Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  There was something that piqued Eva’s curiosity about these movements, and just as the door was opening behind her into the Vanderheyden house, the strange woman turned away, and as she turned, the light of the street lamp flashed strongly on her face. Its expression of haggard pain and misery was something that struck to Eva’s heart, though it was but a momentary glimpse, as she turned to go into the house; for, after all, the woman was nothing to her, and the glimpse of her face was purely an accident, such as occurs to one hundreds of times in the streets of a city. Still, like the sound of a sob or a cry from one unknown, the misery of those dark eyes struck painfully to Eva’s heart; as if to her, young, beloved, gay and happy, some of the ever-present but hidden anguish of life — the great invisible mass of sorrow — had made an appeal.

  But she went in and shut the door, gave one sigh, and dismissed it.

  CHAPTER XIV

  MR. ST. JOHN IS OUT-ARGUED

  A WOMAN has two vernal seasons in her life. One is the fresh, sweetbrier, apple-blossom spring of girlhood — dewy, bird-singing, joyous, and transient. The other is the spring of young marriage, before the austere labors and severe strains of real life commence. It is the spring of wedding presents, of first housekeeping, of incipient, undeveloped matronage. If the young girl is charming, with her dawning airs of womanhood, her inexperienced naïve assumptions, her grave, ignorant wisdom, at which elders smile indulgently — so is the new-made wife with her little matronly graces, her pretty sense of responsibility in her new world of power.

  In the first period the young girl herself is the object of attention and devotion. She is the permitted centre of all eyes, the leading star of her own little drama of life. But with marriage the centre changes. Self begins to melt away into something higher. The girl recognizes that it is no longer her individuality that is the chief thing, but that she is the priestess and minister of a family state. The home becomes her centre, and to her home passes the charm that once was thrown around her person. The pride that she may have had in self becomes a pride in her home. Her home is the new impersonation of herself; it is her throne, her empire. How often do we see the young wife more sensitive to the adornment of her house than the adornment of her person, willing even to retrench and deny in the last, that her home may become more cheerful and attractive! A pretty set of china for her tea-table goes farther with her than a gay robe for herself. She will sacrifice ribbons and laces for means to adorn the sacred recesses which have become to her an expansion of her own being.

  The freshness of a new life invests every detail of the freshly arranged ménage. Her china, her bronzes, her pictures, her silver, her table-cloths and napkins, her closets and pantries, all speak to her of a new sense of possession —— a new and different hold on life. Once she was only a girl, moving among things that belonged to mamma and papa; now she is a matron, surrounded everywhere by things that are her own — a princess in her own little kingdom. Nor is the charm lessened that she no longer uses the possessive singular, but says “our.” And behind those pronouns, “we” and “our,” what pleasant security! What innocent pharisaism of self-complacency, as each congratulates the other on “our” ways, “our” plans, “our” arrangements; each, the while sure that they two are the fortunate among mankind, and that all who are not blest as they are proper subjects for indulgent pity. “After all, my dear,” says he, “what can you expect of poor Snooks?

  —— a bachelor, poor fellow. If he only had a wife like you, now,” etc., etc. Or, “I can’t really blame Cynthia with that husband of hers, Harry dear. If I were married to such a man, I should act like a little fiend. If she had only such a husband as you, now!” This secret, respectable, mutual admiration society of married life, of how much courage and hope is it the parent! For, do not our failures and mistakes often come from discouragement? Does not every human being need a believing second self, whose support and approbation shall reinforce one’s failing courage? The saddest hours of life are when we doubt ourselves. To sensitive, excitable people, who expend nervous energy freely, must come many such low tides.

  “Am I really a miserable failure — a poor, good-for-nothing, abortive attempt?” In such crises we need another self to restore our equilibrium.

