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 acclaims, 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.
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:
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.
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."
"Well, Angie dear, what do you think of all this?"
"I know he cares for me very much," said Angie, quickly, "more than he says."
"And you, Angie?"
"I think he's good and noble and true, and I love him."
"As a sister, of course," said Eva, laughing.
"Never mind how—I love him," said Angie; "and I shall use my sisterly privilege to caution him to be very distant and dignified to me in future, when those prying eyes are around."
"Well now, darling," said Eva, with all the conscious dignity of early matronage, "we shall have to manage this matter very prudently—for those girls have had their suspicions aroused, and you know how such things will fly through the air. The fact is, there is nothing so perplexing as just this state of things; when you know as well as you know anything that a man is in love with you, and yet you are not engaged to him. I know all about the trouble of that, I'm sure; and it seems to me, what with Mamma, Aunt Maria, and all the rest of them, it was a perfect marvel how Harry and I ever came together. Now, there's that Miss Gusher, she'll be on the watch all the time, like a cat at a mouse-hole; and she's going to be there when we get the Christmas-tree ready and tie on the things, and you must manage to keep as far off from him as possible. I shall be there, and I shall have my eyes in my head, I promise you. We must try to lull their suspicions to sleep."
"Dear me," said Angie, "how disagreeable!"
"I'm sorry for you, darling, but I've kept it off as long as I could; I've seen for a long time how things are going."
"You have? Oh, Eva!"
"Yes; and I have had all I could do to keep Jim Fellows from talking, and teasing you, as he has been perfectly longing to do for a month past."
"You don't say that Jim has noticed anything?"
"Yes, Jim noticed his looking at you, the very first thing after he came to Sunday-school."
"Well, now, at first I noticed that he looked at me often, but I thought it was because he saw something he disapproved of—and it used to embarrass me. Then I thought he seemed to avoid me, and I wondered why. And I wondered, too, why he always would take occasion to look at me. I noticed, when your evenings first began, that he never came near me, and never spoke to me, and yet his eyes were following me wherever I went. The first evening you had, he walked round and round me nearly the whole evening, and never spoke a word; then suddenly he came and sat down by me, when I was sitting by Mrs. Betsey, and gave me a message from the Prices; but he spoke in such a stiff, embarrassed way, and then there was an awful pause, and suddenly he got up and went away again; and poor little Mrs. Betsey said, 'Bless me, how stiff and ungracious he is'; and I said that I believed he wasn't much used to society—but, after a while, this wore away, and he became very social, and we grew better and better acquainted all the time. Although I was a little contradictious, and used to controvert some of his notions, I fancy it was rather a novelty to him to find somebody that didn't always give up to him, for, I must say, some of the women that go to our chapel do make fools of themselves about him. It really provokes me past all bearing. If any body could set me against a man, it would be those silly, admiring women who have their hands and eyes always raised in adoration, whatever he does. It annoys him, I can see, for it is very much against his taste, and he likes me because, he says, I always will tell him the truth."
Meanwhile St. John had gone back to his study, walking as on a cloud. The sunshine streaming into a western window touched the white lilies over his prie dieu till they seemed alive. He took down the illumination and looked at it. He had a great mind to give this to her as a Christmas present. Why not? Was she not to be his own sister? And his thoughts strolled along through pleasant possibilities and all the privileges of a brother. Certainly, he longed to see her now, and talk them over with her; and suddenly it occurred to him that there were a few points in relation to the arrangement of the tree about which it would be absolutely necessary to get the opinion of Mrs. Henderson. Whether this direction of the path of duty had any relation to the fact that he had last seen her going away from the vestry arm in arm with Angie, we will not assume to say; but the solemn fact was that, that evening, just as it came time to drop the lace curtains over the Henderson windows, when the blazing wood fire was winking and blinking roguishly at the brass andirons, the door-bell rang, and in he walked.
