Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “Well, I suppose you are right, Eva; and after all I’m sorry for poor Mary. She had a hard time with her marriage all round; and I suppose it’s no wonder Maggie went astray. Mary couldn’t control her; and handsome girls in that walk of life are so tempted. How does she get on?”

  “Oh, nicely, for the most part. She seems to have a sort of adoration for me. I can say or do anything with her, and she really is very handy and skillful with her needle; she has ripped up and made over an old dress for me so you’d be quite astonished to see it, and seems really pleased and interested to have something to do. If only her mother will let her alone, and not keep nagging her, and bringing up old offenses. Mary is so eager to make her do right that she isn’t judicious; she doesn’t realize how sensitive and sore people are that know they have been wrong. Maggie is a proud girl.”

  “Oh, well, she’s no business to be proud,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel. “I’m sure she ought to be humbled in the very dust; that’s the least one should expect.”

  “And so ought we all,” said Eva, “but we are not, and she isn’t. She makes excuses for herself, and feels as if she had been abused and hardly treated, just as most of us do when we go wrong, and I tell Mary not to talk to her about the past, but just quietly let her do better in future; but it’s very hard to get her to feel that Maggie ought not to be willing to be lectured and preached to from morning till night.”

  “Your Aunt Maria, no doubt, will come up and free her mind to you about this affair,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel. “She has a scheme in her head of getting another girl for you in Mary’s place. The Willises are going abroad for three years and have given their servants leave to advertise from the house; and your aunt left me Saturday, saying she was going up there to ascertain all about them and get you the refusal of one of them, provided you wished to get rid of Mary.”

  “Get rid of Mary! I think I see myself turning upon my good Mary that loves me as she does her life, and scheming to get her out of my house because she’s in trouble! No, indeed; Mary has been true and faithful to me, and I will be a true and faithful friend to her. What could I do with one of the Willises’ servants, with their airs and their graces? Would they come to a little house like mine, and take all departments in turn, and do for me as if they were doing for themselves, as Mary does?”

  “Just so,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel. “That’s just what I told Maria. I told her that you never would consent. But you know how it is with her when she gets an idea in her head, there’s no turning her. You might as well talk to a steam - engine. She walked off downstairs straight as a ramrod, and took the omnibus for the Willises, in spite of all I could say; and, sure as the world, she’ll be up to talk with you about it. She insisted that it was my duty to interfere; and I told her you had a right to manage your matters in your own way. Then she said if I didn’t do my duty by you, she should.”

  “Well, you have done your duty, mamma dear,” said Eva, kissing her mother. “I’ll bear witness to that, and it isn’t your fault if I am not warned. But you, dear little mother, have sense to let your children sail their own boat their own way, without interfering.”

  “Well, I think your ways generally turn out the best ways, Eva,” said her mother. “And I think Aunt Maria herself comes into them finally. She is proud as a peacock of your receptions, and takes every occasion to tell people what charming, delightful evenings you have; and she praises your house and your housekeeping and you to everybody, so you may put up with a little bother now and then.”

  “Oh, I’ll manage Aunt Maria, never you fear,” said Eva, as she rose confidently and took her husband from a discussion with Mr. Van Arsdel.

  “Come, Harry, it’s nine o’clock, and we have a long walk yet to get home.”

  It was brisk, clear winter moonlight in the streets as Harry and Eva took their way homeward — she the while relieving her mind by reciting her mother’s conversation.

  “Don’t it seem strange,” she said, “how the minute one actually tries to do some real Christian work everything goes against one?”

  “Yes,” said Harry; “the world isn’t made for the unfortunate or unsuccessful. In general, the instinct of society is the same among men as among animals — anything sickly or maimed is to be fought off and got rid of. If there is a sick bird, all the rest fly at it and peck it to death. So in the world, when man or woman doesn’t keep step with respectable people, the first idea is to get them out of the way. We can’t exactly kill them, but we can wash our hands of them. Saving souls is no part of the world’s work — it interferes with its steady business; it takes unworldly people to do that.”

