Part 39

"You didn't know about Mr. Millard's property or social position, I suppose. These are what you have talked to me about this evening. They are not bad things to have, perhaps, but, if they were all, I could give them up--trample them under foot, and be glad."

"Don't be provoked with me, Phillida dear. Indeed, I hardly realized what I said yesterday. I had just got through with speaking, I was very much exhausted, and I did not quite understand."

"You may have been right yesterday," said Phillida; "I hope you were. If you were wrong, it was a dreadful mistake." She made a long pause, and then went on. "I thought the course you advised yesterday a brave course at least. But what you have said to-day, about social position and so on, I hate. And it makes me doubt it all."

Phillida thrust out the toe of her boot, unconsciously giving expression to her disposition to spurn Mrs. Frankland's worldly-wise counsel.

"You're excited, my dear," said Mrs. Frankland. "Your break with Mr. Millard may not be so irretrievable as you think it. Providence will direct. If, on the whole, it is thought best, I have no doubt things may be replaced on their old footing. I am sure Mrs. Hilbrough and I could manage that. You ought not to be unreasonable."

"I sent him in agony out into the rainy night, forsaken and discarded." Phillida could not quite suppress a little sob as she stretched her hand a moment in the direction in which Millard had gone. "God knows I thought I was doing right. Now because you have heard that he has money and moves in fashionable circles you wish me to intrigue with you and Mrs. Hilbrough to bring him back."

Phillida rose to her feet, excitement breaking through the habitual reserve with which her emotional nature was overlaid. "I tell you, Mrs. Frankland," she went on with a directness verging on vehemence, "that I will have none of your interference, nor any of Mrs. Hilbrough's. What I have done, is done, and can never be recalled."

"Indeed, Phillida, you are excited," said Mrs. Frankland. "You reject the advice and assistance of your best friends. You have quite misunderstood what I have said. I only wished to repair my error."

Phillida remained silent, but she resumed her seat.

"Think the matter over. Take time to make your decision. I have acted only in your interest, and yet you blame me." Mrs. Frankland said this with persuasive plaintiveness of tone.

But Phillida said nothing. Not seeing anything else to do, Mrs. Frankland rose and said: "Good-by, Phillida. When you have had time to think you will see things differently." She did not extend her hand, and Phillida felt that her own was too chill and limp to offer. She contrived, however, to utter a "Good-by."

When she had shut the door after Mrs. Frankland one swift thought and bitter came into her mind. "Charley was not wholly wrong as to Mrs. Frankland. Perhaps he was nearer right in other regards than I thought him."

Half an hour later the door-bell rang, and Agatha answered the call. Then she put her head into the parlor where Phillida sat, back to the door, gazing into the street.

"I say, Philly, what do you think? Mr. Frankland came to the door just now for his wife, and seemed quite crestfallen that she had forgotten him, and left him to go home alone. Didn't like to be out so late without an escort, I suppose."

It was one of a hundred devices to which Agatha had resorted during this day to cheer her sister. But seeing that this one served its purpose no better than the rest, Agatha went over and put her arms about her sister's neck and kissed her.

"You dear, dear Philly! You are the best in the world," she said, and the speech roused Phillida from her despair and brought her the balm of tears.

XXVI.

ELEANOR ARABELLA BOWYER.

It is a truth deep and wide, that a brother is born for adversity. The spirit of kin and clan, rooted in remote heredity, outlives other and livelier attachments. It not only survives rude blows, but its true virtue is only extracted by the pestle of tribulation. Having broken with her lover, and turned utterly away from her spiritual guide and adviser, Phillida found herself drawn more closely to her mother and her sister. It mattered little that they differed from her in regard to many things. She could at least count on their affection, and that sympathy which grows out of a certain entanglement of the rootlets of memory and consciousness, out of common interest and long and intimate association.

Mrs. Callender had been habituated when she was a little girl at home to leave the leadership to her sister Harriet, now Mrs. Gouverneur, and to keep her dissents to herself. Her relation with her husband was similar; she had rarely tried to influence a man whose convictions of duty were so pronounced, though the reasons for these convictions were often quite beyond the comprehension of his domestically minded wife. Toward Phillida she had early assumed the same diffident attitude; it was enough for her to say that Phillida was her father over again. That settled it once for all. Phillida was to be treated as her father had been; to be trusted with her own destiny without impertinent inquiries from one who never could understand, though she deeply respected, the mysterious impulses which urged these superior beings to philanthropic toil. For her own part she would have preferred to take the universe less broadly.

A second effect of this crisis in Phillida's life was to drive her back upon the example and teaching of her father. Having utterly abandoned the leadership of Mrs. Frankland, she naturally sought support for her self-sacrificing course of action outside of her own authority. All her father's old letters, written to her when she was a child, were unbundled and read over again, and some of his manuscript sermons had the dust of years shaken from their leaves that she might con their pages written in the dear, familiar hand.

If she had had her decision to make over again without any bolstering from Mrs. Frankland she would have sought, for a while at least, to establish a modus vivendi between her love for Millard and the ultra form of her religious work. But the more she thought of it the more she considered it unlikely that her decision regarding her lover would ever come up for revision. She accepted it now as something providential, because inevitable, to which she must grow accustomed, an ugly fact with which she must learn to live in peace. She had a knack of judging of herself and her own affairs in an objective way. She would not refuse to see merely because it was painful to her that a woman of her tastes and pursuits was an unsuitable mate for a man of society. She admitted the incongruity; she even tried to console herself with it. For if the break had not come so soon, it might have come after marriage in forms more dreadful. There was not much comfort in this--might have been worse is but the skim-milk of consolation.

To a nature like Phillida's one door of comfort, or at least of blessed forgetfulness, is hardly ever shut. After the first bitter week she found hours of relief from an aching memory in her labors among the suffering poor. Work of any kind is a sedative; sympathy with the sorrows of others is a positive balm. Her visits to the Schulenberg tenement were always an alleviation to her unhappiness. There she was greeted as a beneficent angel. The happiness of Wilhelmina, of her mother, and of her brother, for a time put Phillida almost at peace with her destiny.

Her visits to and her prayers for other sufferers were attended with varying success as to their ailments. The confidence in the healing power of her prayers among the tenement people was not based altogether on the betterment of some of those for whom she prayed. Knowing her patient long-suffering with the evil she contended against, they reasoned, in advance of proof, that her prayers ought to have virtue in them. The reverence for her was enhanced by a report, which began to circulate about this time, that she had refused to marry a rich man in order to keep up her labor among the poor. Rumor is always an artist, and tradition, which is but fossil rumor, is the great saint-maker. The nature and extent of Phillida's sacrifice were amplified and adapted until people came to say that Miss Callender had refused a young millionaire because he wished her not to continue her work in Mackerelville. This pretty story did not mitigate the notoriety which was an ingredient of her pain.

In spite of the sedative of labor and the consolation of altruism, Poe's raven would croak in her ears through hours spent in solitude. In the evenings she found herself from habit and longing listening for the door-bell, and its alarm would always give her a moment of fluttering expectation, followed by a period of revulsion. Once the bell rang at about the hour of Millard's habitual coming, and Phillida sat in that state in which one expects without having reason to expect anything in particular until the servant brought her a card bearing the legend, "Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and Metaphysical Practitioner."

"Eleanor Arabella Bowyer," she said, reading it to her mother as they sat in the front basement below the parlor. "Who is she? I've never heard of her."

"I don't know, Phillida. I don't seem to remember any Bowyers."

"Where is the lady, Sarah?" asked Phillida of the servant.