as he found himself in the constant reunions which, for one cause
or another, were taking place in the little Henderson house. He
developed a talent for conversation, a vein of gentle humor, a turn
for versification, with a cast of thought rising into the sphere of
poetry, and then, with Dr. Campbell and Alice and Angie, he formed no
mean quartette in singing.
In all these ways he had been coming nearer and nearer to Angie,
without taking the alarm. He remembered appositely what Montalembert
in his history of the monks of the Middle Ages says of the female
friendships which always exerted such a modifying power in the lives
of celebrated saints; how St. Jerome had his Eudochia, and St.
Somebody-else had a sister, and so on. And as he saw more and more of
Angelique's character, and felt her practical efficiency in church
work, he thought it would be very lovely to have such a friend all to
himself. Now, friendship on the part of a young man of twenty-five for
a young saint with hazel eyes and golden hair, with white, twinkling
hands and a sweet voice, and an assemblage of varying glances, dimples
and blushes, is certainly a most interesting and delightful relation;
and Mr. St. John built it up and adorned it with all sorts of charming
allegories and figures and images, making a sort of semi-celestial
affair of it.
It is true, he had given up St. Jerome's love, and concluded that
it was not necessary that his "heart's elect" should be worn and
weary and wasted, or resemble a dying altar-fire; he had learned to
admire Angie's blooming color and elastic step, and even to take an
appreciative delight in the prettinesses of her toilette; and, one
evening, when she dropped a knot of peach-blow ribbons from her bosom,
the young divine had most unscrupulously appropriated the same, and,
taking it home, gloated over it as a holy relic, and yet he never
suspected that he was in love--oh, no! And, at this moment, when his
voice was vibrating with that strange revealing power that voices
sometimes have in moments of emotion, when the very tone is more than
the words, he, poor fellow, was ignorant that his voice had said to
Angie, "I love you with all my heart and soul."
But there is no girl so uninstructed and so inexperienced as not to be
able to interpret a tone like this at once, and Angie at this moment
felt a sort of bewildering astonishment at the revelation. All seemed
to go round and round in dizzy mazes--the greens, the red berries--she
seemed to herself to be walking in a dream, and Mr. St. John with her.
She looked up and their eyes met, and at that moment the veil
fell from between them. His great, deep, blue eyes had in them an
expression that could not be mistaken.
"Oh, Mr. St. John!" she said.
"Call me _Arthur_," he said, entreatingly.
"Arthur!" she said, still as in a dream.
"And may I call you Angelique, my good angel, my guide? Say so!" he
added, in a rapid, earnest whisper, "say so, dear, dearest Angie!"
"Yes, Arthur," she said, still wondering.
"And, oh, _love_ me," he added, in a whisper; "a little, ever so
little! You cannot think how precious it will be to me!"
"Mr. St. John!" called the voice of Miss Gusher.
He started in a guilty way, and came out from behind the thick shadows
of the evergreen which had concealed this little _tête-à-tête_. He
was all of a sudden transformed to Mr. St. John, the rector--distant,
cold, reserved, and the least bit in the world dictatorial. In his
secret heart, Mr. St. John did not like Miss Gusher. It was a thing
for which he condemned himself, for she was a most zealous and
efficient daughter of the Church. She had worked and presented a most
elegant set of altar-cloths, and had made known to him her readiness
to join a sisterhood whenever he was ready to ordain one. And she
always admired him, always agreed with him, and never criticised him,
which perverse little Angie sometimes did; and yet ungrateful Mr.
St. John was wicked enough at this moment to wish Miss Gusher at the
bottom of the Red Sea, or in any other Scriptural situation whence
there would be no probability of her getting at him for a season.
"I wanted you to decide on this decoration for the font," she said.
"Now, there is this green wreath and this red cross of bitter-sweet.
To be sure, there is no tradition about bitter-sweet; but the very
name is symbolical, and I thought that I would fill the font with
calla lilies. Would lilies at Christmas be strictly Churchly? That is
my only doubt. I have always seen them appropriated to Easter. What
should you say, Mr. St. John?"
"Oh, have them by all means, if you can," said Mr. St. John.
"Christmas is one of the Church's highest festivals, and I admit
anything that will make it beautiful."
