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The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York, a novel by Edward Eggleston |
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Chapter 9. Washington Square And Elsewhere |
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_ CHAPTER IX. WASHINGTON SQUARE AND ELSEWHERE Mrs. Gouverneur had invited both Phillida and Millard to a family dinner this evening with a notion of furthering their acquaintance and drawing her niece into society. She would not admit to herself any purpose or expectation ulterior. She had engaged each one to come two hours before dinner to make a quiet afternoon of it, and when she found them both unpunctual she wondered. "Philip," she said to her son, who was sitting by the window reading a folio volume of Sir Thomas Browne, "I asked Phillida to come early this afternoon, and I can't imagine what keeps her." "Oh, some leper, or some one who has fallen among thieves. It's a dreadful thing to be a Christian. I have only known three or four, and Phillida is one of them." "You don't mean to say we are not all Christians?" demanded Philip's father, a taciturn man with a rather handsome face of the broad Dutch type. What history it carried was mainly one of good dinners and fine wines. The senior Gouverneur had been sitting looking into the fire for half an hour without saying a word. His son's way of treating the sacred white elephants of conventionality was the main grief of this dignified, well-bred, entirely commonplace man. "Yes, you're all--we're all, Christians in the sense that we're neither Jews, Mohammedans, nor Buddhists. But most of us don't belong to the same totem with Jesus." "What do you mean by the same totem with Jesus?" said the mother, who could not help shuddering a little at the temerity of her son's paradoxes, though fondly indulgent of his irreverent cleverness. "A totem among the Indians is the subdivision of a tribe. The Mohawks or Cayugas, for example, were subdivided into totems called the 'Wolf,' the 'Turtle,' the 'Bear.' Every man belonged to the totem of his mother and was akin to everybody in it. If a Mohawk of the Wolf totem stopped in the village of the Cayugas or the Senecas, he was entertained by some Seneca of the same totem who claimed him for a kinsman." "That's very curious," said his mother. "I don't see what it's got to do with your cousin Phillida or with religion," said Mr. Gouverneur, who as an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church, and as the descendant of a long line of men and women who had traveled in the same well-worn path since the good old days of the Synod of Dort, felt much annoyed at Philip's waywardness. "Well," said Philip, leaning back in his chair and letting the folio rest on his knees, "you see there are religious totems that run through all denominations of Christians and even through different religions, and the lines of cleavage between them are deeper than those between Moslems and Christians, or between Jews and idolaters. There is what I call the totem of the Wahahbees--the people who translate religion into dispute or persecution. In central Asia they get rid of an opponent by assassination in the name of Almighty God and his prophet. In the United States doctrine defenders are inconveniently placed, and they have to be content with newspaper and pulpit scolding and with excommunicating those who differ from them. Then there is the most respectable sect of all--the Pharisees, which counts eminent divines and rabbis of every religion among its people. Great church-goers and Sabbath-keepers, great distributors of shalls and shall-nots, great observers of scruples and ordinances. They hold a tight rein over recreations and keep their mint-and-cumin tithes by double-entry. Now, Phillida is no Wahahbee and she is no Pharisee. She is not above enjoying herself at your table on Sunday evening, you see, or going to Mrs. Hilbrough's reception. She takes her religion in the noblest way. Her enthusiasms all have a philanthropic coloring. She's what I call a Jesus-ite." "Ah, now, Philip," said his mother, half-amused and half-startled by the irreverent sound of this expression, but full of admiration for Philip's originality. "And what are _you_, please?" demanded his father with some severity and a slightly heightened color. He knew that Philip must be wrong, for he had never seen anything of this sort in the "Christian Intelligencer" in his life. "What are you?" he repeated. "Only a poor doubting, mocking, useless Sadducee, I suppose," said the son as he bent again over the Religio Medici. There was a touch of dejection in his voice, which served to disarm that resentment which his father felt towards every view of anything that varied from the consecrated commonplace. The door-bell rang, and Mrs. Gouverneur, who had intended that Phillida and Millard should each consider the other a mere coincidence, was a little disconcerted to have them enter together at a later time than she had set, and with an air of slight fatigue, as though they had come from a long walk. And, moreover, without a chaperon. The acquaintance was progressing more rapidly than she had expected. Millard smilingly explained: "I encountered Miss Callender in a very unfashionable quarter of the city, and I thought it my duty to take charge of her." At ten o'clock that evening Phillida was escorted to her home, her cousin Philip Gouverneur walking on one side and Millard on the other. She left them with a pleased sense of having passed an uncommonly happy afternoon and evening, but was alarmed, nevertheless, to think what a romance Agatha would build out of the encounter with Mr. Millard in Avenue C and the