Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Our friend, Mrs. Maria Wouvermans, was the very type and impersonation of this world’s wisdom of the ordinary level. The great object of life being to insure ease, comfort, and freedom from annoyance to one’s self and one’s family, her views of duty were all conveniently arranged along this line. In her view, it was the first duty of every good housekeeper to look ahead and avoid every occasion whence might arise a possible inconvenience or embarrassment. It was nobody’s duty, in her opinion, to have any trouble, if it could be avoided, or to risk having any. There were, of course, duties to the poor, which she settled for by a regular annual subscription to some well-recommended board of charity in her most respectable church. That done, she regarded herself as clear for action, and bound to shake off in detail any troublesome or embarrassing person that threatened to be a burden to her, or to those of her family that she felt responsible for.

  On the other hand, Eva was possessed by an earnest desire to make her religious profession mean something adequate to those startling and constantly recurring phrases in the Bible and the Church service which spoke of the Christian as a being of a higher order, led by another Spirit, and living a higher life than that of the world in general. Nothing is more trying to an ingenuous mind than the conviction of anything like a sham and a pretense in its daily life.

  Mr. St. John had lately been preaching a series of sermons on the history and customs of the primitive Church, in hearing which the conviction often forced itself on her mind that it was the unworldly life of the first Christians which gave victorious power to the faith. She was intimately associated with people who seemed to her to live practically on the same plan. Here was Sibyl Selwyn, whose whole life was an exalted mission of religious devotion; there was her neighbor Ruth Baxter, associated as a lay sister with the work of her more gifted friend. Here were the Sisters of St. Barnabas, lovely, cultivated women who had renounced all selfish ends and occupations in life, to give themselves to the work of comforting the sorrowful and saving the lost. Such people, she thought, fully answered to the terms in which Christians were spoken of in the Bible. But could she, if she lived only to brighten one little spot of her own, if she shut out of its charmed circle all sight or feeling of the suffering and sorrow of the world around her, and made her own home a little paradise of ease and forgetfulness, could she be living a Christian life?

  When, therefore, she heard from the poor mother under her roof the tale of her secretly kept shames, sorrows, and struggles for the daughter whose fate had filled her with misery, she accepted with a large-hearted inconsiderateness a mission of love towards the wanderer.

  She carried it to her husband; and, like two kind-hearted, generous-minded young people, they resolved at once to make their home sacred by bringing into it this work of charity.

  Now, this work would be far easier in most cases if the sinner sought to be saved would step forthwith right across the line, and behave henceforth like a saint. But unhappily that is not to be expected. Certain it was, that Maggie, with her great black eyes and her wavy black hair, was no saint. A petted, indulged child, with a strong, ungovernable nature, she had been whirled hither and thither in the tides of passion, and now felt less repentance for sin than indignation at her own wrongs. It might have been held a hopeful symptom that Maggie had, at least, so much real truthfulness in her as not to profess what she did not feel.

  It was a fact that the constant hymns and prayers and services of the pious Sisters wearied her. They were too high for her. The calm, refined spirituality of these exalted natures was too far above her, and she joined their services at best with a patient acquiescence, feeling the while how sinful she must be to be so bored by them.

  But for Eva she had a sort of wondering, passionate admiration. When she fluttered into her sick-room, with all her usual little graceful array of ribbons and fanciful ornament, Maggie’s dull eye would brighten, and she looked after her with delighted wonder. When she spoke to her tenderly, smoothed her pillow, put cologne on her lace handkerchief and laid it on her brow, poor Maggie felt awed and flattered by the attention, far more, it is to be feared, than if somebody more resembling the traditional angel had done it. This lively, sprightly little lady, so graceful, so pretty in all her motions and in all her belongings, seemed to poor worldly Maggie much more nearly what she would like an angel to be, in any world where she would have to live with them.

  The Sisters, with their black robes, their white caps, and their solemn prayers, seemed to her so awfully good that their presence chilled her. She felt more subdued, but more sinful and more hopeless with them than ever. In short, poor Maggie was yet a creature of this world, and of sense, and the spiritual world to her was only one dark, confused blur, rather more appalling than attractive. A life like that of the Sisters, given to prayer and meditation and good works, was too high a rest for a soul growing so near the ground and with so few tendrils to climb by. Maggie could conceive of nothing more dreary. To her, it seemed like being always thinking of her sins; and that topic was no more agreeable a subject of meditation to Maggie than it is to any of us. Many people seem to feel that the only way of return for those who have wandered from the paths of virtue is the most immediate and utter self-abasement. There must be no effort at self-justification, no excusing one’s self, no plea for abatement of condemnation. But let us Christians who have never fallen, in the grosser sense, ask ourselves if, with regard to our own particular sins and failings, we hold the same strict line of reckoning. Do we come down upon ourselves for our ill temper, for our selfishness, for our pride, and other respectable sins, as we ask the poor girl to do who has been led astray from virtue?

  Let us look back and remember how the Master once coupled an immaculate Pharisee and a fallen woman in one sentence as two debtors, both owing a sum to a creditor, and both having nothing to pay, — both freely forgiven by infinite clemency. It is a summing up of the case that is too often forgotten.

