyes, and quivering down in swift currents to her restless little feet. It mattered little that there was delicious roast beef smoking on the table, and Christmas pies were arrayed upon the sideboard, while upstairs the bright ribbon and tiny, shining, old-fashioned buckles were waiting to be shaped into rosettes for the new slippers, and the lace hung, half basted, from the neck of the simple but delicate silk dress, and those lovely greenhouse flowers stood in a glass dish on her dressing-table, to be sorted for her hair and into a graceful breast-knot.

No, — dinner was a very secondary and contemptible affair, compared with these. |

Ah, if people could only hold out to live, all the rest of their days, on perfume and beauty and grace and dreamy delights, — that seem, in the charmed vision of youth, the essential verities of life, — how the worry and care of breakfasts and dinners and butchers’ and grocers’ bills and the trouble of servants should be gloriously done away with! To-night Faith’s eyes shine, and her cheek glows with the mere joy of life and loveliness; but to-morrow she will be hungry like any other mortal, and there must be chickens, or beefsteak, or even coarser mutton or pork, to feed the very roses that flush and crown her girlish beauty. We don’t live straight from the spirit impulse yet!

There were few forms or faces, truly, that were pleasanter to look upon in the group that stood, disrobed of their careful outer wrappings, in Mrs. Rushleigh’s dressing-room; their hurried chat and gladsome greetings distracted with the drawing on of gloves and the last adjustment of shining locks, while the bewildering music was floating up from below, mingled with the hum of voices from the rooms where, as children say, “the party had begun” already.

And Mrs. Rushleigh, when Faith paid her timid respects in the drawing-room at last, made her welcome with a peculiar grace and empressement that had their own flattering weight and charm; for the lady was a sort of St. Peter of fashion, holding its mystic keys, and admitting or rejecting whom she would; and culled, with marvelous tact and taste, the flower of the upgrowing world of Mishaumok to adorn “ her set.”

After which, Faith, claimed at once by an eager aspirant, and beset with many a following introduction

SORTES. 7 and petition, was drawn to and kept in the joyous whirlpool of the dance, till she had breathed in enough of delight and excitement to carry her quite beyond the thought even of ices and oysters and jellies and fruits, and the score of unnamable luxuries to which the young revelers were duly summoned at half past ten o’clock.

Four days’ anticipation — four hours’ realization — culminated in the glorious after-supper midnight dance, when, marshaled hither and thither by the ingenious orders of the band, the jubilant company found itself, just on the impending stroke of twelve, drawn out around the room in one great circle; and suddenly a hush of the music, at the very poising instant of time, left them motionless for a moment to burst out again in the age-honored and heart-warming strains of “Auld Lang Syne.” Hand joining hand they sang its chorus, and when the last note had lingeringly died away, one after another they gently broke from their places and the momentary figure melted out with the dying of the Year, never again to be just so combined. It was gone, as vanishes also every other phase and grouping in the kaleidoscope of Time.

“Now is the very ‘witching hour’ to try the Sortes! ” :

- Margaret Rushleigh said this, standing on the threshold of a little inner apartment that opened from the long drawing-room, at one end; and speaking to those nearest her in the scattered groups that had hardly ceased bandying back and forth their tumultuous “Happy New Years.”

She held in her hand a large and beautiful volume, —a gift of Christmas day.

“Here are fates for everybody who cares to find them out!”

The book was a collection of poetical quotations, arranged by numbers, and to be chosen thereby, and the chance application taken as an oracle.

Everything like fortune-telling, or a possible peering into the things of coming time, has such a charm! Especially with those to whom the past is but a prelude and beginning, and for whom the great, voluminous future holds enwrapped the whole mystic story of life!

“No, no, this won’t do!” cried the young lady, as circle behind circle closed and crowded eagerly about her. ‘Fate doesn’t-give out her revelations in such wholesale fashion. You must come up with proper reverence, one by one.”

As she spoke, she withdrew a little within the curtained archway, and, plaeing the crimson-covered book of destiny upon an inlaid table, brought forward a piano-stool, and seated herself thereon, as a priestess upon a tripod.

