What Can She Do? Part 52

From that moment Edith could have kissed her feet, and feeling that G.o.d had sent His angel to take care of her, she followed the lady from the hospital. A plain but elegantly-liveried carriage was waiting, and they were driven rapidly to one of the stateliest palaces on Fifth Avenue. As they crossed the marble threshold, the lady turned and said:

"Pardon me, my dear, my name is Mrs. Hart. This is your home now as truly as mine while you are with us," and Edith was shown to a room replete with luxurious comfort, and told to rest till the six o'clock dinner.

With some timidity and fear she came down to meet the others. As she entered she saw a portly man standing on the rug before the glowing grate, with a shock of white hair, and a genial, kindly face.

"My husband," said Mrs. Hart, "this is our new friend, Miss Edith Allen. You knew her father well in business, I am sure."

"Of course I did," said the old gentleman, taking Edith's hand in both of his, "and a fine business man he was, too. You are welcome to our home, Miss Edith. Look here, mother," he said, turning to his wife with a quizzical look, and still keeping hold of Edith's hand, "you didn't bring home an 'angel unawares' this time. I say, wife, you won't be jealous if I take a kiss now, will you--a sort of scriptural kiss, you know?" and he gave Edith a hearty smack that broke the ice between them completely.

With a face like a peony, Edith said, earnestly, "I am sure the real angels throng your home."

"Hope they do," said Mr. Hart, cheerily. "My old lady there is the best one I have seen yet, but I am ready for all the rest. Here come some of them," he added, as his daughters entered, and to each one he gave a hearty kiss, counting, "one, two, three, four, five--now, 'all present or accounted for?'"

"Yes," said his wife, laughing.

"Dinner, then," and after the young ladies had greeted Edith most cordially, he gave her his arm, as if she had been a d.u.c.h.ess, and escorted her to the dining-room. After being seated, they bowed their heads in quiet reverence, and the old man, with the voice and manner of a child speaking to a father, thanked G.o.d for His mercies, and invoked His blessing.

The table-talk was genial and wholesome, with now and then a sparkle of wit, or a broad gleam of humor.

"My good wife there, Miss Edith," said Mr. Hart, with a twinkle in his eye, "is a very sly old lady. If she does wear spectacles, she sees with great discrimination, or else the world is growing so full of interesting saints and sinners, that I am quite in hopes of it. Every day she has a new story about some very good person, or some very bad person becoming good. If you go on this way much longer, mother, the millennium will commence before the doctors of divinity are ready for it."

"My dear," said Mrs. Hart, with a comic aside to Edith, "my husband has never got over being a boy. When he will become old enough to sober down, I am sure I can't tell."

"What have I to sober me, with all these happy faces around, I should like to know?" was the hearty retort. "I am having a better time every day, and mean to go on so _ad infinitum_. You're a good one to talk about sobering down, when you laugh more than any of these youngsters."

"Well," said his wife, her substantial form quivering with merriment, "it's because you make me."

During the meal Edith had time to observe the young ladies more closely. They were fine-looking, and one or two of them really beautiful. Two of them were in early girlhood yet, and there was not a vestige of the vanity and affectation often seen in those of their position. They evidently had wide diversities of character, and faults, but there were the simplicity and sincerity about them which make the difference between a chaste piece of marble and a painted block of wood. She saw about her a house as rich and costly in its appointments as her own old home had been, but it was not so crowded or p.r.o.nounced in its furnishing and decoration. There were fewer pictures, but finer ones; and in all matters of art, French taste was not prominent, as had been the case in her home.

The next day she sat by unconscious Zell as long as was permitted, and wrote fully to Laura.

The dark-eyed girl that seemed dying the day before was gone.

"Did she die?" she asked of an attendant.

"Yes."

"What did they do with her?"

"Buried her in Potter's Field."

Edith shuddered. "It would have been Zell's end," she thought, "if I hadn't found her, and she had died here alone."

That evening Mrs. Hart, as they all sat in her own private parlor, said to her daughters:

"Girls, away with you. I can't move a step without stumbling over one of you. You are always crowding into my sanctum, as if there was not an inch of room for you anywhere else. Vanish. I want to talk to Edith."

"It's your own fault that we crowd in here, mother," said the eldest.

"You are the loadstone that draws us."

"I'll get a lot of stones to throw at you and drive you out with,"

said the old lady, with mock severity.