  Eva’s natural tact and delicacy stood her in stead in her dealings with Maggie, and made her touch upon the wounds of the latter more endurable than any other. Without reproof for the past, she expressed hope for the future.

  “You shall come and stay with your mother at my house, Maggie,” she said cheerfully, “and we will make you useful. The fact is, your mother needs you; she is not so strong as she was, and you could save her a great many steps.”

  Now, Maggie still had skillful hands and a good many available worldly capacities. The very love of finery and of fine living which had once helped to entrap her now came in play for her salvation. Something definite to do is, in some crises, a far better medicine for a sick soul than any amount of meditation and prayer. One step fairly taken in a right direction goes farther than any amount of agonized back-looking.

  In a few days Maggie made for herself in Eva’s family a place in which she could feel herself to be of service. She took charge of Eva’s wardrobe, and was zealous and efficient in ripping, altering, and adapting articles for the adornment of her pretty mistress; and Eva never failed to praise and encourage her for every right thing she did, and never by word or look reminded her of the past.

  Eva did not preach to Maggie; but sometimes, sitting at her piano while she sat sewing in an adjoining room, she played and sung some of those little melodies which Sunday-schools have scattered as a sort of popular ballad literature. Words of piety, allied to a catching tune, are like seeds with wings — they float out in the air and drop in odd corners of the heart, to spring up in good purposes.

  One of these little ballads reminded Eva of the night she first saw Maggie lingering in the street by her house: —

  “I stood outside the gate,

  A poor wayfaring child;

  Within my heart there beat

  A tempest fierce and wild.

  A fear oppressed my soul

  That I might be too late;

  And, oh, I trembled sore

  And prayed — outside the gate.

  “Mercy,’
I loudly cried,

  ‘Oh, give me rest from sin!’

  ‘I will,’ a voice replied,

  And Mercy let me in.

  She bound my bleeding wounds

  And carried all my sin;

  She eased my burdened soul,

  Then Jesus took me in.

  “In Mercy’s guise I knew

  The Saviour long abused,

  Who oft had sought my heart,

  And oft had been refused.

  Oh, what a blest return

  For ignorance and sin!

  I stood outside the gate

  And Jesus let me in.”

  After a few days, Eva heard Maggie humming this tune over her work. “There,” she said to herself, “the good angels are near her! I don’t know what to say to her, but they do.”

  In fact, Eva had that delicacy and self-distrust in regard to any direct and personal appeal to Maggie which is the natural attendant of personal refinement. She was little versed in any ordinary religious phraseology, such as very well-meaning persons often so freely deal in. Her own religious experiences, fervent and sincere though they were, never came out in any accredited set of phrases; nor had she any store of cut-and-dried pious talk laid by, to be used for inferiors whom she was called to admonish. But she had stores of kind artifices to keep Maggie usefully employed, to give her a sense that she was trusted in the family, to encourage hope that there was a better future before her.

  Maggie’s mother, fond and loving as she was, seconded these tactics of her mistress but indifferently. Mary had the stern pride of chastity which distinguishes the women of the old country, and which keeps most of the Irish girls who are thrown unprotected on our shores superior to temptation.

  Mary keenly felt that Maggie had disgraced her, and as health returned and she no longer trembled for her life, she seemed called upon to keep her daughter’s sin ever before her. Her past bad conduct and the lenity of her young mistress, her treating her so much better than she had any reason to expect, were topics on which Mary took every occasion to enlarge in private, leading to passionate altercations between herself and her daughter, in which the child broke over all bounds of goodness and showed the very worst aspects of her nature. Nothing can be more miserable, more pitiable, than these stormy passages between wayward children and honest, good-hearted mothers, who love them to the death, and yet do not know how to handle them, sensitive and sore with moral wounds. Many a time poor Mary went to sleep with a wet pillow, while Maggie, sullen and hard-hearted, lay with her great black eyes wide open, obdurate and silent, yet in her secret heart longing to make it right with her mother. Often, after such a passage, she would revolve the line of the hymn —

  “I stood outside the gate.”

  It seemed to her that that gate was her mother’s heart, and that she stood outside of it; and yet all the while the poor mother would have died for her. Eva could not at first account for the sullen and gloomy moods which came upon Maggie, when she would go about the house with lowering brows, and all her bright, cheerful ways and devices could bring no smile upon her face.

  “What is the matter with Maggie?” she would say to Mary.

  “Oh, nothing, ma’am, only she’s bad; she’s got to be brought under, and brought down, — that’s what she has.”

  “Mary, I think you had better not talk to Maggie about her past faults. She knows she has been wrong, and the best way is to let her get quietly into the right way. We mustn’t keep throwing up the past to her. When we do wrong, we don’t like to have people keep putting us in mind of it.”

  “You’re jest an angel, Miss Eva, and it isn’t many ladies that would do as you do. You ‘re too good to her entirely. She ought to be made sensible of it.”

  “Well, Mary, the best way to make her sensible and bring her to repentance is to treat her kindly and never bring up the past. Don’t you see it does no good, Mary? It only makes her sullen, and gloomy, and unhappy, so that I can’t get anything out of her. Now please, Mary, just keep quiet, and let me manage Maggie.”