A little shyly, one after another, gaining knowledge of what was going on, the company strayed in from without, and, each in turn hazarding a number, received in answer the rhyme or stanza indicated; and who shall say how long those chance-direeted words, chosen for the most part with the elastic ambiguity of all oracles of any established authority, lingered echoing in the heads and hearts of them to whom they were given, —shaping and confirming, or darkening with their denial many an after hope and fear?

One only, of them all, has an interest for us that needs a record.

Faith Gartney came up among the very last.

“How many numbers are there to choose from? ” she asked.

“Three hundred and sixty-five. The number of days in the year.”

“Well, then, I’ll take the number of the day; the last, — no, I forgot, — the first of all.”

SORTES. 9

Nobody before had chosen this, and Margaret read, in a clear, gentle voice, not untouched with the grave beauty of its own words, and the sweet, earnest, listening look of the young face that bent toward her to take them in, —

“ Rouse to some high and holy work of love, And thou an angel’s happiness shalt know ; Shalt bless the earth while in the world above ;

The good begun by thee while here below Shall like a river run, and broader flow.”

Ten minutes later, and all else were absorbed in other things again, —leave-takings, parting chat, and a few waltzing a last measure to a specially accorded grace of music. Faith stood, thoughtfully, by the table where the book was closed and left. She quietly reopened it at that first page. Unconscious of a step behind her, her eyes ran over the lines again, to make their beautiful words her own.

“And that was your oracle, then?” asked a kindly voice.

Glancing quickly up, while the timid color flushed her cheek, she met a look as of a wise and watchful angel, though it came through the eye and smile of a gray-haired man, who laid his hand upon the page as he said, — |

“Remember, — it is conditional.”

Chapter III. Aunt Henderson

“T never met a manner more entirely without frill.” SypNEY SMITH.

LATE into the morning of the New Year Faith slept. Through her half consciousness crept, at last, a feeling of music that had been wandering in faint echoes among the chambers of her brain all those hours of her suspended life, and were the first sensations to stir there when that mysterious life flashed back along its channels, and brought a light more subtle than the mere sunshine that through the easterly windows was flooding all her room with its silent arousal.

Light, and music, and a sense of an unexamined, half-remembered joy, filled her being and embraced her at her waking on this New Year’s Day. A moment she lay in a passive, unthinking delight; and then her first full and distinct thought shaped itself, as from a sweet and solemn memory, —

“Rouse to some high and holy work of love, And thou an angel’s happiness shalt know.”

An impulse of lofty feeling held her in its ecstasy; a noble longing and determination shaped itself, though vaguely, within her. For a little, she was touched in her deepest and truest nature; she was uplifted to the threshold of a great resolve. But generalities are so grand, — details so commonplace and unsatisfying. What should she do? What “high and holy work” lay waiting for her?

And, breaking in upon her reverie, — bringing her

AUNT HENDERSON, 11 down with its rough and common call to common duty, —the second bell for breakfast rang.

“Oh, dear! It is no use! Who’ll know what great things I ’ve been wishing and planning, when I’ve nothing to show for it but just being late to breakfast? And father hates it so, —and New Year’s morning, too! ”

Hurrying her toilet, she repaired, with all the haste possible, to the breakfast-room, where her consciousness of shortcoming was in nowise lessened when she saw who occupied the seat at her father’s right hand, — Aunt Henderson!

Aunt Faith Henderson, who had reached her nephew’s house last evening just after the young Faith, her namesake, had gone joyously off to “dance the Old Year out and the New Year in.” Old-fashioned Aunt Faith, who believed most devoutly that “early to bed and early to rise” was the only way to be “healthy, wealthy, or wise”! Aunt Faith, who had never quite forgiven our young heroine for having said, at the disereet and positive age of nine, that “she didn’t see what her father and mother had called her such an ugly name for. It was a real old-maid’s name!” Whereupon, having asked the child what she would have preferred as a substitute, and being answered, “Well, — Clotilda, I guess; or Cleopatra,” — Miss Henderson had told her that she was quite welcome to change it for any heathen woman’s that she pleased, and the worst behaved perhaps the better. She would n’t be so likely to do it any discredit!