  Our young friends were just in the second spring of life’s new year. They were as fond and proud of their little house as a prince of his palace — possibly a good deal more so. They were proud of each other. Eva felt sure that Harry was destined to the high places of the literary world. She read his editorials with sincere admiration, hid his poems away in her heart, and pasted them carefully in her scrap-book. Fame and success she felt sure ought to come to him, and would. He was “such a faithful, noble-hearted fellow, and worked so steadily.” And he, with what pride he spoke the words “my wife”! With what exultation repressed under an air of playful indifference he brought this and that associate in to dine, and enjoyed the admiration of her and her pretty home, and graceful, captivating ways. He liked to see the effect of her gay, sparkling conversation, her easy grace, on these new subjects; for Eva was, in truth, a charming woman. The mixture of innocent shrewdness, of sprightly insight, of bright and airy fancy about her, made her society a thing to be longed after, as people long for a pleasant stimulant. Like all bright, earnest young men, Harry wanted to “lend a hand” to make the world around him brighter and better, and had his ideas of what a charming, attractive home might do as a centre to many hearts in promoting mutual brotherhood and good fellowship. He had not a doubt of their little social venture in society, nor that Eva was precisely the person to make of their house a pleasant resort, to be in herself the blending and interpreting medium through whom differing and even discordant natures should be brought to understand the good that was in one another.

  As a preparation for the first experiment, Eva had commenced by inviting Mr. St. John to dinner, that she might enlist his approbation of her scheme and have time to set it before him in that charming fireside hour, when spirits, like flowers, open to catch the dews of influence. After dinner Harry had an engagement at the printing-office, and left Eva the field all to herself; and she managed her cards admirably. Mr. St. John had been little accustomed to the society of cultured, attractive women; but he had in his own refined nature every sensibility to respond agreeably to its influences; and already this fireside had come to be a place where he loved to linger. And so, when she had him comfortably niched in his corner, she opened the first parallel of her siege.

  “Now, Mr. St. John, you have been preaching to us about self-denial, and patting us all up to deeds of self-sacrifice — I have some self-denying work to propose to you.”

  Mr. St. John opened his blue eyes wide at this exordium, and looked an interrogation.

  “Well, Mr. St. John,” pursued Eva, “we are going to have little social reunions at our house every Thursday, from seven till ten, for the purpose of promoting good feeling and fellowship, and we want our rector to be one of us and help us.”

  “Indeed, Mrs. Henderson, I have not the least social tact. My sphere doesn’t lie at all in that direction,” said Mr. St. John nervously. “I have no taste for general society.”

  “Yes, but I think you told us last Sunday we were not to consult our tastes. You told us that if we felt a strong distaste for any particular course, it might possibly show that just here the true path of Christian heroism lay.”

  “You turn my words upon me, Mrs. Henderson. I was thinking then of the distaste that people usually feel for visiting the poor and making themselves practically familiar with the unlovely side of life.”

  “Well, but may it not apply the other way? You are perfectly familiar and at home among the poor, but you have always avoided society among cultured persons of your own class. May not the real self-denial for you lie there? You have a fastidious shrinking from strangers. May it not be your duty to overcome it? There are a great many I know in our circle who might be the better for knowing you. Have you a right to shrin
k back from them?”

  Mr. St. John moved uneasily in his chair.

  “Now,” pursued Eva, “there’s a young Dr. Campbell that I want you to know. To be sure, he isn’t a believer in the Church — not a believer at all, I fear; but still a charming, benevolent, kindly, open-hearted man, and I want him to know you, and come under good influences.”

  “I don’t believe I’m at all adapted,” said Mr. St. John hesitatingly.

  “Well, dear sir, what do you say to us when we say the same about mission work? Don’t you tell us that if we honestly try we shall learn to adapt ourselves?”

  “That is true,” said St. John frankly.

  “Besides,” said Eva, “Mr. St. John, Dr. Campbell might do you good. All your friends feel that you are too careless of your health. Indeed, we all feel great concern about it, and you might learn something of Dr. Campbell in this.”