  And then Mary would promise, and Eva would smooth matters over, and affairs would go for a day or two harmoniously. But there was another authority in Mary’s family, as in almost every Irish household, — a man who felt called to have a say and give a sentence.

  Mary had an elder brother, Mike McArtney, who had established himself in a grocery business a little out of the city, and who felt himself to stand in position of head of the family to Mary and her children. The absolute and entire reverence and deference with which Irish women look up to the men of their kindred is something in direct contrast to the demeanor of American women. The male sex, if repulsed in other directions, certainly are fully justified and glorified by the submissive daughters of Erin. Mike was the elder brother, under whose care Mary came to this country. He was the adviser and director of all her affairs. He found her places; he guided her in every emergency. Mike, of course, had felt and bitterly resented the dishonor brought on their family by Maggie’s fall. In his view, there was danger that the path of repentance was being made altogether too easy for her, and he had resolved on the first leisure Sunday evening to come to the house and execute a thorough work of judgment on Maggie, setting her sin in order before her, and, in general, bearing down on her in such a way as to bring her to the dust and make her feel it the greatest possible mercy and favor that any of her relations should speak to her.

  So, after Eva had hushed the mother and tranquilized the girl, and there had been two or three days of serenity, came Sunday evening and Uncle Mike. The result was, as might have been expected, a loud and noisy altercation. Maggie was perfectly infuriated, and talked like one possessed of a demon; using, alas! language with which her sinful life had made her only too familiar, and which went far to justify the rebukes which were heaped upon her.

  In his anger at such contumacious conduct Uncle Mike took full advantage of the situation, and told Maggie that she was a disgrace to her mother and her relations — a disgrace to any honest house — and that he wondered that decent gentle-folks would have her under their roof. In short, in one hour, two of Maggie’s best friends — the mother that loved her as her life and the uncle that had been as a father to her — contrived utterly to sweep away and destroy all those delicate cords and filaments which the hands of good angels had been fastening to her heart, to draw her heavenward.

  When a young tree is put in new ground, its roots put forth fibres delicate as hairs, but in which is all the vitality of a new phase of existence. To tear up those roots and wrench off those fibres is too often the destructive work of well-intending friends; it is done too often by those who would, if need be, give their very heart’s blood for the welfare they imperil. Such is life as we find it.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  ROUGH HANDLING OF SORE NERVES

  THE same Sunday evening that Mary and her brother Mike had devoted to the disciplinary processes with Maggie had been spent by Eva and her husband at her father’s house.

  Mrs. Van Arsdel, to say the truth, had been somewhat shaken and disturbed by Aunt Maria’s suggestions; and she took early occasion to draw Eva aside, and make many doubtful inquiries and utter many admonitory cautions with regard to the part she had taken for Maggie.

  “Of course, dear, it’s very kind in you,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel; “but your aunt thinks it isn’t quite prudent; and, come to think it over, Eva, I’m afraid it may get you into trouble. Everything is going on so well in your house, I don’t want you to have anything disagreeable, you know.”

  “Well, after all, mother, how can I be a Christian, or anything like a Christian, if I am never willing to take any trouble? If you heard the preaching we do every Sunday, you would feel so.”

  “I don’t doubt that Mr. St. John is a good preacher,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel; “but then I never could go so far, you know; and your aunt is almost crazy now because the girls go up there and don’t sit in our pew in church. She was here yesterday, and talked very
strongly about your taking Maggie. She really made me quite uncomfortable.”

  “Well, I should like to know what concern it is of Aunt Maria’s!” said Eva. “It’s a matter in which Harry and I must follow our own judgment and conscience; Harry thinks we are doing right, and I suspect Harry knows what is best to do as well as Aunt Maria.”

  “Well, certainly, Eva, I must say it’s an unusual sort of thing to do. I know your motives are all right and lovely, and I stood up for you with your aunt. I didn’t give in to her a bit; and yet, all the while, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe she was right and that maybe your good-heartedness would get you into difficulty.”

  “Well, suppose it does; what then? Am I never to have any trouble for the sake of helping anybody? I am not one of the very good women with missions, like Sibyl Selwyn, and can’t do good that way; and I’m not enterprising and courageous, like sister Ida, to make new professions for women: but here is a case of a poor woman right under my own roof who is perplexed and suffering, and if I can help her carry her load, ought I not to do it, even if it makes me a good deal of trouble?”

  “Well, yes, I don’t know but you ought,” said Mrs. Van Arsdel, who was always convinced by the last speaker.

  “You see,” continued Eva, “the priest and the Levite who passed by on the other side when a man lay wounded were just of Aunt Maria’s mind. They didn’t want trouble, and if they undertook to do anything for him they would have a good deal; so they left him. And if I turn my back on Mary and Maggie I shall be doing pretty much the same thing.”

  “Well, if you only are sure of succeeding. But girls that have fallen into bad ways are such dangerous creatures; perhaps you can’t do her any good, and will only get yourself into trouble.”

  “Well, if I fail, why then I shall fail. But I think it’s better to try and fail in doing our part for others than never to try at all.”