DISTURBING ELEMENTS.
HE next anxiety was the baby, who contrived to tumble himself over in his high chair, and cried loudly. Eurie ran. Dr. Mitchell was always so troubled about bumps on the head. She bathed this in cold water, and in arnica, and petted, and soothed, and pacified as well as she could a child who thought it a special and unendurable state of things not to have mamma and nobody else. Between the petting she administered wholesome reproof to Jennie.
"If you hadn't been reading, instead of attending to him this would not have happened I wish I had told mother to lock up all the books before she went. You are great help; worth while to stay from school to bury yourself in a book."
"I haven't read a dozen pages this morning," Jennie said, with glowing cheeks. "He was sitting in his high chair, just as he always is, and I had stepped across the room to get a picture-book for Robbie. How could I know that he was going to fall? I don't think you are very kind, anyway, when I am helping all that I can, and losing school besides."
And Miss Jennie put on an air of lofty and injured innocence.
"I believe she is sweeping right on the bread," said Eurie, her thoughts turned into another channel. "Go and see, Jennie."
Jennie went, and returned as full of comfort as any of Job's friends.
"She swept right straight at it; and she left the door open, and the wind blew the cloth off, and a great hunk of dust and dirt lies right on top of one loaf, and the clothes are boiling over on the others. Nice bread you'll have!"
Before this sentence was half finished, Eurie sat the baby on the floor and ran, stopping only to give orders that Jennie should not let him go to sleep for anything.
The door-bell was the next sound that tried her nerves. The little parlor where they had lingered late, she and Nellis, last evening, when they had a pleasant talk together, the pleasantest she had ever had with that brother; now she remembered how it looked; how he had said, as he glanced back when they were leaving:
"Eurie, I hope you won't have any special calls before you get around to this room in the morning; it looks as though there had been an upheaval of books and papers here."
Books, and papers, and dust, and her hat and sack, and Jennie's gloves, and Robbie's play-things; she had forgotten the parlor.
Meantime, Jennie had rushed to the door, and now returned, holding the kitchen door open, and talking loud enough to be heard distinctly in the parlor.
"Eurie, Leonard Brooks is in the parlor. He says he wants to see you for just a minute, and I should think that is about as long as he would care to stay; it looks like sixty in there."
"Oh, dear me!" said Eurie, and she looked down at her dress. It had long black streaks running diagonally across it, and dish-water and grease combined on her apron; a few drops of arnica on her sleeves and hands did not improve the general effect.
"Jennie, why in the world didn't you tell him that I was engaged, and couldn't see him this morning?"
"Why, how should I know that you wanted me to say so to people? You didn't tell me. He said he was in a hurry. He isn't alone, either; there is a strange gentleman with him."
Worse and worse.
"I won't go," said Eurie.
"But you will have to. I told him you were at home, and would be in in a moment. Go on, what do you care?"
There was no way but to follow this advice; but she did care. She set the starch back on the stove, and washed her hands, and waited while Sallie ran up-stairs and hunted a towel; then she went, flushed and annoyed, to the parlor. Leonard Brooks was an old acquaintance, but who was the stranger?
"Mr. Holden, of New York," Leonard said.
"They would detain her but a moment, as she was doubtless engaged;" and then Leonard looked mischievously down at the streaked dress. He was not used to seeing Eurie look so entirely awry in the matter of her toilet.
Mr. Holden was going to get up a tableau entertainment, and needed home talent to help him; he, Leonard, had volunteered to introduce him to some of the talented ladies of the city, and had put her first on the list. Eurie struggled with her embarrassment, and answered in her usual way:
"He can see at a glance that I merit the compliment. If myself and all my surroundings don't show a marked talent for disorder, I don't know what would."
Mr. Holden was courteous and gallant in the extreme. He took very little notice of the remark; ignored the state of the room utterly; apologized for the unseemly hour of their call, attributing it to his earnest desire to secure her name before there was any other engagement made; "might he depend on her influence and help?"
Eurie was in a hurry. She smelled the starch scorching; Robbie was crying fretfully, and the baby was so quiet she feared he was asleep; the main point was, to get rid of her callers as soon as possible. She asked few questions, and knew as little about the projected entertainment as possible, save that she was pledged to a rehearsal on the coming Wednesday at eight o'clock. Then she bowed them out with a sense of relief; and, merely remarking to Jennie that she wished she could coax Robbie and the baby into the parlor, and clear it up a little before anybody more formidable arrived, she went back to the scorched starch and other trials.
