University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
OUR FIRST THURSDAY.

THE Henderson's first “Evening” was a social success.
The little parlors were radiant with the blaze
of the wood-fire, which gleamed and flashed and made
faces at itself in the tall, old-fashioned brass andirons,
and gave picturesque tints to the room.

Eva's tea-table was spread in one corner, dainty with
its white drapery, and with her pretty wedding-present
of china upon it—not china like Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden's,
of the real old Chinese fabric, but china fresh
from the modern improvements of Paris, and so adorned
with violets and grasses and field flowers that it made a
December tea-table look like a meadow where one could
pick bouquets. Every separate tea-cup and saucer was
an artist's study, and a topic for conversation.

The arrangement of the rooms had been a day's
work of careful consideration between Eva and Angelique.
There was probably not a perch or eyrie accessible
by chairs, tables, or ottomans, where these little
persons had not been mounted, at divers times of the
day, trying the effect of various floral decorations. The
amount of fatigue that can be gone through in the mere
matter of preparing one little set of rooms for an evening
reception, is something that men know nothing about;
only the sisterhood could testify to that frantic “fanaticism
of the beautiful” which seizes them when an evening
company is in contemplation, and their house is to
put, so to speak, its best foot forward. Many an aching
back and many a drooping form could testify how the

woman spends herself in advance, in this sort of altar
dressing for home worship.

But, as a consequence, the little rooms were bowers of
beauty. The pictures were overshadowed with nodding
wreaths of pressed ferns and bright bitter-sweet berries,
with glossy holly leaves; the statuettes had backgrounds
of ivy which threw out their whiteness. Harry's little
workroom adjoining the parlor had become a green
alcove, where engravings and books were spread out
under the shade of a German student-lamp. Everywhere
that a vase of flowers could make a pretty show,
there was a vase of flowers, though it was December, and
the ground frozen like lead. For the next door neighbor,
sweet Ruth Baxter, had clipped and snipped every
rosebud, and mignonette blossom, and even a splendid
calla lily, with no end of scarlet geranium, and sent
them in to Eva; and Miss Dorcas had cut away about
half of an ancient and well-kept rose-geranium, which
was the apple of her eye, to help out her little neighbor.
So they reveled in flowers, without cutting those which
grew on Eva's own bushes, which were all turned to the
light and arranged in appropriate situations, blossoming
their best. The little dining-room also was thrown
open, and dressed, and adorned with flowers, pressed
ferns, berries, and autumn leaves; with a distant perspective
of light in it, that there might be a place of withdrawal
and quiet chats over books and pictures. In
every spot were disposed objects to start conversation.
Books of autographs, portfolios of sketches, photographs
of distinguished people, stereoscopic views, with stereoscope
to explain them,—all sorts of intervening means and
appliances by which people, not otherwise acquainted,
should find something to talk about in common.

Eva was admirably seconded by her friends, from
long experience versed in the art of entertaining. Mrs.

Van Arsdel, gentle, affable, society-loving, and with a
quick tact at reading the feelings of others, was a host
in herself. She at once took possession of Miss Dorcas
Vanderheyden, who came in a very short dress of rich
India satin, and very yellow and mussy but undeniably
precious old lace, and walked the rooms with a high-shouldered
independence of manner most refreshing in
this day of long trains and modern inconveniences.

“Sensible old girl,” was Jim Fellows's comment in
Alice's ear as Miss Dorcas marched in; for which, of
course, he got a reproof, and was ordered to remember
and keep himself under.

As to Mrs. Betsey, with her white hair, and lace cap
with lilac ribbons, and black dress, with a flush of
almost girlish timidity in her pink cheeks, she won an
instant way to the heart of Angelique, who took her arm
and drew her to a cosy arm-chair before a table of engravings,
and began an animated conversation on a book
of etchings of the “Old Houses of New York.” These
were subjects on which Mrs. Betsey could talk, and talk
entertainingly. They carried her back to the days of
her youth; bringing back scenes, persons, and places
long forgotten, her knowledge of which was full of entertainment.
Angelique wonderingly saw her transfigured
before her eyes. It seemed as if an after-glow from the
long set sun of youthful beauty flashed back in the old,
worn face, as her memory went back to the days of
youth and hope. It is a great thing to the old and
faded to feel themselves charming once more, even for
an hour; and Mrs. Betsey looked into the blooming
face and wide open, admiring, hazel eyes of Angelique,
and felt that she was giving pleasure, that this charming
young person was really delighted to hear her talk. It
was one of those “cups of cold water” that Angelique
was always giving to neglected and out-of-the-way people,

without ever thinking that she did so, or why she
did it, just because she was a sweet, kind-hearted, loving
little girl.