The youngest daughter precipitated herself on her mother's neck, exclaiming:

"Wouldn't that be fun, to see jolly old mother throwing stones at us.

She would wrap them in eider-down first."

"Scamper; the whole bevy of you," said the old lady, laughing; and Edith, with a sigh, contrasted this "mother's room" with the one which she and her sisters shunned as the place where their "teeth were set on edge."

"My dear," said Mrs. Hart, her face becoming grave and troubled, "there is one thing in my Christian work that discourages me. We reclaim so few of the poor girls that have gone astray. I understand, from Mrs. Ranger, that your sister was at the Home, but that she left it. How can we accomplish more? We do everything we can for them."

"I don't think earthly remedies can meet their case," said Edith, in a low tone.

"I agree with you," said Mrs. Hart, earnestly, "but we do give them religious instruction."

"I don't think religious instruction is sufficient," Edith answered.

"They need a Saviour."

"But we do tell them about Jesus."

"Not always in a way that they understand, I fear," said Edith, sadly.

"I have heard people tell about Him as they would about Socrates, or Moses, or Paul. We don't need facts about Him so much as Jesus Himself. In olden times people did not go to their sick and troubled friends and tell them that Jesus was in Capernaum, and that He was a great deliverer. They brought the poor, helpless creatures right to Him. They laid them right at the feet of a personal Saviour, and He helped them. Do we do this? I have thought a great deal about it,"

continued Edith, "and it seems to me that more a.s.sociate the ideas of duty, restraint, and almost impossible effort with Him, than the ideas of help and sympathy. It was so with me, I know, at first."

"Perhaps you are right," said Mrs. Hart thoughtfully. "The poor creatures to whom I referred seemed more afraid of G.o.d than anything else."

"And yet, of all that ever lived, Jesus was the most tender toward them--the most ready to forgive and save. Believe me, Mrs. Hart, there was more gospel in the kiss you gave my sister--there was more of Jesus Christ in it, than in all the sermons ever written, and I am sure that if she had been conscious, it would have saved her. They must, as it were, _feel_ the hand of love and power that lifted Peter out of the ingulfing waves. The idea of duty and st.u.r.dy self-restraint is perhaps too much emphasized, while they, poor things, are weak as water. They are so 'lost' that He must just 'seek and save'

them, as He said--lift them up--keep them up almost in spite of themselves. Saved--that is the word, as the limp, helpless form is dragged out of danger. On account of my sister I have thought a good deal about this subject, and there seems to me to be no remedy for this cla.s.s, save in the merciful, patient, personal Saviour. He had wonderful power over them when He was on earth, and He would have the same now, if His people could make them understand Him."

"I think few of us understand this personal Saviour ourselves as we ought," said Mrs. Hart, somewhat unveiling her own experience. "The Romish Church puts the Virgin, saints, penances, and I know not what, between the sinner and Jesus, and we put catechisms, doctrines, and a great ma.s.s of truth about them, between Him and us. I doubt whether many of us, like the beloved disciple, have leaned our heads on His heart of love, and felt its throbs. Too much of the time He seems in Heaven to me, not here."

"I never had much religious instruction," said Edith, simply. "I found Him in the New Testament, as people of old found Him in Palestine, and I went to Him, just as I was, and He has been such a Friend and Helper. He lets me sit at His feet like Mary, and the words He spoke seem said directly to poor little me."

Wistful tears came into Mrs. Hart's eyes, and she kissed Edith, saying:

"I have been a Christian forty years, my child, but you are nearer to Him than I am. Stay close to His side. This talk has done me more good than I imagined possible."

"If I seem nearer," said Edith, gently, "isn't it, perhaps, because I am weaker than you are? His 'sheep follow' Him, but isn't there some place in the Bible about his 'carrying the lambs in His bosom'? I think we shall find at last that He was nearer to us all than we thought, and that His arm of love was around us all the time."

In a sudden, strong impulse, Mrs. Hart embraced Edith, and, looking upward, exclaimed:

"Truly 'Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes.' As my husband said, I am entertaining a good angel."

The physician gave Edith great encouragement about Zell, and told her that in two weeks he thought she might be moved. The fever was taking a light form.

One evening, after listening to some superb music from Annie, the second daughter, between whom and Edith quite an affinity seemed to develop itself, the latter said:

"How finely you play! I think you are wonderful for an amateur."