Mrs. Ritchie was a Swedenborgian. I had learned that in her Autobiography of an Actress. All denominations—including some whose adherents would not sit down to the Lord’s Supper with certain others, and those who would not partake of the consecrated “elements” if administered by non-prelatic hands—united in shutting and bolting the door of heaven in her face.
In the intimate companionship, unbroken by these and other admonitions, I never heard from Mrs. Ritchie’s lips a syllable that was not redolent with the law of kindness. I learned to love her fondly and to revere her with fervor I would not have believed possible, six months earlier. It was not her fascination of manner alone that attracted me, or the unceasing acts of sisterly kindness she poured upon me, that deepened my devotion. She opened to me the doors of a new world: broadened and deepened and sweetened my whole nature. We never spoke of doctrines. We rarely had a talk—and henceforward our meetings were almost daily—in which she did not drop into my mind some precious grain of faith in the All-Father; of love for the good and noble in my fellow-man and of compassion, rather than blame, for the erring. Of her own church she did not talk. She assumed, rather, that we were “one family, above, beneath,” and bound by the sacred tie of kinship, to “do good and to communicate.” She had a helpful hand, as well as a comforting word, for the sorrowing and the needy. As to her benefactions, I heard of them, now and again, from others. Now it was an aged gentlewoman, worn down to the verge of nervous prostration, and too poor to seek the change of air she ought to have, who was sent at the Ritchies’ expense to Old Point Comfort for a month; or a struggling music-mistress, for whom Mrs. Ritchie exerted herself quietly to secure pupils; or a girl whose talent for elocution was developed by private lessons from the ex-actress; or a bedridden matron, who had quieter nights after Mrs. Ritchie ran in, two or three evenings in a week, to read to her for half an hour in the rich, thrilling voice that had held hundreds enchanted in bygone days.
To me she was a revelation of good-will to men. She lectured me sometimes, as a mother might and ought, always in infinite tenderness.
“I cannot have you say that, my child!” she said once, when I broke into a tirade against the hypocrisy and general selfishness of humankind at large, and certain offenders in particular. “Nobody is all-wicked. There is more unconquered evil in some natures than in others. There is good—a spark of divine fire—in every soul God has made. Look for it, and you will find it. Encourage it, and it will shine.”
And in reply to a murmur during the trial-experiences of parish work, when I “deplored the effect of these belittling cares and petty commonplaces upon my intellectual growth,” the caressing hand was laid against my hot cheek.
“Dear! you are the wife of the man of God! It is a sacred trust committed to you as his helpmate. To shirk anything that helps him would be a sin. And we climb one step at a time, you know—not by bold leaps. Nothing is belittling that God sets for us to do.”
She, and some other things, gave me a royal winter.
Another good friend, Mrs. Stanard, had notified me that Edward Everett, then lecturing in behalf of the Mount Vernon Association, was to be her guest while in Richmond, and raised me to the seventh heaven of delighted anticipation by inviting me to meet him at a dinner-party she would give him. Mrs. Ritchie forestalled the introduction to the great man by writing a wee note to me on the morning of the day on which the dinner was to be.
The Mount Vernon Association had for its express object the purchase of Washington’s home and burial-place, to be held by the Nation, and not by the remote descendant of Mary and Augustine Washington, who had inherited it. Mrs. Ritchie was the secretary of the organization.
Her note said: