We and Our Neighbors: or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street

As a preparation for the first experiment, Eva had commenced by inviting Mr. St. John to dinner, that she might enlist his approbation of her scheme and have time to set it before him in that charming fireside hour, when spirits, like flowers, open to catch the dews of influence. After dinner Harry had an engagement at the printing-office, and left Eva the field all to herself; and she managed her cards admirably. Mr. St. John had been little accustomed to the society of cultured, attractive women; but he had in his own refined nature every sensibility to respond agreeably to its influences; and already this fireside had come to be a place where he loved to linger. And so, when she had him comfortably niched in his corner, she opened the first parallel of her siege.

"Now, Mr. St. John, you have been preaching to us about self-denial, and putting us all up to deeds of self-sacrifice – I have some self-denying work to propose to you."

Mr. St. John opened his blue eyes wide at this exordium, and looked an interrogation.

"Well, Mr. St. John," pursued Eva, "we are going to have little social reunions at our house every Thursday, from seven till ten, for the purpose of promoting good feeling and fellowship, and we want our rector to be one of us and help us."

"Indeed, Mrs. Henderson, I have not the least social tact. My sphere doesn't lie at all in that direction," said Mr. St. John, nervously. "I have no taste for general society."

"Yes, but I think you told us last Sunday we were not to consult our tastes. You told us that if we felt a strong distaste for any particular course, it might possibly show that just here the true path of Christian heroism lay."

"You turn my words upon me, Mrs. Henderson. I was thinking then of the distaste that people usually feel for visiting the poor and making themselves practically familiar with the unlovely side of life."

"Well, but may it not apply the other way? You are perfectly familiar and at home among the poor, but you have always avoided society among cultured persons of your own class. May not the real self-denial for you lie there? You have a fastidious shrinking from strangers. May it not be your duty to overcome it? There are a great many I know in our circle who might be the better for knowing you. Have you a right to shrink back from them?"

Mr. St. John moved uneasily in his chair.

"Now," pursued Eva, "there's a young Dr. Campbell that I want you to know. To be sure, he isn't a believer in the church – not a believer at all, I fear; but still a charming, benevolent, kindly, open-hearted man, and I want him to know you, and come under good influences."

"I don't believe I'm at all adapted," said Mr. St. John, hesitatingly.

"Well, dear sir, what do you say to us when we say the same about mission work? Don't you tell us that if we honestly try we shall learn to adapt ourselves?"

"That is true," said St. John, frankly.

"Besides," said Eva, "Mr. St. John, Dr. Campbell might do you good. All your friends feel that you are too careless of your health. Indeed, we all feel great concern about it, and you might learn something of Dr. Campbell in this."

Thus Eva pursued her advantage with that fluent ability with which a pretty young woman at her own fireside always gets the best of the argument. Mr. St. John, attacked on the weak side of conscientiousness, was obliged at last to admit that to spend an evening with agreeable, cultivated, well-dressed people might be occasionally as much a shepherd's duty as to sit in the close, ill-smelling rooms of poverty and listen to the croonings and maunderings of the ill-educated, improvident, and foolish, who make so large a proportion of the less fortunate classes of society. It had been suggested to him that a highly-educated, agreeable young doctor, who talked materialism and dissented from the thirty-nine articles, might as properly be borne with as a drinking young mechanic who talked unbelief of a lower and less respectable order.

Now it so happened, by one of those unexpected coincidences that fall out in the eternal order of things, that Eva was reinforced in her course of argument by a silent and subtle influence, of which she was herself scarcely aware. The day seldom passed that one or other of her sisters did not form a part of her family circle, and on this day of all others the fates had willed that Angelique should come up to work on her Christmas presents by Eva's fireside.

Imagine, therefore, as the scene of this conversation, a fire-lighted room, the evening flicker of the blaze falling in flecks and flashes over books and pictures, and Mr. St. John in a dark, sheltered corner, surveying without being surveyed, listening to Eva's animated logic, and yet watching a very pretty tableau in the opposite corner.

There sat Angelique, listening to the conversation, with the fire-light falling in flashes on her golden hair and her lap full of worsteds – rosy, pink, blue, lilac, and yellow. Her little hands were busy in some fleecy wonder, designed to adorn the Christmas-tree for the mission school of his church; and she knit and turned and twisted the rosy mystery with an air of grave interest, the while giving an attentive ear to the conversation.

