The Cross and the Shamrock Part 19

In proof of these statements, we refer any candid mind to the "spiritual rappers," "women's rights," "Mormonism," "gold hunting, and other manias," which, within the last few years, have sprung from the sectarian systems and their teaching, and from no other source.

We are horrified at the morals and tenets of the Gnostic sects, the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and other defunct heresies of old; but we doubt if any thing more impious, immoral, or absurd happened under the auspices of these by-gone sects than the blasphemies, delusions, and corruptions carried on under the cloak of your "camp meetings,"

"revivals," "mediums," "spiritual wife system," and other modern _reproductions_ of the Protestant Christian churches, falsely so called.

CHAPTER XXIII.

IN WHICH THE SCENE OF OUR TALE IS CHANGED.

The events recorded in the foregoing chapters, as you are aware, good reader, happened princ.i.p.ally among the poor and humble of life; and this was in accordance with the scope of our narrative, having no higher ambition than to chronicle the lowly annals of that numerous cla.s.s of the community. _Nunc paulo majora._ Now we must introduce you into high life. We turn our eyes to one of those grand mansions of the rich,--one of those palaces of the "upper ten,"--where few of the humble are privileged to enter, much less to be introduced or admitted on terms of familiarity. It is our privilege to introduce you, friend of the blistered hand and dusty coat, but of the honest heart, into that palace of the merchant prince of the second city in the Union, in order that you may see and judge for yourselves whether or not more happiness dwells there than in your homely residence. See the imposing structure, with the neatly-mowed lawn in front. Observe the taste and artistic skill with which the walks, the little hedges, and the shrubberies are laid out. You can yet get but an imperfect view of the proud edifice itself, which seems as if a monarch, that looks down with dignity and authority on the countless array of ordinary buildings that extend as far as the eye can reach on every side. The gates, as you enter the enclosure, are of ma.s.sive iron, painted green, and, by the help of machinery, yield to the gentlest pressure of the hand, as if some spirit of the ancient fabled Olympus kept guard at their hinges. It is a complete "_rus in urbi_," inside the outer wall. Here the luxuriant grape vine creeps along in graceful festoons, groaning under the pressure of her full paps; there the lofty and beauteous palm spreads his cooling and protecting branches.

On one side see the fruitful lemon and orange trees, bending under the weight of their golden and emerald productions; on the other the fragrant apple, the sweet pear, and mellow peach borrow support from the strong granite wall to bring their burdens to maturity. Behold there two fountains casting their crystal and refres.h.i.+ng contents aloft, as if making rest.i.tution to the thirsting atmosphere for what they stole from him under ground. The water falls back again, however, and is received by the marble basin at the base, to form a neat pond, where gold and silver fish sport and gambol. A little at a distance, to the rear, the fragrance of honey and the busy hum of the bee are perceived by your grateful senses. The place looks like an earthly paradise; every thing there seems to laugh without restraint, from the creeping rose fastened to the hedge to the tall, princely-looking mountain ash, with its bunches of red berries.

The only one living thing that seemed pensive and sad there was a lovely, delicate fawn, which rested, with her head drooping, at the foot of a rose bush, on the summit of the little green mound which was the centre of this delightful spot. Perhaps the lovely creature is after being weaned from the udder of its affectionate dam; or, perhaps, she grieves for the absence of some favorite in the palace of whom she is the pet. But that the creature grieves is evident, for you could see the two moist tracks furrowed on the smooth face, from the tears that have flowed there.

But the inside of the "great house," who can describe it? From the ground floor to the uppermost attic, the rooms presented that waste of furniture, in the shape of sofas, ottomans, easy chairs, couches, carpets, tapestries, curtains, paintings, pier gla.s.ses, plate, and a thousand other articles contributive of ease and luxury, which the most extravagant expenditure could procure or vanity suggest. In truth, the interior was the exact counterpart of the exterior, in the artistic arrangement and splendor of every thing. To the eye of an observer, on an ordinary occasion, every thing appeared gorgeous in the extreme; but on the occasion we describe, when preparation was making for a grand reception, all was joy, mirth, luxury, and happiness. Servants of every color and hue were seen moving through the labyrinths of the saloons and chambers of this great palace, uncovering the long-concealed splendors of valuable articles, and arranging every thing for the most advantageous show.

And

"Now through the palace chambers moving lights And busy shapes proclaim the toilet's rites; From room to room the ready handmaids hie, Some skilled to wreathe the headdress tastefully, Or hang the veil, in negligence of shade, O'er the warm blushes of the youthful maid."

Splendid services of gold and silver plate met the eye in every direction, on their way to the grand dining room; while, from the remotest part of the building, the sense of smelling was simultaneously a.s.sailed by several currents of delightful culinary exhalations, which, like the winds in the cave of aeolus, struggled for egress from their confined birthplace.

