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Title: The Faith Doctor
A Story of New York
Author: Edward Eggleston
Release Date: November 6, 2008 [EBook #27168]
Language: English
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THE
FAITH DOCTOR
_A STORY OF NEW YORK_
BY
EDWARD EGGLESTON
AUTHOR OF THE HOOSIER SCHOOLMASTER, ROXY, ETC.
[Illustration: Publisher's emblem]
_THIRD EDITION_
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1891
COPYRIGHT, 1891,
BY EDWARD EGGLESTON.
_All rights reserved._
PREFACE.
Though there is no life that I know more intimately and none that I have
known for so long a period as that of New York, the present story is the
first in which I have essayed to depict phases of the complex society of
the metropolis. I use the word society in its general, not in its narrow
sense, for in no country has the merely "society novel" less reason for
being than in ours.
The prevailing interest in mind-cure, faith-cure, Christian science, and
other sorts of aërial therapeutics has supplied a motive for this story,
and it is only proper that I should feel a certain gratitude to the
advocates of the new philosophy. But the primary purpose of this novel
is artistic, not polemical. The book was not written to depreciate
anybody's valued delusions, but to make a study of human nature under
certain modern conditions. In one age men cure diseases by potable gold
and strengthen their faith by a belief in witches, in another they
substitute animal magnetism and adventism. Within the memory of those of
us who are not yet old, the religious fervor of millenarianism and the
imitation science of curative mesmerism gave way to spirit-rappings and
clairvoyant medical treatment. Now spiritism in all its forms is passing
into decay, only to leave the field free to mind-doctors and
faith-healers. There is nothing for it but to wait for the middle ages
to pass; when modern times arrive, there will be more criticism and less
credulity, let us hope.
The propositions put into the mouth of Miss Bowyer, though they sound
like burlesque, are taken almost verbatim from the writings of those who
claim to be expounders of Christian science. While Miss Bowyer was drawn
more closely from an original than is usual in fictitious writing, I am
well aware that there are professors of Christian science much superior
to her. There are, indeed, souls who are the victims of their own
generous enthusiasm; and it grieves me that, in treating the subject
with fidelity and artistic truthfulness, I must give pain to many of the
best--to some whose friendship I hold dear.
For the idea of a novel on the present theme I am indebted to an
unpublished short story entitled An Irregular Practitioner, by Miss Anne
Steger Winston, which came under my eye three or four years ago. I
secured the transfer to me of Miss Winston's rights in the subject, and,
though I have not followed the lines of her story, it gives me pleasure
to acknowledge my obligation to her for the suggestion of a motive
without which this novel would not have had existence.
For the comfort of the reader, let me add that the name Phillida should
be accented on the first syllable, and pronounced with the second vowel
short.
JOSHUA'S ROCK ON LAKE GEORGE, _September, 1891_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ORIGIN OF A MAN OF FASHION 7
II. THE EVOLUTION OF A SOCIETY MAN 19
III. A SPONTANEOUS PEDIGREE 29
IV. THE BANK OF MANHADOES 37
V. THE ARRIVAL OF THE HILBROUGHS 55
VI. PHILLIDA CALLENDER 69
VII. THE LION SOIRÉE 91
VIII. IN AVENUE C 110
IX. WASHINGTON SQUARE AND ELSEWHERE 120
X. BROKEN RESOLVES 132
XI. IN THE PARK 144
XII. PHILIP 155
XIII. MRS. FRANKLAND 162
XIV. MRS. FRANKLAND AND PHILLIDA 176
XV. TWO WAYS 185
XVI. A SÉANCE AT MRS. VAN HORNE'S 193
XVII. A FAITH CURE 201
XVIII. FAITH-DOCTOR AND LOVER 208
XIX. PROOF POSITIVE 213
XX. DIVISIONS 225
XXI. MRS. HILBROUGH'S INFORMATION 232
XXII. WINTER STRAWBERRIES 242
XXIII. A SHINING EXAMPLE 249
XXIV. THE PARTING 256
XXV. MRS. FRANKLAND'S REPENTANCE 266
XXVI. ELEANOR ARABELLA BOWYER 280
XXVII. A BAD CASE 294
XXVIII. DR. BESWICK'S OPINION 302
XXIX. MILLARD AND RUDOLPH 314
XXX. PHILLIDA AND PHILIP 321
XXXI. A CASE OF BELIEF IN DIPHTHERIA 332
XXXII. FACE TO FACE 345
XXXIII. A FAMOUS VICTORY 352
XXXIV. DOCTORS AND LOVERS 364
XXXV. PHILLIDA AND HER FRIENDS 374
XXXVI. MRS. BESWICK 383
XXXVII. DR. GUNSTONE'S DIAGNOSIS 388
XXXVIII. PHILIP'S CONFESSION 398
XXXIX. PHILIP IMPROVES AN OPPORTUNITY 407
XL. THE RESTORATION 415
XLI. AS YOU LIKE IT 422
THE FAITH DOCTOR.
I.
THE ORIGIN OF A MAN OF FASHION.
It was the opinion of a good many people that Charles Millard was
"something of a dude." But such terms are merely relative; every fairly
dressed man is a dude to somebody. There are communities in this free
land of ours in which the wearing of a coat at dinner is a most
disreputable mark of dudism.
That Charles Millard was accounted a dude was partly Nature's fault. If
not handsome, he was at least fine-looking, and what connoisseurs in
human exteriors call stylish. Put him into a shad-bellied drab and he
would still have retained traces of dudishness; a Chatham street outfit
could hardly have unduded him. With eyes so luminous and expressive in a
face so masculine, with shoulders so well carried, a chest so deep, and
legs so perfectly proportioned and so free from any deviation from the
true line of support, Millard had temptations to cultivate natural
gifts.
There was a notion prevalent among Millard's acquaintances that one so
versed in the lore and so deft in the arts of society must belong to a
family of long standing; the opinion was held, indeed, by pretty much
everybody except Millard himself. His acquaintance with people of
distinction, and his ready access to whatever was deemed desirable in
New York, were thought to indicate some hereditary patent to social
privilege. Millard had, indeed, lines of ancestors as long as the
longest, and, so far as they could be traced, his forefathers were
honest and industrious people, mostly farmers. Nor were they without
distinction: one of his grandfathers enjoyed for years the felicity of
writing "J. P." after his name; another is remembered as an elder in the
little Dutch Reformed Church at Hamburg Four Corners. But Charley
Millard did not boast of these lights of his family, who would hardly
have availed him in New York. Nor did he boast of anything, indeed; his
taste was too fastidious for self-assertion of the barefaced sort. But
if people persisted in fitting him out with an imaginary pedigree, just
to please their own sense of congruity, why should he feel obliged to
object to an amusement so harmless?
Charles Millard was the son of a farmer who lived near the village of
Cappadocia in the State of New York. When Charley was but twelve years
old his father sold his farm and then held what was called in the
country a "vendoo," at which he sold "by public outcry" his horses,
cows, plows, and pigs. With his capital thus released he bought a
miscellaneous store in the village, in order that his boys "might have a
better chance in the world." This change was brought about by the
discovery on the part of Charley's father that his brother, a
commission merchant in New York, "made more in a week than a farmer
could make in a year." From this time Charley, when not in school,
busied himself behind the counter, or in sweeping out the store, with no
other feeling than that sweeping store, measuring calico, and drawing
molasses were employments more congenial to his tastes and less hard on
good clothes than hoeing potatoes or picking hops. Two years after his
removal to the village the father of Charley Millard died, and the
store, which had not been very successful, was sold to another. Charley
left the counter to take a course in the high school, doing odd jobs in
the mean while.
When young Millard was eighteen years old he came into what was a great
fortune in village eyes. His father's more fortunate brother, who had
amassed money as a dealer in country produce in Washington street, New
York, died, leaving the profits of all his years of toil over eggs and
butter, Bermuda potatoes and baskets of early tomatoes, to his two
nephews, Charley Millard and Charley's elder brother, Richard. After the
lawyers, the surrogate, the executor, and the others had taken each his
due allowance out of it, there may have been fifty or seventy-five
thousand dollars apiece left for the two young men. Just how much it was
the village people never knew, for Charley was not prone to talk of his
own affairs, and Dick spent his share before he fairly had time to
calculate what it amounted to. When Richard had seen the last of his
money, and found himself troubled by small debts, he simplified matters
by executing a "mysterious disappearance," dropping out of sight of his
old associates as effectually as though he had slipped into some
cosmical crack. Charley, though nominally subject to a guardian, managed
his own affairs, husbanded his money, paid Dick's debts, and contrived
to take up the bank stock and other profitable securities that his
brother had hypothecated. He lived with his mother till she died, and
then he found himself at twenty-one with money enough to keep him at
ease, and with no family duty but that which his mother had laid upon
him of finding the recreant Dick if possible, and helping him to some
reputable employment--again if possible.
In Cappadocia Charley's little fortune made him the beau of the town;
the "great catch," in the slang phrase of the little society of the
village--a society in which there were no events worth reckoning but
betrothals and weddings. In such a place leisure is productive of little
except ennui. To get some relief from the fatigue of moving around a
circle so small, and to look after his investments, Charley made a visit
to New York a month after the death of his mother. His affection for his
mother was too fresh for him to neglect her sister, who was the wife of
a mechanic living in Avenue C. He would have preferred to go to a hotel,
but he took up his abode dutifully in his aunt's half of a floor in
Avenue C, where the family compressed themselves into more than their
usual density to give him a very small room to himself. His Aunt Hannah
did her best to make him comfortable, preparing for him the first day a
clam chowder, which delicacy Charley, being an inlander, could not eat.
His cup of green tea she took pains to serve to him hot from the stove
at his elbow. But he won the affection of the children with little
presents, and made his aunt happy by letting her take him to see Central
Park and the animals.
As seen in the narrow apartment of his Aunt Hannah Martin, life in the
metropolis appeared vastly more pinched and sordid than it did in the
cottages at Cappadocia. How the family contrived to endure living in
relations so constant and intimate with the cooking stove and the
feather beds Charley could not understand. But the spectacle of the
streets brought to him notions of a life greatly broader and more
cultivated and inconceivably more luxurious than the best in Cappadocia.
The third day after his arrival he called at the Bank of Manhadoes, in
which the greater part of his uncle's savings had been invested, to make
the acquaintance of the officers in control, and to have transferred to
his own name the shares which his brother had hypothecated. He was very
cordially received by Farnsworth, the cashier, who took him into the
inner office and introduced him to the president of the bank, Mr.
Masters. The president showed Charley marked attention; he was very
sensible of the voting importance of so considerable a block of stock as
Charley held, now that he had acquired all that was his uncle's. Masters
was sorry that his family was out of town, he would have been pleased to
have Mr. Millard dine with him. Would Mr. Millard be in town long?
Dining with a New York bank president would have been a novel
experience for young Millard, but he felt obliged to go home the last of
the week. Not that there was anything of pleasure or duty to render his
return to Cappadocia imperative or desirable, but the pressure he was
daily putting on his aunt's hospitality was too great to be prolonged,
and the discomfort of his situation in Avenue C was too much for a
fastidious man to endure.
Though his return to Cappadocia made a ripple of talk among the young
women of the village, to whom he was at least a most interesting theme
for gossip, he found the place duller than ever. His mind reverted to
the great, dazzling spectacle of the thronged streets of the metropolis,
with their unceasing processions of eager people. Since he had all the
world to choose from, why not live in New York? But he did not care to
go to the city to be idle. He liked employment, and he preferred to earn
something, though he had no relish for speculation, nor even any desire
to run the risks of trade. But he thought that if he could contrive to
make enough to pay a portion of his own expenses, so as to add the
greater part of each year's dividends to his principal, such cautious
proceeding would entirely suit his prudent temperament and content his
moderate ambition. After taking time to revolve the matter carefully, he
wrote to the obliging Mr. Masters, suggesting that he would like to
secure some position in the bank. The letter came at an opportune
moment. A considerable number of the stockholders were opposed to the
president in regard to the general policy to be pursued. The opposition
was strong enough to give Masters some anxiety. What was known as "the
Millard stock" had been held neutral in consequence of Charley's
minority. If now Masters could attach this young shareholder to himself,
it would be a positive gain to the administration party in the
stockholders' meetings, and indeed it would put the opposition beyond
any chance of doing much mischief.
When Masters got the letter Farnsworth, the cashier, was called into his
room. But Farnsworth could not give him any information about Millard's
character or capacities. That he would not do without special training
for a teller or bookkeeper was too evident to require discussion. All
that could be said of him at first glance was that he wrote a good hand
and composed a letter with intelligence. He might be made of assistance
to the cashier if he should prove to be a man of regular habits and
application. What Masters wrote in reply was: "We should be most happy
to have the nephew and heir of one of our founders in the bank. At
present we have no vacancy suitable to you; for, of course, a man of
your position ought not to be assigned to one of the lowest clerkships.
But if an opportunity to meet your wishes should arise in the future we
will let you know."
It was only after some years' experience in the bank that Millard, in
looking over this letter, was able to conjecture its real significance.
Then he knew that when that letter went out of the bank addressed to him
at Cappadocia another must have gone with it to a certain commercial
agency, requesting that Charles Millard, of Cappadocia, New York, be
carefully looked up. Two weeks later Masters wrote that it had been
found necessary to employ a correspondent to aid the cashier of the
bank. The salary would be two thousand dollars if Mr. Millard would
accept it. The offer, he added, was rather larger than would be made to
any one else, as the officers of the bank preferred to have a
stockholder in a semi-confidential position such as this would be. In
village scales two thousand dollars a year was much, but when Charley
came to foot up the expenses of his first year in New York, this salary
seemed somewhat less munificent.
Millard's relations were directly with the cashier, Farnsworth, an
eager, pushing, asthmatic little man, wholly given to business.
Farnsworth's mind rarely took time to peep over the fence that divided
the universe into two parts--the Bank of Manhadoes and its interests
lying on the one side, and all the rest of creation on the other. Not
that he ignored society; he gave dinner parties in his elegant
housekeeping apartment in the Sebastopol Flats. But the dinner parties
all had reference to the Bank of Manhadoes; the invitations were all
calculated with reference to business relations, and the dinners were
neatly planned to bring new business or to hold the old. But there were
dinners and dinners, in the estimation of Farnsworth. Some were aimed
high, and when these master-strokes of policy were successful they
tended to promote the main purposes of the bank. The second-rate dinners
were meant merely to smooth the way in minor business relations.
It was to one of these less significant entertainments, a dinner of not
more than three horse-power, that he invited his correspondent-clerk,
Mr. Millard. It would make the relations between him and Millard
smoother, and serve to attach Millard to his leadership in the bank
management. Millard, he reasoned, being from the country, would be just
as well pleased with a company made up of nobodies in particular and his
wife's relatives as he could be if he were invited to meet a railway
president and a leather merchant from the swamp turned art connoisseur
in his old age.
Charley found his boarding-house a little "poky," to borrow his own
phrase, and he was pleased with Farnsworth's invitation. He honored the
occasion by the purchase of a new black satin cravat. This he tied with
extreme care, according to the approved formula of "twice around and up
and down." Few men could tie a cravat in better style. He also got out
the new frock-coat, made by the best tailor in Cappadocia, carefully
cherished, and only worn on special occasions--the last being the
evening on which he had taken supper at the house of the Baptist
minister. If there was something slightly rustic about the cut or set of
the coat, Millard did not suspect it. The only indispensable thing about
clothes is that the wearer shall be at peace with them. Poor Richard
ventured the proposition that "our neighbors' eyes" are the costliest
things in life, but Bonhomme Richard may have been a little off the mark
just there. Other people's opinions about my garments are of small
consequence except in so far as they affect my own conceit of them.
Charley Millard issued from his room at half-past six content with
himself, and, what was of much more importance to the peace of his
soul, content with his clothes.
At eleven o'clock Millard is in his room again. The broadcloth Prince
Albert lies in an ignominious heap in the corner of the sofa. The satin
cravat is against the looking-glass on the dressing-case, just as
Charley has thrown it down. Nothing has happened to the coat or the
cravat; both are as immaculate as at their sallying forth. But Millard
does not regard either of them; he sits moodily in his chair by the
grate and postpones to the latest moment the disagreeable task of
putting them away.
No matter what the subject under consideration, we later
nineteenth-century people are pretty sure to be brought face to face
with the intellect that has dominated our age, modified our modes of
thinking, and become the main source of all our metaphysical
discomforts. It is this same inevitable Charles Darwin who says that a
man may be made more unhappy by committing a breach of etiquette than by
falling into sin. If Millard had embezzled a thousand dollars of the
bank's funds, could he have been more remorseful than he is now? And all
for nothing but that he found himself at dinner with more cloth in the
tail of his coat than there was in the coattails of his neighbors, and
that he wore an expensive black cravat while all the rest of the world
had on ghostly white linen ties that cost but a dime or two apiece.
Of course Millard exaggerated the importance of his mistake. Young men
who wear frock-coats to dinner, and men of respectability who do not
possess a dress-coat, are not entirely lacking in New York. If he had
known more of the world he would have known that the world is to be
taken less to heart. People are always more lenient toward a mistake in
etiquette than the perspiring culprit is able to imagine them. In after
years Millard smiled at the remembrance that he had worried over
Farnsworth's company. It was not worth the trouble of a dress-coat.
His first impulse was to forswear society, and to escape mortification
in future, by refusing all invitations. If he had been a weakling such
an outcome would have followed a false start. It is only a man who can
pluck the blossom of success out of the very bramble of disaster.
During that dinner party had come to him a dim conception of a society
complicated and conventional to a degree that the upper circle in
Cappadocia had never dreamed of. He firmly resolved now to know this in
all its ramifications; to get the mastery of it in all its details, so
that no man should understand it better than he. To put it under foot by
superior skill was to be his revenge, the satisfaction he proposed to
make to his wounded vanity. As he could not even faintly conceive what
New York society was like--as he had no notion of its Pelions on Ossas
piled--so he could as yet form no estimate of the magnitude of the
success he was destined to achieve. It is always thus with a man on the
threshold of a great career.
Among the widely varying definitions of genius in vogue, everybody is
permitted to adopt that which flatters his self-love or serves his
immediate purpose. "Great powers accidentally determined in a given
direction" is what some one has called it. Millard was hardly a man of
great powers, but he was a man of no small intelligence. If he had been
sufficiently bedeviled by poverty at the outset who knows that he might
not have hardened into a stock-jobbing prestidigitator, and made the
world the poorer by so much as he was the richer? On the other hand, he
might perhaps have been a poet. Certainly a man of his temperament and
ingenuity might by practice have come to write rondeaus, ballades, and
those other sorts of soap-bubble verse just now in fashion; and if he
had been so lucky as to be disappointed in love at the outset of his
career, it is quite within the limits of possibility that he should have
come to write real poetry, fourteen lines to the piece. But as the first
great reverse of Millard's life was in a matter of dress and etiquette,
the innate force of his nature sent him by mere rebound in the direction
of a man of fashion--that is to say, an artist not in words or pigments,
but in dress and manners.
II.
THE EVOLUTION OF A SOCIETY MAN.
It is the first step that costs, say the French, and Millard made those
false starts that are inevitable at the outset of every career. A
beginner has to trust somebody, and in looking around for a mentor he
fell into the hands of a fellow-boarder, one Sampson, who was a quiet
man with the air of one who knows it all and is rather sorry that he
does. Sampson fondly believed himself a man of the world, and he had the
pleasure of passing for one among those who knew nothing at all about
the world. He was a reflective man, who had given much thought to that
gravest problem of a young man's life--how to keep trousers from bagging
at the knees, the failure to solve which is one of the most pathetic
facts of human history. After he had made one or two mistakes in
following the dicta that Sampson uttered with all the diffidence of a
papal encyclical, Millard became aware that in social matters pretension
is often in inverse ratio to accomplishment. About the time that he gave
up Sampson he renounced the cheap tailor into whose hands he had
unwarily fallen, and consigned to oblivion a rather new thirty-dollar
dress-suit in favor of one that cost half a hundred dollars more. He had
by this time found out that the society which he had a chance to meet
moved only in a borderland, and, like the ambitious man he was, he began
already to lay his plans broad and deep, and to fit himself, by every
means within his reach, for success in the greater world beyond.
Having looked about the circle of his small acquaintance in vain for a
guide, he bethought him that there were probably books on etiquette. He
entered a bookstore one day with the intention of asking for some work
of the sort, but finding in the proprietor a well-known depositor of the
bank, Charley bought a novel instead. Behold already the instinct of a
man of the world, whose rôle it is to know without ever seeming to
learn!
When at length Millard had secured a book with the title, "Guide to Good
Manners as Recognized in the Very Best Society. By One of the Four
Hundred," he felt that he had got his feet on firm ground.
It chanced about this time that Sampson brought an old college chum of
his to eat a Sunday dinner at the boarding-house in Eighteenth street.
He introduced this friend to Millard with that impressiveness which
belonged to all that the melancholy Sampson did, as "Mr. Bradley, Mr.
Harrison Holmes Bradley, the author; you know his writings."
Millard was covered with concealed shame to think that he did not happen
to know the books of an author with a name so resonant, but he did not
confess his ignorance. This was his first acquaintance with a real
literary man--for the high-school teacher in Cappadocia who wrote
poetry for the country papers would hardly count. The aspiring Millard
thought himself in luck in thus early making the acquaintance of a man
of letters, for to the half-sophisticated an author seems a person who
reflects a mild and moonshiny luster on even a casual acquaintance. To
know Mr. Bradley might be a first step toward gaining access to the more
distinguished society of the metropolis.
Harrison Holmes Bradley proved to be on examination a New-Englander of
the gaunt variety, an acute man of thirty, who ate his roast turkey and
mashed potatoes with that avidity he was wont to manifest when running
down an elusive fact in an encyclopædia. At the table Millard, for want
of other conversation, plucked up courage to ask him whether he was
connected with a newspaper.
"No; I am engaged in general literary work," said Bradley.
Neither Millard nor any one else at the table had the faintest notion of
the nature of "general literary work." It sounded large, and Bradley was
a clever talker on many themes fresh to Millard, and when he went away
the author exacted a promise from Charley to call on him soon in his
"den," and he gave him a visiting card which bore a street number in
Harlem.
Two weeks later Millard, who was quite unwilling to miss a chance of
making the acquaintance of a distinguished man through whom he might
make other eligible friends, called on Bradley. He found him at work in
his shirt-sleeves, in a hall bedroom of a boarding-house, smoking and
writing as he sat with a gas-stove for near neighbor on the left hand,
and a table, which was originally intended to serve as a wash-stand, on
the other side of him. The author welcomed his guest with unaffected
condescension and borrowed a chair from the next room for him to sit on.
Finding Millard curious about the ways of authors, he entertained his
guest with various anecdotes going to show how books are made and
tending to throw light on the relation of authors to publishers. Millard
noted what seemed to him a bias against publishers, of whom as a human
species Bradley evidently entertained no great opinion. Millard's love
for particulars was piqued by Bradley's statement at their first meeting
that he was engaged in general literary work. He contrived to bring the
author to talk of what he was doing and how it was done.
"You see," said Bradley, pleased to impart information on a theme in
which he was much interested himself, "a literary life isn't what people
generally take it to be. Most men in general literary work fail because
they can do only one thing or, at most, two. To make a living one must
be able to do everything."
"I suppose that is so," said Millard, still unable to form any notion of
what was implied in Bradley's everything. To him all literature was
divided into prose and poetry. General literature seemed to include both
of these and something more.
"Last week," Bradley continued, illustratively, "I finished an index,
wrote some verses for a pictorial advertisement of Appleblossom's Toilet
Soap, and ground out an encyclopædia article on Christian Missions, and
a magazine paper on the history of the game of bumblepuppy. I am now
just beginning a novel of society life. Versatility is the very
foundation of success. If it hadn't been for my knack of doing all sorts
of things I never should have succeeded as I have."
Judging by Bradley's surroundings and his own account of the sordid
drudgery of a worker in general literature, his success did not seem to
Millard a very stunning one. But Bradley was evidently content with it,
and what more can one ask of fortune?
"There is another element that goes a long way toward success in
literature," proceeded the author, "and that is ability to work rapidly.
When Garfield was shot I was out of work and two weeks behind with my
board. I went straight to the Astor Library and worked till the library
closed, gathering material. When I went to bed that night, or rather the
next morning, I had a paper on 'Famous Assassinations of History' ready
for the best market. But what I hate the most about our business is the
having to write, now and then, a thunder and lightning story for the
weekly blood-curdlers. Now there is Milwain, the poet, a man of genius,
but by shop girls and boys reading the Saturday-night papers he is
adored as Guy St. Cyr, the author of a long list of ghastly horribles
thrown off to get money."
"This sort of work of all kinds is what you call general literary work?"
queried Millard.
"General literary work is the evening dress we put on it when it has to
pass muster before strangers," said Bradley, laughing.
What Millard noted with a sort of admiration was Bradley's perfect
complacency, his contentment in grinding Philistine grists, the zest
even that he evinced for literary pot-hunting, the continual
exhilaration that he got out of this hazardous gamble for a living, and
the rank frankness with which he made his own affairs tributary to the
interest of his conversation.
At length Bradley emptied his pipe and laid it across his manuscript, at
the same time rising nervously from his chair and sitting down on the
bed for a change.
"Millard," he said, with a Bohemian freedom of address, "you must know
more about society than I do. Give me advice on a point of etiquette."
Charley Millard was flattered as he never had been flattered before. He
had not hoped to be considered an oracle so soon.
"You see," Bradley went on, "the publisher of a new magazine called the
'United States Monthly' has asked me to dinner. It is away over in
Brooklyn, and, besides, the real reason I can't go is that I haven't got
a dress-coat. Now what is the thing to do about regrets, cards, and so
on?"
Fresh from reading his new "Guide to Good Manners," Millard felt
competent to decide any question of Bristol-board, however weighty or
complicated. He delivered his opinion with great assurance in the very
words of the book.
"I believe in my soul," said Bradley, laughing, "that you prigged that
from the 'Guide to Good Manners as Recognized in the Very Best
Society.'"
Millard looked foolish, but answered good-naturedly, "Well, what if I
did? Have you read the book?"
Bradley rocked his long slender body backward and forward as though
about to fall into a spasm with suppressed merriment.
"There is only one good thing I can say for that book," he said,
recovering himself.
"What's that?" asked Millard, a little vexed with the unaccountable
mirth of his host.
"Why, that I got two hundred dollars for writing it."
"You wrote it?" exclaimed Millard, not concealing his opinion that
Bradley was not a suitable person to give lessons in politeness.
"You see I was offered two hundred for a book on manners. I needed the
money most consumedly. There was Sampson, who knew, or thought he knew,
all about the ways of the world, though, between you and me, Sampson
always did do a large business on a plaguy small capital. So I put
Sampson to press and got out of him whatever I could, and then I
rehashed a good deal in a disguised way from the old 'Bazar Book of
Decorum' and the still older Count D'Orsay, and some others. You have to
know how to do such things if you're going to make a living as a
literary man. The title is a sixpenny publisher's lie. In the day of
judgment, authors, or at least those of us doing general literary work,
will get off easy on the ground that poor devils scratching for their
dinners can not afford to be too high-toned, but publishers won't have
that excuse."
Millard made his way home that night with some sense of disappointment.
Being a fine gentleman was not so easy as it had seemed. The heights
grew more and more frosty and inaccessible as he approached them. Yet he
had really made a great advance by his talk with Bradley. He had cleared
the ground of rubbish. And though during the next week he bought two or
three of the books of decorum then in vogue, he had learned to depend
mainly on his own observations and good sense. He had also acquired a
beginning of that large stock of personal information which made him in
after years so remarkable. Natural bent is shown in what a man
assimilates. Not an item of all the personal traits and anecdotes of
writers and publishers brought out in Bradley's unreserved talk had
escaped him, and years afterward he could use Bradley's funny stories to
give piquancy to conversation.
It was this memory of individual traits and his tactful use of it that
helped to launch him on the sea of social success. The gentleman who sat
next to him at dinner, the lady who chatted with him at a tea or a
reception, felt certain that a man who knew all about every person in
any way distinguished in society could not be quite without
conspicuousness of some sort himself. This belief served to open doors
to him. Moreover, his fund of personal gossip, judiciously and
good-naturedly used, made him a valuable element in a small company; the
interest never flagged when he talked. Then, too, Millard had a knack
of repeating in a way that seemed almost accidental, or at least purely
incidental, what this or that noted person had said to him. It was in
appearance only an embellishment of his talk, but it served to keep up a
belief in the breadth, and especially the height, of his acquaintance.
If he had only been presented to Mrs. Manorhouse, and she had repeated
her stock witticism in his presence, Millard knew how to quote it as a
remark of Mrs. Manorhouse, but the repose of his manner left the
impression that he set no particular store by the Manorhouses. He early
learned the inestimable value of a chastened impudence to a man with
social ambitions.
Some sacrifice of self-respect? Doubtless. But what getter-on in the
world is there that does not have to pay down a little self-respect now
and then? Your millionaire usually settles at a dear rate, and to be a
great statesman implies that one has paid a war tariff in this specie.
One of the talents that contributed to Millard's success was a knack of
taking accomplishments quickly. Whether it was fencing, or boxing, or
polo that was the temporary vogue; whether it was dancing, or speaking
society French, he held his own with the best. In riding he was easily
superior to the riding-school cavaliers, having the advantage of
familiarity with a horse's back from the time he had bestrode the
plow-horses on their way to water. Though he found time in his first
years in New York for only one little run in Europe, he always had the
air of a traveled man, so quickly did he absorb information, imitate
fashions, and get rid of provincial manners and prejudices. His friends
never knew where he learned anything. When a Frenchman of title was
basking in New York drawing-rooms it was found that Millard was equal to
a tête-à-tête with the monolingual foreigner, though his accent was
better than his vocabulary was copious. His various accomplishments of
course represented many hours of toil, but it was toil of which his
associates never heard. He treated himself as a work of art, of which
the beholder must judge only by the charming result, with no knowledge
of the foregoing effort, no thought of the periods of ugly
incompleteness that have been passed on the way to perfection.
III.
A SPONTANEOUS PEDIGREE.
It was not until the battle was more than half won, and Millard had
become a welcome guest in some of the most exclusive houses, that he was
outfitted with a pedigree. He knew little of his ancestors except that
his father's grandfather was a humble private soldier at the storming of
Stony Point. This great-grandfather's name was Miller. Dutch or German
neighbors had called him Millerd by some confusion with other names
having a similar termination, and as he was tolerably illiterate, and
rarely wrote his name, the change came to be accepted. A new
schoolmaster who spelled it Millerd in the copy-book of Charley's
grandfather fixed the orthography and pronunciation in the new form.
About the time that Millard Fillmore became President by succession, the
contemporary Millerds, who were Whigs, substituted _a_ for the _e_ in
the name. After he came to New York, Charley shifted the accent to the
last syllable to conform to a fashion by which a hundred old English
names have been treated to a Gallic accent in America. After this
acquisition of a new accent Charley was frequently asked whether he were
not of Huguenot descent; to which he was wont to reply prudently that he
had never taken much interest in genealogy. Just why it is thought more
creditable for a resident of New York to have descended from a Huguenot
peasant or artisan than from an English colonist, those may tell who
fancy that social pretenses have a rational basis.
Charley's mother's father was named Vandam. The family had been a little
ashamed of the old Dutch cognomen; it had such a wicked sound that they
tried to shift the accent to the first syllable. Among the fads that
Charley had taken up for a time after he came to New York was that of
collecting old prints. In looking over a lot of these one day in a
second-hand book-shop, he stumbled on a picture of the colonial period
in which was represented one of the ancient Dutch churches of New York.
There was a single stately carriage passing in front of the church, and
the artist had taken the pains to show the footman running before the
coach. The picture was dedicated to "Rip Van Dam, Esq.," president of
the council of the colony of New York. As a Christian name "Rip" did not
tend to take the curse off the Van Dam. But this picture made Charley
aware that at least one of the Van Dams had been a great man in his day.
He reflected that this must be the old Rip's own carriage delineated in
the foreground of the picture of which he was the patron; and this must
be his footman charging along at breakneck pace to warn all vulgar carts
to get out of the great gentleman's road. Millard bought the print and
hung it in his sitting-room; for since he had been promoted in the bank
and had been admitted to a fashionable club, he had moved into bachelor
apartments suitable to his improving fortunes and social position. He
had also committed himself to the keeping of an English man-servant--he
did not like to call him his valet, lest the appearance of ostentation
and Anglomania should prejudice him with his business associates. But
somehow the new dignity of his own surroundings seemed to lend something
bordering on probability to the conjecture that this once
acting-governor of New York, Rip Van Dam, might have been one of
Charley's ancestors.
Millard hung this print on one side of the chimney in his apartment, a
chimney that had a pair of andirons and three logs of wood in it. But
whether this or any other chimney in the Graydon Building was fitted to
contain a fire nobody knew; for the building was heated by steam, and no
one had been foolhardy enough to discover experimentally just what would
happen if fire were actually lighted in fireplaces so unrealistic as
these. On the other side of his chimney Charley hung a print of the
storming of Stony Point. One evening, Philip Gouverneur, one of
Millard's new cronies, who was calling on him, asked "Millard, what have
you got that old meeting-house on your wall for?"
"Well, you see," said Millard, with the air of a man but languidly
interested,--your real gentleman always affects to be bored by what he
cares for,--"you see I put it there because it is dedicated to old Rip
Van Dam."
"What do you care for that old cuss?" went on Gouverneur, who, being of
the true blue blood himself, had a fad of making game of the whole race
of ancient worthies.
"I don't really care," said Charley; "but as my mother was a Vandam, she
may have descended from this Rip. I have no documents to prove it."
"Oh, I see. Excuse me for making fun of your forefathers. I say every
mean thing I can think of about mine, but another man's grandfather is
sacred. You see I couldn't help smiling at the meeting-house on one side
and that old-fashioned, bloody bayonet-charge on the other."
"Oh, that's only another case of ancestor," said Millard; "my
great-grandfather was at Stony Point."
"The more fool he," said Gouverneur. "My forefathers, now, contrived to
keep out of bayonet-charges, and shed for their country mostly ink and
oratory, speeches and documents."
Though Philip Gouverneur did not care for ancestors, his mother did. The
one thing that enabled Mrs. Gouverneur to look down on the whole brood
of railway magnates, silver-mine kings, and Standard Oil operators, who,
as she phrased it, "had intruded into New York," was the fact that her
own family had taken an historic part in the Revolutionary struggle. At
this very moment she was concocting a ball in memory of the evacuation
of New York, and she was firmly resolved that on this occasion no
upstart of an Astor or a Vanderbilt, much less any later comer, should
assist--nobody but those whose families were distinctly of Revolutionary
or colonial dignity. In truth, Mrs. Gouverneur had some feeling of
resentment that the capitalist families were of late disposed to take
themselves for leaders in society, and to treat the merely old families
as dispensable if necessary. This assembly to be made up exclusively of
antiques was her countermove.
It cost her something of a struggle. There were amiable people,
otherwise conspicuously eligible, whom she must omit if she adhered to
her plan, and there were some whom she despised that must be asked on
account of the illustriousness of their pedigree. But Mrs. Gouverneur
had set out to check the deterioration of society in New York, and she
was not the woman to draw back when principle demanded the sacrifice of
her feelings. She had taken the liveliest fancy to young Millard, who by
a charming address, obliging manners, and an endless stock of useful
information had made himself an intimate in the Gouverneur household. He
had come to dine with them informally almost every alternate Sunday
evening. To leave him out would be a dreadful cut; but what else could
she do? What would be said of her set of old china if she inserted such
a piece of new porcelain? What would Miss Lavinia Vandeleur, special
oracle on the genealogy of the exclusive families, think, if Mrs.
Gouverneur should be so recreant to right principles as to invite a
young man without a single grandfather to his back, only because he had
virtues of his own?
"I say, mother," said Philip, her son, when he came to look over the
list, "you haven't got Charley Millard down."
"Well, how can I invite Mr. Millard? He has no family."
"No family! Why, he is a descendant of old Governor Van Dam, and one of
his ancestors was an officer under Wayne at Stony Point."
"Are you sure, Philip?"
"Certainly: he has pictures of Stony Point and of Rip Van Dam hanging in
his room. No Revolutionary party would be complete without him."
Mrs. Gouverneur looked at Philip suspiciously; he had a way of quizzing
her; but his face did not flinch, and she was greatly relieved to think
she had missed making the mistake of omitting a friend with so eligible
a backing. Millard was invited, rather to his own surprise, and taken
into preliminary councils as a matter of course. When the introductory
minuet had been danced, and the ball was at its height, Philip
Gouverneur, with a smile of innocence, led his friend straight to Miss
Vandeleur, who proudly wore the very dress in which, according to a
rather shaky tradition, her great-great aunt had poured tea for General
Washington.
"Miss Vandeleur," said Philip, "let me present Mr. Millard."
Miss Vandeleur gave Millard one of the bows she kept ready for people of
no particular consequence.
"Mr. Millard is real old crockery," said Philip in a half-confidential
tone. "Some of us think it enough to be Revolutionary, but he is a
descendant of Rip Van Dam, the old governor of New York in the
seventeenth century."
Miss Vandeleur's face relaxed, and she remarked that judging from his
name, as well as from something in his appearance, Mr. Millard must
have come, like herself, from one of the old Huguenot families.
"Revolutionary, too, Charley?" said Philip, looking at Millard. Then to
Miss Vandeleur, "One of his ancestors was second in command in the
charge on Stony Point."
"Ah, Philip, you put it too strongly, I--"
"There's Governor Cadwallader waiting to speak to you, Miss Vandeleur,"
interrupted Philip, bowing and drawing Millard away. "Don't say a word,
Charley. The most of Miss Vandeleur's information is less sound than
what I told her about you. Nine-tenths of all such a genealogy huckster
takes for gospel is just rot. I knew that Rip Van Dam would impress her
if I put it strongly and said seventeenth century. You see the further
away your forefather is, the more the virtue. Ancestry is like
homeopathic medicine, the oftener it is diluted the greater the
potency."
"Yes," said Millard; "and a remote ancestor has the advantage that
pretty much everything to his discredit has been forgotten."
Charley knew that this faking of a Millard pedigree by his friend would
prove as valuable to him as a decoration in the eyes of certain
exclusive people. His conscience did not escape without some qualms; he
did not like to be labeled what he was not. But he had learned by this
time that society of every grade is in great part a game of Mild Humbug,
and that this game, like all others, must be played according to rule.
Each player has a right to make the most of his hand, whatever it may
be. He had begun without a single strong card. Neither great wealth,
personal distinction, nor noted family had fallen to him. But in the
game of Mild Humbug as in almost all other games, luck and good play go
for much; with skill and fortune a weak card may take the trick, and
Millard was in a fair way to win against odds.
IV.
THE BANK OF MANHADOES.
When a farmer turns a strange cow into his herd she has to undergo a
competitive examination. The fighter of the flock, sometimes a
reckless-looking creature with one horn turned down as a result of
former battles, walks directly up to the stranger, as in duty bound. The
duel is in good form and preceded by ceremonious bowing on both sides;
one finds here the origin of that scrape with the foot which was an
essential part of all obeisance before the frosty perpendicular English
style came in. Politeness over, the two brutes lock horns, and there is
a trial of strength, weight, and bovine persistency; let the one that
first gives ground look out for a thrust in the ribs! But once the
newcomer has settled her relative social standing and knows which of her
fellows are to have the _pas_ of her at the hayrick and the
watering-place, and which she in turn may safely bully, all is peace in
the pasture.
Something like this takes place in our social herds. In every
government, cabinet, party, or deliberative body there is the
preliminary set-to until it is discovered who, by one means or another,
can push the hardest. Not only in governments and political bodies but
in every corporation, club, Dorcas society, base-ball league, church,
and grocery store, the superficial observer sees what appears to be
harmony and even brotherly unity; it is only the result of preliminary
pushing matches by which the equilibrium of offensive and defensive
qualities has been ascertained. And much that passes for domestic
harmony is nothing but a prudent acquiescence in an arrangement based on
relative powers of annoyance.
This long preamble goeth to show that if the Bank of Manhadoes had its
rivalries it was not singular. In the light of the general principles we
have evoked, the elbowings among the officers of the bank are lifted
into the dignity of instances, examples, phenomena illustrating human
nature and human history. More far-reaching than human nature, they are
offshoots of the great struggle for existence, which, as we moderns have
had the felicity to discover, gives rise to the survival of the tough
and the domination of the pugnacious--the annihilation of the tender and
the subjugation of the sensitive.
When Millard entered the bank there existed a conflict in the board of
directors, and a division of opinion extending to the stockholders,
between those who sustained and those who opposed the policy of the
Masters-Farnsworth administration. But the administration proved
fortunate and successful to such a degree that the opposition and
rivalry presently died away or lost hope. Once the opposition to the two
managers had disappeared, the lack of adjustment between the president
and cashier became more pronounced. Farnsworth was the victim of a
chronic asthma, and he was as ambitious as he was restless. The wan
little man was untiring in his exertions because the trouble he had to
get breath left him no temptation to repose. He contrived to find vent
for his uneasiness by communicating a great deal of it to others.
Masters, the president, was a man of sixty-five, with neither disease
nor ambition preying on his vitals. For a long while he allowed
Farnsworth to have his way in most things, knowing that if one entered
into contention with Farnsworth there was no hope of ever making an end
of it except by death or surrender. That which was decided yesterday
against Farnsworth was sure to be reopened this morning; and though
finally settled again to-day, it was all to be gone over to-morrow; nor
would it be nearer to an adjustment next week. Compromise did no good:
Farnsworth accepted your concession to-day, and then higgled you to
split the difference on the remainder to-morrow, until you had so small
a dividend left that it was not worth holding to.
But in dealing with a man like Masters it was possible to carry the
policy of grand worry too far. When at length this rather phlegmatic man
made up his mind that Farnsworth was systematically bullying him--a
conclusion that Mrs. Masters helped him to reach--he became the very
granite of obstinacy, offering a quiet but unyielding resistance to the
cashier's aggressiveness. But an ease-loving man could not keep up this
sort of fight forever. Masters knew this as well as any one, and he
therefore felt the need of some buffer between him and his associate.
There were two positions contemplated in the organization of the bank
that had never yet been filled. One was that of vice-president, the
other that of assistant cashier. By filling the assistant cashier's
place with an active, aggressive man, Masters might secure an ally who
could attack Farnsworth on the other flank. But in doing that he would
have to disappoint Millard, who was steadily growing in value to the
bank, but who, from habitual subordination to Farnsworth, and the
natural courtesy of his disposition, could not be depended on to offer
much resistance. To introduce a stranger would be to disturb the status
quo, and the first maxim in the conduct of institutions is to avoid
violent changes. Once the molecules of an organization are set into
unusual vibration it is hard to foretell what new combinations they may
form. And your practical man dislikes, of all things, to invite the
unforeseen and the incalculable.
The election of a vice-president would bring a new man into the bank
over the head of Farnsworth, but it would also produce a disturbance
from which Masters felt a shrinking natural to an experienced and
conservative administrator. Moreover, there was no one connected with
the direction, or even holding stock in the bank, suitable to be put
over Farnsworth. Unless, indeed, it were thought best to bring Hilbrough
from Brooklyn. To introduce so forceful a man as Hilbrough into the
management would certainly be a great thing for the bank, and it would
not fail to put an end to the domination of Farnsworth. But Masters
reflected that it might equally reduce his own importance. And with all
his irritation against Farnsworth the president disliked to deal him too
severe a blow.
If the matter had been left to Mrs. Masters, there would have been no
relentings. In her opinion Farnsworth ought to be put out. Aren't you
president, Mr. Masters? Why don't you _be_ president, then? Don't like
to be too hard on him? That's just like you. I'd just put him out, and
there'd be an end of his fussiness once for all. _Of course_ you _could_
if you set about it. You are always saying that you don't like to let
feeling interfere with business. But I wouldn't stand Farnsworth--little
shrimp!--setting up to run a bank. Ill? Well, he ought to be; makes
himself ill meddling with other people. He'd be better if he didn't
worry about what doesn't belong to him. I'd give him rest. It's all well
enough to sneer at a woman's notion of business, but the bank would be
better off if you had entire control of it. The directors know that,
they _must_ know it; they are not blind.
There were no half-tones in Mrs. Master's judgment; everything was
painted in coal blacks or glittering whites. She saw no mediums in
character; he who was not good in every particular was capable of most
sorts of deviltry, in her opinion.
This antagonism between the president and the cashier did not reach its
acute stage until Millard had been in the bank for more than three
years. Millard had made his way in the estimation of the directors in
part by his ever-widening acquaintance with people of importance. His
social connections enabled him to be of service to many men whose
good-will was beneficial to the bank, and he was a ready directory to
financial and family relationships, and to the business history and
standing of those with whom the bank had dealings. Add to these
advantages his considerable holdings of the bank's stock, and it is easy
to comprehend how in spite of his youth he had come to stand next to
Masters and Farnsworth. The dissensions between these two were
disagreeable to one who had a decided preference for quietude and
placidity of manners; but he kept aloof from their quarrel, though he
must have had private grievances against a superior so pragmatical as
Farnsworth.
A sort of magnanimity was mingled with craft in Masters's constitution,
and, besides, he much preferred the road that was likely to give him the
fewest jolts. The natural tendency of his irritation was to die away.
This would have been the result in spite of the spur that Mrs. Masters
supplied--applied, rather--if Farnsworth could have been content to let
things take their natural course; but he could not abide to let anything
go its natural way: he would have attempted a readjustment of the
relations between the moon and tides if he had thought himself favorably
situated for puttering in such matters. The temporary obstruction which
Masters offered to his fussy willfulness seemed to the cashier an
outrage hard to be borne. After he had taken so many tedious years to
establish his ascendancy in nine-tenths of the bank's affairs it was
sheer impertinence in Masters to wish to have any considerable share in
the management. The backset to his ambition made him more sleepless than
ever, bringing on frequent attacks of asthma. He lost interest even in
the dinner parties, with a business squint, that he had been so fond of
giving. Mrs. Farnsworth was under the frequent necessity of holding a
platter of burning stramonium under his nose to subdue the paroxysms of
wheezing that threatened to cut short his existence. Along with the
smoke of the stramonium she was wont to administer a soothing smudge of
good advice, beseeching him not to worry about things, though she knew
perfectly that he would never cease to worry about things so long as his
attenuated breath was not wholly turned off. She urged him to make
Masters do his share of the work, and to take a vacation himself, or to
resign outright, so as to spend his winters in Jacksonville. But every
new paroxysm brought to Farnsworth a fresh access of resentment against
Masters, whom he regarded as the source of all his woes. In his wakeful
nights he planned a march on the very lines that Masters had proposed.
He would get Millard made assistant cashier, and then have himself
advanced to vice-president, with Millard, or some one on whom he could
count more surely, for cashier. He proposed nothing less than to force
the president out of all active control, and, if possible, to compel him
to resign. No qualms of magnanimity disturbed this deoxygenated man. It
was high time for Masters to resign, if for no other reason than that
Farnsworth might occupy the private office. This inner office was a
badge of Masters's superiority not to be endured.
There was one director, Meadows, whom Farnsworth lighted on as a
convenient agent in his intrigue. Meadows had belonged to the old
opposition which had resisted both the president and cashier. He was
suspected of a desire to make a place for his brother, who had been
cashier of a bank that had failed, and who had broken in nerve force
when the bank broke. Farnsworth, who rode about in a coupé to save his
breath for business and contention, drove up in front of Meadows's shop
one morning at half-past nine, and made his way back among chandeliers
of many patterns in incongruous juxtaposition, punctuated with wall
burners and table argands. In the private office at the back he found
Meadows opening his letters. He was a round-jawed man with blue eyes, an
iron-oxide complexion, stiff, short, rusty hair, red-yellow
side-whiskers, an upturned nose, and a shorn chin, habitually thrust
forward. Once seated and his wind recovered, Farnsworth complained at
some length that he found it hard to carry all the responsibility of the
bank without adequate assistance.
"You ought to have an experienced assistant," said Meadows. This was the
first occasion on which any officer of the bank had shown his good sense
by consulting Meadows, and he was on that account the more disposed to
encourage Farnsworth.
"If, now," said Farnsworth, "I could have as good a man as they say your
brother is, I would be better fixed. But an experienced man like your
brother would not take the place of assistant cashier."
Meadows was not so sure that his brother would refuse any place, but he
thought it better not to say anything in reply. Farnsworth, who had no
desire to take Meadows's brother unless he should be driven to it, saw
the dangerous opening he had left. He therefore proceeded, as soon as
he could get breath:
"Besides, the assistant's place belongs naturally to young Millard, and
he would have influence enough to defeat anybody else who might be
proposed. He is a good fellow, but he can't take responsibility. If
Masters were not the cold-blooded man he is, he would have made Millard
assistant cashier long ago, and advanced me to be vice-president."
"And then you would want some good man for cashier," said Meadows.
"Precisely," said Farnsworth; "that is just it."
"I think we can do that with or without Masters," said Meadows, turning
his head to one side with a quiet air of defiance. He was only too well
pleased to renew his fight against Masters with Farnsworth for ally. The
question of his brother's appointment was after all an auxiliary one; he
loved faction and opposition pure and simple.
"I am sure we can," said Farnsworth. "Of course my hand must not appear.
But if a motion were to be made to advance both Millard and me one step,
I don't think Masters would dare oppose it."
"I'll make the motion," said Meadows, with something like a sniff, as
though, like Job's war-horse, he smelled the battle and liked the odor.
In taking leave Farnsworth told Meadows that he had not yet spoken to
Millard about the matter, and he thought it not best to mention it to
him before the meeting. But the one thing that rendered Meadows
tolerably innocuous was that he never could co-operate with an ally,
even in factious opposition, without getting up a new faction within the
first, and so fomenting subdivisions as long as there were two to
divide. The moment Farnsworth had left him he began to reflect
suspiciously that the cashier intended to tell Millard himself, and so
take the entire credit of the promotion. This would leave Farnsworth
free to neglect Meadows's brother. Meadows, therefore, resolved to tell
Millard in advance and thus put the latter under obligation to further
his brother's interest. He gave himself great credit for a device by
which he would play Farnsworth against Masters and then head off
Farnsworth with Millard. Farnsworth wished to use him to pull some
rather hot chestnuts out of the fire, and he chuckled to think that he
had arranged to secure his own share of the nuts first.
With this profound scheme in his head, Meadows contrived to encounter
Millard at luncheon, an encounter which the latter usually took some
pains to avoid, for Millard was fastidious in eating as in everything
else and he disliked to see Meadows at the table. Not that the latter
did not know the use of fork and napkin, but he assaulted his food with
a ferocity that, as Millard once remarked, "lent too much support to the
Darwinian hypothesis."
On the day of his conversation with Farnsworth, Meadows bore down on the
table where Millard sat alone, disjointing a partridge.
"Goo' morning," he said, abruptly seating himself on the rail of the
chair opposite to Millard, and beckoning impatiently to a waiter, who
responded but languidly, knowing that Meadows was opposed to the tip
system from both principle and interest.
When he had given his order and then, as usual, called back the waiter
as he was going out the door, waving his hand at him and uttering a
"H-i-s-t, waitah!" to tell him that he did not want his meat so fat as
it had been the last time, he gave his attention to Millard and
introduced the subject of the approaching meeting of the directors.
"Why doesn't old Rip Van Winkle wake up?" said Meadows. "Why doesn't he
make you assistant cashier? I'm sure you deserve it."
"Well, now, if you put it that way, Mr. Meadows, and leave it to me, I
will say candidly that I suppose the real reason for not promoting me is
that Mr. Masters, being a man of sound judgment, feels that he can not
do me justice under the circumstances. If I had my deserts I'd be
president of the bank; but it would be too much to ask a gentleman at
Mr. Masters's time of life to move out of his little office just to make
room for a deserving young man."
"You may joke, but you know that Masters is jealous. Why doesn't he
promote Farnsworth to be vice-president? You know that Farnsworth really
runs the bank."
"It isn't his fault if he doesn't," said Millard in a half-whisper.
"I believe that if I made a move to advance both you and Farnsworth it
could be carried." Meadows looked inquiringly at his companion.
"What would become of the cashiership?" asked Millard. "I suppose we
could divide that between us." "Won't you try a glass of Moselle?" And
he passed the bottle to Meadows, who poured out a glass of it--he never
declined wine when some one else paid for it--while Millard kept on
talking to keep from saying anything. "I like to drink the health of any
man who proposes to increase my salary, Mr. Meadows." Millard observed
with disgust that the bank director drank off the wine at a gulp as he
might have taken any vulgar claret, with an evident lack of
appreciation. Millard himself was a light drinker; nothing but the
delicate flavor of good wine could make drinking tolerable to him. The
mind of Meadows, however, was intent on the subject under discussion.
"The cashiership," he said, "could either be filled by some experienced
man or it might be left vacant for a while."
Millard saw a vision of Meadows, the discouraged brother, stepping in
over his head.
"If a cashier should be put in now," said Meadows, "it would end
presently in old Rip Van Winkle's resigning, and then an advance along
the whole line would move you up once more." Meadows thought that this
sop would reconcile Millard to having his brother interpolated above
him.
"That's a good plan," said Millard, using his finger-bowl; "and then if
Mr. Farnsworth would only be kind enough to die in one of his attacks,
and the other man should get rich by speculation and retire, I'd come
to be president at last. That is the only place suited to a modest and
worthy young man like myself."
This fencing annoyed Meadows, who was by this time salting and peppering
his roast beef, glaring at it the while like a boa-constrictor
contemplating a fresh victim in anticipation of the joys of deglutition.
Millard saw the importance of letting Masters know about this new move,
and feared that Meadows would attempt to put him under bonds of secrecy.
So, as he rose to go, like a prairie traveler protecting himself by
back-firing, he said:
"If you're really serious in this matter, Mr. Meadows, I suppose you'll
take pains not to have it generally known. For one thing, if you won't
tell anybody else, I'll promise you not to tell my wife."
"And if Farnsworth speaks to you about it," said Meadows, "don't tell
him that I have said anything to you. He wanted to tell you himself."
"I'll not let him know that you said anything about it."
And with that Millard went out. The bait of the assistant cashiership
was not tempting enough to draw him into this intrigue. The greater part
of his capital was in the bank, and he knew that the withdrawal of
Masters would be a misfortune to him. Finding that Farnsworth was out,
Millard went to the president's room under color of showing him a letter
of importance. A man of dignity doesn't like to seem to bear tales with
malice prepense. When he was about to leave Millard said:
"I hear that a motion is to be made looking to changes in the personnel
of the bank."
The president was a little startled; his first impression from this
remark being that somehow Millard had got wind of the plans he had
revolved and then discarded.
"What do you hear?" he said, in his usual non-committal way.
"Nothing very definite, but something that leads me to think that Mr.
Farnsworth would like to be vice-president and that Meadows would
consent to have his brother take the cashiership."
"No doubt, no doubt," said Mr. Masters, smiling. It was his habit to
smile when he felt the impulse to frown. He did not like to seem
ignorant of anything going on in the bank, so he said no more to
Millard, but let the conversation drop. He presently regretted this, and
by the time Millard had reached his desk he was recalled.
"You understand that Mr. Farnsworth and Meadows are acting in concert?"
"I have reason to think so."
"Do you think it would be wise to make Mr. Farnsworth vice-president?"
Millard turned the palms of his hands upward and shrugged his shoulders.
He made no other reply than to add, "You know him as well as I do."
"Who would be a good man for the place?"
"Have you thought of Hilbrough?"
"Yes, he would bring real strength to the bank; and, Mr. Millard, there
is one promotion I have long had in mind," said the president. "You
ought to be made assistant cashier, with a considerably larger salary
than you have been getting."
Millard made a slight bow. "I'm sure you don't expect me to offer
serious opposition to that proposal." Then he could not refrain from
adding, "I believe Mr. Farnsworth and Meadows have also reached that
conclusion."
There was no opportunity to reply to this; Farnsworth was heard wheezing
outside the door.
Masters thought rapidly that afternoon. He admitted to himself, as he
had hardly done before, that he was growing old and that a successful
bank ought to have some more vigorous man than he in its management;
some man of ideas more liberal than Farnsworth's, and of more age and
experience than this young Millard. His mind turned to Hilbrough, the
real-estate agent in Montague Street, Brooklyn. First a poor clerk, then
a small collector of tenement-house rents, then a prosperous real-estate
agent and operator on his own account, he had come by shrewd investment
to be a rich man. He was accustomed to make call loans to a large amount
on collateral security, and his business was even now almost that of a
private banker. A director in the Bank of Manhadoes from its beginning
and one of its largest stockholders, he was the most eligible man to
succeed Masters in the active management of its affairs, and the only
man whose election once proposed would certainly command the support of
the directors against the scheme of Farnsworth. He was the one possible
man who would prove quite too large for Farnsworth's domineering. It
was with a pang that Masters reflected that he too would be effaced in a
measure by the advent of a man so vital as Warren Hilbrough; but there
was for him only the choice between being effaced by Hilbrough's
superior personality and being officially put out of the way by
Farnsworth's process of slow torture. He saw, too, that a bank with four
high-grade officers would have a more stable official equilibrium than
one where the power is shared between two. The head of such an
institution is sheltered from adverse intrigues by the counterpoise of
the several officers to one another.
If Masters had needed any stimulus to his resolution to contravene the
ambitious plans of the cashier, Mrs. Masters would have supplied it.
When she heard of Farnsworth's scheme, she raised again her old cry of
_Carthago delenda est_, Farnsworth must be put out. In her opinion
nothing else would meet the requirement of poetic justice; but she
despaired of persuading Masters to a measure so extreme. It was always
the way. Mr. Masters was too meek for anything; he would let people run
over him.
But Masters had no notion of being run over. He went to the office every
day, and from the office he went to his country-place in New Jersey
every afternoon. There was nothing in his actions to excite the
suspicion of the cashier, who could not know that negotiations with
Hilbrough, and the private submission of the proposition to certain
directors, had all been intrusted to the tact of Charley Millard. It was
rather hard on Millard, too; for though he enjoyed his success in an
undertaking so delicate, he regretted two dinner parties and one
desirable reception that he was compelled to forego in order to carry on
his negotiations out of bank hours.
The day before the directors met, Farnsworth confided to Millard his
intention to have him made assistant cashier. Millard said that if Mr.
Masters and the directors should agree to that he would be very well
pleased. Considering his evident loyalty to Masters, Farnsworth did not
think it wise to tell Millard anything further.
In the board of directors Meadows sat with a more than usually defiant
face--with a face which showed premonitions of exultation. Farnsworth
felt sure of his game, but he found breathing so laborious that he did
not show any emotion. Masters thought it best to soften the humiliation
of his associate as much as possible by forestalling his proposition. So
at the first moment he suggested to the directors that the bank needed
new force, on account both of his own advancing years and of Mr.
Farnsworth's ill-health, much aggravated by his excessive industry. He
therefore proposed to have Mr. Hilbrough made vice-president with the
same salary as that paid to the president, to add a thousand to the
cashier's salary, and to promote Mr. Millard to be assistant cashier on
a salary of five thousand a year. He said that the prosperity of the
bank justified the increased expense, and that the money would be well
invested.
Meadows opposed this plan as extravagant. He favored the promotion of
Mr. Millard, and the promotion of Mr. Farnsworth to be vice-president,
leaving the cashiership vacant for a while. But the directors,
accustomed to follow the lead of Masters and Hilbrough, and suspicious
of Meadows as habitually factious, voted the president's proposition.
Farnsworth went home and to bed. Then he asked for a vacation and went
South. The bank officers sent him a handsome bouquet when he sailed away
on the Savannah steamer; for commerce by the very rudeness of its
encounters makes men forgiving. In business it is unprofitable to
cherish animosities, and contact with a great variety of character makes
business men usually more tolerant than men of secluded lives.
Farnsworth, for his part, was as pleased as a child might have been with
the attention paid him on his departure, and Mrs. Farnsworth was
delighted that her husband had consented to take rest, and "make the
others do their share of the work."
V.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE HILBROUGHS.
Of course there is a small set who affect not to mingle freely with
newly prosperous people like the Hilbroughs. These are they in whose
estimation wealth and distinction only gain their proper flavor--their
bouquet, so to speak--by resting stagnant for three generations, for
gentility, like game, acquires an admirable highness by the lapse of
time. Descendants of the Lord knows whom, with fortunes made the devil
knows how, fondly imagine that a village storekeeper who has risen to
affluence is somehow inferior to the grandson of a Dutch sailor who
amassed a fortune by illicit trade with the Madagascar pirates, or a
worse trade in rum and blackamoors on the Guinea coast, and that a
quondam bookkeeper who has fairly won position and money by his own
shrewdness is lower down than the lineal descendant of an Indian trader
who waxed great by first treating and then cheating shivering Mohawks.
Which only shows that we are prone to plant ourselves on the sound
traditions of ancestors; for where is the aristocracy which does not
regard wealth won by ancient thievery as better than money modernly
earned in a commonplace way? But among a gentry so numerous and so
democratic, in spite of itself, as that of our American Babel,
exclusiveness works discomfort mainly to the exclusive. The Hilbroughs
are agreeable Americans, their suppers are provided by the best
caterers, their house has been rendered attractive by boughten taste,
and the company one sees there is not more stupid than that in other
miscellaneous assemblies.
People who are Livingstons of the manor on their great-grandmother's
side, and Van Something-or-others on the side of a great-great-uncle by
his second marriage, and who perhaps have never chanced to be asked to
the Hilbroughs' receptions, shrug their shoulders, and tell you that
they do not know them. But Mrs. Hilbrough does not slight such families
because of the colonialness of their ancestry. Her own progenitors came
to America in some capacity long before the disagreement about the Stamp
Act, though they were not brilliant enough to buy small kingdoms from
the Hudson River Indians with jews'-harps and cast-iron hatchets, nor
supple enough to get manor lordships by bribes to royal governors.
I suppose the advent of the Hilbroughs in society might be dated from
the first reception they gave in New York, though, for that matter, the
Hilbroughs do not take pains to date it at all. For it is a rule of good
society that as soon as you arrive you affect to have always been there.
