CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 21
The Saturday afternoon matinee at the Auditorium in Chicago was just over and the usual crowd struggled to get to its carriage before anyone else.
“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 CRS in gilt letters on the panel of the door.
Two girls stepped out of the crowd toward the carriage. The older one entered and took her seat, but the younger 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 stood 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, and in a few moments the coach-man was speeding the horses rapidly up one of the boulevards.
“You are always doing some peculiar 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 now, Rose?” asked the other.
“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.”
“Would it be peculiar to invite a boy like that to come to the house and get a hot supper?” Felicia asked the question softly.
“Peculiar isn’t just the word, of course,” replied Rose indifferently. “It would be what Madam Blanc calls ‘outré.’ Decidedly.”
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 exclaimed abruptly, “I’m sick of ‘most everything. I hope The Shadows of London will be exciting tonight. You know we have a box with the Delanos tonight.”
Felicia turned her face toward 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. 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.”
“Suppose Christ had gone on that principle,” replied Felicia with unusual persistence. “Do you remember Dr. Bruce’s sermon on Second Corinthians 8:9 a few Sundays ago: ‘For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be 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? Ever since Rachel Winslow wrote about those strange 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.”
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’d made his money in grain speculation and railroad ventures, and was reputed to be worth something over two million dollars. His wife, a sister of Mrs. Winslow of Raymond, 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. Felicia was nineteen, with a tropical beauty somewhat like that of her cousin Rachel, with warm, generous impulses just waking into Christian feeling, capable of all sorts of expression.
“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.
“Rachel says Dr. Bruce has been in Raymond for two Sundays and has seemed very 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 a half-dozen 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.”
Mr. Sterling lit a new cigar, and Rose exclaimed, “Rachel is so peculiar. 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.
“A very peculiar thing, that,” Mr. Sterling said. “I wonder what Dr. Bruce thinks of it on the whole. I must have a talk with him.”
“He is at home and will preach tomorrow,” said Felicia. “Perhaps he will tell us something about it.”
“Oh, well, let’s have some tea!” 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.
“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’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. “If you are going up to see Mother, tell her I’ll run in after the play if she is still awake.”