The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York

"You and I have changed places to-night, Phil," he said at length; "you make me do all the talking. Come now, it's your turn."

"I don't feel in the humor," said Philip. "Are you going to the club?"

"No; I shall go home and write some letters, maybe, now I think of it. So good-night."

Philip's "Good-night" was more curt than courteous, and he made his way to the club, where, according to his habit, he crouched his small form into one of the great chairs, drawing his head down between his shoulders, which were thrust upward by the resting of his elbows on the chair-arms. Here he sat long, taking no part in any conversation, but watching the smoke from his cigar.

The next morning he came late to breakfast, and his mother lingered after the rest had left the table, to see that his coffee and chops were right and to mitigate his apparent depression.

"Your little match-making scheme is likely to succeed beautifully," he said to her when the servant had gone.

"What do you mean? I'm sure I had no views of that kind in asking Charley Millard and Phillida. I only wished to encourage Phillida to go more into society."

"Views or no views, what it'll come to will be a match," Philip retorted.

"Well, there'll be no harm done, I suppose."

"Not if you think Charley the best man for her."

There was something of dejection in the tone of this last remark, and a note of reproach to her, that rendered Mrs. Gouverneur uneasy. When Philip had left the table she revolved it in her mind. Was Philip himself in love with Phillida? Or did he know anything to the disadvantage of Millard?

"Tell Mr. Philip I wish to see him before he goes out," she said to one of the maids.

When Philip came to her room she looked at him with anxiety.

"Do you know anything against Charley, Philip?"

"Nothing whatever," said Philip, emphatically, as he pulled on his gloves.

"Philip, tell me truly, do you care for your cousin yourself?"

"Why, of course. She is my cousin, and a good girl – a little too fearfully good."

"You know what I mean, Philip. Don't trifle with me."

"What would be the use of my caring for Phillida, as you call it? Charley, with his usual luck, will get her, I am sure. You've fixed that."

"Now, Philip, you reproach me unjustly. You've had years of intimacy with Phillida. Why did you never let her know what your feelings were?"

"I? I haven't said that I have any feelings in the matter. Do you think Phillida would have me if Charley were out of the way? She knows me too well. She's a utilitarian. She would say, 'Cousin Phil is interesting, but he hides his talent in a napkin. He studied law, and now neglects to practise it because his uncle left him two or three thousand dollars a year.' To her I am only an idler, when I'm not a mocker."

"She likes you, I am sure."

"Yes, in a way, no doubt. But I'm a doubter, and a mocker, and a failure, and Phillida knows it. And so do I."

"Ah, now, Philip, why will you be so discouraged with yourself? You're the cleverest young man in New York."

But Philip only smiled and said, "Good-morning, mother," and ran down the stairs and out the door.

When Philip had left Millard in Second Avenue the evening before, the latter was puzzled. He had never seen Gouverneur so depressed and irritable. But when they had separated, Millard was relieved that he no longer had to force a conversation about things of no interest to himself, and that his thoughts were at length free to range where they would.

He turned his footsteps towards his apartment, making a detour through Madison Square to lengthen the stroll. His interest in and affection for the family of his aunt was a fact so paradoxical to the rest of his life that it was in some sense his main secret. It was not a thing he should like to have explained to Philip Gouverneur, his bosom friend, for example. But that Phillida Callender was now in possession of the chief secret of his life gave him a sort of pleasure he had never known before. That she was in friendship with his aunt's family and a sharer in this off-color part of his existence made a sort of community of feeling between him and her. He turned the matter over in his mind, he went over in memory all parts of his encounter with her in his aunt's tenement, he dwelt upon the glow of surprise on her countenance, and in imagination he again took her hand in friendly greeting. He recalled every detail of the walk through Avenue C, in Tompkins Square, and then through the cross-streets. He made himself feel over again the pleasure he had felt in those rare moments when she turned her dark, earnest eyes toward him at some more than usually interesting moment in the conversation.