Of other ascents men boast; of social success, rarely. Your millionaire,
for example,--and millionairism is getting so common as to be almost
vulgar,--your millionaire never tires of telling you how he worked the
multiplication table until cents became dimes, and dimes well sown
blossomed presently into dollars, till hundreds swelled to hundreds of
thousands, and the man who had been a blithe youth but twenty years
before became the possessor of an uneasy tumor he calls a fortune. Once
this narrative is begun no matter that you beat your breast with
reluctance to hear out the tedious tale, while loud bassoons perchance
are calling you to wedding feasts. Pray hear the modern Whittington with
patience, good reader! The recital of this story is his main consolation
for the boredom of complicated possession in which his life is
inextricably involved--his recoupment for the irksome vigilance with
which he must defend his hoard against the incessant attacks of cheats
and beggars, subscription papers and poor relations. But the man who has
won his way in that illusive sphere we call society sends to swift
oblivion all his processes. In society no man asks another, "How did you
get here?" or congratulates him on moving among better people than he
did ten years ago. Theoretically society is stationary. Even while
breathless from climbing, the newcomer affects to have been always atop.
Warren Hilbrough's family had risen with his bettered circumstances from
a two-story brick in Degraw street, Brooklyn, by the usual stages to a
brownstone "mansion" above the reservoir in New York. When he came to be
vice-president of the Bank of Manhadoes, Hilbrough had in a measure
reached the goal of his ambition. He felt that he could slacken the
strenuousness of his exertions and let his fortune expand naturally
under prudent management. But Mrs. Hilbrough was ten years younger than
her husband, and her ambition was far from spent. She found herself only
on the threshold of her career. In Brooklyn increasing prosperity had
made her a leader in church fairs and entertainments. The "Church
Social" had often assembled at her house, and she had given a reception
in honor of the minister when he came back from the Holy Land--a party
which the society reporter of the "Brooklyn Daily Eagle" had pronounced
"a brilliant affair." This last stroke had put her at the head of her
little world. But now that Hilbrough was vice-president of the Bank of
Manhadoes, the new business relations brought her invitations from
beyond the little planetary system that revolved around the Reverend Dr.
North. It became a question of making her way in the general society of
Brooklyn, which had long drawn its members from the genteel quarters of
the Heights, the Hill, and the remoter South Brooklyn, and, in later
days, also from Prospect Park Slope. But at the houses of the officers
of the bank she had caught somewhat bewildering vistas of those involved
and undefined circles of people that make up in one way and another
metropolitan society on the New York side of East River. Three years
before Hilbrough entered the bank his family had removed into a new
house in South Oxford street, and lately they had contemplated building
a finer dwelling on the Slope. But Mrs. Hilbrough in a moment of
inspiration decided to omit Brooklyn and to persuade her husband to
remove to New York. There would be many advantages in this course. In
New York her smaller social campaigns were unknown, and by removal she
would be able to readjust with less difficulty her relations with old
friends in Dr. North's congregation. When one goes up one must always
leave somebody behind; but crossing the river would give her a clean
slate, and make it easy to be rid of old scores when she pleased. So it
came about that on the first of May following Hilbrough's accession to
the bank the family in a carriage, and all their belongings on trucks,
were trundled over Fulton Ferry to begin life anew, with painted walls,
more expensive carpets, and twice as many servants. A carriage with a
coachman in livery took the place of the top-buggy in which, by twos,
and sometimes by threes, the Hilbroughs had been wont to enjoy Prospect
Park. The Hilbrough children did not relish this part of the change. The
boys could not see the fun of sitting with folded hands on a carriage
seat while they rumbled slowly through Fifth Avenue and Central Park,
even when the Riverside Park was thrown in. An augmentation of family
dignity was small compensation for the loss of the long drive between
the quadruple lines of maples that shade the Ocean Parkway in full view
of the fast trotting horses which made a whirling maze as they flew past
them in either direction.
"There was some fun in a long Saturday's drive to Coney Island, and
round by Fort Hamilton and the Narrows," muttered Jack, as the horses
toiled up a steep in Central Park; "this here is about as amusing as
riding in a black maria would be."
Ah, Jack! You are too young to comprehend the necessity that rests upon
us of swelling our dignity into some proportion to a growing stock
balance. It is irksome this living on stilts, but an unfortunate
inability to match our fortune by increasing our bulk leaves us no
alternative but to augment our belongings so as to preserve the fitness
of things at any cost. There is as yet no Society for the Emancipation
of Princes, and the Association for the Amelioration of the Condition of
the Children of the Rich has no place in the list of New York
philanthropies.
Mrs. Hilbrough prudently spent her first winter on Manhattan Island in
looking about her. She ventured a dinner company two or three times, but
went no further. She received calls from the wives of those who had, and
those who wished to have, business relations with her husband, and she
returned them, making such observations as she could on the domestic
economy, or rather the domestic extravagance, of those she visited. The
first result of this was that she changed her door-boy. The fine-looking
mulatto she had installed in imitation of some of her richer Brooklyn
acquaintances had to be discharged. The Anglomania of the early eighties
cruelly abolished the handsome darky hall-boy, that most artistic living
bronze, with all his suggestion of barbaric magnificence, and all his
Oriental obsequiousness. His one fault was that he was not English.
Fashion forbade the rich to avail themselves of one of the finest
products of the country. The lackey who took his place had the English
superciliousness, and marked the advance of American civilization by
adding a new discomfort and deformity to the life of people of fashion.
The minister of the church in which the Hilbroughs had taken pews sent
his wife to call on Mrs. Hilbrough, and two of the church officers,
knowing the value of such an acquisition to the church, showed their
Christian feeling in the same way. Many of her old Degraw street and
South Oxford street friends called at the new house, their affection
being quickened by a desire "to see what sort of style the Hilbroughs
are putting on now." Some of her Brooklyn calls she returned out of a
positive liking for good old friends, some because the callers were
those who could introduce her to people she desired to know in New York.
She excused herself from calling on the most of her trans-East-River
acquaintances by urging that it is so much farther from New York to
Brooklyn than it is from Brooklyn to New York, you know. She attended
several large evening receptions in New York, and drank five o'clock tea
at six in the evening at a good many places. She thus made
acquaintances, while with a clever woman's tact she kept her wits about
her and began to "get the hang of the thing," as she expressed it to one
of her confidential friends. Meantime she was as constant in her
attendance at the opera as she had been at the prayer-meeting in former
days.
It was at the beginning of her second winter in New York that she served
notice on Hilbrough that she meant to give a reception; or, as she put
it, "We must give a reception." The children had gone to school, the
butler was otherwise engaged, and there was nobody but a waitress
present.
Hilbrough's face was of that sunny, sanguine sort which always seems to
indicate that things are booming, to borrow a phrase from our modern
argot. His plump, cheery countenance, and the buoyant spontaneity of his
laugh, inspired a confidence which had floated his craft over more than
one financial shoal. But when Mrs. Hilbrough proposed a reception, just
as he finished his coffee, he became meditative, leaned his two large
arms on the table, and made a careful inspection of the china cup: his
wife--Brooklyn woman that she was--had lately made a journey across the
new bridge to buy the set at Ovington's.
"You don't mean one of those stupid crushes," he began, "where all the
people outside are trying to butt their way in, and all those inside are
wishing to heaven that they were well out again--like so many June bugs
and millers on a summer night bumping against both sides of a window
with a candle in it?" Hilbrough finished with a humorous little chuckle
at his own comparison.
"Well," rejoined Mrs. Hilbrough, firmly, "a reception is the thing to
give. We owe it to our social position."
"Social position be hanged!" said Hilbrough, half in vexation, but still
laughing, while his wife tried by frowning to remind him that the use of
such words in the presence of a servant was very improper.
"It seems as though I never could get square with that thing you call
social position. I pay all my other debts and take receipts in full, but
the more money we have the more we owe to social position. I have a
great mind to suspend payment for a while and let social position go to
smash. I detest a reception. I don't mind a nice little gathering of
good friendly folks such as we used to have in Degraw street at the
church socials--"
"Church socials!"
His wife's interruption took Hilbrough's breath. She muttered rather
than spoke these few words, but with a contemptuousness of inflection
that was most expressive. Hilbrough was left in some doubt as to whether
all the contempt was intended for the church socials in Degraw street,
or whether a part of it might not be meant for a husband whose mind had
not kept pace with his fortune.
"I am sure there was real enjoyment in a church social," he said, with a
deprecating laugh, "to say nothing of the money raised to recarpet the
church aisles. And I confess I rather enjoyed the party you gave in
Oxford street when Dr. North got back from the Holy Land."
While Hilbrough was making this speech his wife had, by dumb show,
ordered the waitress to take something down-stairs, in order that there
might be no listener to Hilbrough's autobiographical reminiscences but
herself.
"Well, my dear," she said, taking a conciliatory tone, "our walk in life
has changed, and we must adapt ourselves to our surroundings. You know
you always said that we ought to do our share toward promoting
sociability."
"Sociability!" It was Hilbrough's turn now. His laugh had a note of
derision in it. "W'y, my dear, there is rather more sociability in a
cue of depositors at the teller's window of an afternoon than there was
at Mrs. Master's reception last winter."
"Well, don't let's argue. I hate arguments of all things."
"Most people do, when they get the worst of them," rejoined Hilbrough,
merrily.
"You are positively rude," pouted Mrs. Hilbrough, rising from the table.
If she hated arguments, her husband hated tiffs, and her look of
reproach accomplished what her arguments could not. Hilbrough knew that
at the game of injured innocence he was no match for his wife. The
question in his mind now was to find a line of retreat.
"You ought to have more consideration for my feelings, Warren," she went
on. "Besides, you know you said that whatever widened our acquaintance
was likely to do the bank good. You know you did."
"So I did, my dear; so I did," he answered, soothingly, as he rose from
the table and looked at his watch. "There's one comfort, anyhow. You
don't know a great many people on this side of the river yet, and so I
guess I sha'n't have to put hoops on the house this time, unless you
fetch all Brooklyn across the new bridge."
Mrs. Hilbrough did not care to contradict her husband now that he had
relented. But as for crowding the house she felt sure there was a way to
do it, if she could only find it, and she was resolved not to have fewer
people than Mrs. Masters, and that without depleting Brooklyn.
What she needed was an adviser. She went over the bead-roll of her
acquaintance and found nobody eligible. Those who could have pointed out
to her what were the proper steps to take in such a case were just the
people to whom she was not willing to expose herself in her unfledged
condition. At last she felt obliged to ask Mr. Hilbrough about it.
"Don't you know somebody, my dear, who knows New York better than I do,
who could give me advice about our reception?" This was her opening of
the matter as she sat crocheting by the glowing grate of anthracite in
the large front room on the second floor, while her husband smoked, and
read his evening paper.
"I? How should I know?" he said, laying down the paper. "I don't know
many New York ladies."
"Not a woman! I mean some man. You can't speak to a woman about such
things so well as you can to a man;" and she spread her fancy-work out
over her knee and turned her head on one side to get a good view of its
general effect.
"I should think you would rather confide in a woman." Hilbrough looked
puzzled and curious as he said this.
"You don't understand," she said. "A woman doesn't like to give herself
away to another woman. Women always think you ridiculous if you don't
understand everything, and they remember and talk about it. But a man
likes to give information to a woman. I suppose men like to have a woman
look up to them." Mrs. Hilbrough laughed at the explanation, which was
not quite satisfactory to herself.
"Well," said Hilbrough, after a minute's amused meditation, "the men I
know are all like me. They are business men, and are rather dragged into
society, I suppose, by their wives, and by"--he chuckled merrily at this
point--"by the debts they owe to social position, you know. I don't
believe there's a man in the bank that wouldn't be as likely to ask me
about what coat he ought to wear on any occasion as to give me any
information on the subject. Yes, there is one man. That's young
_Mil_lard, or Mil_lard_, as he calls it. He's a sort of a dude, and I
never could stand dudes. I asked Mr. Masters the other day whether the
assistant cashier was worth so large a salary as five thousand dollars,
and he said that that man had the entry--the _ontray_, as he called
it--to the best houses in New York. He's cheek by jowl with a dozen of
the richest men, he's invited everywhere, and is considered a great
authority on all matters of that kind. He brings some business to the
bank, and he's one of the best judges in New York of a man's character
and responsibility. He knows all about pretty nearly every man whose
note is presented for discount, and, if he does not know at once, he can
generally find out in an hour. I believe he could tell us the name of
the grandmother of almost every prominent depositor if we wished to
know, and how every man got his money."
"Is he rich?"
"Well, nobody seems to know for certain. He has a large slice of the
bank's stock, and he's known to have good investments outside. He's well
enough off to live without his salary if he wanted to. But I am pretty
sure he isn't rich. Belongs to some old family, I suppose."
"I should be afraid of him," said Mrs. Hilbrough, ruefully.
"You needn't be. He's a good enough sort of fellow if he only wouldn't
part his hair in the middle. I can't abide that in a man. But it's no
use being afraid of him. He probably knows all about you and me already.
He first came to see me about coming into the bank, and I don't know but
it was his move to get me."
"Would he come up to dinner some evening?"
"He'd rather like to oblige me. I'll have to get him when he's
disengaged. What shall I tell him?"
"Tell him that Mrs. Hilbrough wishes his advice, and would be glad if he
would come to dinner with us some evening."
"Why do I need to say anything about your wanting advice? I don't just
like to ask a favor of such a dude. I'll ask him to dinner, and you can
ask his advice as though by accident."
"No; that won't do. That kind of man would see through it all. Tell him
that I wish his advice. That will show him that I recognize his position
as an authority. He'll like that better."
Warren Hilbrough suddenly discovered that his wife was cleverer--or, as
he would have said, "smarter"--than he had thought her.
"You are a good hand, Jenny," he said. "You'll win your game." And after
he had resumed the reading of his paper he looked over the top of it
once or twice in furtive admiration of her as she sat between him and
the dark portière, which set her form in relief against the rich
background and made her seem a picture to the fond eyes of her husband.
He reflected that perhaps after all managing church fairs and running
sewing societies was no bad training for a larger social activity.
VI.
PHILLIDA CALLENDER.
"Hilbrough has sent for me," said Millard to Philip Gouverneur, who was
sitting so as to draw his small form into the easy-chair as he smoked by
the open fire in the newspaper room at the Terrapin Club. Millard, who
had never liked tobacco, was pretending to smoke a cigarette because
smoking seemed to him the right thing to do. He had no taste for any
more desperate vice, and tobacco smoke served to take the gloss off a
character which seemed too highly finished for artistic effect.
"Hilbrough"--Charley smiled as he recalled it--"always gets uneasy when
he's talking to me. He takes his foot off the chair and puts it on the
floor. Then he throws himself forward on the table with his elbows
outward, and then he straightens up. He's a jolly kind of man, though,
and a good banker. But his wife--she is the daughter of a Yankee
school-teacher that taught in Brooklyn till he died--is a vigorous
little woman. She hasn't come to New York to live quietly. She's been
head and front of her set in Brooklyn, and the Lord knows what she won't
undertake now that Hilbrough's getting rich very fast. I haven't seen
her yet, but I rather like her in advance. She didn't try to trap me
into an acquaintance, but sent me word that she wanted advice. There's a
woman who knows what she wants, and goes for it with a clear head. But
what can I do for her? She'll be wanting to give a tea or a ball before
she has acquaintances enough. It's awfully ticklish making such people
understand that they must go slow and take what they can get to begin
with."
"Why," said Gouverneur, "you can tell her to take the religious or moral
reform dodge, and invite all the friends of some cause to meet some
distinguished leader of that cause. Bishop Whipple, if she could capture
him, would bring all the Friends of the Red Man, just as Miss Willard or
Mrs. Livermore would fetch the temperance and woman-suffrage people. You
remember the converted Hindu princess they had over here last winter?
Between her rank, and her piety, and her coming from the antipodes, and
her heathen antecedents, she drew beautifully. Fine woman, too. Even my
mother forgave her for not having a drop of Dutch or Revolutionary blood
in her veins, and we all liked her very much. Give Mrs. Hilbrough that
tip."
Millard shook his head, and smiled. He had the appreciative smile of a
man with a genius for listening, which is a better, because a rarer,
contribution to conversation than good speech. Philip, crouched in his
chair with his face averted from the electric lights, went on:
"Well, then you know there is the literary dodge. Have papers read, not
enough to bore people too deeply, but to bore them just enough to give
those who attend an impression of intellectuality. Have discussions of
literary questions, seasoned with stewed terrapin, and decorated with
dress coats and external anatomy gowns. Those who go to such places
flatter themselves that they are getting into literary circles and
improving their minds, especially if a popular magazinist or the son of
some great author can be persuaded to read one of his rejected articles
or to make a few remarks now and then. Then there is the musical dodge
on the drawing-room scale, or by wholesale, like the Seidl Society, for
example. One is able by this means to promote a beautiful art and
increase one's social conspicuousness at the same time. Then there is
the distinguished-foreigner dodge, give a reception in honor of--"
"Hang it, Philip; I'll tell Mrs. Hilbrough to send for you," said
Millard, laughing as he got up and threw his cigarette into the grate.
"I don't like to interrupt your lecture, but it's eleven o'clock, and
I'm going home. Good-night."
Philip sat there alone and listened to the rain against the windows, and
smoked until his cigar went out. The mere turning of things over in his
mind, and tacking witty labels to them, afforded so much amusement that
inactivity and revery were his favorite indulgences.
Mrs. Hilbrough gave a good deal of thought to her dinner on the next
evening after the conversation between Philip Gouverneur and Millard. To
have it elegant, and yet not to appear vulgar by making too much fuss
over a dinner _en famille_, taxed her thought and taste. Half an hour
before dinner she met her husband with a perturbed face.
"It's too bad that Phillida Callender should have come this evening.
That's just the way with an indefinite invitation. Poor girl, I've been
asking her to come any evening, and now she has hit on the only one in
the year on which I would rather she should have stayed at home."
"I'm sure Phillida is nice enough for anybody," said Hilbrough,
sturdily. "I don't see how she interferes with your plan."
"Well, Mr. Millard'll think I've asked her specially to help entertain
him, and Phillida is so peculiar. She's nobody in particular, socially,
and it will seem an unskillful thing to have asked her--and then she has
ideas. Young girls with notions of their own are--well--you know."
"Yes, I know, home-made ideas are a little out of fashion," laughed
Hilbrough. "But I'll bet he likes her. Millard isn't a fool if he does
part his hair in the middle and carry his cane balanced in his fingers
like a pair of steelyards."
"If he takes me to dinner, you must follow with Phillida. Give your left
arm--"
"I'll feel like a fool escorting Phillida--"
"But you must if Mr. Millard escorts me."
Hilbrough could have cursed Millard. He hated what he called "flummery."
Why couldn't people walk to the table without hooking themselves
together, and why couldn't they eat their food without nonsense? But he
showed his vexation in a characteristic way by laughing inwardly at his
wife and Millard, and most of all at himself for an old fool.
Phillida Callender was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister who had
gone as missionary to one of the Oriental countries. After years of life
in the East, Mr. Callender had returned to America on account of his
wife's health, and had settled in Brooklyn. If illusions of his youth
had been dispelled in the attempt to convert Orientals to a belief in
the Shorter Catechism he never confessed it, even to himself, and he
cherished the notion that he would some day return to his missionary
vocation. The family had an income from the rent of a house in New York
that had been inherited by Mrs. Callender, and the husband received
considerable sums for supplying the pulpits of vacant churches. He had
occupied the pulpit of the church that the Hilbroughs attended during
the whole time of Dr. North's journey to the Holy Land, and had thus
come into a half-pastoral relation to the Hilbrough family. Mr.
Callender sickened and died; the fragile wife and two daughters were
left to plan their lives without him. The sudden shock and the new draft
upon Mrs. Callender's energies had completed her restoration to a
tolerable degree of health and activity. Between the elder daughter,
whom the father had fancifully named Phillida, from the leafy grove in
which stood the house where she was born, and Mrs. Hilbrough there had
grown up a friendship in spite of the difference in age and
temperament--a friendship that had survived the shock of prosperity.
Lately the Callenders had found it prudent to remove to their house
situate in the region near Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street, a
quarter which, having once been fashionable, abides now in the merest
twilight of its former grandeur. The letting of the upper rooms of the
house was a main source of income.
Born in Siam, bred in a family pervaded with religious and propagandist
ideas, and having led a half-recluse life, Phillida Callender did not
seem to Mrs. Hilbrough just the sort of person to entertain a man of the
world.
When dinner was announced Millard did give Mrs. Hilbrough his arm, and
Phillida was startled and amused, when Mr. Hilbrough, after pausing an
instant to remember which of his stout arms he was to offer, presented
his left elbow. Despite much internal levity and external clumsiness,
Hilbrough played his _rôle_ to the satisfaction of his anxious wife, and
Phillida looked at him inquiringly after she was seated as though to
discover what transformation had taken place in him.
Millard could not but feel curious about the fine-looking, dark young
woman opposite him. But with his unfailing sense of propriety he gave
the major part of his attention to the elder lady, and, without uttering
one word of flattery, he contrived, by listening well, and by an almost
undivided attention to her when he spoke, to make Mrs. Hilbrough very
content with herself, her dinner, and her guest. This is the sort of
politeness not acquired in dancing-school nor learned in books of
decorum; it is art, and of all the fine arts perhaps the one that gives
the most substantial pleasure to human beings in general. Even Hilbrough
was pleased with Millard's appreciation of Mrs. Hilbrough; to think well
of Jenny was an evidence of sound judgment, like the making of a
prudent investment.
Meantime Millard somewhat furtively observed Miss Callender. From the
small contributions she made to the table-talk, she seemed, to him,
rather out of the common run. Those little touches of inflection and
gesture, which one woman in society picks up from another, and which are
the most evanescent bubbles of fashion, were wanting in her, and this
convinced him that she was not accustomed to see much of the world. On
the other hand, there was no lack of refinement either in speech or
manner. That disagreeable quality in the voice which in an American
woman is often the most easily perceptible note of underbreeding was not
there. Her speech was correct without effort, as of one accustomed to
hear good English from infancy; her voice in conversation was an alto,
with something sympathetic in its vibration, as though a powerful
emotional nature lay dormant under the calm exterior. Millard was not
the person to formulate this, but with very little direct conversation
he perceived that she was outside the category to which he was
accustomed, and that her personality might prove interesting, if one had
an opportunity of knowing it. He reasoned that with such a voice she
ought to be fond of music.
"Have you heard much of Wagner, Miss Callender?" he said when there was
a pause in the conversation. He felt before he had finished the question
that it was a false beginning, and he was helped to this perception by a
movement of uneasiness on the part of Mrs. Hilbrough, who was afraid
that Phillida's disqualifications might be too plainly revealed. But if
Mrs. Hilbrough was rendered uneasy by the question, Phillida was not.
She turned her dark eyes upon Millard, and smiled with genuine amusement
as she answered:
"I have heard but one opera in my life, Mr. Millard, and that was not
Wagner's."
"Miss Callender," said Mrs. Hilbrough, quickly, "is one who has
sacrificed social opportunities to her care for an invalid mother--a
great sacrifice to one at her time of life."
"I don't think I have sacrificed much," answered Phillida with a trace
of embarrassment. "My social opportunities could not have been many at
best, and I would rather have led,"--she hesitated a moment,--"I don't
know but I would rather have led my quiet life than--the other."
In her effort to say this so as neither to boast of her own pursuits nor
to condemn those of others, Miss Callender's color was a little
heightened. Millard was sorry that his innocent question had led the
conversation into channels so personal. Mrs. Hilbrough was inwardly
vexed that Phillida should be so frank, and express views so opposed to
those of good society.
"You find Brooklyn a pleasant place to live, no doubt," said Millard,
taking it for granted that Phillida was from Brooklyn, because of her
friendship for the Hilbroughs.
"I liked it when we lived there. I like New York very well. My relatives
all live on this side of East River, and so I am rather more at home
here."
"Then you don't find New York lonesome," said Millard, with a falling
cadence, seeking to drop the conversation.
"Oh, no! I live near Stuyvesant Square, and I have an aunt in Washington
Square of whom I am very fond."
"I am often at the Gouverneurs, on the north side of the Square. I like
Washington Square very much," said Millard, getting on solid ground
again.
"We visit at the same house. Mrs. Gouverneur is my aunt," said Phillida.
Millard was a little stunned at this announcement. But his habitual tact
kept him from disclosing his surprise at finding Miss Callender's
affiliations better than he could have imagined. He only said with
unaffected pleasure in his voice:
"The Gouverneurs are the best of people and my best friends."
Mr. Hilbrough looked in amusement at his wife, who was manifestly
pleased to find that in Phillida she was entertaining an angel unawares.
Millard's passion for personal details came to his relief.
"Mrs. Gouverneur," he said, "had a brother and two sisters. You must be
the daughter of one of her sisters. One lives, or used to live, in San
Francisco, and the other married a missionary."
"I am the missionary's daughter," said Phillida.
Millard felt impelled to redeem his default by saying something to Miss
Callender about the antiquity and excellence of her mother's family. If
he had been less skillful than he was he might have given way to this
impulse; but with the knack of a conversational artist he contrived in
talking chiefly to Mrs. Hilbrough to lead the conversation to Miss
Callender's distinguished great-grandfather of the Revolutionary period,
who was supposed to shed an ever-brightening luster all the way down the
line of his family, and Millard added some traditional anecdotes of
other ancestors of her family on the mother's side who had played a
conspicuous part in the commercial or civic history of New York. All of
which was flattering to Miss Callender, the more that it seemed to be
uttered in the way of general conversation and with no particular
reference to her.
Hilbrough listened with much interest to this very creditable account of
Phillida's illustrious descent, and longed for the time when he should
have the fun of reminding his wife that he had held the opinion from the
beginning that Phillida Callender was good enough for anybody.
Mrs. Hilbrough took Phillida and left the table, Mr. Hilbrough rising as
the ladies passed out, as he had been instructed. When he and Millard
had resumed their seats the cigars were brought, but when Millard saw
that his host did not smoke he did not see why he should punish himself
with a cigar and a _tête-à-tête_ with Hilbrough, whom he could see any
day at the bank. So by agreement the sitting was soon cut short, and the
gentlemen followed the ladies to the drawing-room. Mrs. Hilbrough had
planned a conversation with Millard about her reception while Phillida
should be left to talk with Mr. Hilbrough. But Phillida's position had
been changed during dinner. Mrs. Hilbrough found a new card in her hand.
She drew Miss Callender into the talk about the reception, leaving her
husband to excuse himself, and to climb the stairs to the third floor,
as was his wont, to see that the children had gone to bed well and were
not quarreling, and to have a few cheery words with Jack and the smaller
ones before they went to sleep. Receptions were nothing to him: the beds
on the third floor contained the greater part of the world.
Millard was relieved to find that Mrs. Hilbrough proposed nothing more
ambitious than an evening reception. He commended her for beginning in
new surroundings in this way.
"You see, Mrs. Hilbrough," he said, "a reception seems to me more
flexible than a ball. It is, in a sense, more democratic. There are many
good people--people of some position--who do not care to attend a ball,
who would be out of place at a ball, indeed, which should be a very
fashionable assembly. The party with dancing can come after."
This commendation had an effect opposite to that intended. Mrs.
Hilbrough hadn't thought of a ball, and she now suspected that she was
going wrong. In proposing a reception she was imitating Mrs. Masters,
and she had fancied herself doing the most proper thing of all. To have
a reception called democratic, and treated as something comparatively
easy of achievement, disturbed her.
"If you think a reception is not the thing, Mr. Millard, I will follow
your advice. You see I only know Brooklyn, and if a reception is going
to compromise our position in the future I wish you would tell me. I am
afraid I can hardly accomplish even that."
But Millard again said that a reception was a very proper thing to begin
with. By degrees he drew out a statement of Mrs. Hilbrough's resources
for a reception, and he could not conceal from her the fact that they
seemed too small, for numerousness is rather indispensable to this
species of entertainment. A reception is in its essence entertainment by
wholesale.
"If you could give a reception in honor of somebody," he suggested,
remembering Philip Gouverneur's suggestion, "it might serve to attract
many beyond your own circle, and--and--give you a reason for asking
people whom--you know but slightly, if at all."
But Mrs. Hilbrough did not know any proper person to honor with a
reception. Her embarrassment was considerable at finding herself so
poorly provided with ways and means, and she was slowly coming to the
conclusion that she must wait another winter, or take other means of
widening her acquaintance. A plan had occurred to Millard by which he
could help her out of the difficulty. But as it involved considerable
trouble and risk on his part, he rejected it. There was no reason why he
should go too far in helping the Hilbroughs. It was not a case for
self-sacrifice.
Hilbrough, in the nursery, had found the youngest little girl suffering
with a slight cold,--nothing more than a case of infantile
sniffles,--but Hilbrough's affection had magnified it into incipient
croup or pneumonia, and, after a fruitless search for the vial of tolu
and squills, he dispatched the maid to call Mrs. Hilbrough.
When they were left alone, Millard turned to Phillida, who had shown
nearly as much disappointment over the possible postponement of Mrs.
Hilbrough's project as the projector herself.
"You are deeply interested in this affair, too, Miss Callender," he
said.
"I don't care much for such things myself, but I should dislike to see
Mrs. Hilbrough disappointed," answered Phillida. "She has been such a
good friend to me, and in time of the greatest trouble she was such a
friend to my family, and especially"--she hesitated--"to my father, who
died two years ago, that I am interested in whatever concerns her
happiness or even her pleasure."
Somehow this changed the color of the enterprise in the eyes of Charles
Millard. The personality of Miss Callender was interesting to him, and
besides she was Mrs. Gouverneur's niece. It seemed worth while
gratifying Mrs. Hilbrough at considerable cost if it would give pleasure
to this peculiar young lady.
"Well, with such a certificate of Mrs. Hilbrough's qualities," said
Millard, after a pause, "we must strain a point and get up this
reception for her. We must be good to the good. We can carry this
through together, you and I, Miss Callender," he said.
"What can I do?" asked Phillida, opening her large, dark eyes with
innocent surprise. "I know nobody."
"You can get Mrs. Gouverneur's countenance, perhaps. That will be a
great deal for Mrs. Hilbrough hereafter."
"Perhaps I can get it, with your help, Mr. Millard. My aunt is good
hearted, but she has queer notions. She has a great opinion of the
social importance of her family." And Mrs. Gouverneur's niece laughed in
a way which went to show that she treated with some levity her aunt's
estimate of the value of ancestry.
"One couldn't avoid being proud of such forefathers," answered Millard.
"Perhaps she will help if I ask her. She is very obliging to me--I
belong to the royal family too, you know," she said archly.
"Together we can get her to lend her influence to Mrs. Hilbrough," said
Millard, "or at least to attend the reception. And I think I know how
the whole thing can be managed."
"I am so glad, and so much obliged to you, Mr. Millard," said Phillida,
a gleam of enthusiastic feeling, almost childlike, suddenly showing
itself through the grave exterior. This little revelation of the self
shut within the disciplined self without puzzled Millard and piqued the
curiosity he felt to understand what manner of young girl this was,
habitually so self-mastered, and apparently so full of unknown power or
of unawakened sensibilities. An apprehension of potencies undeveloped in
Miss Callender gave her new acquaintance the feeling of an explorer who
stands on the margin of a land virgin and unknown, eager to discover
what is beyond his sight. For Millard's main interest in life lay in the
study of the personalities about him, and here was one the like of which
he had never seen. The social naturalist had lighted on a new genus.
Mrs. Hilbrough returned with her husband, and Millard explained to her
that a certain Baron von Pohlsen, a famous archæologist, was at that
time in Mexico studying the remains of Aztec civilization with the view
of enriching the pages of his great work on the "Culturgeschichte" of
the ancient Americans. He was to return by way of New York, where his
money had been remitted to the Bank of Manhadoes, and he had been
socially consigned to Mr. Millard by a friend in Dresden. Pohlsen was
obliged to observe some economy in traveling, and had asked Millard to
find him a good boarding-house. If Mrs. Hilbrough cared to receive the
Baron as a guest for a fortnight, Millard would advise him to accept the
invitation, and, as far as possible, would relieve Mr. Hilbrough of his
share of the burden by taking the Baron about. This would furnish Mrs.
Hilbrough with a good excuse for giving a reception to the nobleman, and
then, without any appearance of pushing, she could invite people far
afield.
It was not in the nature of things that a woman in Mrs. Hilbrough's
position should refuse to entertain a baron. She saw many incidental
advantages in the plan, not the least of which was that Mr. Millard
would be a familiar in the house during the Baron's stay. Hilbrough
acquiesced with a rueful sense that he should be clumsy enough at
entertaining a foreigner and a man of title. Mrs. Hilbrough thanked
Millard heartily for his obliging kindness, but what he cared most for
was that Miss Callender's serious face shone with pleasure and
gratitude.
Having accepted another invitation for the evening, Millard took his
leave soon after ten o'clock, proposing to come at a later time to help
Mrs. Hilbrough--"and Miss Callender, I hope," he added with a bow to
Phillida--to make up the list. Having but two blocks to go, he declined,
in favor of Miss Callender, the Hilbrough carriage, which stood ready at
the door.
The close carriage, with only Phillida for occupant, rattled down Fifth
Avenue to Madison Square, and along Broadway to Union Square, then over
eastward by Fourteenth street, until after a turn or two it waked the
echoes rudely in a quiet cross street, stopping at length before a
three-story house somewhat antique and a little broader than its
neighbors. Phillida closed and bolted the outer doors, and then opened
one of the inner ones with a night-key, and made her way to what had
been the back parlor of the house. In that densification of population
which proceeds so incessantly on Manhattan Island this old house, like
many another, was modernly compelled to hold more people than it had
been meant for in the halcyon days when Second Avenue was a fashionable
thoroughfare. The second floor of the house had been let, without board,
to a gentleman and his wife, and the rooms above to single gentlemen.
The parlor floor and the basement were made to accommodate the mother
and her two daughters with their single servant. The simple, old back
parlor, with no division but a screen, had two beds for mother and
daughters, while the well-lighted extension made them a sitting room in
pleasant weather. Mrs. Callender clung to one luxury persistently--there
was always a grate fire in the back parlor on cold evenings.
To this back parlor came Phillida with a disagreeable sense that Mrs.
Hilbrough's retreating carriage was rousing the quiet neighborhood as
the sleepy and impatient coachman banged his way over the pavement, the
hummocky irregularities of which saved this thoroughfare from all
traffic that could avoid it; for only the drivers of reckless butcher
carts, and one or two shouting milkmen, habitually braved its perils.
Phillida, as she approached the old-fashioned mahogany door of the back
parlor, in the dim light shed by the half-turned-down gas jet at the
other end of the hall, raised her hand to the knob; but it eluded her,
for the door was opened from within by some one who stood behind it.
Then the head of a girl of seventeen with long, loose blond tresses
peered around the edge of the door as Phillida entered.
"Come in, Philly, and tell us all about it," was the greeting she got
from her sister, clad in a red wrapper covering her night-dress, and
shod with worsted bedroom slippers. "Mama wanted me to go to bed; but I
knew you'd have something interesting to tell about the Hilbroughs, and
so I stuck it out and kept mama company while she did the mending. Come
now, Philly, tell me everything all at once."
The mother sat by the drop-light mending a stocking, and she looked up
at Phillida with a gentle, brightening expression of pleasure--that
silent welcome of affection for which the daughters always looked on
entering.
"What, mama, not in bed yet?" exclaimed Phillida, as she laid off her
outer garments, and proceeded to bend over and kiss her mother, trying
to take away her work at the same time. "Come now, you ought to be in
bed; and, besides, this old stocking of mine is darned all over already,
and ought to be thrown away."
"Ah, Phillida," said her mother with a sweet, entreating voice, holding
fast to the stocking all the time, "if it gives me pleasure let me do
it. If I like to save old things I'm sure it's no harm."
"But you ought to have been in bed at nine o'clock," said Phillida, her
hold on the stocking weakening perceptibly under the spell of her
mother's irresistible entreaty.
"It will take but a minute more if you will let me alone," was all the
mother said as Phillida released the work, and the elaborate darning
went on.
"There's a good deal more darn than stocking to that now," said the
younger sister. "It's a work of genius. I'll tell you, Phillida: we'll
take it to the picture framer's to-morrow and have it put under glass,
and then we'll get a prize for it as a specimen of fancy work at the
American Institute Fair. But now tell me, what did you have for dinner?
How many courses were there? Was there anybody else there? What sort of
china have they got? Do they keep a butler? How does Mr. Hilbrough take
to the new fixings? And, oh, say! are they going to give any parties?
And--"
"Give me a chance, Frisky, and I'll answer you," said Phillida, who
began at the beginning and told all that she could think of, even to
describing the doilies and finger-bowls.
"You said there was a gentleman there. Who was he?" said Agatha, the
younger.
"That Mr. Millard that Cousin Phil is so fond of. He is at Aunt
Harriet's often on Sunday evenings. He's a good looking young man,
dressed with the greatest neatness, and is very polite to everybody in
an easy way."
"Did he talk with you?"
"Not at first. He paid as much attention to Mrs. Hilbrough as he could
have paid to a queen; treating her with a great deal of deference. You
could see that she was pleased. Just think, he asked me if I liked
Wagner's music."
"How did you get out of it?"
"I didn't get out of it at all. I just told him I had never heard
anything of Wagner's. But when he found that I was Mrs. Gouverneur's
niece it made things all right with him, and he made as handsome a
speech about my great-grandfather and all the rest as Aunt Harriet could
have done herself."
"Wasn't Mrs. Hilbrough surprised to hear that you were somebody?"
"I don't know."
"Well, don't you think she was?"
"May be so."
"Didn't she seem pleased?"
"I think she was relieved, for my confession that I hadn't heard many
operas bothered her."
"You said Mr. Millard was polite. How was he polite?"
"He made you feel that he liked you, and admired you; I can't tell you
how. He didn't say a single flattering word to me, but when he promised
to meet Mrs. Hilbrough again, to arrange about the people she is to have
at the reception, he bowed to me and said, 'And Miss Callender, I
hope.'"
"I'll tell you what, Phillida, I'll bet he took a fancy to you."
"Nonsense, Agatha Callender; don't talk such stuff. He's been for years
in society, and knows all the fine people in New York."
"Nonsense, yourself, Phillida; you're better than any of the fine ladies
in New York. Mr. Millard isn't good enough for you. But I just know he
was taken with you."
"Do you think I'm going to have my head turned by bows and fine speeches
that have been made to five hundred other women?"
"There never was any other woman in New York as fine as you, Phillida."
"Not among your acquaintance, and in your opinion, my dear, seeing you
hardly know any other young woman but me."
"I know more than you think I do. If you had any common sense,
Phillida, you'd make the most of Aunt Harriet, and marry some man that
would furnish you with a horse and a carriage of your own. But you
won't. You're just a goosey. You spend your time on the urchins down in
Mackerelville. The consequence is you'll never get married, and I shall
have you on my hands an old maid who never improved her opportunities."
"What stuff!" laughed Phillida.
"You've got a fine figure--a splendid figure," proceeded the younger,
"and a face that is sweet and charming, if I do say it. It's a dreadful
waste of woman. You wrap your talent in a Sunday-school lesson-paper and
bury it down in Mackerelville."
At this point Mrs. Callender put away her elaborate hand-finished
stocking, saying softly:
"Agatha, why do you tease Phillida so?"
"Because she's such a goose," said the younger sister, stubbornly.
Twenty minutes later Agatha, looking from her bedside in the dark corner
of the room, saw her sister kneeling by a chair near the fireside. The
sight of Phillida at prayer always awed her. Agatha herself was
accustomed to say, before jumping into bed, a conventional little
prayer, very inclusive as to subjects embraced, and very thin in
texture, but Phillida's prayers were different. Agatha regarded the form
of her sister, well developed and yet delicately graceful, now more
graceful than ever as she knelt in her long night-dress, her two hands
folded naturally the one across the other, and her head bowed. As she
arranged the bed, Agatha followed mentally what she imagined to be the
tenor of the prayer--she fancied that Phillida was praying to be saved
from vanity and worldliness; she knew that each of the little urchins in
the mission Sunday-school class was prayed for by name. She turned away
a moment, and then caught sight of Phillida as she unclasped her hands
and rested them on the chair. Agatha knew that when Phillida changed her
position at the close of her prayer it was to recite, as she always did,
the "Now I lay me," which was associated in her mind, as in Agatha's,
with an oriental environment, a swarthy nurse in waist-cloth and
shoulder scarf, and, more than all, was linked with her earliest
memories of the revered father at whose knees the children were
accustomed to repeat it. When Phillida rose to her feet in that state of
exaltation which prayer brings to one who has a natural genius for
devotion, the now penitent and awe-stricken Agatha went to her sister,
put her arms about her neck, and leaned her head upon her shoulder,
saying softly:
"You dear, good Phillida!"
VII.
THE LION SOIRÉE.
Notwithstanding the romancing of her sister, Phillida built no castles.
Millard's politeness to her had been very agreeable, but she knew that
it was only politeness. Almost every man's and every woman's imagination
is combustible on one side or another. Many young women are set
a-dreaming by any hint of love or marriage. But Phillida had read only
sober books--knowing little of romances, there was no stock of
incendiary material in her memory. Her fancy was easily touched off on
the side of her religious hopes; all her education had intensified the
natural inflammability of her religious emotions, but in affairs of this
world she was by nature and education unusually self-contained for a
woman of one and twenty.
Millard, on his part, had been exposed to the charms of many women, and
his special interest in Phillida amounted only to a lively curiosity.
Always susceptible to the charm of a woman's presence, this
susceptibility had been acted on from so many sides as to make his
interest in women superficial and volatile. The man who is too much
interested in women to be specially interested in a woman is pretty sure
not to marry at all, or to marry late.
Baron Pohlsen arrived, and was duly installed at Mrs. Hilbrough's. He
was greatly pleased with the hospitality shown him by this wealthy
household, and fancied that Americans were the most generous of peoples.
Millard, as in duty bound, took pains to introduce him in many desirable
quarters, and showed him the lions of the city in Hilbrough's carriage.
But in spite of Millard's care to relieve him, Hilbrough afterward
confessed that the panic of 1873 had not taxed his patience and
cheerfulness so deeply as this entertainment for two weeks of a great
German antiquary. Dutifully the banker attended a session of the
Geographical Society to listen to an address made by his guest in broken
English, on the ancient importance of Uxmal and Palenque. Hilbrough also
heard with attentive perplexity the Baron's account before the
Historical Society of the Aztec Calendar Stone, and his theory of its
real purpose.
When the American banker was left alone with the learned High Dutchman,
it became very serious business. Von Pohlsen, with all his erudition,
was extremely ignorant of the art of banking as practised in New York.
He did not know, at least in English, the difference between collateral
and real estate security, and "gilt-edged" paper was more foreign than
papyrus to him. Nor could Hilbrough interest him much in the remarkable
rise in Brooklyn real estate since 1860. Brooklyn was too new by a
millennium for the Baron to care for it. Hilbrough tried the plan of
shunting the antiquary to his main lines of American hieroglyphs,
aboriginal architecture, and Pueblo domestic economy. But this only
shifted the difficulty, for under the steady downpour of Pohlsen's
erudition, Hilbrough had continually to change position, now putting the
right knee over the left and now placing the left atop, to keep from
nodding, and he was even reduced to pinching himself, sometimes, in
order to keep awake, just as the learned and ingenious Baron had got his
pyramid of inference ready to balance on its rather slender apex of
fact. Archæology was new to Hilbrough, and deductive profits so large
from inductive investments so small always seemed to the financier to
indicate bad security.
Mrs. Hilbrough, clever woman, appeared to understand it all. She had
crammed on a copy of Stephens's "Travels in Yucatan" that had belonged
to her father, and she gave Pohlsen no end of pleasure by asking him
about such things as the four-headed altars before the great idols at
Copan, and the nature of the great closed house at Labphak. If you will
look in Pohlsen's book of travels in America (Reise durch Amerika:
Leipzig, 1888) you will discover in his chapter on New York that in this
metropolis the ladies take a remarkable interest in science, and are
generally better informed regarding such matters than their husbands,
these latter being deeply immersed in mere dollar-hunting.
But Mrs. Hilbrough was much more interested in her reception to be given
in honor of Baron Pohlsen than she was in the four-headed altars of the
remoter Aztecs. If she could not fill her house with those very richest
and most exclusive people who in a plutocratic society always try to
think themselves for some reason or other the best people, she found
that under Millard's guidance she could succeed in getting some people
of wealth and distinction who were desirous of being presented to a
baron, and, what was better, she could get a considerable number from
that class of lettered men and their families and the admirers of
literature, art, and learning, who, together, form the really best
people in every metropolis. Most of these knew little of Pohlsen's
researches, and cared less for his title, but since he was vouched for
as a foreigner who had acquired distinction in his department of
knowledge, they were ready to do him honor with that generous
hospitality for which Americans blame themselves while they practise it;
as though it were not better for us to be good-hearted, remembering that
in the studious preservation of national dignity and social
perpendicularity we can never hope to emulate our English cousins.
How was it all arranged? How, without violating the sanctities of
etiquette, did Mrs. Hilbrough contrive to invite people whom she did not
know, and how did they accept with no sacrifice of dignity? Millard was
an expert adviser; he knew that just as counters are made to stand for
money in a game of cards, so do little oblong bits of pastebord with the
sender's name upon them pass current under certain conditions as
substitutes for visits, acquaintance, esteem, and friendship. By a
juggle with these social chips Mrs. Hilbrough became technically, and
temporarily, acquainted with a great many people, and that without much
sacrifice of time. Do not expect details here; your fashionable
stationer is the best reliance in such a case, unless you chance to know
Mr. Millard, or can find the law laid down in Mrs. Sherwood's tactfully
vague chapters, which, like the utterances of the Delphic oracle, are
sure to hit the mark one way or the other.
Now that Millard had taken Mrs. Hilbrough for a client he could not bear
to be balked. The attendance of Mrs. Gouverneur he considered of the
first importance, but this was not easily secured. If anything could
have persuaded that lady to sacrifice her principles as an exclusive so
far as to attend, it would have been her dislike of refusing Phillida;
but as it was, she made excuses without positively refusing. In telling
Mrs. Hilbrough of her lack of success Phillida took pains to repeat Mrs.
Gouverneur's pretexts, and not to betray what she knew to be her aunt's
real reason for hesitation. Millard encountered Mrs. Hilbrough at the
opera, and heard from her of the failure of Phillida's endeavors. He
felt himself put on his mettle.
Knowing that the next day was Mrs. Gouverneur's day for receiving, he
made himself her first caller before the rest began to arrive. Looking
from the old-fashioned windows of Mrs. Gouverneur's front parlor, he
praised the beauty of the winter scene, and admired especially the
spotted boles of the great buttonwoods in Washington Square. He thought
to make his call seem less on purpose by such commonplace civilities,
but Mrs. Gouverneur, who was a soft-spoken lady of much cleverness, with
a talent for diplomacy inherited from her grandfather, asked herself,
while she replied in the same vein to Millard's preliminary vapidities,
what on earth so formal a call and such a waste of adroitness might
lead up to. But Millard, even after this preparation, provided an
inclined plane for approaching his proposition.
"I had the pleasure of meeting a niece of yours the other evening, a
Miss Callender," he said. "I found her very agreeable."
"Oh! You met Phillida Callender at Mrs. Hilbrough's, probably," said
Mrs. Gouverneur with a flush of pleasure. "She's as good as goodness
itself, and very clever. But rather peculiar also. She has a great deal
of Callender in her. Her father gave up good prospects in this country
to preach in Siam. He might have had the pastorate of one of the best
Presbyterian churches in New York, but nothing could dissuade him from
what he fancied to be his duty. It only proves what I have always said,
that 'blood will tell.' It is related in some of the old books that
Philip has upstairs that one of the women of the Callender family,
before the Revolution, felt it her duty to go through the streets of
Newport, crying, 'Repent, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'
She was a refined and delicate lady, and the people of the town felt so
much chagrin to see her expose herself to mortification in the public
street that they shut up their windows or turned away, which I think was
very nice of them. I fancy that Phillida, with all her superior
intelligence, has a good deal of this great-great-aunt of her father's
in her. I was talking to her once about this story of Mary Callender's
preaching in the streets, and she really seemed to take more interest in
that Quaker lady's delusion than she did in her ancestors on our side;
and you know, Mr. Millard, we think a good deal of our descent, though
of course we never say anything about it."
It was inevitable that a courteous man like Millard should meet this
speech by saying, "When one has ancestors whose position is not one of
mere social prominence but whose acts are a part of the history of a
nation, it must be hard to forget so important a fact." It was equally
inevitable that even the wary Mrs. Gouverneur could not help
appreciating flattery so apropos of the subject in hand.
"But I have a notion," Millard continued, "that if we could get Miss
Callender to take an interest in society she would prove an ornament to
it and a credit to her family."
Mrs. Gouverneur shook her head doubtfully. "I don't believe it can be
done, though I should be glad if it could."
"Did she tell you that she is deeply interested in that reception to
Baron Pohlsen next week?"
"Yes; she is attached to Mrs. Hilbrough. She makes friends without the
least regard to social consequences, and I believe even has friendships
among the people with whom she is only connected by her mission
Sunday-school class. She stoutly maintained here last night that she
knew a real lady living in three rooms with a husband and four children!
I declare, I like Phillida all the better for this. Her impulses are
very noble, but I can't help wishing she wouldn't do it. It doesn't do
for one at her time of life to be too disinterested, you know."
This turn in the talk threw Millard off the track for a moment. The
mention of people living narrowly brought to his mind his own early life
in a farmhouse, and reminded him of his amiable but socially
unpresentable aunt, whom he was wont faithfully to visit on one Sunday
afternoon in every month. There was just a little cowardly feeling that
should his relations with the family in Avenue C become known among his
friends, his social position might become compromised. He did not know
that all exclusive people in New York have unpresentable kinsfolk hidden
away somewhere, and are ever trembling lest the fact should be known to
some other family that is likewise doing its best to hide some
never-get-on relatives.
Mrs. Gouverneur noticed Millard's heightened color, and feared her
slighting allusion to Mrs. Hilbrough might have annoyed him. Before he
could pull his wits together to reply to her last remark, she added, "I
have no doubt your friend Mrs. Hilbrough is a very worthy person, Mr.
Millard. But she is new in New York society."
"Indeed I can not call her my friend, Mrs. Gouverneur. Her husband is
the real head of our bank at present; he is likely to be a very rich man
in a few years, and he has obliged me in many ways. But I have only a
few weeks' acquaintance with Mrs. Hilbrough, whose chief recommendation
to me, I must confess, is that she is a friend of Miss Callender, who is
your niece. But Mrs. Hilbrough seems to have many admirable qualities.
She is sure to make herself recognized, and I do not see any advantage
in delaying the recognition. For my part, I think she will do a great
service at the outset if she adds so attractive and clever a young lady
as Miss Callender to society."
"Now, Mr. Millard, you are playing a strong game against me," laughed
Mrs. Gouverneur. "You know my dislike for new acquaintances--for
enlarging my circle. But when you propose to persuade my niece to see a
little more of the world you are taking advantage of my only weakness.
You play a deep game."
"I'll show you my whole hand at once," said Millard, seeing that Mrs.
Gouverneur's penetration had left him no resource but candor. "I very
much desire to be Miss Callender's escort at Mrs. Hilbrough's reception,
if she will accept me. Mrs. Callender, I fear, can not be persuaded to
go."
"You want me for chaperon," interposed Mrs. Gouverneur. "What a clever
scheme! How could you dare to set such a trap for an old friend?"
"It will prove a clever scheme if it succeeds. But it wasn't clever
enough to deceive you."
"Well, you and Phillida together have won. Of course I can not refuse if
Phillida consents."
"Thank you from my heart," said Millard, rising at hearing the door-bell
ring. "I will see Miss Callender, and if she refuses me for escort you
will be able to laugh at me. I'm sure I'm greatly your debtor."
A notion, a mere notion, such as will enter the soberest woman's head
sometimes, had bobbed to the surface of Mrs. Gouverneur's thoughts as
she talked with Millard. It was that her niece's future might somehow
hang on her decision. She was not a matchmaker, but she had a
diplomatic faculty for persuading things to come out as she wished. Mr.
Millard would be a most eligible husband for any woman whose
expectations in life were not unreasonably great. Her practical mind
went a step farther and she saw that in the event of anything so
improbable happening as that Millard should fall in love with a lady
without fortune, say, for example, a clergyman's daughter, his
acquaintance with so prosperous a man as Hilbrough, who could help him
to lucrative investments, might be very desirable. These thoughts were
the mere bubbles of fancy floating in her mind. The consideration which
most affected her decision was that the presentation of her niece under
the auspices of Millard and herself might prove of great social
advantage to Phillida.
Millard left Mrs. Gouverneur with the intention of calling at once on
Miss Callender, but when he reached Broadway he was smitten with a
scruple, not of conscience, but of etiquette. Phillida had not asked him
to call. After staring for a full minute in perplexity at the passing
vehicles and the façade of the ancient theater on the opposite side of
Broadway, then in its last days of existence, he presently concluded
that Miss Callender, being a young woman somewhat unsophisticated, and
having therefore nothing better than good sense for guide, would
probably not be shocked by the audacity of an uninvited call from a
gentleman whose character was well known to her.
The bell rang as Mrs. Callender was just about to try a dress on her
daughter Agatha. Callers were not a frequent interruption to their
pursuits, and when the steps of a man ushered into the front parlor were
heard through the sliding doors, they concluded that it was some one
calling on the gentleman who occupied the second floor. Mrs. Callender
and her daughters lowered their voices to a whisper, that they might not
be heard through the doors; but Sarah, the servant, came to the back
parlor, and said loud enough to be distinctly audible to the visitor:
"It's some cards for Mrs. Callender and Miss Callender." Then she shut
the door and descended the basement stairs, without waiting to carry a
reply.
Agatha took the cards and whispered, "Mr. Millard," biting her lower lip
and making big eyes at Phillida, with an "I-told-you-so" nod of the
head, and then she proceeded to give vent to her feelings by dancing
softly about the room, a picturesque figure in her red petticoat and
white waist, with her bare arms flying about her head. If the doors had
not been so thin her excitement would have found vent in more noisy
ways. As noise was precluded there was nothing left for her but this
dumb show. In her muffled gyrations she at length knocked a chair over
upon the fender, making a loud clatter. She quickly picked it up and sat
down upon it in great confusion, with a remorseful feeling that by her
imprudent excitement she had probably blasted Phillida's prospects in
life.
"Come, mother, you must get ready and go in," whispered Phillida.
"No, please, Phillida. He doesn't really want to see me. It's only a
matter of good form to ask for us both. You must beg him to excuse me. I
do so want to get this dress done."
Agatha, recovering from her remorse by this time, helped Phillida to do
a little hurried prinking. Luckily the latter had been getting ready to
go out and had on the gown that served her on all except extraordinary
occasions for both street and drawing-room.
Millard had amused himself while waiting by noting the various antiques
about the parlor, heirlooms of former family greatness, arranged with an
eye to tasteful effect. On the shelves in the corner some articles
connected with family history were intermingled with curiosities brought
from the East. A pair of brass-bound pattens hinged in the middle, once
worn instead of overshoes by some colonial ancestress, sat alongside a
pair of oriental sandals. Millard thought nothing could be more in
keeping with the ancient desk and table than the unaffected and
straightforward manner in which Miss Callender greeted him, holding out
her hand with modest friendliness and just a touch of diffidence. This
last was due to the innuendoes and antics of Agatha.
"I ventured to call without permission, Miss Callender," said Millard,
with hesitation.
"I'm glad you did, Mr. Millard." Phillida could not see why any
respectable gentleman should wait for an invitation to call on a lady,
or how a young lady could ever be so bold as to ask a gentleman to call.
She added, "My mother wished me to beg you to excuse her. She has some
troublesome affairs on hand just now."
"Certainly; don't let me interrupt her. I came on business with you. I
want to have the pleasure of escorting you to Mrs. Hilbrough's party
with your mother, if she will kindly accompany us."
Phillida hesitated. She knew that chaperonage was required on such
occasions. "Thank you. I should like to accept your kind offer, but my
mother rarely goes out," she said. "I don't believe I could persuade her
to go, and I've no other chaperon."
"How would Mrs. Gouverneur do?"
"But Aunt Harriet won't go."
"I've just come from her house, and she assured me that if you needed
her for a chaperon--if Mrs. Callender could not go--she would keep us
company."
"You have managed Aunt Harriet very well," said Phillida, with some
elation. "Better than I could have done."
"I must have done well. Mrs. Gouverneur gives me great credit for my
nice little scheme, as she calls it. But if she thinks I wish to be your
escort solely in order to get her to attend, I assure you that Mrs.
Gouverneur with all her penetration is mistaken."
Phillida colored a little at this polite speech as she said, "It will
please Mrs. Hilbrough to have my aunt there."
"Yes, Mrs. Hilbrough also will give me great credit where I do not
deserve it. I may call for you with Mrs. Gouverneur?"
"Thank you, it will give me a great deal of pleasure." Phillida said
this with a momentary fear of hearing Agatha overturn another chair
behind the sliding doors; but Mrs. Callender had taken herself and
Agatha to the basement, from motives of delicacy which Agatha was hardly
old enough to appreciate.
Mrs. Gouverneur never did anything by halves. She made herself agreeable
to Mrs. Hilbrough on the evening of the reception and complimented her
heartily on the distinguished people she had brought together. For there
was the learned president of the Geographical, with overhanging brows
and slow and gentle speech; there was the foreign corresponding
secretary of the Historical, a man better known as a diplomatist and an
author, whose long years abroad had liberalized his mind without
spoiling his open-hearted American manners. There were some of the
directors of the Metropolitan Museum, to which institution Pohlsen had
given some Central American pottery. The senior New York poet wandered
in his childlike way among the guests, making gentle and affectionate
speeches to friends, who wondered at the widely contrary moods to which
his susceptible nature is subject. Bolton, known in two hemispheres by
his prose and poetry, had come out of complaisance, protesting rather
indignantly to his friends that he didn't believe in Americans making
such an ado over a mere baron. In him the stranger saw a slight figure
full of character and not in any way to be trifled with; only men of
letters and his friends knew what pains he could be at to oblige and to
help the humblest of struggling fellow-craftsmen, provided he was not
forbidden to accompany the unstinted assistance with a little grumbling
at the fearful wreck of his time which all sorts of people, even the
tramps of the literary profession, make without remorse.
"Charley," said Philip Gouverneur, when he got Millard into a corner,
"what have you been doing? This is society and it isn't; it is more like
what Carlyle calls a 'lion soirée.'"
"Well," said Millard, "it's either society or better. You understand
that the Baron's reputation as a scholar has modified things."
"I say, Charley," said Philip, "I was ashamed to find my little self
lost among these know-it-alls until I met Mrs. Maginnis. She said, 'Oh,
Mr. Gouverneur, I am so glad to see somebody that I know. Who are all
these people?' So I pointed out the university president over there; and
I told her that St. John was our great sculptor, though I'm not sure she
makes any clear distinctions between a sculptor and a maker of
gravestones; and I assured her that we had several magazine editors, and
writers, and illustrators, and painters, and leading journalists, and
some of the very foremost of our German citizens. 'Oh, yes,' she
replied, 'newspaper men, artists, and Germans! Just what I thought; but
there are not more than a dozen people here who were invited to
Marshmallow's great ball last winter.'"
"It mightn't be a bad thing," said Millard, "if Marshmallow, who
pretends to be the boss of society, were to include more people of
artistic and literary distinction such as we have here to-night."
"Nonsense, Charley! he couldn't do it. There are a few men who contrive
to be great and to be men of the world at the same time. But what
society wants is polish. You can put gloss on varnish, but some of these
men are too original to be sand-papered down to a fashionable
uniformity. No, no! Old Red Sandstone and his wife over there are well
enough at a lion soirée, but how would their Silurian manners shine at
the Patriarchs' ball? You see my cousin Phillida, with all her
seriousness, is getting too much of his talk."
At this hint from Philip, Millard moved away and glanced hurriedly about
the room. His eye lighted on Lucas, who is a natural adept as a man of
the world though a man of letters. Approaching him, Millard said:
"Mr. Lucas, let me introduce you to an interesting being."
"That's what I've been looking for in vain all the evening," said Lucas.
The two forced a sinuous way to where Phillida was trying to enjoy the
small talk of a man who was incapable of profitable speech at a depth of
less than fifty fathoms. Millard presented Lucas first to Mrs.
Gouverneur on a chair in the corner, and then bowed politely to the
geologist as he interrupted his remarks on the curiosities of the Bad
Lands, and made Lucas acquainted with Miss Callender. The latter showed
her pleasure at thus encountering a favorite writer, but she had the
good sense not to assure him that she had "long known him through his
books." She reflected in time that such a man must have heard remarks of
this sort rather frequently. But when Millard had moved away he turned
about to note the change in Miss Callender's countenance under the
influence of that stream of sparkling talk that Lucas never fails to
give forth when confronted with an inspiring listener.
Later in the evening when the reception had passed its climax, and the
antiquaries, geographers, historical investigators, and other lions,
grown sleepy, were looking up their wives and daughters to be gone,
Millard found time for conversation with his companion of the evening,
who had drifted away from her chaperon, for chaperonage only half
flourishes in our society, and is indeed quite out of place at a New
York lion soirée, where a maiden's heart is pretty safe without
guardianship.
"You have had a pleasant evening, Miss Callender, I hope. I'm sure
you've helped the rest of us to a pleasant evening."
"Indeed, I have enjoyed myself, Mr. Millard. I have met my favorite
poet, have talked with the editor of my magazine, and have found that
Mr. Lucas makes amends for the bores."
"I hope this will not be the last time we shall meet you in society,"
said Millard. "It would be a pity for one who can do so much to make an
evening delightful to others, not to go more into society."
"It takes a great deal of time, Mr. Millard. I don't think society any
harm as a recreation, but as a pursuit--" Here she checked herself.
"It gives a great deal of happiness, though."
