"Well, Harry," said Eva, when they were seated at dinner, "Alice was up at lunch with me this morning, in such a state! It seems, after all, Aunt Maria could not contain her zeal for management, and has been having an admonitory talk with Jim Fellows about his intimacy with Alice."
"Now, I declare that goes beyond me," said Harry, laying down his knife and fork. "That woman's impertinence is really stupendous. It amounts to the sublime."
"Doesn't it? Alice was in such a state about it; but we talked the matter down into calmness. Still, Harry, I'm pretty certain that Alice is more seriously interested in Jim than she knows of. Of course she thinks it's all friendship, but she is so sensitive about him, and if you make even the shadow of a criticism she flames up and defends him. You ought to see."
"Grave symptoms," said Harry.
"But as she says she is not thinking nor wanting to think of marriage—"
"Any more than a certain other young lady was, with whom I cultivated a friendship some time ago," said Harry, laughing.
"Just so," said Eva; "I plume myself on my forbearance in listening gravely to Alice and not putting in any remarks; but I remembered old times and had my suspicions. We thought it was friendship, didn't we, Harry? And I used to be downright angry if anybody suggested anything else. Now I think Allie's friendship for Jim is getting to be of the same kind. Oh, she knows him so well! and she understands him so perfectly! and she has so much influence over him! and they have such perfect comprehension of each other! and as to his faults, oh, she understands all about them! But, mind you, nobody must criticise him but herself—that's quite evident. I did make a blundering remark or so; but I found it wasn't at all the thing, and I had to beat a rapid retreat, I assure you."
"Well, poor girl! I hope you managed to console her."
"Oh, I was sympathetic and indignant, and after she had poured out her griefs she felt better; and then I put in a soothing word for Aunt Maria, poor woman, who is only monomaniac on managing our affairs."
"Yes," said Harry, "forgiveness of enemies used to be the ultima thule of virtue; but I rather think it will have to be forgiveness of friends. I call the man a perfect Christian that can always forgive his friends."
"The fact is, Aunt Maria ought to have had a great family of her own—twelve or thirteen, to say the least. If Providence had vouchsafed her eight or nine ramping, roaring boys, and a sprinkling of girls, she would have been a splendid woman and we should have had better times."
"She puts me in mind of the story of the persistent broomstick that would fetch water," said Harry; "we are likely to be drowned out by her."
"Well, we can accept her for a whetstone to sharpen up our Christian graces on," said Eva. "So, let her go. I was talking over our projected evening with Alice, and we spent some time discussing that."
"When are you going to begin?" said Henry. "'Well begun is half done,' you know."
Said Eva, "I've been thinking over what day is best, and talking about it with Mary. Now, we can't have it Monday, there's the washing, you know; and Tuesday and Wednesday come baking and ironing."
"Well, then, what happens Thursday?"
"Well, then, it's precisely Thursday that Mary and I agreed on. We both made up our minds that it was the right day. One wouldn't want it on Friday, you know, and Saturday is too late; besides, Mr. St. John never goes out Saturday evenings."
"But what's the objection to Friday?"
"Oh, the unlucky day. Mary wouldn't hear of beginning anything on Friday, you know. Then, besides, Mr. St. John, I suspect, fasts every Friday. He never told me so, of course, but they say he does; at all events, I'm sure he wouldn't come of a Friday evening, and I want to be sure and have him, of all people. Now, you see, I've planned it all beautifully. I'm going to have a nice, pretty little tea-table in one corner, with a vase of flowers on it, and I shall sit and make tea. That breaks the stiffness, you know. People talk first about the tea and the china, and whether they take cream and sugar, and so on, and the gentlemen help the ladies. Then Mary will make those delicate little biscuits of hers and her charming sponge-cake. It's going to be perfectly quiet, you see—from half-past seven till eleven—early hours and simple fare, 'feast of reason and flow of soul.'"
"Quite pastoral and Arcadian," said Harry. "When we get it going it will be the ideal of social life. No fuss, no noise; all the quiet of home life with all the variety of company; people seeing each other till they get really intimate and have a genuine interest in meeting each other; not a mere outside, wild beast show, as it is when people go to parties to gaze at other people and see how they look in war-paint."
"I feel a little nervous at first," said Eva; "getting people together that are so diametrically opposed to each other as Dr. Campbell and Mr. St. John, for instance. I'm afraid Dr. Campbell will come out with some of his terribly free speaking, and then Mr. St. John will be so shocked and distressed."
"Then Mr. St. John must get over being shocked and distressed. Mr. St. John needs Dr. Campbell," said Harry. "He is precisely the man he ought to meet, and Dr. Campbell needs Mr. St. John. The two men are intended to help each other: each has what the other wants, and they ought to be intimate."
"But you see, Dr. Campbell is such a dreadful unbeliever!"
"In a certain way he is no more an unbeliever than Mr. St. John. Dr. Campbell is utterly ignorant of the higher facts of moral consciousness—of prayer and communion with God—and therefore he doesn't believe in them. St. John is equally ignorant of some of the most important facts of the body he inhabits. He does not believe in them—ignores them."
"Oh, but now, Harry, I didn't think that of you—that you could put the truths of the body on a level with the truths of the soul."
"Bless you, darling, since the Maker has been pleased to make the soul so dependent on the body, how can I help it? Why, just see here; come to this very problem of saving a soul, which is a minister's work. I insist there are cases where Dr. Campbell can do more towards it than Mr. St. John. He was quoting to me only yesterday a passage from Dr. Wigan, where he says, 'I firmly believe I have more than once changed the moral character of a boy by leeches applied to the inside of his nose.'"
"Why, Harry, that sounds almost shocking."
"Yet it's a fact—a physiological fact—that some of the worst vices come through a disordered body, and can be cured only by curing the body. So long as we are in this mortal state, our souls have got to be saved in our bodies and by the laws of our bodies; and a doctor who understands them will do more than a minister who doesn't. Why, just look at poor Bolton. The trouble that he dreads, the fear that blasts his life, that makes him afraid to marry, is a disease of the body. Fasting, prayer, sacraments, couldn't keep off an acute attack of dipsomania; but a doctor might."