Angelique had her lap full of dolls, and was sitting like Iris in the rainbow, in a confused mélange of silks, and gauzes, and tissues, and spangles. Three dressed dolls were propped up in various attitudes around her, and she was holding the fourth, while she fitted a sky-blue mantilla which she was going to trim with silver braid. Where Angie got all her budget of fineries was a standing mystery in the household, only that she had an infinitely persuasive tongue, and talked supplies out of admiring clerks and milliners' apprentices. It was a pretty picture to see her there in the warm, glowing room, tossing and turning her filmy treasures, and cocking her little head on one side and the other with an air of profound reflection.
Harry was gone out. Eva was knitting a comforter in her corner, and everything was as still and as cosy as heart could desire, when St. John made his way into the parlor and got himself warmly ensconced in his favorite niche. What more could mortal man desire? He talked gravely with Eva, and watched Angie. He thought of a lean, haggard picture of a St. Mary of Egypt, praying forlornly in the desert, that had hitherto stood in his study, and the idea somehow came over him that modern New York saints had taken a much more agreeable turn than those of old. Was it not better to be dressing dolls for poor children than to be rolling up one's eyes and praying alone out in a desert? In his own mind he resolved to take down that picture forthwith. He had, in his overcoat in the hall, his illuminated lilies, wrapped snugly in tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon; and, all the while he was discoursing with Eva, he was ruminating how he could see Angie alone a minute, just long enough to place it in her hands. Surely, somebody ought to make her a Christmas present, she who was thinking of every one but herself.
Eva was one of the class of diviners, and not at all the person to sit as Madame de Trop in an exigency of this sort, and so she had a sudden call to consult with Mary in the kitchen.
"Now for it," thought St. John, as he rose and drew nearer. Angie looked up with a demure consciousness.
He began fingering her gauzes and her scissors unconsciously.
"Now, now! I don't allow that," she said, playfully, as she took them altogether from his hand.
"I have something for you," he said suddenly.
"Something for me!" with a bright, amused look. "Where is it?"
St. John fumbled a moment in the entry and brought in his parcel. Angie watched him untying it with a kittenish gravity. He laid it down before her. "From your brother, Angie," he said.
"Oh, how lovely! how beautiful! O Mr. St. John, did you do this for me?"
"It was of you I was thinking; you, my inspiration in all that is holy and good; you who strengthen and help me in all that is pure and heavenly."
"Oh, don't say that!"
"It's true, Angie, my Angie, my angel. I knew nothing worthily till I knew you."
Angie looked up at him; her eyes, clear and bright as a bird's, looked into his; their hands clasped together, and then, it was the most natural thing in the world, he kissed her.
"But, Arthur," said Angie, "you must be careful not to arouse disagreeable reports and gossip. What is so sacred between us must not be talked of. Don't look at me, or speak to me, when others are present. You don't know how very easy it is to make people talk."
Mr. St. John promised all manner of prudence, and walked home delighted. And thus these two Babes in the Wood clasped hands with each other, to wander up and down the great forest of life, as simply and sincerely as if they had been Hensel and Grettel in the fairy story. They loved each other, wholly trusted each other without a question, and were walking in dream-land. There was no question of marriage settlements, or rent and taxes; only a joyous delight that they two in this wilderness world had found each other.
We pity him who does not know that there is nothing purer, nothing nearer heaven than a young man's first-enkindled veneration and adoration of womanhood in the person of her who is to be his life's ideal. It is the morning dew before the sun arises.
"My dear," said Mrs. Dr. Gracey to her spouse, "I have a great piece of news for you about Arthur—they say that he is engaged to one of the Van Arsdel girls."
"Good," said the Doctor, pushing up his spectacles. "It's the most sensible thing I have heard of him this long while. I always knew that boy would come right if he were only let alone. How did you hear?"
"Miss Gusher told Mary Jane. She charged her not to tell; but, oh, it's all over town! There can be no doubt about it."
