ribbons, and black dress, with a flush of almost girlish timidity in
her pink cheeks, she won an instant way to the heart of Angelique,
who took her arm and drew her to a cosy arm-chair before a table of
engravings, and began an animated conversation on a book of etchings
of the "Old Houses of New York." These were subjects on which Mrs.
Betsey could talk, and talk entertainingly. They carried her back to
the days of her youth; bringing back scenes, persons, and places long
forgotten, her knowledge of which was full of entertainment. Angelique
wonderingly saw her transfigured before her eyes. It seemed as if an
after-glow from the long set sun of youthful beauty flashed back in
the old, worn face, as her memory went back to the days of youth and
hope. It is a great thing to the old and faded to feel themselves
charming once more, even for an hour; and Mrs. Betsey looked into the
blooming face and wide open, admiring, hazel eyes of Angelique, and
felt that she was giving pleasure, that this charming young person
was really delighted to hear her talk. It was one of those "cups
of cold water" that Angelique was always giving to neglected and
out-of-the-way people, without ever thinking that she did so, or why
she did it, just because she was a sweet, kind-hearted, loving little
girl.
When Mr. St. John, with an apprehensive spirit, adventured his way
into the room, he felt safe and at ease in a moment. All was light,
and bright, and easy--nobody turned to look at him, and it seemed the
easiest thing in the world to thread his way through busy chatting
groups to where Eva made a place for him by her side at the tea-table,
passed him his cup of tea, and introduced him to Dr. Campbell, who sat
on her other side, cutting the leaves of a magazine.
"You see," said Eva, laughing, "I make our Doctor useful on the
Fourier principle. He is dying to get at those magazine articles, so
I let him cut the leaves and take a peep along here and there, but I
forbid reading--in our presence, men have got to give over absorbing,
and begin radiating. Doesn't St. Paul say, Mr. St. John, that if women
are to learn anything they are to ask their husbands at home? and
doesn't that imply that their husbands at home are to talk to _them_,
and not sit reading newspapers?"
"I confess I never thought of that inference from the passage," said
Mr. St. John, smiling.
"But the modern woman," said Dr. Campbell, "scorns to ask her husband
at home. She holds that her husband should ask her."
"Oh, well, I am not the modern woman. I go for the old boundaries
and the old privileges of my sex; and besides, _I_ am a good church
woman and prefer to ask my husband. But I insist, as a necessary
consequence, that he must _hear_ me and answer me, as he cannot do if
he is reading newspapers or magazines. Isn't that case fairly argued,
Mr. St. John?"
"I don't see but it is."
"Well, then, the spirit of it applies to the whole of your cultured
and instructive sex. Men, in the presence of women, ought always to
be prepared to give them information, to answer questions, and make
themselves generally entertaining and useful."
"You see, Mr. St. John," said Dr. Campbell, "that Mrs. Henderson has
a dangerous facility for generalizing. Set her to interpreting and
there's no saying where her inferences mightn't run."
"I'd almost release Mr. St. John from my rules, to allow him to look
over this article of yours, though, Dr. Campbell," said Eva. "Harry
has read it to me, and I said, along in different parts of it, if
ministers only knew these things, how much good they might do!"
"What is the article?"
"It is simply something I wrote on 'Abnormal Influences upon the
Will;' it covers a pretty wide ground as to the question of human
responsibility and the recovery of criminals, and all that."
Mr. St. John remembered at this moment the case of the poor woman whom
he had visited that afternoon, and the periodical fatality which was
making her family life a shipwreck, and he turned to Dr. Campbell a
face so full of eager inquiry and dawning thought that Eva felt that
the propitious moment was come to leave them together, and instantly
she moved from her seat between them, to welcome a new comer who was
entering the room.
"I've got them together," she whispered to Harry a few minutes after,
as she saw that the two were turned towards each other, apparently
intensely absorbed in conversation.
The two might have formed a not unapt personification of flesh and
spirit. Dr. Campbell, a broad-shouldered, deep-breathed, long-limbed
man, with the proudly set head and quivering nostrils of a
high-blooded horse--an image of superb physical vitality: St. John,
so delicately and sparely built, with his Greek forehead and clear
blue eye, the delicate vibration of his cleanly cut lips, and the
cameo purity of every outline of his profile. Yet was he not without
a certain air of vigor, the outshining of spiritual forces. One could
fancy Campbell as the Berserker who could run, race, wrestle, dig, and
wield the forces of nature, and St. John as the poet and orator who
could rise to higher regions and carry souls upward with him. It takes
both kinds to make up a world.