"Yes; but only to those whose lot is fortunate enough anyhow. It seems
to me that we have something else to do in the world than just to amuse
ourselves." At this point it occurred to Phillida that in defending her
own view of life she was reflecting on her companion's. "I don't mean to
find fault with anybody else's pursuits, Mr. Millard, but rather to
defend my own."
The last remark, by focusing what she had said before upon Millard, only
made the matter worse. But the talk was interrupted at this point by
Mrs. Gouverneur, who came to inquire if her younger companions were
ready to go. Millard was a little sorry for the interruption. He could
not but feel that he was in some sort under condemnation by Miss
Callender, and there was something about Miss Callender which made one
respect her moral judgment and desire to stand well in her estimation.
But the conversation in the carriage took another turn, and as she
approached her own home it occurred to Phillida that Millard's remark at
the time of his call implied that his acquaintance with the family might
depend on her inviting him. She felt grateful to him for his graceful
attentions during the evening, and when he left her at the door she
extended her hand and said:
"We shall be glad to see you, Mr. Millard."
When Millard had landed Mrs. Gouverneur in Washington Square, with many
polite speeches on both sides, and had reached his bachelor apartment,
he sat down in front of the grate with a comfortable feeling of
complacency. He had helped Mrs. Hilbrough to launch her little bark
without any untoward accident; he had secured for the Baron an honor
which the latter would certainly not underestimate. Then, too, he had
obliged Mrs. Gouverneur while he gratified his own inclinations in
escorting Miss Callender to the reception. Whenever he came around to
Phillida he found the only uncomfortable spot in his meditations. He had
never dreamed that anybody could think the life of a consummate
gentleman like himself deserving of anything but commendation. The
rector of St. Mathias, who was a genial man of the world himself, with
just the amount of devoutness admixed that was indispensable to his
professional character, had never for a moment found fault with Millard,
who was liberal in parish affairs and an ornament to the church. Here
was a young lady with a very different standard, who thought it a
Christian duty to be useful not so much to the church as to people less
fortunate than herself. Millard tried to dismiss the matter from his
mind by reflecting that Miss Callender's father must have been a
peculiar man. But there was an elevation about Phillida's nature that
made him feel his own to be something less than was desirable. Yet it
was clear to him that Miss Callender misjudged society people from
ignorance of them. He would call some day and set her right. Then he
laughed at the notion. What did it matter to him whether this young
woman judged rightly or wrongly of people in society generally, and of
himself in particular. He dismissed the matter from his mind. But by the
time he had taken off his ties, which were a trifle too narrow in the
toes to be comfortable, he had somehow returned to his first resolution
to set Miss Callender right in the matter if he should have
opportunity.
VIII.
IN AVENUE C.
If Phillida could have known the thoughts that occupied the mind of
Millard on Sunday afternoon, two or three weeks later, as he started for
his monthly visit in Avenue C, she would not have judged his purposes in
life severely. His walk lay through a cross-street which steadily
deteriorated as he journeyed eastward, condescendingly assimilating
itself to the character of each avenue in turn. Beer saloons, cheap
grocery stores, carts against the curbstones with their shafts pointing
skyward, and troops of children on the sidewalk, marked the increasing
poverty and density of the population. Millard wondered at the display
of trinkets and confectionery in the shop-windows, not knowing that
those whose backs are cheaply clad crave ornaments, and those whose
bellies lack bread are ravenous for luxuries.
Being a fastidious man and for years accustomed to the refinements of
life, he exaggerated the discomforts of tenement-house living. How
people endured such misery and yet seemed so cheerful he could not
imagine. And though he did not feel that diffusive benevolence which
prompted Phillida to try to ameliorate the moral condition of such of
this mass as she could reach, he had a strong desire to lift his aunt
and her children to a little higher plane. To this, hitherto, he had
found an obstacle in the pride of her husband. Henry Martin was a
tinsmith who had come to the city to work in a great factory for a
little higher wages than he could get as a journeyman tinker in a
country town. He did not refuse to let the children accept presents from
"Cousin Charley," but he was not willing "to be beholden to any of his
wife's folks," as he expressed it. He resented the fact that even in
Cappadocia he had been somewhat outstripped by his brother-in-law,
Charles Millard's father, and when the "Millard boys" had inherited
money from their father's brother, and Martin saw their mother, his
wife's sister, living in a style to which he could never hope to lift
his own family, it weighed on his mind, and this offense to his pride
had helped to fix his resolution in favor of a removal to New York.
During the walk eastward Millard was debating what might be done for the
promising eldest girl in his aunt's family and for the two boys. Once,
it is true, the throng of children that obstructed his path, as they
chased one another round and round in a maze, did suggest to him that
from Miss Callender's standpoint he ought to do something "for those
less fortunate than himself" even beyond the circle of relationship. But
what could he do? He felt that by his very nature he was disqualified
for contact and personal sympathy with humanity rough-hewn. And as he
crossed Avenue A, and paused to look up and down it, he saw such
inexhaustible swarms of people that what one man could do for them
seemed of no avail. He might give something to some mission or other
agency, and thus get the disagreeables of benevolence done, as he got
his boots blacked, by paying for it. Then he wondered what Miss
Callender would think of such a device, and whether in the luminous
moral atmosphere which enveloped her it would seem mean to substitute a
money service for a personal one--to employ a substitute when you have
no stomach for the war yourself.
He climbed the flights of dark stairs to his aunt's dwelling, which
occupied half of the next to the top floor of a four-story building; the
flat above being the dwelling and working-place of a slop-shop tailor.
He was welcomed with sincere affection by Aunt Hannah Martin, and with
shouts of delight by the two smaller children--the two older ones had
not yet come back from Sunday-school. Mr. Martin, a tallish and rather
broad-shouldered man, with a face whose habitual seriousness was
deepened into a tombstone solemnity by its breadth and flatness in the
region of the cheek-bones, shook hands cordially, but with a touch of
reserve in favor of his own dignity, saying, "How are you, Charley?
How's things with you?" He was proud enough of his connection with a
prosperous man like Millard, and among his comrades in the shop he often
affected to settle points in dispute regarding finance or the ways of
people in high life by gravely reminding the others that he had superior
opportunities for knowing, since his nephew was a banker and "knew all
the rich men in Wall street." But face to face with Charley Millard his
pride was rendered uneasy, and he generally managed to have some
pressing occasion for absenting himself on the afternoons of Millard's
visits.
Millard's attentions were soon engrossed by the little boy Tommy, who of
all the children was his favorite. Tommy climbed on his knees and rifled
his pockets, certain of finding something hidden there for himself.
Presently Millard drew Uncle Martin into talk. With his chair tilted
back and his broad hands locked together on his lap, Uncle Martin gave
Charley an oracular account of all the mistakes which his employers had
recently made in the conduct of their business. From his standpoint the
affairs of the company were usually on the high road to bankruptcy, and
all because of certain failures of judgment which Uncle Martin could
have pointed out in a moment had they taken the trouble to consult a man
of his experience. When Charley suggested that the company had paid an
eight per cent. dividend during the past year Uncle Martin put on a look
of contempt, and shook his head.
"Dividing their capital in order to keep up the price of stock," he said
sagely. Then he proceeded to show that if they would only do this and
not do the other they might easily crowd their rivals to the wall. He
knew three months before it took place that tin would fall in price. But
the company laid in a big stock just in time to get caught.
Having done the polite by Uncle Martin, Millard turned to Aunt Hannah.
Uncle Martin proceeded, therefore, to fill up the stove; which done, he
said:
"Well, Charley, I am going to see one of the men in our shop that got
his foot hurt a week ago Friday. I'll see you at supper; you'll take tea
with us."
"Thank you, Uncle Martin, but this time I can't stay so long. I've
promised to take dinner with some friends."
He held out his hand, and Uncle Martin said good-by, and good luck to
you, and come again, and always glad to see you, Charley, and then made
his exit, stooping a little as he went out through the low door, leaving
Charley what he wanted most, a chance to talk with his aunt about the
progress her children were making in their studies, and to find out what
he could do to help them. The mother told him that besides their school
they were reading some books brought to them by Dick's Sunday-school
teacher, who took a great interest in all the children. Millard always
expected to hear the praises of this Sunday-school teacher when he came
to see his aunt. Once on this theme good Aunt Hannah could not easily
stop.
"She doesn't put on the fine lady or talk to me as though I was somebody
different because I am a workingman's wife. I haven't many friends; the
people down here are so different from the people up in the country. But
I think she is the best friend I ever had. There, she's coming up now,"
she said, hearing the clatter of feet and voices ascending the stairway.
Millard was a little curious to see the teacher of whom he had heard so
much. He figured to himself some one only a little above his aunt in
station, and so the more ready to form an intimacy with humble people.
When Mary and Dick threw open the hall door of the apartment, so as to
make the interior visible from the obscurity of the stair-landing,
Millard, who was sitting with his back to the door, holding Tommy on his
lap, heard the voice of Phillida Callender say:
"I'll not go in this time; you have company."
"Do come in; it's only our Cousin Charley," pleaded Mary Martin, a girl
of fourteen.
Millard felt himself caught, and he would have liked to sit there and
let Miss Callender go down the stairs without recognizing him. But he
felt that he must be polite to her above all things, and his
relationship to the Martins was not a thing to be ashamed of, and must
besides soon be known to Phillida. So he rose with quick decision and
said as he walked towards the door:
"Don't let my presence keep you from coming in, Miss Callender; I am on
the point of leaving."
"You, Mr. Millard!" Phillida came forward, coloring a little, while Aunt
Hannah and the children stood and looked on in amazement. "Who would
have believed it! You are the cousin--the Cousin Charley of whom the
children here speak as though he were a good fairy. They pronounce the
name _Mill_erd, you know, and I didn't suspect _you_."
"But fancy _my_ surprise!" said Millard. "I ought to have guessed that
such a famous Sunday-school teacher could not be anybody but Miss
Callender. But I didn't even think to ask the name. So you are the
person of whose praises I am so jealous when I come here."
"Don't you think we're lucky to have such a cousin?" said Dick Martin,
the second child and the eldest boy, looking up at Miss Callender.
"Ah! now, Dick, you can't trap me into praising Mr. Millard to his
face," said Miss Callender. "Maybe I'll tell you some time when he isn't
here what I think of him." She was patting Dick on the shoulder. "But I
don't mind telling Mr. Millard right here and now that he is a very
lucky man to have such an aunt as your mother."
"Well said and true," answered Millard. "I like that better than
anything Miss Callender could say about me, Dick, even if what she
should say were to be all good; and that it wouldn't be, for she speaks
the truth, and I'll tell you for a secret that she doesn't quite approve
of a man that wastes his leisure time as I do. She'd like me better if I
were to come down to the mission every Sunday."
"Well, there ain't anybody at the mission as good as you, except Miss
Callender," objected Dick.
That young lady only laughed and put her arms about Tommy, who had
deserted Millard and was now climbing on her lap.
This encounter advanced Millard's acquaintance with Phillida more than a
dozen calls or conversations in formal society. Phillida was pleased to
find that Millard was not merely a male butterfly, and he in turn felt
strangely drawn to this young woman who had discovered the royal
excellence of Aunt Hannah Martin amid the rubbish of Avenue C. Millard,
who was "just going" when Phillida came in, sat out the half-hour that
she staid, and when she rose to go he asked her if he might have the
pleasure of walking with her as far as Second Avenue. It seemed to him,
though he did not say so, that a young lady needed an escort in that
part of the town; but Phillida, who knew the people better, had no such
thought.
"Thank you, Mr. Millard," she said; "I should be glad of your company.
But I am not going home; I am going to Washington Square: I promised my
aunt that I would go directly there from Sunday-school, and now I've
staid here longer than I intended, and I shall be late."
"Why, I'm expected there too. If you don't object we'll go together."
The two said good-by all around and descended the stairs, holding on to
the narrow steps with their heels, as it were. When they came into the
light, and breathed the cool salt air blowing into the avenue from the
neighboring East River, Phillida, who had something on her mind, said
rather awkwardly:
"I did not know that you were expected at Aunt Harriet's this evening."
The speech was one of maidenly modesty; if Aunt Gouverneur had planned
to bring the two people together at her table, Phillida wished it known
that she was not a party to the plot. But Millard laughed and said:
"If you had known, I am to understand that you would have declined to
go."
"I did not say that I should be sorry to have you there," she answered,
with the hesitancy of one stepping among pitfalls.
"Shall we take the Tenth street car?" asked Millard. "It runs through
Eighth street on the west side."
"As you please. I should have walked if alone," said Phillida.
"And I would much rather walk with good company than ride. So we will
walk."
It took them full three-quarters of an hour to reach Washington Square,
though either would have done it alone in a quarter less, for walking is
a kind of work that is not shortened when shared with a friend.
Millard purposely drew Miss Callender into talk about the work of the
mission, and he was soon rewarded by seeing her break through her
habitual restraint and reveal the enthusiastic self within. She told him
of the reading-room at the mission, and of the coffee-room where rolls
and hot coffee were served to men every day in the week, so as to keep
them from the saloons. Her face was aglow with interest as she talked,
but Millard would rather have drawn her to speak of her own relation to
the work. This she avoided, beyond confessing that she took her turn
with the other ladies in superintending the coffee-room. At length,
however, as they passed one of those open stairways that lead to
thronged tenements above,--like the entrance to a many-chambered
ant-hill, save that this mounts and that descends,--she spoke to a lad
on the sidewalk, telling him to give her love to his sister and say that
she was coming in to see her the next day. To Millard she explained
that the boy's sister was an invalid young woman on one of the upper
floors, bed-ridden for many years.
"And you visit her?" asked Millard, with a hardly concealed repulsion at
the notion of Phillida climbing these populous stairs and threading the
dingy and malodorous hallways above.
"Yes; she thinks so much of seeing me--because I am well, I suppose. She
says it makes her stronger just to look at me. And if I can take her a
flower, or some little bit of outdoors, it is more in her life than a
trip to the country would be in mine. Poor Wilhelmina Schulenberg has
not been down the stairs for five years. We talk of trying to get an
invalid's chair for her when the warm weather comes, so that her brother
can wheel her in the Square."
Millard turned and looked again at the stairway as though noticing all
the particulars of its environment. It was a balmy day in the last of
February, and they were soon crossing Tompkins Square diagonally towards
Eighth street. He had caught the infection of Phillida's exaltation;
instead of feeling repulsion at sight of the swarming children in cheap
and often shabby clothes, racing madly up and down the broad asphalted
walks, instead of turning in aversion from the commonplace people
sitting talking, staring, smoking, sleeping, flirting, or courting on
the benches, he was able to take Miss Callender's view of the matter and
to feel gratified that the poor, and especially the little folk so long
winter-cribbed in narrow tenements, were now able to get so much
happiness in the open ground.
IX.
WASHINGTON SQUARE AND ELSEWHERE.
Mrs. Gouverneur had invited both Phillida and Millard to a family dinner
this evening with a notion of furthering their acquaintance and drawing
her niece into society. She would not admit to herself any purpose or
expectation ulterior. She had engaged each one to come two hours before
dinner to make a quiet afternoon of it, and when she found them both
unpunctual she wondered.
"Philip," she said to her son, who was sitting by the window reading a
folio volume of Sir Thomas Browne, "I asked Phillida to come early this
afternoon, and I can't imagine what keeps her."
"Oh, some leper, or some one who has fallen among thieves. It's a
dreadful thing to be a Christian. I have only known three or four, and
Phillida is one of them."
"You don't mean to say we are not all Christians?" demanded Philip's
father, a taciturn man with a rather handsome face of the broad Dutch
type. What history it carried was mainly one of good dinners and fine
wines. The senior Gouverneur had been sitting looking into the fire for
half an hour without saying a word. His son's way of treating the sacred
white elephants of conventionality was the main grief of this
dignified, well-bred, entirely commonplace man.
"Yes, you're all--we're all, Christians in the sense that we're neither
Jews, Mohammedans, nor Buddhists. But most of us don't belong to the
same totem with Jesus."
"What do you mean by the same totem with Jesus?" said the mother, who
could not help shuddering a little at the temerity of her son's
paradoxes, though fondly indulgent of his irreverent cleverness.
"A totem among the Indians is the subdivision of a tribe. The Mohawks or
Cayugas, for example, were subdivided into totems called the 'Wolf,' the
'Turtle,' the 'Bear.' Every man belonged to the totem of his mother and
was akin to everybody in it. If a Mohawk of the Wolf totem stopped in
the village of the Cayugas or the Senecas, he was entertained by some
Seneca of the same totem who claimed him for a kinsman."
"That's very curious," said his mother.
"I don't see what it's got to do with your cousin Phillida or with
religion," said Mr. Gouverneur, who as an elder in the Dutch Reformed
Church, and as the descendant of a long line of men and women who had
traveled in the same well-worn path since the good old days of the Synod
of Dort, felt much annoyed at Philip's waywardness.
"Well," said Philip, leaning back in his chair and letting the folio
rest on his knees, "you see there are religious totems that run through
all denominations of Christians and even through different religions,
and the lines of cleavage between them are deeper than those between
Moslems and Christians, or between Jews and idolaters. There is what I
call the totem of the Wahahbees--the people who translate religion into
dispute or persecution. In central Asia they get rid of an opponent by
assassination in the name of Almighty God and his prophet. In the United
States doctrine defenders are inconveniently placed, and they have to be
content with newspaper and pulpit scolding and with excommunicating
those who differ from them. Then there is the most respectable sect of
all--the Pharisees, which counts eminent divines and rabbis of every
religion among its people. Great church-goers and Sabbath-keepers, great
distributors of shalls and shall-nots, great observers of scruples and
ordinances. They hold a tight rein over recreations and keep their
mint-and-cumin tithes by double-entry. Now, Phillida is no Wahahbee and
she is no Pharisee. She is not above enjoying herself at your table on
Sunday evening, you see, or going to Mrs. Hilbrough's reception. She
takes her religion in the noblest way. Her enthusiasms all have a
philanthropic coloring. She's what I call a Jesus-ite."
"Ah, now, Philip," said his mother, half-amused and half-startled by the
irreverent sound of this expression, but full of admiration for Philip's
originality.
"And what are _you_, please?" demanded his father with some severity and
a slightly heightened color. He knew that Philip must be wrong, for he
had never seen anything of this sort in the "Christian Intelligencer" in
his life. "What are you?" he repeated.
"Only a poor doubting, mocking, useless Sadducee, I suppose," said the
son as he bent again over the Religio Medici. There was a touch of
dejection in his voice, which served to disarm that resentment which his
father felt towards every view of anything that varied from the
consecrated commonplace.
The door-bell rang, and Mrs. Gouverneur, who had intended that Phillida
and Millard should each consider the other a mere coincidence, was a
little disconcerted to have them enter together at a later time than she
had set, and with an air of slight fatigue, as though they had come from
a long walk. And, moreover, without a chaperon. The acquaintance was
progressing more rapidly than she had expected.
Millard smilingly explained: "I encountered Miss Callender in a very
unfashionable quarter of the city, and I thought it my duty to take
charge of her."
At ten o'clock that evening Phillida was escorted to her home, her
cousin Philip Gouverneur walking on one side and Millard on the other.
She left them with a pleased sense of having passed an uncommonly happy
afternoon and evening, but was alarmed, nevertheless, to think what a
romance Agatha would build out of the encounter with Mr. Millard in
Avenue C and the detected contrivance of Aunt Gouverneur.
And when she had finished deprecating Agatha's raptures and had escaped
her sister's further questions by going to bed, Phillida found that her
own imagination had at length been set a-going, and her pillow reveries
kept her awake. Why was it always Mr. Millard? She had chanced upon him
at Mrs. Hilbrough's; his desire to bring Mrs. Gouverneur to the
Hilbrough reception had made him her escort; and now most unexpectedly
she finds that he and she are intimates and, in a sense, benefactors in
the same tenement in Avenue C; they are companions in a walk, and again
guests at the same table. It made her superstitious; these coincidences
looked like fate--or rather like a special manifestation of the will of
Providence--to the mind of Phillida Callender.
Undeniably there was something in Charles Millard that attracted her. He
was not just of her own kind, but if he had been would she have liked
him so well? Certainly the young men at the mission, exemplary fellows
that they were, did not excite even a languid interest in her mind.
Millard took life less seriously than she did, but perhaps that very
otherness was agreeable: when one is prone by nature to travel dusty
paths and dutifully to wound one's feet on mountainous rocky roads, a
companion who habitually beckons to green sward and shady seats, who
makes life put on a little more of the air of a picnic excursion into
the world, is a source of refreshment. She now knew that Millard was not
without benevolence, that he clung faithfully to his aunt in spite of
his connections in the great world, and that he was planning to assist
in the education of his cousins. If she had not somewhat exaggerated
these virtues of fidelity and generosity she would not have been a
woman, for it is one of the crowning good fortunes of life that a woman
can contrive to make so much of a little virtue in a man.
Having left Phillida, Millard and Gouverneur walked together up Second
Avenue, past the closed gateways of Stuyvesant Park. Millard was doing
the talking, at a great rate. Philip was silent in regard to everything,
or if he spoke he said only so much as a decent courtesy demanded. This
soon became tiresome to Millard, who was relieving the internal pressure
of his thoughts by mere bubble talk about things of no interest to
himself, while it seemed impossible to excite his companion's interest
in anything.
"You and I have changed places to-night, Phil," he said at length; "you
make me do all the talking. Come now, it's your turn."
"I don't feel in the humor," said Philip. "Are you going to the club?"
"No; I shall go home and write some letters, maybe, now I think of it.
So good-night."
Philip's "Good-night" was more curt than courteous, and he made his way
to the club, where, according to his habit, he crouched his small form
into one of the great chairs, drawing his head down between his
shoulders, which were thrust upward by the resting of his elbows on the
chair-arms. Here he sat long, taking no part in any conversation, but
watching the smoke from his cigar.
The next morning he came late to breakfast, and his mother lingered
after the rest had left the table, to see that his coffee and chops were
right and to mitigate his apparent depression.
"Your little match-making scheme is likely to succeed beautifully," he
said to her when the servant had gone.
"What do you mean? I'm sure I had no views of that kind in asking
Charley Millard and Phillida. I only wished to encourage Phillida to go
more into society."
"Views or no views, what it'll come to will be a match," Philip
retorted.
"Well, there'll be no harm done, I suppose."
"Not if you think Charley the best man for her."
There was something of dejection in the tone of this last remark, and a
note of reproach to her, that rendered Mrs. Gouverneur uneasy. When
Philip had left the table she revolved it in her mind. Was Philip
himself in love with Phillida? Or did he know anything to the
disadvantage of Millard?
"Tell Mr. Philip I wish to see him before he goes out," she said to one
of the maids.
When Philip came to her room she looked at him with anxiety.
"Do you know anything against Charley, Philip?"
"Nothing whatever," said Philip, emphatically, as he pulled on his
gloves.
"Philip, tell me truly, do you care for your cousin yourself?"
"Why, of course. She is my cousin, and a good girl--a little too
fearfully good."
"You know what I mean, Philip. Don't trifle with me."
"What would be the use of my caring for Phillida, as you call it?
Charley, with his usual luck, will get her, I am sure. You've fixed
that."
"Now, Philip, you reproach me unjustly. You've had years of intimacy
with Phillida. Why did you never let her know what your feelings were?"
"I? I haven't said that I have any feelings in the matter. Do you think
Phillida would have me if Charley were out of the way? She knows me too
well. She's a utilitarian. She would say, 'Cousin Phil is interesting,
but he hides his talent in a napkin. He studied law, and now neglects to
practise it because his uncle left him two or three thousand dollars a
year.' To her I am only an idler, when I'm not a mocker."
"She likes you, I am sure."
"Yes, in a way, no doubt. But I'm a doubter, and a mocker, and a
failure, and Phillida knows it. And so do I."
"Ah, now, Philip, why will you be so discouraged with yourself? You're
the cleverest young man in New York."
But Philip only smiled and said, "Good-morning, mother," and ran down
the stairs and out the door.
When Philip had left Millard in Second Avenue the evening before, the
latter was puzzled. He had never seen Gouverneur so depressed and
irritable. But when they had separated, Millard was relieved that he no
longer had to force a conversation about things of no interest to
himself, and that his thoughts were at length free to range where they
would.
He turned his footsteps towards his apartment, making a detour through
Madison Square to lengthen the stroll. His interest in and affection for
the family of his aunt was a fact so paradoxical to the rest of his life
that it was in some sense his main secret. It was not a thing he should
like to have explained to Philip Gouverneur, his bosom friend, for
example. But that Phillida Callender was now in possession of the chief
secret of his life gave him a sort of pleasure he had never known
before. That she was in friendship with his aunt's family and a sharer
in this off-color part of his existence made a sort of community of
feeling between him and her. He turned the matter over in his mind, he
went over in memory all parts of his encounter with her in his aunt's
tenement, he dwelt upon the glow of surprise on her countenance, and in
imagination he again took her hand in friendly greeting. He recalled
every detail of the walk through Avenue C, in Tompkins Square, and then
through the cross-streets. He made himself feel over again the pleasure
he had felt in those rare moments when she turned her dark, earnest eyes
toward him at some more than usually interesting moment in the
conversation.
This was the pleasant side of the reverie. For the rest, he was
tormented with a certain feeling of unworthiness that had never troubled
him so much before. The more he thought of the purposes, sweet, high,
and disinterested, that moved her, the more was he pained at a sense of
frivolity, or, at least, at a want of "worthwhileness" in his own aims.
He was a communicant at St. Matthias's, and highly esteemed for his
exemplary life and his liberality to the church. But the rector of St.
Matthias's did not trouble himself, as Phillida did, about the lost
sheep in the wilderness of the lettered avenues. His own flock, well
washed and kempt, were much more agreeable subjects of contemplation.
Millard sat in revery a long time. He was really afraid that he should
presently find himself in love with Miss Callender, and such a marriage
was contrary to his whole plan of life. His purpose was primarily to
remain a bachelor, though he had dreamed of himself well established,
but always with a wife whose tastes and connections should incline her
to those pursuits that go with a fashionable career, and he always saw a
vision of himself and his wife entertaining the very elect of New York
City. Here suddenly a new path, hitherto untrodden by his imagination,
opened before him as a possibility. Judged by the standards used among
his friends it was an undesirable road. It involved a voluntary
sacrifice of that position of social prominence and leadership which he
had striven so hard to secure. He resolved to put the thought away from
him.
A little later his lights were out and he was abed. But he did not sleep
at once, for in spite of the best resolutions he could not help
recalling again and again the face and figure, the voice and movement,
of Phillida Callender. Again and again he crossed Tompkins Square and
walked through Eighth street and Waverley Place with her; and she once
more confronted him across Mrs. Gouverneur's dinner-table.
One result of Millard's meditations was a desire to relieve his
conscience by sharing a little--if ever so little--in the effort to
improve the life of the multitudinous East-siders. To touch them by
personal effort and contact was out of the question; he could not bring
himself to attempt it, nor would it have availed anything, perhaps, if
he had, for the East-siders would have shrunk from his gloves as
instinctively as he did from their work-darkened palms. But there was
the other resort of his check-book. He sent a check the next evening to
the superintendent of the mission. He stated that he remitted this as
assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes on behalf of a gentleman who
did not wish his name known, and requested that the subscription be
announced merely as from "A Well-wisher." One half of the hundred
dollars was to go to the expenses of the coffee-room and the other half
to be appropriated to the library and reading-room.
Now it is not in the nature of things that a hen should see a new egg in
her nest without cackling over it, or that a man in charge of a
benevolent enterprise should have a hundred-dollar check mysteriously
and unexpectedly dropped into his hat without talking about it. Such a
gift smacks of special divine favor, and offers a good theme for an
address calculated to animate those engaged in the work. The very next
Sunday, when the Testaments had been shut up and the lesson papers had
all been put away, Phillida and the others heard from the superintendent
some very inspiriting remarks on the subject of the encouragements which
ought to make them take heart in their work. He wound up, of course, by
telling of this donation from an unknown well-wisher. Had he stopped
there--but what talker to young people would or could have stopped
there? He whisked out the check and showed it, and then the identical
letter from the assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes was held up
before the admiring boys and girls and read aloud to show how modestly
this benevolent well-wisher had hidden his hand.
And thus the only person in the audience from whom Millard had
particularly wished to conceal his agency in the matter knew perfectly
that the anonymous well-wisher was none other than the assistant cashier
himself. And she thought what a fine thing it was to have money when
there was so much good to be done with it.
X.
BROKEN RESOLVES.
Once the check was dispatched, Millard's conscience, which had been
aroused--irritated--by the standing rebuke of Phillida's superior
disinterestedness, was in a measure appeased. After sitting an hour in
slippery meditation he resolved to master his inclination toward Miss
Callender's society, for fear of jeopardizing that bachelor ideal of
life he had long cherished. Hilbrough's especial friendship, supported
by Mrs. Hilbrough's gratitude, had of late put him in the way of making
money more rapidly than heretofore; the probable early retirement of
Farnsworth would advance him to the cashiership of the bank, and there
opened before him as much as he had ever desired of business and social
success. It was not exactly that he put advantages of this sort into one
side of the scale and the undefinable charms of Phillida into the other.
But he was restrained by that natural clinging to the main purpose which
saves men from frivolous changes of direction under the wayward impulses
of each succeeding day. This conservative holding by guiding resolutions
once formed is the balance-wheel that keeps a human life from wabbling.
Western hunters used to make little square boxes with their names
graven in reverse on the inside. These they fixed over a young gourd,
which grew till it filled the box. Then the hunter by removing the box
and cutting off the end of the stem of the gourd, to make an opening
like the mouth of a bottle, secured a curious natural powder-flask,
shaped to his fancy and bearing his name in relief on its side. Like the
boxed gourd, the lives of men become at length rigidly shaped to their
guiding purposes, and one may read early resolutions ineffaceably
inscribed upon them. But the irony of it! Here was Millard, for example,
a mature man of affairs, held to a scheme of life adopted almost by
accident when he was but just tottering, callow, from his up-country
nest. What a haphazard world is this! Draw me no Fates with solemn
faces, holding distaffs and deadly snipping shears. The Fates? Mere
children pitching heads and tails upon the paving-stones.
But if the dominant purpose to which the man has fitted himself is not
to be suddenly changed, there are forces that modify it by degrees and
sometimes gradually undermine and then break it down altogether. The man
whose ruling purpose is crossed by a grand passion may say to himself,
like the shorn Samson, "I will go out as at other times before," for the
change that has come over him is subtle and not at once apparent to his
consciousness. Millard resolutely repressed his inclination to call on
Miss Callender, resolutely set himself to adhere to his old life as
though adherence had been a duty. But he ceased to be interested in the
decorations and amused by the articles of virtu in his apartment; he no
longer contemplated with pleasure the artistic effect of his rich
portières and the soft tone of his translucent window-hangings. The
place seemed barren and lonely, and the life he led not much worth the
having after all.
But, like the brave man he was, he stuck to his resolution not to call
on Miss Callender, from a sort of blind loyalty to nothing in
particular. Perhaps a notion that a beau like himself would make a
ridiculous figure suing to such a saint as Phillida had something to do
with his firmness of purpose. But when, a month later, he started once
more for Avenue C, he became at length aware that he had not made any
headway whatever in conquering his passion, which like some wild
creature only grew the fiercer under restraint. In spite of himself he
looked about in hope of meeting Miss Callender in the street, and all
the way across the avenues he wondered whether he should encounter her
at his aunt's. But Phillida had taken precautions against this. She
remembered, this time, that the last Sunday in the month was his day for
visiting his aunt, and she went directly home from the mission,
disturbed in spite of herself by conflicting emotions.
Millard could not but respect her dignified avoidance of him, which he
felt to be in keeping with her character. He listened with such grace as
he could to Uncle Martin, whose pessimistic oration to-day chanced to be
on the general ignorance and uselessness of doctors. His complaints
about the medical faculty were uttered slowly and with long pauses
between the sentences. Doctors, according to Uncle Martin, only pretend
to know something, and use a lot of big words to fool people. "Now I
doctor myself. I know what does me good, and I take it, doctor or no
doctor." This was said with a you-don't-fool-me expression on his solemn
face. "W'y, one doctor'll tell you one thing, and another'll tell you
another. One says bathing's good for you, and another says no; one wants
you to get up bright and early, and another says sleep a plenty; one
will half-starve you, and the other says the thing is to feed you up."
At this point Uncle Martin rested his elbows against his sides, threw
his forearms outward and upward at an angle of forty-five degrees,
holding his broad palms toward the ceiling, while he dropped his heavy
shorn chin upon his breast and gazed impressively upon Millard from
under his eyebrows. The young man was rendered uneasy by this climactic
pause, and he thought to break the force of Uncle Martin's attitude by
changing the subject.
"Doctors differ among themselves as much as ministers do," he said.
"Ministers?" said Uncle Martin, erecting his head again, and sniffing a
little. "They are just after money nowadays. W'y, I joined the Baptist
church over here"--beckoning with his thumb--"when I came to New York,
and the minister never come a-nigh us. We are not fine enough, I
suppose. Ministers don't believe the plain Bible; they go on about a lot
of stuff that they get from somewheres else. I say take the plain Bible,
that a plain man like me can understand. I don't want the Greek and
Latin of it. Now the Bible says in one place that if a man's sick the
elders are to pray over him and anoint him with oil--I suppose it was
sweet oil; but I don't know--that they used. But did you ever know any
elder to do that? Naw; they just off for the doctor. Now, I say take the
plain word of God, that's set down so't you couldn't noways make any
mistakes."
Here Uncle Martin again dropped his head forward in a butting position,
and stared at Charley Millard from under his brows. This time the
younger man judged it best to make no rejoinder. Instead, he took the
little Tommy in his arms and began to stroke the cheeks of the nestling
child. The diversion had the proper effect. Uncle Martin, perceiving
that the results of his exhaustive meditations in medicine and theology,
which were as plain as the most self-evident nose on a man's face, were
not estimated at their par value, got up and explained that he must go
to Greenpoint and call on a man who had lately lost a child; and then,
fearing he wouldn't get back to supper, he said good-by, and come again,
and always glad to see you, Charley, and good luck to you; and so made
his way down the dingy stairs.
Charley Millard now turned to his aunt, a thin-faced woman whose rather
high forehead, wide and delicately formed in the region of the temples,
made one think that in a more favorable soil she might have blossomed.
She was sitting by the window that looked out upon the narrow courtyard
below and on the rear house to which Aunt Martin's apartment was bound
by a double clothes-line running upon pulleys. In fact the whole
straitened landscape in view from the back windows was a vision of
ropes on pulleys. Sunday was the only day that Mrs. Martin cared to look
on this view, for on week-days it was a spectacle of sheets and
pillow-cases and the most intimate male and female garments flapping and
straddling shamelessly in the eddying wind.
Millard, while yet the older children had not returned, broached the
subject of their education. He particularly wished to put Mary, the
eldest, into a better school than the public school in her neighborhood,
or at least into a school where the associations would be better. He
proposed this to his aunt as delicately as possible.
"It's very kind of you, Charley," she said. "You want to make a fine
lady of her. But what would you do with her? Would it make her any
happier? She would want better clothes than we could give her; she would
become dependent on you, maybe; and she would be ashamed of the rest of
us."
"She could never be ashamed of you, aunt," said Millard. But he was
struck with a certain good sense and originality in his aunt which kept
her from accepting anything for good merely because it was commonly so
taken. What service, indeed, would it be to Mary to declass her? Of what
advantage to a poor girl to separate her from her surroundings unless
you can secure to her a life certainly better?
"It would be well," he said after a while, "if Mary could prepare
herself for some occupation by which she might some day get a living if
other resources fail. You wouldn't like her to have to go out to
service, or to fall below her family, Aunt Hannah?"
"No; certainly not. But there's the trouble. Her father is like many
other men from the country; he can't bear the idea of Mary's earning her
own living. He says he expects to support his own girls. And you know
Henry won't have her educated at your expense. He's very proud. But if
she could somehow get into a school better than the public schools in
this part of the city, a school where she would get better teaching and
meet a better class of children, I would like it, provided she did not
get a notion of being a fine lady. There is nothing worse than half-cut
quality, and that's all she'd be. And are you sure, Charley, that rich
people are happier than we are? We don't worry about what we haven't
got."
The children were now upon the stairs, and the private talk was ended.
They greeted their cousin eagerly, and began as usual to talk of Miss
Callender.
"We tried to bring her home with us," said Dick, "but she said, 'Not
to-day, Dick, not to-day,' and she stuck to it. I told her you'd be
here, and I thought that would fetch her, but she only laughed and said
she had to call and see a poor sick young lady that hadn't walked for
five years; and then she said, 'Give my love to your mother,' and left
us. I sh'd thought she'd 'a' sent her love to Cousin Charley, too, but
she never done it."
"Don't say 'never done it,' Dick," broke in Mary. "It's not proper."
Millard accepted his aunt's invitation to tea, and then walked homeward
by a very round-about way. He was not quite aware of the nature of the
impulse that caused him to turn downtown and thus to trace a part of
the route he had walked over with Phillida four weeks before. He paused
to look again at the now dark stairway up which lived the bedridden
Wilhelmina Schulenberg, and though he shuddered with a sort of repulsion
at thought of her hard lot, it was not sympathy with Mina Schulenberg
that had arrested his steps at the mouth of this human hive. To his
imagination it seemed that these dark, uninviting stairs were yet warm
with the tread of the feet of Phillida Callender; it could not be more
than two hours since she came down. So instead of following the route of
a month ago through Tompkins Square and Eighth street, as he had half
unconsciously set out to do, he walked through Tenth street to Second
Avenue. This way Phillida must have gone this very afternoon, and this
way he felt himself drawn by an impulse increasing in force ever as he
journeyed. It seemed of prime importance that he should call on Miss
Callender without delay, just to consult her about Mary's education. His
reasoning in favor of this course was convincing, for logic never gets
on so well as when inclination picks all the pebbles out of the pathway.
A long discussion concerning Mary Martin's education was held that
evening between the young people sitting by the drop-lamp in Mrs.
Callender's parlor. Many nice theories were broached by each of them,
but during the whole of the discussion they were both in a state of
double consciousness. Canvassing Mary and her outlook in life in one
center of thought, they were thinking and feeling more profoundly
regarding the outlook in life of two other people in another vortex of
brain action. For Phillida could not conceal from herself the fact that
Mr. Millard was only half interested in what he was saying, but was
utterly absorbed in her with whom he was talking. His passion, so long
denied, now had its revenge, and even the training of a man of the world
to conceal what he felt and to say what he did not think was of no avail
against it.
Notwithstanding the divided state of their minds, in consequence of
which Mary's interests got only a minority of attention, her interests
did not fare badly, for the very effort to keep the thoughts and
feelings that were eddying below the surface from engulfing their whole
mental action forced both talkers to concentrate their minds earnestly
upon Mary's schooling.
In the first place both of them admitted the force of Mrs. Martin's
objection to declassing Mary in such a way as to leave her segregated
from family ties. Then it came out that Phillida did know a school--not
a fine school, but a good school--where Mary would not be without
companions in sober clothes, and where the teacher, a Miss Gillies, knew
her business and had not too many scholars. But how to overcome Uncle
Martin's objection to being helped by his wife's nephew?
"If," said Millard "the teacher of whom you speak had given to her a
sufficient amount to pay the tuition of some suitable girl from a plain
family, she would naturally consult you?"
"Yes; I think so," said Phillida.
"And under such circumstances why could you not recommend Mary?"
Phillida hesitated.
"I see you are more truthful than we men of business, who could not keep
our feet without little ruses. There would be an implied deception of
Uncle Martin, you think. Well, then, I will make the subscription
absolute, and will leave Miss Gillies in entire control of it. I will
advise her to consult you. If she does, and you think some other child
than Mary ought to have it, or if it should be refused for Mary, you may
give it to some one else. Do you know any one else who would profit by
such a tuition?"
"Oh, yes!"
"Well, perhaps a better way would be this. I'll make it double, and you
may have the entire disposal of both scholarships, if Miss Gillies will
let you. Suppose I leave it to you to communicate the fact to her?"
"That will be very good, indeed"; and Phillida's face lost for a moment
the blushing half-confusion that had marked it during the conversation,
and a look of clear pleasure shone in her eyes--the enthusiastic
pleasure of doing good and making happiness. Millard hardly rose to the
height of her feeling; it was not to be expected. Whenever her face
assumed this transfigured look his heart was smitten with pain--the
mingled pain of love intensified and of hope declining; for this
exaltation seemed to put Phillida above him, and perhaps out of his
reach. Why should she fly away from him in this way?
"And may I come--to-morrow evening, perhaps--to inquire about this
matter?" he said, making a movement to depart.
The question brought Phillida to the earth again, for Millard spoke with
a voice getting beyond his control and telling secrets that he would
fain have kept back. His question, tremulously put, seemed to ask so
much more than it did! She responded in a voice betraying emotion quite
out of keeping with the answer to a question like this, and with her
face suffused, and eyes unable to look steadily at his, which were
gazing into hers.
"Certainly, Mr. Millard," she said.
He took her hand gently and with some tremor as he said good-evening,
and then he descended the brownstone steps aware that all debate and
hesitancy were at an end. Come what might come, he knew himself to be
irretrievably in love with Phillida Callender. This was what he had
gained by abstaining from the sight of her for four weeks.
When the elevator had landed him on one of the high floors of the
Graydon Building, a bachelor apartment house, and he had entered his own
parlor, the large windows of which had a southern outlook, he stood a
long time regarding the view. The electric lights were not visible, but
their white glow, shining upward from the streets and open squares,
glorified the buildings that were commonplace enough in daytime. Miles
away across a visible space of water Liberty's torch shone like a star
of the fifth magnitude. The great buildings about the City Hall Park,
seen through a haze of light, seemed strangely aërial, like castles in a
mirage or that ravishing Celestial City which Bunyan gazed upon in his
dreams. A curved line of electric stars well up toward the horizon
showed where the great East River Bridge spanned the unresting tides
far below. Millard's apartment was so high that the street roar reached
it in a dull murmur as of a distant sea, and he stood and absorbed the
glory of the metropolitan scene--such a scene as was never looked upon
in any age before our own decade--and it was to him but a fit
accompaniment to his passion for Phillida, which by its subjective
effect upon him had transformed all life and the universe itself. A
month before he had sat and stared a hard-coal fire out of countenance
in apprehension of falling in love with Phillida. Now he eagerly drank
in the glory of earth and air, and loved her without reserve and without
regret.
XI.
IN THE PARK.
Although love had at length come to Millard like an inundation sweeping
away the barriers of habit and preconception, he was quite aware that
Phillida Callender's was not a temperament to forget duty in favor of
inclination, and the strength of his desire to possess her served as a
restraint upon his action. He followed the habits of business
negotiation even in love-making; he put down his impatience and made his
approaches slowly that he might make sure of success. As a prudent
beginning to his courtship he called on Phillida at first but once a
week. She soon regained her wonted placidity of exterior, and Millard
found it difficult to divine how far his affection was reciprocated.
For himself, he kept up his round of post-Easter social engagements. It
would be time enough to lop these off if Phillida should require it when
his affairs with her should be upon a more secure footing. Phillida,
too, kept up a series of post-Easter engagements, but of another sort.
Besides the ordinary work of the mission, and the extraordinary work
attending the preparations for Fresh Air excursions for the invalid poor
which were to be carried on in the heats of summer, she went once a week
to the parlor Bible readings of Mrs. Frankland, which were, in fact,
eloquent addresses, and which served greatly to stimulate her zeal. Thus
these two lovers journeyed upon paths that had no convergence, even
while feeling themselves drawn irresistibly toward each other.
As April wore into May, Millard ventured on more frequent attentions,
and from day to day meditated how he might light on an opportunity to
tell her what he felt and wished. But at her house he was always held in
check by remembering the crash of an overturned chair at the time of his
first call, and he could not speak very confidential words with no other
screen than those thin sliding doors. When on two occasions he contrived
to encounter Phillida returning from her Sunday afternoon mission to the
east, he thought he perceived certain traces of debate going on in her
mind, and an apparent effort on her part to hold the talk to cool and
indifferent topics. That she was strongly attracted to him he readily
believed, and had she been a woman of the ordinary type this would have
been sufficient. But she was Phillida Callender, and he who would win
her must gain consent not alone of her affections but of her conscience
as well, and of her judgment. Such a decision as he should ask her to
make would be tried by the test of the high life purpose that ruled her
and looked on all interfering delights and affections with something
like fierceness. For how shall one of the daughters of God be persuaded
to wed one of the sons of men?
And thus, by the procrastination that comes of lack of opportunity, and
the procrastination that comes of timidity, the spring was fast passing
into summer. Hilbrough had taken Millard into partnership in an
enterprise of his own--the reorganization of a bankrupt railway company
in the interest of the bondholders. It was necessary to secure the
co-operation of certain English holders of the securities, and Hilbrough
felt sure that a man of Millard's address and flexibility would achieve
more than he himself could in a negotiation abroad. So it was arranged
that on the first Saturday in June the assistant cashier should sail for
London on a ten weeks' leave of absence from the bank, and that when his
business in London should be completed he was to make a short tour over
the well-beaten paths of European travel. This arrangement rendered it
necessary that Millard should bring his diplomatic delays to an end, and
run the risk of an immediate proposal to Phillida Callender.
Memorial Day came round, and all the land showed its sorrow for the
innumerable host that perished untimely in deadly battle and deadlier
hospital by keeping the day right joyously. This gave Millard a holiday,
and he set off after a lazy breakfast to walk up Fifth Avenue and
through Central Park. He proposed to explore the Ramble and meditate all
the time how he might best come to an understanding with Phillida that
very evening.
He entered the Park at the southeast corner, but instead of pushing
straight up to the Mall, a childish impulse to take a hurried glance at
the animals deflected him toward the old armory. The holiday crowd
already gathering proved quite too miscellaneous for his fastidious
nerves; the dumb brutes he could stand, but these pushing and chattering
human monkeys were uninteresting, and he went on through the region of
wild beasts to that of tame ones, where the patient donkeys were busily
employed carrying timid little children and showing their skill in their
favorite game of doing the least possible amount of work in any given
time. Though the motion of these creatures was barely perceptible, the
pace seemed frightful to some of the alarmed infants clinging to their
backs. Millard looked at them a moment in amusement, then refusing the
donkey path he turned to the left toward the shady Mall. The narrow walk
he chose was filled to-day with people, who, having fed the elephant,
admired the diving of the seal, wondered at the inconceivable ugliness
of the hippopotamus, watched the chimpanzee tie knots in the strands of
an untwisted rope by using her four deft hands, and shuddered a little
at the young alligators, were now moving away--a confused mass of
children, eager to spend their nickels for a ride at the carrousel, and
elders bent on finding shelter from the heat under the elms that
overhang the Mall. There was a counter-current of those who had entered
the Park by remoter gateways and were making their way toward the
menagerie, and Millard's whole attention was absorbed in navigating
these opposite and intermingling streams of people and in escaping the
imminent danger of being run over by some of the fleet of
baby-carriages. From a group of three ladies that he had just passed a
little beyond the summer-house, he heard a voice say, half under
breath:
"Mr. Millard, I declare!"
It was Agatha Callender, and as he turned to greet her he saw behind her
Phillida supporting her mother.
"Mama is not very well, and we persuaded her to take a holiday,"
explained Agatha; "and I am trying to find a way for her out of this
crowd."
Millard took charge of the convoy and succeeded in landing the party on
shady seats at the lower end of the Mall, where the colossal Walter
Scott is asking his distinguished countryman Robert Burns, just
opposite, if all poets engaged in the agonizing work of poetic
composition fall into such contortions as Burns does in this perpetual
brass.
After a while Agatha grew as restless as the poet seems in the statue.
She had brought money enough to take her party about the Park in the
regular coaches, and spending-money unspent always made Agatha unhappy.
She now broached the subject of taking a coach, and remembered that it
was a free day at the Art Museum. Millard proposed to go to the Fifth
Avenue gate and get a carriage for the party. This extravagance the
prudent Mrs. Callender would not consent to, and so Millard conducted
the ladies to the place where Shakspere, a little weak in the knees, has
long been doing his best, according to his ability, to learn a part in a
new play. The first coach that came by had but two vacancies. Millard
hailed it, and said promptly:
"Now, Miss Agatha, we shall not find four places in one coach to-day.
You and Mrs. Callender get into this one, and take stop-over checks at
the Museum. Miss Callender and I will join you there in the next coach
or on foot."
There was no time for debate, and before Mrs. Callender could muster her
wits to decide what was best to be done about this, Charley's gloved
hands had gently helped her into the coach, put Agatha in beside her,
and handed a half-dollar to the driver for the fare. Just as Mrs.
Callender was beginning to protest against this last act the coach
rolled away, and Agatha saw Millard and Phillida face about without
waiting for another coach and return toward Shakspere and the Mall.
"I oughtn't to have let him pay for us," murmured Mrs. Callender.
"Oh, you needn't feel under any obligations," whispered Agatha; "he just
wanted to be alone with Phillida."
But now that Millard had seized the advantage of an unchaperoned stroll
with Phillida, he found himself without the courage to use it. The very
suddenness with which they had been left to themselves made Phillida
feel that a crisis was imminent, and this served to give her an air of
confusion and restraint. In presence of this reserve Millard drew back.
The two strolled along the Mall, admiring the wide, elm-shaded triple
avenue, and talking of uninteresting subjects. They were involved once
more in the evergrowing holiday crowd, and Millard saw with vexation
that his opportunity was slipping away from him. When they had traversed
the length of the Mall and were approaching the bust of Beethoven,
Phillida said suddenly:
"There is Mina Schulenberg in a wheel-chair. I wonder how she contrived
to get one."
She pushed forward toward the invalid, but Millard hung back a little,
and Phillida suspected that he was probably ashamed to be seen talking
with Mina, who was wheeled by her brother, a stalwart young man of
twenty, in his Sunday clothes.
"O Miss Callender, is it you? Do you see my chair already? It must have
been you who managed to get it for me."
"No, Wilhelmina; indeed I knew nothing about it till I saw you in it
this moment."
"Then I don't know what to think," said the invalid. "It was sent up
from a place down in Grand street already, with my name on a ticket and
the word 'Paid' marked on the ticket. I wish I could thank the one that
gave it to me wunst already, for I don't feel like it belonged to me
till I do."
Phillida turned about and looked at Millard, who still lurked behind
her. When he met her penetrating gaze he colored as though he had been
caught doing wrong.
"Miss Schulenberg, this is Mr. Millard," said Phillida. "I don't know
who sent you this chair; but if you thank him the person who paid for
your chair will hear about it, I feel sure."
Mina looked at Millard. The faultlessness of his dress and the
perfection of style in his carriage abashed her. But she presently
reached her emaciated hand to him, while tears stood in her eyes.
Millard trembled as he took the semi-translucent fingers in his hand:
they looked brittle, and he could feel the joints through his gloves as
though it were a skeleton that thus joined hands with him.
"You gave me my chair!" she said. "Yesterday I was out in it for the
first time already--in Tompkins Square. But to-day Rudolph here--he is
such a good fellow--he wanted to give me a big treat wunst, and so he
brought me all the way up here already to see this beautiful Park. It's
the--the first time--" but shadowy people like Wilhelmina hover always
on the verge of hysteria, and her feelings choked her utterance at this
point.
Millard could not bear the sight of her emotion. He said hastily, "Never
mind, Miss Schulenberg; never mind. Good-morning. I hope you will enjoy
your day."
Then as he and Phillida went up the stairs that lead out of the Mall at
the north of the arbor by the Casino, Millard made use of his
handkerchief, explaining that he must have taken a slight cold. He half
halted, intending to ask Phillida to sit down with him on a seat partly
screened by a bush at each end; but there were many people passing, and
the two went on and mounted the steps to the circular asphalted space at
the top of the knoll. Phillida, shy of what she felt must come, began to
ask about the great buildings in view, and he named for her the lofty
Dakota Flats rising from a rather naked plain to the westward, the low
southern façade of the Art Museum to the northward, to the east the
somber front of the Lenox Library,--as forbidding as the countenance of
a rich collector is to him who would borrow,--and the columnar gable
chimneys of the Tiffany house.
Millard now guided Phillida to a descending path on the side of the hill
opposite to that by which they had come up, and which perversely turned
southeastward for a while, it having been constructed on the theory that
a park walk should describe the longest distance between any two points.
Here he found a seat shaded by the horizontal limbs of an exotic tree
and confronted by a thicket that shut out at this season almost all but
little glimpses of the Tiffany house and the frowning Lenox. He asked
Phillida to sit down, and he sat beside her. The momentary silence that
followed was unendurable to Phillida's excited nerves, so she said:
"Mr. Millard, it was a splendid thing to do."
"What?"
"To give that chair to Mina Schulenberg, and all so quietly."
"Miss Callender--Phillida--may I call you Phillida?"
A tone of entreaty in this inquiry went to her heart and set her
thoughts in a whirl. It was not possible to say "No." She did not lift
her eyes from the asphalt, which she was pushing with the ferrule of her
parasol, but she said "Yes," filled with she knew not what pleasure at
having Millard use this familiarity.
"Phillida, you have taught me a great deal. It is to you that the poor
girl owes her ride to-day, and to you that I owe the pleasure of seeing
her enjoy it. I'm not so good as you are. I am a rather--a rather
useless person, I'm afraid. But I am learning. And I want to ask you
before I go away whether you _could_ love me?"
Phillida kept trying to bore into the pavement with her parasol, but she
did not reply.
After a pause Millard went on. "I know you don't decide such things by
mere passion. But you've had reason to think that I loved you for a good
while. Haven't you?"
"I--I think I have." This was said with difficulty after a pause of some
seconds.
"And you must have thought about it, and turned it over in the light of
duty. Haven't you--Phillida?"
This address by her Christian name startled her. It was almost like a
caress. But presently she said, "Yes; I have." She remembered that her
prayer this very morning had been that before she should be called upon
to decide the question of marrying Millard she might have some sign to
guide her, and now the happy face of Wilhelmina seemed the very omen she
had sought.
"And you haven't made up your mind to reject me?" said Millard.
The answer this time was longer than ever in coming.
"No; no, Mr. Millard."
Millard paused before putting the next question. "I'm going away, you
know, on Saturday. May I get out of that last answer all that I wish to,
Phillida?"
The parasol trembled in her hand, and perceiving that it betrayed her
she ceased to push the ground and let go of the staff, grasping the edge
of the seat instead. Millard could see her frame tremble, and in his
eagerness he scarcely breathed. With visible effort she at length
slowly raised her flushed face until her gaze encountered his. But
utterance died on her lips. Either from some inclination of the head or
from some assent in her eyes Millard understood her unuttered answer to
be in the affirmative. He lifted her hand from the seat beside him and
gently kissed it. And then as he held it he presently felt her fingers
grasp his hand ever so lightly. It was answer enough. A noisy party was
coming down the steps toward them.
"Now, Phillida dear, we must go," he said, rising. "Your mother will not
know what has detained us."
Phillida looked up playfully as they walked away, and said, her voice
still husky with feeling:
"Agatha will be sure to guess."
XII.
PHILIP.
Philip Gouverneur, passing the Graydon on his return from a
dinner-party, thought to make a farewell call on Millard. He encountered
Charley in the elevator, just coming home from an evening with Phillida,
his face aglow with pleasure.
"Fancied I should find you packing," Philip said. "I thought as you
would cross the Alps for the first time I'd come and give you a few
points. If I were not so lazy and inefficient I believe I should go with
you and 'personally conduct' you."
"That would be jolly. Come over in three or four weeks and I'll be quits
with London. We'll engage a traveled English valet together, and journey
in comfort. I will follow your lead and go anywhere."
"No; I shall not get over this year."
They entered Millard's rooms, where things were in a state of upheaval,
but orderly even in their upheaval. Seating themselves for half an hour
by the open windows they talked of things to be seen in Europe. Then
Philip, remembering that his friend had much to do, rose to go, and
Millard said with an effort:
"Well, Phil, I'm going to be kin to you. Congratulate me."
The color fled from Philip's face as he said:
"How's that?"
"Phillida Callender and I are engaged."
"You and Phillida?" said Philip, struggling to collect his wits. "I
expected it." He spoke low and as though some calamity had befallen him.
A moment he stood trying to muster his forces to utter some phrase
proper to the occasion, and then he abruptly said:
"Good-night; don't come out"; and walked away toward the elevator like a
somnambulist doing what he is compelled to by preconception without
making note of his environment. And Millard wondered as he looked after
him.
The next morning Philip came to breakfast so late that even his
indulgent mother had forsaken the table after leaving directions to
"have things kept hot for Mr. Philip, and some fresh coffee made for
him."
When he had eaten a rather slender meal he sought his mother's
sitting-room.
"Aunt Callender called last night, I hear. She must have had something
to say, or she would hardly have persuaded herself to leave her sewing
so long."
"She came to tell me of Phillida's engagement," said Mrs. Gouverneur,
looking at Philip furtively as she spoke.
"I supposed that was it."
"Did you know it, then?"
"Oh, Charley Millard told me last night. These lucky fellows always take
it for granted that you'll rejoice in all their good fortune; they air
their luck before you as though it were your own." He was looking out of
the window at the limited landscape of Washington Square.
"I'm sorry you feel bad about it," said his mother.
Philip was silent.
"I never dreamed that you had any special attachment for Phillida," said
Mrs. Gouverneur.
"What did you think I was made of?" said Philip, turning toward his
mother. "Since she came from Siam I have seen her about every week. Now
consider what a woman she is, and do you wonder that I like her?"
"Why didn't you tell her so?"
"I might if I'd had Charley's brass. But what is there about a critical,
inefficient young man like me, chiefly celebrated for piquant talk and
sarcasm--what is there to recommend me to such a woman as Phillida? If
I'd had Charley's physique--I suppose even Phillida isn't insensible to
his appearance--but look at me. It might have recommended me to her,
though, that in one respect I do resemble St. Paul--my bodily presence
is weak." And he smiled at his joke. "No, mother, I am jealous of
Charley, but I am not disappointed. I never had any hopes. I'd about as
soon have thought of making love to any beatified saint in glory as to
Phillida. But Charley's refined audacity is equal to anything."
The mother said nothing. She felt her son's bitterness too deeply to try
to comfort him.
"I hate it most of all for Phillida's sake," Philip went on. "It can not
be a happy marriage. Here they've gone and engaged themselves without
reflection, and a catastrophe is sure to follow."
"Oh, maybe not," said Mrs. Gouverneur, who could not help feeling that
Philip partly blamed her for the engagement.
"Why, just look at it. They haven't really kept company. He has been
going to dinner and dancing parties this spring, and she to
Mackerelville Mission and Mrs. Frankland's Bible Readings. If they
should discover their incompatibility before marriage it wouldn't be so
bad; but he's off to Europe for the summer, and then they'll be married
in the autumn, probably, and then what? Phillida will never spend her
time dancing germans with Charley; and he would make a pretty fist
running a class of urchins in Mackerelville. I tell you it only means
misery for both of them." And with this prediction Philip mounted to his
own room.
Millard was too busy with the packing of trunks, the arrangement of
business, and farewell visits to Phillida, to give much thought to
Philip's curious behavior; but it troubled him nevertheless. And when,
on the deck of the steamer _Arcadia_, he bade good-by to a large circle
of friends, including Mr. Hilbrough, who brought a bouquet from his
wife, and Mrs. Callender and her daughters, he looked about in vain for
Philip. He could no longer doubt that for some reason Philip disliked
his engagement. But when the last adieus had been waved to diminishing
and no longer distinguishable friends on the pier-end, and the great
city had shrunk into the background and passed from view as the vessel
glided steadily forward into the Narrows, Millard entered his cabin and
found a package of guide-books and a note from Philip excusing his
absence on the ground of a headache, but hoping that his friend would
have a pleasant voyage and expressing hearty good wishes for his future
with Phillida. It was all very curious and unlike Philip. But the truth
below dawned upon Charley, and it gave him sorrow that his great joy
might be Philip's disappointment.
When September had come Philip sat one day in a wide wicker chair on the
piazza of the old-fashioned cottage of the Gouverneurs at Newport. This
plain but ample cottage had once held up its head stoutly as one of the
best. But now that the age of the Newport cliff-dwellers had come, in
which great architects are employed to expend unsparingly all the ideas
they have ever borrowed, on cottages costlier than kings' palaces, the
Gouverneur house had been overshadowed, and, after the manner of age
outstripped by youth, had taken refuge in the inexpugnable advantage of
priority. Like the family that dwelt within, it maintained a certain
dignity of repose that could well afford to despise decoration and
garniture, and look with contempt on newness. The very althæas, and
lilacs, and clambering jasmines in the dooryard and the large trees that
lent shade to a lawn alongside, bespoke the chronological superiority of
the place. There was no spruceness of biweekly mowing about the lawn, no
ambitious spick-and-spanness about the old, white, wooden, green-blinded
cottage itself, but rather a restful mossiness of ancient
respectability.
Here Philip watched out the lazy September days, as he had watched them
since he was a lad. This was a Newport afternoon, not cloudy, but
touched by a certain marine mistiness which took the edge off the hard
outlines of things and put the world into tone with sweet
do-nothingness. Half-sitting, half-lying, in the wide piazza chair,
clearly not made to measure for him, Philip had remained for two hours,
reading a little at intervals, sometimes smoking, but mostly with head
drawn down between his shoulders while he gazed off at the familiar
trees and houses, and noted the passing of white-capped maids with their
infant convoys, and the infrequent carriages that rolled by. His mother,
with her fingers busy at something of no consequence, sat near him. Each
was fond of the other's presence, neither cared much for conversation.
Gouverneur, the father, was enjoying a fine day in his fashion, asleep
on a lounge in the library.
"It's just as I expected, mother," said Philip, coming out of a
prolonged reverie. "Charley and Phillida will marry without ever getting
acquainted, and then will come the blow-out."
"What do you mean by the blow-out?" said Mrs. Gouverneur. "They are
neither of them quarrelsome."