"Why hasn't he been here, then, like a dutiful nephew, to tell us, I should like to know?" said Dr. Gracey.
"Well, I believe they say it isn't announced yet; but there's no sort of doubt of it. There's no doubt, at any rate, that there's been a very decided intimacy, and that if they are not engaged, they ought to be; and as I know Arthur is a good fellow, I know it must be all right. Those Ritualistic young ladies are terribly shocked. Miss Gusher says that her idol is broken; that she never again shall reverence a clergyman."
"Very likely. A Mrs. St. John will be a great interruption in the way of holy confidences and confessionals, and all their trumpery; but it's the one thing needful for Arthur. A good, sensible woman for a wife will make him a capital worker. The best adviser in church work is a good wife; and the best school of the church is a Christian family. That's my doctrine, Mrs. G."
Mrs. G. blushed at the implied compliment, while the Doctor went on:
"Now, I never felt the least fear of how Arthur was coming out, and I take great credit to myself for not opposing him. I knew a young man must do a certain amount of fussing and fizzling before he settles down strong and clear; and fighting and opposing a crotchety fellow does no good. I think I have kept hold on Arthur by never rousing his combativeness and being sparing of good advice; and you see he is turning right already. A wife will put an end to all the semi-monkish trumpery that has got itself mixed up with his real self-denying labor. A woman is capital for sweeping down cobwebs in Church or State. Well, I shall call on Arthur and congratulate him forthwith."
Dr. Gracey was Arthur's maternal uncle, and he had always kept an eye upon him from boyhood, as the only son of a favorite sister.
The Doctor, himself rector of a large and thriving church, was a fair representative of that exact mixture of conservatism and progress which characterizes the great, steady middle class of the American Episcopacy. He was tolerant and fatherly both to the Ritualists, who overdo on one side, and the Low Church, who underdo on the other. He believed largely in good nature, good sense, and the expectant treatment, as best for diseases both in the churchly and medical practice.
So, when he had succeeded in converting his favorite nephew to Episcopacy, and found him in danger of using it only as a half-way house to Rome, he took good heed neither to snub him, nor to sneer at him, but to give him sympathy in all the good work he did, and, as far as possible, to shield him from that species of persecution which is sure to endear a man's errors to him, by investing them with a kind of pathos.
"The world isn't in danger from the multitudes rushing into extremes of self-sacrifice," the Doctor said, when his wife feared that Arthur was becoming an ascetic. "Keep him at work; work will bring sense and steadiness. Give him his head, and he'll pull in harness all right by and by. A colt that don't kick out of the traces a little, at first, can't have much blood in him."
It will be seen by the subject-matter of this conversation that the good seed which had been sown in the heart of Miss Gusher had sprung up and borne fruit—thirty, sixty and a hundred fold, as is the wont of the gourds of gossip,—more rapid by half in their growth than the gourd of Jonah, and not half as consolatory.
In fact, the gossip plant is like the grain of mustard seed, which, though it be the least of all seeds, becometh a great tree, and the fowls of the air lodge in its branches and chatter mightily there at all seasons.
Miss Gusher, and Miss Vapors, and Miss Rapture, and old Mrs. Eyelet, and the Misses Glibbett, so well employed their time, about the season of Christmas, that there was not a female person in the limits of their acquaintance that had not had the whole story of all that had been seen, surmised, or imagined, related as a profound secret. Notes were collected and compared. Mrs. Eyelet remembered that she had twice seen Mr. St. John attending Angie to her door about nightfall. Miss Sykes, visiting one afternoon in the same district, deposed and said that she had met them coming out of a door together. She was quite sure that they must have met by appointment. Then, oh, the depths of possibility that the gossips saw in that Henderson house! Always there, every Thursday evening! On intimate terms with the family.
"Depend upon it, my dear," said Mrs. Eyelet, "Mrs. Henderson has been doing all she could to catch him. They say he's at her house almost constantly."