"Oh, Harry, do you think so? Well, I must say I do think Mr. St. John is as ignorant as a child about such matters, if I may judge from the way he goes on about his own health. He ignores his body entirely, and seems determined to work as if he were a spirit and could live on prayer and fasting."
"Which, as he isn't a spirit, won't do," said Harry. "It may end in making a spirit of him before the time."
"But don't you think the disinterestedness he shows is perfectly heroic?" said Eva.
"Oh, certainly!" said Harry. "The fact is, I should despair of St. John if he hadn't set himself at mission work. He is naturally so ideal, and so fastidious, and so fond of rules, and limits, and order, that if he hadn't this practical common-sense problem of working among the poor on his hands, I should think he wouldn't be good for much. But drunken men and sorrowful wives, ragged children, sickness, pain, poverty, teach a man the common-sense of religion faster than anything else, and I can see St. John is learning sense for everybody but himself. If he only don't run his own body down, he'll make something yet."
"I think, Harry," said Eva, "he is a little doubtful of whether you really go with him or not. I don't think he knows how much you like him."
"Go with him! of course I do. I stand up for St. John and defend him. So long as a man is giving his whole life to hard work among the poor and neglected he may burn forty candles, if he wants to, for all I care. He may turn to any point of the compass he likes, east, west, north, or south, and wear all the colors of the rainbow if it suits him, and I won't complain. In fact, I like processions, and chantings, and ceremonies, if you don't get too many of them. I think, generally speaking, there's too little of that sort of thing in our American life. In the main, St. John preaches good sermons; that is, good, manly, honest talks to people about what they need to know. But then his mind is tending to a monomania of veneration. You see he has a mystical, poetic element in it that may lead him back into the old idolatries of past ages, and lead weak minds there after him; that's why I want to get him acquainted with such fellows as Campbell. He needs to learn the common sense of life. I think he is capable of it, and one of the first things he has got to learn is not to be shocked at hearing things said from other people's points of view. If these two men could only like each other, so as to listen tolerantly and dispassionately to what each has to say, they might be everything to each other."
"Well, how to get a mordant to unite these two opposing colors," said Eva.
"That's what you women are for—at least such women as you. It's your mission to interpret differing natures—to bind, and blend, and unite."
"But how shall we get them to like each other?" said Eva. "Both are so very intense and so opposite. I suppose Dr. Campbell would consider most of Mr. St. John's ideas stuff and nonsense; and I know, as well as I know anything, that if Mr. St. John should hear Dr. Campbell talking as he talks to you, he would shut up like a flower—he would retire into himself and not come here any more."
"Oh, Eva, that's making the man too ridiculous and unmanly. Good gracious! Can't a man who thinks he has God's truth—and such truth!—listen to opposing views without going into fits? It's like a soldier who cannot face guns and wants to stay inside of a clean, nice fort, making pretty stacks of bayonets and piling cannon balls in lovely little triangles."
"Well, Harry, I know Mr. St. John isn't like that. I don't think he's cowardly or unmanly, but he is very reverent, and, Harry, you are very free. You do let Dr. Campbell go on so, over everything. It quite shocks me."
"Just because my faith is so strong that I can afford it. I can see when he is mistaken; but he is a genuine, active, benevolent man, following truth when he sees it, and getting a good deal of it, and most important truth, too. We've got to get truth as we can in this world, just as miners dig gold out of the mine with all the quartz, and dirt, and dross; but it pays."
"Well, now, I shall try my skill, and do my best to dispose these two refractory chemicals to a union," said Eva. "I'll tell you how let's do. I'll interest Dr. Campbell in Mr. St. John's health. I'll ask him to study him and see if he can't take care of him. I'm sure he needs taking care of."
"And," said Harry, "why not interest Mr. St. John in Dr. Campbell's soul? Why shouldn't he try to convert him from the error of his ways?"
"That would be capital," said Eva. "Let each convert the other. If we could put Dr. Campbell and Mr. St. John together, what a splendid man we could make of them!"
"Try your best, my dear; but meanwhile I have three or four hours' writing to do this evening."
"Well, then, settle yourself down, and I will run over and expound my plans to the good old ladies over the way. I am getting up quite an intimacy over there; Miss Dorcas is really vastly entertaining. It's like living in a past age to hear her talk."
"You really have established a fashion of rushing in upon them at all sorts of hours," said Harry.
"Yes, but they like it. You have no idea what nice things they say to me. Even old Dinah quivers and giggles with delight the minute she sees me—poor old soul! You see they're shut up all alone in that musty old house, like enchanted princesses, and gone to sleep there; and I am the predestined fairy to wake them up!"
Eva said this as she was winding a cloud of fleecy worsted around her head, and Harry was settling himself at his writing-table in a little alcove curtained off from the parlor.
"Don't keep the old ladies up too late," said Harry.
"Never you fear," said Eva. "Perhaps I shall stay to see Jack's feet washed and blanket spread. Those are solemn and impressive ceremonies that I have heard described, but never witnessed."
It was a bright, keen, frosty, starlight evening, and when Eva had rung the door-bell on the opposite side, she turned and looked at the play of shadow and firelight on her own window-curtains.
Suddenly she noticed a dark form of a woman coming from an alley back of the house, and standing irresolute, looking at the windows. Then she drew near the house, and seemed trying to read the name on the door-plate.
There was something that piqued Eva's curiosity about these movements, and just as the door was opening behind her into the Vanderheyden house, the strange woman turned away, and as she turned, the light of the street-lamp flashed strongly on her face. Its expression of haggard pain and misery was something that struck to Eva's heart, though it was but a momentary glimpse, as she turned to go into the house; for, after all, the woman was nothing to her, and the glimpse of her face was purely an accident, such as occurs to one hundreds of times in the streets of a city.
Still, like the sound of a sob or a cry from one unknown, the misery of those dark eyes struck painfully to Eva's heart; as if to her, young, beloved, gay and happy, some of the ever-present but hidden anguish of life—the great invisible mass of sorrow—had made an appeal.