"No; but they are both sensitive. Aunt Callender's sickness took
Phillida to the Catskills before he got home, and she's been there ever
since. I suppose he has gone up once or twice on a Saturday. But what
chance has either of them to know the other's tastes? What do you
suppose they talk about? Does Phillida explain her high ideals, or tell
him the shabby epics of lame beggars and blind old German women in
Mackerelville? Or does he explain to her how to adjust a cravat, or
tell her the amusing incidents of a private ball? They can't go on
always billing and cooing, and what will they talk about on rainy
Sundays after they are married? I'd like to see him persuade Phillida to
wear an ultra-fashionable evening dress and spend six evenings a week at
entertainments and the opera. Maybe it'll be the other way; she may coax
him to teach a workingmen's class in the Mission. By George! It would be
a comedy to see Charley try it once." And Philip indulged in a gentle
laugh.
"You don't know how much they have seen of each other, Philip. Phillida
is a friend of the Hilbroughs, and Mr. Millard once brought her to our
house on Sunday afternoon from the Mission or somewhere over there."
"That's so?" said Philip. "They may be better acquainted than I think.
But they'll never get on."
Perceiving that this line of talk was making his mother uncomfortable,
he said:
"Nature has got the soft pedal down to-day. Come, mother, it's a good
day for a drive. Will you go?"
And he went himself to call the coachman.
XIII.
MRS. FRANKLAND.
Mrs. Frankland, the Bible reader, was a natural orator--a person with
plenty of blood for her brain, ample breathing space in her chest, a
rich-toned voice responsive to her feelings, and a mind not exactly
intellectual, but felicitous in vocabulation and ingenious in the
construction of sentences. Her emotions were mettlesome horses
well-bitted--quick and powerful, but firmly held. Though her exegesis
was second-hand and commonplace, yet upon the familiar chords of
traditional and superficial interpretation of the Bible she knew how to
play many emotional variations, and her hearers, who were all women,
were caught up into a state of religious exaltation under her
instruction. A buoyant and joyous spirit and a genial good-fellowship of
manner added greatly to her personal charms.
She was the wife of a lawyer of moderate abilities and great
trustworthiness, whose modesty, rather than his mediocrity, had confined
him to a small practice in the quieter walks of the profession. Mrs.
Frankland had been bred a Friend, but there was a taste for magnificence
in her that argued an un-Quaker strain in her pedigree. On her marriage
she had with alacrity transferred her allegiance from no-ceremony
Quakerism to liturgical Episcopalianism, the religion of her husband.
She gave herself credit for having in this made some sacrifice to wifely
duty, though her husband would have been willing to join the orthodox
Friends with her, for the simplicity and stillness of the Quakers
consorted well with his constitution. Mrs. Frankland did not relinquish
certain notions derived from the Friends concerning the liberty of women
to speak when moved thereto. No doubt her tenacity in this particular
was due to her own consciousness of possessing a gift for swaying human
sympathies. Such a gift the Anglican communion, from time immemorial,
has delighted to bury in a napkin--in a tablecloth, if a napkin should
prove insufficient. But Mrs. Frankland was not a person to allow her
talent to be buried even in the most richly dight altar-cloth. In her,
as in most of the world's shining lights, zeal for a cause was
indistinguishably blended with personal aspirations--honest desire to be
serviceable with an unconscious desire to be known. It is only healthy
and normal that any human being possessed of native power should wish to
show his credentials by turning possibility into fact accomplished.
Mrs. Frankland's temperament inclined her to live like a city set on a
hill, but the earlier years of her married life had been too constantly
engrossed by domestic cares for her to undertake public duties. It had
often been out of the question for the Franklands to keep a servant, and
they had never kept more than one in a family of four children. At first
this ambitious wife sought to spur her timid and precise husband to
achievements that were quite impossible to him. But when the children
grew larger, so that the elder ones could be of assistance in the care
of the house, Mrs. Frankland's opportunity came. The fame of such women
as Mrs. Livermore, Miss Willard, and Mrs. Bottome had long been a spur
to her aspiration. She did not set up as a reformer. Denunciation and
contention were not proper to her temperament. She was, above all,
pathetic and sympathetic. She took charge of a Bible class of young
ladies in the Sunday-school, and these were soon deeply moved by her
talks to them as a class, and profoundly attracted to her by a way she
had of gathering each one of them under the hen-mother wings of her
sympathies. That she and they exaggerated the degree of her personal
feeling for her individual listeners is probable; the oratorical
temperament enlarges the image of a sentiment as naturally as a magic
lantern magnifies a picture. In later days beloved Maggies and Matildas
of the class, who had believed themselves special favorites of Mrs.
Frankland--their images graven on her heart of hearts--were amazed to
find that they had been quite forgotten when they had been out of sight
a year or two.
The Bible-class room in the Church of St. James the Less soon became
uncomfortably crowded. This was what Mrs. Frankland had long desired.
She thereupon availed herself of the hospitality of a disciple of hers
who had a rather large parlor, and in this she opened a Bible reading on
Friday afternoons. Eloquent talk, and especially pathetic talk and vivid
illustrations by means of incidents and similes, were as natural to her
as melodious whistling is to a brown thrush, and the parlors were easily
filled, though out of deference to church authorities men were excluded.
The success of this first course of so-called Bible readings was marked,
and it determined Mrs. Frankland's career. She was enough of a woman to
be particularly pleased that some of the wealthiest parishioners of St.
James the Less were among her hearers, and that, having neglected her in
all the years of baby-tending and dishwashing obscurity, these people
now invited her to their houses and made her the confidante of their
sorrows. This sort of success was as agreeable to her as merely social
climbing was to Mrs. Hilbrough. For even in people of a higher type than
Mrs. Frankland the unmixed heroic is not to be looked for: if one finds
zeal or heroism in the crude ore it ought to be enough; the refined
articles have hardly been offered in the market since the lives of the
saints were written and the old romances went out of fashion.
Two results of Mrs. Frankland's first winter's readings, or preachings,
had not entered into her calculations, but they were potent in deciding
her to continue her career. One was that her husband's law practice was
somewhat increased by her conspicuousness and popularity. He was not
intrusted with great cases, but there was a very decided increase in his
collection business. At the close of the season Mrs. Frankland, in
making her farewell to her class, had, like a true orator, coined even
her private life into effect. She touched feelingly on the sacrifice
she and her family had had to make in order that she might maintain the
readings, and alluded to her confidence that if Providence intended her
to go forward, provision would be made for her and her children, whom
she solemnly committed by an act of faith, like that of the mother of
Moses, to the care of the Almighty. She said this with deep solemnity,
holding up her hands toward heaven as though to lay an infant in the
arms of the Good Shepherd. The vision of a house-mother trusting the
Lord even for the darning of stockings was an example of faith that
touched the hearers. Under the lead of a few active women in the company
a purse of two hundred dollars was collected and presented to her. It
was done delicately; the givers stated that their purpose was simply to
enable her to relieve herself of care that the good work might not
suffer. The money was thus handed not to her but to the Lord, and Mrs.
Frankland could not refuse it. Do you blame her? She had earned it as
fairly as the rector of St. James the Less earned his. Perhaps even more
fairly, for her service was spontaneous and enthusiastic; he had grown
old and weary, and his service had long since come to be mainly
perfunctory.
There are cynics who imagine a woman with a mission saying, "Well, I've
increased my husband's business, and I have made two hundred very
necessary dollars this winter; and I will try it again." If the matter
had presented itself to her mind in that way Mrs. Frankland probably
would have felt a repulsion from the work she was doing. It is a very
bungling mind, or a more than usually clear and candid mind, that would
view a delicate personal concern in so blunt a fashion. Mrs. Frankland's
mind was too clever to be bungling, and too emotional and imaginative to
be critical. What she saw, with a rush of grateful emotion, was that the
Divine approval of her sacrifices was manifested by this sustaining
increase of temporal prosperity. The ravens of Elijah had replenished
her purse because she trusted. Thus commended from above and lifted into
the circle of those who like the prophets and apostles have a special
vocation, she felt herself ready, as she put it, "to go forward through
fire and flood if need be." It would not have been like her to remember
that the fire and flood to be encountered in her career could be only
rhetorical at best--painted fire and a stage flood.
Among those who chanced to be drawn to Mrs. Frankland's first course of
Bible readings, and who had listened with zest, was Phillida Callender.
Phillida's was a temperament different from Mrs Frankland's. The common
point at which they touched was religious enthusiasm. Mrs. Frankland's
enthusiasms translated themselves instantly into eloquent expression;
she was an instrument richly toned that gave forth melody of joy or
sorrow when smitten by emotion. Phillida was very susceptible to her
congenial eloquence, but hers was essentially the higher nature, and
Mrs. Frankland's religious passion, when once it reached Phillida, was
transformed into practical endeavor. Mrs. Frankland was quite content to
embody her ideals in felicitous speech, and cease; Phillida Callender
labored day and night to make her ideals actual. Mrs. Frankland had no
inclination or qualification for grappling with such thorny problems as
the Mackerelville Mission afforded. It was enough for her to play the
martial music which nerved others for the strife.
It often happens that the superior nature is dominated by one not its
equal. Phillida did not question the superlative excellence of Mrs.
Frankland, from whom she drew so many inspirations. That eloquent lady
in turn admired and loved Phillida as a model disciple. Phillida drew
Mrs. Hilbrough to the readings, and Mrs. Frankland bestowed on that lady
all the affectionate attention her immortal soul and worldly position
entitled her to, and under Mrs. Frankland's influence Mrs. Hilbrough
became more religious without becoming less worldly. For nothing could
have seemed more proper and laudable to Mrs. Hilbrough than the steady
pursuit of great connections appropriate to her husband's wealth.
Mrs. Frankland's imagination had been moved by her success. It was not
only a religious but a social triumph. Some of the rich had come, and it
was in the nature of an orator of Mrs. Frankland's type to love any
association with magnificence. Her figures of speech were richly draped;
her imagination delighted in the grandiose. The same impulse which
carried her easily from drab Quakerism to stained-glass Episcopalianism
now moved her to desire that her ministry might lead her to the great,
for such an association seemed to glorify the cause she had at heart.
She did not think of her purpose nakedly; she was an artist in drapery,
and her ideas never presented themselves in the nude; she was indeed
quite incapable of seeing the bare truth; truth itself became visible to
her only when it had on a wedding garment. As she stated her aspiration
to herself, she longed to carry the everlasting gospel to the weary
rich. "The weary rich" was the phrase she outfitted them with when
considered as objects of pity and missionary zeal. To her mind they
seemed, in advance, shining trophies which she hoped to win, and in her
reveries she saw herself presenting them before the Almighty, somewhat
as a Roman general might lead captive barbarian princes to the throne of
his imperial master.
Mrs. Frankland could not be oblivious to the fact that a Bible reading
among the rich would be likely to bring her better pecuniary returns
than one among the poor. But she did not let this consideration appear
on the surface of her thoughts, nor was it at all a primary or essential
one.
She knew but little of the intricacies of social complications, and her
mind now turned to Mrs. Hilbrough as the wealthiest of all her
occasional hearers, and one having an ample parlor in a fashionable
quarter of the town.
Her first thought had been to get Phillida to accompany her when she
should go to suggest the matter to Mrs. Hilbrough. But on second thought
she gave up this intermediation, for reasons which it would have been
impossible for her to define. If she exerted a powerful influence over
Phillida in the direction of emotion, she could not escape in turn the
influence of Phillida's view of life when in her presence. Although
personal ambitions mixed themselves to a certain extent with Mrs.
Frankland's religious zeal, disguising themselves in rhetorical costumes
of a semi-ecclesiastical sort, they did not venture to masquerade too
freely before Phillida. Mrs. Frankland, though less skillful in affairs
than in speech, felt that it would be better in the present instance to
go to Mrs. Hilbrough alone.
It was with a glow of pleasure not wholly unworldly that she found
herself one afternoon in Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room, and noted all
about her marks of taste and unstinted expenditure. To a critical
spectator the encounter between the two ladies would have afforded
material for a curious comparison. The ample figure of Mrs. Frankland,
her mellifluous voice, her large, sweeping, cheerily affectionate,
influential mode of address, brought her into striking contrast with the
rather slender, quietly self-reliant Mrs. Hilbrough, whose genial
cordiality covered, while it hardly concealed, the thoroughly
business-like carriage of her mind.
Mrs. Frankland opened her plan with the greatest fullness of explanation
as to what her motives were, but she did not feel obliged wholly to
conceal the element of personal aspiration, as she would have done in
talking to Phillida. Her intuitions made her feel that Mrs. Hilbrough
would accept religious zeal all the more readily for its being a little
diluted. Mrs. Hilbrough responded with genial cordiality and even with
some show of enthusiasm. But if she had less address in speech than the
other she had more in affairs. While theoretically supporting this plan
she did not commit herself to it. She knew how slender as yet was her
hold upon the society she courted, and she would not risk an eccentric
move. Her boat was still in shallow water, with hardly buoyancy enough
to float a solitary occupant; if she should undertake to carry Mrs.
Frankland, it would probably go fast aground. What she said to Mrs.
Frankland with superficial fervor was:
"You ought to have a person that has been longer in New York, and is
better acquainted than I am, to carry out your plan, Mrs. Frankland. It
would be a pity to have so excellent a scheme fail; that would probably
prevent your ever succeeding--would shut you out as long as you lived.
It would be a great honor to me to have your readings, but you must
begin under better auspices. I regret to say this. Your readings,
rightly started, will be a great success, and I should like to have them
here."
This last was in a sense sincere. Mrs. Hilbrough was sure of Mrs.
Frankland's success if once the thing were patronized by the right
people. Here Mrs. Frankland looked disappointed, but in a moment broke
forth again in adroit and fervid statement of the good that might be
done, mingled with a flattering protest against Mrs. Hilbrough's too
humble estimate of her influence in society. While she proceeded, Mrs.
Hilbrough was revolving a plan for giving Mrs. Frankland more than she
asked, while avoiding personal responsibility.
"I think I can do something," she said, with a manner less cordial but
more sincere than that she had previously assumed. "Leave the matter
with me, and I may be able to open to you a grand house, not a plain,
middling place like mine"--and she waved her hand deprecatingly toward
the furnishings which seemed to Mrs. Frankland inconceivably rich--"a
grand house with all the prestige of a great family. I don't know that I
shall succeed with my friend, but for the sake of the cause I am willing
to try. I won't tell you anything about it till I try. If I fail, I
fail, but for the present leave all to me."
Mrs. Frankland was not the sort of person to relish being guided by
another, but in Mrs. Hilbrough she had met her superior in leadership.
Reluctantly she felt herself obliged to hand over the helm of her own
craft, holding herself ready to disembark at length wherever Mrs.
Hilbrough might reach dry ground.
Of all that Mrs. Hilbrough had won in her first winter's social
campaign, the achievement that gave her most pleasure was the making
acquaintance and entering into fast ripening friendship with Mrs. Van
Horne. Little Mrs. Van Horne was not in herself very desirable as a
friend, but she was one of those whose fortune it is to have the toil of
thousands at their disposal. Her magnificence was fed by an army:
innumerable laborers with spades and shovels, picks and blasting-drills,
working in smoke and dripping darkness to bore railway paths through
mountain chains; grimy stokers and clear-sighted engineers; brakemen
dripping in the chilly rain; switchmen watching out the weary night by
dim lanterns or flickering torches; desk-worn clerks and methodical
ticket-sellers; civil engineers using brains and long training over
their profiles and cross-sectionings; and scores of able "captains of
industry," such as superintendents, passenger agents, and traffic
managers--all these, and others, by their steady toil kept an unfailing
cataract of wealth pouring into the Van Horne coffers. In herself Mrs.
Van Horne had not half the force of Mrs. Hilbrough, but as the queen bee
of this widespread toil and traffic, fed and clad and decked as she was
by the fruits of the labor of a hundred thousand men, Mrs. Van Horne had
an enormous factitious value in the world. How to bear her dignity as
the wife of a man who used the million as a unit she did not know, for
though she affected a reserved stateliness of manner, it did not set
well on such a round-faced, impressionable little woman quite incapable
of charting a course for herself. No show of leadership had been hers,
but she had taken her cue from this and that stronger nature, until by
chance she came in hailing distance of Mrs. Hilbrough. The two were
perfect counterparts. Mrs. Hilbrough was clairvoyant and of prompt
decision, but she lacked the commanding position for personal
leadership. She was superficially deferential to Mrs. Van Horne's older
standing and vastly greater wealth, but she swiftly gained the real
ascendancy. Her apparent submission of everything to Mrs. Van Horne's
wisdom, while adroitly making up a judgment for the undecided little
lady, was just what Mrs. Van Horne liked, and in three months'
acquaintance that lady had come to lean more and more on Mrs. Hilbrough.
The intimacy with so close a friend rendered life much more comfortable
for Mrs. Van Horne, in that it relieved her from taking advice of her
sisters-in-law, who always gave counsel with a consciousness of
superiority. Now she could appear in her family with opinions and
purposes apparently home-made. To a woman of Mrs. Hilbrough's cleverness
the friendship with one whose brooks ran gold rendered social success
certain.
Mrs. Hilbrough was a natural promoter. Her energy inclined her to take
hold of a new enterprise for the mere pleasure of pushing it. She felt a
real delight in the religious passions awakened by Mrs. Frankland's
addresses; she foresaw an interesting career opening up before that
gifted woman, and to help her would give Mrs. Hilbrough a complex
pleasure. That Mrs. Frankland's addresses if given in Mrs. Van Horne's
parlors would excite attention and make a great stir she foresaw, and
for many reasons she would like to bring this about. Mrs. Hilbrough did
not analyze her motives; that would have been tiresome. She entered them
all up in a sort of lump sum to the credit of her religious zeal, and
was just a little pleased to find so much of her early devotion to
religion left over. Let the entry stand as she made it. Let us not be of
the class unbearable who are ever trying to dissipate those lovely
illusions that keep alive human complacency and make life endurable.
Mrs. Hilbrough contrived to bring Mrs. Frankland with her abounding
enthusiasm and her wide-sweeping curves of inflection and gesture into
acquaintance with the great but rather pulpy Mrs. Van Horne. The natural
inequality of forces in the two did the rest. Mrs. Van Horne, weary of
the inevitable limitations of abnormal wealth, and fatigued in the vain
endeavor to procure any satisfaction which bore the slightest proportion
to the vast family accretion, found a repose she had longed for when she
was caught up in the fiery chariot of Mrs. Frankland's eloquent talk.
All the vast mass of things that had confronted and bullied her so long
was swept into a rhetorical dustpan, and she could feel herself at
length as a human soul without having to remember her possessions. Mrs.
Frankland's phrase of "the weary rich" exactly fitted her, and to her
Mrs. Frankland's eloquent pulverizing of the glory of this world brought
a sort of emancipation.
Mrs. Frankland unfolded to her a desire to reach those who would not
attend her readings at any but a very fashionable house. Mrs. Van Horne,
encouraged thereto by Mrs. Hilbrough, was delighted at finding a novel
and congenial use for some of the luxurious and pompous upholstery of
her life of which she was so tired. Her parlors were opened, and
"persons of the highest fashion" were pleased to find a private and
suitably decorated wicker-gate leading into a strait and narrow
vestibule train, limited, fitted up with all the consolations and
relieved of most of the discomforts of an old-fashioned religious
pilgrimage.
XIV.
MRS. FRANKLAND AND PHILLIDA.
Mrs. Callender would have told you that mountain air had quite restored
her, but enforced rest from scissors and sewing-machine, the two demons
that beset the dear industrious, had more to do with it than mountain
air. The first of October brought her and Phillida again to their house,
where Agatha had preceded them by two days, to help Sarah in putting
things to rights for their advent. Millard met the mother and daughter
at the station with a carriage and left them at their own door.
"Did Mr. Millard say that he would come again this evening?" Agatha
asked of Phillida when she rose from the dinner-table.
"No."
"Well, I should think he would. I wouldn't have a young man that would
take things so coolly. He's hardly seen you at all since his return,
and--that's the expressman with the trunks. I'll go and see about them";
and she bounded away, not "like an antelope," but like a young girl
bubbling to the brim with youth and animal spirits.
An hour later, when Phillida and Agatha had just got to a stage in
unpacking in which all that one owns is lying in twenty heaps about the
room, each several heap seeming larger than the trunk in which it came,
there was a ring at the door, and Mr. Millard was announced.
"Oh, dear! I think he might have waited until to-morrow," grumbled
Agatha to her mother, after Phillida had gone to the parlor. "He'll stay
for hours, I suppose, and I never can get these things put away alone,
and we won't get you to bed before midnight. He ought to remember that
you're not strong. But it's just like a man in love to come when you're
in a mess, and never to go away."
Millard was more thoughtful than another might have been, and in half an
hour Phillida returned to the back room, with a softly radiant
expression of countenance, bearing a bouquet of flowers which Millard
had brought for Mrs. Callender. Phillida at once helped Agatha attack
chaos. The floor, the chairs, the table, the bed, and the top of the
dressing-case were at length cleared, and preparations were making for
getting the tired mother to her rest before ten o'clock.
"Seems to me," said Agatha, "that if I were in Philly's place I'd want
something more than a brief call on the first evening, after so long a
separation."
"Seems to me," said the mother, mimicking Agatha's tone and turning upon
the girl with an amused smile, "if you ever have a lover and are as hard
to please with him as you are with Mr. Millard, he might as well give it
up before he begins."
In the morning early came Mrs. Frankland. She kissed Phillida on this
cheek and on that, embraced her and called her "Dear, dear child," held
her off with both hands and looked with admiration at her well-modeled
face, freshened with wind and sun. She declared that the mountain air
had done Phillida a great deal of good, and inquired how her dear, good
mother was.
"Mother is wonderfully better," said Phillida; "I may say, well again."
"What a mercy that is! Now you'll be able to go on with the blessed work
you are doing. You have a gift for mission work; that's your vocation. I
should make a poor one in your place. It's a talent. As for me, I have a
new call."
"A new call--what is that?" said Phillida, rolling up an easy chair for
Mrs. Frankland to sit on.
"It's all through you, I suppose. You brought Mrs. Hilbrough to hear me,
and Mrs. Hilbrough made me acquainted with Mrs. Van Horne, and she has
invited me to give readings in her parlor. I gave the first last
Thursday, with great success. The great parlor was full, and many wept
like little children."
The words here written are poor beside what Mrs. Frankland said. Her
inflection, the outward sweep of her hand when she said "great parlor,"
brought the rich scene vaguely to Phillida's imagination, and the mellow
falling cadence with which she spoke of those who had wept like little
children, letting her hands drop limp the while upon her lap, made it
all very picturesque and touching. But Phillida twisted the fingers of
her left hand with her right, feeling a little wrench in trying to put
herself into sympathy with this movement. It was the philanthropic side
of religion rather than the propagandist that appealed to her, and she
could hardly feel pity for people whose most imaginary wants were
supplied.
The quick instinct for detecting and following the sympathy of an
audience is half the outfit for an orator; and Mrs. Frankland felt the
need of additional statement to carry the matter rightly to Phillida.
She was ever feeling about for the electrical button that would reach a
hearer's sympathies, and never content until she had touched it.
"I find the burdens of these wealthy women are as great--even greater
than those of others. Many of them are tired of the worldliness, and
weary of the utter frivolity, of their pursuits." She put a long, rich,
vibrant emphasis on the words "utter frivolity." "Don't you think it a
good plan to bring them to the rest of the gospel?"
"Certainly," said Phillida, who could not logically gainsay such a
statement; but she was convinced rather than touched by any living
sympathy with Mrs. Frankland's impulse, and she still twisted the tips
of the fingers of her left hand with her right.
"I hope, dear child," Mrs. Frankland went on, in a meditative tone,
looking out of the window and steering now upon a home tack--"I hope
that I can serve in some way the cause of the poor you have so much at
heart. Missions like yours languish for funds. If I could be the means
of bringing people of great fortune to consecrate their wealth, it might
fill many a thirsty channel of benevolence with refreshing streams." Ah,
that one could produce here the tone of her voice as of a brook
brimming over barriers, and running melodious to the meadows below!
"That is true," said Phillida, remembering how many betterments might be
made in the coffee-room and the reading-room if only one had the money,
and remembering how her own beloved Charley had helped the Mission and
made the lot of the unhappy Wilhelmina Schulenberg less grievous. "I do
think it may prove to be a great work," she added thoughtfully, folding
her hands upon her lap in unconscious sign that she had reached a
conclusion--a logical equilibrium.
"And I want you to go with me to the readings on Thursday. Mrs. Van
Horne knows your aunt, Mrs. Gouverneur, and she will be glad to see
you."
Phillida looked down and began to pinch the tips of her fingers again.
She shrunk a little from Mrs. Van Horne's set; she thought her dress
probably beneath their standard, but with an effort she put away such
fears as frivolous, and promised to go.
Thursday afternoon found Phillida sitting by Mrs. Hilbrough in the Van
Horne parlor, which was draped with the costly products of distant
looms, wrought by the dusky fingers of Orientals inheriting the slowly
perfected special skill of generations, and with the fabrics produced by
mediæval workmen whose artistic products had gathered value as all their
fellows had perished; for other races and other ages have contributed
their toil to the magnificence of a New York palace. The great room was
spanned by a ceiling on which the creative imaginations of great
artists had lavished rare fancies in gold and ivory, while the
costliest, if not the noblest, paintings and sculptures of our modern
time were all about a parlor whose very chairs and ottomans had been
designed by men of genius.
Once the words of Mrs. Frankland were heard with these surroundings, one
felt that it would be wrong to attribute to ambitious motives her desire
for such an environment. She might rather be said to have been drawn
here by an inspiration for artistic harmony. The resonant periods of
Bossuet would hardly have echoed through the modern centuries if he had
not had the magnificent court of Louis the Great for a sounding-board.
When Mrs. Frankland spoke in the Van Horne parlor her auditors felt that
the mellifluous voice and stately sentences could not have had a more
appropriate setting, and that the splendid apartment could not have been
put to a more fitting use. Even the simple religious songs used at the
beginning and close of the meetings were accompanied upon a grand piano
of finest tone, whose richly inlaid case represented the expenditure of
a moderate fortune. Mrs. Van Horne could command the best amateur
musical talent, so that the little emotional Moody-and-Sankeys that Mrs.
Frankland selected were so overlaid and glorified in the performance as
to be almost transformed into works of art.
Phillida looked upon these evidences of lavish expenditure with less
bedazzlement than one might have expected in a person of her age. For
she had grown up under shelter from the world. While she remained in the
antipodes her contact with life outside her own family had been small.
In Brooklyn her mother's ill health had kept her much at home, and the
dominant influence of her father had therefore every chance to make
itself felt upon her character, and that influence was all in favor of a
self-denying philanthropy. To the last her father was altruistic,
finding nothing worth living for but the doing for others. Abiding
secluded as Phillida had, the father's stamp remained uneffaced. She saw
in all this magnificence a wanton waste of resources. She put it side by
side with her sense of a thousand needs of others, and she felt for it
more condemnation than admiration. Mrs. Frankland's vocation to the rich
was justified in her mind; it was, after all, a sort of mission to the
heathen.
And who shall say that Mrs. Frankland's missionary impulse was not a
true one? Phillida's people were exteriorly more miserable; but who
knows whether the woes of a Mulberry street tenement are greater than
those of a Fifth Avenue palace? Certainly Mrs. Frankland found wounded
hearts enough. The woman with an unfaithful husband, the mother of a
reckless son who has been obliged to flee the country, the wife of a
runaway cashier, disgraced and dependent upon rich relatives--these and
a score besides poured into her ear their sorrows, and were comforted by
her sympathy cordially expressed, and by her confidence in a consoling
divine love and her visions of a future of everlasting rest. Mrs.
Frankland had found her proper field--a true mission field indeed, for
in this world-out-of-joint there is little danger of going astray in
looking for misery of one sort or another. If the sorrows of the poor
are greater, they have, if not consolation, at least a fortunate
numbness produced by the never-ending battle for bread; but the canker
has time to gnaw the very heart out of the rich woman.
Even on the mind of Phillida, as she now listened to Mrs. Frankland, the
accessories made a difference. How many dogmas have lived for centuries,
not by their reasonableness but by the impressiveness of trappings!
Liturgies chanted under lofty arches, creeds recited by generation
following generation, traditions of law, however absurd, uttered by one
big-wigged judge following a reverend line of ghostly big-wigs gone
before that have said the same foolish things for ages--these all take
considerable advantage from the power of accessories to impose upon the
human imagination. The divinity that hedges kings is the result of a set
of stage-fixings which make the little great, and half the horror
inspired by the priest's curse is derived from bell and book and candle.
The mystery of print gives weight to small men by the same witchcraft;
you would not take the personal advice of so stupid a man as Criticus
about the crossing of a _t_, but when he prints a tirade anonymously in
the Philadelphia "Tempus" the condemnation becomes serious.
Just in this way the imagination of Phillida was affected by the new
surroundings in the midst of which Mrs. Frankland spoke. The old
addresses in a Bible-class room with four plastered walls, or a modest
parlor, did not seem to have half so much force as these. The weight of
a brilliant success was now thrown into the scale, and Mrs. Frankland
could speak with an apostolic authority hitherto unknown. The speaker's
own imagination felt the influence of her new-found altitude, and she
expressed herself with assurance and deliberation, and with more dignity
and pathos than ever before.
With all this background, Mrs. Frankland spoke to-day from the twelfth
chapter of Romans on personal consecration. But she did not treat the
theme as a person of reformatory temperament might have done, by
denouncing the frivolity of rich and fashionable lives. It was not in
her nature to antagonize an audience. She drew a charming picture of the
beauty of a consecrated life, and she embellished it with wonderful
instances of devotion, interspersed with touching anecdotes of heroism
and self-sacrifice. The impression upon her audience was as remarkable
as it was certain to be transient. Women wept at the ravishing vision of
a life wholly given to noble ends, and then went their ways to live as
before, after the predispositions of their natures, the habits of their
lives, and the conventional standards of their class.
But in the heart of Phillida the words of the speaker fell upon fertile
soil, and germinated, where there was never a stone or a thorn. The
insularity of her life had left her very susceptible to Mrs. Frankland's
discourses. Old stagers who have been impressed now by this, now by
that, speech, writing, or personal persuasion, have suffered a certain
wholesome induration. Phillida was a virginal enthusiast.
XV.
TWO WAYS.
It seemed to Millard that Phillida would be the better for seeing more
of life. He would not have admitted to himself that he could wish her
any whit different from what she was. But he was nevertheless disposed
to mold her tastes into some likeness to his own--it is the impulse of
all advanced lovers and new husbands. It was unlucky that he should have
chosen for the time of beginning his experiment the very evening of the
day on which she had heard Mrs. Frankland. Phillida's mind was all aglow
with the feelings excited by the address when Millard called with the
intention of inviting her to attend the theater with him.
He found a far-awayness in her mood which made him keep back his
proposal for a while. He did not admire her the less in her periods of
exaltation, but he felt less secure of her when she soared into a region
whither he could not follow. He hesitated, and discussed the weather of
the whole week past, smiting his knee gently with his gloves in the
endeavor to obtain cheerfulness by affecting it. She, on her part, was
equally eager to draw Millard into the paths of feeling and action she
loved so well, and while he was yet trifling with his gloves and the
weather topic, she began:
"Charley, I do wish you could have heard Mrs. Frankland's talk to-day."
Phillida's hands were turned palms downward on her lap as she spoke;
Millard fancied that their lines expressed the refinement of her
organization.
"Why doesn't she admit men?" he said, smiling. "Here you, who don't need
any betterment, will become so good by and by that you'll leave me
entirely behind. We men need evangelizing more than women do. Why does
Mrs. Frankland shut us out from her good influences?"
"Oh! you know she's an Episcopalian, and Episcopalians don't think it
right for women to set up to teach men."
"I'm Episcopalian enough, but if a woman sets up as a preacher at all, I
don't see why she shouldn't preach to those that need it most. It's only
called a 'Bible reading'"--here Charley carefully spread his gloves
across his right knee--"there's no law against reading the Bible to
men?" he added, looking up with a quick winning smile. "Now you see she
turns the scripture topsy-turvy. Instead of women having to inquire of
their husbands at home, men are obliged to inquire of their wives and
sweethearts. I don't mind that, though. I'd rather hear it from you than
from Mrs. Frankland any day." And he gathered up his gloves, and leaned
back in his chair.
Phillida smiled, and took this for an invitation to repeat to him part
of what Mrs. Frankland had said. She related the story of Elizabeth
Fry's work in Newgate, as Mrs. Frankland had told it, she retold Mrs.
Frankland's version of Florence Nightingale in the hospital, and then
she paused.
"There, Charley," she said deprecatingly, "I can't tell these things
with half the splendid effect that Mrs. Frankland did. But it made a
great impression on me. I mean to try to be more useful."
"You? I don't see how you can be any better than you are, my dear. That
kind of talk is good for other people, but it isn't meant for you."
"Don't say that; please don't. But Mrs. Frankland made a deep impression
on all the people at Mrs. Van Horne's."
"At Mrs. Van Horne's?" he asked, with curiosity mingled with surprise.
"Yes; I went with Mrs. Hilbrough."
"Whew! Has Mrs. Frankland got in there?" he said, twirling his cane
reflectively. "I hadn't heard it."
"It isn't quite fair for you to say 'got in there,' is it, Charley? Mrs.
Frankland was invited by Mrs. Van Horne to give her readings at her
house, and she thought it might do good," said Phillida, unwilling to
believe that anybody she liked could be more worldly than she was
herself.
"I did not mean to speak slightingly of Mrs. Frankland," he said; "I
suppose she is a very good woman. But I know she asked Mrs. Hilbrough to
let her read in her house. I only guessed that she must have managed
Mrs. Van Horne in some way. It is no disgrace for her to seek to give
her readings where she thinks they will do good."
"Did she ask Mrs. Hilbrough?" said Phillida.
"Mrs. Hilbrough told me so, and the Van Horne opening may have been one
of Mrs. Hilbrough's clever contrivances. _That_ woman is a perfect
general. This reading at Mrs. Van Horne's must be a piece of her fine
work."
Just why this view of the case should have pained Phillida she could
hardly have told. She liked to dwell in a region of high ideals, and she
hated the practical necessities that oblige high ideals to humble
themselves before they can be incarnated into facts. There could be no
harm in Mrs. Frankland's seeking to reach the people she wished to
address, but the notion of contrivance and management for the promotion
of a mission so lofty made that mission seem a little shop-worn and
offended Phillida's love of congruity. Then, too, she felt that to
Millard Mrs. Frankland was not so worshipful a figure as to herself, and
a painful lack of concord in thought and purpose between her lover and
herself was disclosed. The topic was changed, but the two did not get
into the same groove of thought during the evening.
Even though a lover, Millard did not lose his characteristic
thoughtfulness. Knowing that early rest was important for the mother,
and conjecturing that she slept just behind the sliding-doors, Charley
did not allow himself to outstay his time. It was only when he had taken
his hat to leave that he got courage to ask Phillida if she were
engaged for the next afternoon. When she said no, he proposed the
theater. Phillida would have refused the invitation an hour before, but
in the tenderness of parting she had a remorseful sense of pain
regarding the whole interview. With a scrupulousness quite
characteristic she had begun to blame herself. To refuse the invitation
to the Irving matinée would be to add to an undefined estrangement which
both felt but refused to admit, and so, with her mind all in a jumble,
she said: "Yes; certainly. I'll go if you would like me to, Charley."
But she lay awake long that night in dissatisfaction with herself. She
had gained nothing with Charley, her ideals had been bruised and broken,
her visions of future personal excellence were now confused, and she was
committed to give valuable time to what seemed to her a sort of
dissipation. Would she never be able to emulate Mrs. Fry? Would the
lofty aspiration she had cherished prove beyond her reach? And then,
once, just once, there intruded the unwelcome thought that her
engagement with Millard was possibly a mistake, and that it might defeat
the great ends she had in view. The thought was too painful for her; she
banished it instantly, upbraiding herself for her disloyalty, and
replacing the image of her lover on its pedestal again. Was not Charley
the best of men? Had he not been liberal to the Mission and generous to
Mina Schulenberg? Then she planned again the work they would be able to
accomplish together, she diligent, and he liberal, until thoughts of
this sort mingled with her dreams.
She went to see Irving's _Shylock_. The spectacular street scenes
interested her; the boat that sailed so gracefully on the dry land of
the stage excited her curiosity; and she felt the beauty and artistic
delicacy of the _Portia_. But she was ill at ease through it all. She
was too much in the mood of a moralist to see the play merely as a work
of art; she could not keep her mind from reverting to matters having
nothing to do with the play, such as the versatility of an actress's
domestic relations. And she could not but feel that in so far as the
play diverted her, it did so at the expense of that strenuousness of
endeavor for extraordinary usefulness which her mind had taken under the
spell of Mrs. Frankland's speech.
"Didn't you like it?" said Millard, when they had reached the fresh air
of the street and disentangled themselves from the debouching crowd--a
noble pair to look upon as they walked thus in the late afternoon.
"Yes," said Phillida, spreading her parasol against the slant beams of
the declining sun, which illuminated the red brick walls and touched the
lofty cornices and the worn stones of the driveway with high lights,
while now this and now that distant window seemed to burn with ruddy
fire--"yes; I couldn't help enjoying Miss Terry's _Portia_. I am no
judge, but as a play I think it must have been good."
"Why do you say 'as a play'?" he asked. "What could it be but a play?"
He punctuated his question by tapping the pavement with his cane.
Phillida laughed a little at herself, but added with great seriousness:
"Would you think worse of me, Charley, if I should tell you that I don't
quite like plays?" And she looked up at him in a manner at once
affectionate and protesting.
Millard could not help giving her credit for the delicacy she showed in
her manner of differing from him.
"No," he said; "I couldn't but think the best of you in any case,
Phillida, but you might make me think worse of myself, you know, for I
do like plays. And more than that," he said, turning full upon her, "you
might succeed in making me think that you thought the worse of me, and
that would be the very worst of all."
This was said in a half-playful tone, but to Phillida it opened again
the painful vision of a possible drawing apart through a contrariety of
tastes. She therefore said no more in that direction, but contented
herself with some general criticisms on Irving's _Shylock_, the
incongruities in which she pointed out, and her criticisms, which were
tolerably acute, excited Millard's admiration; and it is not to be
expected that a lover's admiration should maintain any just proportion
to that which calls it forth.
Again the Thursday sermon at Mrs. Van Horne's came around, and again
Phillida was restored to a white heat of zeal mingled with a rueful
distrust of her own power to hold herself to the continuous pursuit of
her ideal. Millard, perceiving that she dreaded to be invited again,
refrained from offering to take her to the theater. He waited several
weeks, and then ventured, with some hesitation, to ask her to go with
him to see one of the Wagner operas. He was frightened at his own
boldness in asking, and he kept his eyes upon the ferule of his cane
with which he was tapping the toe of his boot, afraid to look up while
she answered. She saw how timidly he asked, and her heart was cruelly
wounded by the necessity she felt to refuse; but she had fortified
herself to resist just such a temptation.
"I'd rather not go, Charley," she said slowly, in accents so pleading
and so full of pain that Millard felt remorse that he should have
suggested such a thing.
But this traveling on divergent lines could not but have its effect upon
them. He was too well-mannered, she was too good, both were too
affectionate, for them to quarrel easily. But there took place something
that could hardly be called estrangement; it was rather what a Frenchman
might, with a refinement not possible in our idiom, call an
_éloignement_. In spite of their exertions to come together, they drew
apart. This process was interrupted by seasons of renewed tenderness.
But Phillida's zeal, favored by Mrs. Frankland's meetings, held her back
from those pursuits into which Millard would have drawn her, and only a
general interest in her altruistic aims was possible to him. Again and
again he made some exertion to enter into her pursuits, but he could
never get any farther than he could go by the aid of his check-book.
Once or twice she went with him to some public entertainment, but those
social pursuits to which he was habituated she avoided as dissipations.
Thus they loved each other, but it is pitiful to love as they did, while
unable to conceal from themselves that a gulf lay between the main
tastes and pursuits of the one and the other.
XVI.
A SÉANCE AT MRS. VAN HORNE'S.
The Bible reader was no polemic. People of every sect were gathered
under the wings of her sympathies. In vain dogmatic advisers warned her
against Unitarians who believe too little, and Swedenborgians who
believe too much. Mrs. Frankland's organ of judgment lay in her
affections and emotions, and those who felt as she felt were accepted
without contradiction, or, as she put it, mostly in Scripture phrase,
which she delivered in a rich orotund voice: "Let us receive him that is
weak in the faith, but not to doubtful disputation."
A certain sort of combativeness she had, but it was combativeness with
the edge taken off. It served to direct her choice of topics, but not to
give asperity or polemical form to her discourses. Suddenly introduced
to the very heart of Vanity Fair, she had caught her first inspiration
by opposition, and this led her to hold forth on such themes as
consecration. But as her acquaintance with people of wealth extended she
found that even they, conservative by very force of abundance, were
affected by the unbelieving spirit of a critical age. The very
prosperous are partly under shelter from the prevailing intellectual
currents of their time. Those whose attention is engrossed by things
are in so far shut out from the appeal of ideas. But thought is very
penetrating; it will reach by conduction what it can not attain by
radiation. An intellectual movement touches the highest and the lowest
with difficulty, but it does at length affect in a measure even those
whose minds are narcotized by abundance as well as those whose brains
are fagged by too much toil and care. When Mrs. Frankland became aware
that there was unbelief, latent and developed, among her hearers, the
prow of her oratory veered around, and faith became now, as consecration
had been before, the pole-star toward which this earnest and clever
woman aimed. With such a mind as hers the topic under consideration
becomes for the time supreme. Solemnly insisting on a renunciation of
all possibility of merit as a condition precedent to faith, she
proceeded to exalt belief itself into the most meritorious of acts. This
sort of paradox is common to all popular religious teachers.
Mrs. Frankland's new line of talk about the glories of faith had a
disadvantage for Phillida in that it also fell in with a tendency of her
nature and with the habits nourished in her by her father. Millard
thought he had reached the depths of her life in coming to know about
her work among the poor, but a woman's motives are apt to be more
involved than a man imagines or than she can herself quite understand.
Below the philanthropic Phillida lay the devout Phillida, who believed
profoundly that in her devotions she was able to touch hands with the
ever-living God himself. Under the stimulus of Mrs. Frankland's words
this belief became so absorbing that the common interests of life became
to her remote and almost unreal. Her work in the Mission was more and
more her life, and perhaps the necessity for accommodating herself a
little to the habits and tastes of a lover was her main preservative
from a tendency to degenerate into a devotee.
While Mrs. Frankland aroused others, her eloquence also influenced the
orator herself. Advocacy increased the force of conviction, and the
growing intensity of conviction in turn reinforced the earnestness of
advocacy. Irreverent people applied an old joke and called her "the
apostle to the genteels," and in the region to which she seemed
commissioned the warmth of her zeal was not likely to work harm. What
effect it had was in the main good. But the material in her hands was
only combustible in a slow way; the plutocratic conscience is rarely
inflammable--for the most part it smolders like punk. Nor was Mrs.
Frankland herself in any danger of being carried by her enthusiasms into
fanaticism of action. However her utterances might savor of ultraism,
she was conservative enough in practical matters to keep a sort of
"Truce of God" with the world as she found it.
But to Phillida, susceptible as a saint on the road to beatification,
the gradually augmented fervor of Mrs. Frankland's declamation worked
evil. It was especially painful to Agatha that her sister was propelled
by this influence farther and farther out of the safe lines of
commonplace feeling and action, and that every wind from Mrs.
Frankland's quarter of the heavens tended to drift her farther and
farther away from her lover. Agatha's indignation broke out into all
sorts of talk against Mrs. Frankland, whom she did not scruple to
denounce for a Pharisee, binding heavy burdens on the back of poor
Phillida, but never touching them with her own little finger.
Mrs. Frankland's discourses on faith reached their zenith on a January
day, when the carriage wheels that rolled in front of Mrs. Van Horne's
made a ringing almost like the breaking of glass in the hard frozen snow
of the streets, and when the luxurious comfort within the house was the
more deliciously appreciable from the deadly frostiness of the
bone-piercing wind without. Only Phillida of all the throng found her
comfort disturbed by remembering the coachmen who returned for their
mistresses before the end of the discourse. It cost those poor fellows a
pang to do despite to their wonted dignity of demeanor by smiting their
arms against their bodies to keep from perishing. But even a coachman
accustomed to regard himself as the main representative of the unbending
perpendicularity of a ten-million family must give way a little before a
January north wind in the middle of a cold wave, when his little fur
cape becomes a mockery and his hard high hat a misery. However admirable
Mrs. Frankland's prolonged sessions may have seemed to the ladies with
tear-stained cheeks within the house, it appeared far from laudable as
seen from the angle of a coachman's box.
The address on this day followed a reading of the eleventh chapter of
Hebrews, which is itself the rhapsody of an eloquent man upon faith. If
this were written, as some suppose, by Apollos, the orator of the early
Church, one may almost fancy that he reads here a bit of one of those
addresses wherein speaker and hearer are lifted up together above the
meanness and exigencies of mere realism. Mrs. Frankland accompanied the
reading of this summary of faith's victory by a comment consisting
largely of modern instances carefully selected and told with the tact of
a _raconteur_, so as to leave the maximum impression of each incident
unimpaired by needless details. Some of these stories were little short
of miraculous; but they were dignified by the manner of telling, which
never for an instant degenerated into the babble of a mere
wonder-monger.
As usual, Mrs. Frankland, or the oratorical part of her, which was quite
the majority of her mind, was carried away by the force of her own
speech, and in lauding the success of faith it seemed to her most
praiseworthy to push her eulogies unfalteringly to the extreme. You are
not to understand that by doing this she vociferated or indulged in
vehement gesture. He is only a bastard orator who fancies that loudness
and shrillness of tone can enforce conviction. When Mrs. Frankland felt
herself about to say extravagant things she intuitively set off her
transcendent utterances by assuming a calm demeanor and the air of one
who expresses with judicial deliberation the most assured and
long-meditated conclusions. So to-day she closed her little Oxford Bible
and laid it on the richly inlaid table before her, deliberately
depositing her handkerchief upon it and looking about before she made
her peroration, which was in something like the following words,
delivered with impressive solemnity in a deep, rich voice:
"Why should we always praise faith for what it _has_ done? Has God
changed? Faith is as powerful to-day as ever it was since this old world
began. If the sick are not healed, if the dead are not raised to-day, be
sure it is not God's fault. I am asked if I believe in faith-cure. There
is the Bible. It abounds in the divine healing. Nowhere are we told that
faith shall some day cease to work wonders. The arm of the Lord is not
shortened. O ye of little faith! the victory is within your reach, if
you will but rise and seize upon it. I see a vision of a new Church yet
to come that shall believe, and, believing as those of old believed,
shall see wonders such as the faithful of old saw. The sick shall be
healed; women shall receive their dead raised to life again. Why not
now? Rise up, O believing heart, and take the Lord at his word!"
Perhaps Mrs. Frankland did not intend that declamation should be
accepted at its face value; certainly she did not expect it.
After a hymn, beautifully and touchingly sung, and a brief prayer,
ladies put on their sealskin sacques, thrust their jeweled hands into
their muffs, and went out to beckon their impatient coachmen, and to
carry home with them the solemn impressions made by the discourse, which
were in most cases too vague to produce other than a sentimental result.
Yet one may not scatter fire with safety unless he can be sure there are
no dangerous combustibles within reach. The harm of credulity is that
it is liable to set a great flame a-going whenever it reaches that which
will burn. A belief in witches is comparatively innocuous until it finds
favorable conditions, as at Salem a couple of centuries ago, but, in
favorable conditions, the idle speculations of a pedant, or the
chimney-corner chatter of old women, may suddenly become as destructive
as a pestilence.
It was in the sincere and susceptible soul of Phillida that Mrs.
Frankland's words had their full effect. The lust after perfection--the
realest peril of great souls--was hers, and she was stung and humiliated
by Mrs. Frankland's rebuke to her lack of faith, for the words so
impressively spoken seemed to her like a divine message. The whole
catalogue of worthies in the eleventh of Hebrews rose up to reprove her.
"I suppose Mrs. Frankland's been talking some more of her stuff," said
Agatha at the dinner that evening. "I declare, Phillida, you're a victim
of that woman. She isn't so bad. She doesn't mean what she says to be
taken as she says it. People always make allowances for mere preaching,
you know. But you just swallow it all, and then you get to be so poky a
body has no comfort in life. There, now, I didn't mean to hurt your
feelings," she added, as she saw the effort her sister was making at
self-control.
Phillida lay awake that night long after the normal Agatha, with never
an aspiration of the lofty sort, slept the blessed sleep of the
heedless. And while the feeble glow of the banked-down fire in the grate
draped the objects in the room with grotesque shadows, she went over
again the bead-roll of faith in the eleventh of Hebrews and heard again
the response of her conscience to the solemn appeal of Mrs. Frankland,
and prayed for an increase of faith, and went to sleep at last
reflecting on the faith like a germinant mustard grain that should
upheave the very mountains and cast them into the midst of the sea.
XVII.
A FAITH CURE.
The next day the cold wave had begun to let go a little, and there were
omens of a coming storm. The forenoon Phillida gave to domestic industry
of one sort and another, but in the afternoon she put on her overshoes
against icy pavements, and set out for a visit to Wilhelmina
Schulenberg, remembering how lonesome the invalid must be in wintry
weather. There were few loiterers on the sidewalks on such a day, but
Phillida was pretty sure of a recognition from somebody by the time she
reached Avenue A, for her sympathetic kindness had made friends for her
beyond those with whom she came into immediate contact as a
Sunday-school teacher.
"O Miss Callender," said a thinly clad girl of thirteen, with chattering
teeth, and arms folded against her body for warmth, rocking from one
foot to the other, as she stood in the door of a tenement house, "this
is hard weather for poor folks, ain't it?" And then, unable longer to
face the penetrating rawness of the east wind, she turned and ran up the
stairs.
Phillida's meditations as she walked were occupied with what Mrs.
Frankland had said the day before. She reflected that if she herself
only possessed the necessary faith she might bring healing to many
suffering people. Why not to Wilhelmina? With this thought there came a
drawing back--that instinctive resistance of human nature to anything
out of the conventional and mediocre; a resistance that in a time of
excitement often saves us from absurdity at the expense of reducing us
to commonplace. But in Phillida this conservatism was counteracted by a
quick imagination in alliance with a passion for moral excellence, both
warmed by the fire of youth; and in all ventures youth counts for much.
"Dat is coot; you gomes to see Mina wunst more already," said Mrs.
Schulenberg, whom Phillida encountered on the second flight of stairs,
descending with a market-basket on her arm. She was not the
strong-framed peasant, but of lighter build and somewhat finer fiber
than the average immigrant, and her dark hair and eyes seemed to point
to South Germany as her place of origin.
"Wilhelmina she so badly veels to-day," added Mrs. Schulenberg. "I don'
know"--and she shook her head ominously--"I vas mos' afraid to leef her
all py herself already. She is with bein' zick zo tired. She dalk
dreadful dis mornin' already; I don' know." And the mother went on down
the stairs shaking her head dolefully, while Phillida climbed up to the
Schulenberg apartment and entered without knocking, going straight over
to the couch where the emaciated girl lay, and kissing her.
Wilhelmina embraced her while Phillida pushed back the hair from the
pale, hard forehead with something like a shudder, for it was only skin
and skull. In the presence of sympathy Wilhelmina's mood of melancholy
desperation relaxed, and she began to shed tears.
"O Miss Callender, you have from black thoughts saved me to-day," she
said in a sobbing voice, speaking with a slight German accent. "If I
could only die. Here I drag down the whole family already. I make them
sorry. Poor Rudolph, he might be somebody if away off he would go wunst;
but no, he will not leave me. It is such a nice girl he love; I can see
that he love her. But he will say nothing at all. He feels so he must
not anyway leave his poor sister; and I hate myself and my life that for
all my family is unfortunate. Black thoughts will come. If, now, I was
only dead; if I could only find some way myself to put out of the way
wunst, for Rudolph it would be better, and after a while the house would
not any more so sorry be. Last night I thought much about it; but when
falling asleep I saw you plain come in the door and shake your head, and
I say, Miss Callender think it wicked. She will not let me. But I am so
wicked and unfortunate."
Here the frail form was shaken by hysterical weeping that cut off
speech. Phillida shed tears also, and one of them dropped on the
emaciated hand of Wilhelmina. Phillida quickly wiped it away with her
handkerchief, but another took its place.
"Let it be, Miss Callender," sobbed Wilhelmina; "it will surely make me
not so wicked."
She looked up wistfully at Phillida and essayed to speak; then she
turned her eyes away, while she said:
"If now, Miss Callender, you would--but may be you will think that it is
wicked also."
"Speak freely, dear," said Phillida, softly; "it will do you good to
tell me all--all that is in your heart."
"If you would only pray that I might die, then it would be granted
already, maybe. I am such a curse, a dreadful curse, to this house."
"No, no; you mustn't say that. Your sickness is a great misfortune to
your family, but it is not your fault. It is a greater misfortune to
you. Why should you pray to die? Why not pray to get well?"
"That is too hard, Miss Callender. If now I had but a little while been
sick. But I am so long. I can not ever get well. Oh, the medicines I
have took, the pills and the sarsaparillas and the medicine of the
German doctor! And then the American doctor he burnt my back. No; I
can't get well any more. It is better as I die. Pray that I die. Will
you not?"
"But if God can make you die he can make you well. One is no harder than
the other for him."
"No, no; not if I was but a little while sick. But you see it is years
since I was sick."
This illogical ground of skepticism Phillida set herself to combat. She
read from Wilhelmina's sheepskin-bound Testament, printed in parallel
columns in English and German, the story of the miracle at the Pool of
Bethesda, the story of the woman that touched the hem of the garment of
Jesus, and of other cures told in the New Testament with a pathos and
dignity not to be found in similar modern recitals.
Then Phillida, her soul full of hope, talked to Mina of the power of
faith, going over the ground traversed by Mrs. Frankland. She read the
eleventh of Hebrews, and her face was transformed by the earnestness of
her own belief as she advanced. Call it mesmerism, or what you will, she
achieved this by degrees, that Wilhelmina thought as she thought, and
felt as she felt. The poor girl with shaken nerves and enfeebled
vitality saw a vision of health. She watched Phillida closely, and
listened eagerly to her words, for to her they were words of life.
"Now, Mina, if you believe, if you have faith as a grain of mustard
seed, all things are possible."
The girl closed her eyes a moment, then she opened them with her face
radiant.
"Miss Callender, I do believe."
Already her face was changing under the powerful influence of the newly
awakened hope. She folded her hands peacefully, and closed her eyes,
whispering:
"Pray, Miss Callender; pray!"
Phillida laid down the Bible and solemnly knelt by the invalid, taking
hold of one of her hands. It would have been impossible to listen to the
prayer of one so passionately sincere and so believingly devout without
falling into sympathy with it. To the bed-ridden and long-despairing
Wilhelmina it made God seem something other than she had ever thought
him. An hour before she could have believed that God might be persuaded
to take her life in answer to prayer, but not that he could be brought
to restore her. The moment that Phillida began to pray, a new God
appeared to her mind--Phillida's God. Wilhelmina followed the action of
Phillida's mind as a hypnotized subject does that of the dominant agent:
as Phillida believed, so she believed; Phillida's confidence became
hers, and the weak nerves tingled all the way from the nerve-centers
with new life.
"Now, Wilhelmina," said Phillida at length, slowly rising from her knees
and looking steadily into the invalid's eyes, "the good Lord will make
you whole. Rise up and sit upon the bed, believing with all your heart."
In a sort of ecstasy the invalid set to work to obey. There was a
hideous trick of legerdemain in the last generation, by which an
encoffined skeleton was made to struggle to its feet. Something like
this took place as Mina's feeble arms were brought into the most violent
effort to assist her to rise. But a powerful emotion, a tremendous hope,
stimulated the languid nerves; the almost disused muscles were
galvanized into power; and Wilhelmina succeeded at length in sitting
upright without support for the first time in years. When she perceived
this actually accomplished she cried out: "O God! I am getting well!"
Wilhelmina's mother had come to the top of the stairs just as Phillida
had begun to pray. She paused without the door and listened to the
prayer and to what followed. She now burst into the room to see her
daughter sitting up on the side of her couch; and then there were
embraces and tears, and ejaculations of praise to God in German and in
broken English.
"Sit there, Mina, and believe with all your heart," said Phillida, who
was exteriorly the calmest of the three; "I will come back soon."
Wilhelmina did as she was bidden. The shock of excitement thus prolonged
was overcoming the sluggishness of her nerves. The mother could not
refrain from calling in a neighbor who was passing by the open door, and
the news of Mina's partial restoration spread through the building. When
Phillida got back from the Diet Kitchen with some savory food, the
doorway was blocked; but the people stood out of her way with as much
awe as they would had she worn an aureole, and she passed in and put the
food before Wilhelmina, who ate with a relish she hardly remembered to
have known before. The spectators dropped back into the passageway, and
Phillida gently closed the door.
"Now, Wilhelmina, lie down and rest. To-morrow you will walk a little.
Keep on believing with all your heart."
Having seen the patient, who was fatigued with unwonted exertion,
sleeping quietly, Phillida returned home. She said nothing of her
experiences of the day, but Millard, who called in the evening, found
her more abstracted and less satisfactory than ever. For her mind
continually reverted to her patient.
XVIII.
FAITH-DOCTOR AND LOVER.
The next day, though a great snow-storm had burst upon the city before
noon, Phillida made haste after luncheon to work her way first to the
Diet Kitchen and then to the Schulenberg tenement. When she got within
the shelter of the doorway of the tenement house she was well-nigh
exhausted, and it was half a minute before she could begin the arduous
climbing of the stairs.
"I thought you would not come," said Wilhelmina with something like a
cry of joy. "I have found it hard to keep on believing, but still I have
believed and prayed. I was afeard if till to-morrow you waited the black
thoughts would come back again. Do you think I can sit up wunst more
already?"
"If you have faith; if you believe."
Under less excitement than that of the day before, Mina found it hard to
get up; but at length she succeeded. Then she ate the appetizing food
that Phillida set before her. Meantime the mother, deeply affected, took
her market-basket and went out, lest somehow her presence should be a
drawback to her daughter's recovery.
While the feeble Wilhelmina was eating, Phillida drew the only fairly
comfortable chair in the room near to the stove, and, taking from a bed
some covering, she spread it over the back and seat of the chair. Then,
when the meal was completed, she read from the Acts of the Apostles of
the man healed at the gate of the temple by Simon Peter. With the book
open in her hand, as she sat, she offered a brief fervent prayer.
"Now, Wilhelmina, doubt nothing," she said. "In the name of Jesus of
Nazareth, rise up and walk!"
The invalid had again caught the infection of Phillida's faith, and with
a strong effort, helping herself by putting her hand on Phillida's
shoulder, she brought herself at length to her feet, where she stood a
moment, tottering as though about to fall.
"Walk to the chair, dear, nothing wavering," commanded Phillida, and
Mina, with much trembling, let go of Phillida's shoulder, and with sadly
unsteady steps tottered forward far enough to lay hold of the back of
the chair, and at length succeeded, with much ado, in sitting down
without assistance. For years she had believed herself forever beyond
hope of taking a step. She leaned back against the pillow placed behind
her by Phillida, and wept for very joy.
"But, Miss Callender," she said after a while, "the man you read about
in the Bible was made all well at once, and he walked and leaped; but
I--"
"Perhaps our faith isn't strong enough," said Phillida. "Maybe it is
better for us that you should get well slowly, like the man that Jesus
cured of blindness, who, when he first saw men, thought they looked like
walking trees. Let us be thankful for what we have, and not complain."
In a few weeks Wilhelmina's mental stimulation and graduated physical
exercise had made her able to sit up nearly all day, to walk feebly
about the house, and even to render some assistance in such affairs as
could be attended to while sitting. The recovery, though it went no
farther, was remarkable enough to attract much attention, and the fame
of it spread far and wide among the people in the eastern avenues and
those connected with the Mission.
This new development of Phillida's life increased her isolation. She
could not speak to her family about her faith-cures, nor to Mrs.
Hilbrough, and she did not like to confide even in Mrs. Frankland, who
would, she felt sure, make too much of the matter. Most of all, it was
not in her power to bring herself to say anything to Millard about it.
The latter felt, during the three or four weeks that followed the
treatment of Wilhelmina, that the veil between him and the inner life of
Phillida was growing more opaque. He found no ground to quarrel with
Phillida; she was cordial, affectionate, and dutiful toward him, but he
felt, with a quickness of intuition characteristic of him, that there
was some new cause of constraint between them.
"Phillida," he said one evening, a month after Phillida's work as a
faith-doctor had begun, "I wish you would tell me more about your
mission work."
"I don't like to speak of that," she replied. "It is too much like
boasting of what I am doing." She had no sooner said this than she
regretted it; her fierce conscience rose up and charged her with
uncandid speech. But how could she be candid?
"I don't like to think," said Millard, "that so large a part of your
life--a part that lies so near to your heart--should be shut out from
me. I can't do your kind of work. But I can admire it. Won't you tell me
about it?"
Phillida felt a keen pang. Had it been a question of her ordinary work
in the months that were past she might easily have spoken of it. But
this faith-healing would be dangerous ground with Millard. She knew in
her heart that it would be better to tell him frankly about it, and face
the result. But with him there she could not get courage to bring on an
immediate conflict between the affection that was so dear and the work
that was so sacred to her.
"Charley," she said slowly, holding on to her left hand as though for
safety, "I'm afraid I was not very--very candid in the answer I gave you
just now."
"Oh, don't say anything, or tell me anything, dear, that gives you
pain," he said with quick delicacy; "and something about this does pain
you."
Phillida spoke now in a lower tone, looking down at her hands as she
said, with evident effort: "Because you are so good, I must try to be
honest with you. There are reasons why I hesitate to tell--to tell--you
all about what I am doing. At least this evening, though I know I ought
to, and I will--I will--if you insist on it."
"No, dear; no. I will not hear it now."
"But I will tell you all some time. It's nothing _very_ bad, Charley. At
least I don't think it is."