This was the pleasant side of the reverie. For the rest, he was tormented with a certain feeling of unworthiness that had never troubled him so much before. The more he thought of the purposes, sweet, high, and disinterested, that moved her, the more was he pained at a sense of frivolity, or, at least, at a want of "worthwhileness" in his own aims. He was a communicant at St. Matthias's, and highly esteemed for his exemplary life and his liberality to the church. But the rector of St. Matthias's did not trouble himself, as Phillida did, about the lost sheep in the wilderness of the lettered avenues. His own flock, well washed and kempt, were much more agreeable subjects of contemplation.

Millard sat in revery a long time. He was really afraid that he should presently find himself in love with Miss Callender, and such a marriage was contrary to his whole plan of life. His purpose was primarily to remain a bachelor, though he had dreamed of himself well established, but always with a wife whose tastes and connections should incline her to those pursuits that go with a fashionable career, and he always saw a vision of himself and his wife entertaining the very elect of New York City. Here suddenly a new path, hitherto untrodden by his imagination, opened before him as a possibility. Judged by the standards used among his friends it was an undesirable road. It involved a voluntary sacrifice of that position of social prominence and leadership which he had striven so hard to secure. He resolved to put the thought away from him.

A little later his lights were out and he was abed. But he did not sleep at once, for in spite of the best resolutions he could not help recalling again and again the face and figure, the voice and movement, of Phillida Callender. Again and again he crossed Tompkins Square and walked through Eighth street and Waverley Place with her; and she once more confronted him across Mrs. Gouverneur's dinner-table.

One result of Millard's meditations was a desire to relieve his conscience by sharing a little – if ever so little – in the effort to improve the life of the multitudinous East-siders. To touch them by personal effort and contact was out of the question; he could not bring himself to attempt it, nor would it have availed anything, perhaps, if he had, for the East-siders would have shrunk from his gloves as instinctively as he did from their work-darkened palms. But there was the other resort of his check-book. He sent a check the next evening to the superintendent of the mission. He stated that he remitted this as assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes on behalf of a gentleman who did not wish his name known, and requested that the subscription be announced merely as from "A Well-wisher." One half of the hundred dollars was to go to the expenses of the coffee-room and the other half to be appropriated to the library and reading-room.

Now it is not in the nature of things that a hen should see a new egg in her nest without cackling over it, or that a man in charge of a benevolent enterprise should have a hundred-dollar check mysteriously and unexpectedly dropped into his hat without talking about it. Such a gift smacks of special divine favor, and offers a good theme for an address calculated to animate those engaged in the work. The very next Sunday, when the Testaments had been shut up and the lesson papers had all been put away, Phillida and the others heard from the superintendent some very inspiriting remarks on the subject of the encouragements which ought to make them take heart in their work. He wound up, of course, by telling of this donation from an unknown well-wisher. Had he stopped there – but what talker to young people would or could have stopped there? He whisked out the check and showed it, and then the identical letter from the assistant cashier of the Bank of Manhadoes was held up before the admiring boys and girls and read aloud to show how modestly this benevolent well-wisher had hidden his hand.

And thus the only person in the audience from whom Millard had particularly wished to conceal his agency in the matter knew perfectly that the anonymous well-wisher was none other than the assistant cashier himself. And she thought what a fine thing it was to have money when there was so much good to be done with it.

X.