Mr. St. John said this with a radiancy of delight which Miss Gusher
ascribed entirely to his approbation of her zeal; but the heavens and
the earth had assumed a new aspect to him since that little talk in
the corner. For when Angie lifted her eyes, not only had she read the
unutterable in his, but he also had looked far down into the depths of
her soul, and seen something he did not quite dare to put into words,
but in the light of which his whole life now seemed transfigured.
It was a new and amazing experience to Mr. St. John, and he felt
strangely happy, yet particularly anxious that Miss Gusher and Miss
Vapors, and all the other tribe of his devoted disciples, should not
by any means suspect what had fallen out; and therefore it was that he
assumed such a cheerful zeal in the matter of the font and decorations.
Meanwhile, Angie sat in her quiet corner, like a good little church
mouse, working steadily and busily on her cross. Just as she had put
in the last bunch of bitter-sweet, Mr. St. John was again at her elbow.
"Angie," he said, "you are going to give me that cross. I want it for
my study, to remember this morning by."
"But I made it for the front of the organ."
"Never mind. I can put another there; but this is to be _mine_," he
said, with a voice of appropriation. "I want it because you were
making it when you promised what you did. You must keep to that
promise, Angie."
"Oh, yes, I shall."
"And I want one thing more," he said, lifting Angie's little glove,
where it had fallen among the refuse pieces.
"What!--my glove? Is not that silly?"
"No, indeed."
"But my hands will be cold."
"Oh, you have your muff. See here: I want it," he said, "because
it seems so much like you, and you don't know how lonesome I feel
sometimes."
Poor man! Angie thought, and she let him have the glove. "Oh," she
said, apprehensively, "please don't stay here now. I hear Miss Gusher
calling for you."
"She is always so busy," said he, in a tone of discontent.
"She is so good," said Angie, "and does so much."
"Oh, yes, good enough," he said, in a discontented tone, retreating
backward into the shadow of the hemlock, and so finding his way round
into the body of the church.
But there is no darkness or shadow of death where a handsome, engaging
young rector can hide himself so that the truth about him will not get
into the bill of some bird of the air.
The sparrows of the sanctuary are many, and they are particularly wide
awake and watchful.
Miss Gusher had been witness of this last little bit of interview;
and, being a woman of mature experience, versed in the ways of the
world, had seen, as she said, through the whole matter.
"Mr. St. John is just like all the rest of them, my dear," she said to
Miss Vapors, "he will flirt, if a girl will only let him. I saw him
just now with that Angie Van Arsdel. Those Van Arsdel girls are famous
for drawing in any man they happen to associate with."
"You don't say so," said Miss Vapors; "what did you see?"
"Oh, my dear, I sha'n't tell; of course, I don't approve of such
things, and it lowers Mr. St. John in my esteem,--so I'd rather not
speak of it. I did hope he was above such things."
"But do tell me, did he _say_ anything?" said Miss Vapors, ready to
burst in ignorance.
"Oh, no. I only saw some appearances and expressions--a certain manner
between them that told all. Sophronia Vapors, you mark my words:
there is something going on between Angie Van Arsdel and Mr. St. John.
I don't see, for my part, what it is in those Van Arsdel girls that
the men see; but, sure as one of them is around, there is a flirtation
got up."
"Why, they're not so very beautiful," said Miss Vapors.
"Oh, dear, no. I never thought them even pretty; but then, you see,
there's no accounting for those things."
And so, while Mr. St. John and Angie were each wondering secretly over
the amazing world of mutual understanding that had grown up between
them, the rumor was spreading and growing in all the band of Christian
workers.
_CHAPTER XXXVII._
THEREAFTER?
According to the view of the conventional world, the brief, sudden
little passage between Mr. St. John and Angelique among the
Christmas-greens was to all intents and purposes equivalent to an
engagement; and yet, St. John had not actually at that time any
thought of marriage.
"Then," says Mrs. Mater-familias, ruffling her plumage, in high moral
style, "he is a man of no principle--and acts abominably." You are
wrong, dear madam; Mr. St. John is a man of high principle, a man
guided by conscience, and who would honestly sooner die than do a
wrong thing.
