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 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:

"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:

"There are moments in life when the heart is so full of emotion
That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble
Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,
Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together."

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.