Mr. St. John was not aware that he was looking at her; in fact, he supposed he was listening to Eva, who was eloquently setting forth to him all the good points in Dr. Campbell's character, and the reasons why it was his duty to seek and cultivate his acquaintance; but while she spoke and while he replied he saw the little hands moving, and a sort of fairy web weaving, and the face changing as, without speaking a word, she followed with bright, innocent sympathy the course of the conversation.

When Eva, with a becoming air of matronly gravity, lectured him for his reckless treatment of his own health, and his want of a proper guide on that subject, Angelique's eyes seemed to say the same; and sometimes, when Eva turned just the faintest light of satire on the ascetic notions to which he was prone, those same eyes sparkled with that frank gaiety that her dimpled face seemed made to express. Now the kitten catches at her thread, and she stops, and bends over and dangles the ball, and laughs softly to herself, and St. John from his dark corner watches the play. There is something of the kitten in her, he thinks. Even her gravest words have suggested the air of a kitten on good behavior, and perhaps she may be a naughty, wicked kitten – who knows? A kitten lying in wait to catch unwary birds and mice! But she looked so artless – so innocent! – her little head bent on one side like a flower, and her eyes sparkling as if she were repressing a laugh! – a nervous idea shot through the conversation to Mr. St. John's heart. What if this girl should laugh at him? St. Jerome himself might have been vulnerable to a poisoned arrow like this. What if he really were getting absurd notions and ways in the owl-like recesses and retirements of his study – growing rusty, unfit for civilized life? Clearly it was his duty to "come forth into the light of things," and before he left that evening he gave his pledge to Eva that he would be one of the patrons of her new social enterprise.

It is to be confessed that as he went home that night he felt that duty had never worn an aspect so agreeable. It was certainly his place as a good fisher of men to study the habits of the cultured, refined, and influential portion of society, as well as of its undeveloped children. Then, he didn't say it to himself, but the scene where these investigations were to be pursued rose before him insensibly as one where Angelique was to be one of the entertainers. It would give him a better opportunity of studying the genus and habits of that variety of the church militant who train in the uniform of fashionable girls, and to decide the yet doubtful question whether they had any genuine capacity for church work. Angelique's evident success with her class was a puzzle to him, and he thought he would like to know her better, and see if real, earnest, serious purposes could exist under that gay exterior.

Somehow, he could not fancy those laughing eyes and that willful, curly, golden hair under the stiff cap of a Sister of Charity; and he even doubted whether a gray cloak would seem as appropriate as the blue robe and ermine cape where the poor little child had rested her scarred cheek. He liked to think of her just as she looked then and there. And why shouldn't he get acquainted with her? If he was ever going to form a sisterhood of good works, certainly it was his duty to understand the sisters. Clearly it was!

CHAPTER XV

GETTING READY TO BEGIN

"Having company" is one of those incidents of life which in all circles, high or low, cause more or less searchings of heart.

Even the moderate "tea-fight" of good old times necessitated not only anxious thought in the hostess herself, but also a mustering and review of best "bibs and tuckers," through the neighborhood.

But to undertake a "serial sociable" in New York, in this day of serials, was something even graver, causing many thoughts and words in many houses.

Witness the following specimens:

"I confess, Nellie, I can't understand Eva's ways," said Aunt Maria, the morning of the first Thursday. "She don't come to me for advice; but I confess I don't understand her."

Aunt Maria was in a gloomy, severe state of mind, owing to the contumacy and base ingratitude of Alice in rejecting her interposition and care, and she came down this morning to signify her displeasure to Nellie at the way she had been treated.

"I don't know what you mean, sister," said Mrs. Van Arsdel, deprecatingly. "I'm sure I don't know of anything that Eva's been doing lately."

"Why, these evenings of hers; I don't understand them. Setting out to have receptions in that little out-of-the-way shell of hers! Why, who'll go? Nobody wants to ramble off up there, and not get to anything after all. It's going to be a sort of mixed-up affair – newspaper men, and people that nobody knows – all well enough in their way, perhaps; but I shan't be mixed up in it." Aunt Maria nodded her head gloomily, and the bows and feathers on her hat quivered protestingly.