"Well, what does he mean then, talking in this sort of way to Angie,
if he has no intentions? He ought to know better."
Undoubtedly, he ought to know better, but he does not. He knows
at present neither his own heart nor that of womankind, and is
ignorant of the real force and meaning of what he has been saying
and looking, and of the obligations which they impose on him as
a man of honor. Having been, all his life, only a _recluse_ and
student, having planned his voyage of life in a study, where rocks
and waves and breakers and shoals are but so many points on paper, it
is not surprising that he finds himself somewhat ignorant in actual
navigation, where rocks and shoals are quite another affair. It is
one thing to lay down one's scheme and law of life in a study, among
supposititious men and women, and another to carry it out in life
among real ones, each one of whom acts upon us with the developing
force of sunshine on the seed-germ.
In fact, no man knows what there is in himself till he has tried
himself under the influence of other men; and if this is true of
man over man, how much more of that subtle developing and revealing
power of woman over man. St. John, during the first part of his life,
had been possessed by that sort of distant fear of womankind which
a person of acute sensibility has of that which is bright, keen,
dazzling, and beyond his powers of management, and which, therefore,
seems to him possessed of indefinite powers for mischief. It was
something with which he felt unable to cope. He had, too, the common
prejudice against fashionable girls and women as of course wanting in
earnestness; and he entered upon his churchly career with a sort of
hard determination to have no trifling, and to stand in no relation
to this suspicious light guerrilla force of the church but that of a
severe drill-sergeant.
To his astonishment, the child whom he had undertaken to drill had
more than once perforce, and from the very power of her womanly
nature, proved herself competent to guide him in many things which
belonged to the very essence of his profession--church work. Angie had
been able to enter places whence he had been excluded; able to enter
by those very attractions of life and gaiety and prettiness which had
first led him to set her down as unfit for serious work.
He saw with his own eyes that a bright little spirit, with twinkling
ornaments, and golden hair, and a sweet voice, could go into the den
of John Price in his surliest mood, could sing, and get his children
to singing, till he was as persuadable in her hands as a bit of wax;
that she could scold and lecture him at her pleasure, and get him to
making all kinds of promises; in fact that he, St. John himself, owed
his _entrée_ into the house, and his recognition there as a clergyman,
to Angie's good offices and persistent entreaties.
Instead of being leader, he was himself being led. This divine child
was becoming to him a mystery of wisdom; and, so far from feeling
himself competent to be her instructor, he came to occupy, as regards
many of the details of his work, a most catechetical attitude towards
her, and was ready to accept almost anything she told him.
St. John was, from first to last, an idealist. It was ideality that
inclined him from the barren and sterile chillness of New England
dogmatism to the picturesque forms and ceremonies of a warmer ritual.
His conception of a church was a fair ideal; such as a poet might
worship, such as this world has never seen in reality, and probably
never will. His conception of a life work--of the priestly office,
with all that pertains to it--belonged to that realm of poetry that
is above the matter-of-fact truths of experience, and is sometimes in
painful conflict with them. What wonder, then, if love, the eternal
poem, the great ideal of ideals, came over him without precise limits
and exact definitions--that when the divine cloud overshadowed him he
"wist not what he said."
St. John certainly never belonged to that class of clergymen who, on
being assured of a settlement and a salary, resolve, in a general way,
to marry, and look up a wife and a cooking-stove at the same time; who
take lists of eligible women, and have the conditional refusal of a
house in their pockets, when they go to make proposals.
In fact, he had had some sort of semi-poetical ideas of a diviner life
of priestly self-devotion and self-consecration, in which woman can
have no part. He had been fascinated by certain strains of writing in
some of the devout Anglicans whose works furnished most of the studies
of his library; so that far from setting it down in a general way that
he must some time marry, he had, up to this time, shaped his ideal
of life in a contrary direction. He had taken no vows; he had as yet
taken no steps towards the practical working out of any scheme; but
there floated vaguely through his head the idea of a celibate guild--a
brotherhood who should revive, in dusty modern New York, some of the
devout conventual fervors of the middle ages. A society of brothers,
living in a round of daily devotions and holy ministration, had been
one of the distant dreams of his future cloud-land.
