“Depend upon it, my dear,” said Mrs. Eyelet, “Mrs. Henderson has been doing all she could to catch him. They say he’s at her house almost constantly.”
Aunt Maria’s plumage rustled with maternal solicitude. “I don’t know but it is as good a thing as we could expect for Angie,” said she to Mrs. Van Arsdel. “He’s a young man of good family and independent property. I don’t like his ritualistic notions, to be sure; but one can’t have everything. And, at any rate, he can’t become a Roman Catholic if he gets married — that’s one comfort.”
“There he goes!” said little Mrs. Betsey, as she sat looking through the blinds, with the forgiven Jack “on her knee. “He’s at the door now. Dorcas, I do believe there’s something in it.”
“Something in what?” said Miss Dorcas, “and who are you talking about, Betsey?”
“Why, Mr. St. John and Angie. He’s standing at the door, this very minute. It must be true. I’m glad of it; only he isn’t half good enough for her.”
“Well, it don’t follow that there is an engagement because Mr. St. John is at the door,” said Miss Dorcas.
“But all the things Mrs. Eyelet said, Dorcas!”
“Mrs. Eyelet is a gossip,” said Miss Dorcas shortly. “But, Dorcas, I really thought his manner to her last Thursday was particular. Oh, I’m sure there’s something in it! They say he’s such a good young man, and independently rich. I wonder if they’ll take a house up in this neighborhood? It would be so nice to have Angie within calling distance! A great favorite of mine is Angie.”
CHAPTER XL
THE ENGAGEMENT ANNOUNCED
MEANWHILE Dr. Gracey found his way to Arthur’s study.
“So, Arthur,” he said, “that pretty Miss Van Arsdel’s engaged.” —
The blank expression and sudden change of color in St. John’s face was something quite worthy of observation.
“Miss Van Arsdel engaged!” he repeated with a gasp, feeling as if the ground were going down under him.
“Yes, that pretty fairy, Miss Angelique, you know.”
“How did you hear — who told you?”
“How did I hear? Why, it’s all over town. Arthur, you bad boy, why haven’t you told me?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you; you are the happy individual. I came to congratulate you.”
St. John looked terribly confused.
“Well, we are not really exactly engaged.”
“But you are going to be, I understand. So far so good. I like the family — good stock — nothing could be better; but, Arthur, let me tell you, you’d better have it announced and aboveboard forthwith. You are not my sister’s son, nor the man I took you for, if you could take advantage of the confidence inspired by your position to carry on a flirtation.”
The blood flushed into St. John’s cheeks. “I’m not flirting, uncle; that vulgar word is no name for my friendship with Miss Van Arsdel. It is as sacred as the altar.
I reverence her; I love her with all my heart. I would lay down my life for her.”
“Good! but nobody wants you to lay down your life. That is quite foreign to the purpose. What is wanting is, that you step out like a man and define your position with regard to Miss Yan Arsdel before the world; otherwise all the gossips will make free with her name and yours. Depend upon it, Arthur, a man has done too much or too little when a young lady’s name is in every one’s mouth in connection with his, without a definite engagement.”
“It is all my fault, uncle. I hadn’t the remotest idea. It’s all my fault — all. I had no thought of what the world would say; no idea that we were remarked — but, believe me, our intimacy has been, from first to last, entirely of my seeking. It has grown on us gradually, till I find she is more to me than any one ever has been or can be. Whether I am as much to her, I cannot tell. My demands have been humble. We are not engaged, but it shall not be my fault if another day passes and we are not.”
“Right, my boy. I knew you. You were no nephew of mine if you didn’t feel, when your eyes were open, the honor of the thing. God made you a gentleman before he made you a priest, and there’s but one way for a gentleman in a case like this. If there’s anything I despise, it’s a priest who uses his priestly influence, under this fine name and that, to steal from a woman love that doesn’t belong to him, and that he never can return, and never ought to. If a man thinks he can do more good as a single man and a missionary, well; I honor him, but let him make the sacrifice honestly. Don’t let him want pretty girls for intimate friends or guardian angels, or Christian sisters, or any such trumpery. It’s dishonest and disloyal; it is unfair to the woman and selfish in the man.”
