"Master,
I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest."
THE Saturday
afternoon matinee at the Auditorium in Chicago was just over
and the usual crowd was struggling to get to its carriage
before any one else. The Auditorium attendant was shouting
out the numbers of different carriages and the carriage
doors were slamming as the horses were driven rapidly up to
the curb, held there impatiently by the drivers who had
shivered long in the raw east wind, and then let go to
plunge for a few minutes into the river of vehicles that
tossed under the elevated railway and finally went whirling
off up the avenue.
"Now
then, 624," shouted the Auditorium attendant;
"624!" he repeated, and there dashed up to the
curb a splendid span of black horses attached to a carriage
having the monogram, "C. R. S." in gilt letters on
the panel of the door.
Two girls
stepped out of the crowd towards the carriage. The older one
had entered and taken her seat and the attendant was still
holding the door open for the younger, who stood hesitating
on the curb.
"Come,
Felicia! What are you waiting for! I shall freeze to
death!" called the voice from the carriage.
The girl
outside of the carriage hastily unpinned a bunch of English
violets from her dress and handed them to a small boy who
was standing shivering on the edge of the sidewalk almost
under the horses' feet. He took them, with a look of
astonishment and a "Thank ye, lady!" and instantly
buried a very grimy face in the bunch of perfume. The girl
stepped into the carriage, the door shut with the incisive
bang peculiar to well-made carriages of this sort, and in a
few moments the coachman was speeding the horses rapidly up
one of the boulevards.
"You are
always doing some queer thing or other, Felicia," said
the older girl as the carriage whirled on past the great
residences already brilliantly lighted.
"Am I?
What have I done that is queer now, Rose?" asked the
other, looking up suddenly and turning her head towards her
sister.
"Oh,
giving those violets to that boy! He looked as if he needed
a good hot supper more than a bunch of violets. It's a
wonder you didn't invite him home with us. I shouldn't have
been surprised if you had. You are always doing such queer
things."
"Would
it be queer to invite a boy like that to come to the house
and get a hot supper?" Felicia asked the question
softly and almost as if she were alone.
"'Queer'
isn't just the word, of course," replied Rose
indifferently. "It would be what Madam Blanc calls 'outre.'
Decidedly. Therefore you will please not invite him or
others like him to hot suppers because I suggested it. Oh,
dear! I'm awfully tired."
She yawned,
and Felicia silently looked out of the window in the door.
"The
concert was stupid and the violinist was simply a bore. I
don't see how you could sit so still through it all,"
Rose exclaimed a little impatiently.
"I
liked the music," answered Felicia quietly.
"You
like anything. I never saw a girl with so little critical
taste."
Felicia
colored slightly, but would not answer. Rose yawned again,
and then hummed a fragment of a popular song. Then she
exclaimed abruptly: "I'm sick of 'most everything. I
hope the 'Shadows of London' will be exciting tonight."
"The
'Shadows of Chicago,'" murmured Felicia. "The
'Shadows of Chicago!' The 'Shadows of London,' the play, the
great drama with its wonderful scenery, the sensation of New
York for two months. You know we have a box with the Delanos
tonight."
Felicia
turned her face towards her sister. Her great brown eyes
were very expressive and not altogether free from a sparkle
of luminous heat.
"And
yet we never weep over the real thing on the actual stage of
life. What are the 'Shadows of London' on the stage to the
shadows of London or Chicago as they really exist? Why don't
we get excited over the facts as they are?"
"Because
the actual people are dirty and disagreeable and it's too
much bother, I suppose," replied Rose carelessly.
"Felicia, you can never reform the world. What's the
use? We're not to blame for the poverty and misery. There
have always been rich and poor; and there always will be. We
ought to be thankful we're rich."
"Suppose
Christ had gone on that principle," replied Felicia,
with unusual persistence. "Do you remember Dr. Bruce's
sermon on that verse a few Sundays ago: 'For ye know the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich yet
for our sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty
might become rich'?"
"I
remember it well enough," said Rose with some
petulance, "and didn't Dr. Bruce go on to say that
there is no blame attached to people who have wealth if they
are kind and give to the needs of the poor? And I am sure
that he himself is pretty comfortably settled. He never
gives up his luxuries just because some people go hungry.
What good would it do if he did? I tell you, Felicia, there
will always be poor and rich in spite of all we can do. Ever
since Rachel Winslow has written about those queer doings in
Raymond you have upset the whole family. People can't live
at that concert pitch all the time. You see if Rachel
doesn't give it up soon. It's a great pity she doesn't come
to Chicago and sing in the Auditorium concerts. She has
received an offer. I'm going to write and urge her to come.
I'm just dying to hear her sing."