But she went in and shut the door, gave one sigh and dismissed it.
A woman has two vernal seasons in her life. One is the fresh, sweet-brier, apple-blossom spring of girlhood—dewy, bird-singing, joyous and transient. The other is the spring of young marriage, before the austere labors and severe strains of real life commence.
It is the spring of wedding presents, of first housekeeping, of incipient, undeveloped matronage. If the young girl is charming, with her dawning airs of womanhood, her inexperienced naïve assumptions, her grave, ignorant wisdom, at which elders smile indulgently—so is the new-made wife with her little matronly graces, her pretty sense of responsibility in her new world of power.
In the first period, the young girl herself is the object of attention and devotion. She is the permitted center of all eyes, the leading star of her own little drama of life. But with marriage the center changes. Self begins to melt away into something higher. The girl recognizes that it is no longer her individuality that is the chief thing, but that she is the priestess and minister of a family state. The home becomes her center, and to her home passes the charm that once was thrown around her person. The pride that she may have had in self becomes a pride in her home. Her home is the new impersonation of herself; it is her throne, her empire. How often do we see the young wife more sensitive to the adornment of her house than the adornment of her person, willing even to retrench and deny in the last, that her home may become more cheerful and attractive! A pretty set of china for her tea-table goes farther with her than a gay robe for herself. She will sacrifice ribbons and laces for means to adorn the sacred recesses which have become to her an expansion of her own being.
The freshness of a new life invests every detail of the freshly arranged ménage. Her china, her bronzes, her pictures, her silver, her table cloths and napkins, her closets and pantries, all speak to her of a new sense of possession—a new and different hold on life. Once she was only a girl, moving among things that belonged to mamma and papa; now she is a matron, surrounded everywhere by things that are her own—a princess in her own little kingdom. Nor is the charm lessened that she no longer uses the possessive singular, but says our. And behind those pronouns, we and our, what pleasant security! What innocent pharisaism of self-complacency, as each congratulates the other on "our" ways, "our" plans, "our" arrangements; each, the while, sure that they two are the fortunate among mankind, and that all who are not blest as they are proper subjects for indulgent pity. "After all, my dear," says he, "what can you expect of poor Snooks?—a bachelor, poor fellow. If he only had a wife like you, now," etc., etc. Or, "I can't really blame Cynthia with that husband of hers, Harry dear. If I were married to such a man, I should act like a little fiend. If she had only such a husband as you, now!" This secret, respectable, mutual admiration society of married life, of how much courage and hope is it the parent! For, do not our failures and mistakes often come from discouragement? Does not every human being need a believing second self, whose support and approbation shall reinforce one's failing courage? The saddest hours of life are when we doubt ourselves. To sensitive, excitable people, who expend nervous energy freely, must come many such low tides. "Am I really a miserable failure—a poor, good-for-nothing, abortive attempt?" In such crises we need another self to restore our equilibrium.
Our young friends were just in the second spring of life's new year. They were as fond and proud of their little house as a prince of his palace—possibly a good deal more so. They were proud of each other. Eva felt sure that Harry was destined to the high places of the literary world. She read his editorials with sincere admiration, hid his poems away in her heart, and pasted them carefully in her scrap-book. Fame and success she felt sure ought to come to him, and would. He was "such a faithful, noble-hearted fellow, and worked so steadily." And he, with what pride he spoke the words "my wife"! With what exultation repressed under an air of playful indifference he brought this and that associate in to dine, and enjoyed the admiration of her and her pretty home, and graceful, captivating ways. He liked to see the effect of her gay, sparkling conversation, her easy grace, on these new subjects; for Eva was, in truth, a charming woman. The mixture of innocent shrewdness, of sprightly insight, of bright and airy fancy about her, made her society a thing to be longed after, as people long for a pleasant stimulant. Like all bright, earnest young men, Harry wanted to "lend a hand" to make the world around him brighter and better, and had his ideas of what a charming, attractive home might do as a center to many hearts in promoting mutual brotherhood and good fellowship. He had not a doubt of their little social venture in society, nor that Eva was precisely the person to make of their house a pleasant resort, to be in herself the blending and interpreting medium through whom differing and even discordant natures should be brought to understand the good that was in one another.
As a preparation for the first experiment, Eva had commenced by inviting Mr. St. John to dinner, that she might enlist his approbation of her scheme and have time to set it before him in that charming fireside hour, when spirits, like flowers, open to catch the dews of influence. After dinner Harry had an engagement at the printing-office, and left Eva the field all to herself; and she managed her cards admirably. Mr. St. John had been little accustomed to the society of cultured, attractive women; but he had in his own refined nature every sensibility to respond agreeably to its influences; and already this fireside had come to be a place where he loved to linger. And so, when she had him comfortably niched in his corner, she opened the first parallel of her siege.
"Now, Mr. St. John, you have been preaching to us about self-denial, and putting us all up to deeds of self-sacrifice—I have some self-denying work to propose to you."
Mr. St. John opened his blue eyes wide at this exordium, and looked an interrogation.
"Well, Mr. St. John," pursued Eva, "we are going to have little social reunions at our house every Thursday, from seven till ten, for the purpose of promoting good feeling and fellowship, and we want our rector to be one of us and help us."
"Indeed, Mrs. Henderson, I have not the least social tact. My sphere doesn't lie at all in that direction," said Mr. St. John, nervously. "I have no taste for general society."
"Yes, but I think you told us last Sunday we were not to consult our tastes. You told us that if we felt a strong distaste for any particular course, it might possibly show that just here the true path of Christian heroism lay."
"You turn my words upon me, Mrs. Henderson. I was thinking then of the distaste that people usually feel for visiting the poor and making themselves practically familiar with the unlovely side of life."
"Well, but may it not apply the other way? You are perfectly familiar and at home among the poor, but you have always avoided society among cultured persons of your own class. May not the real self-denial for you lie there? You have a fastidious shrinking from strangers. May it not be your duty to overcome it? There are a great many I know in our circle who might be the better for knowing you. Have you a right to shrink back from them?"