And now glided into the company the vision of two women in soft,
dove-colored silks, with white crape kerchiefs crossed upon their
breasts, and pressed crape caps bordering their faces like a
transparent aureole. There was the neighbor, Ruth Baxter, round,
rosy, young, blooming, but dressed in the straitest garb of her sect.
With her back turned, you might expect to see an aged woman stricken
in years, so prim and antique was the fashion of her garments; but
when her face was turned, there was the rose of youth blooming amid
the cool snows of cap and kerchief. The smooth pressed hair rippled
and crinkled in many a wave, as if it would curl if it dared, and
the round blue eyes danced with a scarce suppressed light of cheer
that might have become mirthfulness, if set free; but yet the quaint
primness of her attire set off her womanly charms beyond all arts of
the toilet.
Her companion was a matronly person, who might be fifty or
thereabouts. She had that calm, commanding serenity that comes to
woman only from the habitual exaltation of the spiritual nature. Sibyl
Selwyn was known in many lands as one of the most zealous and best
accepted preachers of her sect. Her life had been an inspiration of
pity and mercy; and she had been in far countries of the earth, where
there was sin to be reproved or sorrow to be consoled, a witness
to testify and a medium through whom guilt and despair might learn
something of the Divine Pity.
She bore about with her a power of personal presence very remarkable.
Her features were cast in large and noble mould; her clear cut,
wide-open gray eyes had a penetrating yet kind expression, that seemed
adapted both to search and to cheer, and went far to justify the
opinion of her sect, which attributed to Sibyl in an eminent degree
the apostolic gift of the discerning of spirits. Somehow, with her
presence there seemed to come an atmosphere of peace and serenity,
such as one might fancy clinging about even the raiment of one just
stepped from a higher sphere. Yet, so gliding and so dove-like was
the movement by which the two had come in--so perfectly, cheerfully,
and easily had they entered into the sympathies of the occasion, that
their entrance made no more break or disturbance in the social circle
than the stealing in of a ray of light through a church window.
Eva had risen and gone to them at once, had seated them at the
opposite side of the little tea-table and poured their tea, chatting
the while and looking into their serene faces with a sincere
cordiality which was reflected back from them in smiles of confidence.
Sibyl admired the pictures, flowers, and grasses on her tea-cup with
the naïve interest of a child; for one often remarks, in intercourse
with her sect, how the æsthetic sense, unfrittered and unworn by the
petting of self-indulgence, is prompt to appreciate beauty.
Eva felt a sort of awed pleasure in Sibyl's admiration of her pretty
things, as if an angel guide were stooping to play with her. She felt
in her presence like one of earth's unweaned babies.
St. John, in one of the pauses of the conversation, looked up and saw
this striking head and face opposite to him; a head reminding him of
some of those saintly portraitures of holy women in which Overbeck
delights. We have described him as peculiarly impressible under actual
social influences. It was only the week before that an application had
been made to him for one Sibyl Selwyn to hold a meeting in his little
chapel, and sternly refused. His idea of a female preacher had been
largely blended with the mediæval masculine contempt of woman and his
horror of modern woman public teachers and lecturers. When this serene
vision rose like an exhalation before him, he did not at first recall
the applicant for his chapel, but he looked at her admiringly in a
sort of dazed wonder, and inquired of Dr. Campbell in a low voice,
"Who is that?"
"Oh," said Dr. Campbell, "don't you know? that's the Quaker preacher,
Sibyl Selwyn; the woman who has faced and put down the devil in places
where _you_ couldn't and I _wouldn't_ go."
St. John felt the blood flush in his cheeks, and a dim idea took
possession of him that, if some had entertained angels unawares,
others unawares had rejected them.
"Yes," said Dr. Campbell, "that woman has been alone, at midnight,
through places where you and I could not go without danger of our
heads; and she has said words to bar-tenders and brothel-keepers
that would cost us our lives. But she walks out of it all, as calm
as you see her to-night. I know that kind of woman--I was brought
up among them. They are an interesting physiological study; the
over-cerebration of the spiritual faculties among them occasions some
very peculiar facts and phenomena. I should like to show you a record
I have kept. It gives them at times an almost miraculous ascendancy
over others. I fancy," he said carelessly, "that your legends of the
saints could furnish a good many facts of the same sort."
