Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  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 toilet; 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 bittersweet, 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. Materfamilias, 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 gayety 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 represente
d 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: —