We and Our Neighbors: or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street

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.

CHAPTER XVII
OUR FIRST THURSDAY

The Henderson's first "Evening" was a social success. The little parlors were radiant with the blaze of the wood-fire, which gleamed and flashed and made faces at itself in the tall, old-fashioned brass andirons, and gave picturesque tints to the room.

Eva's tea-table was spread in one corner, dainty with its white drapery, and with her pretty wedding-present of china upon it – not china like Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden's, of the real old Chinese fabric, but china fresh from the modern improvements of Paris, and so adorned with violets and grasses and field flowers that it made a December tea-table look like a meadow where one could pick bouquets. Every separate tea-cup and saucer was an artist's study, and a topic for conversation.

The arrangement of the rooms had been a day's work of careful consideration between Eva and Angelique. There was probably not a perch or eyrie accessible by chairs, tables, or ottomans, where these little persons had not been mounted, at divers times of the day, trying the effect of various floral decorations. The amount of fatigue that can be gone through in the mere matter of preparing one little set of rooms for an evening reception, is something that men know nothing about; only the sisterhood could testify to that frantic "fanaticism of the beautiful" which seizes them when an evening company is in contemplation, and their house is to put, so to speak, its best foot forward. Many an aching back and many a drooping form could testify how the woman spends herself in advance, in this sort of altar dressing for home worship.

But, as a consequence, the little rooms were bowers of beauty. The pictures were overshadowed with nodding wreaths of pressed ferns and bright bitter-sweet berries, with glossy holly leaves; the statuettes had backgrounds of ivy which threw out their whiteness. Harry's little workroom adjoining the parlor had become a green alcove, where engravings and books were spread out under the shade of a German student-lamp. Everywhere that a vase of flowers could make a pretty show, there was a vase of flowers, though it was December, and the ground frozen like lead. For the next door neighbor, sweet Ruth Baxter, had clipped and snipped every rosebud, and mignonette blossom, and even a splendid calla lily, with no end of scarlet geranium, and sent them in to Eva; and Miss Dorcas had cut away about half of an ancient and well-kept rose-geranium, which was the apple of her eye, to help out her little neighbor. So they reveled in flowers, without cutting those which grew on Eva's own bushes, which were all turned to the light and arranged in appropriate situations, blossoming their best. The little dining-room also was thrown open, and dressed, and adorned with flowers, pressed ferns, berries, and autumn leaves; with a distant perspective of light in it, that there might be a place of withdrawal and quiet chats over books and pictures. In every spot were disposed objects to start conversation. Books of autographs, portfolios of sketches, photographs of distinguished people, stereoscopic views, with stereoscope to explain them, – all sorts of intervening means and appliances by which people, not otherwise acquainted, should find something to talk about in common.

Eva was admirably seconded by her friends, from long experience versed in the art of entertaining. Mrs. Van Arsdel, gentle, affable, society-loving, and with a quick tact at reading the feelings of others, was a host in herself. She at once took possession of Miss Dorcas Vanderheyden, who came in a very short dress of rich India satin, and very yellow and mussy but undeniably precious old lace, and walked the rooms with a high-shouldered independence of manner most refreshing in this day of long trains and modern inconveniences.

"Sensible old girl," was Jim Fellows's comment in Alice's ear as Miss Dorcas marched in; for which, of course, he got a reproof, and was ordered to remember and keep himself under.

As to Mrs. Betsey, with her white hair, and lace cap with lilac ribbons, and black dress, with a flush of almost girlish timidity in her pink cheeks, she won an instant way to the heart of Angelique, who took her arm and drew her to a cosy arm-chair before a table of engravings, and began an animated conversation on a book of etchings of the "Old Houses of New York." These were subjects on which Mrs. Betsey could talk, and talk entertainingly. They carried her back to the days of her youth; bringing back scenes, persons, and places long forgotten, her knowledge of which was full of entertainment. Angelique wonderingly saw her transfigured before her eyes. It seemed as if an after-glow from the long set sun of youthful beauty flashed back in the old, worn face, as her memory went back to the days of youth and hope. It is a great thing to the old and faded to feel themselves charming once more, even for an hour; and Mrs. Betsey looked into the blooming face and wide open, admiring, hazel eyes of Angelique, and felt that she was giving pleasure, that this charming young person was really delighted to hear her talk. It was one of those "cups of cold water" that Angelique was always giving to neglected and out-of-the-way people, without ever thinking that she did so, or why she did it, just because she was a sweet, kind-hearted, loving little girl.