At this moment, Eva came up in her authoritative way as mistress of
ceremonies, took Mr. St. John by the arm, and, walking across with
him, seated him by Sibyl Selwyn, introduced them to each other, and
left them. St. John was embarrassed, but Sibyl received him with the
perfect composure in which she sat enthroned.
"Arthur St. John," she said, "I am glad to meet thee. I am interested
in thy work among the poor of this quarter, and have sought the Lord
for thee in it."
"I am sure I thank you," said St. John, thus suddenly reduced
to primitive elements and spoken to on the simple plane of his
unvarnished humanity. It is seldom, after we come to mature years and
have gone out into the world, that any one addresses us simply by our
name without prefix or addition of ceremony. It is the province only
of rarest intimacy or nearest relationship, and it was long since St.
John had been with friend or relation who could thus address him. It
took him back to childhood and his mother's knee. He was struggling
with a vague sense of embarrassment, when he remembered the curt and
almost rude manner in which he had repelled her overture to speak
in his chapel, and the contempt he had felt for her at the time. In
the presence of the clear, saintly face, it seemed as if he had been
unconsciously guilty of violating a shrine. He longed to apologize,
but he did not know how to begin.
"I feel," he said, "that I am inexperienced and that the work is
very great. You," he added, "have had longer knowledge of it than I;
perhaps I might learn something of you."
"Thou wilt be led," said Sibyl, with the same assured calmness, "be
not afraid."
"I am sorry--I was sorry," said St. John, hesitating, "to refuse the
help you offered in speaking in my chapel, but it is contrary to the
rules of the church."
"Be not troubled. Thee follows thy light. Thee can do no otherways.
Thee is but young yet," she said, with a motherly smile.
"I did not know you personally then," he said. "I should like to talk
more with you, some time. I should esteem it a favor to have you tell
me some of your experiences."
"Some time, if we can sit together in stillness, I might have
something given me for thee; this is not the time," said Sibyl, with
quiet graciousness.
A light laugh seemed to cut into the gravity of the conversation.
Both turned. Angelique was the center of a gay group to whom she
was telling a droll story. Angie had a gift for this sort of thing;
and Miss Dorcas and Mrs. Betsey, Mrs. Van Arsdel and Mr. Van Arsdel
were gathered around her as, with half-pantomime, half-mimicry, she
was giving a street scene in one of her Sunday-school visitations.
St. John laughed too; he could not help it. In a moment, however, he
seemed to recollect himself, and sighed and said:
"It seems sometimes strange to me that we can allow ourselves to laugh
in a world like this. She is only a child or she couldn't."
Sibyl looked tenderly at Angelique. "It is her gift," she said. "She
is one of the children of the bride-chamber, who cannot mourn because
the bridegroom is with them. It would be better for thee, Arthur St.
John, to be more a child. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty."
St. John was impressed by the calm decision of this woman's
manner, and the atmosphere of peace and assurance around her. The
half-mystical character of her words fell in with his devout
tendencies, and that strange, indefinable _something_ that invests
some persons with influence seemed to be with her, and he murmured to
himself the words from Comus--
"She fables not, and I do feel her words
Set off by some superior power."
Mr. St. John had not for a moment during that whole evening lost the
consciousness that Angelique was in the room. Through that double
sense by which two trains of thought can be going on at the same
time, he was sensible of her presence and of what she was doing,
through all his talks with other people. He had given one glance,
when he came into the room, to the place where she was sitting and
entertaining Mrs. Betsey, and without any apparent watchfulness he
was yet conscious of every movement she made from time to time. He
knew when she dropped her handkerchief, he knew when she rose to get
down another book, and when she came to the table and poured for Mrs.
Betsey another cup of tea. A subtle exhilaration was in the air. He
knew not why everything seemed so bright and cheerful; it is as when
a violet or an orange blossom, hid in a distant part of a room, fills
the air with a vague deliciousness.
He dwelt dreamily on Sibyl's half mystical words, and felt as if an
interpreting angel had sanctioned the charm that he found in this
bright, laughing child. He liked to call her a child to himself, it
was a pleasant little nook into which he could retreat from a too
severe scrutiny of his feelings towards her; for, quite unknown to
himself, St. John's heart was fast slipping off into the good old way
of Eden.
