University of Virginia Library

37. 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 cloudland.

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:

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:

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.