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.