CHAPTER XVI. THE MINISTER'S VISIT

Mr. St. John was sitting in his lonely study, contemplating with some apprehension the possibilities of the evening.

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

As we said, Mr. St. John's life had been that of a recluse and scholar, up to the time of his ordination as a priest. He was, by birth and education, a New England Puritan, with all those habits of reticence and self-control which a New England education enforces. His religious experiences, being those of reaction from a sterile and severe system of intellectual dogmatism, still carried with them a tinge of the precision and narrowness of his early life. His was a nature like some of the streams of his native mountains, inclining to cut for itself straight, deep, narrow currents; and all his religious reading and thinking had run in one channel. As to social life, he first began to find it among his inferiors; among those to whom he came, not as a brother man, but as an authoritative teacher—a master, divinely appointed, set apart from the ordinary ways of men. In his rôle of priest he felt strong. In the belief of his divine and sacred calling, he moved among the poor and ignorant with a conscious superiority, as a being of a higher sphere. There was something in this which was a protection to his natural diffidence; he seemed among his parishioners to feel surrounded by a certain sacred atmosphere that shielded him from criticism. But to mingle in society as man with man, to lay aside the priest and be only the gentleman, appeared on near approach a severe undertaking. As a priest at the altar he was a privileged being, protected by a kind of divine aureole, like that around a saint. In general society he was but a man, to make his way only as other men; and, as a man, St. John distrusted and undervalued himself. As he thought it over, he inly assented to the truth of what Eva had so artfully stated—that this ordeal of society was indeed, for him, the true test of self-sacrifice. Like many other men of refined natures, he was nervously sensitive to personal influences. The social sphere of those around him affected him, through sympathy, almost as immediately as the rays of the sun impress the daguerreotype plate; but he felt it his duty to subject himself to the ordeal the more because he dreaded it. "After all," he said to himself, "what is my faith worth, if I cannot carry it among men? Do I hold a lamp with so little oil in it that the first wind will blow it out?"

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

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

"Mr. St. Don; Mr. St. Don."

He looked hastily down and around, to meet the gaze of a pair of dark childish eyes looking forth from a thin, sharp little face. Gradually, he recognized in the thin, barefoot child, the little girl whom he had seen in Angie's class, leaning on her.

"What do you want, my child?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who is she? Who do you mean?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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