And now, for a month or two, he had been like a charmed bird,
fluttering in nearer and nearer circles about this dazzling,
perplexing, repellent attraction.
For weeks, unconsciously to himself, he had had but one method of
marking and measuring his days: there were the days when he expected
to see _her_, and the days when he did not; and wonderful days were
interposed between, when he saw her unexpectedly--as, somehow,
happened quite often.
We believe it is a fact not yet brought clearly under scientific
investigation as to its causes, but a fact, nevertheless, that
young people who have fallen into the trick of thinking about each
other when separated are singularly apt to meet each other in their
daily walks and ways. Victor Hugo has written the _Idyl of the Rue
Plumette_; there are also Idyls of the modern city of New York. At
certain periods in the progress of the poem, one such chance glimpse,
or moment of meeting, at a street corner or on a door-step, is the
event of the day.
St. John was sure of Angie at her class on Sunday mornings, and
at service afterwards. He was sure of her on Thursday evenings, at
Eva's reception; and then, besides, somehow, when she was around
looking up her class on Saturday afternoons, it was so natural that
he should catch a glimpse of her now and then, coming out of that
house, or going into that door; and then, in the short days of
winter, the darkness often falls so rapidly that it often struck him
as absolutely necessary that he should see her safely home: and, in
all these moments of association, he felt a pleasure so strange and
new and divine that it seemed to him as if his whole life until he
knew her had been flowerless and joyless. He pitied himself, when he
thought that he had never known his mother and had never had a sister.
That must be why he had known so little of what it was so lovely and
beautiful to know.
Love, to an idealist, comes not first from earth, but heaven. It comes
as an exaltation of all the higher and nobler faculties, and is its
own justification in the fuller nobleness, the translucent purity,
the larger generosity, and warmer piety, it brings. The trees do not
examine themselves in spring-time, when every bud is thrilling with a
new sense of life--they _live_.
Never had St. John's life-work looked to him so attractive, so
possible, so full of impulse; and he worshiped the star that had risen
on his darkness, without as yet a thought of the future. As yet, he
thought of her only as a vision, an inspiration, an image of almost
childlike innocence and purity, which he represented to himself under
all the poetic forms of saintly legend.
She was the St. Agnes, the child Christian, the sacred lamb of
Christ's fold. She was the holy Dorothea, who wore in her bosom the
roses of heaven, and had fruits and flowers of Paradise to give to
mortals; and when he left her, after ever so brief an interview, he
fancied that one leaf from the tree of life had fluttered to his
bosom. He illuminated the text, "Blessed are the pure in heart," in
white lilies, and hung it over his _prie dieu_ in memorial of her, and
sometimes caught himself singing:
"I can but know thee as my star,
My angel and my dream."
As yet, the thought had not yet arisen in him of appropriating his
angel guide. It was enough to love her with the reverential, adoring
love he gave to all that was holiest and purest within him, to
enshrine her as his ideal of womanhood.
He undervalued himself in relation to her. He seemed to himself coarse
and clumsy, in the light of her intuitions, as he knew himself utterly
unskilled and untrained in the conventional modes and usages of the
society in which he had begun to meet her, and where he saw her moving
with such deft ability, and touching every spring with such easy skill.
Still he felt a craving to be something to her. Why might she not be a
_sister_ to him, to him who had never known a sister? It was a happy
thought, one that struck him as perfectly new and original, though it
was--had he only known it--a well-worn, mossy old mile-stone that had
been passed by generations on the pleasant journey to Eden. He had
not, however, had the least intention of saying a word of this kind
to Angie when he came to the chapel that morning. But he had been
piqued by her quiet, resolute little way of dissent from the flood of
admiration which his illumination had excited. He had been a little
dissatisfied with the persistent adulation of his flock, and, like
Zeuxis, felt a disposition to go after the blush of the maiden who
fled. It was not the first time that Angie had held her own opinion
against him, and turned away with that air of quiet resolution which
showed that she had a reserved force in herself that he longed to
fathom. Then, in the little passage that followed, came one of those
sudden overflows that Longfellow tells of:
"There are moments in life when the heart is so full of
emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths
like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and
its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be
gathered together."