Mr. St. John moved uneasily in his chair.
"Now," pursued Eva, "there's a young Dr. Campbell that I want you to know. To be sure, he isn't a believer in the church—not a believer at all, I fear; but still a charming, benevolent, kindly, open-hearted man, and I want him to know you, and come under good influences."
"I don't believe I'm at all adapted," said Mr. St. John, hesitatingly.
"Well, dear sir, what do you say to us when we say the same about mission work? Don't you tell us that if we honestly try we shall learn to adapt ourselves?"
"That is true," said St. John, frankly.
"Besides," said Eva, "Mr. St. John, Dr. Campbell might do you good. All your friends feel that you are too careless of your health. Indeed, we all feel great concern about it, and you might learn something of Dr. Campbell in this."
Thus Eva pursued her advantage with that fluent ability with which a pretty young woman at her own fireside always gets the best of the argument. Mr. St. John, attacked on the weak side of conscientiousness, was obliged at last to admit that to spend an evening with agreeable, cultivated, well-dressed people might be occasionally as much a shepherd's duty as to sit in the close, ill-smelling rooms of poverty and listen to the croonings and maunderings of the ill-educated, improvident, and foolish, who make so large a proportion of the less fortunate classes of society. It had been suggested to him that a highly-educated, agreeable young doctor, who talked materialism and dissented from the thirty-nine articles, might as properly be borne with as a drinking young mechanic who talked unbelief of a lower and less respectable order.
Now it so happened, by one of those unexpected coincidences that fall out in the eternal order of things, that Eva was reinforced in her course of argument by a silent and subtle influence, of which she was herself scarcely aware. The day seldom passed that one or other of her sisters did not form a part of her family circle, and on this day of all others the fates had willed that Angelique should come up to work on her Christmas presents by Eva's fireside.
Imagine, therefore, as the scene of this conversation, a fire-lighted room, the evening flicker of the blaze falling in flecks and flashes over books and pictures, and Mr. St. John in a dark, sheltered corner, surveying without being surveyed, listening to Eva's animated logic, and yet watching a very pretty tableau in the opposite corner.
There sat Angelique, listening to the conversation, with the fire-light falling in flashes on her golden hair and her lap full of worsteds—rosy, pink, blue, lilac, and yellow. Her little hands were busy in some fleecy wonder, designed to adorn the Christmas-tree for the mission school of his church; and she knit and turned and twisted the rosy mystery with an air of grave interest, the while giving an attentive ear to the conversation.
Mr. St. John was not aware that he was looking at her; in fact, he supposed he was listening to Eva, who was eloquently setting forth to him all the good points in Dr. Campbell's character, and the reasons why it was his duty to seek and cultivate his acquaintance; but while she spoke and while he replied he saw the little hands moving, and a sort of fairy web weaving, and the face changing as, without speaking a word, she followed with bright, innocent sympathy the course of the conversation.
When Eva, with a becoming air of matronly gravity, lectured him for his reckless treatment of his own health, and his want of a proper guide on that subject, Angelique's eyes seemed to say the same; and sometimes, when Eva turned just the faintest light of satire on the ascetic notions to which he was prone, those same eyes sparkled with that frank gaiety that her dimpled face seemed made to express. Now the kitten catches at her thread, and she stops, and bends over and dangles the ball, and laughs softly to herself, and St. John from his dark corner watches the play. There is something of the kitten in her, he thinks. Even her gravest words have suggested the air of a kitten on good behavior, and perhaps she may be a naughty, wicked kitten—who knows? A kitten lying in wait to catch unwary birds and mice! But she looked so artless—so innocent!—her little head bent on one side like a flower, and her eyes sparkling as if she were repressing a laugh!—a nervous idea shot through the conversation to Mr. St. John's heart. What if this girl should laugh at him? St. Jerome himself might have been vulnerable to a poisoned arrow like this. What if he really were getting absurd notions and ways in the owl-like recesses and retirements of his study—growing rusty, unfit for civilized life? Clearly it was his duty to "come forth into the light of things," and before he left that evening he gave his pledge to Eva that he would be one of the patrons of her new social enterprise.
It is to be confessed that as he went home that night he felt that duty had never worn an aspect so agreeable. It was certainly his place as a good fisher of men to study the habits of the cultured, refined, and influential portion of society, as well as of its undeveloped children. Then, he didn't say it to himself, but the scene where these investigations were to be pursued rose before him insensibly as one where Angelique was to be one of the entertainers. It would give him a better opportunity of studying the genus and habits of that variety of the church militant who train in the uniform of fashionable girls, and to decide the yet doubtful question whether they had any genuine capacity for church work. Angelique's evident success with her class was a puzzle to him, and he thought he would like to know her better, and see if real, earnest, serious purposes could exist under that gay exterior.
Somehow, he could not fancy those laughing eyes and that willful, curly, golden hair under the stiff cap of a Sister of Charity; and he even doubted whether a gray cloak would seem as appropriate as the blue robe and ermine cape where the poor little child had rested her scarred cheek. He liked to think of her just as she looked then and there. And why shouldn't he get acquainted with her? If he was ever going to form a sisterhood of good works, certainly it was his duty to understand the sisters. Clearly it was!
"Having company" is one of those incidents of life which in all circles, high or low, cause more or less searchings of heart.
Even the moderate "tea-fight" of good old times necessitated not only anxious thought in the hostess herself, but also a mustering and review of best "bibs and tuckers," through the neighborhood.
But to undertake a "serial sociable" in New York, in this day of serials, was something even graver, causing many thoughts and words in many houses.
Witness the following specimens:
"I confess, Nellie, I can't understand Eva's ways," said Aunt Maria, the morning of the first Thursday. "She don't come to me for advice; but I confess I don't understand her."
Aunt Maria was in a gloomy, severe state of mind, owing to the contumacy and base ingratitude of Alice in rejecting her interposition and care, and she came down this morning to signify her displeasure to Nellie at the way she had been treated.