BROKEN RESOLVES

Once the check was dispatched, Millard's conscience, which had been aroused – irritated – by the standing rebuke of Phillida's superior disinterestedness, was in a measure appeased. After sitting an hour in slippery meditation he resolved to master his inclination toward Miss Callender's society, for fear of jeopardizing that bachelor ideal of life he had long cherished. Hilbrough's especial friendship, supported by Mrs. Hilbrough's gratitude, had of late put him in the way of making money more rapidly than heretofore; the probable early retirement of Farnsworth would advance him to the cashiership of the bank, and there opened before him as much as he had ever desired of business and social success. It was not exactly that he put advantages of this sort into one side of the scale and the undefinable charms of Phillida into the other. But he was restrained by that natural clinging to the main purpose which saves men from frivolous changes of direction under the wayward impulses of each succeeding day. This conservative holding by guiding resolutions once formed is the balance-wheel that keeps a human life from wabbling. Western hunters used to make little square boxes with their names graven in reverse on the inside. These they fixed over a young gourd, which grew till it filled the box. Then the hunter by removing the box and cutting off the end of the stem of the gourd, to make an opening like the mouth of a bottle, secured a curious natural powder-flask, shaped to his fancy and bearing his name in relief on its side. Like the boxed gourd, the lives of men become at length rigidly shaped to their guiding purposes, and one may read early resolutions ineffaceably inscribed upon them. But the irony of it! Here was Millard, for example, a mature man of affairs, held to a scheme of life adopted almost by accident when he was but just tottering, callow, from his up-country nest. What a haphazard world is this! Draw me no Fates with solemn faces, holding distaffs and deadly snipping shears. The Fates? Mere children pitching heads and tails upon the paving-stones.

But if the dominant purpose to which the man has fitted himself is not to be suddenly changed, there are forces that modify it by degrees and sometimes gradually undermine and then break it down altogether. The man whose ruling purpose is crossed by a grand passion may say to himself, like the shorn Samson, "I will go out as at other times before," for the change that has come over him is subtle and not at once apparent to his consciousness. Millard resolutely repressed his inclination to call on Miss Callender, resolutely set himself to adhere to his old life as though adherence had been a duty. But he ceased to be interested in the decorations and amused by the articles of virtu in his apartment; he no longer contemplated with pleasure the artistic effect of his rich portières and the soft tone of his translucent window-hangings. The place seemed barren and lonely, and the life he led not much worth the having after all.

But, like the brave man he was, he stuck to his resolution not to call on Miss Callender, from a sort of blind loyalty to nothing in particular. Perhaps a notion that a beau like himself would make a ridiculous figure suing to such a saint as Phillida had something to do with his firmness of purpose. But when, a month later, he started once more for Avenue C, he became at length aware that he had not made any headway whatever in conquering his passion, which like some wild creature only grew the fiercer under restraint. In spite of himself he looked about in hope of meeting Miss Callender in the street, and all the way across the avenues he wondered whether he should encounter her at his aunt's. But Phillida had taken precautions against this. She remembered, this time, that the last Sunday in the month was his day for visiting his aunt, and she went directly home from the mission, disturbed in spite of herself by conflicting emotions.

Millard could not but respect her dignified avoidance of him, which he felt to be in keeping with her character. He listened with such grace as he could to Uncle Martin, whose pessimistic oration to-day chanced to be on the general ignorance and uselessness of doctors. His complaints about the medical faculty were uttered slowly and with long pauses between the sentences. Doctors, according to Uncle Martin, only pretend to know something, and use a lot of big words to fool people. "Now I doctor myself. I know what does me good, and I take it, doctor or no doctor." This was said with a you-don't-fool-me expression on his solemn face. "W'y, one doctor'll tell you one thing, and another'll tell you another. One says bathing's good for you, and another says no; one wants you to get up bright and early, and another says sleep a plenty; one will half-starve you, and the other says the thing is to feed you up."

At this point Uncle Martin rested his elbows against his sides, threw his forearms outward and upward at an angle of forty-five degrees, holding his broad palms toward the ceiling, while he dropped his heavy shorn chin upon his breast and gazed impressively upon Millard from under his eyebrows. The young man was rendered uneasy by this climactic pause, and he thought to break the force of Uncle Martin's attitude by changing the subject.

"Doctors differ among themselves as much as ministers do," he said.

