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

Angelique, by nature the most conscientious of beings, had listened to this eloquence with awful self-condemnation. She felt herself a dreadfully sinful little girl, that she had lived so unprofitable a life hitherto, and she undertook her Sunday-school labors with an intense ardor. When she came to visit in the poor dwellings from whence her pupils were drawn, and to see how devoid their life was of everything which she had been taught to call comfort, she felt wicked and selfish for enjoying even the moderate luxuries allowed by her father's reduced position. The allowance that had been given her for her winter wardrobe seemed to be more than she had a right to keep for herself in face of the terrible destitutions she saw. Secretly she set herself to see how much she could save from it. She had the gift of a quick eye and of deft fingers; and so, after running through the fashionable shops of dresses and millinery to catch the ideal of the hour, she went to work for herself. A faded merino was ripped, dyed, and, by the aid of clever patterns and skillful hands, transformed into the stylish blue suit. The little blue velvet hat had been gathered from the trimmings of an old dress. The humming bird had been a necessary appendage, to cover the piecing of the velvet; and thus the outfit which had called up so many alarmed scruples in Mr. St. John's mind was as completely a work of self-denial and renunciation as if she had come out in the black robe of a Sister of Charity.

The balance saved was, in her own happy thought, devoted to a Christmas outfit for some of the poorest of her scholars, whose mothers struggled hard and sat up late washing and mending to make them decent to be seen in Sunday-school.

But how should Mr. St. John know this, which Angie had not even told to her own mother and sisters? To say the truth, she feared that perhaps she might be laughed at as Quixotic, or wanting in good sense, in going so much beyond the usual standard in thoughtfulness for others, and, at any rate, kept her own little counsel. Mr. St. John knew nothing about women in that class of society, their works and ways, where or how they got their dresses; but he had a general impression that fashionable women were in heathen darkness, and spent on dress fabulous amounts that might be given to the poor. He had certain floating views in his mind, when further advanced in his ministry, of instituting a holy sisterhood, who should wear gray cloaks, and spend all their money and time in deeds of charity.

On the present occasion, he could see only the very patent fact that Angelique's dress was stylish and becoming to an alarming degree; that, taken in connection with her bright cheeks, her golden hair, and glancing hazel eyes, she was to the full as worldly an object as a blue-bird, or an oriole, or any of those brilliant creatures with which it has pleased the Maker of all to distract our attention in our pilgrimage through this sinful and dying world.

Angie was so far from assuming to herself any merit in this sacrifice that her only thought was how little it would do. Had it been possible and proper, she would have willingly given her ermine cape to the poor, wan little child, to whom the mere touch of it was such a strange, bewildering luxury; but she had within herself a spice of practical common sense which showed her that our most sacred impulses are not always to be literally obeyed.

Yet, while the little scarred cheek was resting on her ermine in such apparent bliss, there mingled in with the thread of her instructions to the children a determination next day to appraise cheap furs, and see if she could not bless the little one with a cape of her very own.

Angie's quiet common sense always stood her in good stead in moderating her enthusiasms, and even carried her at times to the length of differing with the rector, to whom she looked up as an angel guide. For example, when he had expatiated on the propriety and superior sanctity of coming fasting to the holy communion, sensible Angie had demurred.

"I must teach my class," she pleaded with herself, "and if I should go all that long way up to church without my breakfast, I should have such a sick-headache that I couldn't do anything properly for them. I'm always cross and stupid when that comes on."

Thus Angie concluded by her own little light, in her own separate way, that "to do good was better than sacrifice." Nevertheless, she supposed all this was because she was so low down in the moral scale, for did not Mr. St. John fast? – doubtless it gave him headache, but he was so good he went on just as well with a headache as without – and Angie felt how far she must rise to be like that.

"There now," said Jim Fellows, triumphantly, to Alice, as they were coming home, "didn't you see your angel of the churches looking in a certain direction this morning?"

Alice had, as a last resort, a fund of reserved dignity which she could draw upon whenever she was really and deeply in earnest.

"Jim," she said, without a smile, and in a grave tone, "I have confidence that you are a true friend to us all."

"Well, I hope so," said Jim, wonderingly.

"And you are too kind-hearted and considerate to wish to give real pain."

"Certainly I am."