Aunt Henderson had a downright and rather extreme fashion of putting things; nevertheless, in her heart she was not unkindly.

So when Faithie, with her fair, fresh face, —a little apprehensive trouble in it for her tardiness, — tame in, there was a grim bending of the old lady’s brows; but, below, a half-belying twinkle in the eye, that, long as it had looked out sharply and keenly on the things and people of this mixed-up world, found yet a pleasure in anything so young and bright.

“Why, auntie! How do you do?” cried Faith, cunning culprit that she was, taking the “bull by the horns,” and holding out her hand. “I wish you a Happy New Year! Good-morning, father and mother, —a Happy New Year! I’m sorry I’m so late.”

“Wish you a great many,” responded the greataunt, in stereotyped phrase. “It seems to me, though, you ’ve lost the beginning of this one.”

“Oh, no!” replied Faithie gayly. “I had that at the party. We danced the New Year in.”

“Humph! ” said Aunt Henderson.

Breakfast over, and Mr. Gartney gone to his counting-room, the parlor-girl made her appearance with her mop and tub of hot water, to wash up the silver and china.

“Give me that,” said Aunt Henderson, taking a large towel from the girl’s arm as she set down her tub upon the sideboard. “You go and find something else to do.”

Wherever she might be, —to be sure, her round of visiting was not a large one, — Aunt Henderson never let any one else wash up breakfast-cups.

This quiet arming of herself with mop and towel stirred up everybody else to duty. Her niece-in-law laughed, withdrew her feet from the comfortable fender, and departed to the kitchen to give her household orders for the day. Faith removed cups, glasses, forks, and spoons from the table to the sideboard, while the maid, returning with a tray, carried off to the lower regions the larger dishes and the remnants of the meal.

bd

AUNT HENDERSON. 13

“{ haven’t told you yet, Elizabeth, what I came to town for,” said Aunt Faith, when Mrs. Gartney came back into the breakfast-room. “I’m going to hunt up a girl.”

“A girl, Aunt! Why, what has become of Prudence? ”

“Mrs. Pelatiah Trowe. That’s what’s become of her. More fool she.”

“But why in the world do you come to the city for a servant? It’s the worst possible place. Nineteen out of twenty are utterly good-for-nothing.”

“I’m going to look out for the twentieth.”

“But aren’t there girls enough in Kinnicutt who would be glad to step into Prue’s place? ”

“Of course there are, —plenty. But they ’re all well enough off where they are. When I have a chance to give away, I want to give it to somebody that needs it.” .

“I’m afraid you’ll hardly find any efficient girl who will appreciate the chance of going twenty miles into the country.”

“I don’t want an efficient girl. I’m efficient myself, and that ’s enough.”

“Going to train another, at your time of life, Aunt?” asked Mrs. Gartney, in surprise.

“TI suppose 1 must either train a girl, or let her train me; and,.at my time of life, I don’t feel to stand in need of that.”

“How shall I go to work to inquire? ” resumed Aunt Henderson, after a pause.

“Well, there are the Homes, and the Offices, and the Ministers at Large. At a Home, they would probably recommend you somebody they ’ve made up their minds to put out to service, and she might or might not be such a one as would suit you. Then at the Offices, you ’1l see all sorts, and mostly poor ones.”

“T ll try an Office, first,” interrupted Miss Hen. derson. “I want to see all sorts. Faith, you’ll go with me, by and by, won’t you, and help me find the way?”

Faith, seated at a little writing-table at the farther end of the room, busied in copying into her album, in a clear, neat, but rather stiff schoolgirl’s hand, the oracle of the night before, did not at once notice that she was addressed.

“Faith, child! don’t you hear? ”

“Oh, yes, Aunt. What is it?”

“T want you to go to a what-d’ye-call-it office with me, to-day.”

““An intelligence office,” explained her mother. “Aunt Faith wants to find a girl.”

“« Tucus a non lucendo,’” quoted Faith rather wittily, from her little stock of Latin. “Stupidity offices, Z should call them, from the specimens they send out.”

“Hold your tongue, chit! Don’t talk Latin to me!” growled Aunt Henderson.