When Mr. St. John, with an apprehensive spirit, adventured
his way into the room, he felt safe and at ease
in a moment. All was light, and bright, and easy —
nobody turned to look at him, and it seemed the easiest
thing in the world to thread his way through busy chatting
groups to where Eva made a place for him by her
side at the tea-table, passed him his cup of tea, and
introduced him to Dr. Campbell, who sat on her other
side, cutting the leaves of a magazine.

“You see,” said Eva, laughing, “I make our Doctor
useful on the Fourier principle. He is dying to get at
those magazine articles, so I let him cut the leaves and
take a peep along here and there, but I forbid reading—
in our presence, men have got to give over absorbing,
and begin radiating. Doesn't St. Paul say, Mr. St. John,
that if women are to learn anything they are to ask their
husbands at home? and doesn't that imply that their
husbands at home are to talk to them, and not sit reading
newspapers?”

“I confess I never thought of that inference from the
passage,” said Mr. St. John, smiling.

“But the modern woman,” said Dr. Campbell, “scorns
to ask her husband at home. She holds that her husband
should ask her.”

“Oh, well, I am not the modern woman. I go for
the old boundaries and the old privileges of my sex; and
besides, I am a good church woman and prefer to ask
my husband. But I insist, as a necessary consequence,
that he must hear me and answer me, as he cannot do if
he is reading newspapers or magazines. Isn't that case
fairly argued, Mr. St. John?”

“I don't see but it is.”

“Well, then, the spirit of it applies to the whole of
your cultured and instructive sex. Men, in the presence
of women, ought always to be prepared to give them
information, to answer questions, and make themselves
generally entertaining and useful.”

“You see, Mr. St. John,” said Dr. Campbell, “that
Mrs. Henderson has a dangerous facility for generalizing.
Set her to interpreting and there's no saying where her
inferences mightn't run.”

“I'd almost release Mr. St. John from my rules, to
allow him to look over this article of yours, though, Dr.
Campbell,” said Eva. “Harry has read it to me, and I
said, along in different parts of it, if ministers only knew
these things, how much good they might do!”

“What is the article?”

“It is simply something I wrote on `Abnormal Influences
upon the Will;' it covers a pretty wide ground as
to the question of human responsibility and the recovery
of criminals, and all that.”

Mr. St. John remembered at this moment the case of
the poor woman whom he had visited that afternoon,
and the periodical fatality which was making her family
life a shipwreck, and he turned to Dr. Campbell a face
so full of eager inquiry and dawning thought that Eva
felt that the propitious moment was come to leave them
together, and instantly she moved from her seat between
them, to welcome a new comer who was entering the
room.

“I've got them together,” she whispered to Harry a
few minutes after, as she saw that the two were turned
towards each other, apparently intensely absorbed in conversation.

The two might have formed a not unapt personification
of flesh and spirit. Dr. Campcell, a broad-shouldered,
deep-breathed, long-limbed man, with the proudly

set head and quivering nostrils of a high-blooded horse—
an image of superb physical vitality: St. John, so delicately
and sparely built, with his Greek forehead and clear
blue eye, the delicate vibration of his cleanly cut lips,
and the cameo purity of every outline of his profile.
Yet was he not without a certain air of vigor, the outshining
of spiritual forces. One could fancy Campbell
as the Berserker who could run, race, wrestle, dig, and
wield the forces of nature, and St. John as the poet and
orator who could rise to higher regions and carry souls
upward with him. It takes both kinds to make up a
world.

And now glided into the company the vision of two
women in soft, dove-colored silks, with white crape kerchiefs
crossed upon their breasts, and pressed crape
caps bordering their faces like a transparent aureole.
There was the neighbor, Ruth Baxter, round, rosy, young,
blooming, but dressed in the straitest garb of her sect.
With her back turned, you might expect to see an aged
woman stricken in years, so prim and antique was the
fashion of her garments; but when her face was turned,
there was the rose of youth blooming amid the cool
snows of cap and kerchief. The smooth pressed hair
rippled and crinkled in many a wave, as if it would curl
if it dared, and the round blue eyes danced with a scarce
suppressed light of cheer that might have become mirthfulness,
if set free; but yet the quaint primness of her
attire set off her womanly charms beyond all arts of the
toilet.

