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The Faith Doctor: A Story of New York, a novel by Edward Eggleston |
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Chapter 26. Eleanor Arabella Bowyer |
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_ CHAPTER XXVI. ELEANOR ARABELLA BOWYER It is a truth deep and wide, that a brother is born for adversity. The spirit of kin and clan, rooted in remote heredity, outlives other and livelier attachments. It not only survives rude blows, but its true virtue is only extracted by the pestle of tribulation. Having broken with her lover, and turned utterly away from her spiritual guide and adviser, Phillida found herself drawn more closely to her mother and her sister. It mattered little that they differed from her in regard to many things. She could at least count on their affection, and that sympathy which grows out of a certain entanglement of the rootlets of memory and consciousness, out of common interest and long and intimate association. Mrs. Callender had been habituated when she was a little girl at home to leave the leadership to her sister Harriet, now Mrs. Gouverneur, and to keep her dissents to herself. Her relation with her husband was similar; she had rarely tried to influence a man whose convictions of duty were so pronounced, though the reasons for these convictions were often quite beyond the comprehension of his domestically minded wife. Toward Phillida she had early assumed the same diffident attitude; it was enough for her to say that Phillida was her father over again. That settled it once for all. Phillida was to be treated as her father had been; to be trusted with her own destiny without impertinent inquiries from one who never could understand, though she deeply respected, the mysterious impulses which urged these superior beings to philanthropic toil. For her own part she would have preferred to take the universe less broadly. A second effect of this crisis in Phillida's life was to drive her back upon the example and teaching of her father. Having utterly abandoned the leadership of Mrs. Frankland, she naturally sought support for her self-sacrificing course of action outside of her own authority. All her father's old letters, written to her when she was a child, were unbundled and read over again, and some of his manuscript sermons had the dust of years shaken from their leaves that she might con their pages written in the dear, familiar hand. If she had had her decision to make over again without any bolstering from Mrs. Frankland she would have sought, for a while at least, to establish a _modus vivendi_ between her love for Millard and the ultra form of her religious work. But the more she thought of it the more she considered it unlikely that her decision regarding her lover would ever come up for revision. She accepted it now as something providential, because inevitable, to which she must grow accustomed, an ugly fact with which she must learn to live in peace. She had a knack of judging of herself and her own affairs in an objective way. She would not refuse to see merely because it was painful to her that a woman of her tastes and pursuits was an unsuitable mate for a man of society. She admitted the incongruity; she even tried to console herself with it. For if the break had not come so soon, it might have come after marriage in forms more dreadful. There was not much comfort in this--might have been worse is but the skim-milk of consolation. To a nature like Phillida's one door of comfort, or at least of blessed forgetfulness, is hardly ever shut. After the first bitter week she found hours of relief from an aching memory in her labors among the suffering poor. Work of any kind is a sedative; sympathy with the sorrows of others is a positive balm. Her visits to the Schulenberg tenement were always an alleviation to her unhappiness. There she was greeted as a beneficent angel. The happiness of Wilhelmina, of her mother, and of her brother, for a time put Phillida almost at peace with her destiny. Her visits to and her prayers for other sufferers were attended with varying success as to their ailments. The confidence in the healing power of her prayers among the tenement people was not based altogether on the betterment of some of those for whom she prayed. Knowing her patient long-suffering with the evil she contended against, they reasoned, in advance of proof, that her prayers ought to have virtue in them. The reverence for her was enhanced by a report, which began to circulate about this time, that she had refused to marry a rich man in order to keep up her labor among the poor. Rumor is always an artist, and tradition, which is but fossil rumor, is the great saint-maker. The nature and extent of Phillida's sacrifice were amplified and adapted until people came to say that Miss Callender had refused a young millionaire because he wished her not to continue her work in Mackerelville. This pretty story did not mitigate the notoriety which was an ingredient of her pain. In spite of the sedative of labor and the consolation of altruism, Poe's raven would croak in her ears through hours spent in solitude. In the evenings she found herself from habit and longing listening