"Well, then, promise me never to make remarks of that nature again, to me or anybody else, about Angie and Mr. St. John. It would be more distressing and annoying to her than anything you could do; and the dear child is now perfectly simple-hearted and unconstrained, and cheerful as a bird in her work. The least intimation of this kind might make her conscious and uncomfortable, and spoil it all. So promise me now."

Jim eyed his fair monitress with the kind of wicked twinkle a naughty boy gives to his mother, to ascertain if she is really in earnest, but Alice maintained a brow of "sweet, austere composure," and looked as if she expected to be obeyed.

"Well, I perfectly long for a hit at St. John," he said, "but if you say so, so it must be."

"You promise on your honor?" insisted Alice.

"Yes, I promise on my honor; so there!" said Jim. "I won't even wink an eyelid in that direction. I'll make a perfect stock and stone of myself. But," he added, "Jim can have his thoughts for all that."

Alice was not exactly satisfied with the position assumed by her disciple, she therefore proceeded to fortify him in grace by some farther observations, delivered in a very serious tone.

"For my part," she said, "I think nothing is in such bad taste, to say the least, as the foolish way in which some young people will allow themselves to talk and think about an unmarried young clergyman, while he is absorbed in duties so serious and has feelings so far above their comprehension. The very idea or suggestion of a flirtation between a clergyman and one of his flock is utterly repulsive and disagreeable."

Here Jim, with a meek gravity of face, simply interposed the question:

"What is flirtation?"

"You know, now, as well as I do," said Alice, with heightened color. "You needn't pretend you don't."

"Oh," said Jim. "Well, then, I suppose I do." And the two walked on in silence, for some way; Jim with an air of serious humility, as if in a deep study, and Alice with cheeks getting redder and redder with vexation.

"Now, Jim," she said at last, "you are very provoking."

"I'm sure I give in to everything you say," said Jim, in an injured tone.

"But you act just as if you were making fun all the time; and you know you are."

"Upon my word I don't know what you mean. I have assented to every word you said – given up to you hook and line – and now you're not pleased. I tell you it's rough on a fellow."

"Oh, come," said Alice, laughing at the absurdity of the quarrel; "there's no use in scolding you."

Jim laughed too, and felt triumphant; and just then they turned a corner and met Aunt Maria coming from church.

CHAPTER XI

AUNT MARIA CLEARS HER CONSCIENCE

When Mrs. Wouvermans met our young friends, she was just returning home after performing her morning devotions in one of the most time-honored churches in New York. She was as thorough and faithful in her notions of religion as of housekeeping. She adhered strictly to her own church, in which undeniably none but ancient and respectable families worshiped, and where she was perfectly sure that whatever of dress or deportment she saw was certain to be the correct thing.

It was a church of eminent propriety. It was large and lofty, with long-drawn aisles and excellent sleeping accommodations, where the worshipers were assisted to dream of heaven by every appliance of sweet music, and not rudely shaken in their slumbers by any obtrusiveness on the part of the rector.

In fact, everything about the services of this church was thoroughly toned down by good breeding. The responses of the worshipers were given in decorous whispers that scarcely disturbed the solemn stillness; for when a congregation of the best-fed and best-bred people of New York on their knees declare themselves "miserable sinners," it is a matter of delicacy to make as little disturbance about it as possible. A well-paid choir of the finest professional singers took the whole responsibility of praising God into their own hands, so that the respectable audience were relieved from any necessity of exertion in that department. As the most brilliant lights of the opera were from time to time engaged to render the more solemn parts of the service, flocks of sinners who otherwise would never have entered a church crowded to hear these "morning stars sing together;" let us hope, to their great edification. The sermons of the rector, delivered in the dim perspective, had a plaintive, far-off sound, as a voice of one "crying in the wilderness," and crying at a very great distance. This was in part owing to the fact that the church, having been built after an old English ecclesiastical model in days when English churches were used only for processional services, was entirely unadapted for any purposes of public speaking, so that a man's voice had about as good chance of effect in it as if he spoke anywhere in the thoroughfares of New York.

The rector, the Rev. Dr. Cushing, was a good, amiable man; middle-aged, adipose, discreet, devoted to "our excellent liturgy," and from his heart opposed to anything which made trouble.