This is one of those occasions on which the Dives of this sumptuous palace, Mr. Goldrich, intends to celebrate his birthday; and as he can't tell where he was born, nor can he show any genuine images of his ancestry, (except that he came down a scion from the great "Anglo-Saxon race,") he is determined to make amends for this calamity he could not help, and the want of taste in his father, whoever he was, by spending an ordinary fortune in the present celebration, and thus combine the splendors of all the possible past anniversaries of his birth in one grand, unrivalled celebration to-day.

"And here, at once, the glittering saloon Bursts on the sight, boundless and bright as noon."

The select music of splendid bands now announced the movements of guests towards the grand banquet room. In pairs they enter, and singular; the short procession is now at an end, and the places are filled up with the scanty number of twoscore guests, male and female.

You would have supposed, from the preparation, that the inhabitants of the entire city were invited; but no, the exact number was forty, besides the members of the rich man's family. And this happened not by accident, or because of the penury or avarice of Mr. Goldrich, but because in the whole city there were no more than twenty families who ranked in the sphere of the "upper ten" in which "mine host" moved.

These s.h.i.+ning figures, that you can scarcely look at without risk to your eyes from their jewelry, are the ladies who leave us in doubt which they love most to exhibit--their charms, or the richness of their ornaments. Among that bright array of female beauty there is missed the fair form of one who was, heretofore, an ordinary occupant of an honorable place at the family table. It was the chair of the rosy-cheeked Alia that was unoccupied at this splendid circle. The presiding queen of the feast, Madam Goldrich, apologized for the absence of "poor Alia," by representing her indisposed; and at the announcement of this dispiriting intelligence, disappointment marked the countenances of the guests, for Alia was the brightest star that shone in that brilliant galaxy of fas.h.i.+on.

Being the oldest among the children of Mr. Goldrich, Alia possessed all that graceful and dignified superiority over those whom she regarded as her younger sisters, which are the acknowledged privileges of age in every well-regulated family, and which her superior talent seemed naturally to enforce.

Years rolled on, and the dear child lived in blissful ignorance of her origin and desolate condition, till the jealousy of her younger sisters excited her suspicions, and she began to mistrust the genuineness, as she felt the coldness, of that parental affection which the pretended authors of her existence so long counterfeited. During many months, if not years, these suspicions preyed on the poor girl's mind; and though she never dared to mention them to any save old Judy, the negro woman, she felt satisfied that her sisters and herself could not belong to the same stock or the same race. The transparent delicacy of her complexion, the rosy tint on her cheek, unrivalled by the costly paint of her sisters, the s.h.i.+ning blackness of her splendid hair,--all these circ.u.mstances pointed her out and proclaimed her as of a different race to those whom she hitherto regarded as her kindred. Long had she mused on the cause of this disparity, and much had she suffered, in the depth of her soul, from the representations and suggestions of her active imagination in reference to her origin, and many were the tears shed by her while oppressed with these doubts. But the events of this day, added to the late insolent conduct of her sisters, which provoked the reprimand of her peevish mother guardian, who told her to curb her "Irish temper,"--these cleared up all her doubts; and, filled with a melancholy joy at a revelation she owed to the jealousy and vanity of a proud mother and her daughters, Alia retired to her room to give vent to her feelings in sobs and tears.

"Thank G.o.d," she cried, "I know what I am, or ought to be. Thank G.o.d I am Irish, too, for I often wished I belonged to that much-abused and persecuted people. But O, where shall I find my parents? or how came my lot to be cast in this proud palace, which, alas! I too long regarded as my home? O, who, who will restore this poor 'exile of Erin,' to the home of her unknown parents? How gladly would I exchange all the splendor of this place for the homeliest cot in that land of the shamrock and the cross; ay, the poorest 'cabin, fast by the wild-wood,' in the land of St. Patrick, and my unknown ancestors."

Such were the soliloquies of poor, despised Alia, in her room on the third floor, where old aunt Judy, the negro, having missed her favorite from the grand company, after having sought her in vain in the lower saloons of the house, just entered her room.

"Dere, now, Miss Ali', am poor aunt Judy half kilt from sarching for you all over. What make you be here, and all the gran' gem'men asking for you?"

"Ah, aunt Judy, why have you all along denied of me all knowledge of my extraction, parentage, and race? Did you not know that I was Irish? and yet you always denied that I was, though I have suspected I was, and you must have known it, having lived so long in the family. This is not what I expected from you, aunt Judy," she said, casting a look of gentle reproach at the old negro.

"O, dear, miss--O, dear," cried the poor affectionate creature, bursting into tears; "don't blame dis ole n.i.g.g.e.r, but ma.s.sa and missus, and Miss Sillerman, sister to the missus who died last year. They forbid aunt Jude to tell who rosy-faced Ali' was. I was bound to swear not to tell.

