Good Mrs Hypocrite/Chapter 2
It was while in Edinburgh, and staying
under the roof of Dr. Scott, that the great
event of Catherine Macpherson's life
happened.
At that time a great wave of religious feeling was sweeping over the country. It had taken its rise in America, and then flowed in a triumphant stream throughout Great Britain.
It was largely concerned with mission meetings, outdoor services, the playing of portable harmoniums, and the singing of hymns, set to popular tunes. It may or may not have done good. It claimed to be "awakening." So far as noise went, it certainly was. However, it caught up young and old in its froth of enthusiasm, and swept them safely to the shores of salvation. Among those captured converts was Catherine Macpherson. She had "got religion," and trumpeted everywhere the glorious news that she was "saved."
In this new phase of her existence, she became rather more of a nuisance to all who knew her than she had yet contrived to be. She erected a pinnacle of self-excellence, and set herself upon it, and called on every one to behold her, and talked "texts " more violently than ever, and pored over dry volumes of theology, and expounded the Scriptures, in her own fashion, to the great edification of herself and others like her, and the discomfiture of less perfect and assured mortals.
Such an intolerable affliction did she now become that even the blind doctor could not stand her, and, in a fit of sarcastic petulance, he told her that a heaven peopled by such " saints," as she chose to call herself, would be a place calculated to make most people look with no unfavorable eye on its much abused neighbor.
This speech was too trying for even the Macpherson temper. A hailstorm of texts. made the poor old doctor mournfully envious of his wife, placidly knitting a woolen comforter for his neck throughout the controversy. But Catherine left there and then, having " said her say," and taken good care to get her salary paid to the last farthing.
When next heard of she had joined a Christian sisterhood — an institution founded by a rich old maiden lady for such of her sex as loved good work, and did not shrink from giving time, money, and ability, to the poor, and suffering in the great world of London.
This sisterhood, headed by an excellent, but narrow-minded, deaconess, and supported by a branch army of minor deaconesses, sisters, and nurses, afforded to an unbiased mind the noble spectacle of an army of women working together of their own free will for the benefit of the unfortunate. It amalgamated with the Salvation Army, with all classes of Methodists, street preachers, and outdoor missions. It did hospital work in the East End, and proselytized in the West. It preached and sang and lectured in season and out of season, and to Catherine Mac- pherson it seemed the very noblest and most self-denying work that any saved and zealous Christian could possibly undertake. So she undertook it.
There was a good deal of renunciation required in the matter of hair-dressing and clothing. No religious community has ever yet combined what is pleasing to the eye with — principles. So the new convert had to dress her hair in severe bands, to gown herself in stiff black garments, to wear a bonnet that made even a pretty face look plain, and a plain one simply hideous.
But it was all for a good object, and the mortifying of the old Adam in unregenerate souls.
Catherine Macpherson's soul soared above the petty scruples of female vanity. She joined the sisterhood, adopted their strange garb, banded her hair severely on either side of her face, used a depilatory, and became a female missionary to the unchristian savages of the East End.
• • • • •
It may be possible for a community of men to dwell together in brotherly love. It is rarely, if ever, possible for a community of women.
The "Book of Convent Life," were it allowed to be published, would furnish many striking illustrations of this fact. As it is, the little that has leaked out, in the confessions of recalcitrant novices and refractory nuns, shows plainly that a sisterhood is not quite the little "heaven on earth" its superiors and founders would have the world believe.
The special sisterhood to which Catherine Macpherson belonged was a somewhat mixed and refractory one. It was not ignorant of jealousy and animosity — it held spiteful loves as well as time-serving friendships. It rang with mean squabbles and petty plottings, as well as with psalms of penitence and hymns of praise. It gave the head deaconess a world of trouble to manage, and offered to visiting clergy and helpful curates a striking proof of the reality of Christian professions.
It is hardly necessary to say that that particular branch of the sisterhood to which Catherine Macpherson belonged was soon set in flames on all sides by the new fire-brand who had flung herself into its midst. While professing humility and obedience, that estimable virgin had no intention of obeying any authority but her own.
This led to complications. Bickerings, and squabblings, equally dishonorable to piety and profession, were of constant occurrence. But Catherine found texts even for this defensive attitude, and the deaconess could only display her authority by a reprimand, and the suggestion that she should take her zeal and her Christian principles to another section of the institution.
As the moon in its orbit, so Catherine Macpherson moved through a varied circle of works and services, leaving behind her everywhere the ill-savor of her moral obliquity. She was always right — always strictly just in her dealings — always a self-denying Christian, martyred by the ill-will or opinions of others! No one could shake her belief in her own inestimable virtues. Besides, was she not saved?
Matters became too serious to ignore; and for peace sake the head deaconess at last gave Catherine Macpherson an appointment in an out-of-the-way district. It was connected with a mission in the neighborhood of Barnes. It gave her an independent position and two rooms to herself; a good deal of reading and teaching and harmonium practise; a class of adults to pray and sing with; and a fair amount of district visiting, which her soul loved. For there was no task so delightful to Catherine Macpherson as that of harrowing her neighbor's vineyard with the plowshare of her own rabid religious convictions. She worried and badgered the poor, the sick, and the dying, as only a narrow-minded and self-righteous zealot can worry and persecute. Through all the phases of her varied life, her career had been signalized by a want of tact or delicacy in every duty she undertook. It was too late now to learn, or even to adopt, these virtues. She had grown so used to deliberately deceiving herself that it would have needed almost a miracle to open her eyes to that faculty of self-knowledge, of which her national poet so eloquently sings.
Bven an archangel would have had a hard task to persuade Catherine Macpherson that she was not a saved and saintly Christian, sure of her "calling and election," and doubly sure of a place prepared for her in the kingdom to come.
She spent ten years in "good works" of this sort — years which had turned her into an old woman, with iron-gray locks, and a gnarled and wrinkled face. Her form was still spare and angular; her eyes still cold as steel, but sharp as needles at detecting the "mote" in her neighbor's eye; her mouth still wore that habitual expression of ill-temper; and her manner was even more aggressive than of yore. She was a sour, bitter, discontented woman, and, as such, she was suddenly called upon to prove her principles, and vindicate her faith.
The real story of her life was to begin when that of most of her sex is well-nigh over. She was, in fact, close on fifty when a "call" of another sort came to her, and she flung missions and schools and harmonium practises to the winds, and abandoned forever the Christian Workers' Mission.
The "call" made itself heard in this wise.
Her eldest brother had returned from Australia some years before, broken down in health and poor in pocket. His sons were both dead; his daughters had married. Catherine had a vague idea that the husband of the eldest was some "foreign person" — a papist, no doubt; but she lived abroad, and neither aunt nor nieces had met since those early days in Australia.
It was this eldest niece who now wrote to say that she had been recalled to England by the death of her mother. That her father was in a weak mental condition, demanding incessant care; that she was unable herself to live with him at present, and disliked the idea of leaving him in the hands of strangers. In this dilemma the thought of her aunt occurred to her. She wrote asking that lady to favor her with an interview, in which she would explain her plans and wishes, with a hope they might suit the convenience of both parties.
Catherine Macpherson read this letter carefully and slowly. Then she folded it up, and sat with her hands crossed on her lap, and took counsel with her heart as to the "expediency" of the course she saw before her. By expediency she meant the exact manner in which it might suit herself, and the amount of personal advantage it offered.
Then she clothed herself in her long cloak and sister's bonnet, left her class to take care of itself, and set off to the regions of Bayswater to see her niece, Madame Weimar, and hear fuller particulars than her letter had contained.