Aunt Maria's plumage rustled with maternal solicitude. "I don't know but it is as good a thing as we could expect for Angie," said she to Mrs. Van Arsdel. "He's a young man of good family and independent property. I don't like his ritualistic notions, to be sure; but one can't have everything. And, at any rate, he can't become a Roman Catholic if he gets married—that's one comfort."
"There he goes!" said little Mrs. Betsey, as she sat looking through the blinds, with the forgiven Jack on her knee. "He's at the door now. Dorcas, I do believe there's something in it."
"Something in what?" said Miss Dorcas, "and who are you talking about, Betsey?"
"Why, Mr. St. John and Angie. He's standing at the door, this very minute. It must be true. I'm glad of it; only he isn't half good enough for her."
"Well, it don't follow that there is an engagement because Mr. St. John is at the door," said Miss Dorcas.
"But all the things Mrs. Eyelet said, Dorcas!"
"Mrs. Eyelet is a gossip," said Miss Dorcas, shortly.
"But, Dorcas, I really thought his manner to her last Thursday was particular. Oh, I'm sure there's something in it! They say he's such a good young man, and independently rich. I wonder if they'll take a house up in this neighborhood? It would be so nice to have Angie within calling distance! A great favorite of mine is Angie."
Meanwhile Dr. Gracey found his way to Arthur's study.
"So, Arthur," he said, "that pretty Miss Van Arsdel's engaged."
The blank expression and sudden change of color in St. John's face was something quite worthy of observation.
"Miss Van Arsdel engaged!" he repeated with a gasp, feeling as if the ground were going down under him.
"Yes, that pretty fairy, Miss Angelique, you know."
"How did you hear—who told you?"
"How did I hear? Why, it's all over town. Arthur, you bad boy, why haven't you told me?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you; you are the happy individual. I came to congratulate you."
St. John looked terribly confused.
"Well, we are not really exactly engaged."
"But you are going to be, I understand. So far so good. I like the family—good stock—nothing could be better; but, Arthur, let me tell you, you'd better have it announced and above board forthwith. You are not my sister's son, nor the man I took you for, if you could take advantage of the confidence inspired by your position to carry on a flirtation."
The blood flushed into St. John's cheeks.
"I'm not flirting, uncle; that vulgar word is no name for my friendship with Miss Van Arsdel. It is as sacred as the altar. I reverence her; I love her with all my heart. I would lay down my life for her."
"Good! but nobody wants you to lay down your life. That is quite foreign to the purpose. What is wanting is, that you step out like a man and define your position with regard to Miss Van Arsdel before the world; otherwise all the gossips will make free with her name and yours. Depend upon it, Arthur, a man has done too much or too little when a young lady's name is in every one's mouth in connection with his, without a definite engagement."
"It is all my fault, uncle. I hadn't the remotest idea. It's all my fault—all. I had no thought of what the world would say; no idea that we were remarked—but, believe me, our intimacy has been, from first to last, entirely of my seeking. It has grown on us gradually, till I find she is more to me than any one ever has been or can be. Whether I am as much to her, I cannot tell. My demands have been humble. We are not engaged, but it shall not be my fault if another day passes and we are not."
"Right, my boy. I knew you. You were no nephew of mine if you didn't feel, when your eyes were open, the honor of the thing. God made you a gentleman before he made you a priest, and there's but one way for a gentleman in a case like this. If there's anything I despise, it's a priest who uses his priestly influence, under this fine name and that, to steal from a woman love that doesn't belong to him, and that he never can return, and never ought to. If a man thinks he can do more good as a single man and a missionary, well; I honor him, but let him make the sacrifice honestly. Don't let him want pretty girls for intimate friends or guardian angels, or Christian sisters, or any such trumpery. It's dishonest and disloyal; it is unfair to the woman and selfish in the man."