"Oh, they are going to be just unpretending sociable little gatherings," said Mrs. Van Arsdel. "Just the family and a few friends; and I think they are going to be pleasant. I wish you would go, Maria. Eva will be disappointed."

"No, she won't. It's evident, Nelly, that your girls don't any of them care about me, or regard anything I say. Well, I only hope they mayn't live to repent it; that's all."

Aunt Maria said this with that menacing sniff with which people in a bad humor usually dispense Christian charity. The dark awfulness of the hope expressed really chilled poor little Mrs. Van Arsdel's blood. From long habits of dependence upon her sister, she had come to regard her displeasure as one of the severer evils of life. To keep the peace with Maria, as far as she herself was concerned, would have been easy. Contention was fatiguing to her. It was a trouble to have the responsibility of making up her own mind; and she was quite willing that Maria should carry her through the journey of life, buy her tickets, choose her hotels, and settle with her cabmen. But, complicated with a husband, and a family of bright, independent daughters, each endowed with a separate will of her own, Mrs. Van Arsdel led on the whole a hard life. People who hate trouble generally get a good deal of it. It's all very well for a gentle acquiescent spirit to be carried through life by one bearer. But when half a dozen bearers quarrel and insist on carrying one opposite ways, the more facile the spirit, the greater the trouble.

Mrs. Van Arsdel, in fact, passed a good deal of her life in being talked over to one course of conduct by Aunt Maria, and talked back again by her girls. She resembled a weak, peaceable hamlet on the border-land between France and Germany, taken and retaken with much wear and tear of spirit, and heartily wishing peace at any price.

"I don't see how Eva is going to afford all this," continued Aunt Maria gloomily.

"Oh! there's to be no evening entertainment, nothing but a little tea, and biscuit, and sponge cake, in the most social way," pleaded Mrs. Van Arsdel.

"But all this, every week, in time comes to a good deal," said Aunt Maria. "Now, if Eva would put all the extra trouble and expense of these evenings into one good handsome party of select people and have it over with, why that would be something worth while, and I would help her get it up. Such a party stands for something. But she doesn't come to me for advice. I'm a superannuated old woman, I suppose," and Aunt Maria sighed in a way heart-breaking to her peace-loving sister.

"Indeed, Maria, you are wrong. You are provoked now. You don't mean so."

"I'm —not provoked. Do you suppose I care? I don't! but I can see, I suppose! I'm not quite blind yet, I hope, and I sha'n't go where I'm not wanted. And now, if you'll give me those samples, Nellie, I'll go to Arnold's and Stewart's and look up that dress for you, and then I'll take your laces to the mender's. It's a good morning's work to go up to that dark alley where she rooms; but I'll do it, now I'm about it. I'm not so worn out yet but what I am acceptable to do errands for you," said Aunt Maria, with gloomy satisfaction.

"Oh, Maria, how can you talk so!" said little Mrs. Van Arsdel, with tears in her eyes. "You really are unjust."

"There's no use in discussing matters, Nellie. Give me the patterns and the laces," said Aunt Maria, obdurately. "Here! I'll sort 'em out. You never have anything ready," she said, opening her sister's drawer, and taking right and left such articles as she deemed proper, with as much composure as if her sister had been a seven-year-old child. "There!" she said, shutting the drawer, "now I'm ready. Good morning!" – and away she sailed, leaving her sister abased in spirit, and vaguely contrite for she couldn't tell what.

Aunt Maria had the most disagreeable habit of venting her indignation on her sister, by going to most uncomfortable extremes of fatiguing devotion to her service. With a brow of gloom and an air of martyrdom, she would explore shops, tear up and down stair-cases, perform fatiguing pilgrimages for Nellie and the girls; piling all these coals of fire on their heads, and looking all the while so miserably abused and heart-broken that it required stronger discrimination than poor Mrs. Van Arsdel was gifted with not to feel herself a culprit.

"Only think, your Aunt Maria says she won't go this evening," she said in a perplexed and apprehensive tone to her girls.

"Glad of it," said Alice, and the words were echoed by Angelique.

"Oh, girls, you oughtn't to feel so about your aunt!"

"We don't," said Alice, "but as long as she feels so about us, it's just as well not to have her there. We girls are all going to do our best to make the first evening a success, so that everybody shall have a good time and want to come again; and if Aunt Maria goes in her present pet, she would be as bad as Edgar Poe's raven."

