Part 42

"Sh-h!" said Phillida, pointing to the shadow cast against the ground glass of the inner door by the tall form of the Christian Scientist and Metaphysical Practitioner in the light of the street lamp.

"I don't care whether she hears or not," said Agatha, dropping her voice, nevertheless; "she ought to be snubbed. You're a little too easy. That woman is meditating whether she sha'n't break into the house to preach Christian Science. There, she's going at last; she won't commit Christian burglary this time. I suppose she thinks burglary doesn't really exist, since it's contrary to the unity of God. Anyhow, she wouldn't commit burglary, because housebreaking is a physical thing that's transacted on the mortal plane."

Agatha said this in Miss Bowyer's tone, and Phillida's vexation gave way to laughter.

XXVII.

A BAD CASE.

Notwithstanding Phillida's efforts to the contrary, the most irrelevant things were sufficient to send her thoughts flitting--like homing pigeons that can ply their swift wings in but one direction--toward Millard, or toward that past so thickly peopled by memories of him. Now that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and metaphysical healer of ailments the substantial existence of which she denied, had cast a shadow upon her, Phillida realized for the first time the source of that indignant protest of Millard's which had precipitated the breaking of their engagement. Her name was on men's lips in the same class with this hard-cheeked professor of religious flummery, this mercenary practitioner of an un-medical imposture calculated to cheat the unfortunate by means of delusive hopes. How such mention of her must have stung a proud-spirited lover of propriety like Millard! For the first time she could make allowance and feel grateful for his chivalrous impulse to defend her.

No child is just like a parent. Phillida differed from her strenuous father in nature by the addition of esthetic feeling. Her education had not tended to develop this, but it made itself felt. Her lofty notions of self-sacrifice were stimulated by a love for the sublime. Other young girls read romances; Phillida tried to weave her own life into one. The desire for the beautiful, the graceful, the externally appropriate, so long denied and suppressed, furnished the basis of her affection for Millard. A strong passion never leaves the nature the same, and under the influence of Millard her esthetic sense had grown. Nothing that Eleanor Arabella Bowyer had said assailed the logical groundwork of her faith. But during the hours following that conversation it was impossible for her to reflect with pleasure, as had been her wont, on the benefits derived from her prayers by those who had been healed in whole or in part through her mediation. A remembrance of the jargon of the Christian Scientist mingled with and disturbed her meditations; the case of a belief in rheumatism and the case of a belief in consumption with goitre stood grinning at her like rude burlesques of her own cures, making ridiculous the work that had hitherto seemed so holy. But when the morrow came she was better able to disentangle her thoughts of healing from such phrases as "the passive impressible state" and "interior perception." And when at length the remembrance of Miss Bowyer had grown more dim, the habitual way of looking at her work returned.

One morning about ten days later, while she was at breakfast, the basement door-bell was rung, and when the servant answered it Phillida heard some one in the area, speaking with a German accent.

"Please tell Miss Callender that Rudolph Schulenberg will like to speak with her."

Phillida rose and went to the door.

"Miss Callender," said Rudolph, "Mina is so sick for three days already and she hopes you will come to her right away this morning, wunst, if you will be so kind."

"Certainly I will. But what is the matter with her? Is it the old trouble with the back?"

"No; it is much worse as that. She has got such a cough, and she can not breathe. Mother she believe that Mina is heart-sick and will die wunst already."

"I will come in half an hour or so."

"If you would. My mother her heart is just breaking. But Mina is sure that if Miss Callender will come and pray with her the cough will all go away wunst more already."

Phillida finished her breakfast in almost total silence, and then without haste left the house. She distinctly found it harder to maintain her attitude of faith than it had been. But all along the street she braced herself by prayer and meditation, until her spirit was once more wrought into an ecstasy of religious exaltation. She mounted the familiar stairs, thronged now with noisy-footed and vociferous children issuing from the various family cells on each level to set out for school.

"How do you do, Mrs. Schulenberg?" said Phillida, as she encountered the mother on the landing in front of her door. "How is Wilhelmina?"

"Bad, very bad," whispered the mother, closing the door behind her and looking at Phillida with a face laden with despair. Then alternately wiping her eyes with her apron and shaking her head ominously, she said: "She will never get well this time. She is too bad already. She is truly heart-sick."

"Have you had a doctor?"

"No; Mina will not have only but you. I tell her it is no use to pray when she is so sick; she must have a doctor. But no."

"How long has she been sick?"

"Well, three or four days; but she was not well"--the mother put her hand on her chest--"for a week. She has been thinking you would come." Mrs. Schulenberg's speech gave way to tears and a despairing shaking of the head from side to side.

Phillida entered, and found Mina bolstered in her chair, flushed with fever and gasping for breath. The sudden change in her appearance was appalling.

"I thought if you would come, nothing would seem too hard for your prayers. O Miss Callender,"--her voice died to a hoarse whisper,--"pray for me, I wanted to die wunst already; you remember it. But ever since I have been better it has made my mother and Rudolph so happy again. If now I die what will mother do?"

The spectacle of the emaciated girl wrestling for breath and panting with fever, while her doom was written upon her face, oppressed the mind of Phillida. Was it possible that prayer could save one so visibly smitten? She turned and looked at the mother standing just inside the door, her face wrung with the agony of despair while she yet watched Phillida with eagerness to see if she had anything to propose that promised relief. Then a terrible sense of what was expected of her by mother and daughter came over her mind, and her spirits sank as under the weight of a millstone.

Phillida was not one of those philanthropists whom use has enabled to look on suffering in a dry and professional way. She was most susceptible on the side of her sympathies. Her depression came from pity, and her religious exaltation often came from the same source. After a minute of talk and homely ministry to Wilhelmina's comfort, Phillida's soul rose bravely to its burden. The threat of bereavement that hung over the widow and her son, the shadow of death that fell upon the already stricken life of the unfortunate young woman, might be dissipated by the goodness of God. The sphere into which Phillida rose was not one of thought but one of intense and exalted feeling. The sordid and depressing surroundings--the dingy and broken-backed chairs, the cracked and battered cooking-stove, the ancient chest of drawers without a knob left upon it, the odor of German tenement cookery and of feather-beds--vanished now. Wilhelmina, for her part, held Phillida fast by the hand and saw no one but her savior, and Phillida felt a moving of the heart that one feels in pulling a drowning person from the water, and that uplifting of the spirit that comes to those of the true prophetic temperament. She read in a gentle, fervent voice some of the ancient miracles of healing from the English columns of the leather-covered German and English Testament, while the exhausted Wilhelmina still held her hand and wrestled for the breath of life.

Then Phillida knelt by the well-worn wooden-bottom chair while Mrs. Schulenberg knelt by a stool on the other side of the stove, burying her face in her apron. Never was prayer more sincere, never was prayer more womanly or more touching. As Phillida proceeded with her recital of Wilhelmina's sufferings, as she alluded to the value of Mina to her mother and the absent Rudolph, and then prayed for the merciful interposition of God, the mother sobbed aloud, Phillida's faith rose with the growing excitement of her pity, and she closed the prayer at length without a doubt that Mina would be cured.

"I do feel a little better now," said Wilhelmina, when the prayer was ended.