menu_book Chapter 18

chapter eighteen of from different standpoints by pansy and fay huntington this librivox recording is in the public domain chapter eighteen eunice's letter to perry and eleanor new york may thirteenth eighteen blank dear friends at home you two people ought to write oftener to your mother i know you have a great many cares in that bustling place with a large family to look after and all that sort of thing but for all that you shouldn't neglect your mother her poor drawn face quivered pitifully when i had to tell her there was no letter to-day and yesterday it was only a postal i don't mean to be cross but i have been feeling a little indignant at you all day now please reform your mother is better i can see quite an improvement and i'm sure dr mason feels a good deal encouraged if she had nothing to worry about she would get along faster but perry i can see that she worries about you she imagines that because you don't write long letters to her you are therefore not able if you were sick i am not sure but the might of her mother love would enable her to rise up from her sick-bed and go to you

i don't believe it is a christian duty to neglect such a mother there i didn't mean to say another word on that subject i'll tell you who is real good to her almost like a son your brother tom haddington did you know he was here he has been boarding with aunt ruth by spells all winter that i suppose you knew though i didn't and he is taking quite a long spell at it now it is a fortunate thing for your mother he comes up to see her every day always with a flower or a bud or an orange or some sweet-smelling offering she watches for him and follows him wistfully with her eyes when he departs perhaps as much as anything she enjoys the prayers that he offers at her bedside he does pray as though he were used to it and believed in it and rejoiced in it very few people pray in that way you know i think such praying must be helpful to one who is sick he is very thoughtful never forgetting to come for a few moments as soon as she is able to see him in the morning and again just before her room is closed to callers at night this beside the bright little calls made between times

in fact perry possibly your brother-in-law will usurp the place you have hitherto held in your mother's heart how should you like that he is rather good to most people except me i hope eleanor will forgive me for saying that about her brother but he has been ugly to me and i feel like having so much revenge i'll tell you about it he came to me last evening and said he and aunt ruth had been plotting against me they were of the opinion that i had too quiet and pleasant a time up in that sunny south room from morning till night with nothing to do except to be cheery to a loving and patient invalid that i must yield my place to aunt ruth for the evening and be taken out to breathe a little of outside life that i might be the better able to appreciate the sweetness and rest of my retreat and considerable more high-sounding stuff i was very willing to agree to the plan inasmuch as your mother fancies aunt ruth very much seeming to really desire her presence and as for aunt ruth she has taken one of her insane and intense fancies for the invalid and would go down on her knees to serve her

i had a plan also and it needed mr haddington or some other masculine to help me carry it out the moment he proposed my going out with him that evening i saw my way clearly make it to-morrow evening i said eagerly and i shall be delighted there is a place to which i very much want to go to-morrow he looked so grave over that that i hastened to assure him that it was not a theatre or any other disreputable place that i wanted to attend but a church i want to hear dr rogers i said he was my father's pastor ever so many years ago indeed he married my father and mother and i have always wanted to see and hear him i noticed by the morning paper that he was to preach in brooklyn all day to-morrow and if you can take me in the evening i shall be able to please my father with an account of his sermon i wish you could have seen the young gentleman's face as it looked when i had ceased speaking it was as grave and disturbed as though i had proposed marriage to him then and there

i'm very sorry he began hesitatingly and then stopping in distress why never mind i hastened to say of course you may have some other engagements i meant if you had no other plans i should like it not of course if it interferes i dare say some of the boarders will be going over and i can accompany them it isn't that he said instantly as if he were afraid i would give him credit for a motive that did not exist the trouble lies in reaching there reaching there i replied in bewilderment why don't the ferry-boats and street-cars run as usual i presume they do he answered his disturbed look deepening if anything while aunt ruth looking from one to the other of us smiled sardonically but the difficulty miss eunice lies in the fact that i do not ride on street cars or ferry-boats as a rule on sundays in the name of common sense why i asked in downright and genuine perplexity

for this was a form of extreme religiousness with which i had never come in contact before of course it is because street cars do not run in nassau for even while i write i feel instinctively that you perry would be taken in the same way was there the slightest provocation but i didn't think of it then and was honestly bewildered why i protested how could people get to church if they didn't ride in the street cars at least to say nothing of the ferry boats as a matter of argument he answered composedly i presume i could prove to you that it is not a question of reaching church but a necessity which is supposed to exist for reaching the particular church of one's choice there are churches within easy walking distance of the majority of the people who frequent street cars but what if there were no other way of attending public service on the sabbath except by breaking one of the express commandments of the lord in regard to the sabbath day what would it prove miss but i was too much vexed with him to argue you may be sure did you ever hear of such an absurdly inconvenient conscience i wonder how such people manage to live in this wicked world

i told him he ought to be translated and he answered quietly that he lived in restful expectation of that event one dab i made at him and missed i had heard only the day before that some of the very wealthy gentlemen of the city had to do with street railroad stock and from a conversation i had overheard i imagined him to be one of them so i said i should think if it was such a wicked thing to ride on street cars on sunday it would be almost as wicked to grow rich from the proceeds of other people's riding in which i entirely agree with you he said i cannot conceive how christian people make it seem right i didn't make much by that argument you perceive neither did i get to hear dr rogers i assured your polite brother-in-law that i could not think of allowing him to sully his conscience for me but i needn't have said it in the hope that he would be mortified instead he simply bowed and said of course a christian has no right to violate his conscience to please anybody which was a polite way of saying don't be disturbed i haven't the slightest intention of going