“What are you writing?” she asked, shortly after, when Mrs. Gartney had again left her and Faith to each other. “Letters, or Latin? ”

Faith colored, and laughed.

“Only a fortune that was told me last night,” she repled.

"Oh! ‘A little husband,’ I suppose, ‘no bigger than my thumb; put him in a pint pot, and there bid him drum.’ ”

“No,” said Faith, half seriously, and half teased out of her seriousness. “It’s nothing of that sort. At least,” she added, glancing over the lines again, “T don’t think it means anything like that.”

And Faith laid down the book, and went upstairs for a word with her mother.

Oe

AUNT HENDERSON. 15

Aunt Henderson, who had been brought up in times when all the doings of young girls were strictly supervised, and who had no high-flown scruples, because she had no mean motives, deliberately walked over and fetched the elegant little volume from the table, reseated herself in her armchair, — felt for her glasses, and set them carefully upon her nose, — and, as her grand-niece returned, was just finishing her perusal of the freshly-inscribed lines.

“Humph! A good fortune. Only you’ve got to earn it.”

“Yes,” said Faith quite gravely. “And I don‘t see how. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much that I can do.”

“Just take hold of the first thing that comes in your way. If the Lord’s got anything bigger to give you, He ’ll see to it. There ’s your mother’s mendingbasket brimful of stockings.”

Faith couldn’t help laughing. Presently she grew grave again.

“Aunt Henderson,” said she abruptly, “I wisk something would happen to me. I get tired of living, sometimes. Things don’t seem worth while.”

Aunt Henderson bent her head slightly, and opened her eyes wide over the tops of her glasses.

“Don’t say that again,” said she. ‘Things happen fast enough. Don’t you dare to tempt Providence.”

‘Providence won’t be tempted, nor misunderstand, ” replied Faith, an undertone of reverence qualifying her girlish repartee. “He knows just what I mean.”

“She ’s a queer child,” said Aunt Faith to herself, afterward, thinking over the brief conversation. “She ’ll be something or nothing, I always said. I used to think ’t would be nothing.”

Chapter IV. Glory M°whirk

There ’s beauty waiting to be born, And harmony that makes no sound ; And bear we ever, unawares, A glory that hath not been crowned.

SHA I try to give you a glimpse of quite another young life than Faith Gartney’s? One looking also vaguely, wonderingly, for “something to happen,” — that indefinite “something ” which lies in everybody’s future, which may never arrive, and yet which any ‘hour may bring?

Very little likelihood there has ever seemed for any great joy to get into such a life as this has been, that began, or at least has its earliest memory and association, in the old poorhouse at Stonebury.

A child she was, of five years, when she was taken in there with her old crippled grandmother.

Peter MeWhirk was picked up dead from the grayeled drive of a gentleman’s place, where he had been trimming the high trees that shaded it. An unsound limb, —a heedless movement,—and Peter went straight down, thirty feet, and out of life. Out of life, where he had a trim, comfortable young wife, — one happy little child, for whom skies were as blue, and grass as green, and buttercups as golden as for the little heiress of Elm Hill, who was riding over the lawn in her basket-wagon, when Peter met his death there, — the hope, also, of another that was to come.

Rosa. Mec Whirk and her baby of a day old were buried the week after, together; and then there was nothing left for Glory and her helpless grandmother but the

GLORY MCWHIRK. 17 poorhouse as a present refuge; and to the one death, that ends all, and to the other a life of rough and unremitting work to look to for by and by.

When Glory came into this world where wants begin with the first breath, and go on thickening around us, and pressing upon us until the last one is supplied to us, —a grave, —she wanted, first of all, a name.

“Sure what ’ll I call the baby?” said the proud young mother to the ladies from the white corner house, where she had served four faithful years of her maidenhood, and who came down at once with comforts and congratulations. “They’ve sint for the praist, an’ I’ve niver bethought of a name. I made so certain ’t would be a boy! ”

“What a funny bit of a thing it is!” cried the younger of the two visitors, turning back the _bedclothes a little from the tiny, red, puckered face, with short, sandy-colored hair standing up about the temples like a fuzz-ball.