CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 22
When the company was seated in the box and the curtain had gone up, Felicia was back of the others and remained for the evening by herself. Mrs. Delano, as chaperone for half a dozen young ladies, understood Felicia well enough to know that she was “peculiar,” and she made no attempt to draw her out of her corner.
The play was an English melodrama full of startling situations, realistic scenery, and unexpected climaxes. One scene in the third act impressed even Rose Sterling.
It was midnight on Blackfriars Bridge. The Thames flowed dark and forbidding below. The figure of a child came upon the bridge and stood there for a moment peering about as if looking for someone. In one of the recesses about midway of the bridge a woman stood, leaning out over the parapet, with a strained agony of face and figure that told plainly of her intention. Just as she stealthily mounted the parapet to throw herself into the river, the child caught sight of her, ran forward with a shrill cry more animal than human, seized the woman’s dress, and dragged back upon it with all her little strength.
Then there came suddenly upon the scene two other characters—a tall, handsome, athletic gentleman dressed in the fashion attended by a slim-figured lad who was as refined in dress and appearance as the little girl clinging to her mother, who was mournfully hideous in her rags and repulsive poverty. The gentleman and the lad prevented the attempted suicide, and after the revelation that the man and woman were brother and sister, the scene transferred to the interior of one of the slum tenements in the East Side of London.
Here the scene painter and carpenter had done their utmost to produce an exact copy of a famous court and alley well known to the poor creatures who make up a part of the outcast London humanity. The rags, the crowding, the vileness, the broken furniture, the horrible animal existence forced upon creatures made in God’s image were so skillfully shown in this scene that more than one elegant woman in the theater caught herself shrinking back a little as if contamination were possible from the nearness of this piece of scenery.
From the tenement scene the play shifted to the interior of a nobleman’s palace. The contrast was startling.
Felicia found herself living the scenes on the bridge and in the slums over and over. This was not the first time she had felt the contrast between the upper and the lower conditions of human life. It had been growing upon her until it had made her what Rose called “peculiar” and other people in her circle of wealthy acquaintances called “very unusual.”
Finally, the play was over, the curtain down, and people went noisily out, laughing and gossiping as if The Shadows of London was simply good diversion.
Felicia rose and went out with the rest quietly. She was never absent-minded but often thought herself into a condition that left her alone in the midst of a crowd.
“Well, what did you think of it?” asked Rose when the sisters had reached home and were in the drawing room.
“I thought it was a pretty fair picture of real life.”
“I mean the acting,” said Rose, annoyed.
“The bridge scene was well acted, especially the woman’s part. I thought the man overdid the sentiment a little.”
“Did you? I enjoyed that. But the slum scene was horrible. I think they ought not to show such things in a play. They are too painful.”
“They must be painful in real life, too,” replied Felicia.
“Yes, but we don’t have to look at the real thing. It’s bad enough at the theater where we pay for it.”
“Are you going up to see Mother?” asked Felicia after a while.
“No,” replied Rose. “I won’t trouble her tonight. If you go in, tell her I am too tired to be agreeable.”
So Felicia turned into her mother’s room as she went up the great staircase and down the upper hall. The light burned there, and the servant who always waited on Mrs. Sterling beckoned Felicia to come in.
“Tell Clara to go out,” Mrs. Sterling said as Felicia came up to the bed.
Surprised, Felicia did as her mother bade her and then inquired how she was feeling.
“Felicia,” said her mother, “can you pray?”
The question was so unlike any her mother had ever asked before that she was startled. But she answered, “Why, yes, Mother. Why?”
“Felicia, I am frightened. Your father—I have had such strange fears about him all day. Something is wrong with him. I want you to pray.”
“Now, here, Mother?”
“Yes. Pray, Felicia.”
Felicia reached out her hand and took her mother’s. It was trembling. Mrs. Sterling had never shown such tenderness for her younger daughter, and her strange demand now was the first real sign of any confidence in Felicia’s character.
The girl knelt, still holding her mother’s trembling hand, and prayed. She must have said in her prayer the words that her mother needed, for when it was silent in the room, the invalid wept softly and her nervous tension was over.
Felicia stayed some time. When she was assured that her mother would not need her any longer, she rose to go.
“Good night, Mother. You must let Clara call me if you feel badly in the night.”
“I feel better now.” Then as Felicia was moving away, Mrs. Sterling said, “Won’t you kiss me, Felicia?”
Felicia went back and bent over her mother. The kiss was almost as strange to her as the prayer had been. When Felicia went out of the room, her cheeks were wet with tears.
Sunday morning at the Sterling mansion was generally very quiet. The girls went to eleven o’clock service at church. Mr. Sterling was not a member but a heavy contributor, and he generally went to church in the morning. Today he did not come down to breakfast and finally sent word by a servant that he did not feel well enough to go out. So Rose and Felicia drove up to the door of the Nazareth Avenue Church and entered the family pew alone.
Dr. Bruce walked out of the room at the rear of the platform and went up to the pulpit to open the Bible as his custom was. He proceeded with the service as usual. He was calm and his voice was steady and firm. His prayer was the first intimation the people had of anything new or strange in the service.
No one in Nazareth Avenue Church had any idea that Dr. Bruce, the dignified, cultured, refined doctor of divinity, had within a few days been crying like a little child on his knees, asking for strength and courage and Christlikeness to speak his Sunday message; and yet the prayer was an unconscious involuntary disclosure of his soul’s experience such as the Nazareth Avenue people had seldom heard.
In the hush that succeeded the prayer, a distinct wave of spiritual power moved over the congregation. The most oblivious persons in the church felt it. Felicia, whose sensitive religious nature responded swiftly to every touch of emotion, quivered under the passing of that supernatural pressure, and when she lifted her head and looked up at the minister, there was a look in her eyes that announced her intense, eager anticipation of the scene that was to follow.