i attended church in the evening from sheer self-weariness and a desire to do something and i put down my wrath and went with mr haddington because he asked me and because there was nothing else to do or no other way to go we heard what he pronounced a powerful sermon it was about forgiving one's enemies he proved conclusively that no one had a right to live and breathe the air of heaven who cherished enmity in his heart or something like that so if you two people have any enemies you must forgive them before you say your prayers to-night i forgot to say the text was if i regard iniquity in my heart the lord will not hear me wicked people have no right to pray it seems that is one comfort my conscience needn't trouble me any more for a neglect of that duty as it is clearly not a duty for me there this letter must close i meant it to have been a long one containing much more about your mother but mr haddington who is sitting with her has just called to me that she wants me and before i can return it will be mail time

so i will wait until to-morrow for further particulars meantime this is far more than you deserve and i have said nothing about my boys i shall write to them tell joe stone so good-bye una from eunice's journal this evening i sent a letter to parry which contained a few grains of truth swimming in a sea of deceptions it was a wicked letter i enjoyed every line of it how mrs eleanor will wince over my somewhat elaborate description of her aristocratic brother's attentions to poor little me who am now nothing but a hired companion for her husband's mother doing what a daughter and son ought to do for her i made much of mr tom haddington his attentions and his conscience yet i did not say what i thought i did not tell them that i honored the man from the very depths of my soul for his firm grand adherence to right or to his views of right even when i knew very well he would do a good deal to please me what a trial to mrs elinor her brother stooping to please me i should think that to her would be almost worse than to have her husband on friendly terms with me

i didn't tell the truth about that sermon either it was a powerful one and it was to those who are not christians as much as to others more so perhaps it made me feel strangely i have been unable to get away from it ever since i have always had a feeling that i could be a christian whenever i chose and that i certainly would be one some time i could not be separated from my father and mother for an eternity yet now it seems to me that i never can be not if that preacher's theories are correct for there is one woman in this world that i have no desire to forgive and if i had the desire i haven't the power i can never forgive eleanor harrison that looks awful put in black and white i did not know i was so wicked yet i feel in my soul that it is true i can not forgive her more than that i can't want to she has stabbed me too often and too sorely i could forgive her slighting way of speaking to me i could forgive her insolence in speaking to me or in writing about me but her slow shipwreck of her husband's life

and the cold and cruel hand with which she holds him away from his mother's dying bed are acts not to be forgiven she is his wife and if she had been to him what she ought to have been i believe i could feel oh so different even though i know now what no other soul will ever know that she ought never to have been his wife i am the one whom perry ought to have married that looks strangely written here before my eyes what would become of me if other eyes than mine were ever to see it but it is true i could have been to him all that a wife ought to be i could have helped him mentally and physically yes and in time spiritually she never can or worse than that never will and for her utter disregard for his feelings and aims and aspirations i hate her even more than i hate her for myself if to be a christian means to forgive eleanor harrison and to look upon her with endurance even to love her as the bible phrases it then i can never be a christian for i can never do it never

it would be an easy enough thing to be a fatalist that is if i knew what fatalists are or what they believe perhaps i know as well as they know themselves but how is it possible for people to suppose that the little things of life are ordered by an overruling providence a providence that knows the end from the beginning why my whole life is an utter refutation of such a theory why should god if he took the trouble to care anything about me have thrown my life in unison with perry harrison's from my babyhood linking it closely with his up to the time when without planning of mine or knowledge of mine it had grown to be part of me necessary so i thought to my very existence and then snapped the thread and instead of putting the ocean or the alps between us setting us side by side for me to endure insult and misery and never be able to lift a finger to break the chain where is the wisdom or the love in that doesn't he know what i could have been to perry harrison then he knows less than an ignorant sinful girl doesn't he care

then he is not the tender god who plans all things for good or caring can he not help it then he is not god at all what can one think i am weary with thinking i wish i need never do any more of it yet what faith some people have still when i think of it it is the faith of people who have not been tried after all what does perry harrison know about trial his own sickness is the extent of his trouble and bodily sickness is not by any means so hard to bear as some other things he has told me a dozen times that he sees the hand of love in that what if he understood his wife as well as i understand her instead of supposing her to be all purity and grandeur then there is tom haddington a grand man indeed but why shouldn't he be what has he had to make him otherwise a son of fortune and of luxury the hardest trial he knows anything about is to wait on his mother to the door of the opera and sit in the carriage for half an hour before it closes waiting for her because his conscience which really in him at least needs to be translated his inclination

will not permit him to attend intellectually he is above the opera and he thinks it is his conscience as for mr romaine the very quiet of his face tells that the road of his life has been as smooth and level as the floor such people have no difficulty in believing that their lives were planned for them but why was mine planned for me in such bitter by ways now here is another change just as i was getting interested in those boys struggling to help them really eager to do so making plans for their advancement suddenly i must be taken up without plan or desire of mine and set down here a hundred miles away from them and put in such a position that i can do nothing to help them the only piece of work for others that i ever undertook from an honest desire to help along people who were nothing to me and it is whisked out of my hands why any one can see that i was doing them good any one can see that i was needed there where is the wisdom in this planning oh eunice taylor what would your blessed father think of this wicked writing he shall never see it nor know of it nor of the bitterness of my life dear precious self-sacrificing father he would have planned life so smoothly for me if he had the power

well meantime i have had the exquisite pleasure of writing to mrs eleanor as though i were her very sister i have advised and scolded i have proved the familiarity of my friendship with her brother tom and made her feel thoroughly and helplessly exasperated i believe for that bit of exquisite pleasure that has fallen to my lot let me be thankful now i must go to mother harrison she loves me and oh how dearly i love her she is parry's mother chapter