When Mr. St. John, with an apprehensive spirit, adventured his way into the room, he felt safe and at ease in a moment. All was light, and bright, and easy – nobody turned to look at him, and it seemed the easiest thing in the world to thread his way through busy chatting groups to where Eva made a place for him by her side at the tea-table, passed him his cup of tea, and introduced him to Dr. Campbell, who sat on her other side, cutting the leaves of a magazine.

"You see," said Eva, laughing, "I make our Doctor useful on the Fourier principle. He is dying to get at those magazine articles, so I let him cut the leaves and take a peep along here and there, but I forbid reading – in our presence, men have got to give over absorbing, and begin radiating. Doesn't St. Paul say, Mr. St. John, that if women are to learn anything they are to ask their husbands at home? and doesn't that imply that their husbands at home are to talk to them, and not sit reading newspapers?"

"I confess I never thought of that inference from the passage," said Mr. St. John, smiling.

"But the modern woman," said Dr. Campbell, "scorns to ask her husband at home. She holds that her husband should ask her."

"Oh, well, I am not the modern woman. I go for the old boundaries and the old privileges of my sex; and besides, I am a good church woman and prefer to ask my husband. But I insist, as a necessary consequence, that he must hear me and answer me, as he cannot do if he is reading newspapers or magazines. Isn't that case fairly argued, Mr. St. John?"

"I don't see but it is."

"Well, then, the spirit of it applies to the whole of your cultured and instructive sex. Men, in the presence of women, ought always to be prepared to give them information, to answer questions, and make themselves generally entertaining and useful."

"You see, Mr. St. John," said Dr. Campbell, "that Mrs. Henderson has a dangerous facility for generalizing. Set her to interpreting and there's no saying where her inferences mightn't run."

"I'd almost release Mr. St. John from my rules, to allow him to look over this article of yours, though, Dr. Campbell," said Eva. "Harry has read it to me, and I said, along in different parts of it, if ministers only knew these things, how much good they might do!"

"What is the article?"

"It is simply something I wrote on 'Abnormal Influences upon the Will;' it covers a pretty wide ground as to the question of human responsibility and the recovery of criminals, and all that."

Mr. St. John remembered at this moment the case of the poor woman whom he had visited that afternoon, and the periodical fatality which was making her family life a shipwreck, and he turned to Dr. Campbell a face so full of eager inquiry and dawning thought that Eva felt that the propitious moment was come to leave them together, and instantly she moved from her seat between them, to welcome a new comer who was entering the room.

"I've got them together," she whispered to Harry a few minutes after, as she saw that the two were turned towards each other, apparently intensely absorbed in conversation.

The two might have formed a not unapt personification of flesh and spirit. Dr. Campbell, a broad-shouldered, deep-breathed, long-limbed man, with the proudly set head and quivering nostrils of a high-blooded horse – an image of superb physical vitality: St. John, so delicately and sparely built, with his Greek forehead and clear blue eye, the delicate vibration of his cleanly cut lips, and the cameo purity of every outline of his profile. Yet was he not without a certain air of vigor, the outshining of spiritual forces. One could fancy Campbell as the Berserker who could run, race, wrestle, dig, and wield the forces of nature, and St. John as the poet and orator who could rise to higher regions and carry souls upward with him. It takes both kinds to make up a world.