detected contrivance of Aunt Gouverneur. And when she had finished deprecating Agatha's raptures and had escaped her sister's further questions by going to bed, Phillida found that her own imagination had at length been set a-going, and her pillow reveries kept her awake. Why was it always Mr. Millard? She had chanced upon him at Mrs. Hilbrough's; his desire to bring Mrs. Gouverneur to the Hilbrough reception had made him her escort; and now most unexpectedly she finds that he and she are intimates and, in a sense, benefactors in the same tenement in Avenue C; they are companions in a walk, and again guests at the same table. It made her superstitious; these coincidences looked like fate--or rather like a special manifestation of the will of Providence--to the mind of Phillida Callender. Undeniably there was something in Charles Millard that attracted her. He was not just of her own kind, but if he had been would she have liked him so well? Certainly the young men at the mission, exemplary fellows that they were, did not excite even a languid interest in her mind. Millard took life less seriously than she did, but perhaps that very otherness was agreeable: when one is prone by nature to travel dusty paths and dutifully to wound one's feet on mountainous rocky roads, a companion who habitually beckons to green sward and shady seats, who makes life put on a little more of the air of a picnic excursion into the world, is a source of refreshment. She now knew that Millard was not without benevolence, that he clung faithfully to his aunt in spite of his connections in the great world, and that he was planning to assist in the education of his cousins. If she had not somewhat exaggerated these virtues of fidelity and generosity she would not have been a woman, for it is one of the crowning good fortunes of life that a woman can contrive to make so much of a little virtue in a man. Having left Phillida, Millard and Gouverneur walked together up Second Avenue, past the closed gateways of Stuyvesant Park. Millard was doing the talking, at a great rate. Philip was silent in regard to everything, or if he spoke he said only so much as a decent courtesy demanded. This soon became tiresome to Millard, who was relieving the internal pressure of his thoughts by mere bubble talk about things of no interest to himself, while it seemed impossible to excite his companion's interest in anything. "You and I have changed places to-night, Phil," he said at length; "you make me do all the talking. Come now, it's your turn." "I don't feel in the humor," said Philip. "Are you going to the club?" "No; I shall go home and write some letters, maybe, now I think of it. So good-night." Philip's "Good-night" was more curt than courteous, and he made his way to the club, where, according to his habit, he crouched his small form into one of the great chairs, drawing his head down between his shoulders, which were thrust upward by the resting of his elbows on the chair-arms. Here he sat long, taking no part in any conversation, but watching the smoke from his cigar. The next morning he came late to breakfast, and his mother lingered after the rest had left the table, to see that his coffee and chops were right and to mitigate his apparent depression. "Your little match-making scheme is likely to succeed beautifully," he said to her when the servant had gone. "What do you mean? I'm sure I had no views of that kind in asking Charley Millard and Phillida. I only wished to encourage Phillida to go more into society." "Views or no views, what it'll come to will be a match," Philip retorted. "Well, there'll be no harm done, I suppose." "Not if you think Charley the best man for her." There was something of dejection in the tone of this last remark, and a note of reproach to her, that rendered Mrs. Gouverneur uneasy. When Philip had left the table she revolved it in her mind. Was Philip himself in love with Phillida? Or did he know anything to the disadvantage of Millard? "Tell Mr. Philip I wish to see him before he goes out," she said to one of the maids. When Philip came to her room she looked at him with anxiety. "Do you know anything against Charley, Philip?" "Nothing whatever," said Philip, emphatically, as he pulled on his gloves. "Philip, tell me truly, do you care for your cousin yourself?" "Why, of course. She is my cousin, and a good girl--a little too fearfully good." "You know what I mean, Philip. Don't trifle with me." "What would be the use of my caring for Phillida, as you call it? Charley, with his usual luck, will get her, I am sure. You've fixed that." "Now, Philip, you reproach me unjustly. You've had years of intimacy with Phillida. Why did you never let her know what your feelings were?" "I? I haven't said that I have any feelings in the matter. Do you think Phillida would have me if Charley were out of the way? She knows me too well. She's a utilitarian. She would say, 'Cousin Phil is interesting, but he hides his talent in a napkin. He studied law, and now neglects to practise it because his uncle left him two or three thousand dollars a year.' To her I am only an idler, when I'm not a mocker." "She likes you, I am sure." "Yes, in a way, no doubt. But I'm a doubter, and a mocker, and a failure, and Phillida knows it. And so do I." "Ah, now, Philip, why will you be so discouraged with yourself? You're the cleverest young man in New York." But Philip only smiled and said, "Good-morning, mother," and ran down the stairs and out the door. When Philip had left Millard in Second Avenue the evening before, the latter was puzzled. He had never seen Gouverneur so depressed and irritable. But when they had separated, Millard was relieved that he no longer had to force a