"I don't know what you mean, sister," said Mrs. Van Arsdel, deprecatingly. "I'm sure I don't know of anything that Eva's been doing lately."
"Why, these evenings of hers; I don't understand them. Setting out to have receptions in that little out-of-the-way shell of hers! Why, who'll go? Nobody wants to ramble off up there, and not get to anything after all. It's going to be a sort of mixed-up affair—newspaper men, and people that nobody knows—all well enough in their way, perhaps; but I shan't be mixed up in it." Aunt Maria nodded her head gloomily, and the bows and feathers on her hat quivered protestingly.
"Oh, they are going to be just unpretending sociable little gatherings," said Mrs. Van Arsdel. "Just the family and a few friends; and I think they are going to be pleasant. I wish you would go, Maria. Eva will be disappointed."
"No, she won't. It's evident, Nelly, that your girls don't any of them care about me, or regard anything I say. Well, I only hope they mayn't live to repent it; that's all."
Aunt Maria said this with that menacing sniff with which people in a bad humor usually dispense Christian charity. The dark awfulness of the hope expressed really chilled poor little Mrs. Van Arsdel's blood. From long habits of dependence upon her sister, she had come to regard her displeasure as one of the severer evils of life. To keep the peace with Maria, as far as she herself was concerned, would have been easy. Contention was fatiguing to her. It was a trouble to have the responsibility of making up her own mind; and she was quite willing that Maria should carry her through the journey of life, buy her tickets, choose her hotels, and settle with her cabmen. But, complicated with a husband, and a family of bright, independent daughters, each endowed with a separate will of her own, Mrs. Van Arsdel led on the whole a hard life. People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it. It's all very well for a gentle acquiescent spirit to be carried through life by one bearer. But when half a dozen bearers quarrel and insist on carrying one opposite ways, the more facile the spirit, the greater the trouble.
Mrs. Van Arsdel, in fact, passed a good deal of her life in being talked over to one course of conduct by Aunt Maria, and talked back again by her girls. She resembled a weak, peaceable hamlet on the border-land between France and Germany, taken and retaken with much wear and tear of spirit, and heartily wishing peace at any price.
"I don't see how Eva is going to afford all this," continued Aunt Maria gloomily.
"Oh! there's to be no evening entertainment, nothing but a little tea, and biscuit, and sponge cake, in the most social way," pleaded Mrs. Van Arsdel.
"But all this, every week, in time comes to a good deal," said Aunt Maria. "Now, if Eva would put all the extra trouble and expense of these evenings into one good handsome party of select people and have it over with, why that would be something worth while, and I would help her get it up. Such a party stands for something. But she doesn't come to me for advice. I'm a superannuated old woman, I suppose," and Aunt Maria sighed in a way heart-breaking to her peace-loving sister.
"Indeed, Maria, you are wrong. You are provoked now. You don't mean so."
"I'm—not provoked. Do you suppose I care? I don't! but I can see, I suppose! I'm not quite blind yet, I hope, and I sha'n't go where I'm not wanted. And now, if you'll give me those samples, Nellie, I'll go to Arnold's and Stewart's and look up that dress for you, and then I'll take your laces to the mender's. It's a good morning's work to go up to that dark alley where she rooms; but I'll do it, now I'm about it. I'm not so worn out yet but what I am acceptable to do errands for you," said Aunt Maria, with gloomy satisfaction.
"Oh, Maria, how can you talk so!" said little Mrs. Van Arsdel, with tears in her eyes. "You really are unjust."
"There's no use in discussing matters, Nellie. Give me the patterns and the laces," said Aunt Maria, obdurately. "Here! I'll sort 'em out. You never have anything ready," she said, opening her sister's drawer, and taking right and left such articles as she deemed proper, with as much composure as if her sister had been a seven-year-old child. "There!" she said, shutting the drawer, "now I'm ready. Good morning!"—and away she sailed, leaving her sister abased in spirit, and vaguely contrite for she couldn't tell what.
Aunt Maria had the most disagreeable habit of venting her indignation on her sister, by going to most uncomfortable extremes of fatiguing devotion to her service. With a brow of gloom and an air of martyrdom, she would explore shops, tear up and down stair-cases, perform fatiguing pilgrimages for Nellie and the girls; piling all these coals of fire on their heads, and looking all the while so miserably abused and heart-broken that it required stronger discrimination than poor Mrs. Van Arsdel was gifted with not to feel herself a culprit.
"Only think, your Aunt Maria says she won't go this evening," she said in a perplexed and apprehensive tone to her girls.
"Glad of it," said Alice, and the words were echoed by Angelique.
"Oh, girls, you oughtn't to feel so about your aunt!"
"We don't," said Alice, "but as long as she feels so about us, it's just as well not to have her there. We girls are all going to do our best to make the first evening a success, so that everybody shall have a good time and want to come again; and if Aunt Maria goes in her present pet, she would be as bad as Edgar Poe's raven."
"Just fancy our having her on our hands, saying 'nevermore' at stated intervals," said Angelique, laughing; "why, it would upset everything!"
"Angelique, you oughtn't to make fun of your aunt," said Mrs. Van Arsdel, with an attempt at reproving gravity.
"I'm sure it's the nicest thing we can make of her, Mammy dear," said Angelique; "it's better to laugh than to cry any time. Oh, Aunt Maria will keep, never fear. She'll clear off by-and-by, like a northeast rain-storm, and then we shall like her well as ever; sha'n't we, girls?"
"Oh, yes; she always comes round after a while," said Alice.
"Well, now I'm going up to help Eva get the rooms ready," said Angelique, and out she fluttered, like a flossy bit of thistle-down.
Angelique belonged to the corps of the laughing saints—a department not always recognized by the straiter sort in the church militant, but infinitely effective and to the purpose in the battle of life. Her heart was a tender but a gay one—perhaps the lovingness of it kept it bright; for love is a happy divinity, and Angelique loved everybody, and saw the best side of everything; besides, just now she was barely seventeen, and thought the world a very nice place. She was the very life of the household, the one who loved to run and wait and tend; who could stop gaps and fill spaces, and liked to do it: and so, this day, she devoted herself to Eva's service in the hundred somethings that pertain to getting a house in order for an evening reception.