"Just fancy our having her on our hands, saying 'nevermore' at stated intervals," said Angelique, laughing; "why, it would upset everything!"

"Angelique, you oughtn't to make fun of your aunt," said Mrs. Van Arsdel, with an attempt at reproving gravity.

"I'm sure it's the nicest thing we can make of her, Mammy dear," said Angelique; "it's better to laugh than to cry any time. Oh, Aunt Maria will keep, never fear. She'll clear off by-and-by, like a northeast rain-storm, and then we shall like her well as ever; sha'n't we, girls?"

"Oh, yes; she always comes round after a while," said Alice.

"Well, now I'm going up to help Eva get the rooms ready," said Angelique, and out she fluttered, like a flossy bit of thistle-down.

Angelique belonged to the corps of the laughing saints – a department not always recognized by the straiter sort in the church militant, but infinitely effective and to the purpose in the battle of life. Her heart was a tender but a gay one – perhaps the lovingness of it kept it bright; for love is a happy divinity, and Angelique loved everybody, and saw the best side of everything; besides, just now she was barely seventeen, and thought the world a very nice place. She was the very life of the household, the one who loved to run and wait and tend; who could stop gaps and fill spaces, and liked to do it: and so, this day, she devoted herself to Eva's service in the hundred somethings that pertain to getting a house in order for an evening reception.

On the opposite side of the way, the projected hospitalities awoke various conflicting emotions.

"Dinah, I don't really know whether I shall go to that company to-night or not," said Mrs. Betsey confidentially to Dinah over her ironing-table.

"Land sakes, Mis' Betsey," said Dinah, with her accustomed giggle, "how you talk! What you 'feard on?"

Mrs. Betsey had retreated to the kitchen, to indulge herself with Dinah in tremors and changes of emotion which had worn out the patience of Miss Dorcas in the parlor. That good lady, having made up her mind definitively to go and take Betsey with her, was indisposed to repeat every half hour the course of argument by which she had demonstrated to her that it was the proper thing to do.

But the fact was, that poor Mrs. Betsey was terribly fluttered by the idea of going into company again. Years had passed in that old dim house, with the solemn clock tick-tocking in the corner, and the sunbeam streaming duskily at given hours through the same windows, with no sound of coming or going footsteps. There the two ancient sisters had been working, reading, talking, round and round on the same unvarying track, for weeks, months and years, and now, suddenly, had come a change. The pretty, gay, little housekeeper across the way had fluttered in with a whole troop of invisible elves of persuasion in the very folds of her garments, and had cajoled and charmed them into a promise to be supporters of her "evenings," and Miss Dorcas was determined to go. But all ye of womankind know that after every such determination comes a review of the wherewithal, and many tremors.

Now Miss Dorcas was self-sufficing, and self-sustained. She knew herself to be Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden, in the first place; and she had a general confidence, by right of her family and position, that all her belongings were the right things. They might be out of fashion – so much the worse for the fashion; Miss Dorcas wore them with a cheerful courage. Yet, as she frequently remarked, "sooner or later, if you let things lie, fashion always comes round to them." They had come round to her many times in the course of her life, and always found her ready for them. But Mrs. Betsey was timorous, and had a large allowance of what the phrenologists call "approbativeness." In her youth she had been a fashionable young belle, and now she had as many flutters and tremors about her gray curls and her caps as in the days when she sat up all night in an arm-chair with her hair dressed and powdered for a ball. In fact, an old lady's cap is undeniably a tender point. One might imagine it to be a sort of shrine or last retreat in which all her youthful love of dress finds asylum; and, in estimating her fitness for any scene of festivity, the cap is the first consideration. So, when Dinah chuckled, "What ye 'feard on, honey?" Mrs. Betsey came out with it:

"Dinah, I don't know which of my caps to wear."

"Lor' sakes, Mis' Betsey, wear yer new one. What's to hender?"

"Well, you see, it's trimmed with lilac ribbons, and the shade don't go with my new brown gown; they look horridly together. Dorcas never does notice such things, but they don't go well together. I tried to tell Dorcas about it, but she shut me up, saying I was always fussy."

"Well, laws! then, honey, wear your other cap – it's a right nice un now," said Dinah in a coaxing tone.

