"Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest."
THE Saturday afternoon matinee at the Auditorium in Chicago was just
over and the usual crowd was struggling to get to its carriage
before any one else. The Auditorium attendant was shouting out the
numbers of different carriages and the carriage doors were slamming
as the horses were driven rapidly up to the curb, held there
impatiently by the drivers who had shivered long in the raw east
wind, and then let go to plunge for a few minutes into the river of
vehicles that tossed under the elevated railway and finally went
whirling off up the avenue.
"Now then, 624," shouted the Auditorium attendant; "624!" he
repeated, and there dashed up to the curb a splendid span of black
horses attached to a carriage having the monogram, "C. R. S." in
gilt letters on the panel of the door.
Two girls stepped out of the crowd towards the carriage. The older
one had entered and taken her seat and the attendant was still
holding the door open for the younger, who stood hesitating on the
curb.
"Come, Felicia! What are you waiting for! I shall freeze to death!"
called the voice from the carriage.
The girl outside of the carriage hastily unpinned a bunch of English
violets from her dress and handed them to a small boy who was
standing shivering on the edge of the sidewalk almost under the
horses' feet. He took them, with a look of astonishment and a "Thank
ye, lady!" and instantly buried a very grimy face in the bunch of
perfume. The girl stepped into the carriage, the door shut with the
incisive bang peculiar to well-made carriages of this sort, and in a
few moments the coachman was speeding the horses rapidly up one of
the boulevards.
"You are always doing some queer thing or other, Felicia," said the
older girl as the carriage whirled on past the great residences
already brilliantly lighted.
"Am I? What have I done that is queer now, Rose?" asked the other,
looking up suddenly and turning her head towards her sister.
"Oh, giving those violets to that boy! He looked as if he needed a
good hot supper more than a bunch of violets. It's a wonder you
didn't invite him home with us. I shouldn't have been surprised if
you had. You are always doing such queer things."
"Would it be queer to invite a boy like that to come to the house
and get a hot supper?" Felicia asked the question softly and almost
as if she were alone.
"'Queer' isn't just the word, of course," replied Rose
indifferently. "It would be what Madam Blanc calls 'outre.'
Decidedly. Therefore you will please not invite him or others like
him to hot suppers because I suggested it. Oh, dear! I'm awfully
tired."
She yawned, and Felicia silently looked out of the window in the
door.
"The concert was stupid and the violinist was simply a bore. I don't
see how you could sit so still through it all," Rose exclaimed a
little impatiently.
"I liked the music," answered Felicia quietly.
"You like anything. I never saw a girl with so little critical
taste."
Felicia colored slightly, but would not answer. Rose yawned again,
and then hummed a fragment of a popular song. Then she exclaimed
abruptly: "I'm sick of 'most everything. I hope the 'Shadows of
London' will be exciting tonight."
"The 'Shadows of Chicago,'" murmured Felicia. "The 'Shadows of
Chicago!' The 'Shadows of London,' the play, the great drama with
its wonderful scenery, the sensation of New York for two months. You
know we have a box with the Delanos tonight."
Felicia turned her face towards her sister. Her great brown eyes
were very expressive and not altogether free from a sparkle of
luminous heat.
"And yet we never weep over the real thing on the actual stage of
life. What are the 'Shadows of London' on the stage to the shadows
of London or Chicago as they really exist? Why don't we get excited
over the facts as they are?"
"Because the actual people are dirty and disagreeable and it's too
much bother, I suppose," replied Rose carelessly. "Felicia, you can
never reform the world. What's the use? We're not to blame for the
poverty and misery. There have always been rich and poor; and there
always will be. We ought to be thankful we're rich."
"Suppose Christ had gone on that principle," replied Felicia, with
unusual persistence. "Do you remember Dr. Bruce's sermon on that
verse a few Sundays ago: 'For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that though he was rich yet for our sakes he became poor,
that ye through his poverty might become rich'?"
"I remember it well enough," said Rose with some petulance, "and
didn't Dr. Bruce go on to say that there is no blame attached to
people who have wealth if they are kind and give to the needs of the
poor? And I am sure that he himself is pretty comfortably settled.
He never gives up his luxuries just because some people go hungry.
What good would it do if he did? I tell you, Felicia, there will
always be poor and rich in spite of all we can do. Ever since Rachel
Winslow has written about those queer doings in Raymond you have
upset the whole family. People can't live at that concert pitch all
the time. You see if Rachel doesn't give it up soon. It's a great
pity she doesn't come to Chicago and sing in the Auditorium
concerts. She has received an offer. I'm going to write and urge her
to come. I'm just dying to hear her sing."
Felicia looked out of the window and was silent. The carriage rolled
on past two blocks of magnificent private residences and turned into
a wide driveway under a covered passage, and the sisters hurried
into the house. It was an elegant mansion of gray stone furnished
like a palace, every corner of it warm with the luxury of paintings,
sculpture, art and modern refinement.