"It couldn't be, I'm sure. Nothing bad could exist about you"; and he
took her hand in his. "Don't say any more to-night. You are nervous and
tired. But some other time, when you feel like it, speak freely. It
won't do for us not to open our hearts and lives to each other. If we
fail to live openly and truthfully, our little boat will go ashore,
Phillida dear--will be wrecked or stranded before we know it."
His voice was full of pleading. How could she refuse to tell him all?
But by all the love she felt for him, sitting there in front of her,
with his left hand on his knee, looking in her face, and speaking in
such an honest, manly way, she was restrained from exposing to him a
phase of her life that would seem folly to him while it was a very holy
of holies to her. The alternative was cruel.
"Another time, Charley, I mean to tell you all," she said; and she knew
when she said it that procrastination would not better the matter, and
in the silence that ensued she was just about to change her resolve and
unfold the whole matter at once.
But Millard said: "Don't trouble yourself. I'm sorry I have hurt you.
Remember that I trust you implicitly. If you feel a delicacy in speaking
to me about anything, let it go."
The conversation after this turned on indifferent matters; but it
remained constrained, and Millard took his leave early.
XIX.
PROOF POSITIVE.
The more Millard thought of the mysterious reserve of Phillida, the more
he was disturbed by it, and the next Sunday but one he set out at an
earlier hour than usual to go to Avenue C, not this time with a
comfortable feeling that his visit would be a source of cheer to his
aunt, but rather hoping that her quiet spirit might somehow relieve the
soreness of his heart. It chanced that on this fine winter Sunday he
found her alone, except for the one-year-old little girl.
"I let the children all go to Sunday-school," she said, "except baby,
and father has gone to his meeting, you know."
"His meeting? I did not know that he had any," said Millard.
"W'y yes, Charley; I thought you knew. Henry always had peculiar views,"
she said, laughing gently, as was her wont, at her husband's oddities.
"He has especially disliked preachers and doctors. Lately he has got the
notion that the churches do not believe the Bible literally enough.
There were two Swedes and one Swiss in his shop who agreed with him.
From reading the Bible in their way and reading other books and papers
they have adopted what is called Christian Science. They have found some
other men and women who believe as they do, and a kind of a Christian
Science woman doctor who talks to them a little--a good enough woman in
her way, I suppose--and they think that by faith, or rather by declaring
that there is no such thing as a real disease, and believing themselves
well, they can cure all diseases."
"All except old age and hunger?" queried Millard.
The aunt smiled, and went on. "But father and his woman doctor or
preacher don't agree with your Miss Callender. They say her cures are
all right as far as they go, but that she is only a babe, unable to take
strong meat. The Christian Science woman in Fourteenth street, now, they
say, knows all about it, and works her cures scientifically, and not
blindly as Miss Callender does."
This allusion to cures by Phillida set Millard into a whirl of feeling.
That she had been doing something calculated to make her the subject of
talk brought a rush of indignant feeling, but all his training as a man
of society and as a man of business inclined him to a prudent silence
under excitement. He turned his derby hat around and around, examining
the crown by touch, and then, reversing it, he scrutinized the address
of the hatter who did not make it. Though he had come all the way to
Avenue C to make a confidante of his aunt, he now found it impossible to
do so. She had rejoiced so much in his betrothal to her friend, how
could he let her see how far apart he and Phillida had drifted? For
some minutes he managed to talk with her about her own family matters,
and then turned back to Phillida again.
"Tell me, Aunt Hannah, all you know about Miss Callender's cures. I
don't like to ask her because she and I disagree so widely on some
things that we do not like to talk about them."
His aunt saw that Charley was profoundly disturbed. She therefore began
with some caution, as treading on unknown ground, in talking with him
about Phillida.
"I don't know what to think about these things, Charley. But in anything
I say you must understand that I love Miss Callender almost as much as
you do, and if anybody can cure by faith she can. In fact, she has had
wonderful success in some cures. Besides, she's no money-maker, like the
woman doctor in Fourteenth street, who takes pay for praying over you,
and rubbing your head, maybe. You know about the cure of Wilhelmina
Schulenberg, of course?"
"No; not fully. We haven't liked to talk about it. Wilhelmina is the
poor creature that has been in bed so long."
This mere fencing was to cover the fact that Millard had not heard
anything of the miracle in Wilhelmina's case. But seeing his aunt look
at him inquiringly, he added:
"Is she quite cured, do you think--this Miss Schulenberg?"
"No; but she can sit up and walk about. She got better day after day
under Miss Callender's praying, but lately, I think, she is at a
standstill. Well, that was the first, and it made a great talk. And I
don't see but that it is very remarkable. Everybody in the tenement
house was wild about it, and Miss Callender soon came to be pointed at
by the children on the street as 'the woman doctor that can make you
well by praying over you.' Then there was the wife of the crockery-store
man in Avenue A. She had hysterical fits, or something of the sort, and
she got well after Miss Callender visited her three or four times. And
another woman thought her arm was paralyzed, but Miss Callender made her
believe, and she got so she could use it. But old Mr. Greenlander, the
picture-frame maker in Twentieth street, didn't get any better. In fact,
he never pretended to believe that he would."
"What was the matter with him?" asked Millard, his lips compressed and
his brows contracted.
"Oh, he had a cataract over his eye. He's gone up to the Eye and Ear
Hospital to have it taken off. I don't suppose faith could be expected
to remove that."
"It doesn't seem to work in surgical cases," said Millard.
"But several people with nervous troubles and kind of breakdowns have
got better or got well, and naturally they are sounding the praises of
Miss Callender's faith," added his aunt.
"Do you think Phillida likes all this talk about her?"
"No. This talk about her is like hot coals to her feet. She suffers
dreadfully. She said last Sunday that she wondered if Christ did not
shrink from the talk of the crowds that followed him more than he did
from crucifixion itself. She is wonderful, and I don't wonder the people
believe that she can work miracles. If anybody can in these days, she is
the one."
Millard said nothing for a time; he picked at the lining of his hat, and
then put it down on the table and looked out of the window. His
irritation against Phillida had by this time turned into affectionate
pity for her self-imposed suffering--a pity rendered bitter by his
inability to relieve her.
"Do you think that Phillida begins to suspect that perhaps she has made
a mistake?" he asked after a while.
"No. I'm not so sure she has. No doctor cures in all cases, and even
Christ couldn't heal the people in Nazareth who hadn't much faith."
"She will make herself a byword in the streets," said Millard in a tone
that revealed to his aunt his shame and anguish.
"Charley," said Mrs. Martin, "don't let yourself worry too much about
Miss Callender. She is young yet. She may be wrong or she may be right.
I don't say but she goes too far. She's a house plant, you know. She has
seen very little of the world. If she was like other girls she would
just take up with the ways of other people and not make a stir. But she
has set out to do what she thinks is right at all hazards. Presently she
will get her lesson, and some of her oddities will disappear, but she'll
never be just like common folks. Mind my words, Charley, she's got the
making of a splendid woman if you'll only give her time to get ripe."
"I believe that with all my heart," said Millard, with a sigh.
"I tell you, Charley, I do believe that her prayers have a great effect,
for the Bible teaches that. Besides, she don't talk any of the nonsense
of father's Christian Science woman. I can understand what Phillida's
about. But Miss what's-her-name, in Fourteenth street, can't explain to
save her life, so's you can understand, how she cures people, or what
she's about, except to earn money in some way easier than hard work.
There comes your uncle, loaded to the muzzle for a dispute," said Aunt
Hannah, laughing mischievously as she heard her husband's step on the
stairs.
Uncle Martin greeted Charley with zest. It was no fun to talk to his
wife, who never could be drawn into a discussion, but held her husband's
vagaries in check as far as possible by little touches of gentle
ridicule. But Mr. Martin was sure that he could overwhelm Charley
Millard, even though he might not convince him. So when he had said,
"How-are-yeh, and glad to see yeh, Charley, and hope yer well, and how's
things with you?" he sat down, and presently opened his battery.
"You see, Charley, our Miss Bowyer, the Christian Science healer, is
well-posted about medicine and the Bible. She says that the world is
just about to change. Sin and misery are at the bottom of sickness, and
all are going to be done away with by spirit power. God and the angel
world are rolling away the rock from the sepulchre, and the sleeping
spirit of man is coming forth. People are getting more susceptible to
magnetic and psy--psy-co-what-you-may-call-it influences. This is
bringing out new diseases that the old doctors are only able to look at
with dumb amazement."
Here Uncle Martin turned his thumbs outward with a flourish, and the air
of a lad who had solved a problem on a blackboard. At the same time he
dropped his head forward and gazed at Charley, who was not even amused.
"What are her proofs?" demanded Millard, wearily.
"Proofs?" said Uncle Martin, with a sniff, as he reared his head again.
"Proofs a plenty. You just come around and hear her explain once about
the vermic--I can't say the word--the twistifying motion of the stomach
and what happens when the nerve-force gets a set-back and this motion
kind of winds itself upward instead of downward, and the nerve-force all
flies to the head. Proofs?" Here Uncle Martin paused, ill at ease. "Just
notice the cases. The proof is in the trying of it. The cures are
wonderful. You first get the patient into a state where you can make him
think as you do. Then you will that he shall forget all about his
diseases. You make him feel well, and you've done it."
"I suppose you could cure him by forgetfulness easily enough. I saw an
old soldier with one leg yesterday; he was drunk in the street. And he
had forgotten entirely that one leg was gone. But he didn't seem to walk
any better."
"That don't count, Charley, and you're only making fun. You see there is
a philosophy in this, and you ought to hear it from somebody that can
explain it."
"I'd like to find somebody who could," said Charley.
"Well, now, how's this? Miss Bowyer--she's a kind of a preacher as well as
a doctor--she says that God is good, and therefore he couldn't create evil.
You see? Well, now, God created everything that is, so there can not be any
evil. At least it can't have any real, independent--what-you-may-call-it
existence. You see, Charley?"
"Yes; what of it?"
"Well, then, sickness and sin are evil. But this argument proves that
they don't really exist at all. They're only magic-lantern shadows so to
speak. You see? Convince the patient that he is well, and he _is_ well."
Here Uncle Martin, having pointed out the easy road to universal health,
looked in solemn triumph from under his brows.
"Yes," said Millard, "that's just an awfully good scheme. But if you
work your argument backward it will prove that as evil exists there
isn't any good God. But if it's true that sin and disease have no real
existence, we'll do away with hanging and electrocution, as they call
it, and just send for Miss Bowyer to convince a murderer that murder is
an evil, and so it can't have any real independent existence in a
universe made by a good God."
"Well, Charley, you make fun of serious things. You might as well make
fun of the miracles in the Bible."
"Now," said Millard, "are the cures wrought by Christian Science
miracles, or are they founded on philosophy?"
"They're both, Charley. It's what they call the
psy-co-what-you-may-call-it mode of cure. But it's all the same as the
miracles of the Bible," said Uncle Martin.
"Oh, it is," said Millard, gayly, for this tilt had raised his spirits.
"Now the miracles in the Bible are straight-out miracles. Nobody went
around in that day to explain the vermicular motion of the stomach or
the upward action of nerve-force, or the psychopathic value of animal
magnetism. Some of the Bible miracles would stump a body to believe, if
they were anywhere else but in the Bible; but you just believe in them
as miracles by walking right straight up to them, looking the difficulty
in the eye, and taking them as they are because you ought to." Here
Charley saw his aunt laughing gently at his frank way of stating the
processes of his own mind. Smiling in response, he added: "You believe
them, or at least I do, because I can't have my religion without them.
But your Christian psychopathists bring a lot of talk about a science,
and they don't seem to know just whether God is working the miracle or
they are doing it by magnetism, or mind-cure, or psychopathy, or whether
the disease isn't a sort of plaguey humbug anyhow, and the patient a
fool who has to be undeceived."
"W'y, you see, Charley, we know more nowadays, and we understand all
about somnambulism and hyp-what-you-may-call-it, and we understand just
how the miracles in the Bible were worked. God works by law--don't you
see?"
"The apostles did not seem to understand it?" asked Charley.
"No; they were mere faith-doctors, like Miss Callender, for instance,
doing their works in a blind sort of way."
"The apostles will be mere rushlights when you get your Christian
Science well a-going," said Charley, seriously. Then he rose to leave,
having no heart to await the return of the children.
"Of course," said Uncle Martin, "the world is undergoing a change,
Charley. A great change. Selfishness and disease shall vanish away, and
the truth of science and Christianity prevail." Uncle Martin was now
standing, and swinging his hands horizontally in outward gestures, with
his elbows against his sides.
"Well, I wish to goodness there was some chance of realizing your
hopes," said Charley, conciliatorily. "I must go. Good-by, Uncle Martin;
good-by, Aunt Hannah."
Uncle Martin said good-by, and come again, Charley, and always glad to
see you, you know, and good luck to you. And Millard went down the
stairs and bent his steps homeward. As the exhilaration produced by his
baiting of Uncle Martin's philosophy died away, his heart sank with
sorrowful thoughts of Phillida and her sufferings, and with indignant
and mortifying thoughts of how she would inevitably be associated in
people's minds with mercenary quacks and disciples of a sham science.
He would go to see her at once. The defeat of Uncle Martin had given him
courage. He would turn the same battery on Phillida. No; not the same.
He could not ridicule her. She was never quite ridiculous. Her plane of
motive was so high that his banter would be a desecration. It was not
in his heart to add to the asperity of her martyrdom by any light words.
But perhaps he could find some way to bring her to a more reasonable
course.
It was distinctly out of his way to cross Tompkins Square again, but in
his present mood there was a satisfaction to him in taking a turn
through the square, which was associated in his mind with a time when
his dawning affection for Phillida was dimmed by no clouds of
separation. Excitement pushed him forward, and a fine figure he was as
he strode along with eager and elastic steps, his head erect and his
little cane balanced in his fingers. In the middle of the square his
meditation was cut short in a way most unwelcome in his present frame of
mind.
"It is Mr. Millard, isn't it?" he heard some one say, and, turning, he
saw before him Wilhelmina Schulenberg, not now seated helpless in the
chair he had given her, but hanging on the arm of her faithful Rudolph.
"How do you do, Miss Schulenberg?" said Millard, examining her with
curiosity.
"You see I am able to walk wunst again," she said. "It is to Miss
Callender and her prayers that I owe it already."
"But you are not quite strong," said Millard. "Do you get better?"
"Not so much now. It is my faith is weak. If I only could believe
already, it would all to me be possible, Mr. Millard. But it is
something to walk on my feet, isn't it, Mr. Millard?"
"Indeed it is, Miss Schulenberg. It must make your good brother glad."
Rudolph received this polite indirect compliment a little foolishly, but
appreciation from a fine gentleman did him good, and after Charley had
gone he was profuse in his praises of "Miss Callender's man," as he
called him.
XX.
DIVISIONS.
Millard went no farther through the square, but turned toward Tenth
street, and through that to Second Avenue, and so uptownward. But how
should he argue with Phillida? He had seen an indisputable example of
the virtue of her prayers. Though he could not believe in the miraculous
character of the cure, how should he explain it? That Wilhelmina had
been shamming was incredible, that her ailments were not imaginary was
proven by the fact of her recovery being but partial. To deny the
abstract possibility of such a cure seemed illogical from his own
standpoint. Even the tepid rector of St. Matthias had occasionally
homilized in a vague way about the efficacy of faith and the power of
prayer, but the rector seemed to think that this potency was for the
most part a matter of ancient history, for his illustrations were rarely
drawn from anything more modern than the lives of the Church fathers,
and of the female relatives of the Church fathers, such as Saint Monica.
Millard could not see any ground on which he could deny the reality of
the miracle in the Schulenberg case, but his common sense was that of a
man of worldly experience, a common sense which stubbornly refuses to
believe the phenomenal or extraordinary, even when unable to formulate
a single reason for incredulity.
After an internal debate he decided not to call on Phillida this
afternoon. It might lead to a scene, a scene might bring on a
catastrophe. But, as fortune would have it, Phillida was on her return
from the Mission, and her path coincided with his, so that he
encountered her in Tenth street. He walked home with her, asking after
her health and talking commonplaces to escape conversation. He went
in--there was no easy way to avoid it, had he desired. She set him a
chair, and drew up the shades, and then took a seat near him.
"I've been at Aunt Martin's to-day," he said.
"Have you?" she asked with a sort of trepidation in her voice.
"Yes." Then after a pause he edged up to what he wished to say by
adding: "I had a curious talk with Uncle Martin, who has got his head
full of the greatest jumble of scientific terms which he can not
remember, and nonsense about what he calls Christian Science. He says he
learned it from Miss Bowyer, a Christian Science talker. Do you know
her?"
"No; I have only heard of her from Mr. Martin, and I don't think I ought
to judge her by what is reported of her teaching. Maybe it is not so
bad. One doesn't like to be judged at second-hand," she said, looking at
him with a quick glance.
"Especially when Uncle Martin is the reporter," he replied.
Meantime Phillida's eyes were inquiring whether he had heard anything
about her present course of action.
"I saw Wilhelmina Schulenberg in Tompkins Square to-day," he said, still
approaching the inevitable, sidewise.
"Did you?" she asked almost in a whisper. "Was she walking?"
"Yes. Why did you not tell me she was better?"
Phillida looked down. At this moment her reserve with her lover in a
matter so personal to herself seemed to her extremely reprehensible.
"I--I was a coward, Charley," she said with a kind of ferocity of
remorse. This self-accusation on her part made him unhappy.
"You?" he said. "You are no coward. You are a brave woman." He leaned
over and lightly kissed her cheek as he finished speaking.
"I knew that my course would seem foolish to you, and I couldn't bear
that you should know. I was afraid it would mortify you."
"You have suffered much yourself, my dear."
She nodded her head, the tears brimming in her eyes at this unexpected
sign of sympathy.
"And borne it bravely all alone. And all for a mistake--a cruel
mistake."
Millard had not meant to say so much, but his feelings had slipped away
from him. However, he softened his words by his action, for he drew out
his handkerchief and gently wiped away a tear that had paused a moment
in its descent down her cheek.
"How can you say it is a mistake?" she asked. "You saw Wilhelmina
yourself."
"Yes; but it is all a misunderstanding, dear. It's all wrong, I tell
you. You haven't seen much of life, and you'll be better able to judge
when you are older." Here he paused, for of arguments he had none to
offer.
"I don't want to see anything of life if a knowledge of the world is to
rob me of what is more precious than life itself." Her voice was now
firm and resolute, and her tears had ceased.
Millard was angry at he knew not what--at whatever thing human or
supernal had bound this burden of misbelief upon so noble a soul as
Phillida's. He got up and paced the floor a moment, and then looked out
of the window, saying from time to time in response to deprecatory or
defensive words of hers, "I tell you, dear, it's a cruel mistake." Now
and then he felt an impulse to scold Phillida herself; but his
affectionate pity held him back. His irritation had the satisfaction of
finding an object on which to vent itself at length when Phillida said:
"If Mrs. Frankland would admit men to her readings, Charley, I'm sure
that if you could only hear her explain the Bible--"
"No, thank you," said Millard, tartly. "Mrs. Frankland is eloquent, but
she has imposed on you and done you a great deal of harm. Why, Phillida,
you are as much superior to that woman as the sky is--" He was about to
say, "as the sky is to a mud-puddle," but nothing is so fatal to offhand
vigor of denunciation as the confirmed habit of properness. Millard's
preference for measured and refined speech got the better of his wrath
barely in time, and, after arresting himself a moment, he finished the
sentence with more justness as he made a little wave with his right
hand--"as the sky is to a scene-painter's illusion."
Then he went on: "But Mrs. Frankland is persuasive and eloquent, and you
are too sincere to make allowance for the dash of exaggeration in her
words. You won't find her at a mission in Mackerelville. She is dressed
in purple by presents from the people who hear her, and Mrs. Hilbrough
tells me that Mrs. Benthuysen has just given her a check of a thousand
dollars to go to Europe with."
"Why shouldn't they do such things for her? They hardly know what to do
with their money, and they ought to be grateful to her," said Phillida
with heat. "Charley, I don't like to have you talk so about so good a
woman. I know her and love her. You don't know her, and your words seem
to me harsh and unjust."
"Well, then forgive me, dear. I forgot that she is your friend. That's
the best thing I ever knew about her."
Saying this, he put on his hat and went out lest he should give way
again to his now rising indignation against Mrs. Frankland, who, as the
real author of Phillida's trouble, in his judgment deserved severer
words than he had yet applied to her. But when he had opened the front
door he turned back suddenly, distressed that his call had only added to
the troubles of Phillida. She sat there, immovable, where he had left
her; he crossed the room, bent over her, and kissed her cheek.
"Forgive me, darling; I spoke hastily."
This tenderness overcame Phillida, and she fell to weeping. When she
raised her head a moment later Charley had gone, and the full confession
she had intended must be deferred.
To a man who has accepted as a divine authority all the conventions of
society, hardly anything that could befall a young woman would be more
dreadful than to become a subject of notoriety. His present interview
with Phillida had thoroughly aroused Millard, and he was resolved to
save her from herself by any means within his reach. Again the
alternative of an early marriage presented itself. He might hasten the
wedding, and then take Phillida to Europe, where the sight of a
religious life quite different from her own would tend to widen her
views and weaken the ardor of her enthusiasm. He wondered what would be
the effect upon her, for instance, of the stack of crutches built up in
monumental fashion in one of the chapels of the Church of St. Germain
des Près at Paris--the offerings of cripples restored by a Roman
Catholic faith-cure. But he reflected that the wedding could be hardly
got ready before Lent, and a marriage in Lent was repugnant to him not
only as a Churchman but even more as a man known for sworn fealty to the
canons of fashionable society, which are more inexorable than
ecclesiastical usages, since there is no one high and mighty enough to
grant a dispensation from them. It had long been understood that the
wedding should take place some time after Easter, and it seemed best not
to disturb that arrangement. What he wanted now was some means of
checking the mortifying career of Phillida as a faith-doctor.
XXI.
MRS. HILBROUGH'S INFORMATION.
Casting about in his thoughts for an ally, he hit upon Mrs. Hilbrough.
In her he would find an old friend of Phillida's who was pretty sure to
be free from brain-fogs. He quickly took a resolution to see her. It was
too late in the afternoon to walk uptown. On a fine Sunday like this the
street cars would not have strap-room left, and the elevated trains
would be in a state of extreme compression long before they reached
Fourteenth street. He took the best-looking cab he could find in Union
Square as the least of inconveniences; and just as the slant sun,
descending upon the Jersey lowlands, had set all the windows on the
uptown side of the cross streets in a ruddy glow, he alighted at the
Hilbrough door, paid his cabman a full day's wages, after the manner of
New York, and sent up his card to Mrs. Hilbrough with a message that he
hoped it would not incommode her to see him, since he had some inquiries
to make. Mrs. Hilbrough descended promptly, and there took place the
usual preliminary parley on the subject of the fine day, a parley
carried on by Millard with as little knowledge of what he was saying as
a phonographic doll has. Then begging her pardon for disturbing her on
Sunday afternoon, he asked:
"Have you heard anything about Miss Callender's course as a
faith-healer?"
Mrs. Hilbrough took a moment to think before replying. Here was a
direct, even abrupt, approach to a matter of delicacy. There was a
complete lack of the diplomatic obliquity to be expected in such a case.
This was not like Millard, and though his exterior was calm and suave
enough from mere force of habit, she quickly formed an opinion of his
condition of internal ebullition from his precipitancy.
"I did not hear anything about it until Thursday, two weeks ago, and I
learned certainly about it only yesterday," she replied, resting as
non-committal as possible until the drift of Millard's inquiry should be
disclosed.
"May I ask from whom?" He was now sitting bolt upright, and his words
were uttered without any of that pleasing deference of manner that
usually characterized his speech.
"From Mrs. Maginnis--Mrs. California Maginnis," she added for the sake
of explicitness and with an impulse to relax the tension of Millard's
mind by playfulness.
"Mrs. Maginnis?" he said with something like a start. "How does Mrs.
Maginnis know anything about what takes place in Mackerelville?"
"It wasn't the Mackerelville case, but one a good deal nearer home, that
she was interested in," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "It's too warm here," she
added, seeing him wipe his brow with his handkerchief. She put her hand
to the bell, but withdrew it without ringing, and then crossed the room
and closed the register.
Millard proceeded in a straightforward, businesslike voice, "Tell me,
please, what Mrs. Maginnis had to do with Miss Callender's faith-cures?"
"Her relation to them came about through Mrs. Frankland."
"No doubt," said Millard; "I expected to find her clever hand in it."
The mordant tone in which this was said disconcerted Mrs. Hilbrough. She
felt that she was in danger of becoming an accomplice in a lovers'
quarrel that might prove disastrous to the pretty romance that had begun
in her own house. She paused and said:
"I beg pardon, Mr. Millard, but I ought hardly to discuss this with you,
if you make it a matter of feeling between you and Phillida. She is my
friend--"
"Mrs. Hilbrough," he interrupted, taking a softer tone than before, and
leaning forward and resting his left hand on his knee, and again wiping
his forehead with his handkerchief, "my whole destiny is involved in the
welfare of Phillida Callender. I haven't quarreled with her, but I
should like to show her that this faith-curing is a mistake and likely
to make her ridiculous. You said that Mrs. Frankland--"
"Mrs. Frankland," said Mrs. Hilbrough, "through somebody connected with
the Mackerelville Mission got hold of the story of the cure of a poor
German girl somewhere down about what they call Tompkins Square. Is
that the name of a square? Well, on Thursday, two weeks ago, when
Phillida was not present, Mrs. Frankland told this story--"
"Trotted it out as a fine illustration of faith," broke in Millard, with
something between a smile and a sneer, adding, "with Phillida's name
attached."
"No, she didn't give the name; she spoke of her as a noble Christian
young woman, the daughter of a devoted missionary to the heathen, which
made me suspect Phillida. She also alluded to her as a person accustomed
to attend these meetings, and again as 'my very dear friend,' and 'my
beloved young friend.' Mrs. Maginnis listened eagerly, and longed to
know who this was, for she had a little girl troubled with Saint Vitus's
dance. She had just been to see Dr. Legammon, the specialist."
"Who always begins his treatment by scaring a patient half to death, I
believe, especially if the patient has money," said Millard, who, in his
present biting mood, found a grim satisfaction even in snapping at Dr.
Legammon's heels.
"He told Mrs. Maginnis that it was an aggravated case of chorea, and
that severe treatment would be necessary," continued Mrs. Hilbrough.
"There must be eyeglasses, and an operation by an oculist, and perhaps
electricity, and it would require nearly a year to cure the child even
under Dr. Legammon; and he didn't even give her much assurance that her
child would get well at all. He especially excited Mrs. Maginnis's
apprehension by saying, 'We must be hopeful, my dear madam.' Mrs.
Maginnis, you know, is strung away up above concert-pitch, and this
melancholy encouragement threw her into despair, and came near to making
her a fit patient for the doctor's specialistic attentions in a private
retreat. She couldn't bring herself to have the eyes operated on, or
even to have electricity applied. It was just after this first visit to
the doctor, while Mrs. Maginnis was in despondency and her usual
indecision, that she heard Mrs. Frankland's address in which the cure of
the poor girl in the tenement-house was told as an illustration of the
power of prayer."
"Mrs. Frankland worked up all the details with striking effect, no
doubt," said Millard, with an expression of disgust.
"Well, you know Mrs. Frankland can't help being eloquent. Everybody
present was deeply affected as she pictured the scene. As soon as the
meeting closed, Mrs. Maginnis, all in a sputter of excitement, I fancy,
sailed up to Mrs. Frankland, and laid her troubles before her, and
wondered if Mrs. Frankland couldn't get her young friend to pray for her
daughter Hilda. Phillida, by solicitation of Mrs. Frankland, visited the
Maginnises every day for a week. They sent their carriage for her every
afternoon, I believe. At the end of a week 'the motions disappeared,' as
Mrs. Maginnis expressed it."
"I believe it isn't uncommon for children to get well of Saint Vitus's
dance," said Millard.
"You couldn't make Mrs. Maginnis believe that. She regards it as one of
the most remarkable cures of a wholly incurable ailment ever heard of.
The day after Phillida's last visit she sent her a check for three
hundred dollars for her services."
"Sent her money?" said Millard, reddening, and contracting his brows.
"Did Phillida take it?" This last was spoken in a low-keyed monotone.
"Hasn't she told you a word about it?"
"Not a word," said Millard, with eyes cast down.
"She sent back the check by the next postman, saying merely that it was
'respectfully declined.'"
"And Mrs. Maginnis?" asked Millard, his face lighting up.
"Didn't understand," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "These brutally rich people
think that cash will pay for everything, you know. Mrs. Maginnis
concluded that she had offered too little."
"It was little enough," said Millard, "considering her wealth and the
nature of the service she believed to have been rendered to her child."
"She thought so herself, on reflection," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "She also
had grace enough to remember that she might have been a little more
delicate in her way of tendering the money. She likes to do things
royally, so she dispatched her footman to Mrs. Callender with a note
inclosing a check for a thousand dollars, asking the mother to use it
for the benefit of her daughter. Mrs. Callender took the check to Mrs.
Gouverneur, and asked her, as having some acquaintance with Mrs.
Maginnis, to explain that Phillida could not accept any pay for
religious services or neighborly kindness. Mrs. Gouverneur"--here Mrs.
Hilbrough smiled--"saw the ghosts of her grandfathers looking on, I
suppose. She couched her note to Mrs. Maginnis in rather chilling terms,
and Mrs. Maginnis understood at last that she had probably given
offense. She went to Mrs. Frankland, who referred her to me, as
Phillida's friend, and she called here yesterday in a flutter of
hysterical importance to get me to apologize, and to ask me what she
_could_ do."
Millard was almost amused at this turn in the affair, but his smile had
a tang of bitterness.
"She explained that she had not understood that Miss Callender was that
kind of person," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "She had always supposed that
ministers and missionaries and their families expected presents. When
she was a little girl her father used to send a whole hog to each
minister in the village every fall when he killed his pigs. But it
seemed Miss Callender and her mother held themselves above presents.
Were they 'people of wealth'? That is her favorite phrase. I told her
that they were one of the best old families in the city, without much
property but with a great deal of pride, and that they were very
admirable people. 'You know, these very old and famous families hold
themselves rather above the rest of us, no matter how rich we may get to
be,' I said, maliciously.
"This seemed almost to subdue her. She said that she supposed people
would expect her to do something at such a time. It was always expected
that 'people of wealth' should show themselves grateful. What could she
do that would not offend such touchy people?
"I suggested that Hilda should buy some article, not too expensive, for
a love token for Miss Callender. 'Treat her as you would if she were
Mrs. Van Horne's daughter,' I said, 'and she will be content.' 'I don't
want to seem mean,' she replied, 'and I didn't think so pious a girl
would carry her head so high. Now, Mrs. Hilbrough, do you think a
Christian girl like Miss Callender ought to be so proud?' 'Would you
like to take money for a friendly service?' I asked. 'Oh, no! But then
I--you see, my circumstances are different; however, I will do just what
you say.' I warned her when she left that the present must not be too
costly, and that Hilda ought to take it in person. She was still a
little puzzled. 'I didn't suppose people in their circumstances would
feel that way,' she said in a half-subdued voice, 'but I'll do just as
you say, Mrs. Hilbrough.'"
This action of Phillida's was a solace to Millard's pride. But one grain
of sugar will not perceptibly sweeten the bitterness of a decoction of
gentian, and this overflow into uptown circles of Phillida's reputation
as a faith-doctor made the matter extremely humiliating.
When Mrs. Hilbrough had finished her recital Millard sat a minute
absorbed in thought. It occurred to him that if he had not spoken so
impetuously to Phillida and then left her so abruptly he might have had
this story in her own version, and thus have spared himself the
imprudence and indecorum of discussing Phillida with Mrs. Hilbrough. But
he could not refrain from making the request he had had in mind when he
came, and which alone could explain and justify to Mrs. Hilbrough his
confidence.
"I came here to-day on an impulse," he said. "Knowing your friendliness
for Phillida, and counting on your kindness, I thought perhaps you might
bring your influence to bear--to--to--what shall I say?--to modify
Phillida's zeal and render her a little less sure of her vocation to
pursue a course that must make her talked about in a way that is certain
to vulgarize her name."
Mrs. Hilbrough shook her head. She was flattered by Millard's
confidence, but she saw the difficulty of the task he had set for her.
"Count on me for anything I can do, but that is something that I suppose
no one can accomplish. What Phillida thinks right she will do if she
were to be thrown to the wild beasts for it."
"Yes, yes; that is her great superiority," he added, with mingled
admiration and despondency.
"You, who have more influence than any one else," said Mrs. Hilbrough,
"have talked with her. I suppose her mother has said what could be said,
and Agatha must have been a perfect thorn in the flesh to her since the
matter became known at home."
"Yes," said Millard, ruefully; "she must have suffered a great deal,
poor child!"
"I don't suppose Mrs. Gouverneur let her off cheaply," continued Mrs.
Hilbrough. "She must have made Phillida feel that she was overthrowing
the statues of her great-grandfathers, and she no doubt urged the
unhappiness she would cause you."
Millard saw at this moment the origin of Phillida's sensitiveness in
talking with him.
"I don't care for myself, but I wish to heaven that I could shelter her
a little from the ridicule she will suffer." He was leaning forward with
his hand on his knee and his eyes cast down.
Mrs. Hilbrough felt herself moved at sight of so much feeling in one not
wont to show his emotions to others.
"I will see if anything can be done, Mr. Millard; but I am afraid not.
I'll ask Phillida here to lunch some day this week."
The winter sunshine had all gone, the lights in the streets were winning
on the fast-fading twilight, and Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room was
growing dusk when Millard slowly, as one whose purposes are benumbed,
rose to leave. Once in the street, he walked first toward one avenue and
then toward the other. He thought to go to his apartment, but he shrank
from loneliness; he would go to dinner at a neighboring restaurant; then
he turned toward his club; and then he formed the bold resolution to
make himself welcome, as he had before, at Mrs. Callender's
Sunday-evening tea-table. But reflecting on the unlucky outcome of his
interview with Phillida, he gave this up, and after some further
irresolution dined at a table by himself in the club. He had small
appetite for food, for human fellowship he had none at all, and he soon
sought solitude in his apartment.
XXII.
WINTER STRAWBERRIES.
Knowing that Phillida was a precipice inaccessible on the side of what
she esteemed her duty, Mrs. Hilbrough was almost sorry that she had
promised to attempt any persuasions. But she dispatched a note early
Tuesday morning, begging Phillida's company at luncheon, assigning the
trivial reason, for want of a better, that she had got some winter-grown
strawberries and wished a friend to enjoy them with her. Phillida,
fatigued with the heart-breaking struggle between love and duty, and
almost ready sometimes to give over and take the easier path, thought to
find an hour's intermission from her inward turmoil over Mrs.
Hilbrough's hothouse berries. The Hilbrough children were fond of
Phillida, and luncheon was a meal at which they made a point of
disregarding the bondage of the new family position. They seasoned their
meal with the animal spirits of youth, and, despite the fact that the
costly winter berries were rather sour, the lunch proved exceedingly
agreeable to Phillida. The spontaneous violence which healthy children
do to etiquette often proves a relish. But when the Hilbrough children
had bolted their strawberries, scraped the last remainder of the sugar
and cream from the saucers, and left the table in a hurry, there came
an audible pause, and Mrs. Hilbrough approached the subject of
Phillida's faith-healing in a characteristically tactful way by giving
an account of Mrs. Maginnis's call, and by approving Phillida's
determination not to take money. It was a laudable pride, Mrs. Hilbrough
said.
"I can not call it pride altogether," said Phillida, with the innate
veracity of her nature asserting itself in a struggle to be exactly
sincere. "If I were to take pay for praying for a person, I'd be no
better than Simon, who tried to buy the gift of the Holy Ghost from
Saint Paul. I couldn't bring myself to take money."
"And if you did, my dear, it would mortify your family, who have a right
to be proud, and then there is Mr. Millard, who, I suppose, would feel
that it would be a lasting disgrace." These words were spoken in a
relaxed and indifferent tone, as though it was an accidental commonplace
of the subject that Mrs. Hilbrough was settling.
Phillida said nothing. Here she was face to face with the old agony. If
her faith-healing were only a matter of her own suffering she need not
hesitate; she would take the cross with all her heart. But Mrs.
Hilbrough's words reminded her again that her sense of duty forced her
to bind Charley Millard for the torture. A duty so rude to her feelings
as the half-publicity of it made faith-healing, ought to be a duty
beyond question, but here was the obligation she owed her lover running
adverse to her higher aspirations. The questions for decision became
complex, and she wavered.
"Your first duty is to him, of course," continued Mrs. Hilbrough, as she
rose from the table, but still in an indifferent tone, as though what
she said were a principle admitted beforehand. This arrow, she knew,
went straight to the weakest point in Phillida's defense. But divining
that her words gave pain, she changed the subject, and they talked again
on indifferent matters as they passed out of the room together. But when
Phillida began her preparations for leaving, Mrs. Hilbrough ventured a
practical suggestion.
"I suppose you'll forgive an old friend for advising you, Phillida dear,
but you and Mr. Millard ought to get married pretty soon. I don't
believe in long courtships. Mr. Millard is an admirable person, and
you'll make a noble wife."
"We have long intended to have the wedding next spring. But as to my
making a noble wife, I am not sure about that," returned Phillida. "I am
engaged with my work, and I shall be more and more talked about in a way
that will give Charley a great deal of suffering. It's a pity--"
She was going to say that it was a pity that Charley had not chosen some
one who would not be a source of humiliation to him, but she could not
complete the sentence. The vision of Millard married to another was too
much even for her self-sacrifice. After a moment's pause she reverted to
Mrs. Hilbrough's remark, made at the table, which had penetrated to her
conscience.
"You said a while ago that my first duty is to Charley. But if I am
wrong in trying to heal the sick by the exercise of faith, why have I
been given success in some cases? If I refused requests of that kind
would I not be like the man who put his hand to the plow and looked
back? You don't know how hard it is to decide these things. I do look
back, and it almost breaks my heart. Sometimes I say, 'Why can't I be a
woman? Why am I not free to enjoy life as other women do? But then the
poor and the sick and the wicked, are they to be left without any one to
care for them? There are but few that know how to be patient with them
and help them by close sympathy and forbearance. How can I give up my
poor?'"
Her face was flushed, and she was in a tremor when she ceased speaking.
Her old friend saw that Phillida had laid bare her whole heart. Mrs.
Hilbrough was deeply touched at this exhibition of courage and at
Phillida's evident suffering, and besides, she knew that it was not best
to debate where she wished to influence. She only said:
"It will grow clearer to you, dear, as time goes on. Mr. Millard would
suffer anything--I believe he would die for you."
Phillida was a little startled at Mrs. Hilbrough's assumption that she
knew the exact state of Millard's feelings.
"Have you seen him lately?" she asked.
"Yes; he called here after four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, and he
spoke most affectionately of you. I'm sorry you must go so soon. Come
and spend a day with me some time, and I'll have Mr. Millard take dinner
with us."
As Phillida rode downtown in the street car she reasoned that Charley
must have gone straight to Mrs. Hilbrough's after his conversation with
her. When she remembered the agitation in which he had left her, she
could not doubt that he went uptown on purpose to speak with Mrs.
Hilbrough of his relations with herself, and she felt a resentment that
Millard should discuss the matter with a third person. He had no doubt
got Mrs. Maginnis's story from Mrs. Hilbrough, and for this she partly
reproached her own lack of frankness. She presently asked herself what
Charley's call on Mrs. Hilbrough had to do with the luncheon to which
she had just been invited? The more she thought of it, the more she felt
that there had been a plan to influence her. She did not like to be the
subject of one of Mrs. Hilbrough's clever manoeuvers at the suggestion
of her lover. The old question rose again whether she and Charley could
go on in this way; whether it might not be her duty to release him from
an engagement that could only make him miserable.
He called that evening while the Callenders were at six o'clock dinner.
He was in evening dress, on the way to dine at the house of a friend,
and he went straight to the Callender basement dining-room, where he
chatted as much with Mrs. Callender and Agatha as with Phillida, who on
her part could not show her displeasure before the others, for lovers'
quarrels are too precious to be shared with the nearest friend. He left
before the dinner was over, so that Phillida did not have a moment alone
with him. The next evening she expected him to call, but he only sent
her a bunch of callas.
That night Phillida sat by the fire sewing after her mother and Agatha
were asleep. During the past two days she had wrought herself up to a
considerable pitch of indignation against Millard for trying to
influence her through Mrs. Hilbrough, but resentment was not congenial
to her. Millard's effort to change her purposes at least indicated an
undiminished affection. The bunch of flowers on the table was a silent
pleader. If he did wrong in going to Mrs. Hilbrough for advice, might it
not be her own fault? Why had she not been more patient with him on
Sunday afternoon? The callas were so white, they reminded her of
Charley, she thought, for they were clean, innocent, and of graceful
mien. After all, here was one vastly dearer to her than those for whom
she labored and prayed--one whose heart and happiness lay in her very
palm. Might she not soften her line of action somewhat for his sake?
But conscience turned the glass, and she remembered Wilhelmina, and
thought of the happiness of little Hilda Maginnis and her mother. Was it
nothing that God had endowed her with this beneficent power? How could
she shrink from the blessedness of dispensing the divine mercy? Her
imagination took flame at the vision of a life of usefulness and
devotion to those who were suffering.
Then she raised her head and there were the white flowers. She felt an
impulse to kiss her hand in good-night to them as she rose from her
chair, but such an act would have seemed foolish to one of her
temperament.
She went to bed in doubt and got up in perplexity. She could not help
looking forward to Mrs. Frankland's Bible-reading that afternoon with
expectation that some message would be providentially sent for her
guidance. The spirit perplexed is ever superstitious. Since so many
important decisions in life must be made blindly, one does not wonder
that primitive men settled dark questions by studying the stars, by
interpreting the flight of birds, the whimsical zigzags of the lightning
bolt, or the turning of the beak of a fowl this way or that in picking
corn. The human mind bewildered is ever looking for crevices in the
great mystery that inwraps the visible universe, and ever hoping that
some struggling beam from beyond may point to the best path.
XXIII.
A SHINING EXAMPLE.
Mrs. Hilbrough and Phillida Callender sat together that day at Mrs.
Frankland's readings and heard her with very different feelings
discourse of discipleship, culling texts from various parts of the four
gospels to set forth the courage and self-denial requisite and the
consolation and splendid rewards that awaited such as were really
disciples. Now that she had undertaken to look after Phillida in the
interest of Millard, Mrs. Hilbrough trembled at the extreme statements
that Mrs. Frankland allowed herself to make in speaking of self-denial
as the crowning glory of the highest type of discipleship. The speaker
was incapable of making allowance for oriental excess in Bible language;
it suited her position as an advocate to take the hyperbolic words of
Jesus in an occidental literalness. But Mrs. Hilbrough thought her most
dangerous when she came to cite instances of almost inconceivable
self-sacrifice from Christian biography. The story of Francis of Assisi
defending himself against the complaint of his father by disrobing in
the presence of the judge and returning into his father's hands the last
thread of raiment bought with the father's money that he might free
himself from the parental claim, was likely to excite a Platonic
admiration in the minds of Mrs. Van Horne's friends, but such sublime
self-sacrifice is too far removed from prevailing standards to be
dangerous in New York. Mrs. Frankland no more expected her hearers to
emulate St. Francis than she dreamed of refusing anything beautiful
herself. But Mrs. Hilbrough knew Phillida, and, having known the spirit
that was in her father, she was able to measure pretty accurately the
tremendous effect of this mode of speech upon her in her present state
of mind. While the address went on Mrs. Hilbrough planned. She reflected
that Mrs. Frankland's influence could only be counteracted by the orator
herself. Could she not talk confidentially with Mrs. Frankland and make
her see the necessity for moderating Phillida's tendency to extreme
courses of action? But when she tried to fancy Mrs. Frankland counseling
moderation in an address, she saw the impossibility of it. Prudence
makes poor woof for oratory. It would "throw a coldness over the
meeting," as the negroes express it, for her to attempt to moderate the
zeal of her disciples; the more that exhortations to moderation were
what they seemed least to require. Another alternative presented itself.
She would appeal from Mrs. Frankland public to Mrs. Frankland private,
from the orator aflame to the woman cool. If Mrs. Frankland could be
rightly coached and guided, she might by private conversation with
Phillida counteract the evil wrought by her public speech.
Mrs. Hilbrough's state of antagonism continued to the very close of the
address, and then while many were thanking and congratulating the
speaker, and receiving the greetings she gave with ever-fresh
effusiveness, Mrs. Hilbrough came in her turn, and Mrs. Frankland
extended both hands to her, saying, "My dear Mrs. Hilbrough, how are
you?" But Mrs. Hilbrough did not offer her any congratulations. She only
begged Mrs. Frankland to make an appointment that she might consult her
on a matter of importance.
"Certainly, certainly, dear friend," said Mrs. Frankland, beaming;
"_when_ever you wish and _wher_ever you say."
"Perhaps you could drive with me in the Park to-morrow, if the weather
is fine," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "Shall I call for you about half-past
three?"
"With pleasure, Mrs. Hilbrough"; and Mrs. Frankland made an affectionate
farewell nod backward at Mrs. Hilbrough as she stretched out her hand to
one of her hearers who was waiting on the other side for a share of her
sunshine.
Mrs. Hilbrough turned about at this moment to find Phillida, meaning to
take her home in the carriage, but Phillida, engrossed with thoughts and
feelings excited by the address, had slipped away and taken the Madison
Avenue car.
She had counted that this address would give her personal guidance; she
had prayed that it might throw light on her path. Its whole tenor
brought to her conscience the sharpest demand that she should hold to
the rigor of her vocation at every cost. All the way home the text about
leaving "father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my
sake," was ringing in her memory. Even Mrs. Frankland, in the rush of
oratorical extravagance, had not dared to give this its literal sense.
But she had left in it strenuousness enough to make it a powerful
stimulant to Phillida's native impulse toward self-sacrifice.
Once at home, Phillida could not remain there. She felt that a crisis in
her affairs had arrived, and in her present state of religious
exaltation she was equal to the task of giving up her lover if
necessary. But the questions before her were not simple, and before
deciding she thought to go and privately consult Mrs. Frankland, who
lived less than half a mile away in one of those habitable, small
high-stoop houses in East Fifteenth street which one is surprised to
find lingering so far down as this into the epoch of complicated flats
and elevated apartments.
Phillida was begged to come without ceremony up to the front room on the
second floor. Here she found Mrs. Frankland in a wrapper, lying on a
lounge, her face still flushed by the excitement of her speech.
"Dear child, how are you?" said Mrs. Frankland in a tone of
semi-exhaustion, reaching out her hand, without rising. "Sit here by me.
It is a benediction to see you. To you is given the gift of faith. The
gift of healing and such like ministration is not mine. I can not do the
work you do. But if I can comfort and strengthen those chosen ones who
have these gifts, it is enough. I will not complain." Saying this last
plaintively, she pressed Phillida's hand in both of hers.
If her profession of humility was not quite sincere, Mrs. Frankland at
least believed that it was.
"Mrs. Frankland, I am in trouble, in a great deal of trouble," said
Phillida in a voice evidently steadied by effort.
"In trouble? I am _so_ sorry." Saying this she laid her right hand on
Phillida's lap caressingly. "Tell me, beloved, what it is all about?"
Mrs. Frankland was still in a state of stimulation from public speaking,
and her words were pitched in the key of a peroration. At this moment
she would probably have spoken with pathos if she had been merely giving
directions for cooking the dinner spinach.
The barriers of Phillida's natural reserve were melted away by her
friend's effusive sympathy, and the weary heart lightened its burdens,
as many another had done before, by confessing them to the all-motherly
Mrs. Frankland. Phillida told the story of her lover, of his dislike to
the notoriety of her faith-cures. She told of her own struggles and of
the grave questions she might soon have to settle. Should she yield, if
ever so little, to the demands of one who was to be her husband? Or
should she maintain her course as she had begun? And what if it should
ever come to be a question of breaking her engagement? This last was
spoken with faltering, for at the very suggestion Phillida saw the abyss
open before her.
A person of Mrs. Frankland's temperament is rarely a good counselor in
practical affairs, but if she had been entirely at herself she would
perhaps have advised with caution, if not with wisdom, in a matter so
vital and delicate. But the exhilaration of oratorical inebriety still
lingered with her, and she heard Phillida professionally rather than
personally. She was hardly conscious, indeed, of the personality of the
suffering soul before her. What she perceived was that here was a new
and beautiful instance of the victory of faith and a consecrated spirit.
In her present state of mind she listened to Phillida's experience with
much the feeling she would have had if some one had brought her a story
of martyrdom in the days of Nero. St. Francis himself was hardly finer
than this, and the glory of this instance was that it was so modern and
withal so romantic in its elements. She exulted in the struggle, without
realizing, as she might have done in a calmer mood, the vast perspective
of present and future sorrow which it presented to Phillida. The
disclosure of Phillida's position opened up not the modicum of practical
wisdom which she possessed but the floodgates of her eloquence.
"You will stand fast, my dear," she said, rising to a sitting posture
and flushing with fresh interest. "You will be firm. You will not shrink
from your duty."
"But what is my duty?" asked Phillida.
"To give the Lord and his work no second place in your affections. He
has honored your faith and works above those of other people. Therefore
stand unfalteringly faithful, my dear Phillida. It is a hard saying,
that of Christ: 'If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and
mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his
own life also, he can not be my disciple.' But you are one of those able
to receive the hard words of Christ."
All this was said as it might have been in an address, with little
realization of its application to the individual case before her. Mrs.
Frankland would have been the last person to advise an extreme course of
action. She admired the extravagance of religious devotion for its
artistic effect when used in oratory. It was the artistic effect she was
dreaming of now. Phillida got little from her but such generalities,
pitched in the key of her recent address; but what she got tended to
push her to yet greater extremes.
In the hour that followed, Phillida's habitually strenuous spirit
resolved and held itself ready for any surrender that might be demanded
of it. Is the mistaken soul that makes sacrifice needlessly through
false perceptions of duty intrinsically less heroic than the wiser
martyr for a worthy cause?
XXIV.
THE PARTING.
On that Thursday evening Millard dined at his club. Instead of signing a
joint order with a friend for a partnership dinner, he ordered and ate
alone. He chose a table in a deep window from which he could look out on
the passers-by. A rain had set in, and he watched the dripping umbrellas
that glistened in the lamplight as they moved under the windows, and
took note of the swift emergence of approaching vehicles and then of
their disappearance. His interest in the familiar street-world was
insipid enough, but even an insipid interest in external affairs he
found better than giving his mind up wholly to the internal drizzle of
melancholy thoughts.
Presently Millard became dimly conscious of a familiar voice in
conversation at the table in the next window. Though familiar, the voice
was not associated with the club-restaurant; it must be that of some
non-member brought in as the dinner-guest of a member. He could not make
out at first whose it was without changing his position, which he
disliked to do, the more that the voice excited disagreeable feelings,
and by some association not sufficiently distinct to enable him to make
out the person. But when the visitor, instead of leaving the direction
of the meal to his host, called out an exasperatingly imperative,
"Hist! waitah!" Millard was able to recognize his invisible neighbor.
Why should any member of a club so proper as the Terrapin ask Meadows?
But there he was with his inborn relish for bulldozing whatever
bulldozable creature came in his way. Once he had made him out, Millard
engaged in a tolerably successful effort to ignore his conversation,
returning again to his poor diversion of studying the people plashing
disconsolately along the wet street. It was only when he heard Meadows
say, "You know I am a director of that bank," that his attention was
sharply arrested.
"Farnsworth is cashier," continued Meadows. "He ought to have resigned
long ago, but he isn't that sort of a man. So he's at last taken to bed,
has he? Some complication of the heart, I believe. Won't live long,
and--well, I'll have on hand a hard fight about the filling of his
place. But I didn't hear of that faith-doctor plan before."
"I don't believe they've carried it out," said the club man who had
invited Meadows and who was a stranger to Millard. "Farnsworth wouldn't
agree. I used to dine with Farnsworth often, and my sister knows Mrs.
Farnsworth; they go to the same church. Mrs. Farnsworth has heard of a
Miss Callender that can pray a person up out of the grave almost, and
she's nearly persuaded Farnsworth to send for her. His mind is weakening
a little, and I shouldn't wonder if he did consent to have her pray over
him. The doctors have given him up, and--"
"Who is this Miss Callender?" interrupted Meadows; and though Millard
could not see him he knew that in the very nature of things Meadows's
pugnacious chin must be shoved forward as he asked this.
"She's a young woman that won't take any money for her services. That's
the greatest miracle of all," said the other. "If anything could make me
believe her mission supernatural, it would be that."
"Don't you believe it," said Meadows; "don't you believe a word of it.
The dead may be raised, but not for nothing. There's money below it all.
Money makes the mare go"; and Meadows laughed complacently at the
proverb, giving himself credit for it with a notion that adopted wit was
as good as the native born.
"No; she won't have it. I heard that Mrs. Maginnis sent her a check for
curing her little girl, and that she sent it back."
"Wasn't enough," sneered Meadows.
"Well, I believe they tried a larger check with the same result. She
doesn't seem to be an impostor; only a crank."
"These people that refuse money when it's pushed under their noses are
the worst knaves of all," said Meadows. "She knows that Maginnis is very
rich. She's laying for something bigger. She'll get into Mrs. Maginnis
for something handsome. More fool if she doesn't, I say"; and Meadows
laughed in an unscrupulous, under-breath fashion, as of a man who
thought a well-played trick essentially meritorious.
Millard was debating. Should he protest against these words? Or should
he knock Meadows down? That is not just the form it took in his mind.
Any rowdy or a policeman may knock a man down. Your man of fashion, when
he wishes to punish an enemy or have an affray with a friend, only
"punches his head." It is a more precise phrase, and has no boast in it.
No one knows which may go down, but the aggressor feels sure that he can
begin by punching his enemy's head. Millard was on the point of rising
and punching Meadows's head in the most gentlemanly fashion. But he
reflected that a head-punching affray with Meadows in the club-room
would make Phillida and her cures the talk of the town, and in
imagination he saw a horrible vision of a group of newspaper reporters
hovering about Mrs. Callender's house, and trying to gain some
information about the family from the servant girl and the butcher boy.
To protest, to argue, to say anything at all, would be but an awful
aggravation. Having concluded not to punch the head of a bank director,
he rose from the table himself, and, avoiding Meadows's notice, beckoned
the waiter to serve his coffee in the reading-room. When he had
swallowed the coffee he rose and went out. As he stood in the door of
the club-house and buttoned up his coat, a cabman from the street
called, "Kerrige, sir?" but not knowing where he should go, Millard
raised his umbrella and walked. Mechanically he went toward Mrs.
Callender's. He had formed no deliberate resolution, but he became aware
that a certain purpose had taken possession of him all uninvited and
without any approval of its wisdom on his part. Right or wrong, wise or
unwise, there was that which impelled him to lay the condition of
things before Phillida in all its repulsiveness and have it out with
her. He could not think but that she would recoil if she knew how her
course was regarded. He fancied that his own influence with her would be
dominant if the matter were brought to an issue. But these
considerations aside, there was that which impelled him to the step he
was about to take. In crises of long suppressed excitement the sanest
man sometimes finds himself bereft of the power of choosing his line of
action; the directing will seems to lie outside of him. It is not
strange that a Greek, not being a psychologist, should say that a Fate
was driving him to his destiny, or that his Dæmon had taken the helm and
was directing affairs as a sort of _alter ego_.
When at length Millard found himself in front of Mrs. Callender's, and
saw by the light that the family were sitting together in the front
basement, his heart failed him, and he walked past the house and as far
as the next corner, where his Fate, his Dæmon, his blind impulsion,
turned him back, and he did not falter again until he had rung the
door-bell; and then it was too late to withdraw.
"You are wet, Charley; sit nearer the register," said Phillida, when she
saw how the rain had beaten upon his trousers and how recklessly he had
plunged his patent-leather shoes into the street puddles. This little
attention to his comfort softened Millard's mood, but it was impossible
long to keep back the torrent of feeling. Phillida was alarmed at his
ominous abstraction.
"I don't care for the rain," he said.
"But you know there is a good deal of pneumonia about."
"I--I am not afraid of pneumonia," he said. "I might as well die as to
suffer what I do."
"What is the matter, Charley?" demanded Phillida, alarmed.
"Matter? Why, I have to sit in the club and hear you called a crank and
an impostor."
Phillida turned pale.
"Vulgar cads like Meadows," he gasped, "not fit for association with
gentlemen, call you a quack seeking after money, and will not be set
right. I came awfully near to punching his head."
"Why, Charley!"
"I should have done it, only I reflected that such an affray might drag
you into the newspapers. I tell you, Phillida, it is unendurable that
you should go on in this way."
Phillida's face was pale as death. She had been praying all the
afternoon that the bitterness of this cup might not be pressed to her
lips. She now saw that the issue was joined. She had vowed that not even
her love for the man dearest to her should swerve her from her course.
The abyss was under her feet, and she longed to draw back. She heard the
voice of duty in the tones of Mrs. Frankland saying: "If any man come to
me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my
disciple." It was a cruel alternative that was set before her, and she
trembled visibly.
"I--I can't neglect what I believe to be duty," she said. She wished
that, by some circumlocution or some tenderness in the tone, she could
have softened the words that she spoke, but all her forces had to be
rallied to utter the decision, and there was no power left to qualify
the bare words which sounded to Millard hard and cruel. A suspicion
crossed his mind that Phillida wished to be released from the
engagement.
"You do not consider that you owe any duty to me at all," he said in a
voice smothered by feeling.
Phillida tried to reply, but she could not speak.
Millard was now pacing the floor. "It is all that Mrs. Frankland's work.
She isn't worthy to tie your shoes. She never fed the hungry, or clothed
the naked, or visited the sick. It's all talk, talk, talk, with her. She
talks beautifully, and she knows it. She loves to talk and to have
people crowd around her and tell her how much good she is doing. She
denies herself nothing; she feeds her vanity on the flattery she gets,
and then thinks herself a saint besides. She exhorts people to a
self-sacrifice she wouldn't practise for the world. She's making more
money out of her piety than her husband can out of law. And now she
comes with her foolish talk and breaks up the happiness you and I have
had." This was spoken with bitterness. "We can not go on in this way,"
he said, sitting down exhausted, and looking at her.
Phillida had listened in silence and anguish to his words, spoken
hurriedly but not loudly. What he said had an effect the opposite of
what he had expected. The first impression produced by his words was
that the engagement had become a source of misery to Millard; the second
thought was that, considering only her duty to him, she ought to release
him from bonds that had proved so painful. His last words seemed to
indicate that he wished the engagement broken, and after what he had
said it was evident that she must break with him or swerve from the duty
she had vowed never to desert. Taking up the word where he had left off,
she said in a low, faltering voice:
"We certainly can not go on in this way."
Then, rising, she turned to the antique desk in the corner of the
parlor. With a key from her pocket she unlocked a drawer, and from it
took hurriedly every keepsake she had had from her lover, not allowing
herself to contemplate them, but laying them all at last on the ancient
center-table in the middle of the room. With a twinge of regret, visible
to Millard, she drew her engagement ring from her finger, and with an
unsteady hand laid it softly down with the rest.
Millard was too much startled at first to know what to say. Had she
misunderstood the intent of his last remark? Or did she wish to be
released?
"It is all over, Mr. Millard. Take them, please."
"I--I have not--asked you to release me, Phillida."
"You have said that we can not go on in this way. I say the same. It--"
she could not speak for a quarter of a minute; then she slowly finished
her sentence with an effort of desperation and without raising her eyes
to his--"it is better that it is over."
"Is it over?" he asked, stunned. "Think what you say."
"We have agreed that we can not go on," she answered. "You must take
these. I can not keep them."
"Don't make me take them. Why not keep them?"
"I will send them to-morrow. I can not retain them."
Millard could not take them. He would have felt much as he might in
rifling a grave of its treasures had he lifted those tokens from the
table. But he saw, or thought he saw, that remonstrances might make
Phillida more unhappy, but that it would be perfectly useless. It was
better to accept his fate, and forbear. He tried to say something to
soften the harshness of parting, but his powers of thought and speech
deserted him, and he knew that whatever he would say must be put into
one or two words. He looked up, hesitatingly stretched out his hand, and
asked huskily:
"Part friends?"
Phillida, pale and speechless, took his hand a moment, and then he went
out. She leaned her head against the window-jamb, lifted the shade, and
watched his form retreating through the drizzly night until he
disappeared from view, and then she turned out the lights. But instead
of returning to her mother and Agatha in the basement, she threw herself
on the floor, resting her arms on the sofa while she sobbed in utter
wretchedness. All her courage was spent; all her faith had fled;
helpless, wounded, wretched as a soul in bottomless perdition, she could
see neither life nor hope in any future before her. She had believed
herself able to go on alone and to bear any sacrifice. But in losing him
she had lost even the power to pray.
About an hour after Millard's departure, Mrs. Callender came up the
stairs and called gently:
"Phillida!"
Then she entered the parlor. The shutters were not closed, and the room
was faintly lighted by rays that came through the shades from the lamp
on the other side of the street.
"I'm here, mother," said Phillida, rising and coming toward her. Then,
embracing her mother, she said, "And I'm so unhappy, mother, so utterly
wretched."
Such an appeal for sympathy on the part of the daughter was an
occurrence almost unknown. She had been the self-reliant head of the
family, but now she leaned helplessly upon her mother and whispered,
"It's all over between Charley and me."
XXV.
MRS. FRANKLAND'S REPENTANCE.