“Well, uncle, I trust you say all this because you don’t think it of me; as I know my heart before God, I say I have not been doing so mean and cowardly a thing. There was a time when I thought I never should marry. Those were my days of ignorance. I did not know how much a true woman might teach me, and how much I needed such a guide, even in my church work.”
“In short, my boy, you found out that the Lord was right when he said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ We pay the Lord the compliment once in a while to believe he knows best. Depend on it, Arthur, that Christian families are the Lord’s church, and better than any guild of monks and nuns whatsoever.”
All which was listened to by Mr. St. John with a radiant countenance. It is all down-hill when you are showing a man that it is his duty to do what he wants to do. Six months before, St. John would have fought every proposition of this speech, and brought up the whole of the Middle Ages to back him. Now, he was as tractable as heart could wish.
“After all, uncle,” he said, at last, “what if she will not have me? And what if I am not the man to make her happy?”
“Oh, if you ask prettily, I fancy she won’t say nay; and then you must make her happy. There are no two ways about that, my boy.”
“I’m not half good enough for her,” said St. John. “Like enough. We are none of us good enough for these women; but, luckily, that isn’t apt to be their opinion.”
St. John started out from the conference with an alert step. In two days more, rumor was met with open confirmation. St. John had had the decisive interview with Angie, had seen and talked with her father and mother, and been invited to a family dinner; and Angie wore on her finger an engagement ring. There was no more to be said now. Mr. St. John was an idol who had stepped down from his pedestal into the ranks of common men. He was no longer a mysterious power — an angel of the churches, hut a man of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is an undoubted fact that, for all the purposes of this mortal life, a good man is better than an angel.
But not so thought the ecstasia of his chapel. A holy father, in a long black gown, with a cord round his waist, and with a skull and hour-glass in his cell, is somehow thought to be nearer to heaven than a family man with a market-basket on his arm; but we question whether the angels themselves think so. There may be as holy and unselfish a spirit in the way a market-basket is filled as in a week of fasting; and the oil of gladness may make the heavenward wheels run more smoothly than the spirit of heaviness. The first bright day, St. John took Angie a drive in the Park, a proceeding so evidently of the earth, earthy, that Miss Gusher hid her face, after the manner of the seraphim, as he passed; but he and Angie were too happy and too busy in their new world to care who looked or who didn’t, and St. John rather triumphantly remembered the free assertion of the great apostle, “Have we not power to lead about a sister or a wife?” and felt sure that he should have been proud and happy to show Angie to St. Paul himself.
Alice was at first slightly disappointed, but the compensation of receiving so very desirable a brother-in-law reconciled her to the loss of her poetic and distant ideal.
As to little Mrs. Betsey, she fell upon Angie’s neck in rapture; and her joy was heightened in the convincing proof that she was now able to heap upon the unbelieving head of Dorcas that she had been in the right all along. When d
ear little Mrs. Betsey was excited, her words and thoughts came so thick that they were like a flock of martins, all trying to get out of a martin-box together, — chattering, twittering, stumbling over each other, and coming out at heads and points in a wonderful order. When the news had been officially sealed to her, she begged the right to carry it to Dorcas, and ran home and burst in upon her with shining eyes and two little pink spots in her cheeks.