If they knowed I did hab a _parle_ vit you on de subject, they would turn poor ole Jude out de door to die in the poor _maison_."

This poor negro woman was a native of St. Domingo, and, at the time of the revolution there, came to New Orleans, in care of a child belonging to one of the white planters who was murdered--which child, by the way, has since become a pious and eminent clergyman. By some accident or other she fell in with the Goldriches, in their commercial visits to New Orleans, and, though brought up a Catholic, the poor thing forgot all practice of her religion, and this accounts for her evasions and denials to the repeated questions of Alia regarding her parentage and birth.

"'Pon my fait, miss," she ever said, "I know nothing about you, 'cept that you are the rose-cheeked Ali', the _fleur de lis_ of the flock."

Promises, and flattering presents, and all other persuasive arts of Alia to get the secret out of Judy proved useless. She had promised to keep it, and no human authority, she thought, could ever cause her to violate that promise. Although Judy had, through fear of displeasing her patrons, given up all public practice of her religion, she nevertheless never denied that she was a "Catholique," and never omitted to recite full five decades of the beads after going to bed. She declared she could not fall asleep till she complied with this rather lazy effort of prayer. Besides these rather faint evidences of her faith, she often told her loved Ali' that she intended calling in the priest at the hour of her death; and she confided to the honor of the young lady this secret desire of hers, and elicited many promises from her Ali' to send for his reverence when she would perceive her end approach. "This is rather a singular notion of yours," Alia used to say. "If you are a Catholic, and believe your faith the best, or the only true one, why do you not practise its teachings, and fulfil all the requirements of your church? I am sure neither father nor mother would blame you."

"O miss, I feard, I feard," the poor, timid soul would answer. "But tink of vat I tol' you; when I go to die, send for the _bon_ priest, who know how to do the '_parle Francaise_,' and I pray for you when I go to heaven."

"I shall do that for you, poor aunt Judy, or even attend you now, while you are in health, to the Catholic church, where you can go to the sacraments, and become a member again of that church which you have so long neglected, but which yet seems still to retain a strong hold of your affections and heart. Won't this be the best course, aunt Judy? I will attend you to the church of that zealous young Irish priest whom I see so often hurrying along here to his sick calls up town; and as I suspect I am 'Irish' myself, I hope he will not be displeased at my call."

"O, you no Irish, miss, at all, but good Yankee. But tish better not go for de priest till he come to me when I go to die. Now I have religion here in _mon coeur_; ven I die, I profess her open."

"Well, Judy, act as you wish; but it appears to me your conduct is singular. I shall do my part, however; and if there is a priest to be had in the city when you take to your death bed, you must have him to attend you."

It was by such communings and conversations as the foregoing, during the leisure hours of aunt Judy and her loved Ali', that mutual confidence and disinterested friends.h.i.+p grew into maturity between them--the childish and helpless simplicity of the one, and kind and good-natured condescension of the other, producing the like effects in the hearts of both respectively--that is, disinterested friends.h.i.+p. Yet strong as this friends.h.i.+p was, and enthusiastic as was the love of Judy for her "rosy-cheeked" favorite, they were not sufficient to cause her to reveal the secret of her birth and adoption, even at this hour of Alia's deepest grief and affliction.

There were two causes for this her unaccountable silence. Firstly, she had promised not to mention the slightest circ.u.mstance connected with the adopted child, and she feared punishment from the anger of her proud ma.s.sa, whose disgrace might be the consequence. And again, having been in the habit of hearing all sorts of reflections on the "Irish," whom some mad abolitionists would gladly enslave in place of the blacks, poor Judy thought to save Alia from the mortification of finding herself "Irish," by her equivocation and falsehood.

CHAPTER XXIV.

SHOWS HOW THE CROSS AND SHAMROCK WERE PERMANENTLY UNITED AFTER A LONG SEPARATION.

Paul O'Clery had been appointed pastor of one of the princ.i.p.al churches in the second city in the Union, as we have before mentioned, and already the evidences of the "care of souls" with which he was charged for several years began to manifest themselves on his placid brow. His was a life of unceasing activity. The visitations of the sick, the calls of charity, the hearing of confessions, together with the instruction of youth and the preaching of G.o.d's word,--these, the ordinary lot of pastors, const.i.tuted but a share, and not the largest one, of his onerous duties. Ever mindful of his own dest.i.tute condition while an orphan deprived of both parents, all the orphans of the thickly-inhabited district that const.i.tuted his mission became objects of his special care. And at a time when such an inst.i.tution as a Catholic orphanage was regarded as visionary, or the ephemeral creation of a too ardent zeal, this good pastor succeeded in founding and supporting an asylum which has since become of incalculable value, not only to the Catholics as a body, but to the inhabitants of the whole city and state. A house of refuge for repentant Magdalens, placed under the care of the Sisters of Mercy, commanded his next care. In a word, the founding of schools, hospitals, confraternities, guilds, and other pious inst.i.tutions exercised all of his time that was not devoted to his strictly ecclesiastical duties; so that his sister Bridget, known in religion as Sister St. John of the Cross, complained a good deal of his want of charity in not having visited her but once in seven years. "Ad majorem Dei gloriam,"--"To the greater glory of G.o.d,"--was this pious Levite's motto; and he was dead to all the ties of flesh and blood, and heedless of all calls save those of charity to his G.o.d and his neighbor.