"Well, uncle, I trust you say all this because you don't think it of me; as I know my heart before God, I say I have not been doing so mean and cowardly a thing. There was a time when I thought I never should marry. Those were my days of ignorance. I did not know how much a true woman might teach me, and how much I needed such a guide, even in my church work."
"In short, my boy, you found out that the Lord was right when he said, 'It is not good for man to be alone.' We pay the Lord the compliment once in a while to believe he knows best. Depend on it, Arthur, that Christian families are the Lord's church, and better than any guild of monks and nuns whatsoever."
All which was listened to by Mr. St. John with a radiant countenance. It is all down-hill when you are showing a man that it is his duty to do what he wants to do. Six months before, St. John would have fought every proposition of this speech, and brought up the whole of the Middle Ages to back him. Now, he was as tractable as heart could wish.
"After all, Uncle," he said, at last, "what if she will not have me? And what if I am not the man to make her happy?"
"Oh, if you ask prettily, I fancy she won't say nay; and then you must make her happy. There are no two ways about that, my boy."
"I'm not half good enough for her," said St. John.
"Like enough. We are none of us good enough for these women; but, luckily, that isn't apt to be their opinion."
St. John started out from the conference with an alert step. In two days more, rumor was met with open confirmation. St. John had had the decisive interview with Angie, had seen and talked with her father and mother, and been invited to a family dinner; and Angie wore on her finger an engagement-ring. There was no more to be said now. Mr. St. John was an idol who had stepped down from his pedestal into the ranks of common men. He was no longer a mysterious power—an angel of the churches, but a man of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it is an undoubted fact that, for all the purposes of this mortal life, a good man is better than an angel.
But not so thought the ecstasia of his chapel. A holy father, in a long black gown, with a cord round his waist, and with a skull and hour-glass in his cell, is somehow thought to be nearer to heaven than a family man with a market-basket on his arm; but we question whether the angels themselves think so. There may be as holy and unselfish a spirit in the way a market-basket is filled as in a week of fasting; and the oil of gladness may make the heavenward wheels run more smoothly than the spirit of heaviness. The first bright day, St. John took Angie a drive in the park, a proceeding so evidently of the earth, earthy, that Miss Gusher hid her face, after the manner of the seraphim, as he passed; but he and Angie were too happy and too busy in their new world to care who looked or who didn't, and St. John rather triumphantly remembered the free assertion of the great apostle, "Have we not power to lead about a sister or a wife?" and felt sure that he should have been proud and happy to show Angie to St. Paul himself.
Alice was at first slightly disappointed, but the compensation of receiving so very desirable a brother-in-law reconciled her to the loss of her poetic and distant ideal.
As to little Mrs. Betsey, she fell upon Angie's neck in rapture; and her joy was heightened in the convincing proof that she was now able to heap upon the unbelieving head of Dorcas that she had been in the right all along.
When dear little Mrs. Betsey was excited, her words and thoughts came so thick that they were like a flock of martins, all trying to get out of a martin-box together,—chattering, twittering, stumbling over each other, and coming out at heads and points in a wonderful order. When the news had been officially sealed to her, she begged the right to carry it to Dorcas, and ran home and burst in upon her with shining eyes and two little pink spots in her cheeks.
"There, Dorcas, they are engaged. Now, didn't I say so, Dorcas? I knew it. I told you so, that Thursday evening. Oh, you can't fool me; and that day I saw him standing on the doorstep! I was just as certain! I saw it just as plain! What a shame for people to talk about him as they do, and say he's going to Rome. I wonder what they think now? The sweetest girl in New York, certainly. Oh! and that ring he bought! Just as if he could be a Roman Catholic! It's big as a pea, and sparkles beautiful, and's got the 'Lord is thy keeper' in Hebrew on the inside. I want to see Mrs. Wouvermans and ask her what she thinks now. Oh, and he took her to ride in such a stylish carriage, white lynx lap-robe, and all! I don't care if he does burn candles in his chapel. What does that prove? It don't prove anything. I like to see people have some logic about things, for my part, don't you, Dorcas? Don't you?"