But we leave him for a peep at other parties. It is amusing to think
how many people in one evening company are weaving and winding
threads upon their own private, separate spools. Jim Fellows, in the
dining-room, was saying to Alice:
"I'm going to bring Hal Stephens and Ben Hubert to you this evening;
and by George, Alice, I want you to look after them a little, as _you
can_. They are raw newspaper boys, tumbled into New York; and nobody
cares a hang for them. Nobody does care a hang for any stranger body,
you know. They haven't a decent place to visit, nor a woman to say
a word to them; and yet I tell you they're good fellows. Everybody
curses newspaper reporters and that sort of fellow. Nobody has a good
word for them. It's small salary, and many kicks and cuffs they get at
first; and yet that's the only way to get on the papers, and make a
man of yourself at last; and so, as I've got up above the low rounds,
I want to help the boys that are down there, and I'll tell you, Alice,
it'll do 'em lots of good to know you."
And so Alice was gracious to the new-comers and made them welcome, and
showed them pictures, and drew them out to talk, and made them feel
that they were entertaining her.
Some women have this power of divining what a man can say, and giving
him courage to say it. Alice was one of these; people wondered when
they left her how they had been made to talk so well. It was the best
and truest part of every one's nature that she gave courage and voice
to. This power of young girls to ennoble young men is unhappily one
of which too often they are unconscious. Too often the woman, instead
of being a teacher in the higher life, is only a flatterer of the
weaknesses and lower propensities of the men whose admiration she
seeks.
St. John felt frightened and embarrassed with his message to Angie.
He had dwelt on it, all his way to the house, as an auspicious key to
a conversation which he anticipated with pleasure; yet the evening
rolled by, and though he walked round and round, and nearer and
nearer, and conversed with this and that one, he did not come to the
point of speaking to Angie. Sometimes she was talking to somebody else
and he waited; sometimes she was not with anybody else, and then he
waited lest his joining her should be remarked. He did not stop to ask
himself why on earth it should be remarked any more than if he had
spoken to Alice or Eva, or anybody else, but he felt as if it would be.
At last, however, after making several circles about the table where
she sat with Mrs. Betsey, he sat down by them, and delivered his
message with a formal precision, as if he had been giving her a
summons. Angie was all sympathy and sweetness, and readily said she
would go and see the poor woman the very next day, and then an awkward
pause ensued. She was a little afraid of him as a preternaturally good
man, and began to wonder whether she had been laughing too loud, or
otherwise misbehaving, in the gaiety of her heart, that evening.
So, after a rather dry pause, Mr. St. John uttered some commonplaces
about the books of engravings before them, and then, suddenly seeming
to recollect something he had forgotten, crossed the room to speak to
Dr. Campbell.
"Dear me, child, and so that is your rector," said Mrs. Betsey. "Isn't
he a little stiff?"
"I believe he is not much used to society," said Angie; "but he is a
_very_ good man."
The evening entertainment had rather a curious finale. A spirit of
sociability had descended upon the company, and it was one of those
rare tides that come sometimes where everybody is having a good time,
and nobody looks at one's watch; and so, ten o'clock was long past,
and eleven had struck, and yet there was no movement for dissolving
the session.
Across the way, old Dinah had watched the bright windows with longing
eyes, until finally the spirit of the occasion was too strong for
her, and, bidding Jack lie down and be a good dog, she left her own
precincts and ran across to the kitchen of the festal scene, to pick
up some crumbs for her share.
Jack looked at her in winking obedience as she closed the kitchen
door, being mindful in his own dog's head of a small slip of a pantry
window which had served his roving purposes before now. The moment
Dinah issued from the outer door, Jack bounced from the pantry window
and went padding at a discreet distance from her heels. Sitting down
on the front door-mat of the festive mansion, he occupied himself with
his own reflections till the door opening for a late comer gave him an
opportunity to slip in quietly.
Jack used his entrance ticket with discretion, watched, waited,
reconnoitered, till finally, seeing an unemployed ottoman next Mrs.
Betsey, he suddenly appeared in the midst, sprang up on the ottoman
with easy grace, sat up on his hind paws, and waved his front ones
affably to the public.