  “And when one begins,” said Eva, “shrewd, sensible folks, like Aunt Maria, blame us; and little, tender-hearted folks, like mamma, think it’s almost a pity we should try, and that we had better leave it to somebody else; and then the very people we are trying to do for are really troublesome and hard to manage — like poor Maggie. She is truly a very hard person to get along with, and her mother is injudicious, and makes it harder; but yet, it really does seem to be our work to help take care of her. Now, isn’t it?”

  “Well, then, darling, you may comfort your heart with one thought: when you are doing for pure Christian motives a thing that makes you a great deal of trouble, and gets you no applause, you are trying to live just that unworldly life that the first Christians did. They were called a peculiar people, and whoever acts in the same spirit nowadays will be called the same. I think it is the very highest wisdom to do as you are doing; but it isn’t the wisdom of this world. It’s the kind of thing that Mr. St. John is sacrificing his whole life to; it is what Sibyl Selwyn is doing all the time, and your little neighbor Ruth is helping in. We can at least try to do a little. We are inexperienced, it may be that we shall not succeed, it may be that the girl is past saving; but it’s worth while to try, and try our very best.”

  Harry was saying this just as he put his latch-key into the door of his house.

  It was suddenly opened from within, and Maggie stood before them with her bonnet and shawl on, ready to pass out. There was a hard, sharp, desperate expression in her face as she pressed forward to pass them.

  “Maggie, child,” said Eva, laying hold of her arm, “where are you going?”

  “Away — anywhere — I don’t care where,” said Maggie fiercely, trying to pull away.

  “But you mustn’t,” said Eva, laying hold of her. “Maggie,” said Harry, stepping up to her and speaking in that calm, steady voice which controls passionate people, “go into the house immediately with Mrs. Henderson; she will talk with you.”

  Maggie turned, and sullenly followed Eva into a little sewing-room adjoining the parlor, where she had often sat at work. —

  “Now, Maggie,” said Eva, “take off your bonnet, for I’m not going to have you go into the streets at this hour of the night, and sit down quietly here and tell me all about it. What has happened? What is the matter? You don’t want to distress your mother and break her heart?”

  “She hates me,” said Maggie. “She says I’ve disgraced her and I disgrace you, and that it’s a disgrace to have me here. She and Uncle Mike both said so, and I said I’d go off, then.”

  “But where could you go?” said Eva.

  “Oh, I know places enough! They ‘re bad, to be sure. I wanted to do better, so I came away; but I can go back again.”

  “No, Maggie, you must never go back. You must do as I tell you. Have I not been a friend to you?”

  “Oh yes, yes, you have; but they say I disgrace you.”

  “Maggie, I don’t think so. I never said so. There is no need that you should disgrace anybody. I hope you’ll live to be a credit to your mother — a credit to us all. You are young yet; you have a good many years to live; and if you’ll only go on and do the very best you can from this time, you can be a comfort to your mother and be a good woman. It’s never too late to begin, Maggie, and I’ll help you now.”

  Maggie sat still and gazed gloomily bef
ore her.

  “Come, now, I’ll sing you some little hymns,” said Eva, going to her piano and touching a few chords. “You’ve got your mind all disturbed, and I’ll sing to you till you are more quiet.”

  Eva had a sweet voice, and a light, dreamy sort of touch on the piano, and she played and sung with feeling.

  There were truths in religion, higher, holier, deeper than she felt capable of uttering, which breathed themselves in these hymns; and something within her gave voice and pathos to them.

  The influence of music over the disturbed nerves and bewildered moral sense of those who have gone astray from virtue is something very remarkable. All modern missions more or less recognize that it has a power which goes beyond anything that spoken words can utter, and touches springs of deeper feeling.

  Eva sat playing a long time, going from one thing to another; and then, rising, she found Maggie crying softly by herself.

  “Come, now, Maggie,” she said, “you are going to be a good girl, I know. Go up and go to bed now, and don’t forget your prayers. That’s a good girl.” Maggie yielded passively, and went to her room.