  Thus Eva pursued her advantage with that fluent ability with which a pretty young woman at her own fireside always gets the best of the argument. Mr. St. John, attacked on the weak side of conscientiousness, was obliged at last to admit that to spend an evening with agreeable, cultivated, well-dressed people might be occasionally as much a shepherd’s duty as to sit in the close, ill-smelling rooms of poverty and listen to the croonings and maunderings of the ill-educated, improvident, and foolish, who make so large a proportion of the less fortunate classes of society. It had been suggested to him that a highly educated, agreeable young doctor, who talked materialism and dissented from the Thirty-Nine Articles, might as properly be borne with as a drinking young mechanic who talked unbelief of a lower and less respectable order.

  Now it so happened, by one of those unexpected coincidences that fall out in the eternal order of things, that Eva was reinforced in her course of argument by a silent and subtle influence, of which she was herself scarcely aware. The day seldom passed that one or other of her sisters did not form a part of her family circle, and on this day of all others the fates had willed that Angelique should come up to work on her Christmas presents by Eva’s fireside.

  Imagine, therefore, as the scene of this conversation, a fire-lighted room, the evening flicker of the blaze falling in flecks and flashes over books and pictures, and Mr. St. John in a dark, sheltered corner, surveying without being surveyed, listening to Eva’s animated logic, and yet watching a very pretty tableau in the opposite corner.

  There sat Angelique, listening to the conversation, with the firelight falling in flashes on her golden hair and her lap full of worsteds — rosy, pink, blue, lilac, and yellow. Her little hands were busy in some fleecy wonder, designed to adorn the Christmas-tree for the mission school of his church; and she knit and turned and twisted the rosy mystery with an air of grave interest, the while giving an attentive ear to the conversation.

  Mr. St. John was not aware that he was looking at her; in fact, he supposed he was listening to Eva, who was eloquently setting forth to him all the good points in Dr. Campbell’s character, and the reasons why it was his duty to seek and cultivate his acquaintance; but while she spoke and while he replied he saw the little hands moving, and a sort of fairy web weaving, and the face changing as, without speaking a word, she followed with bright, innocent sympathy the course of the conversation.

  When Eva, with a becoming air of matronly gravity, lectured him for his reckless treatment of his own health, and his want of a proper guide on that subject, Angelique’s eyes seemed to say the same; and sometimes, when Eva turned just the faintest light of satire on the ascetic notions to which he was prone, those same eyes sparkled with that frank gayety that her dimpled face seemed made to express. Now the kitten catches at her thread, and she stops, and bends over and dangles the ball, and laughs softly to herself, and St. John from his dark corner watches the play. There is something of the kitten in her, he thinks. Even her gravest words have suggested the air of a kitten on good behavior, and perhaps she may be a naughty, wicked kitten — who knows? A kitten lying in wait to catch unwary birds and mice! But she looked so artless — so innocent! — her little head bent on one side like a flower, and her eyes sparkling as if she were repressing a laugh!

  —— a nervous idea shot through the conversation to Mr. St. John’s heart. What if this girl should laugh at him? St. Jerome himself might have been vulnerable to a poisoned arrow like this. What if he really were getting absurd notions and ways in the owl-like recesses and retirements of his study — growing rusty, unfit for civilized life? Clearly it was his duty to “come forth into the light of things,” and before he left that evening he gave his pledge to Eva that he would be one of the patrons of her new social enterprise.

  It is to be confessed that as he went home that night he felt that duty had never worn an aspect so agreeable. It was certainly his place as a good fisher of men to study the habits of the cultured, refined, and influential portion of society, as well as of its undeveloped children. Then, he didn’t say it to himself, but the scene where these investigations were to be pursued rose before him insensibly as one where Angelique was to be one of the entertainers. It would give him a better opportunity of studying the genus and habits of that variety of the Church militant who train in the uniform of fashionable girls, and to decide the yet doubtful question whether they had any genuine capacity for Church work. Angelique’s evident success with her class was a puzzle to him, and he thought he would like to know her better, and see if real, earnest, serious purposes could exist under that gay exterior.