"Ministers?" said Uncle Martin, erecting his head again, and sniffing a little. "They are just after money nowadays. W'y, I joined the Baptist church over here" – beckoning with his thumb – "when I came to New York, and the minister never come a-nigh us. We are not fine enough, I suppose. Ministers don't believe the plain Bible; they go on about a lot of stuff that they get from somewheres else. I say take the plain Bible, that a plain man like me can understand. I don't want the Greek and Latin of it. Now the Bible says in one place that if a man's sick the elders are to pray over him and anoint him with oil – I suppose it was sweet oil; but I don't know – that they used. But did you ever know any elder to do that? Naw; they just off for the doctor. Now, I say take the plain word of God, that's set down so't you couldn't noways make any mistakes."

Here Uncle Martin again dropped his head forward in a butting position, and stared at Charley Millard from under his brows. This time the younger man judged it best to make no rejoinder. Instead, he took the little Tommy in his arms and began to stroke the cheeks of the nestling child. The diversion had the proper effect. Uncle Martin, perceiving that the results of his exhaustive meditations in medicine and theology, which were as plain as the most self-evident nose on a man's face, were not estimated at their par value, got up and explained that he must go to Greenpoint and call on a man who had lately lost a child; and then, fearing he wouldn't get back to supper, he said good-by, and come again, and always glad to see you, Charley, and good luck to you; and so made his way down the dingy stairs.

Charley Millard now turned to his aunt, a thin-faced woman whose rather high forehead, wide and delicately formed in the region of the temples, made one think that in a more favorable soil she might have blossomed. She was sitting by the window that looked out upon the narrow courtyard below and on the rear house to which Aunt Martin's apartment was bound by a double clothes-line running upon pulleys. In fact the whole straitened landscape in view from the back windows was a vision of ropes on pulleys. Sunday was the only day that Mrs. Martin cared to look on this view, for on week-days it was a spectacle of sheets and pillow-cases and the most intimate male and female garments flapping and straddling shamelessly in the eddying wind.

Millard, while yet the older children had not returned, broached the subject of their education. He particularly wished to put Mary, the eldest, into a better school than the public school in her neighborhood, or at least into a school where the associations would be better. He proposed this to his aunt as delicately as possible.

"It's very kind of you, Charley," she said. "You want to make a fine lady of her. But what would you do with her? Would it make her any happier? She would want better clothes than we could give her; she would become dependent on you, maybe; and she would be ashamed of the rest of us."

"She could never be ashamed of you, aunt," said Millard. But he was struck with a certain good sense and originality in his aunt which kept her from accepting anything for good merely because it was commonly so taken. What service, indeed, would it be to Mary to declass her? Of what advantage to a poor girl to separate her from her surroundings unless you can secure to her a life certainly better?

"It would be well," he said after a while, "if Mary could prepare herself for some occupation by which she might some day get a living if other resources fail. You wouldn't like her to have to go out to service, or to fall below her family, Aunt Hannah?"

"No; certainly not. But there's the trouble. Her father is like many other men from the country; he can't bear the idea of Mary's earning her own living. He says he expects to support his own girls. And you know Henry won't have her educated at your expense. He's very proud. But if she could somehow get into a school better than the public schools in this part of the city, a school where she would get better teaching and meet a better class of children, I would like it, provided she did not get a notion of being a fine lady. There is nothing worse than half-cut quality, and that's all she'd be. And are you sure, Charley, that rich people are happier than we are? We don't worry about what we haven't got."

The children were now upon the stairs, and the private talk was ended. They greeted their cousin eagerly, and began as usual to talk of Miss Callender.

"We tried to bring her home with us," said Dick, "but she said, 'Not to-day, Dick, not to-day,' and she stuck to it. I told her you'd be here, and I thought that would fetch her, but she only laughed and said she had to call and see a poor sick young lady that hadn't walked for five years; and then she said, 'Give my love to your mother,' and left us. I sh'd thought she'd 'a' sent her love to Cousin Charley, too, but she never done it."

"Don't say 'never done it,' Dick," broke in Mary. "It's not proper."