for the door-bell, and its alarm would always give her a moment of fluttering expectation, followed by a period of revulsion. Once the bell rang at about the hour of Millard's habitual coming, and Phillida sat in that state in which one expects without having reason to expect anything in particular until the servant brought her a card bearing the legend, "Eleanor Arabella Bowyer, Christian Scientist and Metaphysical Practitioner." "Eleanor Arabella Bowyer," she said, reading it to her mother as they sat in the front basement below the parlor. "Who is she? I've never heard of her." "I don't know, Phillida. I don't seem to remember any Bowyers." "Where is the lady, Sarah?" asked Phillida of the servant. "She is in the parlor, Miss." Phillida rose and went up-stairs. She found awaiting her a woman rather above medium height. Phillida noted a certain obtrusiveness about the bony substructure of her figure, a length and breadth of framework never quite filled out as it was meant to be, so that the joints and angles of her body showed themselves with the effect of headlands and rocky promontories. She had a sallow complexion and a nose that was retrousse, with a prompt outward and upward thrust about the lower half of it, accompanied by a tendency to thinness as it approached its termination, quite out of agreement with the prominent cheek-bones. The whole face had a certain air of tough endurance, of determination, of resolute go-forwardness untempered by the recoil of sensitiveness. Miss Bowyer was clad in good clothes without being well-dressed. "Miss Callender, I suppose," said the visitor, rising, and extending her hand with confidence. Her voice was without softness or resonance, but it was not nasal--a voice admirably suited, one would think, for calling cows. Her grasp of the hand was positive, square, unreserved, but as destitute of sympathetic expression as her vowels. "I've heard a good deal about you, one way and another," she said. "You've been remarkably successful in your faith-cures, I am told. It's a great gift, and you must be proud of it--grateful for it, I should think." She closed this speech with a smile which seemed not exactly spontaneous but, rather, habitual, as though it were a fixed principle with her to smile at about this stage of every conversation. Phillida was puzzled to reply to this speech. She did not feel proud of her gift of faith-healing; hardly was she grateful for it. It was rather a burden laid on her, which had been mainly a source of pain and suffering. But she could not bring herself to enter on a subject so personal with a stranger. "I don't know that I am," was all she said. "Well, there's a great deal in it," said Miss Bowyer. "I have had a good deal of experience. There's a great deal more in it than you think." "I don't quite understand you," said Phillida. "No; of course not. I am a faith-healer myself." "Are you?" said Phillida, mechanically, with a slight mental shudder at finding herself thus classified with one for whom she did not feel any affinity. "Yes; that is, I _was_. I began as a faith-doctor, but I found there was a great deal more in it, don't you know?" "A great deal more in it?" queried Phillida. "A great deal more of what, may I ask?" "Oh, everything, you know." This was not clarifying, and Phillida waited without responding until the metaphysical practitioner should deign to explain. "I mean there's a great deal more science in it, as well as a great deal more success, usefulness, and--and--and remuneration to be had out of it than you think." "Oh," said Phillida, not knowing what else to say. "Yes," said Eleanor Arabella Bowyer with a smile. She had a way of waiting for the sense of her words to soak into the minds of her hearers, and she now watched Phillida for a moment before proceeding. "You see when I began I didn't know anything about Christian Science,--the new science of mental healing, faith-cure, psychopathy,--by which you act on the spirit and through the spirit upon the body. Matter is subject to mind. Matter is unreal. All merely physical treatment of disease is on the mortal plane." Miss Bowyer paused here waiting for this great truth to produce its effect; then she said, "Don't you think so?" and looked straight at Phillida. "I haven't thought a great deal about it," said Phillida. "No?" This was said with the rising inflection. "I thought not; mere faith-healing doesn't require much thought. I know, you see, having been a faith-healer at first. But we must go deeper. We must always go deeper. Don't you think so?" "I don't understand just what you mean," said Phillida. "You see," said Miss Bowyer, "faith-healing is a primitive and apostolic mode of healing the sick." Miss Bowyer paused, and Phillida said, "Yes," in a hesitant way; for even the things she believed seemed false when uttered by Eleanor Bowyer. "Well, ours is a scientific age. Now we practise--we revive this mode of healing, but in a scientific spirit, in the spirit of our age, and with a great deal more of knowledge than people had in ancient times. We reject the belief in evil; we call it unreal. Disease is a mistake. We teach faith in the unity of God the All-good." Miss Bowyer evidently expected Phillida to say something