“There, Dorcas, they are engaged. Now, didn’t I say so, Dorcas? I knew it. I told you so, that Thursday evening. Oh, you can’t fool me; and that day I saw him standing on the door-step! I was just as certain! I saw it just as plain! What a shame for people to talk about him as they do, and say he’s going to Rome. I wonder what they think now? The sweetest girl in New York, certainly. Oh! and that ring he bought! Just as if he could be a Roman Catholic! It’s big as a pea, and sparkles beautiful, and’s got the ‘Lord is thy keeper’ in Hebrew on the inside. I want to see Mrs. Wouvermans and ask her what she thinks now. Oh, and he took her to ride in such a stylish carriage, white lynx lap-robe, and all! I don’t care if he does burn candles in his chapel. What does that prove? It don’t prove anything. I like to see people have some logic about things, for my part, don’t you, Dorcas? Don’t you?”
“Mercy! yes, Betsey,” said Miss Dorcas, delighted to see her sister so excitedly happy, “though I don’t exactly see my way clear through yours; but no matter.”
“I’m going to crochet a toilet cushion for a wedding present, Dorcas, like that one in the red room, you know. I wonder when it will come off? How lucky I have that sweet cap that Mrs. Henderson made. Wasn’t it good of her to make it? I hope they’ll invite us. Don’t you think they will? I suppose it will be in his chapel, with candles and all sorts of new ways. Well, I don’t care, so long as folks are good people, what their ways are; do you, Dorcas? I must run up and count the stitches on that cushion this minute!” and Mrs. Betsey upset her basket of worsteds in her zeal, and Jack flew round and round, barking sympathetically. In fact, he was so excited by the general breeze that he chewed up two balls of worsted before recovering his composure. Such was the effect of the news at the old Vanderheyden house.
CHAPTER XLI
LETTER FROM EVA TO HARRY’S MOTHER
My DEAR MOTHER, — I sit down to write to you with a heart full of the strangest feelings and experiences. I feel as if I had been out in some other world and been brought back again; and now I hardly know myself or where I am. You know I wrote you all about Maggie, and her leaving us, and poor Mary’s trouble about her, and how she had been since seen in a very bad neighborhood; I promised Mary faithfully that I would go after her; and so, after all our Christmas labors were over, Harry and I went on a midnight excursion with Mr. James, the Methodist minister, who has started the mission there.
It seemed to me very strange that a minister could have access to all those places where he proposed to take us, and see all that was going on without insult or danger, but he told me that he was in the constant habit of passing through the dance-houses, and talking with the people who kept them, and that he had never met with any rudeness or incivility. He told us that in the very centre of this worst district of New York, among drinking saloons and dance-houses, a few Christian people had bought a house in which they had established a mission family, with a room which they use for a chapel; and they hold weekly prayer-meetings, and seek to draw in the wretched people there. On this evening, he said, they were about to give a midnight supper at the Home to any poor houseless wanderer whom they could find in those wretched streets, or who hung about the drinking saloons.
“Our only hope in this mission,” he said, “is to make these wretched people feel that we really are their friends and seek their good; and, in order to do this, we must do something for them that they can understand. They can all understand a good supper, when they are lying about cold and hungry and homeless, on a stinging cold night like this; and we don’t begin to talk to them till we have warmed and fed them. It surprises them to have us take all this trouble to do them good; it awakens their curiosity; they wonder what we do it for, and then, when we tell them it is because we are Christians, and love them, and want to save them, they believe us. After that, they are willing to come to our meetings, and attend to what we say.”
Now, this seemed to me good philosophy, but I could not help saying, “Dear Mr. James, how could you have the courage to begin a mission in such a dreadful place; and how can you have any hope of saving such people?” And he answered, “With God, all things are possible. That was what Christ came for — to seek and save the lost. The Good Shepherd,” he said, “leaves the ninety and nine safe sheep in the fold, and goes after one that is lost until he finds it.” I asked him who supported the Home, and he said it was supported by God, in answer to prayer; that they made no public solicitation; had nobody pledged to help them; but that contributions were constantly coming in from one Christian person or another, as they needed them; that the superintendent and matron of the Home had no stated salary, and devoted themselves to the work in the same faith that the food and raiment needed would be found for them; and so far it had not failed.