On the opposite side of the way, the projected hospitalities awoke various conflicting emotions.
"Dinah, I don't really know whether I shall go to that company to-night or not," said Mrs. Betsey confidentially to Dinah over her ironing-table.
"Land sakes, Mis' Betsey," said Dinah, with her accustomed giggle, "how you talk! What you 'feard on?"
Mrs. Betsey had retreated to the kitchen, to indulge herself with Dinah in tremors and changes of emotion which had worn out the patience of Miss Dorcas in the parlor. That good lady, having made up her mind definitively to go and take Betsey with her, was indisposed to repeat every half hour the course of argument by which she had demonstrated to her that it was the proper thing to do.
But the fact was, that poor Mrs. Betsey was terribly fluttered by the idea of going into company again. Years had passed in that old dim house, with the solemn clock tick-tocking in the corner, and the sunbeam streaming duskily at given hours through the same windows, with no sound of coming or going footsteps. There the two ancient sisters had been working, reading, talking, round and round on the same unvarying track, for weeks, months and years, and now, suddenly, had come a change. The pretty, gay, little housekeeper across the way had fluttered in with a whole troop of invisible elves of persuasion in the very folds of her garments, and had cajoled and charmed them into a promise to be supporters of her "evenings," and Miss Dorcas was determined to go. But all ye of womankind know that after every such determination comes a review of the wherewithal, and many tremors.
Now Miss Dorcas was self-sufficing, and self-sustained. She knew herself to be Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden, in the first place; and she had a general confidence, by right of her family and position, that all her belongings were the right things. They might be out of fashion—so much the worse for the fashion; Miss Dorcas wore them with a cheerful courage. Yet, as she frequently remarked, "sooner or later, if you let things lie, fashion always comes round to them." They had come round to her many times in the course of her life, and always found her ready for them. But Mrs. Betsey was timorous, and had a large allowance of what the phrenologists call "approbativeness." In her youth she had been a fashionable young belle, and now she had as many flutters and tremors about her gray curls and her caps as in the days when she sat up all night in an arm-chair with her hair dressed and powdered for a ball. In fact, an old lady's cap is undeniably a tender point. One might imagine it to be a sort of shrine or last retreat in which all her youthful love of dress finds asylum; and, in estimating her fitness for any scene of festivity, the cap is the first consideration. So, when Dinah chuckled, "What ye 'feard on, honey?" Mrs. Betsey came out with it:
"Dinah, I don't know which of my caps to wear."
"Lor' sakes, Mis' Betsey, wear yer new one. What's to hender?"
"Well, you see, it's trimmed with lilac ribbons, and the shade don't go with my new brown gown; they look horridly together. Dorcas never does notice such things, but they don't go well together. I tried to tell Dorcas about it, but she shut me up, saying I was always fussy."
"Well, laws! then, honey, wear your other cap—it's a right nice un now," said Dinah in a coaxing tone.
"Trimmed with white ribbon—" said Mrs. Betsey, ruminating; "but you see, Dinah, that ribbon has really got quite yellow; and there's a spot on one of the strings," she added, in a tone of poignant emotion.
"Well, now, I tell ye what to do," said Dinah; "you jest wear your new cap with them laylock ribbins, and wear your black silk: that are looks illegant now."
"But my black silk is so old; it's pieced under the arm, and beginning to fray in the gathers."
"Land sake, Mis' Betsey! who's agoin' to look under your arm?" said Dinah. "They a'n't agoin' to set you up under one o' them sterry scopes to be looked at, be they? You'll do to pass now, I tell ye; now don't go to gettin' fluttered and 'steriky, Mis' Betsey. Why don't ye go right along, like Mis' Dorcas? She don't have no megrims and tantrums 'bout what she's goin' to wear."
Dinah's tolerant spirit in admitting this discussion was, however, a real relief to Mrs. Betsey. Like various liquors which are under a necessity of working themselves clear, Mrs. Betsey found a certain amount of talk necessary to clear her mind when proceeding to act in any emergency, and for this purpose a listener was essential; but Dorcas was so entirely above such fluctuations as hers—so positive and definite in all her judgments and conclusions—that she could not enjoy in her society the unlimited amount of discussion necessary to clarify her mental vision.
It was now about the fifth or sixth time that all the possibilities with regard to her wardrobe had been up for consideration that day; till Miss Dorcas, who had borne with her heroically for a season, had finally closed the discussion by recommending a chapter in Watts on the Mind which said a great many unpleasant things about people who occupy themselves too much with trifles, and thus Mrs. Betsey was driven to unbosom herself to Dinah.
"Then, again, there's Jack," she added; "I'm sure I don't know what he'll think of our both being out; there never such a thing happened before."
"Land sake, Mis' Betsey, jest as if Jack cared! Why, he'll stay with me. I'll see arter him—I will."
"Well, you must be good to him, Dinah," said Mrs. Betsey, apprehensively.
"Ain't I allers good to him? I don't set him up for a graven image and fall down and washup him, to be sure; but Jack has good times with me, if I do make him mind."
The fact was, that Dinah often seconded the disciplinary views of Miss Dorcas with the strong arm, pulling Jack backward by the tail, and correcting him with vigorous thumps of the broomstick when he fell into those furors of barking which were his principal weakness.
Dinah had all the sociable instincts of her race; and it moved her indignation that the few acquaintances who found their way to the forsaken old house should be terrified and repelled by such distracted tumults as Jack generally created when the door-bell rang. Hence her attitude toward him had so often been belligerent that poor Mrs. Betsey felt small confidence in leaving him to the trying separation of the evening under Dinah's care.
"Well, Dinah, you won't whip Jack if he does bark? I dare say he'll be lonesome. You must make allowances for him."
"Oh, laws, yes, honey, I'll make 'lowance, never you fear."