conversation about things of no interest to himself, and that his thoughts were at length free to range where they would. He turned his footsteps towards his apartment, making a detour through Madison Square to lengthen the stroll. His interest in and affection for the family of his aunt was a fact so paradoxical to the rest of his life that it was in some sense his main secret. It was not a thing he should like to have explained to Philip Gouverneur, his bosom friend, for example. But that Phillida Callender was now in possession of the chief secret of his life gave him a sort of pleasure he had never known before. That she was in friendship with his aunt's family and a sharer in this off-color part of his existence made a sort of community of feeling between him and her. He turned the matter over in his mind, he went over in memory all parts of his encounter with her in his aunt's tenement, he dwelt upon the glow of surprise on her countenance, and in imagination he again took her hand in friendly greeting. He recalled every detail of the walk through Avenue C, in Tompkins Square, and then through the cross-streets. He made himself feel over again the pleasure he had felt in those rare moments when she turned her dark, earnest eyes toward him at some more than usually interesting moment in the conversation. This was the pleasant side of the reverie. For the rest, he was tormented with a certain feeling of unworthiness that had never troubled him so much before. The more he thought of the purposes, sweet, high, and disinterested, that moved her, the more was he pained at a sense of frivolity, or, at least, at a want of "worthwhileness" in his own aims. He was a communicant at St. Matthias's, and highly esteemed for his exemplary life and his liberality to the church. But the rector of St. Matthias's did not trouble himself, as Phillida did, about the lost sheep in the wilderness of the lettered avenues. His own flock, well washed and kempt, were much more agreeable subjects of contemplation. Millard sat in revery a long time. He was really afraid that he should presently find himself in love with Miss Callender, and such a marriage was contrary to his whole plan of life. His purpose was primarily to remain a bachelor, though he had dreamed of himself well established, but always with a wife whose tastes and connections should incline her to those pursuits that go with a fashionable career, and he always saw a vision of himself and his wife entertaining the very elect of New York City. Here suddenly a new path, hitherto untrodden by his imagination, opened before him as a possibility. Judged by the standards used among his friends it was an undesirable road. It involved a voluntary sacrifice of that position of social prominence and leadership which he had striven so hard to secure. He resolved to put the thought away from him. A little later his lights were out and he was abed. But he did not sleep at once, for in spite of the best resolutions he could not help recalling again and again the face and figure, the voice and movement, of Phillida Callender. Again and again he crossed Tompkins Square and walked through Eighth street and Waverley Place with her; and she once more confronted him across Mrs. Gouverneur's dinner-table. One result of Millard's meditations was a desire to relieve his conscience by sharing a little--if ever so little--in the effort to improve the life of the multitudinous East-siders. To touch them by personal effort and contact was out of the question; he could not bring himself to attempt it, nor would it have availed anything, perhaps, if he had, for the East-siders would have shrunk from his gloves as instinctively as he did from their work-darkened palms. But there was the other resort of his check-book. He sent a check the next evening to the superintendent of the mission. He stated that he remitted this as assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes on behalf of a gentleman who did not wish his name known, and requested that the subscription be announced merely as from "A Well-wisher." One half of the hundred dollars was to go to the expenses of the coffee-room and the other half to be appropriated to the library and reading-room. Now it is not in the nature of things that a hen should see a new egg in her nest without cackling over it, or that a man in charge of a benevolent enterprise should have a hundred-dollar check mysteriously and unexpectedly dropped into his hat without talking about it. Such a gift smacks of special divine favor, and offers a good theme for an address calculated to animate those engaged in the work. The very next Sunday, when the Testaments had been shut up and the lesson papers had all been put away, Phillida and the others heard from the superintendent some very inspiriting remarks on the subject of the encouragements which ought to make them take heart in their work. He wound up, of course, by telling of this donation from an unknown well-wisher. Had he stopped there--but what talker to young people would or could have stopped there? He whisked out the check and showed it, and then the identical letter from the assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes was held up before the admiring boys and girls and read aloud to show how modestly this benevolent well-wisher had hidden his hand. And thus the only person in the audience from whom Millard had particularly wished to conceal his agency in the matter knew perfectly that the anonymous well-wisher was none other than the assistant cashier himself. And she thought what a fine thing it was to have money when there was so much good to be done with it. _ |
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