Her companion was a matronly person, who might
be fifty or thereabouts. She had that calm, commanding
serenity that comes to woman only from the habitual
exaltation of the spiritual nature. Sibyl Selwyn was
known in many lands as one of the most zealous and
best accepted preachers of her sect. Her life had been

an inspiration of pity and mercy; and she had been in
far countries of the earth, where there was sin to be
reproved or sorrow to be consoled, a witness to testify
and a medium through whom guilt and despair might
learn something of the Divine Pity.

She bore about with her a power of personal presence
very remarkable. Her features were cast in large
and noble mould; her clear cut, wide-open gray eyes
had a penetrating yet kind expression, that seemed
adapted both to search and to cheer, and went far to
justify the opinion of her sect, which attributed to Sibyl
in an eminent degree the apostolic gift of the discerning
of spirits. Somehow, with her presence there seemed to
come an atmosphere of peace and serenity, such as one
might fancy clinging about even the raiment of one just
stepped from a higher sphere. Yet, so gliding and so dovelike
was the movement by which the two had come in—so
perfectly, cheerfully, and easily had they entered into the
sympathies of the occasion, that their entrance made no
more break or disturbance in the social circle than the
stealing in of a ray of light through a church window.

Eva had risen and gone to them at once, had seated
them at the opposite side of the little tea-table and
poured their tea, chatting the while and looking into their
serene faces with a sincere cordiality which was reflected
back from them in smiles of confidence.

Sibyl admired the pictures, flowers, and grasses on
her tea-cup with the naïve interest of a child; for one
often remarks, in intercourse with her sect, how the
æsthetic sense, unfrittered and unworn by the petting of
self-indulgence, is prompt to appreciate beauty.

Eva felt a sort of awed pleasure in Sibyl's admiration
of her pretty things, as if an angel guide were
stooping to play with her. She felt in her presence like
one of earth's unweaned babies.

St. John, in one of the pauses of the conversation,
looked up and saw this striking head and face opposite
to him; a head reminding him of some of those saintly
portraitures of holy women in which Overbeck delights.
We have described him as peculiarly impressible under
actual social influences. It was only the week before
that an application had been made to him for one
Sibyl Selwyn to hold a meeting in his little chapel, and
sternly refused. His idea of a female preacher had been
largely blended with the mediæval masculine contempt
of woman and his horror of modern woman public
teachers and lecturers. When this serene vision rose
like an exhalation before him, he did not at first recall
the applicant for his chapel, but he looked at her admiringly
in a sort of dazed wonder, and inquired of Dr.
Campbell in a low voice, “Who is that?”

“Oh,” said Dr. Campbell, “don't you know? that's
the Quaker preacher, Sibyl Selwyn; the woman who has
faced and put down the devil in places where you couldn't
and I wouldn't go.”

St. John felt the blood flush in his cheeks, and a dim
idea took possession of him that, if some had entertained
angels unawares, others unawares had rejected them.

“Yes,” said Dr. Campbell, “that woman has been
alone, at midnight, through places where you and I could
not go without danger of our heads; and she has said
words to bar-tenders and brothel-keepers that would cost
us our lives. But she walks out of it all, as calm as you
see her to-night. I know that kind of woman—I was
brought up among them. They are an interesting physiological
study; the over-cerebration of the spiritual
faculties among them occasions some very peculiar facts
and phenomena. I should like to show you a record I
have kept. It gives them at times an almost miraculous
ascendancy over others. I fancy,” he said carelessly,

“that your legends of the saints could furnish a good
many facts of the same sort.”

At this moment, Eva came up in her authoritative
way as mistress of ceremonies, took Mr. St. John by the
arm, and, walking across with him, seated him by Sibyl
Selwyn, introduced them to each other, and left them.
St. John was embarrassed, but Sibyl received him with
the perfect composure in which she sat enthroned.

“Arthur St. John,” she said, “I am glad to meet
thee. I am interested in thy work among the poor of
this quarter, and have sought the Lord for thee in it.”