at this point, but as she did not, Miss Bowyer was forced to proceed without encouragement. "When I found that there was a great deal in it, I took the subject up and studied it. I studied mind-cure, or metaphysical healing, which strikes at the root of disease; I went into hypnotism, mesmerism, and phreno-magnetism, and the od force--I don't suppose you know about the _od_ which Reichenbach discovered." "No." "Well, it's wonderful, but mysterious. Blue blazes seen by the sensitive, and all that. I studied that, and theosophy a little too, and I took up Swedenborg; but he was rather too much for me. You can't quite understand him, and then life is too short to ever get through him. So I only read what somebody else had printed about Swedenborgianism, and I understand him a good deal better that way. That's the best way to tackle him, you know. Well, now, all of these go to explain the unity of truth, and how the miracles of the Bible were worked." Phillida said nothing, though her interlocutor gave her an opportunity. "Well," proceeded Miss Bowyer, "this is what we call Christian Science. It's the science of sciences. It's as much above the rude method of primitive faith-cure practised by the apostles as the heavens are above the earth. We understand from knowing the philosophy of miracles the reason why we do not always succeed. We can not always secure the impressible condition by producing the quiescence of the large brain. But if we understand the theory of hypnotism we shall be able to put the cerebrum at rest and secure the passive impressible state of the cerebellum; that is, an introverted condition of the mind. This securing of interior perception is the basis of all success." "Then you do not believe that God does it all," said Phillida, with a twitch of the shoulder expressing the repulsion she felt from this incomprehensible explication. "Oh, yes. Faith in God the All-good is at the root of it all. It is one of the things that induces passive receptivity. We must convince the patient that the unity of God excludes the real existence of evil." "But still you do not admit the direct action of God?" queried Phillida. "God works through the forces in nature, according to law," said Miss Bowyer, glibly. "That is just as true of the action of medicine," said Phillida. "I don't like this affecting to put God in while you leave him out of your mixture. Besides, I don't pretend that I understand your explanation." "It is somewhat fine; all philosophy of man's internal nature is so. It's not a thing to argue about. Intellect argues; spirit perceives. But if you would give your mind to Truth in a receptive way, Truth would set you free. I am sure you would be convinced after reading the books on the question." Phillida made no offer to read the books, and this seemed to disappoint Miss Bowyer. After a pause she began again: "You might as well know, Miss Callender, that I had a business object in view in coming to see you. Some of our Christian Science people are all enthusiasm, but I am trained to business, and I carry on my practice on business principles. There is no reason why a doctor who treats diseases on the mortal plane by medication should be paid for his time, and you and I not be. Is there?" "I don't know," said Phillida, mechanically. "Well, now, I have given my time to the beautiful work of Christian Science healing. I have an office in East Fourteenth street. It is a blessed religious work. But I can't work without pay; I follow it as a business, and it's got to support me. I have as much right to get on in the world as anybody else. Now I've cleared over and above my office-rent, including what I get for teaching a class in Christian Science, almost eighteen hundred dollars in the very first year since I set up. That's pretty good for a lone woman; don't you think so?" Phillida slightly inclined her head to avoid speaking. "Well, now, I haven't got many advantages. My brother kept a health-lift a few years ago when everything was cured by condensed exercise. But people got tired of condensed exercise, and then he had a blue-glass solarium until that somehow went out of fashion. I helped run the female side of his business, you know, for part of the profits. My education is all business. I didn't have any time to learn painting or fine manners, or any music, except to play Moody-and-Sankeys on the melodeon. My practice is mostly among the poor, or the people that are only so-so. I haven't got the ways that go down with rich people, nor anybody to give me a start among them. Well, now, I say to myself, science is all very well, and faith is all very well, but you want something more than that to get on in a large way. I would rather get on in a large way. Wouldn't you?" Here she paused, but Phillida sat motionless and stoically attentive. She only answered, "Well, I don't know." "Now, when I heard that you'd been sent for to the Maginnis child, and that you have got relations that go among rich people, I says to myself, she's my partner. I'll furnish the science, and I'll do the talking, and the drumming-up business, and the collecting bills, and all that; and you, with your stylish ways, don't you know? and your good looks, and your family