All this seemed very strange to me. It seemed a sort of literal rendering of some of the things in the Bible that we pass over as having no very definite meaning. Mr. James seemed so quiet, so assured, so calm and unexcited, that one couldn’t help believing him.
It seemed a great way that we rode, in parts of the city that I never saw before, in streets whose names were unknown to me, till finally we alighted before a plain house in a street full of drinking saloons. As we drove up, we heard the sound of hymn-singing, and looked into a long room set with benches which seemed full of people. We stopped a moment to listen to the words of an old Methodist hymn: —
“Come, ye weary, heavy-laden,
Lost and ruined by the fall,
If you tarry till you ‘re better,
You will never come at all.
Not the righteous —
Sinners, Jesus came to call.
“Come ye thirsty, come and welcome,
God’s free bounty glorify.
True belief and true repentance, —
Every grace that brings us nigh,
Without money,
Come to Jesus Christ and buy.”
It was the last hymn, and they were about breaking up as we went into the house. This building, Mr. James told us, used to be a rat-pit, where the lowest, vilest, and most brutal kinds of sport were going on. It used to be, he said, foul and filthy, physically as well as morally; but scrubbing and paint and whitewash had transformed it into a comfortable home. There was a neat sitting-room, carpeted and comfortably furnished, a dining-room, a pantry stocked with serviceable china, a work-room with two or three sewing-machines, and a kitchen, from which at this moment came a most appetizing smell of the soup which was preparing for the midnight supper. Above, were dormitories, in which were lodging about twenty girls, who had fled to this refuge to learn a new life. They had known the depth of sin and the bitterness of punishment, had been spurned, disgraced, and outcast. Some of them had been at Blackwell’s Island — on the street — in the very gutter — and now, here they were, as I saw some of them, decently and modestly dressed, and busy preparing for the supper. When I looked at them setting the tables, or busy about their cooking, they seemed so cheerful and respectable, I could scarcely believe that they had been so degraded. A portion of them only were detailed for the night service; the others had come up from the chapel and were going to bed in the dormitories, and we heard them singing a hymn before retiring. It was very affecting to me — the sound of that hymn, and the thought of so peaceful a home in the midst of this dreadful neighborhood. Mr. James introduced us to the man and his wife who take charge of the family. They are converts — the fruits of these labors. He was once a singer, and connected with a drinking saloon, but was now giving his whole time and strength to this work, in which he had all the more suc
cess because he had so thorough an experience and knowledge of the people to be reached. We were invited to sit down to a supper in the dining-room, for Mr. James said we should be out so late before returning home that we should need something to sustain us. So we took some of the soup which was preparing for the midnight supper, and very nice and refreshing we found it. After this, we went out with Mr. James and the superintendent, to go through the saloons and dance-houses and drinking places, and to distribute tickets of invitation to the supper. What we saw seems now to me like a dream. I had heard that such things were, but never before did I see them. We went from one place to another, and always the same features — a dancing-room, with girls and women dressed and ornamented, sitting round waiting for partners; men of all sorts walking in and surveying and choosing from among them and dancing, and, afterwards or before, going with them to the bar to drink. Many of these girls looked young and comparatively fresh; their dresses were cut very low, so that I blushed for them through my veil. I clung tight to Harry’s arm, and asked myself where I was, as I moved round among them. Nobody noticed us. Everybody seemed to have a right to be there, and see what they could.
I remember one large building of two or three stories, with larger halls below, all lighted up, with dancing and drinking going on, and throngs and throngs of men, old and young, pouring and crowding through it. These tawdrily bedizened, wretched girls and women seemed to me such a sorrow and disgrace to womanhood and to Christianity that my very heart sunk, as I walked among them. I felt as if I could have cried for their disgrace. Yet nobody said a word to us. All the keepers of the places seemed to know Mr. James and the superintendent. He spoke to them all kindly and politely, and they answered with the same civility. In one or two of the saloons the superintendent asked leave to sing a song, which was granted, and he sung the hymn that begins: —
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 405
