CHAPTER XXIV.

EVA TO HARRY'S MOTHER

My Dear Mother: When I wrote you last we were quite prosperous, having just come through with our first evening as a great success; and everybody since has been saying most agreeable things to us about it. Last Thursday, we had our second, and it was even pleasanter than the last, because people had got acquainted, so that they really wanted to see each other again. There was a most charming atmosphere of ease and sociability. Bolton and Mr. St. John are getting quite intimate. Mr. St. John, too, develops quite a fine social talent, and has come out wonderfully. The side of a man that one sees in the church and the pulpit is after all only one side, as we have discovered. I find that he has quite a gift in conversation, when you fairly get him at it. Then, his voice for singing comes into play, and he and Angie and Dr. Campbell and Alice make up a quartette quite magnificent for non-professionals. Angie has a fine soprano, and Alice takes the contralto, and the Doctor, with his great broad shoulders and deep chest, makes a splendid bass. Mr. St. John's tenor is really very beautiful. It is one of those penetrating, sympathetic voices that indicate both feeling and refinement, and they are all of them surprised and delighted to find how well they go together. Thursday evening they went on from thing to thing, and found that they could sing this and that and the other, till the evening took a good deal the form of a musical. But never mind, it brought them acquainted with each other and made them look forward to the next reunion as something agreeable. Ever since, the doctor goes round humming tunes, and says he wants St. John to try the tenor of this and that, and really has quite lost sight of his being anything else but a musical brother. So here is the common ground I wanted to find between them.

The doctor has told Mr. St. John to call on him whenever he can make him useful in his visits among the poor. Our doctor loves to talk as if he were a hard-hearted, unbelieving pirate, who didn't care a straw for his fellow-creatures, while he loses no opportunity to do anybody or anything a kindness.

You know I told you in my last letter about a girl that Harry and Bolton found in the street, the night of our first reception, and that they took her to the St. Barnabas Refuge. The poor creature has been lying there ever since, sick of a brain fever, caught by cold and exposure, and Dr. Campbell has given his services daily. If she had been the richest lady in the land, he could not have shown more anxiety and devotion to her than he has, calling twice and sometimes three times a day, and one night watching nearly all night. She is still too low and weak to give any account of herself; all we know of her is that she is one of those lost sheep, to seek whom the Good Shepherd would leave the ninety nine who went not astray. I have been once or twice to sit by her, and relieve the good Sisters who have so much else to do; and Angelique and Alice have also taken their turns. It seems very little for us to do, when these good women spend all their time and all their strength for those who have no more claim on them than they have on us.

It is a week since I began this letter, and something quite surprising to me has just developed.

I told you we had been to help nurse the poor girl at the Sisters', and the last week she has been rapidly mending. Well, yesterday, as I didn't feel very well, and my Mary is an excellent nurse, I took her there to sit with the patient in my place, when a most strange scene ensued. The moment Mary looked on her, she recognized her own daughter, who had left her some years ago with a bad man. Mary had never spoken to me of this daughter, and I only knew, in a sort of general way, that she had left her mother under some painful circumstances. The recognition was dreadfully agitating to Mary and to the poor girl; indeed, for some time it was feared that the shock would produce a relapse. The Sisters say that the poor thing has been constantly calling for her mother in her distress.

It really seemed, for the time, as if Mary were going to be wholly unnerved. She has a great deal of that respectable pride of family character which belongs to the better class of the Irish, and it has been a bitter humiliation to her to have to acknowledge her daughter's shame to me; but I felt that it would relieve her to tell the whole story to some one, and I drew it all out of her. This poor Maggie had the misfortune to be very handsome. She was so pretty as a little girl, her mother tells me, as to attract constant attention; and I rather infer that the father and mother both made a pet and plaything of her, and were unboundedly indulgent. The girl grew up handsome, and thoughtless, and self-confident, and so fell an easy prey to a villain who got her to leave her home, on a promise of marriage which he never kept. She lived with him a while in one place and another, and he became tired of her and contrived to place her in a house of evil, where she was entrapped and enslaved for a long time. Having by some means found out where her mother was living, she escaped from her employers, and hung round the house irresolutely for some time, wishing but fearing to present herself, and when she spoke to Harry in the street, the night after our party, she was going in a wild, desperate way to ask something about her mother—knowing that he was the man with whom she was living.

Such seems to be her story; but I suppose, what with misery and cold, and the coming on of the fever, the poor thing hardly had her senses, or knew what she was about—the fever must have been then upon her.

So you see, dear mother, I was wishing in my last that I could go off with Sibyl Selwyn on her mission to the lost sheep, and now here is one brought to my very door. Is not this sent to me as my work? as if the good Lord had said, "No, child, your feet are not strong enough to go over the stones and briars, looking for the lost sheep; you are not able to take them out of the jaws of the wolf; but here is a poor wounded lamb that I leave at your door—that is your part of the great work." So I understand it, and I have already told Mary that as soon as Maggie is able to sit up, we will take her home with us, and let her stay with us till she is strong and well, and then we will try and put her back into good respectable ways, and keep her from falling again.

I think persons in our class of life cannot be too considerate of the disadvantages of poor working women in the matter of bringing up children.

A very beautiful girl in that walk of life is exposed to solicitation and temptation that never come near to people in our stations. We are guarded on all hands by our very position. I can see in this poor child the wreck of what must have been very striking beauty. Her hair is lovely, her eyes are wonderfully fine, and her hands, emaciated as she is, are finely formed and delicate. Well, being beautiful, she was just like any other young girl—her head was turned by flattery. She was silly and foolish, and had not the protections and barriers that are around us, and she fell. Well, then, we that have been more fortunate must help her up. Is it not so?

So, dear Mother, my mission work is coming to me. I need not go out for it. I shall write more of this in a day or two.

Ever yours,

Eva.