connections, and all that, will help me to get in where I want to get in. Once in, we're sure to win. There's no reason, Miss Callender, why we shouldn't get rich. I will give you half of my practice already established, and I'll teach you the science and how to manage, you know; the great thing is to know how to manage your patients, you see. I learned that in the health-lift and the blue-glass solarium. We'll move farther up town, say to West Thirty-fourth street. Then you can, no doubt, write a beautiful letter--that'll qualify us to go into what is called 'absent treatment.' We'll advertise, 'Absent treatment a specialty,' and altogether we can make ten thousand or even twenty thousand, maybe, a year, in a little while. Keep our own carriage, and so on. What do you say to that?" Miss Bowyer's uplifted nose was now turned toward Phillida in triumphant expectation. She had not long to wait for a reply. Phillida's feelings had gathered head enough to break through. She answered promptly: "I do not believe in your science, and wouldn't for the world take money from those that I am able to help with my prayers." Phillida said this with a sudden fire that dismayed Miss Bowyer. "But you'll look into the matter maybe, Miss Callender?" "No; I will not. I hate the whole business." Phillida wanted to add, "and you besides"; however, she only said: "Don't say any more, please. I won't have anything at all to do with it." Phillida rose, but Miss Bowyer did not take the hint. "You're pretty high-toned, it seems to me," said the Scientist, smiling, and speaking without irritation. "You're going to throw away the great chance of your life. Perhaps you'll read some books that set forth the mighty truths of Christian Science if I send them. You ought to be open to conviction. If you could only know some of the cases I myself have lately cured--a case of belief in rheumatism of three years' standing, and a case of belief in mental prostration of six years' duration. If you could only have seen the joyful results. I cured lately an obstinate case of belief in neuralgia, and another of cancer--advanced stage. A case of belief in consumption with goitre was lately cured in the West. Perhaps you'll look over some numbers of the 'International Magazine of Christian Science' if I send them to you; under the head of 'Sheaves from the Harvest Field,' it gives many remarkable cases." "I have no time to read anything of the sort," said Phillida, still standing. "Oh, well, then, I'll just come in now and then and explain the different parts of the science to you. It's a great subject, and we may get mutual benefit by comparing notes." The prospect of repeated calls from Eleanor Arabella Bowyer put Phillida's already excited nerves into something like a panic. She had reached the utmost point of endurance. "No," she said; "I will have nothing at all to do with it. You must excuse me; positively, I must be excused. I am very busy, and I can not pursue the subject further." "Certainly," said the Metaphysical Practitioner, rising reluctantly; "but I think I'll take the liberty of calling again when you're more at leisure. You won't object, I'm sure, to my coming in next week?" "Yes," said Phillida; "I will not have anything to do with the matter you propose, and I can not see you again. You must excuse me." "Well, we never get offended, Miss Callender. Christian Science does not argue. We never resent an affront, but live in love and charity with all. That is Christian Science. Our success depends on purity and a Christian spirit. I think I'll send you a little book," added Miss Bowyer, as reluctantly she felt herself propelled towards the door by the sheer force of Phillida's manner. "Just a little book; it won't take long to read." As Miss Bowyer said this she paused in the vestibule with her back to Phillida. She was looking into the street, trying to think of some new device for gaining her end. "I won't read a book if you send it. Save yourself the trouble," said Phillida, softly closing the inner door behind Miss Bowyer, leaving her standing face outwards in the vestibule. "You had a hard time shaking her off, didn't you, Philly?" said Agatha, issuing from the back part of the dark hall, having come out of the back room just in time to catch a glimpse of Eleanor Bowyer. "I declare, the way you closed the door on her at the last was too good." "Sh-h!" said Phillida, pointing to the shadow cast against the ground glass of the inner door by the tall form of the Christian Scientist and Metaphysical Practitioner in the light of the street lamp. "I don't care whether she hears or not," said Agatha, dropping her voice, nevertheless; "she ought to be snubbed. You're a little too easy. That woman is meditating whether she sha'n't break into the house to preach Christian Science. There, she's going at last; she won't commit Christian burglary this time. I suppose she thinks burglary doesn't really exist, since it's contrary to the unity of God. Anyhow, she wouldn't commit burglary, because housebreaking is a physical thing that's transacted on the mortal plane." Agatha said this in Miss Bowyer's tone, and Phillida's vexation gave way to laughter. _ |
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