Mrs. Wouvermans, however, was not of a dozing or dreamy nature. Her mind, such as it was, was always wide awake and cognizant of what she was about. She was not susceptible of a dreamy state; to use an idiomatic phrase, she was always up and dressed; everything in her mental vision was clear-cut and exact. The sermon was intensified in its effect upon her by the state of the Van Arsdel pew, of which she was on this Sunday the only occupant. The fact was, that the ancient and respectable church in which she worshiped had just been through a contest, in which Mr. Simons, a young assistant rector, had been attempting to introduce some of the very practices hinted at in the discourse. This fervid young man, full of fire and enthusiasm, had incautiously been made associate rector for this church at the time when Dr. Cushing had been sent to Europe to recover from a bronchial attack. He was young, earnest, and eloquent, and possessed with the idea that all those burning words and phrases in the Prayer-Book, which had dropped like precious gems dyed with the heart’s blood of saints and martyrs, ought to mean something more than they seemed to do for modern Christians. Without introducing any new ritual, he set himself to make vivid and imperative every doctrine and direction of the Prayer-Book, and to bring the drowsy company of pewholders somewhere up within sight of the plane of the glorious company of apostles and the noble army of martyrs with whose blood it was sealed. He labored and preached, and strove and prayed, tugging at the drowsy old church, like Pegasus harnessed to a stone cart. He set up morning and evening prayers, had Communion every Sunday, and annoyed old rich saints by suggesting that it was their duty to build mission chapels and carry on mission works, after the pattern of St. Paul and other irrelevant and excessive worthies, who in their time were accused of turning the world upside down. Of course there was resistance and conflict, and more life in the old church than it had known for years; but the conflict became at last so wearisome that, on Mr. Cushing’s return from Europe, the young angel spread his wings and fled away to a more congenial parish in a neighboring city. But many in whom his labors had wakened a craving for something real and earnest in religion strayed off to other churches, and notably the younger members of the Van Arsdel family, to the no small scandal of Aunt Maria.
The Van Arsdel pew was a perfect fort and intrenchment of respectability. It was a great high, square wall-pew, well cushioned and ample, with an imposing array of Prayer-Books; there was room in it for a regiment of saints, and here Aunt Maria sat on this pleasant Sunday listening to the dangers of the Church, all alone. She felt, in a measure, like Elijah the Tishbite, as if she only were left to stand up for the altars of her faith. Mrs. Wouvermans was not a person to let an evil run on very far without a protest. “While she was musing the fire burned,” and when she had again mounted guard in the pew at afternoon service, and still found herself alone, she resolved to clear her conscience; and so she walked straight up to Nelly’s, to see why none of them were at church.
“It’s a shame, Nelly, a perfect shame! There wasn’t a creature but myself in our pew to-day, and good Dr. Cushing giving such a sermon this morning!”
This to Mrs. Van Arsdel, whom she found luxuriously ensconced on a sofa drawn up before the fire in her bedroom.
“Ah, well, the fact is, Maria, I had such a headache this morning,” replied she plaintively.
“Well, then, you ought to have made your husband and family go; somebody ought to be there! It positively isn’t respectable.”
“Ah, well, Maria, my husband, poor man, gets so tired and worn out with his week’s work, I haven’t a heart to get him up early enough for morning service. Mr. Van Arsdel isn’t feeling quite well lately; he hasn’t been out at all to-day.”
“Well, there are the girls, Alice and Angelique and Marie, where are they? All going up to that old Popish, ritualistic chapel, I suppose. It’s too bad. Now, that’s all the result of Mr. Simons’s imprudences. I told you, in the time of it, just what it would lead to. It leads straight to Rome, just as I said. Mr. Simons set them a-going, and now he is gone and they go where they have lighted candles on the altar every Sunday, and Mr. St. John prays with his back to them, and has processions, and wears all sorts of heathenish robes; and your daughters go there, Nelly.” The very plumes in Aunt Maria’s hat nodded with warning energy as she spoke.
“Are you sure the candles are lighted?” said Mrs. Van Arsdel, sitting up with a weak show of protest, and looking gravely into the fire. “I was up there once, and there were candles on the altar, to be sure, but they were not lighted.”
“They are lighted,” said Mrs. Wouvermans, with awful precision. “I’ve been up there myself and seen them. Now, how can you let your children run at loose ends so, Nelly? I only wish you had heard the sermon this morning. He showed the danger of running into Popery; and it really was enough to make one’s blood run cold to hear how those infidels are attacking the Church, carrying all before them; and then to think that the only true Church should be all getting divided and mixed up and running after Romanism! It’s perfectly awful.”
“Well, I don’t know what we can do,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel helplessly.
“And we’ve got both kinds of trouble in our family. Eva’s husband is reading all What’s-his-name’s works — that Evolution man, and all that; and then Eva and the girls going after this St. John — and he’s leading them as straight to Rome as they can go.”
Poor Mrs. Van Arsdel was somewhat fluttered by this alarming view of the case, and clasped her pretty, fat, white hands, that glittered with rings like lilies with dew-drops, and looked the image of gentle, incapable perplexity.
