Part 23

There are cynics who imagine a woman with a mission saying, "Well, I've increased my husband's business, and I have made two hundred very necessary dollars this winter; and I will try it again." If the matter had presented itself to her mind in that way Mrs. Frankland probably would have felt a repulsion from the work she was doing. It is a very bungling mind, or a more than usually clear and candid mind, that would view a delicate personal concern in so blunt a fashion. Mrs. Frankland's mind was too clever to be bungling, and too emotional and imaginative to be critical. What she saw, with a rush of grateful emotion, was that the Divine approval of her sacrifices was manifested by this sustaining increase of temporal prosperity. The ravens of Elijah had replenished her purse because she trusted. Thus commended from above and lifted into the circle of those who like the prophets and apostles have a special vocation, she felt herself ready, as she put it, "to go forward through fire and flood if need be." It would not have been like her to remember that the fire and flood to be encountered in her career could be only rhetorical at best--painted fire and a stage flood.

Among those who chanced to be drawn to Mrs. Frankland's first course of Bible readings, and who had listened with zest, was Phillida Callender. Phillida's was a temperament different from Mrs Frankland's. The common point at which they touched was religious enthusiasm. Mrs. Frankland's enthusiasms translated themselves instantly into eloquent expression; she was an instrument richly toned that gave forth melody of joy or sorrow when smitten by emotion. Phillida was very susceptible to her congenial eloquence, but hers was essentially the higher nature, and Mrs. Frankland's religious passion, when once it reached Phillida, was transformed into practical endeavor. Mrs. Frankland was quite content to embody her ideals in felicitous speech, and cease; Phillida Callender labored day and night to make her ideals actual. Mrs. Frankland had no inclination or qualification for grappling with such thorny problems as the Mackerelville Mission afforded. It was enough for her to play the martial music which nerved others for the strife.

It often happens that the superior nature is dominated by one not its equal. Phillida did not question the superlative excellence of Mrs. Frankland, from whom she drew so many inspirations. That eloquent lady in turn admired and loved Phillida as a model disciple. Phillida drew Mrs. Hilbrough to the readings, and Mrs. Frankland bestowed on that lady all the affectionate attention her immortal soul and worldly position entitled her to, and under Mrs. Frankland's influence Mrs. Hilbrough became more religious without becoming less worldly. For nothing could have seemed more proper and laudable to Mrs. Hilbrough than the steady pursuit of great connections appropriate to her husband's wealth.

Mrs. Frankland's imagination had been moved by her success. It was not only a religious but a social triumph. Some of the rich had come, and it was in the nature of an orator of Mrs. Frankland's type to love any association with magnificence. Her figures of speech were richly draped; her imagination delighted in the grandiose. The same impulse which carried her easily from drab Quakerism to stained-glass Episcopalianism now moved her to desire that her ministry might lead her to the great, for such an association seemed to glorify the cause she had at heart. She did not think of her purpose nakedly; she was an artist in drapery, and her ideas never presented themselves in the nude; she was indeed quite incapable of seeing the bare truth; truth itself became visible to her only when it had on a wedding garment. As she stated her aspiration to herself, she longed to carry the everlasting gospel to the weary rich. "The weary rich" was the phrase she outfitted them with when considered as objects of pity and missionary zeal. To her mind they seemed, in advance, shining trophies which she hoped to win, and in her reveries she saw herself presenting them before the Almighty, somewhat as a Roman general might lead captive barbarian princes to the throne of his imperial master.

Mrs. Frankland could not be oblivious to the fact that a Bible reading among the rich would be likely to bring her better pecuniary returns than one among the poor. But she did not let this consideration appear on the surface of her thoughts, nor was it at all a primary or essential one.

She knew but little of the intricacies of social complications, and her mind now turned to Mrs. Hilbrough as the wealthiest of all her occasional hearers, and one having an ample parlor in a fashionable quarter of the town.

Her first thought had been to get Phillida to accompany her when she should go to suggest the matter to Mrs. Hilbrough. But on second thought she gave up this intermediation, for reasons which it would have been impossible for her to define. If she exerted a powerful influence over Phillida in the direction of emotion, she could not escape in turn the influence of Phillida's view of life when in her presence. Although personal ambitions mixed themselves to a certain extent with Mrs. Frankland's religious zeal, disguising themselves in rhetorical costumes of a semi-ecclesiastical sort, they did not venture to masquerade too freely before Phillida. Mrs. Frankland, though less skillful in affairs than in speech, felt that it would be better in the present instance to go to Mrs. Hilbrough alone.

