LITMIR.BIZ

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to hush free conversation, or to be treated like a baby who will cry if they make too much noise; and then on the other hand is Mr. St. John – whom I regard with reverence on account of his holy, self-denying life – who stands so definitely entrenched within the limits of the church, and does not in his own mind ever admit a doubt of anything which the church has settled; and between them and Harry and all I don't know just what I ought to do.

      I am sure, if there is a man in the world who means in all things to live the Christian life, it's Harry. There is no difference between him and Mr. St. John there. He is ready for any amount of self-sacrifice, and goes with Mr. St. John to the extent of his ability in his efforts to do good; and yet he really does not believe a great many things that Mr. St. John thinks are Christian doctrines. He says he believes only in the wheat, and not in the chaff, and that it is only the chaff that will be blown away in these modern discussions. With all this, I feel nervous and anxious, and sometimes wish I could go right into some good, safe, dark church, and pull down all the blinds, and shut all the doors, and keep out all the bustle of modern thinking, and pray, and meditate, and have a lovely, quiet time.

      Mr. St. John lends me from time to time some of his ritualistic books; and they are so refined and scholarly, and yet so devout, that Harry and I are quite charmed with their tone; but I can't help seeing that, as Harry says, they lead right back into the Romish church – and by a way that seems enticingly beautiful. Sometimes I think it would be quite delightful to have a spiritual director who would save you all the trouble of deciding, and take your case in hand, and tell you exactly what to do at every step. Mr. St. John, I know, would be just the person to assume such a position. He is a natural school-master, and likes to control people, and, although he is so very gentle, I always feel that he is very stringent, and that if I once allowed him ascendancy he would make no allowances. I can feel the "main de fer" through the perfect gentlemanly polish of his exterior; but you see I know Harry never would go completely under his influence, and I shrink from anything that would divide me from my husband, and so I don't make any move in that direction.

      You see, I write to you all about these matters, for my mamma is a sweet, good little woman who never troubles her head with anything in this line, and my god-mother, Aunt Maria, is a dear worldly old soul, whose heart is grieved within her because I care so little for the pomps and vanities. She takes it to heart that Harry and I have definitely resolved to give up party-going, and all that useless round of calling and dressing and visiting that is called "going into society," and she sometimes complicates matters by trying her forces to get me into those old grooves I was so tired of running in. I never pretend to talk to her of the deeper wants or reasons of my life, for it would be ludicrously impossible to make her understand. She is a person over whose mind never came the shadow of a doubt that she was right in her views of life; and I am not the person to evangelize her.

      Well now, dear Mother, imagine a further complication. Harry is very anxious that we should have an evening once a week to receive our friends – an informal, quiet, sociable, talking evening, on a sort of ideal plan of his, in which everybody is to be made easy and at home, and to spend just such a quiet, social hour as at one's own chimney-corner. But fancy my cares, with all the menagerie of our very miscellaneous acquaintances! I should be like the man in the puzzle that had to get the fox and geese and corn over in one boat without their eating each other. Fancy Jim Fellows and Mr. St. John! Dr. Campbell, with his molecules and cerebration, talking to my little Quaker dove, with her white wings and simple faith, or Aunt Maria and mamma conversing with a Jewish Rabbi! I believe our family have a vague impression that Jews are disreputable, however gentlemanly and learned; and I don't know but Mr. St. John would feel shocked at him. Nevertheless, our Rabbi is a very excellent German gentleman, and one of the most interesting talkers I have heard. Oh! then there are our rococo antiquities across the street, Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden and her sister. What shall I do with them all? Harry has such boundless confidence in my powers of doing the agreeable that he seems to think I can, out of this material, make a most piquant and original combination. I have an awful respect for the art de tenir salon, and don't wonder that among our artistic French neighbors it got to be a perfect science. But am I the woman born to do it in New York?

      Well, there's no way to get through the world but to keep doing, and to attack every emergency with courage. I shall do my possible, and let you know of my success.

Your daughter,Eva.

       CHAPTER V

      A TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT

      The housekeeping establishment of Eva Henderson, née Van Arsdel, was in its way a model of taste, order, and comfort. There was that bright, attractive, cosy air about it that spoke of refined tastes and hospitable feelings – it was such a creation as only the genius of a thorough home-artist could originate. There are artists who work in clay and marble, there are artists in water-colors, and artists in oils, whose works are on exhibition through galleries and museums: but there are also, in thousands of obscure homes, domestic artists, who contrive out of the humblest material to produce in daily life the sense of the beautiful; to cast a veil over its prosaic details and give it something of the charm of a poem.

      Eva was one of these, and everybody that entered her house felt her power at once in the atmosphere of grace and enjoyment which seemed to pervade her rooms.

      But there was underneath all this an unseen, humble operator, without whom one step in the direction of poetry would have been impossible; one whose sudden withdrawal would have been like the entrance of a black frost into a flower-garden, leaving desolation and unsightliness around: and this strong pivot on which the order and beauty of all the fairy contrivances of the little mistress turned was no other than the Irish Mary McArthur, cook, chambermaid, laundress, and general operator and adviser of the whole.

      Mary was a specimen of the best class of those women whom the old country sends to our shores. She belonged to the family of a respectable Irish farmer, and had been carefully trained in all household economies and sanctities. A school kept on the estate of their landlord had been the means of instructing her in the elements of a plain English education. She wrote a good hand, was versed in accounts, and had been instructed in all branches of needle-work with a care and particularity from which our American schools for girls might take a lesson. A strong sense of character pervaded her family life – a sense of the decorous, the becoming, the true and honest, such as often gives dignity to the cottage of the laboring man of the old world. But the golden stories of wealth to be gotten in America had induced her parents to allow Mary with her elder brother to try their fortunes on these unknown shores. Mary had been fortunate in falling into the Van Arsdel family; for Mrs. Van Arsdel, though without the energy or the patience which would have been necessary to control or train an inexperienced and unsteady subject, was, on the whole, appreciative of the sterling good qualities of Mary, and liberal and generous in her dealings with her.

      In fact, the Van Arsdels were in all things a free, careless, good natured, merry set, and Mary reciprocated their kindliness to her with all the warmth of her Irish heart. Eva had been her particular pet and darling. She was a pretty, engaging child at the time she first came into the family. Mary had mended her clothes, tidied her room, studied her fancies and tastes, and petted her generally with a whole-souled devotion. "When you get a husband, Miss Eva," she would say, "I will come and live with you." But before that event had come to pass, Mary had given her whole heart to an idle, handsome, worthless fellow, whom she appeared to love in direct proportion to his good-for-nothingness. Two daughters were the offspring of this marriage, and then Mary became a widow, and had come with her youngest child under the shadow of "Miss Eva's" roof-tree.

      Thus much to give back-ground to the scenery on which Aunt Maria entered, on the morning when she took the omnibus at Mrs. Van Arsdel's door.

      Eva was gone out when the door-bell of the little house rang. Mary looking from the chamber window saw Mrs. Wouvermans standing at the door step. Now against this good lady Mary had always cherished a secret antagonism. Nothing so awakens the animosity of her class as the entrance of a third power into the family, between the regnant mistress and the servants; and Aunt Maria's intrusions and dictations had more than once been discussed in the full parliament of Mrs. Van Arsdel's servants. Consequently the arrival of a police officer armed with a search warrant could not have

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