  Then Eva had another hour’s talk, to persuade Mary that she must not be too exacting with Maggie, and that she must for the future avoid all such encounters with her. Mary was, on the whole, glad to promise anything; for she had been thoroughly alarmed at the altercation into which their attempt at admonition had grown, and was ready to admit to Eva that Mike had been too hard on her. At all events, the family honor had been sufficiently vindicated, and, if Maggie would only behave herself, she was ready to promise that Mike should not be allowed to interfere in future. And so, at last, Eva succeeded in inducing Mary to go to her daughter’s room with a reconciling word before she went to bed, and had the comfort of seeing the naughty girl crying in her mother’s arms, and the mother petting and fondling her as a mother should.

  Alas! it is only in the good old Book that the father sees the prodigal a great way off, and runs and falls on his neck and kisses him, before he has confessed his sin or done any work of repentance. So far does God’s heavenly love outrun even the love of fathers and mothers.

  “Well, I believe I’ve got things straightened out at last,” said Eva, as she came back to Harry; “and now, if Mary will only let me manage Maggie, I think I can make all go smooth.”

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  REASON AND UNREASON

  THE next morning being Monday, Dr. Campbell dropped in to breakfast. Since he and Eva had met so often in Maggie’s sick-room, and he had discussed the direction of her physical well-being, he had rapidly grown in intimacy with the Hendersons, and the little house had come to be regarded by him as a sort of home. Consequently, when Eva sailed into her dining-room, she found him quietly arranging a handful of cut flowers which he had brought in for the centre of her breakfast-table.

  “Good-morning, Mrs. Henderson,” he said composedly. “I stepped into Allen’s greenhouse on my way up, to bring in a few flowers. With the mercury at zero, flowers are worth something.”

  “How perfectly lovely of you, Doctor,” said she. “You are too good.”

  “I don’t say, however, that I had not my eye on a cup of your coffee,” he replied. “You know I have no faith in disinterested benevolence.”

  “Well, sit down then, old fellow,” said Harry, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’re welcome, flowers or no flowers.”

  “How are you all getting on?” he said, seating himself. “Charmingly, of course,” said Eva, from behind the coffee-pot, “and as the song says, ‘the better for seeing you.’”

  “And how’s my patient — Maggie?”

  “Oh, she’s doing well, if only people will let her alone; but her mother, and uncle, and relations will keep irritating her with reproaches. You see, I had got her in beautiful training, and she was sewing for me and making herself very useful, when, Sunday evening when I was gone out, her uncle came to see her, and talked and bore down upon her so as to completely upset all I had done. I came home and found her just going out of the house, perfectly desperate.”

  “And ready to go to the devil straight off, I suppose?” said the doctor. “His doors are always open.”

  “You see,” said Harry, “things seem to be so arranged in this world that if man, woman, or child does wrong or gets out of the way, all society is armed to the teeth to prevent their ever doing right again. Their own flesh and blood pitch into them with reproaches and expostulations, and everybody else looks on them with suspicion, and nobody wants them and nobody dares trust them.”

  “Just so,” said Dr. Campbell, “the world is an army — it can’t stop for anything. ‘ Wounded to the rear,’ is the word, and the army must go on and leave the sick and wounded to die or be taken by the enemy. For my part, I never thought Napoleon was so much out of the way when he recommended poisoning the sick and wounded that could not be moved. I think I should prefer to be comfortably and decently poisoned myself in such a case. The world isn’t ripe yet for the doctrine; but I think all people who get broken down, and don’t keep step physically and morally, had better be killed at once. Then we could get on comfortably, and in a few generations should have a nice population.”

  “Come, now, Doctor, I’m not going to have that sort of talk,” said Eva. “In short, you’ve got to keep on as you have been doing — working for the wounded in the rear. And now tell me if I could do a better thing for Maggie than keep her here in our house, under my own eye and influence, till she gets quite strong and well, and help her to live down the past?”