The owner of it all, Mr. Charles R. Sterling, stood before an open
grate fire smoking a cigar. He had made his money in grain
speculation and railroad ventures, and was reputed to be worth
something over two millions. His wife was a sister of Mrs. Winslow
of Raymond. She had been an invalid for several years. The two
girls, Rose and Felicia, were the only children. Rose was twenty-one
years old, fair, vivacious, educated in a fashionable college, just
entering society and already somewhat cynical and indifferent. A
very hard young lady to please, her father said, sometimes
playfully, sometimes sternly. Felicia was nineteen, with a tropical
beauty somewhat like her cousin, Rachel Winslow, with warm, generous
impulses just waking into Christian feeling, capable of all sorts of
expression, a puzzle to her father, a source of irritation to her
mother and with a great unsurveyed territory of thought and action
in herself, of which she was more than dimly conscious. There was
that in Felicia that would easily endure any condition in life if
only the liberty to act fully on her conscientious convictions were
granted her.
"Here's a letter for you, Felicia," said Mr. Sterling, handing it to
her.
Felicia sat down and instantly opened the letter, saying as she did
so: "It's from Rachel."
"Well, what's the latest news from Raymond?" asked Mr. Sterling,
taking his cigar out of his mouth and looking at Felicia with
half-shut eyes, as if he were studying her.
"Rachel says Dr. Bruce has been staying in Raymond for two Sundays
and has seemed very much interested in Mr. Maxwell's pledge in the
First Church."
"What does Rachel say about herself?" asked Rose, who was lying on a
couch almost buried under elegant cushions.
"She is still singing at the Rectangle. Since the tent meetings
closed she sings in an old hall until the new buildings which her
friend, Virginia Page, is putting up are completed.
"I must write Rachel to come to Chicago and visit us. She ought not
to throw away her voice in that railroad town upon all those people
who don't appreciate her."
Mr. Sterling lighted a new cigar and Rose exclaimed: "Rachel is so
queer. She might set Chicago wild with her voice if she sang in the
Auditorium. And there she goes on throwing it away on people who
don't know what they are hearing."
"Rachel won't come here unless she can do it and keep her pledge at
the same time," said Felicia, after a pause.
"What pledge?" Mr. Sterling asked the question and then added
hastily: "Oh, I know, yes! A very peculiar thing that. Alexander
Powers used to be a friend of mine. We learned telegraphy in the
same office. Made a great sensation when he resigned and handed over
that evidence to the Interstate Commerce Commission. And he's back
at his telegraph again. There have been queer doings in Raymond
during the past year. I wonder what Dr. Bruce thinks of it on the
whole. I must have a talk with him about it."
"He is at home and will preach tomorrow," said Felicia. "Perhaps he
will tell us something about it."
There was silence for a minute. Then Felicia said abruptly, as if
she had gone on with a spoken thought to some invisible hearer: "And
what if he should propose the same pledge to the Nazareth Avenue
Church?"
"Who? What are you talking about?" asked her father a little
sharply.
"About Dr. Bruce. I say, what if he should propose to our church
what Mr. Maxwell proposed to his, and ask for volunteers who would
pledge themselves to do everything after asking the question, 'What
would Jesus do?'"
"There's no danger of it," said Rose, rising suddenly from the couch
as the tea-bell rang.
"It's a very impracticable movement, to my mind," said Mr. Sterling
shortly.
"I understand from Rachel's letter that the Raymond church is going
to make an attempt to extend the idea of the pledge to other
churches. If it succeeds it will certainly make great changes in the
churches and in people's lives," said Felicia.
"Oh, well, let's have some tea first!" said Rose, walking into the
dining-room. Her father and Felicia followed, and the meal proceeded
in silence. Mrs. Sterling had her meals served in her room. Mr.
Sterling was preoccupied. He ate very little and excused himself
early, and although it was Saturday night, he remarked as he went
out that he should be down town on some special business.
"Don't you think father looks very much disturbed lately?" asked
Felicia a little while after he had gone out.
"Oh, I don't know! I hadn't noticed anything unusual," replied Rose.
After a silence she said: "Are you going to the play tonight,
Felicia? Mrs. Delano will be here at half past seven. I think you
ought to go. She will feel hurt if you refuse."
"I'll go. I don't care about it. I can see shadows enough without
going to the play."
"That's a doleful remark for a girl nineteen years old to make,"
replied Rose. "But then you're queer in your ideas anyhow, Felicia.
If you are going up to see mother, tell her I'll run in after the
play if she is still awake."
Felicia went up to see her mother and remained with her until the
Delano carriage came. Mrs. Sterling was worried about her husband. She
talked incessantly, and was irritated by every remark Felicia made. She
would not listen to Felicia's attempts to read even a part of Rachel's
letter, and when Felicia offered to stay with her for the evening, she
refused the offer with a good deal of positive sharpness.