“I don’t believe Harry is an infidel,” she said at last. “He has to read Darwin and all those things, because he has to talk about them in the magazine; and as to Mr. St. John — you know Eva is delicate and can’t walk so far as our church, and this is right round the corner from her; and Mr. St. John is a good man. He does ever so much for the poor, and almost supports a mission there; and the Bishop doesn’t forbid him, and if the Bishop thought there was any danger he would.”
“Well, I can’t think, for my part, what our Bishop can be thinking of,” said Aunt Maria, who was braced up to an extraordinary degree by the sermon of the morning. “I don’t see how he can let them go on so — with candles, and processions, and heathen robes, and all that. I’d process ’em out of the Church in quick time. If I were he, I’d have all that sort of trumpery cleaned out at once; for just see where it leads to! I may not be as good a Christian as I ought to be — we all have our shortcomings — but one thing I know, I do hate the Catholics and all that belongs to them; and I’d no more have such goings on in my diocese than I’d have moths in my carpet! I’d sweep ’em right out!” said Aunt Maria, with a gesture as if she held the besom of destruction.
Mrs. Wouvermans belonged to a not uncommon class of Christians, whose evidences of piety are more vigorous in hating than in loving. There is no manner of doubt that she would have made good her word had she been a bishop.
“Oh, well, Maria,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel, drawing her knit zephyr shawl about her with a sort of consolatory movement, and settling herself cosily back on her sofa, “it’s evident that the Bishop doesn’t see just as you do, and I am content to allow what he does. As to the girls, they are old enough to judge for themselves, and, besides, I think they are doing some good by teaching in that mission school. I hope so, at least. Anyway, I couldn’t help it if I would. But, do tell me, did Mrs. Demas have on her new bonnet?”
“Yes, she did,” said Aunt Maria, with vigor; “and I can tell you it’s a perfect fright, if it did come from Paris. Another thing I saw — fringes have come round again! Mrs. Lamar’s new cloak was trimmed with fringe.”
“You don’t say so,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel, contemplating all the possible consequences of this change. “There was another reason why I couldn’t go out this morning,” «he added rather irrelevantly—”I had no bonnet. Adrienne couldn’t get the kind of ruche necessary to finish it till next week, and the
old one is too shabby. Were the Stuyvesants out?”
“Oh yes, in full force. She has the same bonnet she wore last year, done over with a new feather.”
“Oh, well, the Stuyvesants can do as they please,” said Mrs. Yan Arsdel; “everybody knows who they are, let them wear what they will.”
“Emma Stuyvesant had a new Paris hat and a sack trimmed with bullion fringe,” continued Aunt Maria. “I thought I’d tell you, because you can use what was on your velvet dress over again; it’s just as good as ever.”
“So I can” — and for a moment the great advantage of going punctually to church appeared to Mrs. Van Arsdel. “Did you see Sophie Sydney?”
“Yes. She was gorgeous in a mauve suit with hat to match; but she has gone off terribly in her looks — yellow as a lemon.”
“Who else did you see?” said Mrs. Van Arsdel, who liked this topic of conversation better than the dangers of the Church.
“Oh, well, the Davenports were there, and the Livingstones, and of course Polly Elmore, with her tribe, looking like birds of paradise. The amount of time and money and thought that family gives to dress is enormous! John Davenport stopped and spoke to me coming out of church. He says, ‘Seems to me, Mrs. Wouvermans, your young ladies have deserted us; you mustn’t suffer them to stray from the fold,’ says he. I saw he had his eye on our pew when he first came into church.”
“I think, Maria, you really are quite absurd in your suspicions about that man,” said Mrs. Yan Arsdel. “I don’t think there’s anything in it.”
“Well, just wait now and see. I know more about it than you do. If only Alice manages her cards right, she can get that man.”
“Alice will never manage cards for any purpose. She is too proud for that. She hasn’t a bit of policy.”
“And there was that Jim Fellows waiting on her home. I met him this morning, just as I turned the corner.”
“Well, Alice tries to exert a good influence over Jim, and has got him to teach in Mr. St. John’s Sunday-school.”
“Fiddlesticks! What does he care for Sunday-school?”
“Well, the girls all say that he does nicely. He has more influence over that class of hoys than anybody else would.”
“Likely! ‘Set a rogue to catch a rogue,’” said Aunt Maria. “It’s his being seen so much with Alice that I’m thinking of. You may depend upon it, it has a bad effect.”
Mrs. Van Arsdel dreaded the setting of her sister’s mind in this direction, so by way of effecting a diversion she rang and inquired when tea would be ready. As the door opened, the sound of very merry singing came upstairs. Angelique was seated at the piano and playing tunes out of one of the Sunday-school manuals, and the whole set were singing with might and main. Jim’s tenor could be heard above all the rest.
“Why, is that fellow here?” said Aunt Maria.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel; “he very often stays to tea with us Sunday nights, and he and the girls sing hymns together.”