For some time after Phillida had left Mrs. Frankland resting on the
lounge that lady had felt an additional exaltation in contemplating this
new and admirable instance of faith and devotion--an instance that
seemed to owe much to the influence of her own teachings. Her mind had
toyed with it as a brilliant having many facets. She had unconsciously
reduced it to words; she could only get the virtue out of anything when
she had phrased it. Phillida she had abstracted into a "young woman of a
distinguished family," "beautiful as the day," "who had all the
advantages of high associations," and "who might have filled to the brim
the cup of social enjoyment." The lover, whose name and circumstances
she did not know, she yet set up in her mind as "an accomplished young
man of splendid gifts and large worldly expectations." It would have
been a serious delinquency in him had he failed to answer to this
personal description, for how else could this glorious instance be
rounded into completeness? Incapable of intentional misrepresentation,
Mrs. Frankland could never help believing that the undisclosed portion
of any narrative conformed to the exigencies of artistic symmetry and
picturesque effect. She set the story of Phillida's sacrifice before her
now in one and now in another light, and found in contemplating it much
exhilaration--spiritual joy and gratitude in her phraseology. How
charmingly it would fit into an address!
But as the hours wore on the excitement of her oratorical effort
subsided and a natural physical reaction began. Her pulses, which had
been beating so strenuously as to keep her brain in a state of
combustion, were now correspondingly below their normal fullness and
rapidity, and the exhausted nerves demanded repose. It was at such times
as these that Mrs. Frankland's constitutional buoyancy of spirit sank
down on an ebb tide; it was at such times that her usually sunny temper
chafed under the irritations of domestic affairs. On this evening, when
the period of depression set in, Mrs. Frankland's view of Phillida's
case suffered a change. She no longer saw it through the iridescent haze
of excited fancy. She began to doubt whether it was best that Phillida
should break with her lover for the mere sake of being a shining
example. In this mood Mrs. Frankland appreciated for the first time the
fact that Phillida could hardly feel the same exultation in slaughtering
her affections and hopes that Mrs. Frankland had felt in advising such a
course of spiritual discipline. Just a little ripple of remorse flecked
the surface of her mind, but she found consolation in a purpose to make
the matter right by seeing Phillida the next day and inquiring more
fully into the matter. Her natural hopefulness came to her rescue, and
Mrs. Frankland slept without disturbance from regrets.
When she awaked in the morning it was with a dull sense that there was
something which needed to be righted. She had to rummage her memory
awhile to discover just what it was. Having placed it at length in
Phillida's affair, she suddenly reflected that perhaps Mrs. Hilbrough
could throw light on it, and she would postpone seeing Phillida until
after her drive with Mrs. Hilbrough in the afternoon. "It is better to
give counsel advisedly," was the phrase with which she ticketed this
decision and sustained it.
The day was fine, and the drive in Mrs. Hilbrough's easy-rolling open
carriage was exhilarating, and in that sort of bird-chatter about
nothing in particular in which two people enjoying motion are prone to
engage Mrs. Frankland was in danger of forgetting her purpose to inquire
about Phillida Callender, until at length, when the carriage was fairly
within the Park, Mrs. Hilbrough, whose businesslike brain never let go
its grasp on a main purpose, said:
"Mrs. Frankland, I wanted to speak to you about Miss Callender."
"The very person I wished to ask your advice about," said Mrs.
Frankland. "She called on me yesterday late in the afternoon."
"Did she?" Mrs. Hilbrough asked this with internal alarm. "Did she say
anything to you about her love affair?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Frankland; "I suppose I ought not to repeat what she
said, but you are her friend and you will be able to advise me in the
matter. I'm afraid I didn't say just the right thing--I mean that I
didn't advise her as fully as I should have done. It's hard to know what
to say about other people's affairs. I felt worried about her, and I
came near going to see her this morning. But I remembered that you were
her friend, and I thought it best to see what you would say. It's always
best to give counsel advisedly, I think."
"May I ask what you said to her?" said Mrs. Hilbrough,
characteristically refusing to be shunted from the main line of her
purpose.
Mrs. Frankland winced at the question, and especially at the
straightforward thrust with which it was asked. But she said: "I only
advised her in a very general way. It was just after I had finished
speaking, and I wasn't able to take up the matter as carefully as I
should have liked to do, you know, until after I had rested."
"Did you advise her to break her engagement?" The steadiness with which
Mrs. Hilbrough pushed her inquiry was disagreeable to her companion, who
liked to find refuge from an unpleasant subject in vagueness of
statement. But at least she was not driven to bay yet; she had not
definitely advised Phillida to break with her lover.
"No; not that. I only gave her general advice to be faithful to her
convictions."
Mrs. Frankland's avoidance of the explicit confirmed Mrs. Hilbrough's
suspicion as to the tenor of the advice given. The latter blamed herself
for having moved too slowly, and she was impatient, moreover, with Mrs.
Frankland; for one is apt to be vexed when a person very clever in one
way is conspicuously stupid in other regards. When Mrs. Hilbrough spoke
again a trace of irritation showed itself.
"Phillida is the only person I know to whom I think your Bible readings
may do harm."
"My Bible readings?" queried Mrs. Frankland. She had been used so long
to hear her readings spoken of in terms not of praise but rather of
rapture, as though they were the result of a demi-divine inspiration,
that this implied censure or qualification of the universality of their
virtue and application came to her, not exactly as a personal offense,
but with the shock of something like profanation; and she reddened with
suppressed annoyance.
"I don't mean that it is your fault," said Mrs. Hilbrough, seeking to
get on a more diplomatic footing with her companion. "Phillida is very
peculiar and enthusiastic in her nature, and she knows nothing of the
world. She is prone to take all exhortations rather too literally."
"But my words have often encouraged Phillida," said Mrs. Frankland, who
had been touched to the quick. "You would rob me of one of the solid
comforts of my life if you took from me the belief that I have been able
to strengthen her for her great work."
"I am sure you have encouraged her to go on," said Mrs. Hilbrough,
desirous not to antagonize Mrs. Frankland. "But she also needs
moderating. She is engaged to an admirable man, a man getting to be very
well off, and who will be made cashier of our bank very soon. He is
kind-hearted, liberal with his money, and universally beloved and
admired in society."
Mrs. Frankland was not the person to undervalue such a catalogue of
qualities when presented to her in the concrete. True, on her theory, a
Christian young woman ought to be ready in certain circumstances to
throw such a lover over the gunwale as ruthlessly as the sailors pitched
Jonah headlong. That is to say, a Christian young woman in the abstract
ought to be abstractly willing to discard a rich lover in the abstract.
But presented in this concrete and individual way the case was
different. She was a little dazzled at the brightness of Phillida's
worldly prospects, now that they were no longer merely rhetorical, but
real, tangible, and, in commercial phrase, convertible.
"True, true," she answered reflectively. "She would be so eminently
useful if she had money." This was the way Mrs. Frankland phrased her
sense of the attractiveness of such a man. "She might exert an excellent
influence in society. We do need more such people as the leaven of the
kingdom of heaven in wealthy circles."
"Indeed we do," said Mrs. Hilbrough, "and for Phillida to throw away
such prospects, and such opportunities for usefulness"--she added this
last as an afterthought, taking her cue from Mrs. Frankland--"seems to
me positively wrong."
"It would certainly be a mistake," said Mrs. Frankland. Mrs. Hilbrough
thought she detected just a quiver of regret in her companion's voice.
"Does he object strongly to her mission work?"
"No; he doesn't object to her work, I am sure, for she was already
absorbed in it when he first met her at my house, and if he had objected
there would have been no beginning of their attachment. But he is
greatly annoyed that she should be talked about and ridiculed as a
faith-doctor. He is a man of society, and he feels such things. Now,
considering how much danger of mistake and of enthusiasm there is in
such matters, Phillida might yield a little to so good a man."
"Perhaps I had better see her, Mrs. Hilbrough," was Mrs. Frankland's
non-committal reply.
"It would be necessary to see her at once, I fear. She is very resolute,
and he is greatly distressed by what people are saying about her, and a
little provoked, no doubt, at what he thinks her obstinacy."
"Perhaps I had better see her this evening," said Mrs. Frankland, with a
twinge of regret that she had not spoken with more caution the day
before.
"I do wish you would," said Mrs. Hilbrough. Just then the driver sent
the horses into a swift trot on a down grade, and the conversation was
broken off. When talk began again it was on commonplace themes, and
therefore less strenuous. Mrs. Frankland was glad to get away from an
affair that put her into an attitude of apology.
Phillida had passed the day miserably. She had tried to bolster herself
with the consciousness of having acted from the sincerest motives, and
from having done only what was right. But consciousness of rectitude,
whatever the moralists may say, is an inadequate balm for a heart that
is breaking. Phillida had not dared to enter the parlor to gather up
the little presents that Millard had given her and dispatch them to him
until after supper, when she made them all into a bundle and sent them
away. The messenger boy had hardly left the door when Mrs. Frankland
rang. Her husband had accompanied her, and she dismissed him at the
steps with instructions to call for her in about an hour.
Phillida was glad to see Mrs. Frankland. A cruel doubt had been knocking
at her door the livelong day. It had demanded over and over whether her
tremendous sacrifice was necessary after all. She had succeeded
indifferently well in barring out this painful skepticism by two
considerations. The one was, that Millard, who had almost asked to be
released, would hereafter be saved from mortification on her account.
The other was, that Mrs. Frankland's authority was all on the side of
the surrender she had made. And now here was Mrs. Frankland, sent like a
messenger to confirm her faith and to console her in her sorrow.
"You are looking troubled," said Mrs. Frankland, kissing her now on this
cheek and now on the other. "Dear child, if I could only bring you some
comfort!"
"Thank you, Mrs. Frankland," said Phillida; "I am so glad that you have
come. I have wished for you all day."
"Maybe I am sent to console you. Who knows? Perhaps, after all, things
may turn out better than you think." This was said in a full round voice
and an under manifestation of buoyant hopefulness and self-reliance
characteristic of Mrs. Frankland; but Phillida shook her head
despondently.
"Since I saw you I have heard a good deal about your Mr. Millard; I get
the most favorable accounts of him; they say he is good, and every way a
worthy, liberal, and charming man."
Phillida sat up straight in her chair with eyes averted, and made no
reply.
"I have been thinking that, after all, perhaps you ought to make some
concessions to such a man."
Phillida trembled visibly. This was not what she had expected.
"You wouldn't wish me to be unfaithful to my duty, would you?" she asked
in a low voice.
"No, dear; I don't say you ought to sacrifice anything that is _clearly_
your duty. Some duties are so clear that they shine like the pole-star
which guides the mariner. But there are many duties that are not quite
clear. We should be careful not to insist too strongly on things in
which we may be mistaken. There would be no such thing as marriage if
there was not some yielding on both sides; I mean in matters not
certainly essential to a Christian life."
Phillida was now looking directly at her visitor with a fixed and
hopeless melancholy which puzzled Mrs. Frankland, who had expected that
she would seize gratefully upon any advice tending to relax the rigor of
her self-sacrifice. Phillida's attitude was incomprehensible to her
visitor. Could it be that she had resolved to break with her lover at
all hazards?
"You know, dear," said Mrs. Frankland, sailing on a new tack now, as was
her wont when her audience proved unresponsive, "I think, that as the
wife of a man with increasing wealth and of excellent social position,
like Mr. Millard, you would be very useful. We need such devoted and
faithful people as you are in society. And, after all, your gift of
healing might be exercised without publicity--you might, I think, defer
a good deal to one whom you have promised to love. Love is also a gift
of God and a divine ordinance. In fact, considering how ample your
opportunities would be as the wife of a man of wealth and position, such
as Mr. Millard, it seems to be your duty to examine carefully and
prayerfully whether there is not some reasonable ground on which you can
meet him. At least, my dear, do not act too hastily in a matter of so
much moment."
Advice pitched in this key did not weigh much at any time with Phillida.
A thin veil of religious sentiment served a purpose of self-deception
with Mrs. Frankland, but such disguises could not conceal from
Phillida's utterly sincere spirit the thoroughly worldly standpoint of
Mrs. Frankland's suggestions. The effect of this line of talk upon her
mind was very marked, nevertheless. It produced a disenchantment, rapid,
sudden, abrupt, terrible. Mrs. Frankland, the oracle upon whose
trustworthiness she had ventured her all, had proven herself one of the
most fallible of guides. The advice given yesterday with an assurance
that only a settled and undoubting conviction could possibly excuse, was
to-day pettifogged away mainly on the ground of Charley's worldly
prosperity. Phillida had revered the woman before her as a sort of
divine messenger, had defended her against Millard's aspersions, had
followed her counsel at the most critical moment of her life in
opposition to the judgment of her family and of the man she loved. And
now, too late, the strenuous exhortation was retracted, not so much in
the interest of a breaking heart as in that of a good settlement.
When, after a pause, Phillida spoke, the abrupt and profound change in
the relations of the two became manifest. Her voice was broken and
reproachful as she said, "You come this evening to take back what you
said yesterday."
"I spoke without time to think yesterday," said Mrs. Frankland, making a
movement of uneasiness. One accustomed to adulation does not receive
reproach gracefully.
"You spoke very strongly," said Phillida. "I thought you must feel very
sure that you were right, for you knew how critical my position was."
The words were uttered slowly and by starts. Mrs. Frankland did not
reply. Phillida presently went on: "I don't care anything about the
worldly prospects you think so much of to-day. But God knows what an
awful sacrifice I have made. In following your advice, which was very
solemnly given, I have thrown away the love and devotion of one of the
best men in the world." She lifted her hands from her lap as she spoke
and let them fall when she had finished.
"Have you broken your engagement already?" said Mrs. Frankland, with a
start.
"What else could I do? You told me to stand by my work of healing. I
hope you were right, for it has cost me everything--everything. I
thought you had come to comfort me to-night and to strengthen my faith.
Instead of that you have taken back all that you said before."
"I only spoke generally before. I didn't know the circumstances. I did
not know anything about Mr. Millard, or--" Here she paused.
"You didn't know about Mr. Millard's property or social position, I
suppose. These are what you have talked to me about this evening. They
are not bad things to have, perhaps, but, if they were all, I could give
them up--trample them under foot, and be glad."
"Don't be provoked with me, Phillida dear. Indeed, I hardly realized
what I said yesterday. I had just got through with speaking, I was very
much exhausted, and I did not quite understand."
"You may have been right yesterday," said Phillida; "I hope you were. If
you were wrong, it was a dreadful mistake." She made a long pause, and
then went on. "I thought the course you advised yesterday a brave course
at least. But what you have said to-day, about social position and so
on, I hate. And it makes me doubt it all."
Phillida thrust out the toe of her boot, unconsciously giving expression
to her disposition to spurn Mrs. Frankland's worldly-wise counsel.
"You're excited, my dear," said Mrs. Frankland. "Your break with Mr.
Millard may not be so irretrievable as you think it. Providence will
direct. If, on the whole, it is thought best, I have no doubt things may
be replaced on their old footing. I am sure Mrs. Hilbrough and I could
manage that. You ought not to be unreasonable."
"I sent him in agony out into the rainy night, forsaken and discarded."
Phillida could not quite suppress a little sob as she stretched her hand
a moment in the direction in which Millard had gone. "God knows I
thought I was doing right. Now because you have heard that he has money
and moves in fashionable circles you wish me to intrigue with you and
Mrs. Hilbrough to bring him back."
Phillida rose to her feet, excitement breaking through the habitual
reserve with which her emotional nature was overlaid. "I tell you, Mrs.
Frankland," she went on with a directness verging on vehemence, "that I
will have none of your interference, nor any of Mrs. Hilbrough's. What I
have done, is done, and can never be recalled."
"Indeed, Phillida, you are excited," said Mrs. Frankland. "You reject
the advice and assistance of your best friends. You have quite
misunderstood what I have said. I only wished to repair my error."
Phillida remained silent, but she resumed her seat.
"Think the matter over. Take time to make your decision. I have acted
only in your interest, and yet you blame me." Mrs. Frankland said this
with persuasive plaintiveness of tone.
But Phillida said nothing. Not seeing anything else to do, Mrs.
Frankland rose and said: "Good-by, Phillida. When you have had time to
think you will see things differently." She did not extend her hand, and
Phillida felt that her own was too chill and limp to offer. She
contrived, however, to utter a "Good-by."
When she had shut the door after Mrs. Frankland one swift thought and
bitter came into her mind. "Charley was not wholly wrong as to Mrs.
Frankland. Perhaps he was nearer right in other regards than I thought
him."
Half an hour later the door-bell rang, and Agatha answered the call.
Then she put her head into the parlor where Phillida sat, back to the
door, gazing into the street.
"I say, Philly, what do you think? Mr. Frankland came to the door just
now for his wife, and seemed quite crestfallen that she had forgotten
him, and left him to go home alone. Didn't like to be out so late
without an escort, I suppose."
It was one of a hundred devices to which Agatha had resorted during this
day to cheer her sister. But seeing that this one served its purpose no
better than the rest, Agatha went over and put her arms about her
sister's neck and kissed her.
"You dear, dear Philly! You are the best in the world," she said, and
the speech roused Phillida from her despair and brought her the balm of
tears.
XXVI.
ELEANOR ARABELLA BOWYER.
It is a truth deep and wide, that a brother is born for adversity. The
spirit of kin and clan, rooted in remote heredity, outlives other and
livelier attachments. It not only survives rude blows, but its true
virtue is only extracted by the pestle of tribulation. Having broken
with her lover, and turned utterly away from her spiritual guide and
adviser, Phillida found herself drawn more closely to her mother and her
sister. It mattered little that they differed from her in regard to many
things. She could at least count on their affection, and that sympathy
which grows out of a certain entanglement of the rootlets of memory and
consciousness, out of common interest and long and intimate association.
Mrs. Callender had been habituated when she was a little girl at home to
leave the leadership to her sister Harriet, now Mrs. Gouverneur, and to
keep her dissents to herself. Her relation with her husband was similar;
she had rarely tried to influence a man whose convictions of duty were
so pronounced, though the reasons for these convictions were often quite
beyond the comprehension of his domestically minded wife. Toward
Phillida she had early assumed the same diffident attitude; it was
enough for her to say that Phillida was her father over again. That
settled it once for all. Phillida was to be treated as her father had
been; to be trusted with her own destiny without impertinent inquiries
from one who never could understand, though she deeply respected, the
mysterious impulses which urged these superior beings to philanthropic
toil. For her own part she would have preferred to take the universe
less broadly.
A second effect of this crisis in Phillida's life was to drive her back
upon the example and teaching of her father. Having utterly abandoned
the leadership of Mrs. Frankland, she naturally sought support for her
self-sacrificing course of action outside of her own authority. All her
father's old letters, written to her when she was a child, were
unbundled and read over again, and some of his manuscript sermons had
the dust of years shaken from their leaves that she might con their
pages written in the dear, familiar hand.
If she had had her decision to make over again without any bolstering
from Mrs. Frankland she would have sought, for a while at least, to
establish a _modus vivendi_ between her love for Millard and the ultra
form of her religious work. But the more she thought of it the more she
considered it unlikely that her decision regarding her lover would ever
come up for revision. She accepted it now as something providential,
because inevitable, to which she must grow accustomed, an ugly fact with
which she must learn to live in peace. She had a knack of judging of
herself and her own affairs in an objective way. She would not refuse to
see merely because it was painful to her that a woman of her tastes and
pursuits was an unsuitable mate for a man of society. She admitted the
incongruity; she even tried to console herself with it. For if the break
had not come so soon, it might have come after marriage in forms more
dreadful. There was not much comfort in this--might have been worse is
but the skim-milk of consolation.
To a nature like Phillida's one door of comfort, or at least of blessed
forgetfulness, is hardly ever shut. After the first bitter week she
found hours of relief from an aching memory in her labors among the
suffering poor. Work of any kind is a sedative; sympathy with the
sorrows of others is a positive balm. Her visits to the Schulenberg
tenement were always an alleviation to her unhappiness. There she was
greeted as a beneficent angel. The happiness of Wilhelmina, of her
mother, and of her brother, for a time put Phillida almost at peace with
her destiny.
Her visits to and her prayers for other sufferers were attended with
varying success as to their ailments. The confidence in the healing
power of her prayers among the tenement people was not based altogether
on the betterment of some of those for whom she prayed. Knowing her
patient long-suffering with the evil she contended against, they
reasoned, in advance of proof, that her prayers ought to have virtue in
them. The reverence for her was enhanced by a report, which began to
circulate about this time, that she had refused to marry a rich man in
order to keep up her labor among the poor. Rumor is always an artist,
and tradition, which is but fossil rumor, is the great saint-maker. The
nature and extent of Phillida's sacrifice were amplified and adapted
until people came to say that Miss Callender had refused a young
millionaire because he wished her not to continue her work in
Mackerelville. This pretty story did not mitigate the notoriety which
was an ingredient of her pain.
In spite of the sedative of labor and the consolation of altruism, Poe's
raven would croak in her ears through hours spent in solitude. In the
evenings she found herself from habit and longing listening for the
door-bell, and its alarm would always give her a moment of fluttering
expectation, followed by a period of revulsion. Once the bell rang at
about the hour of Millard's habitual coming, and Phillida sat in that
state in which one expects without having reason to expect anything in
particular until the servant brought her a card bearing the legend,
"Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and Metaphysical
Practitioner."
"Eleanor Arabella Bowyer," she said, reading it to her mother as they
sat in the front basement below the parlor. "Who is she? I've never
heard of her."
"I don't know, Phillida. I don't seem to remember any Bowyers."
"Where is the lady, Sarah?" asked Phillida of the servant.
"She is in the parlor, Miss."
Phillida rose and went up-stairs. She found awaiting her a woman rather
above medium height. Phillida noted a certain obtrusiveness about the
bony substructure of her figure, a length and breadth of framework
never quite filled out as it was meant to be, so that the joints and
angles of her body showed themselves with the effect of headlands and
rocky promontories. She had a sallow complexion and a nose that was
retroussé, with a prompt outward and upward thrust about the lower half
of it, accompanied by a tendency to thinness as it approached its
termination, quite out of agreement with the prominent cheek-bones. The
whole face had a certain air of tough endurance, of determination, of
resolute go-forwardness untempered by the recoil of sensitiveness. Miss
Bowyer was clad in good clothes without being well-dressed.
"Miss Callender, I suppose," said the visitor, rising, and extending her
hand with confidence. Her voice was without softness or resonance, but
it was not nasal--a voice admirably suited, one would think, for calling
cows. Her grasp of the hand was positive, square, unreserved, but as
destitute of sympathetic expression as her vowels. "I've heard a good
deal about you, one way and another," she said. "You've been remarkably
successful in your faith-cures, I am told. It's a great gift, and you
must be proud of it--grateful for it, I should think." She closed this
speech with a smile which seemed not exactly spontaneous but, rather,
habitual, as though it were a fixed principle with her to smile at about
this stage of every conversation.
Phillida was puzzled to reply to this speech. She did not feel proud of
her gift of faith-healing; hardly was she grateful for it. It was rather
a burden laid on her, which had been mainly a source of pain and
suffering. But she could not bring herself to enter on a subject so
personal with a stranger.
"I don't know that I am," was all she said.
"Well, there's a great deal in it," said Miss Bowyer. "I have had a good
deal of experience. There's a great deal more in it than you think."
"I don't quite understand you," said Phillida.
"No; of course not. I am a faith-healer myself."
"Are you?" said Phillida, mechanically, with a slight mental shudder at
finding herself thus classified with one for whom she did not feel any
affinity.
"Yes; that is, I _was_. I began as a faith-doctor, but I found there was
a great deal more in it, don't you know?"
"A great deal more in it?" queried Phillida. "A great deal more of what,
may I ask?"
"Oh, everything, you know."
This was not clarifying, and Phillida waited without responding until
the metaphysical practitioner should deign to explain.
"I mean there's a great deal more science in it, as well as a great deal
more success, usefulness, and--and--and remuneration to be had out of it
than you think."
"Oh," said Phillida, not knowing what else to say.
"Yes," said Eleanor Arabella Bowyer with a smile. She had a way of
waiting for the sense of her words to soak into the minds of her
hearers, and she now watched Phillida for a moment before proceeding.
"You see when I began I didn't know anything about Christian
Science,--the new science of mental healing, faith-cure,
psychopathy,--by which you act on the spirit and through the spirit upon
the body. Matter is subject to mind. Matter is unreal. All merely
physical treatment of disease is on the mortal plane." Miss Bowyer
paused here waiting for this great truth to produce its effect; then she
said, "Don't you think so?" and looked straight at Phillida.
"I haven't thought a great deal about it," said Phillida.
"No?" This was said with the rising inflection. "I thought not; mere
faith-healing doesn't require much thought. I know, you see, having been
a faith-healer at first. But we must go deeper. We must always go
deeper. Don't you think so?"
"I don't understand just what you mean," said Phillida.
"You see," said Miss Bowyer, "faith-healing is a primitive and apostolic
mode of healing the sick."
Miss Bowyer paused, and Phillida said, "Yes," in a hesitant way; for
even the things she believed seemed false when uttered by Eleanor
Bowyer.
"Well, ours is a scientific age. Now we practise--we revive this mode of
healing, but in a scientific spirit, in the spirit of our age, and with
a great deal more of knowledge than people had in ancient times. We
reject the belief in evil; we call it unreal. Disease is a mistake. We
teach faith in the unity of God the All-good."
Miss Bowyer evidently expected Phillida to say something at this point,
but as she did not, Miss Bowyer was forced to proceed without
encouragement.
"When I found that there was a great deal in it, I took the subject up
and studied it. I studied mind-cure, or metaphysical healing, which
strikes at the root of disease; I went into hypnotism, mesmerism, and
phreno-magnetism, and the od force--I don't suppose you know about the
_od_ which Reichenbach discovered."
"No."
"Well, it's wonderful, but mysterious. Blue blazes seen by the
sensitive, and all that. I studied that, and theosophy a little too, and
I took up Swedenborg; but he was rather too much for me. You can't quite
understand him, and then life is too short to ever get through him. So I
only read what somebody else had printed about Swedenborgianism, and I
understand him a good deal better that way. That's the best way to
tackle him, you know. Well, now, all of these go to explain the unity of
truth, and how the miracles of the Bible were worked."
Phillida said nothing, though her interlocutor gave her an opportunity.
"Well," proceeded Miss Bowyer, "this is what we call Christian Science.
It's the science of sciences. It's as much above the rude method of
primitive faith-cure practised by the apostles as the heavens are above
the earth. We understand from knowing the philosophy of miracles the
reason why we do not always succeed. We can not always secure the
impressible condition by producing the quiescence of the large brain.
But if we understand the theory of hypnotism we shall be able to put the
cerebrum at rest and secure the passive impressible state of the
cerebellum; that is, an introverted condition of the mind. This
securing of interior perception is the basis of all success."
"Then you do not believe that God does it all," said Phillida, with a
twitch of the shoulder expressing the repulsion she felt from this
incomprehensible explication.
"Oh, yes. Faith in God the All-good is at the root of it all. It is one
of the things that induces passive receptivity. We must convince the
patient that the unity of God excludes the real existence of evil."
"But still you do not admit the direct action of God?" queried Phillida.
"God works through the forces in nature, according to law," said Miss
Bowyer, glibly.
"That is just as true of the action of medicine," said Phillida. "I
don't like this affecting to put God in while you leave him out of your
mixture. Besides, I don't pretend that I understand your explanation."
"It is somewhat fine; all philosophy of man's internal nature is so.
It's not a thing to argue about. Intellect argues; spirit perceives. But
if you would give your mind to Truth in a receptive way, Truth would set
you free. I am sure you would be convinced after reading the books on
the question."
Phillida made no offer to read the books, and this seemed to disappoint
Miss Bowyer. After a pause she began again:
"You might as well know, Miss Callender, that I had a business object in
view in coming to see you. Some of our Christian Science people are all
enthusiasm, but I am trained to business, and I carry on my practice on
business principles. There is no reason why a doctor who treats diseases
on the mortal plane by medication should be paid for his time, and you
and I not be. Is there?"
"I don't know," said Phillida, mechanically.
"Well, now, I have given my time to the beautiful work of Christian
Science healing. I have an office in East Fourteenth street. It is a
blessed religious work. But I can't work without pay; I follow it as a
business, and it's got to support me. I have as much right to get on in
the world as anybody else. Now I've cleared over and above my
office-rent, including what I get for teaching a class in Christian
Science, almost eighteen hundred dollars in the very first year since I
set up. That's pretty good for a lone woman; don't you think so?"
Phillida slightly inclined her head to avoid speaking.
"Well, now, I haven't got many advantages. My brother kept a health-lift
a few years ago when everything was cured by condensed exercise. But
people got tired of condensed exercise, and then he had a blue-glass
solarium until that somehow went out of fashion. I helped run the female
side of his business, you know, for part of the profits. My education is
all business. I didn't have any time to learn painting or fine manners,
or any music, except to play Moody-and-Sankeys on the melodeon. My
practice is mostly among the poor, or the people that are only so-so. I
haven't got the ways that go down with rich people, nor anybody to give
me a start among them. Well, now, I say to myself, science is all very
well, and faith is all very well, but you want something more than that
to get on in a large way. I would rather get on in a large way. Wouldn't
you?"
Here she paused, but Phillida sat motionless and stoically attentive.
She only answered, "Well, I don't know."
"Now, when I heard that you'd been sent for to the Maginnis child, and
that you have got relations that go among rich people, I says to myself,
she's my partner. I'll furnish the science, and I'll do the talking, and
the drumming-up business, and the collecting bills, and all that; and
you, with your stylish ways, don't you know? and your good looks, and
your family connections, and all that, will help me to get in where I
want to get in. Once in, we're sure to win. There's no reason, Miss
Callender, why we shouldn't get rich. I will give you half of my
practice already established, and I'll teach you the science and how to
manage, you know; the great thing is to know how to manage your
patients, you see. I learned that in the health-lift and the blue-glass
solarium. We'll move farther up town, say to West Thirty-fourth street.
Then you can, no doubt, write a beautiful letter--that'll qualify us to
go into what is called 'absent treatment.' We'll advertise, 'Absent
treatment a specialty,' and altogether we can make ten thousand or even
twenty thousand, maybe, a year, in a little while. Keep our own
carriage, and so on. What do you say to that?" Miss Bowyer's uplifted
nose was now turned toward Phillida in triumphant expectation. She had
not long to wait for a reply. Phillida's feelings had gathered head
enough to break through. She answered promptly:
"I do not believe in your science, and wouldn't for the world take money
from those that I am able to help with my prayers." Phillida said this
with a sudden fire that dismayed Miss Bowyer.
"But you'll look into the matter maybe, Miss Callender?"
"No; I will not. I hate the whole business." Phillida wanted to add,
"and you besides"; however, she only said: "Don't say any more, please.
I won't have anything at all to do with it." Phillida rose, but Miss
Bowyer did not take the hint.
"You're pretty high-toned, it seems to me," said the Scientist, smiling,
and speaking without irritation. "You're going to throw away the great
chance of your life. Perhaps you'll read some books that set forth the
mighty truths of Christian Science if I send them. You ought to be open
to conviction. If you could only know some of the cases I myself have
lately cured--a case of belief in rheumatism of three years' standing,
and a case of belief in mental prostration of six years' duration. If
you could only have seen the joyful results. I cured lately an obstinate
case of belief in neuralgia, and another of cancer--advanced stage. A
case of belief in consumption with goitre was lately cured in the West.
Perhaps you'll look over some numbers of the 'International Magazine of
Christian Science' if I send them to you; under the head of 'Sheaves
from the Harvest Field,' it gives many remarkable cases."
"I have no time to read anything of the sort," said Phillida, still
standing.
"Oh, well, then, I'll just come in now and then and explain the
different parts of the science to you. It's a great subject, and we may
get mutual benefit by comparing notes."
The prospect of repeated calls from Eleanor Arabella Bowyer put
Phillida's already excited nerves into something like a panic. She had
reached the utmost point of endurance.
"No," she said; "I will have nothing at all to do with it. You must
excuse me; positively, I must be excused. I am very busy, and I can not
pursue the subject further."
"Certainly," said the Metaphysical Practitioner, rising reluctantly;
"but I think I'll take the liberty of calling again when you're more at
leisure. You won't object, I'm sure, to my coming in next week?"
"Yes," said Phillida; "I will not have anything to do with the matter
you propose, and I can not see you again. You must excuse me."
"Well, we never get offended, Miss Callender. Christian Science does not
argue. We never resent an affront, but live in love and charity with
all. That is Christian Science. Our success depends on purity and a
Christian spirit. I think I'll send you a little book," added Miss
Bowyer, as reluctantly she felt herself propelled towards the door by
the sheer force of Phillida's manner. "Just a little book; it won't take
long to read."
As Miss Bowyer said this she paused in the vestibule with her back to
Phillida. She was looking into the street, trying to think of some new
device for gaining her end.
"I won't read a book if you send it. Save yourself the trouble," said
Phillida, softly closing the inner door behind Miss Bowyer, leaving her
standing face outwards in the vestibule.
"You had a hard time shaking her off, didn't you, Philly?" said Agatha,
issuing from the back part of the dark hall, having come out of the back
room just in time to catch a glimpse of Eleanor Bowyer. "I declare, the
way you closed the door on her at the last was too good."
"Sh-h!" said Phillida, pointing to the shadow cast against the ground
glass of the inner door by the tall form of the Christian Scientist and
Metaphysical Practitioner in the light of the street lamp.
"I don't care whether she hears or not," said Agatha, dropping her
voice, nevertheless; "she ought to be snubbed. You're a little too easy.
That woman is meditating whether she sha'n't break into the house to
preach Christian Science. There, she's going at last; she won't commit
Christian burglary this time. I suppose she thinks burglary doesn't
really exist, since it's contrary to the unity of God. Anyhow, she
wouldn't commit burglary, because housebreaking is a physical thing
that's transacted on the mortal plane."
Agatha said this in Miss Bowyer's tone, and Phillida's vexation gave way
to laughter.
XXVII.
A BAD CASE.
Notwithstanding Phillida's efforts to the contrary, the most irrelevant
things were sufficient to send her thoughts flitting--like homing
pigeons that can ply their swift wings in but one direction--toward
Millard, or toward that past so thickly peopled by memories of him. Now
that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and metaphysical
healer of ailments the substantial existence of which she denied, had
cast a shadow upon her, Phillida realized for the first time the source
of that indignant protest of Millard's which had precipitated the
breaking of their engagement. Her name was on men's lips in the same
class with this hard-cheeked professor of religious flummery, this
mercenary practitioner of an un-medical imposture calculated to cheat
the unfortunate by means of delusive hopes. How such mention of her must
have stung a proud-spirited lover of propriety like Millard! For the
first time she could make allowance and feel grateful for his chivalrous
impulse to defend her.
No child is just like a parent. Phillida differed from her strenuous
father in nature by the addition of esthetic feeling. Her education had
not tended to develop this, but it made itself felt. Her lofty notions
of self-sacrifice were stimulated by a love for the sublime. Other
young girls read romances; Phillida tried to weave her own life into
one. The desire for the beautiful, the graceful, the externally
appropriate, so long denied and suppressed, furnished the basis of her
affection for Millard. A strong passion never leaves the nature the
same, and under the influence of Millard her esthetic sense had grown.
Nothing that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer had said assailed the logical
groundwork of her faith. But during the hours following that
conversation it was impossible for her to reflect with pleasure, as had
been her wont, on the benefits derived from her prayers by those who had
been healed in whole or in part through her mediation. A remembrance of
the jargon of the Christian Scientist mingled with and disturbed her
meditations; the case of a belief in rheumatism and the case of a belief
in consumption with goitre stood grinning at her like rude burlesques of
her own cures, making ridiculous the work that had hitherto seemed so
holy. But when the morrow came she was better able to disentangle her
thoughts of healing from such phrases as "the passive impressible state"
and "interior perception." And when at length the remembrance of Miss
Bowyer had grown more dim, the habitual way of looking at her work
returned.
One morning about ten days later, while she was at breakfast, the
basement door-bell was rung, and when the servant answered it Phillida
heard some one in the area, speaking with a German accent.
"Please tell Miss Callender that Rudolph Schulenberg will like to speak
with her."
Phillida rose and went to the door.
"Miss Callender," said Rudolph, "Mina is so sick for three days already
and she hopes you will come to her right away this morning, wunst, if
you will be so kind."
"Certainly I will. But what is the matter with her? Is it the old
trouble with the back?"
"No; it is much worse as that. She has got such a cough, and she can not
breathe. Mother she believe that Mina is heart-sick and will die wunst
already."
"I will come in half an hour or so."
"If you would. My mother her heart is just breaking. But Mina is sure
that if Miss Callender will come and pray with her the cough will all go
away wunst more already."
Phillida finished her breakfast in almost total silence, and then
without haste left the house. She distinctly found it harder to maintain
her attitude of faith than it had been. But all along the street she
braced herself by prayer and meditation, until her spirit was once more
wrought into an ecstasy of religious exaltation. She mounted the
familiar stairs, thronged now with noisy-footed and vociferous children
issuing from the various family cells on each level to set out for
school.
"How do you do, Mrs. Schulenberg?" said Phillida, as she encountered the
mother on the landing in front of her door. "How is Wilhelmina?"
"Bad, very bad," whispered the mother, closing the door behind her and
looking at Phillida with a face laden with despair. Then alternately
wiping her eyes with her apron and shaking her head ominously, she said:
"She will never get well this time. She is too bad already. She is
truly heart-sick."
"Have you had a doctor?"
"No; Mina will not have only but you. I tell her it is no use to pray
when she is so sick; she must have a doctor. But no."
"How long has she been sick?"
"Well, three or four days; but she was not well"--the mother put her
hand on her chest--"for a week. She has been thinking you would come."
Mrs. Schulenberg's speech gave way to tears and a despairing shaking of
the head from side to side.
Phillida entered, and found Mina bolstered in her chair, flushed with
fever and gasping for breath. The sudden change in her appearance was
appalling.
"I thought if you would come, nothing would seem too hard for your
prayers. O Miss Callender,"--her voice died to a hoarse whisper,--"pray
for me, I wanted to die wunst already; you remember it. But ever since I
have been better it has made my mother and Rudolph so happy again. If
now I die what will mother do?"
The spectacle of the emaciated girl wrestling for breath and panting
with fever, while her doom was written upon her face, oppressed the mind
of Phillida. Was it possible that prayer could save one so visibly
smitten? She turned and looked at the mother standing just inside the
door, her face wrung with the agony of despair while she yet watched
Phillida with eagerness to see if she had anything to propose that
promised relief. Then a terrible sense of what was expected of her by
mother and daughter came over her mind, and her spirits sank as under
the weight of a millstone.
Phillida was not one of those philanthropists whom use has enabled to
look on suffering in a dry and professional way. She was most
susceptible on the side of her sympathies. Her depression came from
pity, and her religious exaltation often came from the same source.
After a minute of talk and homely ministry to Wilhelmina's comfort,
Phillida's soul rose bravely to its burden. The threat of bereavement
that hung over the widow and her son, the shadow of death that fell upon
the already stricken life of the unfortunate young woman, might be
dissipated by the goodness of God. The sphere into which Phillida rose
was not one of thought but one of intense and exalted feeling. The
sordid and depressing surroundings--the dingy and broken-backed chairs,
the cracked and battered cooking-stove, the ancient chest of drawers
without a knob left upon it, the odor of German tenement cookery and of
feather-beds--vanished now. Wilhelmina, for her part, held Phillida fast
by the hand and saw no one but her savior, and Phillida felt a moving of
the heart that one feels in pulling a drowning person from the water,
and that uplifting of the spirit that comes to those of the true
prophetic temperament. She read in a gentle, fervent voice some of the
ancient miracles of healing from the English columns of the
leather-covered German and English Testament, while the exhausted
Wilhelmina still held her hand and wrestled for the breath of life.
Then Phillida knelt by the well-worn wooden-bottom chair while Mrs.
Schulenberg knelt by a stool on the other side of the stove, burying her
face in her apron. Never was prayer more sincere, never was prayer more
womanly or more touching. As Phillida proceeded with her recital of
Wilhelmina's sufferings, as she alluded to the value of Mina to her
mother and the absent Rudolph, and then prayed for the merciful
interposition of God, the mother sobbed aloud, Phillida's faith rose
with the growing excitement of her pity, and she closed the prayer at
length without a doubt that Mina would be cured.
"I do feel a little better now," said Wilhelmina, when the prayer was
ended.
"I will bring you something from the Diet Kitchen," said Phillida as she
went out. The patient had scarcely tasted food for two days, but when
Phillida came back she ate a little and thought herself better.
Phillida came again in the afternoon, and was disappointed not to find
Mina improving. But the sick girl clung to her, and while Phillida
remained she would have nothing even from the hand of her mother. The
scene of the morning was repeated; again Phillida prayed, again
Wilhelmina was a little better, and ate a little broth from the hands of
her good angel.
The burden of the poor girl and her mother rested heavily on Phillida
during the evening and whenever she awakened during the night. Mrs.
Callender and Agatha only asked how she found Wilhelmina; they thought
it best not to intrude on the anxiety in Phillida's mind, the nature of
which they divined.
When breakfast was over the next morning Phillida hastened again to the
Schulenbergs.
"Ah! it is no good this time; I shall surely die," gasped Wilhelmina,
sitting bolstered on her couch and looking greatly worse than the day
before. "The night has been bad. I have had to fight and fight all the
long night for my breath. Miss Callender, my time has come."
The mother was looking out of the window to conceal her tears. But
Phillida's courage was of the military sort that rises with supreme
difficulty. She exhorted Wilhelmina to faith, to unswerving belief, and
then again she mingled her petitions with the sobs of the mother and the
distressful breathing of the daughter. This morning Wilhelmina grew no
better after the prayer, and she ate hardly two spoonfuls of the broth
that was given her. She would not take it from Phillida this time.
Seeing prayers could not save her and that she must die, the instincts
of infancy and the memories of long invalidism and dependence were now
dominant, and she clung only to her mother.
"You haf always loved me, mother; I will haf nobody now any more but
you, my mother, the time I haf to stay with you is so short. You will be
sorry, mother, so sorry, when poor unfortunate Wilhelmina, that has
always been such a trouble, is gone already."
This talk from the smitten creature broke down Phillida's self-control,
and she wept with the others. Then in despondency she started home. But
at the bottom of the stairs she turned back and climbed again to the
top, and, re-entering the tenement, she called Mrs. Schulenberg to her.
"You'd better get a doctor."
Wilhelmina with the preternaturally quick hearing of a feverish invalid
caught the words and said: "No. What is the use? The doctor will want
some of poor Rudolph's money. What good can the doctor do? I am just so
good as dead already."
"But, Wilhelmina dear," said Phillida, coming over to her, "we have no
right to leave the matter this way. If you die, then Rudolph and your
mother will say, 'Ah, if we'd only had a doctor!'"
"That is true," gasped Mina. "Send for Dr. Beswick, mother."
A neighbor was engaged to carry the message to Dr. Beswick in
Seventeenth street, and Phillida went her way homeward, slowly and in
dejection.
XXVIII.
DR. BESWICK'S OPINION.
Dr. Beswick of East Seventeenth street was a man from the country, still
under thirty, who had managed to earn money enough to get through the
College of Physicians and Surgeons by working as a school-teacher
between times. Ambitious as such self-lifted country fellows are apt to
be, he had preferred to engage in the harsh competition of the
metropolis in hope of one day achieving professional distinction. To a
poor man the first necessity is an immediate livelihood. Such favorite
cross-streets of the doctors as Thirty-fourth, and the yet more
fashionable doctor-haunted up-and-down thoroughfares, were for long
years to come far beyond the reach of a man without money or social
backing, though Beswick saw visions of a future. He had planted himself
in Mackerelville, where the people must get their medical advice cheap,
and where a young doctor might therefore make a beginning. The
sweetheart of his youth had entered the Training School for Nurses just
when he had set out to study medicine. They two had waited long, but she
had saved a few dollars, and at the end of his second year in practice,
his income having reached a precarious probability of five hundred a
year, they had married and set up office and house together in two
rooms and a dark closet. There were advantages in this condensed
arrangement, since the new Mrs. Beswick could enjoy the husband for whom
she had waited so long and faithfully, by sitting on the lounge in the
office whenever she had sedentary employment--the same lounge that was
opened out at night into a bed. Both of the Beswicks were inured to
small and hard quarters, and even these they had been obliged to share
with strangers; since, therefore, they must lead a kind of camp life in
the crowded metropolis they found it delightful to season their
perpetual picnic with each other's society. And, moreover, two rooms for
two people seemed by comparison a luxury of expansion. When youth and
love go into partnership they feel no hardships, and for the present the
most renowned doctor in Madison Avenue was probably something less than
half as happy as these two lovers living in a cubbyhole with all the
world before them, though but precious little of it within their reach
beyond two well-worn trunks, three chairs, a table, and a bedstead
lounge.
Dr. Beswick was profoundly unknown to fame, but he was none the less a
great authority on medicine as well as on most other things in the
estimation of Mrs. Beswick, and, for that matter, of himself as well. He
liked, as most men do, to display his knowledge before his wife, and to
her he talked of his patients and of the good advice he had given them
and how he had managed them, and sometimes also of the mistakes of his
competitors; and he treated her to remarks on that favorite theme of
the struggling general practitioner, the narrowness of the celebrated
specialists. When he came back from his visit to Wilhelmina it was with
a smile lighting up all that was visible of his face between two thrifty
patches of red side-whiskers.
"The patient is not very sick, I should say from your face," was Mrs.
Beswick's remark as she finished sewing together the two ends of a piece
of crash for a towel. For this towel the doctor had made a kind of
roller, the night before, by cutting a piece off a broken mop-stick and
hanging it on brackets carved with his jack-knife and nailed to the
closet-door. "I can always tell by your face the condition of the
patient," added Mrs. Beswick.
"That's where you're mistaken this time, my love," he said triumphantly.
"The Schulenberg girl will die within two weeks." And he smiled again at
the thought.
"What do you smile so for? You are not generally so glad to lose a
patient," she said, holding up the towel for his inspection, using her
hand and forearm for a temporary roller to show it off.
"Oh! no; not that," he said, nodding appreciatively at the towel while
he talked of something else. "I suppose I ought to be sorry for the poor
girl, and her mother does take on dreadfully. But this case'll explode
that faith-quackery if anything can. The Christian Science doctor, Miss
Cullender, or something of the sort, made her great sensation over this
girl, who had some trouble in her back and a good deal the matter with
her nerves."
"She's the one there was so much talk about, is she?" asked Mrs.
Beswick, showing more animation than sympathy.
"Yes; when her mind had been sufficiently excited she believed herself
cured, and got up and even walked a little in the square. That's what
gave the woman faith-doctor her run. I don't know much about the
faith-doctor, but she's made a pretty penny, first and last, out of this
Schulenberg case, I'll bet. Now the girl's going to die out of hand, and
I understand from the mother that the faith-cure won't work. The
faith-doctor's thrown up the case."
"I suppose the faith-doctor believes in herself," said the wife.
"Naah!" said the doctor with that depth of contempt which only a rather
young man can express. "She? She's a quack and a humbug. Making money
out of religion and tomfoolery. I'll give her a piece of my mind if she
ever crosses my track or meddles with my patients."
Crowing is a masculine foible, and this sort of brag is the natural
recreation of a young man in the presence of femininity.
Two hours later, a frugal dinner of soup and bread and butter having
been served and eaten in the mean time, and Mrs. Beswick having also
washed a double set of plate, cup, saucer, knife, and fork,--there were
no tumblers; it seemed more affectionate and social in this turtle-dove
stage to drink water from a partnership cup,--the afternoon hung a
little heavy on their hands. It was not his day at the dispensary, and
so there was nothing for the doctor to do but to read a medical journal
and wait for patients who did not come, while his wife sat and sewed.
They essayed to break the ennui a little by a conversation which
consisted in his throwing her a kiss upon his hand, now and then, and
her responding with some term of endearment. But even this grew
monotonous. Late in the afternoon the bell rang, and the doctor opened
the door. There entered some one evidently not of Mackerelville, a
modestly well-dressed young lady of dignified bearing and a gentle grace
of manner that marked her position in life beyond mistake. Mrs. Beswick
glanced hurriedly at the face, and then made a mental but descriptive
inventory of the costume down to the toes of the boots, rising
meanwhile, work in hand, to leave the room.
"Please don't let me disturb you," said the newcomer to the doctor's
wife; "don't go. What I have to say to the doctor is not private."
Mrs. Beswick sat down again, glad to know more of so unusual a visitor.
"Dr. Beswick, I am Miss Callender," said the young lady, accepting the
chair the doctor had set out for her. "I called as a friend to inquire,
if you don't mind telling me, what you think of Wilhelmina Schulenberg."
When Dr. Beswick had made up his mind to dislike Miss Callender and to
snub her on the first occasion in the interest of science and
professional self-respect, he had not figured to himself just this kind
of a person. So much did she impress him that if it had not been for the
necessity he felt to justify himself in the presence of his wife he
might have put away his professional scruples. As it was he colored a
little, and it was only after a visible struggle with himself that he
said:
"You know, Miss Callender, that I am precluded by the rules of the
profession from consultation with one who is not a regular
practitioner."
Miss Callender looked puzzled. She said, "I did not know that I was
violating proprieties. I did not know the rules were so strict. I
thought you might tell me as a friend of the family."
"Don't you think you might do that, dear?" suggested Mrs. Beswick, who
felt herself drawn to this young lady, for Miss Callender had won her
heart by an evident deference for Dr. Beswick's position and
professional knowledge, and she was touched by a certain sadness in the
face and voice of the visitor.
The doctor relented when he found that his wife would sustain him in it.
"I may answer your question if you ask it merely as a friend of the
patient, but not as recognizing your standing as a practitioner," he
said.
Phillida answered with a quick flush of pain and surprise, "I am not a
practitioner, Dr. Beswick. You are under some mistake. I know nothing
about medicine."
"I didn't suppose you did," said the doctor with a smile. "But are you
not what they call a Christian Scientist?"
"I? I hate what they call Christian Science. It seems to me a lot of
nonsense that nobody can comprehend. I suppose it's an honest delusion
on the part of some people and a mixture of mistake and imposture on
the part of others."
"You have made a pretty good diagnosis, if you are not a physician,"
said Dr. Beswick, laughing, partly at Phillida's characterization of
Christian Science and partly at his own reply, which seemed to him a
remark that skillfully combined wit with a dash of polite flattery.
"But, Miss Callender,--I beg your pardon for saying it,--people call you
a faith-doctor."
"Yes; I know," said Phillida, compressing her lips.
"Did you not treat this Schulenberg girl as a faith-healer?"
"I prayed for her as a friend," said Phillida, "and encouraged her to
believe that she might be healed if she could exercise faith. She _did_
get much better."
"I know, I know," said the doctor in an offhand way; "a well-known
result of strong belief in cases of nerve disease. But, pardon me, you
have had other cases that I have heard of. Now don't you think that the
practice of faith-healing for--for--compensation makes you a
practitioner?"
"For compensation?" said Phillida, with a slight gesture of impatience.
"Who told you that I took money?"
It was the doctor's turn to be confounded.
"I declare, I don't know. Don't you take pay, though?"
"Not a cent have I ever taken directly or indirectly." Phillida's
already overstrained sensitiveness on this subject now broke forth into
something like anger. "I would not accept money for such a service for
the world," she said. "In making such an unwarranted presumption you
have done me great wrong. I am a Sunday-school teacher and mission
worker. Such services are not usually paid for, and such an assumption
on your part is unjustifiable. If you had only informed yourself better,
Dr. Beswick--"
"I am very sorry," broke in the doctor. "I didn't mean to be offensive.
I--"
"Indeed, Miss Callender," said Mrs. Beswick, speaking in a pleasant,
full voice and with an accent that marked her as not a New Yorker, "he
didn't mean to be disrespectful. The doctor is a gentleman; he couldn't
be disrespectful to a lady intentionally. He didn't know anything but
just what folks say, and they speak of you as the faith-doctor and the
woman doctor, you see. You must forgive the mistake."
This pleading of a wife in defense of her husband touched a chord in
Phillida and excited an emotion she could not define. There was that in
her own heart which answered to this conjugal championship. She could
have envied Mrs. Beswick her poverty with her right to defend the man
she loved. She felt an increasing interest in the quiet, broad-faced,
wholesome-looking woman, and she answered:
"I know, Mrs. Beswick, your husband is not so much to blame. I spoke too
hastily. I am a little too sensitive on that point. I don't pretend to
like to be talked about and called a faith-doctor."
There was an awkward pause, which the doctor broke by saying presently
in a subdued voice:
"In regard to your perfectly proper question, Miss Callender, I will say
that the Schulenberg young woman has acute pulmonary tuberculosis."
"Which means?" queried Phillida, contracting her brows.
"What people call galloping consumption," said the doctor. "Now, I can't
help saying, Miss Callender,"--the doctor's habitual self-contentment
regained sway in his voice and manner,--"that this particular sort of
consumption is one of the things that neither medicine nor faith was
ever known to heal since the world was made. This young woman's lungs
are full of miliary tubercles--little round bodies the size of a millet
seed. The tissues are partly destroyed already. You might as well try to
make an amputated leg grow on again by medicine or by prayer as to try
to reconstruct her lungs by similar means. She has got to die, and I
left her only some soothing medicine, and told her mother there was no
use of making a doctor's bill."
There was a straightforward rectitude in Dr. Beswick that inclined
Phillida to forgive his bluntness of utterance and lack of manner. Here
at least was no managing of a patient to get money, after the manner
hinted at by Miss Bowyer. The distinction between diseases that might
and those that might not be cured or mitigated by a faith-process, which
Phillida detected in the doctor's words, quickened again the doubts
which had begun to assail her regarding the soundness of the belief on
which she had been acting, and awakened a desire to hear more. She
wanted to ask him about it, but sensitiveness regarding her private
affairs made her shrink. In another moment she had reflected that it
would be better to hear what was to be said on this subject from a
stranger than from one who knew her. The natural honesty and courage of
her nature impelled her to submit further to Dr. Beswick's rather blunt
knife.
"You seem to think that some diseases are curable by faith and some not,
Dr. Beswick," she said.
"Certainly," said Beswick, tipping his chair back and drumming on the
table softly with his fingers. "We use faith-cure and mind-cure in
certain diseases of the nerves. Nothing could have been better for that
Schulenberg girl than for you to make her believe she could walk. I
should have tried that dodge myself, but in a different way, if I had
been called."
"Don't speak in that way, dear," interposed Mrs. Beswick, softly, seeing
that Phillida was pained.
"Why, what's the matter with that way?" said the doctor, good-naturedly.
"Well, Miss Callender will think you are not honest if you talk about
trying a dodge. Besides, I'm sure Miss Callender isn't the kind of
person that would say what she didn't believe. It was no dodge with
her."
"No; of course not," said the doctor. "I didn't mean that."
"You do not admit any divine agency in the matter, doctor?" asked
Phillida.
"How can we? The starting-point of that poor girl's galloping
consumption, according to the highest medical opinion of our time, is a
little organism called a bacillus. These bacilli are so small that ten
thousand of them laid in a row lengthwise would only measure an inch.
They multiply with great rapidity, and as yet we can not destroy them
without destroying the patient. You might just as well go to praying
that the weeds should be exterminated in your garden, or try to clear
the Schulenberg tenement of croton bugs by faith, as to try to heal that
young woman in that way. Did you ever look into the throat of a
diphtheria patient?"
"No," said Phillida.
"Well, you can plainly see little white patches of false membrane there.
By examining this membrane we have come to know the very species that
does the mischief--the _micrococcus diphtheriticus_."
The conversation was naturally a little disagreeable to Phillida, who
now rose to depart without making reply. She went over and shook hands
with Mrs. Beswick, partly from an instinctive kindness, judging from her
speech that she was a stranger in New York. Besides, she felt strongly
drawn to this simple and loyal-hearted woman.
"If you'd like to come to the mission, Mrs. Beswick," she said, "I'd
take pleasure in introducing you. You'd find good friends among the
people there and good work to do. The mission people are not all
faith-healers like me."
"Oh, now, I'd like them better if they were like you, Miss Callender. I
think I'd like to go. I couldn't do much; I have to do my own work; the
doctor's practice is growing, but he hasn't been here long, you know. I
think I might go"--this with a look of inquiry at her husband.
"Why not?" said Dr. Beswick. He could not help seeing that the
association of his wife with the mission might serve to extend his
practice, and that even Mrs. Beswick must grow tired after a while of
conversations with him alone, sugared though they were.
When Phillida had gone the doctor's wife said to her husband that she
never had seen a nicer lady than that Miss Callender. "I just love her,"
she declared, "if she does believe in faith-healing."
"Ah, well, what I said to her will have its effect," he replied, with
suppressed exultation.
"You said just the right thing, my love. You 'most always do. But I was
afraid you would hurt her feelings a little. She doesn't seem very
happy."
XXIX.
MILLARD AND RUDOLPH.
Rudolph, coming home from work early on the next Saturday afternoon, saw
Millard approaching from the other direction. With that appetite for
sympathy which the first dash of sorrow is pretty sure to bring, the
young man felt an impulse to accost the person who had thought enough of
his sister's sufferings to give her a wheel-chair.
"Mr. Millard!"
"Oh, yes; you are Wilhelmina Schulenberg's brother," scrutinizing the
young man. "And how is your sister now?"
Rudolph shook his head gloomily.
"She can not live many days already; she will be dying purty soon."
"What? Sick again? Then Miss Callender's cure did not last."
"Ah, yes; her back it is all right. But you see maybe praying is not
strong for such sickness as she has now. It is quick consumption."
"Poor child!" said Millard.
"She has been very unlucky," said Rudolph. "We are all very unlucky. My
father he died when I was little, and my mother she had to work hard,
and I soon had also to work. And then Whilhelmina she got sick, and it
gave mother trouble."
"Has Miss Callender seen your sister?"
"Yes; she did not tell you already?" queried Rudolph.
"I have not seen her for a long time," said Millard.
"Oh!" exclaimed Rudolph, and went no farther.
"Did she--did she not try to make your sister well?"
"Yes; but believing is all good enough for the back, but it is no good
when you're real sick insides. You see it is consumption."
"Yes; I see," said Millard. A rush of feeling came over him. He
remembered Mina Schulenberg as she sat that day about a year ago--the
day of his engagement--near the bust of Beethoven in the park. She had
been the beginning and in some sense she had been the ending of his
engagement. Millard walked away from Rudolph in a preoccupied way.
Suddenly he turned and called after him:
"I say--Schulenberg!"
The young man faced about and came back. Millard said to him in a low
voice and with feeling: "Will you let me know if your sister dies? Come
straight to me. Don't say anything about it, but maybe I can show myself
a friend in some way. Here's my address at home, and between nine and
three I'm at the Bank of Manhadoes."
Rudolph said yes, and tried to thank him, but Millard strode away, his
mind reverting to the poor girl whose now fast-withering life seemed to
have some occult relation to his own, and thinking, too, of Phillida's
unfaltering ministrations. What mistakes and delusions could not be
forgiven to one so unwearyingly good? Why did he not share her reproach
with her, and leave her to learn by time and hard experience? Such
thoughts stung him sorely. And this death, under her very hand, of the
Schulenberg girl must be a sore trial. Would she learn from failure? Or
would she resolutely pursue her course?
Millard was not a man to lament the inevitable. Once he and Phillida had
broken, he had set out to be what he had been before. But who shall
cause the shadow to go backward upon the dial of Ahaz? When was a human
being ever the same after a capital passion that he had been before?
Millard had endeavored to dissipate his thoughts in society and at
places of amusement, only to discover that he could not revolve again in
the orbit from which he had been diverted by the attraction of Phillida.
Business, in so far as it engrossed his thoughts, had produced a
temporary forgetfulness, and of business he now had a great deal.
Farnsworth, who had contrived to give everybody connected with the Bank
of Manhadoes more uneasiness than one could reasonably expect from a man
whose vitality was so seriously impaired, died about this time, just
when those who knew him best had concluded that he was to be exempted
from the common lot. He died greatly regretted by all who had known him,
and particularly by those who had been associated with him in the
conduct of the bank from its foundation. So ran the words of the
obituary resolutions drafted by Masters, adopted by the Board of
Directors of the bank, printed in all the newspapers, and engrossed for
the benefit of his widow and his posterity. Posterity indeed gets more
out of such resolutions than contemporaries, for posterity is able to
accept them in a more literal sense. Hilbrough's ascendency in the bank,
and his appreciation of Millard, in spite of the latter's symmetrical
way of parting his hair, the stylish cut he gave his beard, and the
equipoise with which he bore his slender cane, procured the latter's
promotion to the vacant cashiership without visible opposition. Meadows
would have liked to oppose, but he found powerful motives to the
contrary; for Meadows himself was more and more disliked by members of
the board, and his remaining there depended now on the good-will of
Hilbrough. He therefore affected to be the chief advocate, and indeed
the original proposer, of Millard for the place.
The advancement carried with it an increase of dignity, influence, and
salary, which was rather gratifying to a man at Millard's time of life.
It would have proved a great addition to his happiness if he could only
have gone to Phillida and received her congratulations and based a
settlement of his domestic affairs upon his new circumstances. He did
plan to take a larger apartment next year and to live in a little better
style, perhaps also to keep horses; but the prospect was not
interesting.
While he sat one evening debating such things the electric bell of his
apartment was rung by the conductor of the freight-elevator, who came to
say that there was a German man in the basement inquiring for Mr.
Millard. His name was Schulenberg. Rudolph had come in by the main
entrance, but the clerk, seeing that he was a workingman, had spoken to
him with that princely severity which in a democratic country few but
hotel and house clerks know how to affect, and had sent him packing
down-stairs, out of sight, where he could have no chance to lower the
respectability of a house in which dwelt scores of people whose names
were printed in the Social Register, they subscribing for the same at a
good round price.
Rudolph had lost his way two or three times before he could find the
entrance to the lift, but at the convenience of the elevator-man he was
hoisted to Millard's floor. When he presented himself he looked
frightened at being ushered into a place accessible only by means of so
much ceremony and by ways so roundabout.
"Mr. Millard, my sister has just died. You told me to tell you already,"
he said, standing there and grasping his cap firmly as though it were
the only old friend he had to help him out of the labyrinth.
"When did she die?" asked Millard, motioning the young fellow to a
chair.
"Just now. I came straight away."
"Who is with your mother?"
"Miss Callender and a woman what lifs in the next room."
Millard mused a minute, his vagrant thoughts running far away from
Rudolph. Then recovering himself he said:
"Have you money enough for the funeral?"