The general tumult that ensued, the horror of Miss Dorcas, the
scolding she tried to give Jack, the storm of applause and petting
which greeted him in all quarters, confirming him, as Miss Dorcas
remarked, in his evil ways,--all these may better be imagined than
described.
"A quarter after eleven, sister!"
"Can it be possible?" said Mrs. Betsey. "No wonder Jack came to bring
us home."
Jack seconded the remark with a very staccato bark and a brisk
movement towards the door, where, with much laughing, many hand
shakings, ardent protestations that they had had a delightful evening,
and promises to come again next week, the company dispersed.
_CHAPTER XVIII._
RAKING UP THE FIRE.
The cream of an evening company is the latter end of it, after the
more ceremonious have slipped away and only "we and our folks" remain
to croon and rake up the fire.
Mr. and Mrs. Van Arsdel, Angelique, and Marie went home in the
omnibus. Alice staid to spend the night with Eva, and help put up the
portfolios, and put back the plants, and turn the bower back into a
workroom, and set up the vases of flowers in a cool place where they
could keep till morning; because, you know--you who are versed in
these things--that flowers in December need to be made the most of, in
order to go as far as possible.
Bolton yet lingered in his arm-chair, in his favorite corner, gazing
placidly at the coals of the fire. Dr. Campbell was solacing himself,
after the unsatisfied longings of the evening, with seeing how his own
article looked in print, and Jim Fellows was helping miscellaneously
in setting back flower-pots, re-arranging books, and putting chairs
and tables, that had been arranged festively, back into humdrum
household places. Meanwhile, the kind of talk was going on that
usually follows a social venture--a sort of review of the whole scene
and of all the actors.
"Well, Doctor, what do you think of our rector?" said Eva, tapping his
magazine briskly.
He lowered his magazine and squared himself round gravely.
"That fellow hasn't enough of the abdominal to carry his brain power,"
he said. "Splendid head--a little too high in the upper stories and
not quite heavy enough in the basement. But if he had a good broad,
square chest, and a good digestive and blood-making apparatus, he'd
go. The fellow wants blood; he needs mutton and beef, and plenty of
it. That's what he needs. What's called common sense is largely a
matter of good diet and digestion."
"Oh, Doctor, you materialistic creature!" said Eva, "to think of
talking of a clergyman as if he were a horse--to be managed by
changing his feed!"
"Certainly, a man must be a good animal before he can be a good man."
"Well," said Alice, "all I know is, that Mr. St. John is perfectly,
disinterestedly, heart and soul and body, devoted to doing good among
men; and if that is not noble and grand and godlike, I don't know what
is."
"Well," said Dr. Campbell, "I have a profound respect for all those
fellows that are trying to mop out the Atlantic Ocean; and he mops
cheerfully and with good courage."
"It's perfectly hateful of you, Doctor, to talk so," said Eva.
"Well, you know I don't go in for interfering with nature--having
noble, splendid fellows waste and wear themselves down, to keep
miserable scalawags and ill-begotten vermin from dying out as they
ought to. Nature is doing her best to kill off the poor specimens
of the race, begotten of vice and drunkenness; and what you call
Christian charity is only interference."
"But you do it, Doctor; you know you do. Nobody does more of that very
sort of thing than you do, now. Don't you visit, and give medicine and
nursing, and all that, to just such people?"
"I may be a fool for doing it, for all that," said the Doctor. "I
don't pretend to stick to my principles any better than most people
do. We are all fools, more or less; but I don't believe in Christian
charity: it's all wrong--this doctrine that the brave, strong good
specimens of the race are to torment and tire and worry their lives
out to save the scum and dregs. Here's a man who, by economy, honesty,
justice, temperance and hard work, has grown rich, and has houses,
and lands, and gardens, and pictures, and what not, and is having a
good time as he ought to have, and right by him is another who, by
dishonesty, and idleness, and drinking, has come to rags and poverty
and sickness. Shall the temperate and just man deny himself enjoyment,
and spend his time, and risk his health, and pour out his money, to
take care of the wife and children of this scalawag? There's the
question in a nutshell? and _I_ say, no! If scalawags find that their
duties will be performed for them when they neglect them, that's all
they want. What should St. John live like a hermit for? deny himself
food, rest and sleep? spend a fortune that might make him and some
nice wife happy and comfortable, on drunkards' wives and children? No
sense in it."