“Hymns!” said Aunt Maria. “I should call that a regular jollification that they are having down there.”
“Oh, well, Maria, they are singing children’s tunes out of one of the little Sunday-school manuals. You know children’s tunes are so different from old-fashioned psalm tunes!”
Just then the choir below struck up
“Onward, Christian soldier,”
with a marching energy and a vivacity that were positively startling, and, to be sure, not in the least like the old, long-drawn, dolorous strains once supposed to be peculiar to devotion. In fact, one of the greatest signs of progress in our modern tunes is the bursting forth of religious thought and feeling in childhood and youth in strains gay and airy as hope and happiness — melodies that might have been learned of those bright little “fowls of the air,” of whom the Master bade us take lessons, so that a company of wholesome, healthy, right-minded young people can now get together and express themselves in songs of joy, and hope, and energy, such as childhood and youth ought to be full of.
Let those who will talk of the decay of Christian faith in our day; so long as songs about Jesus and his love are bursting forth on every hand, thick as violets and apple blossoms in June, so long as the little Sunday-school song-books sell by thousands and by millions, and spring forth every year in increasing numbers, so long will it appear that faith is ever fresh-springing and vital. It was the little children in the temple who cried, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” when chief priests and scribes were scowling and saying, “Master, forbid them,” and doubtless the same dear Master loves to hear these child-songs now as then.
At all events, our little party were having a gay and festive time over two or three new collections of Clarion, Golden Chain, Golden Shower, or what not, of which Jim had brought a pocketful for the girls to try, and certainly the melodies as they came up were bright and lively and pretty enough to stir one’s blood pleasantly. In fact, both Aunt Maria and Mrs. Van Arsdel were content for a season to leave the door open and listen.
“You see,” said Mrs. Yan Arsdel, “Jim is such a pleasant, convenient, obliging fellow, and has done so many civil turns for the family, that we quite make him at home here; we don’t mind him at all. It’s a pleasant thing, too, and a convenience, now the boys are gone, to have some young man that one feels perfectly free with to wait on the girls; and where there are so many of them there’s less danger of anything particular. There’s no earthly danger of Alice’s being specially interested in Jim. He isn’t at all the person she would ever think seriously of, though she likes him as a friend.”
Mrs. Wouvermans apparently acquiesced for the time in this reasoning, but secretly resolved to watch appearances narrowly this evening, and, if she saw what warranted the movement, to take the responsibility of the case into her own hands forthwith. Her perfect immutable and tranquil certainty that she was the proper person to manage anything within the sphere of her vision gave her courage to go forward in spite of the fears and remonstrances of any who might have claimed that they were parties concerned.
Mr. Jim Fellows was one of those persons in whom a sense of humor operates as a subtle lubricating oil through all the internal machinery of the mind, causing all which might otherwise have jarred or grated to slide easily. Many things which would be a torture to more earnest people were to him a source of amusement. In fact, humor was so far a leading faculty that it was difficult to keep him within limits of propriety and decorum, and prevent him from racing off at unsuitable periods like a kitten after a pinball, skipping over all solemnities of etiquette and decorum. He had not been so long intimate in the family without perfectly taking the measure of so very active and forth-putting a member as Aunt Maria. He knew exactly —— as well as if she had told him — how she regarded him, for his knowledge of character was not the result of study, but that sort of clear sight which in persons of quick perceptive organs seems like a second sense. He saw into persons without an effort, and what he saw for the most part only amused him.
He perceived immediately on sitting down to tea that he was under the glance of Mrs. Wouvermans’s watchful and critical eye, and the result was that he became full and ready to boil over with wicked drollery. With an apparently grave face, without passing the limits of the most ceremonious politeness and decorum, he contrived, by a thousand fleeting indescribable turns and sliding intonations and adroit movements, to get all the girls into a tempest of suppressed gayety. There are wicked rogues known to us all who have this magical power of making those around them burst out into indiscreet sallies of laughter, while they retain the most edifying and innocent air of gravity. Seated next to Aunt Maria, Jim managed, by most devoted attention and reverential listening, to draw from her a zealous analysis of the morning sermon, which she gave with the more heat and vigor, hoping thereby to reprove the stray sheep who had thus broken boundaries.
Her views of the danger of modern speculation, and her hearty measures for its repression, were given with an earnestness that was fr
om the heart.
“I can’t understand what anybody wants to have these controversies for, and listen to these infidel philosophers. I never doubt. I never have doubted. I don’t think I have altered an iota of my religious faith since I was seven years old; and if I had the control of things, I’d put a stop to all this sort of fuss.”
“You then would side with his Holiness the Pope,” said Jim. “That’s precisely the ground of his last allocution.”
“No, indeed, I shouldn’t. I think Popery is worse yet — it’s terrible! Dr. Cushing showed that this morning, and it’s the greatest danger of our day; and I think that Mr. St. John of yours is nothing more than a decoy duck to lead you all to Rome. I went up there once and saw ’em genuflecting, and turning to the east, and burning candles, and that’s all I want to know about them.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 383