It was with a glow of pleasure not wholly unworldly that she found herself one afternoon in Mrs. Hilbrough's reception-room, and noted all about her marks of taste and unstinted expenditure. To a critical spectator the encounter between the two ladies would have afforded material for a curious comparison. The ample figure of Mrs. Frankland, her mellifluous voice, her large, sweeping, cheerily affectionate, influential mode of address, brought her into striking contrast with the rather slender, quietly self-reliant Mrs. Hilbrough, whose genial cordiality covered, while it hardly concealed, the thoroughly business-like carriage of her mind.

Mrs. Frankland opened her plan with the greatest fullness of explanation as to what her motives were, but she did not feel obliged wholly to conceal the element of personal aspiration, as she would have done in talking to Phillida. Her intuitions made her feel that Mrs. Hilbrough would accept religious zeal all the more readily for its being a little diluted. Mrs. Hilbrough responded with genial cordiality and even with some show of enthusiasm. But if she had less address in speech than the other she had more in affairs. While theoretically supporting this plan she did not commit herself to it. She knew how slender as yet was her hold upon the society she courted, and she would not risk an eccentric move. Her boat was still in shallow water, with hardly buoyancy enough to float a solitary occupant; if she should undertake to carry Mrs. Frankland, it would probably go fast aground. What she said to Mrs. Frankland with superficial fervor was:

"You ought to have a person that has been longer in New York, and is better acquainted than I am, to carry out your plan, Mrs. Frankland. It would be a pity to have so excellent a scheme fail; that would probably prevent your ever succeeding--would shut you out as long as you lived. It would be a great honor to me to have your readings, but you must begin under better auspices. I regret to say this. Your readings, rightly started, will be a great success, and I should like to have them here."

This last was in a sense sincere. Mrs. Hilbrough was sure of Mrs. Frankland's success if once the thing were patronized by the right people. Here Mrs. Frankland looked disappointed, but in a moment broke forth again in adroit and fervid statement of the good that might be done, mingled with a flattering protest against Mrs. Hilbrough's too humble estimate of her influence in society. While she proceeded, Mrs. Hilbrough was revolving a plan for giving Mrs. Frankland more than she asked, while avoiding personal responsibility.

"I think I can do something," she said, with a manner less cordial but more sincere than that she had previously assumed. "Leave the matter with me, and I may be able to open to you a grand house, not a plain, middling place like mine"--and she waved her hand deprecatingly toward the furnishings which seemed to Mrs. Frankland inconceivably rich--"a grand house with all the prestige of a great family. I don't know that I shall succeed with my friend, but for the sake of the cause I am willing to try. I won't tell you anything about it till I try. If I fail, I fail, but for the present leave all to me."

Mrs. Frankland was not the sort of person to relish being guided by another, but in Mrs. Hilbrough she had met her superior in leadership. Reluctantly she felt herself obliged to hand over the helm of her own craft, holding herself ready to disembark at length wherever Mrs. Hilbrough might reach dry ground.

Of all that Mrs. Hilbrough had won in her first winter's social campaign, the achievement that gave her most pleasure was the making acquaintance and entering into fast ripening friendship with Mrs. Van Horne. Little Mrs. Van Horne was not in herself very desirable as a friend, but she was one of those whose fortune it is to have the toil of thousands at their disposal. Her magnificence was fed by an army: innumerable laborers with spades and shovels, picks and blasting-drills, working in smoke and dripping darkness to bore railway paths through mountain chains; grimy stokers and clear-sighted engineers; brakemen dripping in the chilly rain; switchmen watching out the weary night by dim lanterns or flickering torches; desk-worn clerks and methodical ticket-sellers; civil engineers using brains and long training over their profiles and cross-sectionings; and scores of able "captains of industry," such as superintendents, passenger agents, and traffic managers--all these, and others, by their steady toil kept an unfailing cataract of wealth pouring into the Van Horne coffers. In herself Mrs. Van Horne had not half the force of Mrs. Hilbrough, but as the queen bee of this widespread toil and traffic, fed and clad and decked as she was by the fruits of the labor of a hundred thousand men, Mrs. Van Horne had an enormous factitious value in the world. How to bear her dignity as the wife of a man who used the million as a unit she did not know, for though she affected a reserved stateliness of manner, it did not set well on such a round-faced, impressionable little woman quite incapable of charting a course for herself. No show of leadership had been hers, but she had taken her cue from this and that stronger nature, until by chance she came in hailing distance of Mrs. Hilbrough. The two were perfect counterparts. Mrs. Hilbrough was clairvoyant and of prompt decision, but she lacked the commanding position for personal leadership. She was superficially deferential to Mrs. Van Horne's older standing and vastly greater wealth, but she swiftly gained the real ascendancy. Her apparent submission of everything to Mrs. Van Horne's wisdom, while adroitly making up a judgment for the undecided little lady, was just what Mrs. Van Horne liked, and in three months' acquaintance that lady had come to lean more and more on Mrs. Hilbrough. The intimacy with so close a friend rendered life much more comfortable for Mrs. Van Horne, in that it relieved her from taking advice of her sisters-in-law, who always gave counsel with a consciousness of superiority. Now she could appear in her family with opinions and purposes apparently home-made. To a woman of Mrs. Hilbrough's cleverness the friendship with one whose brooks ran gold rendered social success certain.

