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
mediaeval 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.