“I am sure I thank you,” said St. John, thus suddenly
reduced to primitive elements and spoken to on the
simple plane of his unvarnished humanity. It is seldom,
after we come to mature years and have gone out into
the world, that any one addresses us simply by our name
without prefix or addition of ceremony. It is the province
only of rarest intimacy or nearest relationship, and
it was long since St. John had been with friend or relation
who could thus address him. It took him back to
childhood and his mother's knee. He was struggling
with a vague sense of embarrassment, when he remembered
the curt and almost rude manner in which he had
repelled her overture to speak in his chapel, and the
contempt he had felt for her at the time. In the presence
of the clear, saintly face, it seemed as if he had
been unconsciously guilty of violating a shrine. He
longed to apologize, but he did not know how to begin.

“I feel,” he said, “that I am inexperienced and that
the work is very great. You,” he added, “have had
longer knowledge of it than I; perhaps I might learn
something of you.”

“Thou wilt be led,” said Sibyl, with the same assured
calmness, “be not afraid.”

“I am sorry—I was sorry,” said St. John, hesitating,

“to refuse the help you offered in speaking in my chapel,
but it is contrary to the rules of the church.”

“Be not troubled. Thee follows thy light. Thee
can do no otherways. Thee is but young yet,” she said,
with a motherly smile.

“I did not know you personally then,” he said. “I
should like to talk more with you, some time. I should
esteem it a favor to have you tell me some of your experiences.”

“Some time, if we can sit together in stillness, I might
have something given me for thee; this is not the time,”
said Sibyl, with quiet graciousness.

A light laugh seemed to cut into the gravity of the
conversation.

Both turned. Angelique was the center of a gay
group to whom she was telling a droll story. Angie had
a gift for this sort of thing; and Miss Dorcas and Mrs.
Betsey, Mrs. Van Arsdel and Mr. Van Arsdel were gathered
around her as, with half-pantomime, half-mimicry,
she was giving a street scene in one of her Sunday-school
visitations. St. John laughed too; he could not help
it. In a moment, however, he seemed to recollect himself,
and sighed and said:

“It seems sometimes strange to me that we can allow
ourselves to laugh in a world like this. She is only a
child or she couldn't.”

Sibyl looked tenderly at Angelique. “It is her gift,”
she said. “She is one of the children of the bridechamber,
who cannot mourn because the bridegroom is
with them. It would be better for thee, Arthur St. John,
to be more a child. Where the spirit of the Lord is,
there is liberty.”

St. John was impressed by the calm decision of this
woman's manner, and the atmosphere of peace and assurance
around her. The half-mystical character of her

words fell in with his devout tendencies, and that strange,
indefinable something that invests some persons with influence
seemed to be with her, and he murmured to himself
the words from Comus—

Mr. St. John had not for a moment during that
whole evening lost the consciousness that Angelique was
in the room. Through that double sense by which two
trains of thought can be going on at the same time, he
was sensible of her presence and of what she was doing,
through all his talks with other people. He had given
one glance, when he came into the room, to the place
where she was sitting and entertaining Mrs. Betsey, and
without any apparent watchfulness he was yet conscious
of every movement she made from time to time. He
knew when she dropped her handkerchief, he knew when
she rose to get down another book, and when she came
to the table and poured for Mrs. Betsey another cup of
tea. A subtle exhilaration was in the air. He knew not
why everything seemed so bright and cheerful; it is as
when a violet or an orange blossom, hid in a distant part
of a room, fills the air with a vague deliciousness.

He dwelt dreamily on Sibyl's half mystical words,
and felt as if an interpreting angel had sanctioned the
charm that he found in this bright, laughing child. He
liked to call her a child to himself, it was a pleasant little
nook into which he could retreat from a too severe scrutiny
of his feelings towards her; for, quite unknown to
himself, St. John's heart was fast slipping off into the
good old way of Eden.

