University of Virginia Library

16. CHAPTER XVI.
THE MINISTER'S VISIT.

MR. ST. JOHN was sitting in his lonely study, contemplating
with some apprehension the possibilities
of the evening.

Perhaps few women know how much of an ordeal
general society is to many men. Women are naturally
social and gregarious, and have very little experience of
the kind of shyness that is the outer bark of many
manly natures, in which they fortify all the more sensitive
part of their being against the rude shocks of the
world.

As we said, Mr. St. John's life had been that of a
recluse and scholar, up to the time of his ordination as
a priest. He was, by birth and education, a New England
Puritan, with all those habits of reticence and
self-control which a New England education enforces.
His religious experiences, being those of reaction from
a sterile and severe system of intellectual dogmatism,
still carried with them a tinge of the precision and narrowness
of his early life. His was a nature like some of
the streams of his native mountains, inclining to cut for
itself straight, deep, narrow currents; and all his religious
reading and thinking had run in one channel. As to
social life, he first began to find it among his inferiors;
among those to whom he came, not as a brother man,
but as an authoritative teacher—a master, divinely appointed,
set apart from the ordinary ways of men. In
his role of priest he felt strong. In the belief of his
divine and sacred calling, he moved among the poor

and ignorant with a conscious superiority, as a being of
a higher sphere. There was something in this which
was a protection to his natural diffidence; he seemed
among his parishioners to feel surrounded by a certain
sacred atmosphere that shielded him from criticism.
But to mingle in society as man with man, to lay aside
the priest and be only the gentleman, appeared on near
approach a severe undertaking. As a priest at the altar
he was a privileged being, protected by a kind of divine
aureole, like that around a saint. In general society he
was but a man, to make his way only as other men; and,
as a man, St. John distrusted and undervalued himself.
As he thought it over, he inly assented to the truth of
what Eva had so artfully stated—that this ordeal of
society was indeed, for him, the true test of self-sacrifice.
Like many other men of refined natures, he was nervously
sensitive to personal influences. The social sphere
of those around him affected him, through sympathy,
almost as immediately as the rays of the sun impress the
daguerreotype plate; but he felt it his duty to subject
himself to the ordeal the more because he dreaded it.
“After all,” he said to himself, “what is my faith worth,
if I cannot carry it among men? Do I hold a lamp
with so little oil in it that the first wind will blow it
out?”

It was with such thoughts as these that he started
out on his usual afternoon tour of visiting and ministration
in one of the poorest alleys of his neighborhood.

As he was making his way along, a little piping voice
was heard at his elbow:

“Mr. St. Don; Mr. St. Don.”

He looked hastily down and around, to meet the gaze
of a pair of dark childish eyes looking forth from a
thin, sharp little face. Gradually, he recognized in the

thin, barefoot child, the little girl whom he had seen in
Angie's class, leaning on her.

“What do you want, my child?”

“Mother's took bad, and Poll's gone to wash for her.
They told me to watch till you came round, and call
you. Mother wants to see you.”

“Well, show me the way,” said Mr. St. John, affably,
taking the thin, skinny little hand.

The child took him under an alley-way, into a dark,
back passage, up one or two rickety staircases, into
an attic, where lay a woman on a poor bed in the
corner.

The room was such a one as his work made only
too familiar to him—close, dark, bare of comforts, yet
not without a certain lingering air of neatness and self-respect.
The linen of the bed was clean, and the woman
that lay there had marks of something refined and decent
in her worn face. She was burning with fever;
evidently, hard work and trouble had driven her to the
breaking point.

“Well, my good woman, what can I do for you?”
said Mr. St. John.

The woman roused from a feverish sleep and looked
at him.

“Oh, sir, please send her here. She said she would
come any time I needed her, and I want her now.”

“Who is she? Who do you mean?”

“Please, sir, she means my teacher,” said the child,
with a bright, wise look in her thin little face. “It's
Miss Angie. Mother wants her to come and talk to
father; father's getting bad again.”

“He isn't a bad man,” put in the woman, “except
they get him to drink; it's the liquor. God
knows there never was a kinder man than John used
to be.”

“Where is he? I will try to see him,” said Mr. St.
John.

“Oh, don't; it won't do any good. He hates ministers;
he wouldn't hear you; but Miss Angie he will
hear; he promised her he wouldn't drink any more, but
Ben Jones and Jim Price have been at him and got him
off on a spree. O dear!”

At this, moment a feeble wail was heard from the
basket cradle in the corner, and the little girl jumped
from the bed, and in an important, motherly way, began
to soothe an indignant baby, who put up his stomach
and roared loudly after the manner of his kind, astonished
and angry at not finding the instant solace and
attention which his place in creation demanded.

Mr. St. John looked on in a kind of silent helplessness,
while the little skinny creature lifted a child who
seemed almost as large as herself and proceeded to
soothe and assuage his ill humor by many inexplicable
arts, till she finally quenched his cries in a sucking-bottle,
and peace was restored.

“The only person in the world that can do John any
good,” resumed the woman, when she could be heard,
“is Miss Angie. John would turn any man, specially
any minister, out of the house, that said a word about
his ways; but he likes to have Miss Angie come here.
She has been here Saturday afternoons and read stories
to the children, and taught them little songs, and John
always listens, and she almost got him to promise he
would give up drinking; she has such pretty ways of
talking, a man can't get mad with her. What I want is,
can't you tell her John's gone, and ask her to come to
me? He'll be gone two days or more, and when he
comes back he'll be sorry—he always is then; and then
if Miss Angie will talk to him; you see she's so pretty,
and dresses so pretty. John says she is the brightest,

prettiest lady he ever saw, and it sorter pleases him that
she takes notice of us. John always puts his best foot
foremost when she is round. John's used to being with
gentlefolk,” she said, with a sigh; “he knows a lady
when he sees her.”

“Well, my good woman,” said Mr. St. John, “I shall
see Miss Angie this evening, and you may be sure that I
shall tell her all about this. Meanwhile, how are you
off? Do you need money now?”

“I am pretty well off, sir. He took all my last week's
money when he went, but Poll has gone to my wash-place
to-day, and I told her to ask for pay. I hope
they'll send it.”

“If they don't,” said Mr. St. John, “here is something
to keep things going,” and he slipped a bill into
the woman's hand.

“Thank you, sir. When I get up, if you'll please give
me some washing, I'll make it square. I've been held
good at getting up linen.”

Poor woman! She had her little pride of independence,
and her little accomplishment—she could
wash and iron! There she felt strong! Mr. St. John
allowed her the refuge, and let her consider the money
as an advance, not a charity.

He turned away, and went down the cracked and
broken stairs with the thought struggling in an undefined
manner in his breast, how much there was of pastoral
work which transcended the power of man, and
required the finer intervention of woman. With all, there
came a glow of shy pleasure that there was a subject of
intercommunication opened between him and Angie,
something definite to talk about; and to a diffident man
a definite subject is a mine of gold.