"I haf fifteen dollars, already, that I haf been puttin' in the Germania
Spar Bank for such a trouble. I had more as that, but we haf had bad
luck. My uncle he will maybe lend me some more."
"What do you work at?"
"Mostly odd jobs. I had a place in a lumber-yard, but the man he failed
up already. I am hopin' that I shall get something more steady soon."
"It will be pretty hard for you to go in debt."
"Yes," with a rueful shrug. "But we're unlucky. Poor folks 'mos' always
is unlucky already."
"Well, now, you let me pay these expenses. Here's my card. Tell the
undertaker to send his bill to me. He can come to the bank and inquire
if he should think it not all right. But don't tell anybody about it."
"I thank you very much, very, very much, Mr. Millard; it will make my
mother feel a leetle better. And I will pay you wheneffer I haf the good
luck to get some money."
"Don't worry about that. Don't pay me till I ask you for it. Was Miss
Callender with you when your sister died?"
"Yes. Oh, yes; she is better as anybody I effer see."
Millard said no more, and Rudolph thanked him again, put on his cap, and
went out to try his luck at finding the door to the freight-elevator for
a descent from this lofty height to the dark caves of the
basement--vaulted caves with mazes of iron pipes of all sizes overhead,
the narrow passages beset by busy porters bearing parcels and trunks,
and by polyglot servants in dress-coats and white aprons running hither
and thither with trays balanced on their finger-tips and mostly quite
above replying to the questions of a bewildered intruder clad in
trousers of well-worn brown denim.
XXX.
PHILLIDA AND PHILIP.
Mrs. Gouverneur concluded not to try her clever hand on Millard and
Phillida again. Pessimistic Philip could no longer reproach her for
having blasted his hopes, for he had a new chance if he chose to improve
it. But to improve any opportunity seemed to be out of Philip's power,
except perhaps the opportunity to spend his last available dollars on a
rare book. He had of late been seeking a chance to invest some hundreds
in a copy of Captain John Smith's "Generall Historie of Virginia,"
provided that he could find a copy with 1624 on the title-page. The 1626
was rare and almost, if not exactly, word for word the same as the 1624;
but it would not do. For there were already several twenty-sixes in this
country, and there was no fun in possessing a book that two or three
other people could boast of having. When not busy with his books Philip
was mostly crouched in an armchair in his library, or for a change
crouched in an armchair at the Terrapin Club--in either case smoking
and, as his mother believed, making profound reflections which might one
day come to something. For how could a bright-minded man like Philip
fail to bring forth something of value, seeing he bought expensive
books and gave so much of his time to meditation?
That Phillida should be specially asked to dine at her aunt's was rather
inevitable under the circumstances, and Mrs. Gouverneur saw to it that
she came when Philip was at home and when there was no other company.
This arrangement pleased Phillida; Uncle Gouverneur was dull enough, but
Cousin Philip was always interesting in talk, and a good fellow, if he
did spend his life in collecting books mostly of no particular value to
anybody but a curiosity-hunter, and in poking good-natured fun at other
people's cherished beliefs.
The meal was well-nigh finished when Philip said to his cousin who
confronted him--there were only four at the table:
"Phillida, I saw Mrs. Maginnis day before yesterday at Mrs.
Benthuysen's. She is still sounding your praises as a faith-healer, but
she confided to me that a pious girl and a minister's daughter ought not
to be proud. She suggested that you didn't get that from your father.
'Her pride comes from the mother's side, they tell me,' she said. 'How's
that, Mr. Gouverneur?' and she laughed at what she regarded a capital
drive at me."
Phillida was not pleased at the mention of Mrs. Maginnis. Since the
death of Wilhelmina, two weeks before, her mind had been disturbed as to
the substantial value of faith-cures. Dr. Beswick's rationalism on the
subject rose to trouble her. Happily she had not been sent for to visit
any new cases, the death of Wilhelmina, her first notable example,
having a little spoiled the charm of her success, as Dr. Beswick had
foreseen. Doubt had made her cowardly, and there lurked in her mind a
hope that she might no more be called upon to exercise her gift in the
direction of faith-healing, and that she might thus without the
necessity of a formal decision creep out of responsibility and painful
notoriety in a matter concerning which she could not always feel
absolutely sure of her ground. To this shrinking the revolt of her taste
against such getters-on as Miss Bowyer had contributed, for her mind was
after all that of a young woman, and in a young woman's mind taste is
likely to go for more than logic. To Philip's words about Mrs. Maginnis
she only replied:
"Curious woman, isn't she?"
"Yes," interposed Mrs. Gouverneur, desirous of turning the talk away
from what she saw was a disagreeable subject to Phillida--"yes; and I
don't see the use of taking such people into society in such a hurry,
merely because they _are_ exceedingly rich."
"Mrs. Maginnis is respectable enough," said Philip, "and interesting,"
he added with a laugh; "and I thought her the most brilliant of the
party at Mrs. Benthuysen's, taking her diamond necklace into the
account."
"Yes; no doubt she's entirely respectable," said Mrs. Gouverneur. "So
are ten thousand other people whom one doesn't care to meet in society.
It seems to me that New York society is too easy nowadays."
"It's not too easy toward the poor; eh, Phillida?"
"That's no great deprivation to the poor," said Phillida. "They could
not indulge in fashionable amusements anyhow, and some of the most
sensible among them believe that the families of fairly prosperous
workingmen are happier and more content than the rich."
"Certainly people in the social world are not examples of peace of
mind," said Philip. "For me, now, I would have sworn last week that I
should be as perfectly happy as a phoebe-bird on a chimneytop if I could
only get a John Smith of 1624, which I've been trying for so long. But I
got it yesterday, and now I'm just miserable again."
"You want something else?" queried Phillida, laughing.
"Indeed I do. You see the splendid John Smith looks lonesome. It needs a
complete set of De Bry's Voyages to keep it company. But I couldn't find
a complete De Bry for sale probably, and I couldn't afford to buy it if
I should stumble on it. John Smith has eaten up the remainder of my book
allowance for this year and nibbled about two hundred dollars out of
next year."
When dinner was over Philip said:
"Come up-stairs, Phillida, you and mother, and see my lovely old Captain
Smith in the very first edition, with the fresh-looking portrait of
Pocahontas as Lady Rebecca."
"You go, Phillida; I'll follow you in a minute," said Mrs. Gouverneur.
"The book is of the earliest impression known," went on Philip with
enthusiasm as he led the way up-stairs followed by his cousin, "and is
perfect throughout except that one page has been mended."
"Mended?" queried Phillida, as she followed Philip into his library and
sitting room. "Do they darn old books as they do old stockings?"
"Oh, yes! it is a regular trade to patch books."
Saying this, Philip turned up the gas, and then unlocked a glass case
which held what he called his "nuggets," and took down the two precious
volumes of the bravest and boastfullest of all the Smiths, laying them
tenderly on a table under the chandelier. Turning the leaves, he
directed Phillida's attention to one that seemed to have the slightest
discoloration of one corner; rather the corner seemed just perceptibly
less time-stained than the rest of the leaf.
"There," he said; "the most skillful mender in London did that."
"Did what?" said Phillida.
"Put on that corner. Isn't it a work of art?"
"I don't see that anything has been done there," said Phillida. "The
corner is ever so little paler than the rest, maybe."
"That is the new piece. The mender selected a piece of hand-made paper
of similar texture to the old, and stained the new piece as nearly to
the tint of the old leaf as possible. Then he beveled the edge of the
leaf, and made a reverse bevel on the piece, and joined them with
exquisite skill and pains."
Phillida held the leaf between her and the light, regarding it with
wonder, hardly able to believe that a piece had been affixed.
"But, Philip, how did he get a corner with the right printing on it? The
line where the two are joined seems to run through the middle of words
and even through the middle of letters."
"All the letters and parts of letters on the corner were made by the
hand of the mender. He has imitated the ink and the style of the ancient
letters. Take this magnifying glass and you may be able to detect the
difference between the hand-made letters in the new part and the printed
ones. But to the naked eye it is perfect."
"What a genius he must be!" said Phillida. "I should think that the book
would be worth more than if it had never been torn. Do they ever tear a
piece out just for the sake of mending it?"
"On the contrary, it would have added fifty dollars to the price of this
copy if the original page had been complete, or if it could have been
mended without a possibility of detection--say by a process of
faith-cure."
Philip said this laughing, as he set a chair for Phillida, and then sat
down himself.
"I beg pardon, Phillida. I oughtn't to jest about what you--feel--to be
sacred."
Phillida colored, and compressed her lips a little. Then she said:
"I don't think I ought to refuse to hear anything you have to say about
faith-cure, Philip. You evidently differ with me. But I want to know the
truth; and I--" here Phillida made a long pause, smoothing out the folds
of her gown the meanwhile. "I will tell you, Cousin Phil, that I am not
always so confident as I used to be about the matter."
Mrs. Gouverneur looked into the room at this moment, but perceiving
that the conversation had taken on a half-confidential tone, she only
said:
"I'll have to leave you with Philip a little longer, Phillida. I have
some things to see to," and went out again.
Philip went to a drawer of rare old prints, and turned them over rapidly
until he came to one of Charles II. touching for the king's evil.
"There," he said; "Charles was a liar, a traitor who took money to
betray the interests of his country, and a rake of the worst. You
wouldn't believe that he could cure sickness by any virtue in his royal
touch. Yet great doctors and clergymen of the highest ranks certify
incredible things regarding the marvelous cures wrought by him. If one
might believe their solemn assertions, more cures were wrought by him
than by any other person known to history. The only virtue that Charles
possessed was lodged in his finger-tips."
"How do you account for it?"
"The evidence of a cure is the obscurest thing in the world. People get
well by sheer force of nature in most cases. Every patent medicine and
every quack system is therefore able to count up its cures. Then, too,
many diseases are mere results of mental disturbance or depression. The
mind has enormous influence on the body. I know a doctor who cured a
woman that had not walked for years by setting fire to the bedding where
she lay and leaving her a choice to exert herself or be burned."
"But there are the cures by faith related in the Bible. I am afraid
that if I give up modern cures I must lose my faith in miracles," said
Phillida. An unusual tenderness in Philip's speech had dissipated her
reserve, and she was in a mood to lay bare her heart. In this last
remark she disclosed to Philip her main difficulty. With a mind like
hers such things are rather matters of association than of simple logic.
Religion and miracles were bound up in the same bundle in her mind. To
reject the latter was to throw away the former, and this, by another
habitual association in her mind, would have seemed equivalent to the
moral subversion of the universe. On the other hand she had associated
modern faith-healing with Scripture miracles; the rejection of
faith-cures involved therefore a series of consequences that seemed
infinitely disastrous.
If it had been merely an abstract question Philip would not have
hesitated to reject the miraculous altogether, particularly in any
conversation in which such a rejection would have yielded interesting
results. But Phillida's confiding attitude touched him profoundly. After
all, he deemed faith a very good thing for a woman; unbelief, like
smoking and occasional by-words, was appropriate only to the coarser
sex.
"Well," he replied evasively, "the Bible stands on a very different
ground. We couldn't examine the ancient miracles just as we do modern
faith-cures if we wished. The belief in Bible miracles is a poetic and
religious belief, and it does not involve any practical question of
action to-day. But faith-healing now is a matter of great
responsibility."
Philip spoke with a tremor of emotion in his voice. His cousin was
sitting at the other side of the table looking intently at him, and
doing her best to understand the ground of his distinction between
ancient and modern miracles, which Philip, agitated as he was by a
feeling that had no relation to the question, did not succeed in
clearing up quite to his own satisfaction. Abandoning that field
abruptly, he said:
"What I urge is that you ought not to trust too much to accidental
recoveries like that of the Maginnis child. If faith-healing is a
mistake it may do a great deal of harm."
Phillida's eyes fell to the table, and she fingered a paper-weight with
manifest emotion.
"What you say in regard to responsibility is true, Philip. But if you
have a power to heal, refusal is also a responsibility. I know I must
seem like a fool to the rest of you."
"No," said Philip, in a low, earnest voice; "you are the noblest of us
all. You are mistaken, but your mistake is the result of the best that
is in you; and, by George! Phillida, there is no better in anybody that
lives than there is in you."
This enthusiastic commendation, so unexpected by Phillida, who had felt
herself in some sense under the ban of her family, brought to the
parched and thirsty heart the utmost refreshment. She trembled visibly,
and tears appeared in her eyes.
"Thank you, Philip. I know the praise is not deserved, but your kindness
does me no end of good."
Mrs. Gouverneur came in at this moment. Phillida's eyes and Philip's
constraint showed her that something confidential had passed between
them, and she congratulated herself on the success of her plan, though
she could not divine the nature of the conversation. Phillida would not
be a brilliant match for Philip in a worldly point of view, but it had
long been a ruling principle with Mrs. Gouverneur that whatever Philip
wanted he was to have, if it were procurable, and as the husband of such
a woman as Phillida he ought to be a great deal happier than in mousing
among old books and moping over questions that nobody could solve.
Besides, Phillida possessed one qualification second to no other in Mrs.
Gouverneur's opinion--there could be no question that her family was a
first-rate one, at least upon the mother's side. The intrusion of a
third person at this moment produced a little constraint. To relieve
this Mrs. Gouverneur felt bound to talk of something.
"I scold Philip for wasting his time over old books and such trifles,"
she said to Phillida. "I wish you could persuade him out of it."
"Trifles!" exclaimed Philip. "Trifles are the only real consolation of
such beings as we are. They keep us from being crushed by the
immensities. If we were to spend our time chiefly about the momentous
things, life would become unendurable."
The conversation drifted to indifferent subjects, and Philip talked with
an unwonted gayety that caused Phillida to forget her anxieties, while
Mrs. Gouverneur wondered what change had come over her son that he
should feel so much elation. The confidence and affection that Phillida
had exhibited while conversing with him this evening consoled Philip for
the misery of having to live, and his cheerfulness lasted throughout her
visit. At its close he walked towards her home, with her hand upon his
arm, in an atmosphere of hope which he had not been accustomed to
breathe. At the door Phillida said:
"Good-night, Cousin Philip. Thank you for the kind advice you have given
me. I don't think I shall agree with it, but I'll think about it." Then
in a low voice she added, "If I have made a mistake it has cost me
dear--nobody knows how dear."
After he had left her Philip's buoyancy declined. These last words,
evidently full of regrets as regarded her relation with Charley, gave
him a twinge of his old jealousy and restored him to his habitual
discouragement.
XXXI.
A CASE OF BELIEF IN DIPHTHERIA.
It was inevitable that Phillida should turn Philip's talk over in her
mind again and again. There were moments when she felt that her healing
power might be as much of a delusion as the divinity in the touch of the
merry King Charles. There were other times when Dr. Beswick's infecting
bacteria germinated in her imagination and threatened destruction to her
faith, and yet other times when sheer repulsion from Miss Bowyer's cant
of metaphysical and Christian therapeutics inclined her to renounce the
belief in faith-cure, which seemed somehow a second cousin to this
grotesque science. But the great barrier remained; in her mind
faith-healing had associated itself with other phases of religious
belief, and she could find no resting-place for her feet betwixt her
faith and Philip's ill-concealed general skepticism. She did go so far
as to adopt Philip's opinion that an exclusive occupation of the mind
with the immensities rendered life unendurable. She came to envy her
cousin his eagerness over unreadable Indian Bibles, black-letter
Caxtons, and a rare date on a title-page. She envied Millard the
diversion that came to him from his interest in people, his taste in
dress, his care for the small proprieties, his love for all the minor
graces of life. Why should she alone of the three be crushed beneath the
trip-hammer of the immensities? But she ended always as she had begun,
by reverting to that ancestral spirit of religious strenuousness in
which she had been bred and cradled, and by planting herself once more
upon the eleventh of Hebrews and the renowned victories of faith that
had been the glory of the Church in every age. To leave this ground
seemed to her an abandonment by consequence of all that was dearest and
noblest in life. Nor was she aware that with each cross-examination her
hold on the cherished belief became less firm.
About two weeks after her talk with Philip she had just concluded a
fresh conflict of this sort, and settled herself once more in what she
intended should hereafter prove an unwavering faith in the efficacy of
prayer, at least in certain cases, even against all sorts of bacteria,
when it was announced that Mr. Martin wished to see her. It was eight
o'clock, and the evening was a raw and rainy one in March.
"Howdy do, Miss Callender? How's all with you?" said Martin, when
Phillida appeared at the door.
"How do you do, Mr. Martin?" she said. "Won't you come in?"
"No, thank you," said Martin, standing shivering in the vestibule, his
solemn face looking neither more nor less like mortuary sculpture than
it ever did. "Mother wants to know if you won't come down right away
this evening. Our Tommy is seemingly sick."
"Seemingly sick?" asked Phillida. "How do you mean?"
"He's got a belief in a sore throat," said Mr. Martin, "and he's
seemingly not well. Mother'd like to see you."
After a moment of puzzled thought Phillida comprehended that this way of
speaking of disease was a part of the liturgy of Christian Science. She
could not persuade Mr. Martin into the parlor; he waited in the
vestibule while she got ready to go. Once out on the wet sidewalk he
said:
"It's all the fault of the infant-class teacher, down at the Mission."
"What is the fault of the infant-class teacher, Mr. Martin?" asked
Phillida with some surprise.
"This seeming sore throat of Tommy's."
"How can that be? I don't understand."
"Well, you see she talked to the children last Sunday about
swearing and other such sins of speech. Now sin and disease are
cor--what-you-may-call-it. Tommy he came home with that big head of
his running on the talk about swearing, and in two days here he is
with a--a belief in a sore throat. If I had my way I'd take the
children out of Sunday-school. But mother will have her own way,
you know, and I ain't anywhere when it comes to anything like
that."
Phillida said nothing in reply to this, and presently Mr. Martin began
again:
"It ain't my doing, the getting you to come and pray for Tommy. I wanted
somebody ruther more scientific; Miss Bowyer she knows the cause and
effect of things. But mother ain't enlightened yet, and she declared up
and down against Miss Bowyer. And I declared up and down against doctors
that can only cure sickness on the mortal plane. So, you see, we
comp'omised on you. But I let mother know that if she would be so
obs'inate ag'inst Miss Bowyer I wa'n't risponsible for the consequences;
they'd be on her head. She can't say that I'm risponsible."
Phillida shuddered, and made a motion as of drawing her sack more
closely about her.
"Though for that matter," Martin went on, "Tommy's kind of settled the
thing himself. He declared up and down that he didn't want Miss Bowyer,
and he declared up and down he didn't want a man doctor. What he wanted
was Dick's Sunday-school teacher. And neither one of us kind of liked to
refuse him anything, seeing he's sick; and so that kind of settled it.
And so the risponsibility'll be--I don't know where--unless it's on
you."
Phillida found Tommy in a state of restlessness and dullness,
complaining of difficulty in swallowing. Mrs. Martin was uneasy lest
there should be something malignant about the attack; but to Phillida
the case seemed an ordinary one, not likely to prove serious. She held
Tommy in her arms for a while and this was a solace to the little
fellow. Then she prayed with him, and at half-past nine she returned
home leaving Tommy sleeping quietly. When she neared her own door she
suddenly bethought her that she had not seen the other children. She
turned to Mr. Martin, who was walking by her side in silence and with a
measured stride that would have been very becoming to an undertaker, but
with which Phillida found it quite impossible to keep step.
"I didn't see the rest of the children, Mr. Martin; where are they?" she
asked.
"Well, a neighbor acrost the street come over to-day and took 'em away.
She didn't know but it might be dip'thery."
"Have you had any diphtheria in your neighborhood?"
"Well, yes; the caretaker of our flats down on the first floor of the
next house lost a child last week by a belief in dip'thery. The neighbor
acrost the street thought Tommy might have got it, but we didn't believe
it. But it made mother kind of uneasy, and she wanted to see you or a
doctor to-night. For my part, I knew that it was the talk of the
infant-class teacher that was at the bottom of it, dip'thery or not. Sin
oughtn't to be mentioned to a child. It's likely to break out into a
belief about sickness."
Phillida's spirits suddenly sank to zero. Alarm at the responsibility
she had taken got the better of her faith by surprise, and she said:
"Mr. Martin, get a doctor. It may be diphtheria."
"Why, what if it is?" said Mr. Martin. "It's better to treat it on a
spiritual plane. No, I'm not a-going back on my faith in the very words
of the Bible."
"But, Mr. Martin, I don't feel sure enough to want to be responsible for
Tommy's life. You must get a doctor as you go home. You go almost past
Dr. Beswick's in Seventeenth street."
"No, I won't do that; I'd made up my mind already that your treatment
wa'n't thorough enough. You haven't had the experience; you haven't
studied the nature of disease and the cor-what-you-may-call-it between
sin and sickness. I'll call Miss Bowyer if Tommy don't mend before
morning."
Just then it began to rain again. The sudden plash of the downpour and
Phillida's instinctive impulse to get quickly under shelter interrupted
the conversation. A minute later Miss Callender was standing in the
vestibule with a weeping umbrella in her hand, while she heard Mr.
Martin's retreating footsteps, no whit hurried by the fitful gusts of
rain, or the late hour, or the illness at home.
She thought of running after him, but of what use would that be, seeing
his obstination against treating diseases on the mortal plane? She would
have liked to go home with him and beg the mother to send for a doctor;
but she could not feel sure that this would serve the purpose, and while
she debated the rain came on in driving torrents, and the steady beat of
Mr. Martin's steps was lost in the distance and the rush of waters. In
vain she told her mother that the child did not seem very ill, in vain
she told herself during the night that Tommy had only an ordinary cold.
She was restless and wakeful the night long; two or three times she
lighted a match and looked at the slow-going clock on the mantelpiece.
In that hour unbelief in the validity of her cures came into her mind
with a rush that bore down all barriers before it. Her mind went over
to Dr. Beswick's side of the question, and she saw her success in some
cases as the mere effect on the nervous system. In the bitterness of
something like despair she thought herself a deluded and culpable
enthusiast, worthy of ridicule, of contempt, of condemnation. There were
no longer any oscillations of her mind toward the old belief; the
foundations of sand had been swept away, and there was no space to make
a reconstruction. Scarcely could she pray; unbelief tardily admitted
threatened to revenge itself for the long siege by sacking the whole
city. She was almost ready to plunge into Philip's general skepticism,
which had seemed hitherto a horrible abyss. At a quarter to five o'clock
she lighted the gas, turning it low so as not to disturb the others. She
dressed herself quickly, then she wrote a little note in which she said:
I am uneasy about Mrs. Martin's child, and have gone down there.
Back to breakfast. PHILLIDA.
This she pinned to Agatha's stocking, so that it would certainly be
seen. Then she threw an old gray shawl over her hat, drawing it about
her head, in order to look as much as possible like a tenement-house
dweller running an early morning errand, hoping thus to escape the
curiosity that a well-dressed lady might encounter if seen on the street
at so early an hour. The storm and the clouds had gone, but the air was
moist from the recent rain. When she sallied forth no dawn was
perceptible, though the street lamps were most of them already out.
Just as the sky above Greenpoint began to glow and the reeking streets
took on a little gray, Phillida entered the stairway up which she
stumbled in black darkness to the Martin apartment.
The Martins were already up, and breakfast was cooking on the stove.
"Is that you, Miss Callender?" said Mrs. Martin. "I didn't expect you at
this hour. How did you get here alone?"
"Oh, well enough," said Phillida. "But how is little Tommy?"
"I'm afraid he is worse. I was just trying to persuade Mr. Martin to go
for you."
"I came to give up the case," said Phillida, hurriedly, "and to beg you
to get a doctor. I have done with faith-cures. I've lost my faith in
them entirely, and I'm afraid from what Mr. Martin told me last night
that this is diphtheria."
"I hope not," said Mrs. Martin, in renewed alarm.
Mr. Martin, who was shaving in his shirt-sleeves near the window, only
turned about when he got the lather off his face to say: "Good-morning,
Miss Callender. How's things with you?"
Phillida returned this with the slightest good-morning. She was out of
patience with Mr. Martin, and she was revolving a plan for discovering
whether Tommy's distemper were diphtheria or not. During her long
midnight meditations she had gone over every word of Dr. Beswick's about
bacteria and bacilli. She remembered his statement that the _micrococcus
diphtheriticus_ was to be found in the light-colored patches visible in
the throat of a diphtheria patient. At what stage these were developed
she did not know, but during her hours of waiting for morning she had
imagined herself looking down little Tommy's throat. She now asked for a
spoon, and, having roused Tommy from a kind of stupor, she inserted the
handle as she had seen physicians do, and at length succeeded in
pressing down the tongue so as to discover what she took to be
diphtheria patches on the fauces.
"Mrs. Martin, I am sure this is diphtheria. You must get a doctor right
away."
"I'll attend to that," said Mr. Martin, who had now got his beard off
and his coat on.
As he donned his hat and went out the door, Mrs. Martin called: "Father,
you'd better get Dr. Beswick"; but her husband made no reply further
than to say, "I'll attend to that," without interrupting for a moment
his steady tramp down the stairs.
"I'm afraid," said Mrs. Martin, "that he has gone for Miss Bowyer."
"I hope not," said Phillida.
"If he gets her he'll be awfully stubborn. He has been offended that I
sent for you last night. It touches his dignity. He thinks that if he
doesn't have his way in certain things he is put out of his place as
head of the family."
Phillida presently perceived that Mrs. Martin was shedding tears of
apprehension.
"My poor little Tommy! I shall lose him."
"Oh, no; I hope not," said Phillida.
But Mrs. Martin shook her head.
In about half an hour Henry Martin, with a look that came near to being
more than usually solemn, ushered in Dr. Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, and
then sat himself down to his breakfast, which was on the table, without
a word, except to ask Phillida if she wouldn't have breakfast, too,
which invitation was declined.
Miss Bowyer nodded to Phillida, saying, "Your case?"
"No," said Phillida; "I have no case. This is a case of diphtheria."
"Case of belief in diphtheria?" queried Miss Bowyer, and without waiting
for an invitation she calmly poured out a cup of coffee and drank it,
standing. When she had finished the coffee and was ready for business,
Phillida said:
"Miss Bowyer, let me speak with you a moment." She drew the psychopathic
healer over toward a large old-fashioned bureau that the Martins had
brought from the country and that seemed not to have room enough for its
ancient and simple dignity in its present close quarters. "Miss Bowyer,
this is diphtheria. A child in the next house died last week of the same
disease. Mrs. Martin wishes to call a doctor, a regular doctor. Don't
you think you ought to give way to her wish?"
"Not at all. The father is enlightened, and I am thankful for that. He
knows the mighty power of Christian Science, and he does not wish to
have his child treated on the mortal plane. Parents often differ this
way, and I am sometimes supported by only one of them. But I never give
way on that account. It's a great and glorious work that must be
pushed."
"But if the child should die?" urged Phillida.
"It's not half so apt to die if treated on the spiritual plane; and if
it dies we'll know that we have done all that opportunity offered. In
all such cases the true physician can only commend the patient to the
care of a loving Providence, feeling assured that disorder has its laws
and limitations and that suffering is a means of developing the inner
nature."
Having reeled this off like a phrase often spoken, Miss Bowyer walked
over to the bed where the little lad lay.
"Miss Bowyer," said Mrs. Martin, with an earnestness born of her agony,
"I don't believe in your treatment at all."
"That's not necessary," said the doctor with a jaunty firmness; "the
faith of one parent is sufficient to save the sick."
"This is my child, and I wish you to leave him alone," said Mrs. Martin.
"I am called by the child's father, Mrs. Martin, and I can not shirk my
responsibility in this case."
"Please leave my house. I don't want you here," said Mrs. Martin, with
an excitement almost hysterical. "I believe you are an impostor."
"I've often been called that," said Miss Bowyer, with a winning smile.
"Used to it. One has to bear reproach and persecution in a Christian
spirit for the sake of a good cause. You are only delaying the cure of
your child, and perhaps risking his precious life."
"Henry," said Mrs. Martin, "I want you to send this woman away and get a
doctor."
"Hannah, I'm the head of this family," said Martin, dropping his chin
and looking ludicrously impressive. But as a matter of precaution he
thought it best to leave the conflict to be fought out by Miss Bowyer.
He feared that if he stayed he might find himself deposed from the only
leadership that had ever fallen to his lot in life. So he executed a
strategic move by quitting his breakfast half-finished and hurrying away
to the shop.
Miss Bowyer was now exultingly confident that nothing short of force and
a good deal of it could dislodge a person of her psychic endurance from
the post of duty.
She began to apply her hands to Tommy's neck, but as there was external
soreness, the little lad wakened and cried for his mother and "the
teacher," as he called Phillida.
Mrs. Martin approached him and said: "Miss Bowyer, this is my child;
stand aside."
"Not at all, Mrs. Martin. You are doing your child harm, and you ought
to desist. If you continue to agitate him in this way the consequences
will be fatal."
Certainly an affray over Tommy's bed was not desirable; the more so that
no force at present available could expel the tenacious scientist.
Phillida, who somehow felt frightfully accountable for the state of
affairs, beckoned Mrs. Martin to the landing at the top of the stairs,
closing the door of the apartment behind them. But even there the hoarse
and piteous crying of Tommy rent the hearts of both of them.
"You must send for Mr. Millard," said Phillida. "He will have authority
with Mr. Martin, and he will know how to get rid of her," pointing
through the door in the direction in which they had left Miss Bowyer
bending over the patient.
"There is nobody to send," answered Mrs. Martin, in dismay.
"I will send," said Phillida. They re-entered the room, and Phillida put
on her sack in haste, seizing her hat and hurrying down the long flight
of stairs into Avenue C, where the sidewalks, steaming after the
yesterday's rain, were peopled by men on their way to work, and by women
and children seeking the grocery-stores and butcher-shops. Loiterers
were already gathering, in that slouching fashion characteristic of
people out of work, about the doors of the drinking-saloons; buildings
whose expensive up-fittings lent a touch of spurious grandeur to the
pinched and populous avenue.
XXXII.
FACE TO FACE.
Once in the street, Phillida's perplexities began. She had undertaken to
send for Millard, but there were no slow-footed district Mercuries to be
had in the Mackerelville part of New York. It was now barely half-past
six, and Millard would hardly have risen yet. In a battle against grim
death and Miss Bowyer time seemed all important. She therefore took a
Fourteenth street car and changed to an up-town line carrying her to the
vicinity of the Graydon, debating all the way how quickest to get an
explicit message to Millard without a personal interview, which would be
painful to both, and which might be misconstrued. Phillida alighted from
the car in the neighborhood of the Graydon, whose mountainous dimensions
deflected the March wind into sudden and disagreeable backsets and
whirling eddies that threatened the perpendicularity of foot-passengers.
She requested a florist, who was opening his shop and arranging a little
exhibition of the hardier in-door plants on the sidewalk, to direct her
to a district telegraph office, and was referred to one just around the
corner. To this always open place she walked as rapidly as possible, to
find a sleepy-looking young woman just settling herself at the desk,
having at that moment relieved the man who had been on duty all night.
"Can you give me a messenger right away?" she demanded.
"In about fifteen or twenty minutes we'll have one in," said the girl.
"We don't keep but two on duty at this hour, and they're both out, and
there's one call ahead of you. Take a seat, won't you?"
But Phillida saw in her imagination Mrs. Martin badgered by Eleanor
Bowyer, and heard again the grievous cry of the frightened and suffering
Tommy. After all, she could only make the matter understood imperfectly
by means of a message. Why should she stand on delicacy in a matter of
life and death? She reflected that there was no animosity between her
and Millard, and she recalled his figure as he reached his hand to her
that fatal evening, and she remembered the emotion in his voice when he
said, "Part friends?" She resolved to go in person to the Graydon.
The entrance to the apartment building displayed a good deal of that
joint-stock grandeur which goes for much and yet costs each individual
householder but little. Despite her anxiety, Phillida was so far
impressed by the elaborate bronze mantelpiece over the great hall
fireplace, the carved wooden seats, and the frescoing and gilding of the
walls, as to remember that she was dressed for a tenement in Avenue C,
and not for a west-side apartment house. The gray shawl she had left
behind; but she felt sure that the important-looking hall boys and,
above all, the plump and prosperous-seeming clerk at the desk, with an
habitually neutral expression upon his countenance, must wonder why a
woman had intruded into the sacred front entrance in so plain a hat and
gown at seven o'clock in the morning. She felt in her pocket for her
card-case, but of course that had been left in the pocket of a better
dress, and she must write upon one of those little cards that the house
furnishes; and all this while the clerk would be wondering who she was.
But there was a native self-reliance about Phillida that shielded her
from contempt. She asked for the card, took up a pen, and wrote:
"Miss Callender wishes to see Mr. Millard in great haste, on a matter of
the utmost importance."
She was about to put this into an envelope, but she reflected that an
open message was better. She handed the card to the clerk, who took it
hesitatingly, and with a touch of "style" in his bearing, saying, "Mr.
Millard will not be down for half an hour yet. He is not up. Will you
wait?"
"He must be called," said Phillida. "It is a matter of life and death."
The clerk still held the note in his hand.
"He will be very much annoyed if that is not delivered to him at once.
It is his own affair, and, as I said, a matter of life and death," said
Phillida, speaking peremptorily, her courage rising to the occasion.
The clerk still held the note. He presently beckoned to a negro boy
sitting on one of the carved benches.
"Washington," he said.
Washington came forward to the counter.
"Wash," said the clerk in an undertone--an undress tone kept for those
upon whom it would have been useless to waste his habitual bearing as
the representative of the corporate proprietorship of the building--"has
Mr. Millard's man come in yet?"
"No, sir."
"Take this up to seventy-nine, and say that the lady is below and
insists on his being called at once." Then to Phillida, as the form of
Washington vanished upward by way of the marble staircase, "Will you
take a seat in the reception-room?" waving his hand slightly in the
direction of a portière, behind which Phillida found herself in the
ladies' reception-room.
In ten minutes Millard came down the elevator, glanced about the office,
and then quickly entered the reception-room. There were unwonted traces
of haste in his toilet; his hair had been hastily brushed, but it had
been brushed, as indeed it would probably have been if Washington had
announced that the Graydon was in flames.
There was a moment of embarrassment. What manner was proper for such a
meeting? It would not do to say "Phillida," and "Miss Callender" would
sound forced and formal. Phillida was equally embarrassed as she came
forward, but Millard's tact relieved the tension. He spoke in a tone of
reserve and yet of friendliness.
"Good-morning. I hope no disaster has happened to you." The friendly
eagerness of this inquiry took off the brusqueness of omitting her name,
and the anxiety that prompted it was sincere.
"There is no time for explanations," said Phillida, hurriedly. "Mr.
Martin has called a Christian Science healer to see Tommy, who is very
ill with diphtheria."
"Tommy has diphtheria?" said Millard, his voice showing feeling.
"Your aunt wants a doctor," continued Phillida, "but Mr. Martin has left
the woman in charge, and she refuses to give up the case. Tommy is
crying, and Mrs. Martin is in a horrible position and wants to see you."
Here Phillida's eyes fell as she added, "There was nobody to send; I
couldn't get a messenger; and so I had to come myself."
"I am glad--" here Millard paused and began over--"You did the best
thing to come yourself. You will excuse me, but I don't understand. You
haven't charge of the case at all, then?"
"No, no, Charley--Mr. Millard; there is no time to explain. Get a good
doctor, and put Miss Bowyer out, if you have to fetch a policeman. Get a
good doctor at once. If you save the child you must be quick, quick! The
horrible woman will be the death of him."
Millard caught the infection of urgency and began to take in the
situation. He stepped to the door, drew aside the portière, and said:
"Washington, call a coupé for me. Quick, now." Then he called after the
boy as he went to the telephone, "Tell them to hurry it up."
He turned towards Phillida; then with a new impulse he turned again and
walked impatiently to the office. "Mr. Oliver, won't you ask if my man
is below, and send him here as quickly as possible?"
The clerk moved, without ruffling his dignity by undue haste, to the
speaking-tube which communicated with the basement. In the course of
half a minute a young Englishman, with a fore-and-aft cap in his hand,
came running to the reception-room, in the door of which Millard was
standing.
"Robert," said Millard, "run to the stable and have them send my coupé
on the jump. Come back with it yourself."
The well-trained Robert glided swiftly out of the front door, not even
asking a question with his eyes.
"You'll go back with me in the coupé?" Millard said to Phillida, who had
risen and now stood waiting in embarrassment to say good-morning.
Phillida could not for a moment think of driving back with Millard, not
so much on account of the conventional impropriety in it as because her
visit was capable of misconstruction; and while she believed that
Millard knew her too well to put any interpretation of self-interest on
her coming, she could not have brought herself to return to Avenue C in
his coupé. If for no other reason, she would have declined in order to
avoid prolonging an interview painful and embarrassing to both. She was
worn and faint from the fatigues of the night and the excitement of the
morning, and she could not think of the right thing to say.
"No; I will go home," she said. Spoken thus, without calling him by
name, the words had a severe sound, as of one mortally offended. A
sudden access of fatigue and faintness reminded her that she had eaten
nothing this morning.
"You will excuse me. I've had no breakfast yet. I've been at Mrs.
Martin's since daylight. Good-morning, Mr. Millard."
This explanation made her perfectly proper refusal somewhat less abrupt
and direct; but the words were still cold and severe.
"I will call another coupé, and send you home. You are faint," he said.
"No, thank you," she said, and went out.
But Millard followed her into the street, and hailed a car, and assisted
her to enter it, and lifted his hat and bowed in response to her "Thank
you," when she had gained the platform. As the car moved away he stood a
moment looking after it, and then returned toward the sidewalk, saying
softly to himself, "By Jove, what a woman! What a woman that is!"
XXXIII.
A FAMOUS VICTORY.
By the time the coupé reached the curb in front of the Graydon, Millard
had fixed in his mind the first move in his campaign, and had scribbled
a little note as he stood at the clerk's counter in the office. Handing
the driver a dollar as a comprehensible hint that speed was required,
and, taking Robert with him, he was soon bowling along the yet rather
empty Fifth Avenue. He alighted in front of a rather broad, low-stoop,
brownstone house, with a plain sign upon it, which read "Dr. Augustine
Gunstone." What ills and misfortunes had crossed that door-stone! What
celebrities had here sought advice from the great doctor in matters of
life and death! Few men can enjoy a great reputation and be so unspoiled
as Dr. Gunstone. The shyest young girl among his patients felt drawn to
unburden her sorrows to him as to a father; the humblest sufferer
remembered gratefully the reassuring gentleness of his voice and manner.
But Millard made no reflections this morning; he rang the bell sharply.
"The doctor hasn't come down yet," said the servant. "He will not see
patients before nine o'clock."
"At what time does he come down?"
"At a quarter to eight."
"It's half-past seven now," said Millard. "Kindly take this note to his
room with my card, and say that I wait for an answer."
There was that in Millard's manner that impressed the servant. He was
sure that this must be one of those very renowned men who sometimes came
to see Dr. Gunstone and who were not to be refused. He ran up the stairs
and timidly knocked at the doctor's door. Millard waited five minutes in
a small reception-room, and then the old doctor came down, kindly,
dignified, unruffled as ever, a man courteous to all, friendly with all,
but without any familiars.
"Good-morning, Mr. Millard. I can't see your patient now. Every moment
of my time to-day is engaged. Perhaps I might contrive to see the child
on my way to the hospital at twelve."
"If I could have a carriage here at the moment you finish your
breakfast, with my valet in it to see that no time is lost, could you
give us advice, and get back here before your office hours begin?"
Dr. Gunstone hesitated a moment. "Yes," he said; "but you would want a
doctor in the vicinity. I can not come often enough to take charge of
the case."
"We'll call any one you may name. The family are poor, I am interested
in them, they are relatives of mine, and this child I have set my heart
on saving, and I will not mind expense. I wish you to come every day as
consultant, if possible."
Dr. Gunstone's was a professional mind before all. He avoided those
profound questions of philosophy toward which modern science propels the
mind, limiting himself to the science of pathology and the art of
healing. On the other hand, he habitually bounded his curiosity
concerning his patients to their physical condition and such of their
surroundings as affected for good or ill their chances of recovery. He
did not care to know more of this poor family than that he was to see a
patient there; but he knew something of Millard from the friendly
relations existing between him and younger members of his own family,
and the disclosure that Millard had kinsfolk in Avenue C, and was deeply
interested in people of a humble rank, gave Dr. Gunstone a momentary
surprise, which, however, it would have been contrary to all his habits
to manifest. He merely bowed a polite good-morning and turned toward the
breakfast-room.
These men, in whose lives life and death are matters of hourly
business--matters of bread and butter and bank-account--acquire in
self-defense a certain imperviousness; they learn to shed their
responsibilities with facility in favor of digestion and sleep. Dr.
Gunstone ate in a leisurely way, relishing his chops and coffee, and
participating in the conversation of the family, who joined him one by
one at the table. It did not trouble him that another family in Avenue C
was in agonized waiting for his presence, and that haste or delay might
make the difference between life and death to a human being. This was
not heartlessness, but a condition of his living and working--a
postponement of particular service, however important, in favor of the
general serviceableness of his life.
Millard was not sorry for the delay; it gave him time to dispose of Miss
Bowyer.
Seeing that Phillida had gone to seek re-enforcements, Mrs. Martin had
concluded that, in Tommy's interest, a truce would be the better thing.
So, while Miss Bowyer was seeking to induce in little Tommy the
impressible conscious state--or, to be precise, the conscious, passive,
impressible state--Mrs. Martin offered to hold him in her arms. To this
the metaphysical healer assented with alacrity, as likely to put the
child into a favorable condition for the exercise of her occult
therapeutic powers.
"Hold him with his back to the north, Mrs. Martin," she said; "there, in
a somewhat reclining posture; that will increase his susceptibility to
psychic influence. There is no doubt that the magnetism of the earth has
a polar distribution. It is quite probable also that the odylic
emanation of the terrestrial magnet has also a polar arrangement. Does
the little fellow ever turn round in his bed at night?"
"Yes."
"That shows that he is sensitive to magnetic influences. He is trying to
get himself north and south, so as to bring the body into harmony with
the magnetic poles of the earth. You see the brain is normally positive.
We wish to invert the poles of the body, and send the magnetism of the
brain to the feet."
Miss Bowyer now took out a small silver cross and held it up before the
child a little above the natural range of vision.
"Will you look at this, little boy?" she said.
She did her best to make her naturally unsympathetic voice persuasive,
even to pronouncing the last word of her entreaty "baw-ee." But the
"little baw-ee" was faint with sickness, and he only lifted his eyes a
moment to the trinket, and then closed the eyelids and turned his face
toward his mother's bosom.
"Come, little baw-ee. Look at this, my child. Isn't it pretty? Little
baw-ee, see here!"
But the little baw-ee wanted rest, and he showed no signs of having
heard Miss Bowyer's appeal, except that he fretted with annoyance after
each sentence she addressed to him.
"That is bad," said Miss Bowyer, seeing that Tommy would not look. "If I
could get him to strain the eyes upward for five minutes, while I gazed
at him and concentrated my mind on the act of gazing, I should be able
to produce what is known in psychopathic science as the conscious
impressible state--something resembling hypnotism, but stopping short of
the unconscious state. I could make him forget his disease by willing
forgetfulness. I must try another plan."
Miss Bowyer now sat and gazed on the child, who was half-slumbering. For
five minutes she sat there like a cat ready to jump at the first
movement of a moribund mouse. Apparently she was engaged in
concentrating her mind on the act of gazing.
"Now," she said to Mrs. Martin in a whisper--for explication was a
necessity of Miss Bowyer's nature, or perhaps essential to the potency
of her measures--"now I will gently place the right hand on the fore
brain and the left over the cerebellum, willing the vital force of the
cerebrum to retreat backward to the cerebellum. This is the condition of
the brain in the somnambulic state and in ordinary sleep. The right
hand, you must know, acts from without inward, while the left acts from
within outward." She suited the action to the words; but Tommy did not
take kindly to the action of her right hand from without inward, or else
he was annoyed by the action of the left hand from within outward.
Evidently Miss Bowyer's positive and negative poles failed to harmonize
with his. He put up his hands to push away her positive and negative
poles; but finding that impossible, he kicked and cried in a way which
showed him to be utterly out of harmony with the odylic emanations of
the terrestrial magnet.
With these and other mummeries Miss Bowyer proceeded during all the long
hour and a quarter that intervened between Phillida's departure and the
arrival of the reinforcement. Miss Bowyer was wondering meanwhile what
could have been the nature of Phillida's conference outside the door
with Mrs. Martin, and whether Mrs. Martin were sufficiently convinced of
her skill by this time for her to venture to leave the place presently
to meet certain office patients whom she expected. But she concluded to
run no risks of defeat; she had left word at her office that she had
been called to see a patient dangerously ill, and such a report would do
her reputation no harm.
Mrs. Martin was driven to the very verge of distraction by the sense of
Tommy's danger and the necessity she was under of suppressing her
feelings while this woman, crank or impostor, held possession of the
child and of her house. Not to disturb Tommy, she affected a peaceful
attitude toward the professor of Christian sorcery, whom, in the anguish
of her spirit, she would have liked to project out of a window into the
dizzy space occupied by pulleys and clothes-lines. Footsteps came and
went past her door, but there was as yet no interruption to Miss
Bowyer's pow-wow. At length there came a step on the stairs, and a rap.
Mrs. Martin laid Tommy on the bed and opened the door. Charley beckoned
her to be silent and to come out.
"What is the name of the faith-healer, Aunt Hannah?" he whispered.
"Miss Bowyer."
"Does she still refuse to leave?"
"Oh, yes! She declares she will not leave."
"You want her out?"
"Yes; I want a doctor," said Mrs. Martin, giving her hands a little
wring.
"Tell Miss Bowyer that there is a gentleman outside the door who wishes
to see her. Whenever the door is shut, do you fasten it inside."
"Miss Bowyer, there's a gentleman inquiring for you outside," said Mrs.
Martin when she returned.
Miss Bowyer opened the door suspiciously, standing in the doorway as she
spoke.
"Did you wish to see me?"
"Are you Miss Bowyer?"
"Yes,"--with a wave inflection, as though half inquiring.
"Are you the Christian Scientist?"
"Yes," said Miss Bowyer, "I am."
"This is a case of diphtheria, isn't it?"
"It's a case of belief in diphtheria. I have no doubt I shall be able to
reduce the morbid action soon. The child is already in the state of
interior perception," she said, seeing in Millard a possible patient,
and coming a little further out of the door.
"It's catching, I believe," said Millard. "Would you mind closing the
door a moment while I speak with you?"
Miss Bowyer peered into the room to see Mrs. Martin giving Tommy a
drink. Feeling secure, she softly closed the door, keeping hold of the
handle. Then she turned to Millard.
"Did you wish to see me professionally?" she asked.
"Well," said Millard, "I think you might call it professionally. I live
over on the west side. Do you know where the Graydon apartment building
is?"
"Yes, oh, yes; I attended a patient near there once, in one of the
brownstone houses on the other side of the street. He got well
beautifully."
"Well, I live in the Graydon," said Millard.
"Yes," said Miss Bowyer, with a rising inflection, wondering what could
be the outcome of this roundabout talk. "Is some member of your family
sick?" she asked.
A bolt clicked behind the metaphysical healer, who turned with the alarm
of a trapped mouse and essayed to push the door. Then, remembering what
seemed more profitable game in front, she repeated her question, but in
a ruffled tone, "Some member of your family?"
Charley laughed in spite of himself.
"Not of my family, but a relative," he said. "It is my cousin who is
sick in this room, and I called to get you outside of the door. I beg
your pardon for the seeming rudeness."
Miss Bowyer now pushed on the door in vain.
"You think this is a gentlemanly way to treat a lady?" she said, choking
with indignation.
"It doesn't seem handsome, does it?" he said. "But do you think you have
treated Mrs. Martin in a ladylike way?"
"I was called by her husband," she said.
"You are now dismissed by the wife."
"I will see Mr. Martin at once, and he will reinstate me."
"You will not see Mr. Martin. I shall not give you a chance. I am going
to report you to the County Medical Society and the Board of Health at
once. Have you reported this case of diphtheria, as the law requires?"
"No, I have not," said Miss Bowyer; "but I was going to do so to-day."
"I don't like to dispute the word of a lady," he said, "but you know
that you are not a proper practitioner, and that in case of a contagious
disease the Board of Health would put you out of here neck and heels, if
I must speak so roughly. Mrs. Martin is my aunt. If you make any
trouble, I shall feel obliged to have you arrested at once. If you go
home quietly and do not say a word to Mr. Martin, I'll let you off. You
have no doubt lost patients of this kind before, and if I look up your
record--"
"My hat and cloak are in there," said Miss Bowyer.
"If you renounce the case and say no more to Mr. Martin I will not
follow you up," said Charley; "but turn your hand against Mrs. Martin,
and I'll spend a thousand dollars to put you in prison."
This put a new aspect on the case in Miss Bowyer's mind. That Mrs.
Martin had influential friends she had not dreamed. Miss Bowyer had had
one tilt with the authorities, and she preferred not to try it again.
"My hat and cloak are in there," she repeated, pushing on the door.
"Stand aside," said Millard, "and I will get them."
Somehow Millard had reached Miss Bowyer's interior perception and put
her into the conscious, impressible, passive state, in which his will
was hers. She moved to the other side of the dark hall in such a state
of mind that she could hardly have told whether the magnetism of her
brain was in the cerebrum or in the cerebellum or in a state of
oscillation between the two.
"Aunt Hannah," called Millard, "open the door."
The bolt was shoved back by Mrs. Martin. Millard opened the door a
little way, holding the knob firmly in his right hand. Mrs. Martin stood
well out of sight behind the door, from an undefined fear of getting in
range of Miss Bowyer, whose calm bullying had put Mrs. Martin into some
impassive state not laid down in works on Christian Science.
"Give me Miss Bowyer's hat and cloak," said Millard.
The things were passed out by Mrs. Martin, who, in doing so, exposed
nothing but her right hand to the enemy, while Charley took them in his
left and passed them to Miss Bowyer.
"Now remember," he said, closing the door and holding it until he heard
the bolt shoved to its place again, "if you know what is good for you,
you will not make the slightest movement in this case."
"But you will not refuse me my fee," she said. "You have put me out of a
case that would have been worth ten or twenty dollars. I shall expect
you to pay me something."
Millard hesitated. It might be better not to provoke her too far; but on
the other hand, he could not suppress his indignation on his aunt's
behalf so far as to give her money.
"Send me your bill, made out explicitly for medical services in this
case. Address the cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes. I will pay you if
your bill is regularly made out."
Miss Bowyer went down the stairs and into the street. But the more she
thought of it the more she was convinced that this demand for a regular
bill for medical services from a non-registered practitioner concealed
some new device to entrap her. She had had enough of that young man
up-stairs, and, much as she disliked the alternative, she thought it
best to let her fee go uncollected, unless she could some day collect
it quietly from the head of the Martin family. Her magnetism had never
before been so much out of harmony with every sort of odylic emanation
in the universe as at this moment.
XXXIV.
DOCTORS AND LOVERS.
Faint from the all-night strain upon her feelings, Phillida returned to
her home from the Graydon to find her mother and sister at breakfast.
"Philly, you're 'most dead," said Agatha, as Phillida walked wearily
into the dining-room by way of the basement door. "You're pale and sick.
Here, sit down and take a cup of coffee."
Phillida sat down without removing her bonnet or sack, but Agatha took
them off while her mother poured her coffee.
"Where have you been and what made you go off so early?" went on Agatha.
"Or did you run away in the night?"
"Let Phillida take her coffee and get rested," said the mother.
"All right, she shall," said Agatha, patting her on the back in a
baby-cuddling way. "Only tell me how that little boy is; I do want to
know, and you can just say 'better,' 'worse,' 'well,' or 'dead,' without
waiting for the effect of the coffee, don't you see?"
"The child has diphtheria. I don't know whether I ought to come home and
expose the rest of you."
"Nonsense," said Agatha. "Do you think we're going to send you off to
the Island? You take care of the rest of the world, Philly, but mama and
I take care of you. When you get up into a private box in heaven as a
great saint, we'll hang on to your robe and get good seats."
"Sh-sh," said Phillida, halting between a revulsion at Agatha's
irreverent speech and a feeling more painful. "I'll never be a great
saint, Aggy. Only a poor, foolish girl, mistaking her fancies for her
duty."
"Oh, that's the way with all the great saints. They just missed being
shut up for lunatics. But do you think you'll be able to save that
little boy? Don't you think you ought to get them to call a doctor?"
"I? Oh, I gave up the case. I'm done with faith-healing once for all,
Agatha." This was said with a little gulp, indicating that the
confession cost her both effort and pain.
"You--"
"Don't ask me any questions till I'm better able to answer. I'm awfully
tired out and cross."
"What have you been doing this morning?" said Agatha, notwithstanding
Phillida's injunction against questions.
"Getting Miss Bowyer out of the Martin house. Mr. Martin was determined
to have her, and he went for her when his wife sent him for a doctor."
"Miss Bowyer! I don't see how you ever got her out," said Agatha. "Did
you get a policeman to put her into the station-house on the mortal
plane?"
"No; I did worse. I actually had to go to the Graydon and wake up
Charley Millard--"
"You did?"
"Yes; I couldn't get a messenger, and so I went myself. And I put the
case into Charley's hands, and he sent his man Friday scampering after a
coupé, and I came home and left him to go over there and fight it out."
"Well, I declare!" said Agatha. "What remarkable adventures you have!
And I never have anything real nice and dreadful happen to me. But he
might have brought you home."
"It wasn't his fault that he didn't. But give me a little bit of steak,
please; I have got to go back to the Martins'."
"No, you mustn't. Mother, don't you let her."
"I do wish, Phillida," said the mother, "that you wouldn't go down into
the low quarters of the town any more. You're so exposed to disease. And
then you're a young woman. You haven't got your father's endurance. It's
a dreadful risk."
"Well, I'm rather responsible for the child, and then I ought to be
there to protect Mrs. Martin from her husband when he comes home at
noon, and to share the blame with her when he finds his favorite put out
and Charley's doctor in possession."
"So you and Charley are in partnership in saving the boy's life," said
Agatha, "and you've got a regular doctor. That's something like. I can
guess what'll come next."
"Hush, Agatha," said the mother.
Phillida's appetite for beefsteak failed in a moment, and she pushed her
plate back and looked at her sister with vexation.
"If you think there's going to be a new engagement, you're mistaken."
"Think!" said Agatha, with a provoking laugh, "I don't think anything
about it. I know just what's got to happen. You and Charley are just
made for each other, though for my part I should prefer a young man
something like Cousin Philip."
Phillida was silent for a moment, and Mrs. Callender made a protesting
gesture at the impulsive Agatha.
"I don't think you ought to talk about such things when I'm so tired,"
said Phillida, struggling to maintain self-control. "Mr. Millard is a
man used to great popularity and much flattery in society. He would
never stand it in the world; it would hurt him twenty years hence to be
reminded that his wife had been a--well--a fanatic." This was uttered
with a sharp effort of desperation, Phillida grinding a bit of bread to
pieces between thumb and finger the meanwhile. "If he were to offer to
renew the engagement I should refuse. It would be too mortifying to
think of."
Agatha said nothing, and Phillida presently added, "And if you think I
went to the Graydon to renew the acquaintance of Charley,
it's--very--unkind of you, that's all." Phillida could no longer
restrain her tears.
"Why, Phillida, dear, Agatha didn't say any such thing," interposed Mrs.
Callender.
"If you think," said Agatha, angrily, "that I could even imagine such a
thing as that, it's just too awfully mean, that's all. But you've
worried yourself sick and you're unreasonable. There, now, please don't
cry, Philly," she added, going around and stroking her sister's hair.
"You're too good for any man that ever lived, and that's a great
misfortune. If they could have split the difference between your
goodness and my badness, they might have made two fair average women.
There, now, if you don't eat something I'll blame myself all day. I'm
going to toast you a piece of bread."
In spite of remonstrance, the repentant Agatha toasted a piece of bread
and boiled the only egg that Sarah had in the house, to tempt her
sister's appetite.
"Your motto is, 'Hard words and kind acts,'" said Mrs. Callender, as
Agatha came in with the toast and the egg.
"My motto is, 'Hard words and soft boiled eggs,'" said Agatha, who had
by this penance secured her own forgiveness and recovered her gayety.
In vain was Phillida entreated to rest. She felt herself drawn to Mrs.
Martin, who would, as she concluded, have got rid of Miss Bowyer, and
seen the doctor and Charley, and be left alone, by this time. So,
promising to be back by one o'clock, if possible, she went out again,
indulging her fatigue so far as to take a car in Fourteenth street.
Arrived at Mrs. Martin's, she was embarrassed at finding Millard sitting
with his aunt. She gave him a look of recognition as she entered, and
said to Mrs. Martin, who was holding Tommy:
"I thought I should find you alone by this time."
This indirect statement that she had not considered it desirable to
encounter Millard again cut him, and he said, as though the words had
been addressed to him, "I am expecting Dr. Gunstone every moment."
"Dr. Gunstone? I am glad he is coming," said Phillida, firing the remark
in the air indiscriminately at the aunt or nephew, as either might
please to accept it.
At that moment Millard's valet, Robert, in the capacity of pioneer and
pilot, knocked at the door. When Millard opened it he said, "Dr.
Gunstone, sir," and stood aside to let the physician pass.
Gunstone made a little hurried bow to Millard, and, without waiting for
an introduction, bowed with his usual deference to Mrs. Martin.
"Good-morning, madam; is this the little sufferer?" at the same time
making a hurried bow of courtesy to Phillida as a stranger; but as he
did so, he arrested himself and said in the fatherly tone he habitually
used with his young women patients, "How do you do? You came to see me
last year with--"
"My mother, Mrs. Callender," said Phillida.
"Yes, yes; and how is your mother, my dear?"
"Quite well, thank you, doctor."
The doctor dispatched these courtesies with business-like promptness,
and then settled himself to an examination of little Tommy.
"This is diphtheria," he said; "you will want a physician in the
neighborhood. Let's see, whom have you?" This to Millard.
Millard turned to his aunt. She looked at Phillida. "There's Dr. Smith
around the corner," said Phillida.
Dr. Gunstone said, "Dr. Smith?" inquiringly to himself. But the name did
not seem to recall any particular Smith.
"And Dr. Beswick in Seventeenth street," said Phillida.
"Beswick is a very good young fellow, with ample hospital experience,"
said Gunstone. "Can you send for him at once?"
Robert, who stood alert without the door, was told to bring Dr. Beswick
in the carriage, and in a very short space of time Beswick was there,
having left Mrs. Beswick sure that success and renown could not be far
away when her husband was called on Gunstone's recommendation, and
fetched in a coupé under the conduct of what seemed to her a coachman
and a footman. Beswick's awkwardness and his abrupt up-and-downness of
manner contrasted strangely with Dr. Gunstone's simple but graceful
ways. A few rapid directions served to put the case into Beswick's
hands, and the old doctor bowed swiftly to all in the room, descended
the stairs, and, having picked his way hurriedly through a swarm of
children on the sidewalk, entered the carriage again, and was gone.
Millard looked at his watch, remembered that he had had no breakfast,
and prepared to take his leave.
"Thank you, Charley, ever so much," said his aunt. "I don't know what I
should have done without you."
"Miss Callender is the one to thank," said Millard, scarcely daring to
look at her, as he bade her and Dr. Beswick good-morning.
When he had reached the bottom of the long flight of stairs, Millard
suddenly turned about and climbed upward once more.
"Miss Callender," he said, standing in the door, "let me speak to you,
please."
Phillida went out to him. This confidential conversation could not but
excite a rush of associations and emotion in the minds of both of them,
so that neither dared to look directly at the other as they stood there
in the obscure light which struggled through two dusty panes of glass at
the top of the next flight.
"You must not stay here," he said. "You're very weary; you will be
liable to take the disease. I am going to send a professional nurse."
This solicitude for her was so like the Charley of other times that it
made Phillida tremble with a grateful emotion she could not quite
conceal.
"A professional nurse will be better for Tommy. But I can not leave
while Mrs. Martin has any great need for me." She could not confess to
him the responsibility she felt in the case on account of her having
undertaken it the evening before as a faith-doctor.
"What is the best way to get a nurse?" asked Millard, regarding her
downcast face, and repressing a dreadful impulse to manifest his
reviving affection.
"Dr. Beswick will know," said Phillida. "I will send him out." She was
glad to escape into the room again, for she was afraid to trust her own
feelings longer in Millard's company. The arrangement was made that Dr.
Beswick should send a nurse, and then Millard and Beswick went
down-stairs together.
Phillida stayed till Mr. Martin came home, hoping to soften the scene
between husband and wife. In his heart Martin revered his wife's good
sense, but he thought it due to his sex to assert himself once in a
while against a wife whose superiority he could not but recognize. As
soon as he had accomplished this feat, thereby proving his masculinity,
he always repented it. For so long as his wife approved his course he
was sure that he could not be far astray; but whenever his vanity had
made him act against her judgment he was a mariner out of reckoning, and
he made haste to take account of the pole star of her good sense.
He had just now been impelled by certain ugly elements in his nature to
give his wife a taste of his power as the head of the family, the more
that she had dared to make sport of his new science and of his new
oracle, Miss Bowyer. But once he had become individually responsible for
Tommy's life without the security of Mrs. Martin's indorsement on the
back of the bond, he became extremely miserable. As noontime approached
he grew so restless that he got excused from his bench early, and came
home.
Motives of delicacy had prevented any communication between Phillida and
Mrs. Martin regarding the probable attitude of Mr. Martin toward the
transactions of the morning. But when his ascending footsteps, steady
and solemn as the Dead March in "Saul," were heard upon the stairs,
their hearts failed them.
"How's little Tommy?" he asked.
"I don't think he's any better," said Mrs. Martin.
"Come to think," said the husband, "I guess I'd better send word to Miss
Bowyer to give it up and not come any more, and then I'd better get a
regular doctor. I don't somehow like to take all the responsibility,
come to think."
"Miss Bowyer's given up the case," said Mrs. Martin. "Charley's been
here, scared to death about Tommy. He brought a great doctor from Fifth
Avenue, and together they sent for Dr. Beswick. Miss Bowyer gave up the
case."