From that time forth a great many people wanted Dr. Mitchell. The bell rang, and rang, and rang. Jennie had to run, and Eurie had to run to baby. Then came noon bringing the boys home from school, hungry and in a hurry; and Eurie had to go to Sallie's help, who was struggling to get the table set, and something on it to eat.
Whereupon the bread suddenly announced itself ready for the oven by spreading over one-half of the bread cloth, with a sticky mass. Then the bell rang again.
"I hope that is some one who will send to the Valley for father right away; then we shall have mother again."
This was Eurie's half aloud admission that she was not equal to the strain. Then she listened for Jennie's report. The parlor door being opened, and somebody being invited thither; and that room not cleared up yet! Then came Jennie with her exasperating news.
"It is Dr. Snowdon, from Morristown, and he wants father for a consultation; says he is going to take him back with him on the two o'clock train, and he wants to know if you could let him have a mouthful of dinner with father? He met father at the crossing half a mile below, and he told him to come right on."
"And where is mother?" said Eurie, pale and almost breathless under this new calamity.
"Why, he didn't say; but I suppose she is with father. He stopped to call at the Newton's. I guess you will have to hurry, won't you?"
Jennie was provokingly cool and composed; no sense of responsibility rested upon her.
"Hurry!" said Eurie. "Why, he can't have any dinner here. We haven't a thing in the house for a stranger."
"Well," said Jennie, balancing herself on one foot, "shall I go and tell him that he must take himself off to a hotel?"
"Nonsense!" said Eurie; "you know better." Then she whisked into the kitchen. Twenty minutes of one, and the train went at ten minutes of two, and nothing to eat, and Dr. Snowdon (of all particular and gentlemanly mortals, without a wife or a home, or any sense of the drawbacks of Monday) to eat it! Is it hardly to be wondered at that the boys voted Eurie awfully cross?
"Altogether, it was just the most horrid time that ever anybody had." That was the way Eurie closed the account of it, as she sat curled on the foot of Marion's bed, with the three friends, who had been listening and laughing, gathered around her in different attitudes of attention.
"Oh, you can laugh, and so can I, now that it is over," Eurie said. "But I should just like to have seen one of you in my place; it was no laughing matter, I can tell you. It was just the beginning of vexations, though; the whole week, so far, has been exasperating in every respect. Never anything went less according to planning than my programme for the week has."
Each of her auditors could have echoed that, but they were silent. At last Marion asked:
"But how did you get out of it? Tell us that. Now, a dinner of any kind is something that is beyond me. I can imagine you transfixed with horror. Just tell us what you did."
"Why, you will wonder who came to my rescue; but I tell you, girls, Nellis is the best fellow in the world. If I was half as good a Christian as he is, without any of that to help him, I should be a thankful mortal. I didn't expect him, thought he had gone away for the day; but when he came he took in the situation at a glance. Half a dozen words of explanation set him right. 'Never mind.' he said. 'Tell him we didn't mean to have dinner so early, but we flew around and got them a bite—then let's do it.' 'But what will the bite be?' I asked, and I stood looking up at him like a ninny who had never gotten a meal in her life. 'Why, bread, and butter, and coffee, and a dish of sauce, and a pickle, or something of that sort;' and the things really sounded appetizing as he told them off. 'Come,' he said, 'I'll grind the coffee, and make it; I used to be a dabster at that dish when I was in college. Jennie, you set the table, and Ned will help; he's well enough for that, I know.'
"And in less time than it takes to tell it, he had us all at work, baby and all; and, really, we managed to get up quite a decent meal, out of nothing, you understand; had it ready when father drove up; and he said it was as good a dinner as he had had in a week. But, oh, me! I'm glad such days don't come very often. You see, none of you know anything about it. You girls with your kitchens supplied with first-class cooks, and without any more idea of what goes on in the way of work before you are fed than though you lived in the moon, what do you know about such a day as I have described? Here's Marion, to be sure, who has about as empty a purse as mine; but as for kitchens, and wash days, and picked-up dinners, she is a novice."
"I know all about those last articles, so far as eating them is concerned," Marion said, grimly. "I know things about them that you don't, and never will. But I have made up my mind that living a Christian life isn't walking on a feather bed, whether you live in a palace or a fourth-rate board-house, and teach school. I shouldn't wonder if there were such things as vexations everywhere."