St. John's secret looked out of his eager eyes; and, in fact, he was
asking for Angie's whole heart, while his words said only, "love me as
a brother." A man, unfortunately, cannot look into his own eyes, and
does not always know what they say. But a woman may look into them;
and Angie, though little in person and childlike in figure, had in
her the concentrated, condensed essence of womanhood--all its rapid
foresight; its keen flashes of intuition; its ready self-command, and
something of that maternal care-taking instinct with which Eve is ever
on the alert to prevent a blunder or mistake on the part of the less
perceiving Adam.
She felt the tones of his voice. She knew that he was saying more than
he was himself aware of, and that there were prying eyes about: and
she knew, too, with a flash of presentiment, what would be the world's
judgment of so innocent a brotherly and sisterly alliance as had been
proposed and sealed by the sacrifice of her glove.
She laughed a little to herself, fancying her brother Tom's wanting
her glove, or addressing her in the reverential manner and with the
beseeching tones that she had just heard. Certainly she would be a
sister to him, she thought, and, the next time she met him at Eva's
alone, she would use her liberty to reprove him for his imprudence in
speaking to her in that way when so many were looking on. The little
empress knew her ground; and that it was hers now to dictate and his
to obey.
_CHAPTER XXXVIII._
"WE MUST BE CAUTIOUS."
Eva was at the chapel that morning and overheard, of the conversation
between Miss Gusher and Miss Vapors, just enough to pique her
curiosity and rouse her alarm. Of all things, she dreaded any such
report getting into the whirlwind of gossip that always eddies round a
church door where there is an interesting, unmarried rector, and she
resolved to caution Angie on the very first opportunity; and so, when
her share of wreaths and crosses was finished, and the afternoon sun
began to come level through the stained windows, she crossed over to
Angie's side, to take her home with her to dinner.
"I've something to tell you," she said, "and you must come home and
stay with me to-night." And so Angie came.
"Do you know," said Eva, as soon as the sisters found themselves alone
in her chamber, where they were laying off their things and preparing
for dinner, "do you know that Miss Gusher?"
"I--no, very slightly," said Angie, shaking out her shawl to fold it.
"She's a very cultivated woman, I believe."
"Well, I heard her saying some disagreeable things about you and Mr.
St. John this morning," said Eva.
The blood flushed in Angie's cheek, and she turned quickly to the
glass and began arranging her hair.
"What did she say?" she inquired.
"Something about the Van Arsdel girls always getting up flirtations."
"Nonsense! how hateful! I'm sure it's no fault of mine that Mr. St.
John came and spoke to me."
"Then he did come?"
"Oh, yes; I was perfectly astonished. I was sitting all alone in that
dark corner where the great hemlock tree was, and the first I knew
he was there. You see, I criticised his illuminated card--that one
in the strange, queer letters--I said I couldn't understand it; but
Miss Gusher, Miss Vapors, and all the girls were oh-ing and ah-ing
about it, and I felt quite snubbed and put down. I supposed it must
be my stupidity, and so I just went off to my tree and sat down to
work quietly in the dark corner, and left Miss Gusher expatiating on
mottoes and illuminations. I knew she was very accomplished and clever
and all that, and that I didn't know anything about such things."
"Well, then," said Eva, "he followed you?"
"Yes, he came suddenly in from the vestry behind the tree, and I
thought, or hoped, he stood so that nobody noticed us, and he insisted
on my telling him why I didn't like his illumination. I said I did
like it, that I thought it was beautifully done, but that I did not
think it would be of any use to those poor children and folks to have
inscriptions that they didn't understand; and he said I was quite
right, and that he should alter it and put it in plain English; and
then he said, what a help it was to have a woman's judgment on things,
what a misfortune it was that he had never had a sister or any friend
of that kind, and then he asked me to be a sister to him, and tell him
frankly always just what I thought of him, and I said I would. And
then"--
"What then?"
"Oh, Eva, I can't tell you; but he spoke so earnestly and quick, and
asked me if I couldn't love him just a little; he asked me to call him
Arthur, and then, if you believe me, he would have me give him my
glove, and so I let him take it, because I was afraid some of those
girls would see us talking together. I felt almost frightened that he
should speak so, and I wanted him to go away."