Felicia
looked out of the window and was silent. The carriage rolled
on past two blocks of magnificent private residences and
turned into a wide driveway under a covered passage, and the
sisters hurried into the house. It was an elegant mansion of
gray stone furnished like a palace, every corner of it warm
with the luxury of paintings, sculpture, art and modern
refinement.
The owner of
it all, Mr. Charles R. Sterling, stood before an open grate
fire smoking a cigar. He had made his money in grain
speculation and railroad ventures, and was reputed to be
worth something over two millions. His wife was a sister of
Mrs. Winslow of Raymond. She had been an invalid for several
years. The two girls, Rose and Felicia, were the only
children. Rose was twenty-one years old, fair, vivacious,
educated in a fashionable college, just entering society and
already somewhat cynical and indifferent. A very hard young
lady to please, her father said, sometimes playfully,
sometimes sternly. Felicia was nineteen, with a tropical
beauty somewhat like her cousin, Rachel Winslow, with warm,
generous impulses just waking into Christian feeling,
capable of all sorts of expression, a puzzle to her father,
a source of irritation to her mother and with a great
unsurveyed territory of thought and action in herself, of
which she was more than dimly conscious. There was that in
Felicia that would easily endure any condition in life if
only the liberty to act fully on her conscientious
convictions were granted her.
"Here's
a letter for you, Felicia," said Mr. Sterling, handing
it to her.
Felicia sat
down and instantly opened the letter, saying as she did so:
"It's from Rachel."
"Well,
what's the latest news from Raymond?" asked Mr.
Sterling, taking his cigar out of his mouth and looking at
Felicia with half-shut eyes, as if he were studying her.
"Rachel
says Dr. Bruce has been staying in Raymond for two Sundays
and has seemed very much interested in Mr. Maxwell's pledge
in the First Church."
"What
does Rachel say about herself?" asked Rose, who was
lying on a couch almost buried under elegant cushions.
"She is
still singing at the Rectangle. Since the tent meetings
closed she sings in an old hall until the new buildings
which her friend, Virginia Page, is putting up are
completed.
"I must
write Rachel to come to Chicago and visit us. She ought not
to throw away her voice in that railroad town upon all those
people who don't appreciate her."
Mr. Sterling
lighted a new cigar and Rose exclaimed: "Rachel is so
queer. She might set Chicago wild with her voice if she sang
in the Auditorium. And there she goes on throwing it away on
people who don't know what they are hearing."
"Rachel
won't come here unless she can do it and keep her pledge at
the same time," said Felicia, after a pause.
"What
pledge?" Mr. Sterling asked the question and then added
hastily: "Oh, I know, yes! A very peculiar thing that.
Alexander Powers used to be a friend of mine. We learned
telegraphy in the same office. Made a great sensation when
he resigned and handed over that evidence to the Interstate
Commerce Commission. And he's back at his telegraph again.
There have been queer doings in Raymond during the past
year. I wonder what Dr. Bruce thinks of it on the whole. I
must have a talk with him about it."
"He is
at home and will preach tomorrow," said Felicia.
"Perhaps he will tell us something about it."
There was
silence for a minute. Then Felicia said abruptly, as if she
had gone on with a spoken thought to some invisible hearer:
"And what if he should propose the same pledge to the
Nazareth Avenue Church?"
"Who?
What are you talking about?" asked her father a little
sharply.
"About
Dr. Bruce. I say, what if he should propose to our church
what Mr. Maxwell proposed to his, and ask for volunteers who
would pledge themselves to do everything after asking the
question, 'What would Jesus do?'"
"There's
no danger of it," said Rose, rising suddenly from the
couch as the tea-bell rang.
"It's a
very impracticable movement, to my mind," said Mr.
Sterling shortly.
"I
understand from Rachel's letter that the Raymond church is
going to make an attempt to extend the idea of the pledge to
other churches. If it succeeds it will certainly make great
changes in the churches and in people's lives," said
Felicia.
"Oh,
well, let's have some tea first!" said Rose, walking
into the dining-room. Her father and Felicia followed, and
the meal proceeded in silence. Mrs. Sterling had her meals
served in her room. Mr. Sterling was preoccupied. He ate
very little and excused himself early, and although it was
Saturday night, he remarked as he went out that he should be
down town on some special business.
"Don't
you think father looks very much disturbed lately?"
asked Felicia a little while after he had gone out.
"Oh, I
don't know! I hadn't noticed anything unusual," replied
Rose. After a silence she said: "Are you going to the
play tonight, Felicia? Mrs. Delano will be here at half past
seven. I think you ought to go. She will feel hurt if you
refuse."
"I'll
go. I don't care about it. I can see shadows enough without
going to the play."
"That's
a doleful remark for a girl nineteen years old to
make," replied Rose. "But then you're queer in
your ideas anyhow, Felicia. If you are going up to see
mother, tell her I'll run in after the play if she is still
awake."
