University of Virginia Library

36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
LOVE IN CHRISTMAS GREENS.

THE little chapel in one of the out-of-the-way streets
of New York presented a scene of Christmas activity
and cheerfulness approaching to gaiety. The whole
place was fragrant with the spicy smell of spruce and
hemlock. Baskets of green ruffles of ground-pine were
foaming over their sides with abundant contributions
from the forest; and bright bunches of vermilion bitter-sweet,
and the crimson-studded branches of the black
alder, added color to the picture. Of real traditional
holly, which in America is a rarity, there was a scant
supply, reserved for more honorable decorations.

Mr. St. John had been busy in his vestry with paper,
colors, and gilding, illuminating some cards with Scriptural
mottoes. He had just brought forth his last effort
and placed it in a favorable light for inspection. It is the
ill-fortune of every successful young clergyman to stir
the sympathies and enkindle the venerative faculties of
certain excitable women, old and young, who follow his
footsteps and regard his works and ways with a sort of
adoring rapture that sometimes exposes him to ridicule
if he accepts it, and which yet it seems churlish to
decline. It is not generally his fault, nor exactly the
fault of the women, often amiably sincere and unconscious;
but it is a fact that this kind of besetment is
more or less the lot of every clergyman, and he cannot
help it. It is to be accepted as we accept any of the
shadows which are necessary in the picture of life, and
got along with by the kind of common sense with which
we dispose of any of its infelicities.

Mr. St. John did little to excite demonstrations of
this kind; but the very severity with which he held himself
in reserve seemed rather to increase a kind of sacred
prestige which hung around him, making of him a sort
of churchly Grand Llama. When, therefore, he brought
out his illuminated card, on which were inscribed in
Anglo Saxon characters,

there was a loud acclaim of “How lovely! how sweet!”
with groans of intense admiration from Miss Augusta
Gusher and Miss Sophronia Vapors, which was echoed
in “ohs!” and “ahs!” from an impressible group of girls
on the right and left.

Angelique stood quietly gazing on it, with a wreath
of ground-pine dangling from her hand, but she said
nothing.

Mr. St. John at last said, “And what do you think,
Miss Van Arsdel?”

“I think the colors are pretty,” Angie said, hesitating,
“but”—

“But what?” said Mr. St. John, quickly.

“Well, I don't know what it means—I don't understand
it.”

Mr. St. John immediately read the inscription in
concert with Miss Gusher, who was a very mediæval
young lady and quite up to reading Gothic, or Anglo
Saxon, or Latin, or any Churchly tongue.

“Oh!” was all the answer Angie made; and then,
seeing something more was expected, she added again,
“I think the effect of the lettering very pretty,” and
turned away, and busied herself with a cross of ground-pine
that she was making in a retired corner.

The chorus were loud and continuous in their ac

[ILLUSTRATION]

SKIRMISHING.
"I like your work," he said, "better than you do mine." "I did n't
say that I did n't like yours." said Angie, coloring.—p. 341.

[Description: 710EAF. Illustration page. Image of a woamn seated and a man standing. The woman has floral wreaths scattered around her feet. The man has his top had in one hand, and with the other is handing the woman an object, possibly a white glove. In the background two women are frowing and watching the man and woman.]

claims, and Miss Gusher talked learnedly of lovely
inscriptions in Greek and Latin, offering to illuminate
some of them for the occasion. Mr. St. John thanked
her and withdrew to his sanctum, less satisfied than
before.

About half an hour after, Angie, who was still quietly
busy upon her cross in her quiet corner, under the shade
of a large hemlock tree which had been erected there,
was surprised to find Mr. St. John standing, silently
observing her work.

“I like your work,” he said, “better than you did
mine.”

“I didn't say that I didn't like yours,” said Angie,
coloring, and with that sort of bright, quick movement
that gave her the air of a bird just going to fly.

“No, you did not say, but you left approbation unsaid,
which amounts to the same thing. You have some
objection, I see, and I really wish you would tell me
frankly what it is.”