Millard accepted his aunt's invitation to tea, and then walked homeward by a very round-about way. He was not quite aware of the nature of the impulse that caused him to turn downtown and thus to trace a part of the route he had walked over with Phillida four weeks before. He paused to look again at the now dark stairway up which lived the bedridden Wilhelmina Schulenberg, and though he shuddered with a sort of repulsion at thought of her hard lot, it was not sympathy with Mina Schulenberg that had arrested his steps at the mouth of this human hive. To his imagination it seemed that these dark, uninviting stairs were yet warm with the tread of the feet of Phillida Callender; it could not be more than two hours since she came down. So instead of following the route of a month ago through Tompkins Square and Eighth street, as he had half unconsciously set out to do, he walked through Tenth street to Second Avenue. This way Phillida must have gone this very afternoon, and this way he felt himself drawn by an impulse increasing in force ever as he journeyed. It seemed of prime importance that he should call on Miss Callender without delay, just to consult her about Mary's education. His reasoning in favor of this course was convincing, for logic never gets on so well as when inclination picks all the pebbles out of the pathway.

A long discussion concerning Mary Martin's education was held that evening between the young people sitting by the drop-lamp in Mrs. Callender's parlor. Many nice theories were broached by each of them, but during the whole of the discussion they were both in a state of double consciousness. Canvassing Mary and her outlook in life in one center of thought, they were thinking and feeling more profoundly regarding the outlook in life of two other people in another vortex of brain action. For Phillida could not conceal from herself the fact that Mr. Millard was only half interested in what he was saying, but was utterly absorbed in her with whom he was talking. His passion, so long denied, now had its revenge, and even the training of a man of the world to conceal what he felt and to say what he did not think was of no avail against it.

Notwithstanding the divided state of their minds, in consequence of which Mary's interests got only a minority of attention, her interests did not fare badly, for the very effort to keep the thoughts and feelings that were eddying below the surface from engulfing their whole mental action forced both talkers to concentrate their minds earnestly upon Mary's schooling.

In the first place both of them admitted the force of Mrs. Martin's objection to declassing Mary in such a way as to leave her segregated from family ties. Then it came out that Phillida did know a school – not a fine school, but a good school – where Mary would not be without companions in sober clothes, and where the teacher, a Miss Gillies, knew her business and had not too many scholars. But how to overcome Uncle Martin's objection to being helped by his wife's nephew?

"If," said Millard "the teacher of whom you speak had given to her a sufficient amount to pay the tuition of some suitable girl from a plain family, she would naturally consult you?"

"Yes; I think so," said Phillida.

"And under such circumstances why could you not recommend Mary?"

Phillida hesitated.

"I see you are more truthful than we men of business, who could not keep our feet without little ruses. There would be an implied deception of Uncle Martin, you think. Well, then, I will make the subscription absolute, and will leave Miss Gillies in entire control of it. I will advise her to consult you. If she does, and you think some other child than Mary ought to have it, or if it should be refused for Mary, you may give it to some one else. Do you know any one else who would profit by such a tuition?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Well, perhaps a better way would be this. I'll make it double, and you may have the entire disposal of both scholarships, if Miss Gillies will let you. Suppose I leave it to you to communicate the fact to her?"

"That will be very good, indeed"; and Phillida's face lost for a moment the blushing half-confusion that had marked it during the conversation, and a look of clear pleasure shone in her eyes – the enthusiastic pleasure of doing good and making happiness. Millard hardly rose to the height of her feeling; it was not to be expected. Whenever her face assumed this transfigured look his heart was smitten with pain – the mingled pain of love intensified and of hope declining; for this exaltation seemed to put Phillida above him, and perhaps out of his reach. Why should she fly away from him in this way?

"And may I come – to-morrow evening, perhaps – to inquire about this matter?" he said, making a movement to depart.

The question brought Phillida to the earth again, for Millard spoke with a voice getting beyond his control and telling secrets that he would fain have kept back. His question, tremulously put, seemed to ask so much more than it did! She responded in a voice betraying emotion quite out of keeping with the answer to a question like this, and with her face suffused, and eyes unable to look steadily at his, which were gazing into hers.