"And you really think the black dress will do?"
"Jest as sartin as I be that I'm here a ironin' this 'ere pillow-bier. Why, honey, you'll look like a pictur, you will."
"Oh, Dinah, I'm an old woman."
"Well, honey, what if you be? Land sakes, don't I remember when you was the belle of New York city? Lord love ye! Them was days! When 'twas all comin' and goin', hosses a-prancin', house full, and fellers fairly a-tumblin' over each other jest to get a look at ye. Laws, honey, ye was wuth lookin' at in dem days."
"Oh, Dinah, you silly old soul, what nonsense you talk!"
"Well, honey, you know you was de handsomest gal goin'. Now you knows you was," said Dinah, chuckling and shaking her portly sides.
"I suppose I wasn't bad looking," said Mrs. Betsey, laughing in turn; and the color flushed in her delicate, faded cheeks, and her pretty bright eyes grew misty with a thought of all the little triumphs, prides, and regrets of years ago.
To say the truth, Mrs. Betsey, though past the noon-time of attraction, was a very pretty old woman. Her hands were still delicate and white, her skin was of lily fairness, and her hair like fine-spun silver; and she retained still all the nice instincts and habits of the woman who has known herself charming. She still felt the discord of a shade in her ribbons like a false note in music, and was annoyed by the slightest imperfection of her dress, however concealed, to a degree which seemed at times wearisome and irrational to her stronger minded sister.
But Miss Dorcas, who had carried her in her arms, a heart-broken wreck snatched from the waves of a defeated life, bore with her as heroically as we ever can bear with another whose nature is wholly of a different make and texture from our own.
In general, she made up her mind with a considerable share of good sense as to what it was best for Betsey to do, and then made her do it, by that power which a strong and steady nature exercises over a weaker one.
Miss Dorcas had made up her mind that more society, and some little change in her modes of life, would be a benefit to her sister; she had taken a strong fancy to Eva, and really looked forward to her evenings as something to give a new variety and interest in life.
"Now, Jim," said Alice, in a monitory tone, "you know we all depend on you to manage this thing just right to-night. You mustn't be too lively and frighten the serious folks; but you must keep things moving, just as you know how."
"Well, are you going to have 'our rector?'" said Jim.
"Certainly. Mr. St. John will be there."
"And of course, our little Angie," said Jim.
"Certainly. Angie, and Mamma, and Papa, and I, shall all be there," said Alice, with dignity. "Now, Jim!"
The exclamation was addressed not to anything which this young gentleman had said, but to a certain wicked sparkle in his eye which Alice thought predicted coming mischief.
"What's the matter now?" said Jim.
"I know just what you're thinking," said Alice; "and now, Jim, you mustn't look that way to-night."
"Look what way!"
"Well, you mustn't in any way—look, sign, gesture or word—direct anybody's attention to Mr. St. John and Angie. Of course there's nothing there; it's all a fancy of your own—a very absurd one; but I've known people made very uncomfortable by such absurd suggestions."
"Well, am I to wear green spectacles to keep my eyes from looking?"
"You are to do just right, Jim, and nobody knows how that is to be done better than you do. You know that you have the gift of entertaining, and there isn't a mortal creature that you can't please, if you try; and you mustn't talk to those you like best to-night, but bestow yourself wherever a hand is needed. You must entertain those old ladies over the way, and get acquainted with Mr. St. John, and talk to the pretty Quaker woman; in short, make yourself generally useful."
"O. K.," said Jim. "I'll be on hand. I'll make love to all the old ladies, and let the parson admonish me, as meek as Moses; and I'll look right the other way, if I see him looking at Angie. Anything more?"
"No, that'll do," said Alice, laughing. "Only do your best, and it will be good enough."
Eva was busy about her preparations, when Dr. Campbell came in to borrow a book.
"Now, Dr. Campbell," said she, "you're just the man I wanted to see. I must tell you that one grand reason why I want to be sure and secure you for our evenings, and this one in particular, is I have caught our rector and got his promise to come, and I want you to study him critically, for I'm afraid he's in the way to get to heaven long before we do, if he isn't looked after. He's not in the least conscious of it, but he does need attention."
Dr. Campbell was a hale young man of twenty-five; blonde, vigorous, high-strung, active, and self-confident, and as keen set after medical and scientific facts as a race-horse for the goal. As a general thing, he had no special fancy for clergymen; but a clergyman as a physical study, a possible verification of some of his theories, was an object of interest, and he readily promised Eva that he would spare no pains in making Mr. St. John's acquaintance.
"Now, drolly enough," said Eva, "we're going to have a Quaker preacher here. I went in to invite Ruth and her husband; and lo, they have got a celebrated minister staying with them, one Sibyl Selwyn. She is as lovely as an angel in a pressed crape cap and dove-colored gown; but what Mr. St. John will think about her I don't know."
"Oh, Mrs. Henderson, there'll be trouble there, depend on it," said Dr. Campbell. "He won't recognize her ordination, and very likely she won't recognize his. You see, I was brought up among the Friends. I know all about them. If your friend Sibyl should have a 'concern' laid on her for your Mr. St. John, she would tell him some wholesome truths."
"Dear me," said Eva. "I hope she won't have a 'concern' the very first evening. It would be embarrassing."
"Oh, no; to tell the truth, these Quaker preachers are generally delightful women," said Dr. Campbell. "I'm sure I ought to say so, for my good aunt that brought me up was one of them, and I don't doubt that Sibyl Selwyn will prove quite an addition to your circle."
Well, the evening came, and so did all the folks. But what they said and did, must be told in another chapter.
Mr. St. John was sitting in his lonely study, contemplating with some apprehension the possibilities of the evening.
Perhaps few women know how much of an ordeal general society is to many men. Women are naturally social and gregarious, and have very little experience of the kind of shyness that is the outer bark of many manly natures, in which they fortify all the more sensitive part of their being against the rude shocks of the world.