In the pulpit, the spontaneous eloquence of his heart chained the attention of his hearers; and his discourses, though rather inclined to asceticism than controversial, went to the hearts, and convinced the understandings, of unbelievers of the divinity of the doctrine he preached. No cla.s.s of his fellow-creatures was excluded from the influence of his boundless zeal. Protestants--to whom he was very mild, on account of his knowledge of the ignorant prejudices in which they are bound by the malice of their teachers--heard him, and became converts to the church of G.o.d. Even the neglected negro race claimed and received a full measure of his zeal. He established a school for the children of these neglected sons of Africa, and never lost an opportunity of visiting them at the death bed or in the hour of serious sickness.

It was on occasion of one of these visits that G.o.d rewarded his priest, even in this world, by the joyous disclosure which we here record, and which, next to his grace of vocation to the priesthood, of all the manifestations of G.o.d's mercy to him, claimed his sincerest grat.i.tude and thanksgiving. After the end of the grand "birthday banquet," which lasted for a day and two nights, Alia's position at the palace became more disagreeable than ever. The young girls frowned on her and shunned her society, and Madame Goldrich, after she had got over the fatigue of the party, read her a smart lesson on her "ill manners and Irish temper," because she dared to absent herself, to the disappointment of the guests, from a table at which she was denied her proper and usual place. "Alia, this conduct of yours must be reformed, and that quick, or your separation from this family, to which you do not belong, must soon take place. I ain't goin' to let you take precedence of my children no longer."

To this vulgar speech of the "princess, our hostess," as she was flatteringly toasted by a John Bull guest who was there, Alia answered not a word, but, having retired to her room, fell on her knees and prayed long and fervently to the G.o.d of her fathers to a.s.sist her by his inspirations, and direct her to the best, in her present perplexity.

Having unburdened her bosom of a load of grief by a copious effusion of tears, and felt in her spirit that calm resignation which a sense of its own forlorn condition and a total reliance on G.o.d are calculated to inspire even in the unregenerate and imperfect soul, Alia now proceeded to the chamber of old Judy, whose expected illness had at last arrived, having been ill now for three days. On perceiving her entrance into the room, the old negress appealed to her in most supplicating terms to fulfil her promise to send for "de priest, for now de hour am come. O Ali', angel, dear," she cried, "do not let me die without the 'bon Dieu,' or I lost foreber. O, haste! O, haste!"

Alia lost no time, but, taking pen and paper, wrote as follows to the bishop of the diocese:--

"The Right Rev. Catholic bishop is respectfully informed that there is a negro woman lying dangerously ill at Mr. Goldrich's, who, being a Catholic, desires the last rites of that church. Being a native of St.

Domingo, the French is her vernacular tongue; for which cause it will be desirable, if possible, to send, a clergyman who can speak that language."

A young negro lad was the bearer of this despatch, and he returned in less than an hour, attended by Rev. Paul O'Clery, whom the bishop sent to answer this urgent call, all those of the episcopal residence having been out since early morning attending on the sick in their respective localities. In order to avoid any further cause of displeasure to Mrs.

Goldrich, Alia had given the negro lad instructions to bring the priest in through a private door that communicated with the garden, rather than attract attention by entering the hall door. She had a full view of the countenance of the young priest, through the window, while he was crossing that part of the garden that lay next the houses of the city, and, strange! her heart throbbed, and an indescribable sensation pa.s.sed over her frame.

"How happy," she thought, "must be the sister of such a gentleman as that! how different her lot from mine!"

The priest entered, and was received with a very polite bow by Alia, which was returned profoundly. Declining to take a seat, on account of his many other urgent calls, he was escorted to old Judy's chamber by his fair guide, who, on the way thither, explained to him what sort of a person she was, and how odd in her notions about religion. Having conducted him to her bedside, she made a polite bow, and retired, asking if her services were further needed.

The priest answered, "No; that he believed all the requirements for this holy but melancholy service were prepared, and that he supposed he had to thank her for the nice arrangements he observed."