From the remote distances whence his short Sunday cry was uttered, he appeared moved to send protests against two things: first, the tendency to philosophical speculation and the skeptical humanitarian theories of the age; and second, against Romanizing tendencies in the church. The young missionary, St. John, who got up to early services at conventual hours, and had prayers every morning and evening, and communion every Sunday and every Saint's day; who fasted on all the Ember Days, and called on other people to fast, and seemed literally to pray without ceasing; appeared to him a bristling impersonation of the Romanizing tendencies of the age, and one of those who troubled Israel. The fact that many of the young ladies of the old established church over which the good Doctor ministered were drawn to flock up to the services of this disturber gave to him a realizing sense of the danger to which the whole church was thereby exposed.

On this particular morning he had selected that well-worn text, "Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Jordan? May I not wash in them and be clean?"

Of course, like everybody who preaches on this text, he assumed that Jordan was the true faith as he preached it, and that the rivers of Damascus were any and every faith that diverged from his own.

These improper and profane rivers were various. There was, of course, modern skepticism with profuse allusions to Darwin; there were all sorts of modern humanitarian and social reforms; and there was in the bosom of the very church herself, he regretted to state, a disposition to go off after the Abana and Pharpar of Romish abominations. All these were to be avoided, and people were to walk in those quiet paths of godliness in which they had been brought up to walk, and, in short, do pretty much as they had been doing, undisturbed by new notions, or movements, or ideas, whether out of the church or in.

And as he plaintively recited these exhortations, his voice coming in a solemn and spectral tone adown the far-off aisles, it seemed to give a dreamy and unreal effect even to the brisk modern controversies and disturbances which formed his theme. The gorgeous, many-colored lights streamed silently the while through the stained windows, turning the bald head of one ancient church-warden yellow, and of another green, and another purple, while the white feathers on Mrs. Demas's bonnet passed gradually through successive tints of the rainbow; and the audience dosed off at intervals, and awakened again to find the rector at another head, and talking about something else; and so on till the closing ascription to the Trinity, when everybody rose with a solemn sense that something or other was over. The greater part of the audience in the intervals of somnolency congratulated themselves that they were in no danger of running after new ideas, and thanked God that they never speculated about philosophy. As to turning out to daily morning and evening prayers, or fasting on any days whatsoever, or going into any extravagant excesses of devotion and self-sacrifice, they were only too happy to find that it was their duty to resist the very suggestion as tending directly to Romanism.

The true Jordan, they were happy to find, ran directly through their own particular church, and they had only to continue their stated Sunday naps on its borders as before.

Mrs. Wouvermans, however, was not of a dozing or dreamy nature. Her mind, such as it was, was always wide awake and cognizant of what she was about. She was not susceptible of a dreamy state: to use an idiomatic phrase, she was always up and dressed; everything in her mental vision was clear cut and exact. The sermon was intensified in its effect upon her by the state of the Van Arsdel pew, of which she was on this Sunday the only occupant. The fact was, that the ancient and respectable church in which she worshiped had just been through a contest, in which Mr. Simons, a young assistant rector, had been attempting to introduce some of the very practices hinted at in the discourse. This fervid young man, full of fire and enthusiasm, had incautiously been made associate rector for this church, at the time when Dr. Cushing had been sent to Europe to recover from a bronchial attack. He was young, earnest and eloquent, and possessed with the idea that all those burning words and phrases in the prayer-book, which had dropped like precious gems dyed with the heart's blood of saints and martyrs, ought to mean something more than they seemed to do for modern Christians. Without introducing any new ritual, he set himself to make vivid and imperative every doctrine and direction of the prayer-book, and to bring the drowsy company of pew-holders somewhere up within sight of the plane of the glorious company of apostles and the noble army of martyrs with whose blood it was sealed. He labored and preached, and strove and prayed, tugging at the drowsy old church, like Pegasus harnessed to a stone cart. He set up morning and evening prayers, had communion every Sunday, and annoyed old rich saints by suggesting that it was their duty to build mission chapels and carry on mission works, after the pattern of St. Paul and other irrelevant and excessive worthies, who in their time were accused of turning the world upside down. Of course there was resistance and conflict, and more life in the old church than it had known for years; but the conflict became at last so wearisome that, on Mr. Cushing's return from Europe, the young angel spread his wings and fled away to a more congenial parish in a neighboring city.

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