But we leave him for a peep at other parties. It is
amusing to think how many people in one evening company
are weaving and winding threads upon their own

private, separate spools. Jim Fellows, in the dining-room,
was saying to Alice:

“I'm going to bring Hal Stephens and Ben Hubert
to you this evening; and by George, Alice, I want you to
look after them a little, as you can. They are raw newspaper
boys, tumbled into New York; and nobody cares a
hang for them. Nobody does care a hang for any
stranger body, you know. They haven't a decent place
to visit, nor a woman to say a word to them; and yet I
tell you they're good fellows. Everybody curses newspaper
reporters and that sort of fellow. Nobody has a
good word for them. It's small salary, and many kicks
and cuffs they get at first; and yet that's the only way to
get on the papers, and make a man of yourself at last;
and so, as I've got up above the low rounds, I want to
help the boys that are down there, and I'll tell you, Alice,
it'll do 'em lots of good to know you.”

And so Alice was gracious to the new-comers and
made them welcome, and showed them pictures, and
drew them out to talk, and made them feel that they
were entertaining her.

Some women have this power of divining what a man
can say, and giving him courage to say it. Alice was
one of these; people wondered when they left her how
they had been made to talk so well. It was the best and
truest part of every one's nature that she gave courage
and voice to. This power of young girls to ennoble
young men is unhappily one of which too often they are
unconscious. Too often the woman, instead of being a
teacher in the higher life, is only a flatterer of the weaknesses
and lower propensities of the men whose admiration
she seeks.

St. John felt frightened and embarrassed with his
message to Angie. He had dwelt on it, all his way to the
house, as an auspicious key to a conversation which he

anticipated with pleasure; yet the evening rolled by, and
though he walked round and round, and nearer and
nearer, and conversed with this and that one, he did not
come to the point of speaking to Angie. Sometimes she
was talking to somebody else and he waited; sometimes
she was not with anybody else, and then he waited lest
his joining her should be remarked. He did not stop to
ask himself why on earth it should be remarked any
more than if he had spoken to Alice or Eva, or anybody
else, but he felt as if it would be.

At last, however, after making several circles about
the table where she sat with Mrs. Betsey, he sat down by
them, and delivered his message with a formal precision,
as if he had been giving her a summons. Angie was all
sympathy and sweetness, and readily said she would go
and see the poor woman the very next day, and then an
awkward pause ensued. She was a little afraid of him as
a preternaturally good man, and began to wonder whether
she had been laughing too loud, or otherwise misbehaving,
in the gaity of her heart, that evening.

So, after a rather dry pause, Mr. St. John uttered some
commonplaces about the books of engravings before them,
and then, suddenly seeming to recollect something he had
forgotten, crossed the room to speak to Dr. Campbell.

“Dear me, child, and so that is your rector,” said
Mrs. Betsey. “Isn't he a little stiff?”

“I believe he is not much used to society,” said
Angie; “but he is a very good man.”

The evening entertainment had rather a curious finale.
A spirit of sociability had descended upon the company,
and it was one of those rare tides that come sometimes
where everybody is having a good time, and nobody looks
at one's watch; and so, ten o'clock was long past, and
eleven had struck, and yet there was no movement for
dissolving the session.

Across the way, old Dinah had watched the bright
windows with longing eyes, until finally the spirit of the
occasion was too strong for her, and, bidding Jack lie
down and be a good dog, she left her own precincts and
ran across to the kitchen of the festal scene, to pick up
some crumbs for her share.

Jack looked at her in winking obedience as she closed
the kitchen door, being mindful in his own dog's head of
a small slip of a pantry window which had served his
roving purposes before now. The moment Dinah issued
from the outer door, Jack bounced from the pantry window
and went padding at a discreet distance from her
heels. Sitting down on the front door-mat of the festive
mansion, he occupied himself with his own reflections
till the door opening for a late comer gave him an opportunity
to slip in quietly.

Jack used his entrance ticket with discretion, watched,
waited, reconnoitered, till finally, seeing an unemployed
ottoman next Mrs. Betsey, he suddenly appeared in the
midst, sprang up on the ottoman with easy grace, sat up
on his hind paws, and waved his front ones affably to the
public.

The general tumult that ensued, the horror of Miss
Dorcas, the scolding she tried to give Jack, the storm of
applause and petting which greeted him in all quarters,
confirming him, as Miss Dorcas remarked, in his evil
ways,—all these may better be imagined than described.

“A quarter after eleven, sister!”

“Can it be possible?” said Mrs. Betsey. “No wonder
Jack came to bring us home.”

Jack seconded the remark with a very staccato bark
and a brisk movement towards the door, where, with
much laughing, many hand shakings, ardent protestations
that they had had a delightful evening, and promises
to come again next week, the company dispersed.