"I don't doubt it," Ruth Erskine said, speaking more quickly than was usual to her. The others had been more or less communicative with each other. It wasn't in Ruth's nature to tell how tried, and dissatisfied she had been with herself and her life, and her surroundings all the week. She was not sympathetic by nature. She couldn't tell her inward feeling to any one; but she could indorse heartily the discovery that Marion had made.
"Well, I know one thing," said Eurie, "it requires twice the grace that I supposed it did to get through with kitchen duties and exasperations and keep one's temper. I shall think, after this, that mother is a saint when she gets through the day without boxing our ears three or four times around. Come, let's go to meeting."
It was Wednesday evening, and our four girls had met to talk over the events of the week, and to keep each other countenance during their first prayer-meeting.
"It is almost worse than going to Sunday-school," Eurie said, as they went up the steps, "except that we can help ourselves to seats without waiting for any attentions which would not be shown."
Now the First Church people were not given to going to prayer-meeting. It is somewhat remarkable how many First Churches there are to which that remark will apply. The chapel was large and inviting, looking as though in the days of its planning many had been expected at the social meetings, or else it was built with an eye to festivals and societies. The size of the room only made the few persons who were in it, seem fewer in number than they were.
Flossy had been to prayer-meeting several times before with a cousin who visited them, but none of the others had attended such a meeting since they could remember. To Eurie and Ruth it was a real surprise to see the rows of empty seats. As for Marion she had overheard sarcastic remarks enough in the watchful and critical world in which she had moved to have a shrewd suspicion that such was the case.
"I don't know where to sit," whispered Flossy, shrinking from the gaze of several heads that were turned to see who the new comers were. "Don't you suppose they will seat us?"
"Not they," said Eurie, "Don't you remember Sunday? We must just put the courageous face on and march forward. I'm going directly to the front. I always said if ever I went to prayer-meeting at all, I shouldn't act as though I was ashamed that I came." Saying which she led the way to the second seat from the desk, directly in line with Dr. Dennis' eye.
That gentleman looked down at them with troubled face. Marion looked to see it light up, for she said in her heart:
"Gracie has surely told him my secret."
She knew little about the ways in the busy minister's household. The delightful communion of feeling that she had imagined between father and daughter was almost unknown to them. Very fond and proud of his daughter was Dr. Dennis; very careful of her health and her associations; very grateful that she was a Christian, and so, safe.
But so busy and harassed was his life, so endless were the calls on his time and his patience and his sympathy, that almost without his being aware of it, his own family were the only members of his church who never received any pastoral calls.
Consequently a reserve like unto that in too many households had grown up between himself and his child, utterly unsuspected by the father, never but half owned by the daughter. He thought of her religious life with joy and thanksgiving; when she went astray, was careful and tender in his admonition; yet of the inner workings of her life, of her reaching after higher and better living, of her growth in grace, or her days of disappointment and failure and decline he knew no more than the veriest stranger with whom she never spoke.
For while Grace Dennis loved and reverenced her father more than she did any other earthly being, she acknowledged to herself that she could not have told him even of the little conversation between her teacher and herself. She could, and did, tell him all about the lesson in algebra, but not a word about the lesson in Christian love.
So on this evening his face expressed no satisfaction in the presence of the strangers. He was simply disturbed that they had formed a league to meet here with mischief ahead, as he verily believed.
He arose and read the opening hymn; then looked about him in a disturbed way. Nobody to lead the singing. This was too often the case. The quartette choir rarely indeed found their way to the prayer-meeting; and when the one who was a church-member occasionally came to the weekly meeting, for reasons best known to herself, apparently the power of song for which she received so good a Sabbath-day salary had utterly gone from her, for she never opened her lips.
"I hope," said Dr. Dennis, "that there is some one present who can start this tune; it is simple. A prayer-meeting without singing loses half its spiritual force." Still everyone was dumb. "I am sorry that I cannot sing at all," he said again, after a moment's pause. "If I could, ever so little, it would be my delight to consecrate my voice to the service of God's house."
Still silence. All this made Marion remember her resolves at Chautauqua.
"What tunes do people sing in prayer-meeting?" she whispered to Eurie.
"I don't know, I am sure," Eurie whispered back. And then the ludicrous side happened to forcibly strike that young lady, just then she shook with laughter and shook the seat. Dr. Dennis looked down at her with grave, rebuking eye.
"Well," he began; "if we cannot sing"—
And then, before he had time to say further, a soft, sweet voice, so tremulous it almost brought the tears to think what a tremendous stretch of courage it had taken, quivered on the air.