"Mercy! yes, Betsey," said Miss Dorcas, delighted to see her sister so excitedly happy, "though I don't exactly see my way clear through yours; but no matter."
"I'm going to crochet a toilet cushion for a wedding present, Dorcas, like that one in the red room, you know. I wonder when it will come off? How lucky I have that sweet cap that Mrs. Henderson made. Wasn't it good of her to make it? I hope they'll invite us. Don't you think they will? I suppose it will be in his chapel, with candles and all sorts of new ways. Well, I don't care, so long as folks are good people, what their ways are; do you, Dorcas? I must run up and count the stitches on that cushion this minute!" And Mrs. Betsey upset her basket of worsteds in her zeal, and Jack flew round and round, barking sympathetically. In fact, he was so excited by the general breeze that he chewed up two balls of worsted before recovering his composure. Such was the effect of the news at the old Vanderheyden house.
My Dear Mother: I sit down to write to you with a heart full of the strangest feelings and experiences. I feel as if I had been out in some other world and been brought back again; and now I hardly know myself or where I am. You know I wrote you all about Maggie, and her leaving us, and poor Mary's trouble about her, and how she had been since seen in a very bad neighborhood: I promised Mary faithfully that I would go after her; and so, after all our Christmas labors were over, Harry and I went on a midnight excursion with Mr. James, the Methodist minister, who has started the mission there.
It seemed to me very strange that a minister could have access to all those places where he proposed to take us, and see all that was going on without insult or danger but he told me that he was in the constant habit of passing through the dance-houses, and talking with the people who kept them, and that he had never met with any rudeness or incivility.
He told us that in the very center of this worst district of New York, among drinking saloons and dance-houses, a few Christian people had bought a house in which they had established a mission family, with a room which they use for a chapel; and they hold weekly prayer-meetings, and seek to draw in the wretched people there.
On this evening, he said, they were about to give a midnight supper at the Home to any poor houseless wanderer whom they could find in those wretched streets, or who hung about the drinking-saloons.
"Our only hope in this mission," he said, "is to make these wretched people feel that we really are their friends and seek their good; and, in order to do this, we must do something for them that they can understand. They can all understand a good supper, when they are lying about cold and hungry and homeless, on a stinging cold night like this; and we don't begin to talk to them till we have warmed and fed them. It surprises them to have us take all this trouble to do them good; it awakens their curiosity; they wonder what we do it for, and then, when we tell them it is because we are Christians, and love them, and want to save them, they believe us. After that, they are willing to come to our meetings, and attend to what we say."
Now, this seemed to me good philosophy, but I could not help saying: "Dear Mr. James, how could you have the courage to begin a mission in such a dreadful place; and how can you have any hope of saving such people?" And he answered: "With God, all things are possible. That was what Christ came for—to seek and save the lost. The Good Shepherd," he said, "leaves the ninety and nine safe sheep in the fold, and goes after one that is lost until he finds it." I asked him who supported the Home, and he said it was supported by God, in answer to prayer; that they made no public solicitation; had nobody pledged to help them; but that contributions were constantly coming in from one Christian person or another, as they needed them; that the superintendent and matron of the Home had no stated salary, and devoted themselves to the work in the same faith that the food and raiment needed would be found for them; and so far it had not failed.
All this seemed very strange to me. It seemed a sort of literal rendering of some of the things in the Bible that we pass over as having no very definite meaning. Mr. James seemed so quiet, so assured, so calm and unexcited, that one couldn't help believing him.
It seemed a great way that we rode, in parts of the city that I never saw before, in streets whose names were unknown to me, till finally we alighted before a plain house in a street full of drinking-saloons. As we drove up, we heard the sound of hymn-singing, and looked into a long room set with benches which seemed full of people. We stopped a moment to listen to the words of an old Methodist hymn;