As we said, Mr. St. John's life had been that of a recluse and scholar, up to the time of his ordination as a priest. He was, by birth and education, a New England Puritan, with all those habits of reticence and self-control which a New England education enforces. His religious experiences, being those of reaction from a sterile and severe system of intellectual dogmatism, still carried with them a tinge of the precision and narrowness of his early life. His was a nature like some of the streams of his native mountains, inclining to cut for itself straight, deep, narrow currents; and all his religious reading and thinking had run in one channel. As to social life, he first began to find it among his inferiors; among those to whom he came, not as a brother man, but as an authoritative teacher—a master, divinely appointed, set apart from the ordinary ways of men. In his rôle of priest he felt strong. In the belief of his divine and sacred calling, he moved among the poor and ignorant with a conscious superiority, as a being of a higher sphere. There was something in this which was a protection to his natural diffidence; he seemed among his parishioners to feel surrounded by a certain sacred atmosphere that shielded him from criticism. But to mingle in society as man with man, to lay aside the priest and be only the gentleman, appeared on near approach a severe undertaking. As a priest at the altar he was a privileged being, protected by a kind of divine aureole, like that around a saint. In general society he was but a man, to make his way only as other men; and, as a man, St. John distrusted and undervalued himself. As he thought it over, he inly assented to the truth of what Eva had so artfully stated—that this ordeal of society was indeed, for him, the true test of self-sacrifice. Like many other men of refined natures, he was nervously sensitive to personal influences. The social sphere of those around him affected him, through sympathy, almost as immediately as the rays of the sun impress the daguerreotype plate; but he felt it his duty to subject himself to the ordeal the more because he dreaded it. "After all," he said to himself, "what is my faith worth, if I cannot carry it among men? Do I hold a lamp with so little oil in it that the first wind will blow it out?"
It was with such thoughts as these that he started out on his usual afternoon tour of visiting and ministration in one of the poorest alleys of his neighborhood.
As he was making his way along, a little piping voice was heard at his elbow:
"Mr. St. Don; Mr. St. Don."
He looked hastily down and around, to meet the gaze of a pair of dark childish eyes looking forth from a thin, sharp little face. Gradually, he recognized in the thin, barefoot child, the little girl whom he had seen in Angie's class, leaning on her.
"What do you want, my child?"
"Mother's took bad, and Poll's gone to wash for her. They told me to watch till you came round, and call you. Mother wants to see you."
"Well, show me the way," said Mr. St. John, affably, taking the thin, skinny little hand.
The child took him under an alley-way, into a dark, back passage, up one or two rickety staircases, into an attic, where lay a woman on a poor bed in the corner.
The room was such a one as his work made only too familiar to him—close, dark, bare of comforts, yet not without a certain lingering air of neatness and self-respect. The linen of the bed was clean, and the woman that lay there had marks of something refined and decent in her worn face. She was burning with fever; evidently, hard work and trouble had driven her to the breaking point.
"Well, my good woman, what can I do for you?" said Mr. St. John.
The woman roused from a feverish sleep and looked at him.
"Oh, sir, please send her here. She said she would come any time I needed her, and I want her now."
"Who is she? Who do you mean?"
"Please, sir, she means my teacher," said the child, with a bright, wise look in her thin little face. "It's Miss Angie. Mother wants her to come and talk to father; father's getting bad again."
"He isn't a bad man," put in the woman, "except they get him to drink; it's the liquor. God knows there never was a kinder man than John used to be."
"Where is he? I will try to see him," said Mr. St. John.
"Oh, don't; it won't do any good. He hates ministers; he wouldn't hear you; but Miss Angie he will hear; he promised her he wouldn't drink any more, but Ben Jones and Jim Price have been at him and got him off on a spree. O dear!"
At this, moment a feeble wail was heard from the basket cradle in the corner, and the little girl jumped from the bed, and in an important, motherly way, began to soothe an indignant baby, who put up his stomach and roared loudly after the manner of his kind, astonished and angry at not finding the instant solace and attention which his place in creation demanded.
Mr. St. John looked on in a kind of silent helplessness, while the little skinny creature lifted a child who seemed almost as large as herself and proceeded to soothe and assuage his ill humor by many inexplicable arts, till she finally quenched his cries in a sucking-bottle, and peace was restored.
"The only person in the world that can do John any good," resumed the woman, when she could be heard, "is Miss Angie. John would turn any man, specially any minister, out of the house, that said a word about his ways; but he likes to have Miss Angie come here. She has been here Saturday afternoons and read stories to the children, and taught them little songs, and John always listens, and she almost got him to promise he would give up drinking; she has such pretty ways of talking, a man can't get mad with her. What I want is, can't you tell her John's gone, and ask her to come to me? He'll be gone two days or more, and when he comes back he'll be sorry—he always is then; and then if Miss Angie will talk to him; you see she's so pretty, and dresses so pretty. John says she is the brightest, prettiest lady he ever saw, and it sorter pleases him that she takes notice of us. John always puts his best foot foremost when she is round. John's used to being with gentlefolk," she said, with a sigh; "he knows a lady when he sees her."
"Well, my good woman," said Mr. St. John, "I shall see Miss Angie this evening, and you may be sure that I shall tell her all about this. Meanwhile, how are you off? Do you need money now?"
"I am pretty well off, sir. He took all my last week's money when he went, but Poll has gone to my wash-place to-day, and I told her to ask for pay. I hope they'll send it."
"If they don't," said Mr. St. John, "here is something to keep things going," and he slipped a bill into the woman's hand.
"Thank you, sir. When I get up, if you'll please give me some washing, I'll make it square. I've been held good at getting up linen."
Poor woman! She had her little pride of independence, and her little accomplishment—she could wash and iron! There she felt strong! Mr. St. John allowed her the refuge, and let her consider the money as an advance, not a charity.
He turned away, and went down the cracked and broken stairs with the thought struggling in an undefined manner in his breast, how much there was of pastoral work which transcended the power of man, and required the finer intervention of woman. With all, there came a glow of shy pleasure that there was a subject of intercommunication opened between him and Angie, something definite to talk about; and to a diffident man a definite subject is a mine of gold.