"Give up the case, did she?" he said wonderingly.
"Yes."
"Well, that's better. But I didn't ever hardly believe she'd go and give
it up."
Mr. Martin did not care to inquire further. He was rid of
responsibility, and finding himself once more under the lee of his wife,
he could eat his dinner and go back to work a happier man.
XXXV.
PHILLIDA AND HER FRIENDS.
The appearance in the Martin apartment of the trained nurse, who was an
old friend and hospital associate of Mrs. Beswick's, relieved Phillida
of night service; but nothing could relieve her sense of partial
responsibility for the delay in calling a doctor, and her resolution to
stay by little Tommy as much as possible until the issue should be
known. Every day while the nurse rested she took her place with the
patient, holding him in her arms for long hours at a time, and every day
Millard called to make inquiries. He was not only troubled about the
little boy, but there hung over him a dread of imminent calamity to
Phillida. On the fifth day the symptoms in Tommy's case became more
serious, but at the close of the sixth Dr. Beswick expressed himself as
hopeful. The next evening, when Millard called, he learned that Tommy
was improving slowly, and that Miss Callender had not come to the
Martins' on that day. His aunt thought that she was probably tired out,
and that she had taken advantage of Tommy's improvement to rest. But
when had Phillida been known to rest when anybody within her range was
suffering? Millard felt sure that she would at least have come to learn
the condition of the sick boy had she been able.
He hesitated to make inquiry after Phillida's health. Her effort to
avoid conversation with him assured him that she preferred not to
encourage a new intimacy. But though he debated, he did not delay going
straight to the Callenders' and ringing the bell.
Agatha came to the door.
"Good-evening, Miss Agatha," he said, presuming so much on his old
friendship as to use her first name.
"Good-evening, Mr. Millard," said Agatha, in an embarrassed but austere
voice.
"I called to inquire after your sister. Knowing that she had been
exposed to diphtheria, I was afraid--" He paused here, remembering that
he no longer had any right to be afraid on her account.
Agatha did not wait for him to re-shape or complete his sentence. She
said, "Thank you. She has a sore throat, which makes us very uneasy.
Cousin Philip has just gone to see if he can get Dr. Gunstone."
When Millard had gone, Agatha told her mother that Charley had called.
"I am glad of it," said Mrs. Callender. "Did you ask him in?"
"Not I," said Agatha, with a high head. "If he wants to renew his
acquaintance with Phillida, he can do it without our asking him. I was
just as stiff as I could be with him, and I told him that Cousin Phil
had gone for the doctor. That'll be a thorn in his side, for he always
was a little jealous of Philip, I believe."
"Why, Agatha, I'm afraid you haven't done right. You oughtn't to be so
severe. For my part, I hope the engagement will be renewed. I am sick
and tired of having Phillida risk her life in the tenements. It was very
kind of Mr. Millard to call and inquire, I am sure."
"He ought to," said Agatha. "She got this dreadful disease taking care
of his relations. I don't want him to think we're dying to have him take
Phillida off our hands." Agatha's temper was ruffled by her anxiety at
Phillida's sickness. "I'm sure his high and mighty tone about Phillida's
faith-cures has worried her enough. Now just let him worry awhile."
Certainly, Agatha Callender's bearing toward him did not reassure
Millard. He thought she might have called him Charley; or if that was
not just the thing to do, she might have made her voice a little less
frosty. He could not get rid of a certain self-condemnation regarding
Phillida, and he conjectured that her family were disposed to condemn
him also. He thought they ought to consider how severely his patience
had been tried; but then they could not know how Phillida was talked
about. How could they ever imagine Meadows's brutal impertinence?
He was not clear regarding the nature of the change in Phillida's views.
Had she wholly renounced her faith-healing, or was she only opposed to
the Christian Science imposture? Or did she think that medicine should
be called in after an appeal to Heaven had failed? If he had felt that
there was any probability of a renewal of his engagement with Phillida,
he could have wished that she might not yet have given up her career as
a faith-doctor. He would then have a chance to prove to her that he was
not too cowardly to endure reproach for her sake. But, from the way
Agatha spoke, it must be that Philip Gouverneur was now in favor rather
than he. Nothing had been more evident to him than that Philip was in
love with his cousin. What was to be expected but that Philip, with the
advantage of cousinly intimacy, should urge his suit, once Phillida was
free from her engagement?
But all his other anxieties were swallowed up in the one fear that she
who had ventured her life for others so bravely might have sacrificed
it. Millard was uneasy the night long, and before he went to the bank he
called again at the Callender house. He was glad that it was Sarah, and
not Agatha, who came to the door. He sent in a card to Mrs. Callender
with the words, "Kind inquiries," written on it, and received through
Sarah the reply that Mrs. Callender was much obliged to him for
inquiring, and that Miss Callender had diphtheria and was not so well as
yesterday.
The cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes was not happy that day. He threw
himself into his business with an energy that seemed feverish. He did
not feel that it would be proper for him to call again before the next
morning; it would seem like trying to take advantage of Phillida's
illness. But, with such a life in jeopardy, how could his impatience
delay till morning?
Just before three o'clock the Hilbrough carriage stopped at the bank.
Mrs. Hilbrough had come to take up her husband for a drive. Hilbrough
was engaged with some one in the inner office, which he had occupied
since Masters had virtually retired from the bank. Millard saw the
carriage from his window, and, with more than his usual gallantry,
quitted his desk to assist Mrs. Hilbrough to alight. But she declined to
come in; she would wait in the carriage for Mr. Hilbrough.
"Did you know of Miss Callender's illness?" he asked.
"No; is it anything serious?" Mrs. Hilbrough showed a sincere
solicitude.
"Diphtheria," he said. "I called there this morning. Mrs. Callender sent
word that Phillida was not so well as yesterday."
Mrs. Hilbrough was pleased that Millard had gone so far as to inquire.
She reflected that an illness, if not a dangerous one, might be a good
thing for lovers situated as these two. But diphtheria was another
matter.
"I wish I knew how she's getting along this afternoon," said Mrs.
Hilbrough.
"I would call again at once," said Millard, "but, you know, my relations
are peculiar. To call twice in a day might seem intrusive."
"I would drive there at once," said Mrs. Hilbrough, meditatively, "but
Mr. Hilbrough is so wrapped up in his children, and so much afraid of
their getting diphtheria, that he will not venture into the street where
it is. If I should send the footman, Mr. Hilbrough would not let him
return to the house again. I'm afraid he would not even approve of
communication by a telegraph-boy."
"A boy would be long enough returning to be disinfected," said Millard;
but the pleasantry was all in his words; his face showed solicitude and
disappointment. He could think of no one but Mrs. Hilbrough through whom
he could inquire.
"Perhaps," he said, "you would not object to my sending an inquiry in
your name?"
"Oh, certainly not; that would be a good plan, especially if you will
take the trouble to let me know how she is. Use my name at your
discretion, Mr. Millard. I give you _carte blanche_," said she, smiling
with pleasure at the very notion of bearing so intimate a relation to a
clever scheme which lent a little romance to a love-affair highly
interesting to her on all accounts. She took out a visiting-card and
penciled the words, "Hoping that Miss Callender is not very ill, and
begging Mrs. Callender to let her know." This she handed to Millard.
Mr. Hilbrough came out at that moment, and Millard bowed to Mrs.
Hilbrough and went in. Hilbrough had been as deeply grieved as his wife
to hear that the much-admired Phillida was ill.
"What are you going to do, my dear?" he said. "You can not go there
without risking the children. You can't send James without danger of
bringing the infection into the house. But we mustn't leave Phillida
without some attentions; I don't see how to manage it."
"I've just made Mr. Millard my deputy," said Mrs. Hilbrough. "You see,
he feels delicate about inquiring too often; so I have written inquiries
on one of my cards and given it to Mr. Millard."
Hilbrough didn't like to do things in a stinted way, particularly in
cases which involved his generous feelings.
"Give me a lot of your cards," he said.
"What for?"
"For Mr. Millard."
"I don't see what use he can make of them," said Mrs. Hilbrough, slowly
opening her card-case.
"He'll know," said Hilbrough. "He can work a visiting-card in more ways
than any other man in New York." Hilbrough took half a dozen of his
wife's cards and carried them into the bank.
"Use these as you see fit," he said to Millard, "and if you need a dozen
or two more let me know."
Under other circumstances Millard would have been amused, this liberal
overdoing was so characteristic of Hilbrough. But he only took the cards
with thanks, reflecting that there might be some opportunity to use
them.
As he would be detained at the bank until near four o'clock, his first
impulse was to call a district messenger and dispatch Mrs. Hilbrough's
card of inquiry at once. But he reflected that the illness might be a
long one, and that his measures should be taken with reference to his
future conduct. On his way home from the bank he settled the manner of
his procedure. The Callender family, outside of Phillida at most, did
not know his man Robert. By sending the discreet Robert systematically
with messages in Mrs. Hilbrough's name, those who attended the door
would come to regard him as the Hilbrough messenger.
It was about five o'clock when Robert, under careful instructions,
presented Mrs. Hilbrough's card at the Callender door. Unfortunately for
Millard's plan, Mrs. Callender, despite Robert's hint that a verbal
message would be sufficient, wrote her reply. When the note came into
Millard's hands he did not know what to do. His commission did not
extend to opening a missive addressed to Mrs. Hilbrough. The first
impulse was to dispatch Robert with the note to Mrs. Hilbrough. Then
Millard remembered Mr. Hilbrough's apprehension of diphtheria, and that
Robert had come from the infected house. He would send Mrs. Callender's
note by a messenger. But, on second thought, the note would be a more
deadly missile in Hilbrough's eyes than Robert, who had not gone beyond
the vestibule of the Callender house. He therefore sent a note by a
messenger, stating the case, and received in return permission to open
all letters addressed to Mrs. Hilbrough which his man might bring away
from the Callenders'. This scheme, by which Millard personated Mrs.
Hilbrough, had so much the air of a romantic intrigue of the harmless
variety that it fascinated Mrs. Hilbrough, who dearly loved a manoeuver,
and who would have given Millard permission to forge her name and seal
his notes of inquiry with the recently discovered Hilbrough
coat-of-arms, if such extreme measures had been necessary. Mrs.
Callender's reply stated that Dr. Gunstone was hopeful, but that
Phillida seemed pretty ill.
The next morning Millard's card with "Kind inquiries" was sent in, and
the reply was returned that Phillida was no worse. Her mother showed her
the card, and Phillida looked at it for half a minute and then wearily
put it away. An hour later Robert appeared at the door with a bunch of
callas, to which Mrs. Hilbrough's card was attached.
"Oh! see, Philly," said Agatha softly, "Mrs. Hilbrough has sent you some
flowers."
Phillida reached her hand and touched them, gazed at them a moment, and
then turned her head away, and began to weep.
"What is the matter, Philly? What are you crying about?" said her
mother, with solicitation.
"The flowers make me want to die."
"Why, how can the flowers trouble you?"
"They are just like what Charley used to send me. They remind me that
there is nothing more for me but to die and have done with the world."
The flowers were put out of her sight; but Phillida's mind had fastened
itself on those other callas whose mute appeal for Charley Millard, at
the crisis of her history, had so deeply moved her, though her perverse
conscience would not let her respond to it.
XXXVI.
MRS. BESWICK.
About the time that Phillida got her flowers Mrs. Beswick sat mending
her husband's threadbare overcoat. His vigorous thumbs, in frequent
fastening and loosening, had worn the cloth quite through in the
neighborhood of the buttons. To repair this, his wife had cut little
bits of the fabric off the overplus of cloth at the seams, and worked
these little pieces through the holes, and then sewed the cloth down
upon them so as to underlay the thumb-worn places. The buttonholes had
also frayed out, and these had to be reworked.
"I declare, my love," she said, "you ought to have a new overcoat. This
one is not decent enough for a man in your position to wear."
"It'll have to do till warm weather," he said; "I couldn't buy another
if I wanted to."
"But you see, love, since Dr. Gunstone called you and sent a carriage
for you, there's a chance for a better sort of practice, if we were only
able to furnish the office a little better, and, above all, to get you a
good overcoat. There, try that on and see how it looks."
Dr. Beswick drew the overcoat on, and Mrs. Beswick gave herself the
pleasure of buttoning it about his manly form, and of turning the
doctor around as a Bowery shopkeeper does a sidewalk dummy, to try the
effect, smoothing the coat with her hands the while.
"That looks a good deal better, Mattie," he said.
"Yes; but it's fraying a little at the cuffs, and when it gives away
there darning and patching won't save it. There, don't, don't, love,
please; I'm in a hurry."
This last appeal was occasioned by the doctor's availing himself of her
proximity to put his arm about her.
"Annie Jackson got twenty-five dollars for nursing the Martin child.
Now, if I'd only done that."
"But you couldn't, Mattie. You're a doctor's wife, and you owe it to
your position not to go out nursing."
"I know. Never mind; your practice'll rise now that Dr. Gunstone has
called you, and they sent a carriage with a coachman and a footman after
you. That kind of thing makes an impression on the neighbors. I
shouldn't wonder if you'd be able to keep your own carriage in a few
years. I'm sure you've got as much ability as Dr. Gunstone, though you
don't put on his stylish ways. But we must manage to get you a new
overcoat before another winter. Take off the coat, quick."
The last words were the result of a ring at the door. The doctor slipped
quickly out of his overcoat, laughing, and then instantly assumed his
meditative office face, while Mrs. Beswick opened the door. There stood
a man in shirt-sleeves who had come to get the doctor to go to the dry
dock to see a workman who was suffering from an attack of cart-pin in
the hands of a friend with whom he had been discussing municipal
politics.
Fifteen minutes later Mrs. Beswick's wifely heart was gladdened by
another ring. When she saw that the visitor was a fine-looking
gentleman, scrupulously well-dressed, even to his gloves and cane, she
felt that renown and wealth must be close at hand.
"Is Dr. Beswick in?" demanded the caller.
"He was called out in haste to see a patient, who--was--taken down very
suddenly," she said; "but I expect him back every moment. Will you come
in and wait?"
"Can I see Mrs. Beswick?" said the stranger, entering.
"I am Mrs. Beswick."
"I am Mr. Millard. My aunt, Mrs. Martin, referred me to you. The
occasion of my coming is this: Miss Callender, while caring for my
little cousin, has caught diphtheria."
"I'm so sorry. You mean the one they call the faith-doctor? She's such a
sweet, ladylike person! She's been here to see the doctor. And you want
Dr. Beswick to attend her?"
"No; the family have called Dr. Gunstone, who has been their physician
before."
Mrs. Beswick was visibly disappointed. It seemed so long to wait until
Dr. Beswick's transcendent ability should be recognized. She was tired
of hearing of Gunstone.
"I would like to send a good nurse to care for Miss Callender," said
Millard, "since she got her sickness by attention to my little cousin.
My aunt, Mrs. Martin, said that the nurse Dr. Beswick sent to her child
was a friend of yours, I believe."
"Yes; I was in the hospital with her. But you couldn't get Miss
Jackson, who nursed the little Martin boy. She's going to take charge of
a case next week. It's a first-rate case that will last all summer. You
could find a good nurse by going to the New York Hospital."
Millard looked hopeless. After a moment he said: "It wouldn't do. You
see the family of Miss Callender wouldn't have me pay for a nurse if
they knew about it. I thought I might get this Miss Jackson to go in as
an acquaintance, having known Miss Callender at the Martins'. They
needn't know that I pay her. Don't you think I could put somebody in her
place, and get her?"
"No; it's a long case, and it will give her a chance to go to the
country, and the people have waited nearly a week to get her."
"I suppose I'll have to give it up. Unless--unless--"
Millard paused a moment. Then he said:
"They say you are a trained nurse. If, now, I could coax you to go in as
an acquaintance? You have met her, and you like her?"
"Oh, ever so much! She's so good and friendly. But I don't think I could
go. The doctor's only beginning, but his practice is improving fast, and
his position, you know, might be affected by my going out to nurse
again."
But Mrs. Beswick looked a little excited, and Millard, making a hurried
estimate of the Beswick financial condition from the few assets visible,
concluded that the project was by no means hopeless.
"I wouldn't ask you to go out as a paid nurse. You would go and tender
your services as a friend," he said.
"I'd feel like a wretch to be taking pay and pretending to do it all
for kindness," said Mrs. Beswick, with a rueful laugh.
"Indeed, it would be a kindness, Mrs. Beswick, and it might save a
valuable life."
"I don't know what to say till I consult the doctor," she said, dreaming
of all the things she could do toward increasing the doctor's
respectability if she had a little extra money. "I can not see that it
would hurt his practice if managed in that way."
"Indeed, it might help it," said Millard, seeing Mrs. Beswick's
accessible point. "You'd make the friendship of people who are connected
with the first families of the city, and you'd make the acquaintance of
Dr. Gunstone, who would recognize you only as a friend of Miss
Callender's."
"I'll speak to the doctor. I'm sure I wouldn't do it for any one else. I
couldn't stay away all the time, you know."
"Stay whatever time you can, and it will give me pleasure to pay you at
the highest rate, for the service is a very delicate one."
"I'll feel like a liar," she said, with her head down, "pretending to do
it all for nothing, though, indeed, I wouldn't go for anybody else."
"Oh, do it for nothing. We'll have no bargain. I'll make you a present
when you are done."
"That'll be better," she said, though Millard himself could hardly see
the difference.
XXXVII.
DR. GUNSTONE'S DIAGNOSIS.
Mrs. Beswick, at the cost of a little persistence and a good many
caresses, succeeded in getting the doctor to consent that she should go
to the Callenders'. The risk of contagion she pooh-poohed. She called at
Mrs. Callender's, and, again by a little persistence, succeeded in
laying off her hat and sack and ensconcing herself as a volunteer nurse
to Phillida. It seemed a case of remarkable disinterestedness to the
Callender family, and a case of unparalleled hypocrisy to Mrs. Beswick,
but she could not be dissuaded from staying from the early morning to
bedtime, assuring Mrs. Callender that she would rather care for her
daughter than for any one else. "Except the doctor, of course," she
added. She was always pleased when she could contrive to mention the
doctor; no topic of conversation brought her so many pleasurable
emotions. Phillida became fond of her and whenever she went away longed
for her return.
Robert brought flowers every day in Mrs. Hilbrough's name, and Millard
called to inquire as often as he thought proper. The tidings secured on
the third and fourth days indicated that the attack would prove a
lighter one than that which had almost cost the life of Tommy. On the
fifth day it was reported that Phillida was convalescent. Dr. Gunstone
had announced that he would come no more unless there should appear
symptoms of temporary paralysis, such as sometimes follow this disease,
or unless other complications should arise. Millard thought it would be
more prudent and, so to speak, realistic, to make Mrs. Hilbrough's
inquiries and his own less frequent after this. He and Robert,
therefore, called on alternate days. On Monday it was Mr. Millard who
called, on Tuesday it was a bunch of flowers and inquiries in Mrs.
Hilbrough's name. But Phillida's progress was so slow that it seemed
doubtful after some days whether she made any advancement at all. The
disease had quite disappeared, but strength did not return. At the end
of a week from Dr. Gunstone's leave-taking, the family were in great
anxiety lest there might be some obscure malady preying on her strength,
and there was talk of taking her to some southern place to meet half-way
the oncoming spring. But this would have drawn heavily on the family
savings, which were likely to dwindle fast enough; the appearance of
diphtheria having vacated all the rooms in the house at a time when
there was small hope of letting them again before the autumn.
Milder measures than a trip were tried first. The arm-chair in which she
sat was removed into the front parlor in hope that a slight change of
scene might be an improvement; the cheerful sight of milk-wagons and
butcher-carts, the melodious cries of old clothes buyers and sellers of
"ba-nan-i-yoes" and the piping treble of girl-peddlers of
horse-red-deesh were somehow to have a tonic effect upon her. But the
spectacle of the rarely swept paving-stones of a side-street in the last
days of March was not inspiriting. Phillida had the additional
discomfort of involuntarily catching glimpses of her own pallid and
despondent face in the pier-glass between the windows.
As for the life of the street, it seemed to her to belong to a world in
which she no longer had any stake. The shock of disillusion regarding
faith-healing had destroyed for the time a good deal besides. If
mistaken in one thing she might be in many. However wholesome and
serviceable a critical skepticism may prove to an enthusiast in the full
tide of health and activity, to Phillida broken in heart and hope it was
but another weight to sink her to the bottom. For now there was no
longer love to look forward to, nor was she even able to interest
herself again in the work that had mainly occupied her life, but which
also she had marred by her errors. Turn either way she felt that she had
spoiled her life.
Looking out of the window listlessly, late one afternoon, her attention
was awakened by a man approaching with some cut flowers in his hand. She
noticed with a curious interest that he wore a cap like the one she had
remarked in the hands of Millard's valet. As he passed beneath the
window, she distinctly recognized Robert as the man Millard had sent to
hasten the coming of the coupé, and when he mounted the steps she felt
her pulses beat more quickly.
Her mother entered presently with the flowers.
"From Mrs. Hilbrough with inquiries," Mrs. Callender read from the card
as she arranged the flowers in a vase on the low marble table under the
pier-glass.
"Mrs. Hilbrough?" said Phillida with a feeling of disappointment. "But
that was Charley Millard's man."
"No, that is the man Mrs. Hilbrough has sent ever since you were taken
ill," said the mother. "He speaks in a peculiar English way; did you
hear him? You've got a better color this evening, I declare."
"Mama, that is Charley's man," persisted Phillida. "I saw him at the
Graydon. And the flowers he has brought all along are in Charley's
taste--just what he used to send me, and not anything out of Mrs.
Hilbrough's conservatory. Give me a sip of water, please." Phillida's
color had all departed now.
Having drunk the water she leaned against her chair-back and closed her
eyes. Continuous and assiduous attention from Mrs. Hilbrough was more
than she had expected; and now that the messenger was proven to be
Millard's own man, she doubted whether there were not some mystery about
the matter, the more that the flowers sent were precisely Millard's
favorites.
The next day Phillida sat alone looking into the street, as the twilight
of a cloudy evening was falling earlier than usual, when Agatha came
into the room to light two burners, with a notion that darkness might
prove depressing to her sister. Phillida turned to watch the process of
touching a match to the gas, as an invalid is prone to seek a languid
diversion in the least things. When the gas was lighted she looked out
of the window again, and at the same moment the door-bell sounded. To
save Sarah's deserting the dinner on the range, Agatha answered it.
Phillida, with a notion that she might have a chance to verify her
recognition of Millard's valet, kept her eyes upon the portion of the
front steps that was visible where she sat. She saw Millard himself
descend the steps and pass in front of her window. He chanced to look
up, and his agitation was visible even from where she sat as he suddenly
lifted his hat and bowed, and then hurried away.
The night that followed was a restless one, and it was evident in the
morning that Dr. Gunstone must be called again. Mrs. Callender found
Phillida so weak that she hesitated to speak to her of a note she had
received in the morning mail. It might do good; it might do harm to let
her know its contents. Agatha was consulted and she turned the scale of
Mrs. Callender's decision.
"Phillida, dear," said the mother, "I don't know whether I ought to
mention it to you or not. You are very weak this morning. But Charley
Millard has asked for permission to make a brief call. Could you bear to
see him?"
Phillida's face showed her deeply moved. After a pause and a struggle
she said: "Charley is sorry for me, that is all. He thinks I may die,
and he feels grateful for my attention to his aunt. But if he had to
begin over again he would never fall in love with me."
"You don't know that, Phillida. You are depressed; you underestimate
yourself."
"With his advantages he could take his choice almost," said Phillida.
"It's very manly of him to be so constant to an unfortunate and
broken-hearted person like me. But I will not have him marry me out of
pity."
"I'm afraid you are depressed by your weakness. I don't think you ought
to refuse to see him if you feel able," said the mother.
"I am not able to see him. It is easier to refuse in this way than after
I have been made ill by too much feeling. I am not going to subject
Charley to the mortification of taking into his circle a wife that will
be always remembered as--as a sort of quack-doctor."
Saying this Phillida broke down and wept.
When Agatha heard of her decision she came in and scolded her sister
roundly for a goose. This made Phillida weep again, but there was a
firmness of will at the base of her character that held her
determination unchanged. About an hour later she begged her mother to
write the answer at her dictation. It read:
"Miss Callender wishes me to say that she is not able to bear an
interview. With the utmost respect for Mr. Millard and with a grateful
appreciation of his kind attention during her illness, she feels sure
that it is better not to renew their acquaintance."
After this letter was sent off Phillida's strength began to fail, and
the mother and sister were thrown into consternation. In the afternoon
Dr. Gunstone came again. He listened to the heart, he examined the
lungs, he made inquisition for symptoms and paused baffled. The old
doctor understood the mind-cure perfectly; balked in his search for
physical causes he said to Mrs. Callender:
"Perhaps if I could speak with Miss Callender alone a few moments it
might be better."
"I have no secrets from mama," protested Phillida.
"That's right, my child," said Dr. Gunstone gravely, "but you can talk
with more freedom to one person than to two. I want to see your mother
alone, also, when I have talked with you."
Mrs. Callender retired and the doctor for a minute kept up a simulation
of physical examination in order to wear away the restraint which
Phillida might feel at being abruptly left for a confidential
conversation with her physician.
"I'm afraid you don't try to get well, Miss Callender," he said.
"Does trying make any difference?" demanded Phillida.
"Yes, to be sure; that's the way that the mesmerists and magnetizers,
and the new faith-cure people work their cures largely. They enlist the
will, and they do some good. They often help chronic invalids whom the
doctors have failed to benefit."
Dr. Gunstone had his hand on Phillida's wrist, and he could not
conjecture why her pulse increased rapidly at this point in the
conversation. But he went on:
"Have you really tried to get well? Have you wanted to get well as soon
as possible?"
"On mama's account I ought to wish to get well," she said.
"But you are young and you have much happiness before you. Don't you
wish to get well on your own account?"
Phillida shook her head despondently.
"Now, my child, I am an old man and your doctor. May I ask whether you
are engaged to be married?"
"No, doctor, I am not," said Phillida, trying to conjecture why he asked
this question.
"Have you been engaged?"
"Yes," said Phillida.
"And the engagement was broken off?"
"Yes."
"Recently?"
"Yes, rather recently. This last winter."
"Now, tell me as your doctor, whether or not the circumstances connected
with that interruption of your love-affair have depressed you--have made
you not care much about living?"
Phillida's "I suppose they have" was almost inaudible.
"Now, my child, you must not let these things weigh upon you. The world
will not always look dark. Try to see it more lightly. I think you must
go away. You must have a change of scene and you must see people. I will
find your mother. Good-morning, Miss Callender."
And with that the doctor shook hands in his half-sympathetic,
half-reserved manner, and went out into the hall.
Mrs. Callender, who was waiting at the top of the stairs, came down and
encountered him.
"May I see you alone a moment?" said the doctor, looking at his watch,
which always seemed to go too fast to please him.
Mrs. Callender led the way to the basement dining-room, below, beckoning
Agatha, who sat there, to go up to her sister.
"Mrs. Callender, there is in your daughter's case an interrupted love
affair which is depressing her health, and which may cut short her life.
Do you think that the engagement is broken off for all time, or is it
but a tiff?"
"I hardly know, doctor. My daughter is a peculiar person; she is very
good, but with ideas of her own. We hardly understand the cause of the
disagreement--or why she still refuses to see the young man."
"Has the young man shown any interest in Miss Callender since the
engagement ceased?"
"He has called here several times during her sickness to inquire, and he
sent a note this morning asking to see her. She has declined to see him,
while expressing a great esteem for him."
"That's bad. You do not regard him as an objectionable person?"
"Oh, no; quite the contrary."
"It is my opinion that Miss Callender's recovery may depend on the
renewal of that engagement. If that is out of the question--and it is a
delicate matter to deal with--especially as the obstacle is in her own
feelings, she must have travel. She ought to have change of scene, and
she ought to meet people. Take her South, or North, or East, or West--to
Europe or anywhere else, so as to be rid of local associations, and to
see as many new things and people as possible. Good-morning, Mrs.
Callender."
Having said this the old doctor mounted the basement stairs too nimbly
for Mrs. Callender to keep up with him. When she reached the top he had
already closed the front door and a moment later the wheels of his
barouche were rattling violently over the irregular pavement that lay
between the Callender house and Third Avenue.
To take Phillida away--that was the hard problem the doctor had given to
Mrs. Callender. For with the love affair the mother might not meddle
with any prospect of success. But the formidable barrier to a journey
was the expense.
"Where would you like to go, Phillida?" said her mother.
"To Siam. I'd like to see the things and the people I saw when I was a
child, when papa was with us and when it was easy to believe that
everything that happened was for the best. It would be about as easy for
us to go to Siam as anywhere else, for we haven't the money to spare to
go anywhere. I sit and dream of the old house, and the yellow people,
and the pleasure of being a child, and the comfort of believing. I am
tired to death of this great, thinking, pushing, western world, with its
restlessness and its unbelief. If I were in the East I could believe and
hope, and not worry about what Philip calls 'the immensities.'"
XXXVIII.
PHILIP'S CONFESSION.
It was evident that something must be done speedily to save Phillida
from a decline that might end in death, or from that chronic invalidism
which is almost worse. All sort of places were thought of, but the
destination was at last narrowed down to the vicinity of Hampton Roads,
as the utmost limit that any prudent expenditure would allow the
Callenders to venture upon. Even this would cost what ordinary caution
forbade them to spend, and Phillida held out stoutly against any trip
until the solicitude of her mother and sister bore down all objections.
Not long after Dr. Gunstone's visit, Mrs. Callender received a letter
from Mrs. Hilbrough expressing anxiety regarding Phillida, and
regretting that her husband's horror of diphtheria still prevented her
from calling. She continued:
"I very much wish to do something by which I can show my love for
Phillida. Won't you let me bear the expense of a trip southward, if you
think that will do good? If you feel delicate about it, consider it a
loan to be paid whenever it shall be convenient, but it would give me
great happiness if I might be allowed to do this little act of
affection."
Mrs. Callender showed the note to Phillida. "It would save our selling
the bonds," she said, "but I do not like to go in debt, and of course we
would repay it by degrees."
"It is a trifle to her," said Phillida, "and I think we might accept two
hundred dollars or more as a loan to be repaid."
"Well, if you think so, Phillida, but I do hate to be in debt."
Phillida sat thinking for a minute. Then her pale face colored.
"Did the letter come by mail?" she asked.
Mrs. Callender examined the envelope. "I thought it came from the
postman, but there is no postmark; Sarah brought it to me."
"Suppose you ask Sarah to come up," said Phillida.
On Sarah's arrival Phillida asked her who brought this letter.
"It wuz that young man with the short side whiskers just under his ears
and a cap that's got a front before and another one behind, so't I don't
see for the life of me how he gets it on right side before."
"The man that brought flowers when I was sick?"
"That very same, Miss."
"All right, Sarah. That'll do." Then when Sarah had gone Phillida leaned
her head back and said:
"It won't do, Mother. We can't accept it."
It was a tedious week after Dr. Gunstone's last visit before a trip was
finally determined on and a destination selected, and Mrs. Callender,
who had a genius for thoroughness, demanded yet another week in which to
get ready. Phillida, meanwhile, sat wearily waiting for to-morrow to
follow to-day.
"Mother," she said, one day, rousing herself from a reverie, "what a
good fellow Cousin Philip is, after all! I used to feel a certain
dislike for what seemed to me irresolution and inactivity in him. But
ever since I was taken sick he has been just like a brother to me."
"He has taken charge of us," said Mrs. Callender. "He has inquired about
board for us at Hampton, and he has worked out all the routes by rail
and steamboat."
Philip's kindness to his aunt's family was originally self-moved, but,
as Phillida convalesced, his mother contrived to send him with messages
to her, and even suggested to him that his company would be cheering to
his cousin. Philip sat and chatted with her an hour every day, but the
exercise did not raise his spirits in the least. For his mother
frequently hinted that if he had courage he would be more prompt to
avail himself of his opportunities in life. Philip could have no doubt
as to what his mother meant by opportunities in life, and he knew better
than any one else that he was prone to waste his haymaking sunshine in
timid procrastinations. But how to make love to Phillida? How offer his
odd personality to such a woman as she? His mother's severe hints about
young men who could not pluck ripe fruit hanging ready to their hand
spurred him, but whenever he was in Phillida's presence something of
preoccupation in her mental attitude held him back from tender words. He
thought himself a little ridiculous, and when he tried to imagine
himself making love he thought that he would be ten times more absurd.
If he could have got into his favorite position in an arm-chair and
could have steadied his nerves by synchronous smoking, as he was
accustomed to do whenever he had any embarrassing business matters to
settle, he might have succeeded in expressing to Phillida the smoldering
passion that made life a bitterness not to be sweetened even by Caxton
imprints and Bedford-bound John Smiths of 1624.
He always knew that if he should ever succeed in letting Phillida know
of his affection it would be by a sudden charge made before his
diffidence could rally to oppose him. He had once or twice in his life
done bold things by catching his dilatory temper napping. With this idea
he went every day to call on Phillida, hoping that a fit of desperation
might carry him at a bound over the barrier. At first he looked for some
very favorable opportunity, but after several visits he would have been
willing to accept one that offered the least encouragement.
There were but a few days left before Phillida's departure southward,
and if he should allow her to escape he would incur the bitter
reproaches of his own conscience, and, what seemed even worse, the
serious disapproval of Mrs. Gouverneur.
Phillida and her mother were to leave on Friday afternoon by the
Congressional Limited for Baltimore, and to take boat down the bay on
Saturday. Philip had arranged it all. It was now Tuesday, and the time
for "improving his opportunity in life" was short. On this Tuesday
afternoon he talked an hour to Phillida, but he could not possibly
cause the conversation to swing around so as to be able, even with
considerable violence, to make the transition he desired. He first let
her lead, and she talked to him about the East and the queer ways of the
yellow Mongolians she remembered. These memories of early childhood, in
the blessed period when care and responsibility had not yet disturbed
the spirit's freedom, brought her a certain relief from gnawing
reflections. When she tired it was his turn to lead, and he soon slipped
into his old grooves and entertained her with stories of the marvelous
prices fetched by Mazarin Bibles, and with accounts of people who had
discovered "fourteeners" in out-of-the-way places, and such like lore of
the old book-shop. All the time he was tormented by a despairing
under-thought that love-making was just as far from book-collecting as
it was from Phillida's Oriental memories. At length the under-thought
suppressed the upper ones, and he paused and looked out of the window
and drew his small form down on the chair, assuming his favorite
attitude, while he supported his right elbow with his left hand and
absent-mindedly held the fingers of the right hand near his lips as
though to support an imaginary cigar.
"Philip," said the invalid, embarrassed by the silence, "I envy you your
interest in books."
"You do?" Philip moved his right hand as he might have done in removing
a cigar from the mouth and turned to Phillida. "Why?"
"It saves you from being crushed by the immensities as you call them. I
suppose it has consoled you in many a trouble, and no doubt it has kept
you from the miseries of falling in love."
She laid her thin hand on the arm of her chair as she spoke.
"Kept me from falling in love," gasped Philip, aware that his
now-or-never had arrived, "how do you know that?"
"I never heard that you were in love with anybody. Excuse me if I have
trodden on forbidden ground."
"I have loved but one woman, and I'm such a coward that I never had the
courage to tell her," he said abruptly, at the same time restoring his
imaginary cigar to his mouth.
"That's a pity," she said.
"What a figure I'd cut as a lover! Little, lank, nervous, eccentric in
manner, peculiar in my opinions, lacking resolution to undertake
anything worth while, frittering away my time in gathering rare
books--what woman would think of me?"
"Philip, you have many excellent qualities, and I shouldn't wonder if
marriage would be good for you," said Phillida, in that motherly tone
that only a young woman can assume easily.
"You'd laugh at me as long as you live if I should tell you whom I have
dared to love without ever daring to confess." His face was averted as
he said this.
"You poor fellow," said Phillida, "you are always doubtful of yourself.
Come, I think you had better tell me; may be I can encourage you, and it
will give me something to think about and keep away thoughts that I
don't wish to think."
Philip drew a long breath and then said slowly and with a firm voice,
but with his eyes on the window fastenings:
"The woman I love and have loved for a long time is my Cousin Phillida."
"You are joking, Philip," said Phillida, but her voice died as she
spoke.
"Yes," said Philip, in his old desponding tone, "I knew it would seem
ridiculous to you. That's why I never spoke of it before."
He looked out of the window in silence, and presently became aware that
Phillida was weeping.
"O God! let me die," she murmured in a broken voice. "I am doomed to
work only misery in the world. Isn't it enough to have blighted the
happiness of Charley, whom I loved and still love in spite of myself?
Must I also plunge Philip into misery who has been more than a brother
to me? If I could only die and escape from this wretched life before I
do any further harm."
"I am sorry that I said anything, Phillida. Forget it. Forget it,
please." He said in an alarmed voice, rising as he spoke.
"Cousin," said Phillida, "you are the best friend I have. But you _must
not_ love me. There is nothing left for me. Nothing--but to die.
Good-by."
That evening Philip did not appear at dinner and his mother sent to
inquire the reason.
"Mr. Philip says he has a headache, and will not come down," said the
maid on her return.
After dinner the mother sought his room with a cup of coffee and a bit
of toast. Philip was lying on the lounge in his book-room with the gas
turned low.
"What's the matter, Philip? Is your throat sore? Are there any signs of
diphtheria?" demanded his mother anxiously.
"No, I am all right. A little out of sorts. Only just let me be quiet."
"Has anything gone wrong?"
"Nothing more than common."
"Something has worried you. Now, Philip, I can see plainly that you are
worrying about Phillida. Why don't you speak your mind if you care for
her, and have it over with?"
"It is over with, mother," said Philip.
"And she refused you?" said Mrs. Gouverneur, with rising indignation,
for she thought it rather a descent for Philip to offer himself to
Phillida or to anybody else.
"No, she didn't refuse me. I didn't formally offer myself. But I let her
know how I felt toward her. She'll never accept me."
"May be she will," said the mother. "Girls don't like to accept at the
first hint."
"No, she was kind and even affectionate with me, and broke her heart
over my confession that I loved her, so that I'm afraid I have done her
a great deal of harm."
"How do you know she will never accept you, you faint-hearted boy?"
"She let me see her whole heart. She loves Charley Millard as much as
ever, but, I think, for some reason she doesn't expect or wish a renewal
of the engagement. She called me the best friend she had in the world,
next to Charley Millard. That's an end of it. A good deal more of an end
of it than a flat refusal might have been."
"She's a foolish and perverse girl, who has compromised her family and
ruined her own prospects," said Mrs. Gouverneur. "Your aunt told me
to-day that Dr. Gunstone thinks she is going to die of her
disappointment about Charley unless the engagement can be renewed. But
Phillida has determined not to allow a renewal of it. She's always doing
something foolish. Now, eat a little dinner, or take your coffee at
least."
"Leave the things here, mother. May be I'll eat after a while."
Half an hour later Mrs. Gouverneur, uneasy regarding Philip, returned to
his library to find the food as she had left it.
On inquiry she learned that Philip had just gone out. Whither and for
what purpose he had sallied forth dinnerless she could not divine, and
the strangeness of his action did not reassure her. She was on the point
of speaking to her husband about it, but he had so little in common with
Philip, and was of a temper so fixed and stolid, that his advice would
not have availed anything. It never did avail anything certainly in the
first hour or two after dinner.
XXXIX.
PHILIP IMPROVES AN OPPORTUNITY.
The intimacy between Millard and Philip Gouverneur had long languished.
Philip was naturally critical of Charley after he became the accepted
lover of Phillida, and their relations were not bettered by the breaking
off of the engagement. Phillida's cousin felt that he owed it to her not
to seem to condemn her in the matter by a too great intimacy with the
lover who had jilted or been jilted by her, nobody could tell which, not
even the pair themselves. Moreover Philip had for years taken a faint
pleasure in considering himself as a possible suitor to Phillida. He
found the enjoyment of a solitary cigar enhanced by his ruminations
regarding the possibilities of a life glorified--no weaker word could
express his thought--by the companionship of Phillida, little as he had
ever hoped for such a culmination of his wishes. But this love for
Phillida served to complicate his relations with Millard. So that it had
now been long since he had visited The Graydon. Nevertheless on this
evening of his sudden and dinnerless departure from home, the night
clerk remembered him and let him go up to apartment 79 without the
ceremony of sending his card.
Millard, who was writing, received Philip with some surprise and a
curiosity mixed with solicitude regarding the purpose of his call. But
he put up his pen and spoke with something of the old cordial manner
that had won the heart of Gouverneur some years before.
"I'm glad to see you again, Philip. I began to think you were not coming
any more. Sit down," said Millard. "How is book-collecting? Anything
startling lately?" he added by way of launching the talk, as he usually
did on the favorite subject of his companion.
"No, no," said Philip, seating himself.
"I've not seen much of you lately, anywhere," said Millard, making a new
start. "But that is my fault. I've pretty much cut general society this
spring, and I think for good. I've been busy and tired, and to tell the
truth, I don't care much for society any more. You still go out a good
deal. Is there anything interesting?"
"Oh, no," said Gouverneur.
Seeing that Philip was preoccupied and that all attempts to give him
direction and set him in motion were likely to prove futile, Charley
concluded to let him start himself in whatever direction his mood might
lead him. He did this the more readily that he himself found talking
hard work in his present mood. But by way of facilitating the start,
Millard held out to Philip a bronze tray containing some cigars.
"No, thank you, Charley. I don't feel like smoking."
To Millard's mind nothing could have been more ominous than for Philip
Gouverneur to refuse to smoke.
"I suppose I might as well begin at once," said Philip. "If I wait I
never shall get the courage to say what I want to say. I ought to have
waited till morning, but if I once put off a good resolution it is never
carried out. So I came down here pell-mell, Charley, resolved not to
give myself time to think what a piece of impertinent impudence I was
going to be guilty of." Then after a pause he said: "If you turn me out
of the apartment neck and heels, I sha'n't be surprised."
"Pshaw, Philip, you excite my curiosity," said Millard, trying to smile,
but yet a little aghast at seeing his old friend in this unusual mood,
and divining that the subject would be disagreeable.
"I come to speak about Phillida," said Philip.
Ever since Millard's hopes had received their quietus from Mrs.
Callender's note in which Phillida declined to receive a visit from him,
he had recognized the necessity for getting Phillida out of his mind if
he were ever again to have any sane contentment in life. If Phillida did
not any longer care for him, it would be unmanly for him to continue
brooding over the past. But he found that exhorting himself to manliness
would not cure a heartache. There was nothing he could have dreaded so
much at this time as a conversation about Phillida, and, of all people
he most disliked to speak of her with Philip Gouverneur. He made no
reply at all to Philip's blunt statement of the subject on which he
proposed to converse. But Gouverneur was too much absorbed in holding
himself to his plan of action to take note of his companion's lack of
responsiveness.
"I want to ask whether you still love her or not, Charley," said
Philip, with a directness that seemed brutal, his gaze fixed on the
wall.
"I have no claims upon her," said Millard, "if that is what you want to
know."
"That isn't what I want to know. I asked if you still loved her?"
"I don't know whether even you have a right to ask that question," said
Millard with manifest annoyance.
"I am her cousin," said Philip, looking up at Millard with eyes
strangely unsteady and furtive.
"If there were any charge that I had wronged her, you, as her cousin,
might have a right to inquire," said Millard, who fancied that
Gouverneur had a personal end in making the inquiry, and who at any rate
did not care to be known as a discarded and broken-hearted lover. "I'll
tell you plainly that it is a subject on which I don't wish to speak
with anybody. Besides it's hardly fair to come to me as Phillida's
cousin, when there is reason to believe your feelings toward her are
more than cousinly. I have no claims on Phillida, no expectation of a
renewal of our engagement, and I certainly have no complaint to make of
her. Nobody has any right to inquire further."
Charley Millard got up and walked the floor in excitement as he said
this.
"You're plaguey cross, Charley. I never saw you so impolite before.
Didn't know you could be. I suppose you're right, by Jupiter! I went too
straight at the mark, and you had a right to resent it. But I had to go
at it like a man having a tooth pulled, for fear I'd back out at the
last moment."
There was a ten seconds' pause, during which Millard sat down. Then
Philip spoke again.
"I know, Charley; you have misunderstood. You think I wish to get a
disclaimer that will clear the way for me. Charley--" Philip spoke now
in a voice low and just a little husky,--"if I loved Phillida and
believed she could love me, do you think I'd wait to ask your
permission? If I wished to marry her and she loved me, I wouldn't ask
any man's permission! And I came here not in my own interest, nor in
your interest either. I am here only for Phillida's sake and as her
cousin, and I want to know whether you love her."
"If you want me to do anything for her, I am ready. That is all I ought
to be required to say," said Millard, softened by Philip's evident
emotion, but bent on not betraying his own feelings.
"I suppose that means that you don't care for her," said Gouverneur.
Then he went on, looking into the fireplace: "Well, that's an end of it.
What an idiot she has been! She has thrown you over and alienated your
affections, and made herself the talk of the streets. You wouldn't think
such a fine-looking woman could make herself so utterly ridiculous. She
is a mortification to her relations, and--"
"Now, Philip, stop," said Millard, with heat. "You are in my house. No
man shall say a word against that woman in my hearing while I live. I
tell you that even her mistakes are noble. If her relatives are ashamed
of such as she is, I am sorry for her relatives." Millard made an
effort to say more, but his utterance was choked.
Philip laughed a sardonic little laugh.
"Charley, before God, I was not sincere in a word I said against
Phillida. I lied with deliberate purpose. Now I know that you love her.
That's what I wanted to find out. I only denounced her to get at your
feelings. You wouldn't tell me, I had to resort to a ruse."
"Do you think it--do you think it's the thing to pry into my feelings?"
said Millard, still speaking hotly.
"Yes, I do, under the circumstances. In return I'll tell you something
worth your listening to, if you'll only cool off enough to hear it."
Millard's curiosity was excited by this, but he made no reply; he only
sat still with Philip's eyes fixed upon him.
"Phillida loves you," said Philip.
Millard looked steadily at the smallish figure of his old friend, not
shrunken into the chair as usual now, but sitting upright and looking
straight at him with a strange look he had never seen before.
"Philip," he said softly, "how do you know this? Tell me, for God's
sake!"
"I must not betray confidence," said Philip. "You know me, your friend
and Phillida's. I am here to-night--I might say heart-broken, I can
hardly say disappointed. I don't blame Phillida for not caring for me
except as a cousin, or for preferring you. On the whole, if I were in
her place I'd do the same, by George!"
Philip laughed again, that little laugh which pained his friend.
"Why did you come to tell me this, Philip?" Millard was sitting now with
his elbows on the table, and the fingers of his right hand supporting
his cheek, as he regarded Philip steadily.
"Well, if one can not contrive to do what one wants, he should, I
suppose, do the second best thing. The only thing for me to do--the
thing that'll be a comfort for me to look back on--is to render Phillida
some service. In short, to save her life and make her happy."
"How do you propose to do that?" asked Millard.
"I've already done it, old fellow," said Philip, with a mixture of
triumph and regret in his voice. "Dr. Gunstone said to Aunt Callender,
after talking with Phillida, that unless her engagement with you were
renewed she would probably not recover. I wouldn't have told you this
for the world if I had found you didn't love her. She'd better die now
than marry you and discover that you married her from pity."
Millard went to his desk and took out the note from Mrs. Callender in
which Phillida had refused to see him. He handed it to Philip.
"I got that last week, and it seemed final," he said huskily. "I have
found life almost more than I could carry since, Philip."
Philip read the note and then returned it to Millard.
"That's some of her confounded scruples," he said. "She told me that she
had ruined your life. She thinks you wish to marry her from pity, and
she'd rather die like a brave girl than consent to that. But she loves
you and nobody else."
"I wish I were sure of it," said Millard.
Philip sat a good while silent.
"Charley," he said, "the end I have in view justifies the breach of
confidence, I hope. I have the assurance of her feelings toward you from
her own lips, and that not many hours ago. She would have died rather
than tell me had she thought it possible I would tell you. And I would
have died rather than betray her if I hadn't believed your feelings
toward her unchanged."
Saying this he helped himself to a cigar from the tray on the table and
lighted it, and then rose to leave.
"What can I do, Philip? I seem absolutely shut out from making any
further advances by this note," demanded Millard.
"You mustn't expect any further aid or advice from me. I've done all you
can expect," said Gouverneur. "Good-by."
And without shaking hands he went out of the door into the main hall.
Millard followed him and, as they reached the elevator, said with
emotion:
"Philip, you have done one of the bravest acts."
"Pshaw! Charley," said Philip, half-peevishly and looking over his
shoulder at his companion as he pressed the button, "don't put any
heroics on it. There isn't enough of me to play such a part. Such talk
makes me feel myself more ridiculous than ever."
XL.
THE RESTORATION.
How many scores of devices for securing a conversation with Phillida,
Millard hit upon during the night that followed Gouverneur's visit, he
could not have told. He planned letters to her in a dozen different
veins, and rejected them all. He thought of appealing to Mrs. Callender
once more, but could not conceive of Mrs. Callender's overruling
Phillida. His mind perpetually reverted to Agatha. If only he might gain
her co-operation! And yet this notion of securing the assistance of a
younger sister had an air of intrigue that he did not like.
About nine o'clock the next morning there was handed to Mrs. Callender a
note from Millard inclosing an unsealed note which Mr. Millard desired
Mrs. Callender if she saw fit to hand to Miss Agatha. Mrs. Callender
gave it to Agatha without opening it.
AGATHA: I wrote to your mother the other day begging permission
to call on your sister, and received a reply expressing Miss
Callender's desire to avoid an interview. That ought to have put
an end to my hope of securing your sister's forgiveness, and for
a while it did. But on reflection I am led to believe that her
decision was based, not on a lack of affection for me, but on a
wrong notion of my feeling toward her. She probably believes
that I am actuated by gratitude for her attention to my
relatives, or by pity for her sufferings as an invalid. She
holds certain other erroneous notions on the subject, I think. I
give you the assurance with all the solemnity possible that my
devotion to her is greater to-day than ever. Her affection is
absolutely indispensable to my happiness. I will undertake to
convince her of this if I am once permitted to speak to her. Now
if you think that she would be the better for a renewal of our
old relations will you not contrive in some way that I may see
her this afternoon at three o'clock, at which hour I shall
present myself at your door?
I hope your mother will pardon my writing to you; persuasion
exerted by a sister has less the air of authority than that of a
parent. I leave you to show this letter or not at your own
discretion, and I put into your hands my whole future welfare,
and what is of a thousand times greater importance in your eyes
and in mine, Phillida's happiness. Whatever may be your feelings
toward me I know that Phillida can count on your entire devotion
to her interests.
CHARLEY.
The only thing that seemed to Millard a little insincere about this
rather stiff note was the reason assigned for writing to Agatha. Her
persuasions, as Millard well knew, did not have less of authority about
them than her mother's. But this polite insincerity on a minor point he
had not seen how to avoid in a letter that ought to be shown to Mrs.
Callender.
Agatha gave her mother the note to read, telling her, however, in
advance that she proposed to manage the case herself. Mrs. Callender was
full of all manner of anxieties at having so difficult a matter left to
one so impetuous as Agatha. For herself she could not see just what was
to be done, and two or three times she endeavored to persuade Agatha to
let her consult Phillida about it. A consultation with Phillida had been
her resort in difficulties ever since the death of her husband. But
Agatha reminded her that Mr. Millard had intrusted the matter to her own
keeping, and expressed her determination not to have any more of
Phillida's nonsense.
Phillida observed that Agatha was not giving as much attention to
preparations for the journey as she expected her to. Nor could Phillida
understand why the parlor must be swept again before their departure,
seeing it would be snowed under with dust when they got back. But Agatha
put everything in perfect order, and then insisted on dressing her
sister with a little more pains than usual.
"I wouldn't wonder if Mrs. Hilbrough calls this afternoon," said the
young hypocrite. "Besides I think it is good for an invalid to be
dressed up a little--just a little fixed up. It makes a person think of
getting well and that does good, you know."
Agatha refrained from an allusion to faith-cure that rose to her lips,
and finding that Phillida was growing curious she turned to a new
subject.
"Did mama tell you what Miss Bowyer says about your case, Philly?"
"No."
"Mrs. Beswick told mama that she had it from Mr. Martin. Miss Bowyer
told Mr. Martin the other day that she knew you would get well because
she had been giving you absent treatment without your knowledge or
consent. Didn't you feel her pulling you into harmony with the odylic
emanations of the universe?"
Phillida smiled a little and Agatha insisted on helping her to creep
into the parlor. She said she could not pack the trunk with Philly
looking on. But when she got her sister into the parlor she did not seem
to care to go back to the trunks.
The door-bell rang at three and Agatha met Charley in the hall.
"She doesn't know a word of your coming," said Agatha in a low voice. "I
will go and tell her, to break the shock, and then bring you right in."
She left Millard standing by the hat table while she went in.
"Phillida, who do you think has come to see you? It's Charley Millard. I
took the liberty of telling him you'd see him for a short time."
Then she added in a whisper: "Poor fellow, he seems to feel so bad."
Saying this she set a chair for him, and without giving Phillida time to
recover from a confused rush of thought and feeling she returned to the
hall saying, "Come right in, Charley."
To take off the edge, as she afterward expressed it, she sat for three
minutes with them, talking chaff with Millard, and when she had set the
conversation going about indifferent things, she remembered something
that had to be done in the kitchen, and was instantly gone down-stairs.
The conversation ran by its own momentum for a while after Agatha's
departure, and then it flagged.
"You're going away," said Millard after a pause.
"Yes."
"I know it is rude for me to call without permission, but I couldn't
bear that you should leave until I had asked your forgiveness for things
that I can never forgive myself for."
Phillida looked down a moment in agitation and then said, "I have
nothing to forgive. The fault was all on my side. I have been very
foolish."
"I wouldn't quarrel with you for the world," said Millard, "but the
fault was mine. What is an error of judgment in a person of your noble
unselfishness! Fool that I was, not to be glad to bear a little reproach
for such a person as you are!"
To Phillida the world suddenly changed color while Charley was uttering
these words. His affection was better manifested by what he had just
said than if he had formally declared it. But the fixed notion that he
was moved only by pity could not be vanquished in an instant.
"Charley," she said, "it is very good of you to speak such kind words to
me. I am very weak, and you are very good-hearted to wish to comfort
me."
"You are quite mistaken, Phillida. You fancy that I am disinterested. I
tell you now that I am utterly in love with you. Without you I don't
care for life. I have not had heart for any pursuit since that evening
on which we parted on account of my folly. But if you tell me that you
have ceased to care for me, there is nothing for me but to go and make
the best of things."
Phillida was no longer heroic. Her sufferings, her mistakes, her
physical weakness, and the yearning of her heart for Millard's affection
were fast getting the better of all the reasons she had believed so
conclusive against the restoration of their engagement. Nevertheless,
she found strength to say: "I am quite unfit to be your wife. You are a
man that everybody likes and you enjoy society, as you have a right to."
Then after a pause and an evident struggle to control herself she
proceeded: "Do you think I would weight you down with a wife that will
always be remembered for the follies of her youth?"
Phillida did not see how Charley could answer this, but she was so
profoundly touched by his presence that she hoped he might be able to
put matters in a different light. When she had finished speaking he
contracted his brows into a frown for a moment. Then he leaned forward
with his left hand open on one knee and his right hand clinched and
resting on the other.
"I know I gave you reason to think I was cowardly," he said; "but I hope
I am a braver man than you imagine. Now if anybody should ever condemn
you for a little chaff in a great granary of wheat it would give me pain
only if it gave you pain. Otherwise it would give me real pleasure,
because I would like to bear it in such a way that you'd say to
yourself, 'Charley is a braver man than I ever thought him.'" Millard
had risen and was standing before her as he finished speaking. There was
a pause during which Phillida looked down at her own hands lying in her
lap.
"Now, Phillida," he said, "I want to ask one thing--"
"Don't ask me anything just now, Charley," she said in a broken voice
full of entreaty, at the same time raising her eyes to his. Then she
reached her two hands up toward him and he came and knelt at her side
while she put her arms about his neck and drew him to her, and
whispered, "I never understood you before, Charley. I never understood
you."
XLI.
AS YOU LIKE IT.
The next morning Agatha went over to Washington Square to let Philip
know that the trip southward had been postponed for a week or so. And
Philip knew that the trip southward would never take place at all, but
that drives with Charley in Central Park would prove much better for the
invalid.
"Oh, yes, it's all right then. I expected it," he said.
"Yes," said Agatha, "it's all right. I managed it myself, Cousin Philip.
I brought them together."
"Did you, Agatha?" he said with a queer smile. "That was clever."
"Yes, and they have not thanked me for it. Phillida wishes to see you.
She told me to tell you."
"I don't doubt she can wait," said Philip smiling, "seeing me is not
important to her just now. Give her my love and congratulations, and
tell her I'll come in the day before she starts to Hampton. There'll be
time enough before she gets off, Agatha." This last was said with a
laugh that seemed to Agatha almost happy.
Phillida's recovery was very rapid; it was all the effect of driving in
the Park. Perhaps also the near anticipation of a trip to Europe had
something to do with it, for Millard had engaged passage on the
_Arcadia_ the first week in June. To Mrs. Callender this seemed too
early; it gave the mother and her dressmaker no end of worry about the
wardrobe.
Two weeks after her reconciliation with Charley, Phillida demonstrated
her recovery by walking alone to her aunt's in Washington Square. She
asked at the door to see Mr. Philip, and when she learned that he was in
his book-room she sent to ask if she mightn't come up.
"Busy with my catalogue," said Philip as Phillida came in. He had been
busy making a catalogue of his treasures for two years, but he could not
get one to suit him. "I hate to print this till I get a complete 'De
Bry,' and that'll be many a year to come, I'm afraid. I couldn't afford
the cost of a complete set this year nor next, and it's hardly likely
that there'll be one for sale in ten years to come. But it will give me
something to look forward to."
All this he said hurriedly as though to prevent her saying something
else. While speaking he set a chair for Phillida, but she did not sit
down.
"Cousin Philip," she said, "you might just as well hear what I've got to
say first as last."
"Hear? Oh, I'm all attention," he said, "but sit down," and he set the
example, Phillida following it with hesitation.
"If you had pulled me out of the water," she began, "and saved my life,
you'd expect me to say 'thank you,' at least. Charley has told me all
about how you acted. We think you're just the noblest man we have ever
known."
"Ah, now, Phillida," protested Philip, quite bewildered for want of a
lighted cigar to relieve his embarrassment, "you make me feel like a
fool. I'm no hero; it isn't in me to play any grand parts. I shall be
known, after I'm dead, by the auction catalogue of my collection of rare
books, and by nothing else. 'The Gouverneur Sale' will long be
remembered by collectors. That sort of distinction fits me. But you and
Charley are making me ridiculous with all this talk."
"Phil, you dear fellow," said Phillida, passionately, rising and putting
her hands on his shoulder, "you saved me from life-long misery, and may
be from death, at a fearful sacrifice of your own feelings. I'll
remember it the longest day I live," and she leaned over and kissed him,
and then turned abruptly away to go down-stairs.
Philip trembled from head to foot as he rose and followed Phillida to
the top of the stairs, trying in vain to speak. At last he said huskily:
"Phillida, I want to explain. I am no hero. I had made a fool of myself
as I knew I should if I ever--ever spoke to you as I did that day. Now,
of all things I don't like to be ridiculous. I thought that evening if I
could be the means of bringing you two together it would take the curse
off, so to speak. I mean that it would make me cut a less ridiculous
figure than I did and restore my self-respect. I wanted to be able to
think of you and Charley happy together without calling myself bad
names, you know."
"Yes, yes," replied Phillida. "I know. You never did a generous thing in
your life without explaining it away. But I know you too well to be
imposed on. I shall always say to myself, 'There's one noble and
disinterested man under the sky, and that's my brave Cousin Philip.'
Good-by." And standing on the first step down she reached him her hand
over the baluster rail, looked at him with a happy, grateful face which
he never forgot, and pressed his hand, saying again, "Good-by, Philip,"
and then turned and went down-stairs.
And Philip went back and shut his library door and locked it, and was
vexed with himself because for half an hour he could not see to go on
with his cataloguing. And that evening his mother was pleased to hear
him whistling softly an air from the "Mikado"--he had not whistled
before in weeks. She was equally surprised when a little later he
consented to act as Charley's best man. To her it seemed that Philip
ought to feel as though he were a kind of pall-bearer at his own
funeral. But he was quite too gay for a pall-bearer. He and Agatha had
no end of fun at the wedding; she taking to herself all the credit for
having brought it about.
In the middle of the August following, Philip, having come to town from
Newport to attend to some affairs, found a notice from the custom-house
of a box marked with his address. He hated the trouble of going down
town to get it out of the hands of the United States. But when it was
opened he found on top a note from Millard explaining that he and
Phillida had chanced upon a complete set of "De Bry" at Quaritch's, and
that they thought it would be a suitable little present for their best
friend.
Philip closed the box and took it to Newport with him. He explained to
himself that he did this in order to get an opinion on the set from two
or three collectors whose acquaintance he had lately made in lounging
about the Redwood Library. But the fact was, his Newport season would
have been ruined had he left the volumes in town. The books were spread
out on his table, where they held a sort of levee; every book-fancier in
all Newport had to call and pay his respects to the rare volumes and to
the choice English bindings.
"A nice present that," said Philip's father, as he sipped his champagne
at dinner on the day after the son's return with the books. "I've been
looking them over; they must have cost, binding and all, a hundred
dollars, I should think, eh?"
"More than that," said Philip with a smile.
"About what?" demanded his father.
"Considering that the set includes both the Great and the Little
Voyages, it couldn't have cost less than twenty times your estimate,"
said Philip.
"Millard must be richer than I supposed," said the father. "A man ought
to have millions to make presents on that scale."
But after supper when Philip and his mother sat on the piazza she said:
"I never could tell how things were managed between Charley Millard and
Phillida. But since your books came I think I can guess who did it."
"Guess what you please, mother," he said, "I did improve my opportunity
once in my life."
THE END.
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