  Somehow, he could not fancy those laughing eyes and that willful, curly, golden hair under the stiff cap of a Sister of Charity; and he even doubted whether a gray cloak would seem as appropriate as the blue robe and ermine cape where the poor little child had rested her scarred cheek. He liked to think of her just as she looked then and there. And why shouldn’t he get acquainted with her? If he was ever going to form a sisterhood of good works, certainly it was his duty to understand the sisters. Clearly it was!

  CHAPTER XV

  GETTING READY TO BEGIN

  “HAVING company” is one of those incidents of life which, in all circles, high or low, cause more or less searchings of heart. Even the moderate “tea-fight” of good old times necessitated not only anxious thought in the hostess herself, but also a mustering and review of best “bibs and tuckers” through the neighborhood. But to undertake a “serial sociable” in New York, in this day of serials, was something even graver, causing many thoughts and words in many houses.

  Witness the following specimens: —

  “I confess, Nelly, I can’t understand Eva’s ways,” said Aunt Maria, the morning of the first Thursday. “She don’t come to me for advice; but I confess I don’t understand her.”

  Aunt Maria was in a gloomy, severe state of mind, owing to the contumacy and base ingratitude of Alice in rejecting her interposition and care, and she came down this morning to signify her displeasure to Nelly at the way she had been treated.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sister,” said Mrs. Yan Arsdel deprecatingly. “I’m sure I don’t know of anything that Eva’s been doing lately.”

  “Why, these evenings of hers; I don’t understand them. Setting out to have receptions in that little out-of-the-way shell of hers! Why, who’ll go? Nobody wants to ramble off up there, and not get to anything after all. It’s going to be a sort of mixed-up affair — newspaper men, and people that nobody knows — all well enough in their way, perhaps; but I sha’n’t be mixed up in it.” Aunt Maria nodded her head gloomily, and the bows and feathers on her hat quivered protestingly.

  “Oh, they are going to be just unpretending sociable little gatherings,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel. “Just the family and a few friends; and I think they are going to be pleasant. I wish you would go, Maria. Eva will be disappointed.”

  “No, she won’t. It’s evident, Nelly, that your girls don’t any of them care about me, or regard anything I say. Well, I only hope they mayn’t live to repent it; that’s all.”

  Aunt M
aria said this with that menacing sniff with which people in a bad humor usually dispense Christian charity. The dark awfulness of the hope expressed really chilled poor little Mrs. Van Arsdel’s blood. From long habits of dependence upon her sister, she had come to regard her displeasure as one of the severer evils of life. To keep the peace with Maria, as far as she herself was concerned, would have been easy. Contention was fatiguing to her. It was a trouble to have the responsibility of making up her own mind; and she was quite willing that Maria should carry her through the journey of life, buy her tickets, choose her hotels, and settle with her cabmen. But, complicated with a husband, and a family of bright, independent daughters, each endowed with a separate will of her own, Mrs. Van Arsdel led on the whole a hard life. People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it. It’s all very well for a gentle acquiescent spirit to be carried through life by one bearer. But when half a dozen bearers quarrel and insist on carrying one opposite ways, the more facile the spirit, the greater the trouble.

  Mrs. Van Arsdel, in fact, passed a good deal of her life in being talked over to one course of conduct by Aunt Maria, and talked back again by her girls. She resembled a weak, peaceable hamlet on the border-land between France and Germany, taken and retaken with much wear and tear of spirit, and heartily wishing peace at any price.

  “I don’t see how Eva is going to afford all this,” continued Aunt Maria gloomily.

  “Oh! there’s to be no evening entertainment, nothing but a little tea, and biscuit, and sponge-cake, in the most social way,” pleaded Mrs. Van Arsdel.

  “But all this, every week, in time comes to a good deal,” said Aunt Maria. “Now, if Eva would put all the extra trouble and expense of these evenings into one good handsome party of select people and have it over with, why, that would be something worth while, and I would help her get it up. Such a party stands for something. But she doesn’t come to me for advice. I’m a superannuated old woman, I suppose,” and Aunt Maria sighed in a way heart-breaking to her peace-loving sister.