Summary
A marble mausoleum of privilege, the Evringham estate exhales mildewed grandeur: chandeliers drip resentment, ancestral portraits glower like unpaid creditors, and every corridor carries the sour perfume of dynastic failure. Into this mausoleum pirouettes Jewel—an eight-year-old comet of Sunday-school certainty—dispatched as disposable cargo by globetrotting parents who trust her spiritual invulnerability more than any governess. The child’s arrival detonates the household’s brittle equilibrium: the widowed daughter-in-law, a velvet-clad predator, stalks the physician-heir with matrimonial desperation; the housekeeper, Mrs. Forbes, polishes grudges instead of silver; and old Mr. Evringham, a misanthropic sphinx in velvet slippers, guards his fortune like a dragon nursing gout. Jewel, armed only with Mary Baker Eddy’s tome and a sunrise faith, begins an occult renovation: she rebukes fevers as illegitimate thoughts, befriends the drunkard scion of the housekeeper and dries his delirium tremens with prayer, converts the cynical cousin Eloise from vanity to visions, and melts the baron’s heart until it beats in 4/4 time with the universe. By the final reel the mansion, once a sarcophagus of cynicism, glows like a lantern—every room now a chapel of renegotiated affections, every face turned toward the child who walks on metaphysical water.
Synopsis
Mrs. Forbes, longtime housekeeper at the country mansion of disappointed, embittered aristocrat Mr. Evringham, who is almost a luxurious recluse, is worried: the household has been turned upside-down by the advent of the wife of Evringham's dead son Lawrence, who has arrived with her daughter Eloise. The mother is a schemer who, reduced to her last penny, is pulling every wire to induce wealthy young Dr. Ballard to marry Eloise. It looks as if she is going to succeed and the need for success is imperative because Mr. Evringham is set against his female dependents, whom he might expel from his home at any moment. Then word comes from another son, Harry Evringham, who writes that he and his wife must make a business trip abroad and he asks his father to take Jewel, the child he has never seen, into his home until they return in six weeks. Old Mr. Evringham reluctantly agrees to his son's request. He hates children and is gruff, unresponsive, and self-centered. The only reason he agrees to take the child is because his daughter-in-law, the widow, tries to get him to refuse. He hates this daughter-in-law; therefore takes Jewel in to spite her. Upon her arrival, Jewel meets with a very cool reception. She finds that, according to the Christian Science teachings with which she is familiar, that she has entered a household of hatred and discord. She puts the scriptures and Mrs. Eddy's teachings to practical use and proves to all scoffers that she has found and can demonstrate the truth. Jewel takes a strong liking to her bluff, stern, old grandfather and he finds his heart softening under her influence. She cures herself of a fever which she says came o because a shadow of hatred passed over her for the house's inmates. She wins the heart of the grim housekeeper when she redeems her drunkard son from the grip of the liquor demon, she converts Eloise to the truth of Divine Science, and she proves to everyone that Science can win in spite of all. She reaps a harvest of good from a bleak, barren soil, uniting the strained and jarring household by chain after chain of love.