Mrs. Hilbrough was a natural promoter. Her energy inclined her to take hold of a new enterprise for the mere pleasure of pushing it. She felt a real delight in the religious passions awakened by Mrs. Frankland's addresses; she foresaw an interesting career opening up before that gifted woman, and to help her would give Mrs. Hilbrough a complex pleasure. That Mrs. Frankland's addresses if given in Mrs. Van Horne's parlors would excite attention and make a great stir she foresaw, and for many reasons she would like to bring this about. Mrs. Hilbrough did not analyze her motives; that would have been tiresome. She entered them all up in a sort of lump sum to the credit of her religious zeal, and was just a little pleased to find so much of her early devotion to religion left over. Let the entry stand as she made it. Let us not be of the class unbearable who are ever trying to dissipate those lovely illusions that keep alive human complacency and make life endurable.

Mrs. Hilbrough contrived to bring Mrs. Frankland with her abounding enthusiasm and her wide-sweeping curves of inflection and gesture into acquaintance with the great but rather pulpy Mrs. Van Horne. The natural inequality of forces in the two did the rest. Mrs. Van Horne, weary of the inevitable limitations of abnormal wealth, and fatigued in the vain endeavor to procure any satisfaction which bore the slightest proportion to the vast family accretion, found a repose she had longed for when she was caught up in the fiery chariot of Mrs. Frankland's eloquent talk. All the vast mass of things that had confronted and bullied her so long was swept into a rhetorical dustpan, and she could feel herself at length as a human soul without having to remember her possessions. Mrs. Frankland's phrase of "the weary rich" exactly fitted her, and to her Mrs. Frankland's eloquent pulverizing of the glory of this world brought a sort of emancipation.

Mrs. Frankland unfolded to her a desire to reach those who would not attend her readings at any but a very fashionable house. Mrs. Van Horne, encouraged thereto by Mrs. Hilbrough, was delighted at finding a novel and congenial use for some of the luxurious and pompous upholstery of her life of which she was so tired. Her parlors were opened, and "persons of the highest fashion" were pleased to find a private and suitably decorated wicker-gate leading into a strait and narrow vestibule train, limited, fitted up with all the consolations and relieved of most of the discomforts of an old-fashioned religious pilgrimage.

XIV.

MRS. FRANKLAND AND PHILLIDA.

Mrs. Callender would have told you that mountain air had quite restored her, but enforced rest from scissors and sewing-machine, the two demons that beset the dear industrious, had more to do with it than mountain air. The first of October brought her and Phillida again to their house, where Agatha had preceded them by two days, to help Sarah in putting things to rights for their advent. Millard met the mother and daughter at the station with a carriage and left them at their own door.

"Did Mr. Millard say that he would come again this evening?" Agatha asked of Phillida when she rose from the dinner-table.

"No."

"Well, I should think he would. I wouldn't have a young man that would take things so coolly. He's hardly seen you at all since his return, and--that's the expressman with the trunks. I'll go and see about them"; and she bounded away, not "like an antelope," but like a young girl bubbling to the brim with youth and animal spirits.

An hour later, when Phillida and Agatha had just got to a stage in unpacking in which all that one owns is lying in twenty heaps about the room, each several heap seeming larger than the trunk in which it came, there was a ring at the door, and Mr. Millard was announced.

"Oh, dear! I think he might have waited until to-morrow," grumbled Agatha to her mother, after Phillida had gone to the parlor. "He'll stay for hours, I suppose, and I never can get these things put away alone, and we won't get you to bed before midnight. He ought to remember that you're not strong. But it's just like a man in love to come when you're in a mess, and never to go away."

Millard was more thoughtful than another might have been, and in half an hour Phillida returned to the back room, with a softly radiant expression of countenance, bearing a bouquet of flowers which Millard had brought for Mrs. Callender. Phillida at once helped Agatha attack chaos. The floor, the chairs, the table, the bed, and the top of the dressing-case were at length cleared, and preparations were making for getting the tired mother to her rest before ten o'clock.

"Seems to me," said Agatha, "that if I were in Philly's place I'd want something more than a brief call on the first evening, after so long a separation."

"Seems to me," said the mother, mimicking Agatha's tone and turning upon the girl with an amused smile, "if you ever have a lover and are as hard to please with him as you are with Mr. Millard, he might as well give it up before he begins."