“O Mr. St. John, don't say that! Of course I
never thought of objecting; it would be presumptuous
in me. I really don't understand these matters at all,
not at all. I just don't know anything about Gothic
letters and all that, and so the card doesn't say anything
to me. And I must confess, I thought”—

Here Angie, like a properly behaved young daughter
of the Church, began to perceive that her very next sentence
might lead her into something like a criticism
upon her rector; and she paused on the brink of a gulf
so horrible, “with pious awe that feared to have offended.”

Mr. St. John felt a very novel and singular pleasure
in the progress of this interview. It interested him to
be differed with, and he said, with a slight intonation of
dictation:

“I must insist on your telling me what you thought,
Miss Angie.”

“Oh, nothing, only this—that if I, who have had
more education than our Sunday-school scholars, can't
read a card like that, why, they could not. I'm quite
sure that an inscription in plain modern letters that I
could read would have more effect upon my mind, and I
am quite sure it would on them.”

“I thank you sincerely for your frankness, Miss
Angie; your suggestion is a valuable one.”

“I think,” said Angie, “that mediæval inscriptions,
and Greek and Latin mottoes, are interesting to educated,
cultivated people. The very fact of their being
in another language gives a sort of piquancy to them.
The idea gets a new coloring from a new language; but
to people who absolutely don't understand a word, they
say nothing, and of course they do no good; so, at least,
it seems to me.”

“You are quite right, Miss Angie, and I shall immediately
put my inscription into the English of to-day.
The fact is, Miss Angie,” added St. John after a silent
pause, “I feel more and more what a misfortune it has
been to me that I never had a sister. There are so many
things where a woman's mind sees so much more clearly
than a man's. I never had any intimate female friend.”
Here Mr. St. John began assiduously tying up little
bunches of the ground-pine in the form which Angie
needed for her cross, and laying them for her.

Now, if Angie had been a sophisticated young lady,
familiar with the tactics of flirtation, she might have had
precisely the proper thing at hand to answer this remark;
as it was, she kept on tying her bunches assiduously and
feeling a little embarrassed.

It was a pity he should not have a sister, she thought.
Poor man, it must be lonesome for him; and Angie's

face at this moment must have expressed some commiseration
or some emotion that emboldened the young
man to say, in a lower tone, as he laid down a bunch of
green by her:

“If you, Miss Angie, would look on me as you do on
your brothers, and tell me sincerely your opinion of me,
it might be a great help to me.”

Now Mr. St. John was certainly as innocent and
translucently ignorant of life as Adam at the first hour
of his creation, not to know that the tone in which he
was speaking and the impulse from which he spoke, at
that moment, was in fact that of man's deepest, most
absorbing feeling towards woman. He had made his
scheme of life; and, as a set purpose, had left love out
of it, as something too terrestrial and mundane to consist
with the sacred vocation of a priest. But, from the
time he first came within the sphere of Angelique, a
strange, delicious atmosphere, vague and dreamy, yet
delightful, had encircled him, and so perplexed and dizzied
his brain as to cause all sorts of strange vibrations.
At first, there was a sort of repulsion—a vague alarm, a
suspicion and repulsion singularly blended with an
attraction. He strove to disapprove of her; he resolved
not to think of her; he resolutely turned his head away
from looking at her in her place in Sunday-school and
church, because he felt that his thoughts were alarmingly
drawn in that direction.

Then came his invitation into society, of which the
hidden charm, unacknowledged to himself, was that he
should meet Angelique; and that mingling in society had
produced, inevitably, modifying effects, which made him
quite a different being from what he was in his recluse
life passed between the study and the altar.

It is not in man, certainly not in a man so finely
fibered and strung as St. John, to associate intimately

with his fellows without feeling their forces upon himself,
and finding many things in himself of which he had
not dreamed.

But if there be in the circle some one female presence
which all the while is sending out an indefinite though
powerful enchantment, the developing force is still more
marked.

St. John had never suspected himself of the ability
to be so agreeable 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.