  “Well, that’s a sensible putting of the thing,” said Dr. Campbell, “if you will be foolish enough to take the trouble; but I forewarn you that girls that have been through her experiences are troublesome to manage. Their nerves are all in a jangle; they are sore everywhere, and the very good that is in them is turned wrong side outward; and, as you say, the world will be against you, in a general way. Relations, as far as ever I have observed, are rather harder on sinners than anybody else — especially on a woman that goes astray; and next to them sensible, worldly wise, respectable people — people who live to get rid of trouble, and feel that ‘bother’ is the sum and substance of evil. Now, taking up a girl like Maggie, you must count on that. Her relations will hinder all they can; and the more respectable they are, the harder they will bear down upon her. Your relations will think you a sentimental little fool, and do all they can to hinder you. The rank and file of comfortable, religious, church-going people will call you imprudent, and only fanatics, like Mr. St. John and Sibyl Selwyn, will understand you or stand by you; and, to crown all, the girl herself is as unreliable as the wind. The evil done to a woman in this kind of life is the derangement of her whole nervous system, so that she is swept by floods of morbid influences, and liable to wild, passionate gusts of feeling. The cessation from this free Bohemian life, with its strong excitements, leaves them in unnatural states of craving for stimulus; and when you have done all you can for them, — in a moment, off they go. That’s the reason why most prudent people prefer to wash their hands of them, and stop before they begin.”

  “It’s all very well to talk so, Doctor, if the case related to a stranger; but here is my poor, good Mary, who has been in our family ever since I was a little girl, and has always loved me and been devoted to me — shall I now give her the cold shoulder and not help her in this crisis of her life, because I am afraid of trouble? Isn’t it worth trouble, and a great deal of trouble, and a great deal of patience, to save this daughter of hers from ruin? I think it is.”

  “I think you and your husband will do it,” said the doctor, “because you are just what you are; and I shall help you, because I’m what I am; but, nevertheless, I set the reasonable side before you. I think this Maggie is a fine creature. There are, in a confused way, the beginnings of a great deal that is right, and even noble, in her; but nobody ought to begin with her without taking account of risks.”

  “Well,” said Eva, “you kn
ow I am a Christian, and I look in the New Testament for my principles, and there I find it plainly set down that the Lord values one sinner that is brought to repentance more than ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance; and that he would leave the ninety and nine sheep, and go into the wilderness to look up one lost lamb.”

  “That is the Christian religion, undoubtedly,” said Dr. Campbell; “but there is exactly where the Christian religion parts company with worldly prudence. The world and all its institutions are organized and arranged for the strong, the wise, the prudent, and the successful. The weak, the sick, the sinners, and all that sort of thing, are to have as much care as they can without interfering with the healthy and strong. Now, in the good old times of English law, they used to hang summarily anybody that made trouble in society in any way — the woman who stole a loaf of bread, and the man who stole a horse, and the vagrant who picked a pocket; then there was no discussion and no bother about reformation, such as is coming down upon our consciences nowadays. Good old times those were, when there wasn’t any of this gush over the fallen and lost; the slate was wiped clean of all the puzzling sums at the yearly assizes and the account started clear. Nowadays, there is such a bother about taking care of criminals that an honest man has no decent chance of comfort.”

  “Well, Doctor,” said Eva, “if the essence of Christianity is restoration and salvation, I don’t see but your profession is essentially a Christian one. You seek and save the lost. It is your business by your toil and labor to help people who have sinned against the laws of Nature to get them back again to health; isn’t it so?”

  “Well, yes, it is,” said the doctor, “though I find everything going against me in this direction, as much as you do.”

  “But you find mercy in Nature,” said Harry. “In the language of the Psalms, ‘There is forgiveness with her that she may be feared.’ The first thing, after one of her laws has been broken, comes in her effort to restore and save; it may be blind and awkward, but still it points toward life and not death, and you doctors are her ministers and priests. You bear the physical gospel; and we Christians take the same process to the spiritual realm that lies just above yours, and that has to work through yours. Our business in both realms seems to be, by our own labor, self-denial, and suffering, to save those who have sinned against the laws of their being.”