"Trimmed with white ribbon – " said Mrs. Betsey, ruminating; "but you see, Dinah, that ribbon has really got quite yellow; and there's a spot on one of the strings," she added, in a tone of poignant emotion.

"Well, now, I tell ye what to do," said Dinah; "you jest wear your new cap with them laylock ribbins, and wear your black silk: that are looks illegant now."

"But my black silk is so old; it's pieced under the arm, and beginning to fray in the gathers."

"Land sake, Mis' Betsey! who's agoin' to look under your arm?" said Dinah. "They a'n't agoin' to set you up under one o' them sterry scopes to be looked at, be they? You'll do to pass now, I tell ye; now don't go to gettin' fluttered and 'steriky, Mis' Betsey. Why don't ye go right along, like Mis' Dorcas? She don't have no megrims and tantrums 'bout what she's goin' to wear."

Dinah's tolerant spirit in admitting this discussion was, however, a real relief to Mrs. Betsey. Like various liquors which are under a necessity of working themselves clear, Mrs. Betsey found a certain amount of talk necessary to clear her mind when proceeding to act in any emergency, and for this purpose a listener was essential; but Dorcas was so entirely above such fluctuations as hers – so positive and definite in all her judgments and conclusions – that she could not enjoy in her society the unlimited amount of discussion necessary to clarify her mental vision.

It was now about the fifth or sixth time that all the possibilities with regard to her wardrobe had been up for consideration that day; till Miss Dorcas, who had borne with her heroically for a season, had finally closed the discussion by recommending a chapter in Watts on the Mind which said a great many unpleasant things about people who occupy themselves too much with trifles, and thus Mrs. Betsey was driven to unbosom herself to Dinah.

"Then, again, there's Jack," she added; "I'm sure I don't know what he'll think of our both being out; there never such a thing happened before."

"Land sake, Mis' Betsey, jest as if Jack cared! Why, he'll stay with me. I'll see arter him– I will."

"Well, you must be good to him, Dinah," said Mrs. Betsey, apprehensively.

"Ain't I allers good to him? I don't set him up for a graven image and fall down and washup him, to be sure; but Jack has good times with me, if I do make him mind."

The fact was, that Dinah often seconded the disciplinary views of Miss Dorcas with the strong arm, pulling Jack backward by the tail, and correcting him with vigorous thumps of the broomstick when he fell into those furors of barking which were his principal weakness.

Dinah had all the sociable instincts of her race; and it moved her indignation that the few acquaintances who found their way to the forsaken old house should be terrified and repelled by such distracted tumults as Jack generally created when the door-bell rang. Hence her attitude toward him had so often been belligerent that poor Mrs. Betsey felt small confidence in leaving him to the trying separation of the evening under Dinah's care.

"Well, Dinah, you won't whip Jack if he does bark? I dare say he'll be lonesome. You must make allowances for him."

"Oh, laws, yes, honey, I'll make 'lowance, never you fear."

"And you really think the black dress will do?"

"Jest as sartin as I be that I'm here a ironin' this 'ere pillow-bier. Why, honey, you'll look like a pictur, you will."

"Oh, Dinah, I'm an old woman."

"Well, honey, what if you be? Land sakes, don't I remember when you was the belle of New York city? Lord love ye! Them was days! When 'twas all comin' and goin', hosses a-prancin', house full, and fellers fairly a-tumblin' over each other jest to get a look at ye. Laws, honey, ye was wuth lookin' at in dem days."

"Oh, Dinah, you silly old soul, what nonsense you talk!"

"Well, honey, you know you was de handsomest gal goin'. Now you knows you was," said Dinah, chuckling and shaking her portly sides.

"I suppose I wasn't bad looking," said Mrs. Betsey, laughing in turn; and the color flushed in her delicate, faded cheeks, and her pretty bright eyes grew misty with a thought of all the little triumphs, prides, and regrets of years ago.

To say the truth, Mrs. Betsey, though past the noon-time of attraction, was a very pretty old woman. Her hands were still delicate and white, her skin was of lily fairness, and her hair like fine-spun silver; and she retained still all the nice instincts and habits of the woman who has known herself charming. She still felt the discord of a shade in her ribbons like a false note in music, and was annoyed by the slightest imperfection of her dress, however concealed, to a degree which seemed at times wearisome and irrational to her stronger minded sister.