And now glided into the company the vision of two women in soft, dove-colored silks, with white crape kerchiefs crossed upon their breasts, and pressed crape caps bordering their faces like a transparent aureole. There was the neighbor, Ruth Baxter, round, rosy, young, blooming, but dressed in the straitest garb of her sect. With her back turned, you might expect to see an aged woman stricken in years, so prim and antique was the fashion of her garments; but when her face was turned, there was the rose of youth blooming amid the cool snows of cap and kerchief. The smooth pressed hair rippled and crinkled in many a wave, as if it would curl if it dared, and the round blue eyes danced with a scarce suppressed light of cheer that might have become mirthfulness, if set free; but yet the quaint primness of her attire set off her womanly charms beyond all arts of the toilet.

Her companion was a matronly person, who might be fifty or thereabouts. She had that calm, commanding serenity that comes to woman only from the habitual exaltation of the spiritual nature. Sibyl Selwyn was known in many lands as one of the most zealous and best accepted preachers of her sect. Her life had been an inspiration of pity and mercy; and she had been in far countries of the earth, where there was sin to be reproved or sorrow to be consoled, a witness to testify and a medium through whom guilt and despair might learn something of the Divine Pity.

She bore about with her a power of personal presence very remarkable. Her features were cast in large and noble mould; her clear cut, wide-open gray eyes had a penetrating yet kind expression, that seemed adapted both to search and to cheer, and went far to justify the opinion of her sect, which attributed to Sibyl in an eminent degree the apostolic gift of the discerning of spirits. Somehow, with her presence there seemed to come an atmosphere of peace and serenity, such as one might fancy clinging about even the raiment of one just stepped from a higher sphere. Yet, so gliding and so dove-like was the movement by which the two had come in – so perfectly, cheerfully, and easily had they entered into the sympathies of the occasion, that their entrance made no more break or disturbance in the social circle than the stealing in of a ray of light through a church window.

Eva had risen and gone to them at once, had seated them at the opposite side of the little tea-table and poured their tea, chatting the while and looking into their serene faces with a sincere cordiality which was reflected back from them in smiles of confidence.

Sibyl admired the pictures, flowers, and grasses on her tea-cup with the naïve interest of a child; for one often remarks, in intercourse with her sect, how the æsthetic sense, unfrittered and unworn by the petting of self-indulgence, is prompt to appreciate beauty.

Eva felt a sort of awed pleasure in Sibyl's admiration of her pretty things, as if an angel guide were stooping to play with her. She felt in her presence like one of earth's unweaned babies.

St. John, in one of the pauses of the conversation, looked up and saw this striking head and face opposite to him; a head reminding him of some of those saintly portraitures of holy women in which Overbeck delights. We have described him as peculiarly impressible under actual social influences. It was only the week before that an application had been made to him for one Sibyl Selwyn to hold a meeting in his little chapel, and sternly refused. His idea of a female preacher had been largely blended with the mediæval masculine contempt of woman and his horror of modern woman public teachers and lecturers. When this serene vision rose like an exhalation before him, he did not at first recall the applicant for his chapel, but he looked at her admiringly in a sort of dazed wonder, and inquired of Dr. Campbell in a low voice, "Who is that?"

"Oh," said Dr. Campbell, "don't you know? that's the Quaker preacher, Sibyl Selwyn; the woman who has faced and put down the devil in places where you couldn't and I wouldn't go."

St. John felt the blood flush in his cheeks, and a dim idea took possession of him that, if some had entertained angels unawares, others unawares had rejected them.

"Yes," said Dr. Campbell, "that woman has been alone, at midnight, through places where you and I could not go without danger of our heads; and she has said words to bar-tenders and brothel-keepers that would cost us our lives. But she walks out of it all, as calm as you see her to-night. I know that kind of woman – I was brought up among them. They are an interesting physiological study; the over-cerebration of the spiritual faculties among them occasions some very peculiar facts and phenomena. I should like to show you a record I have kept. It gives them at times an almost miraculous ascendancy over others. I fancy," he said carelessly, "that your legends of the saints could furnish a good many facts of the same sort."

At this moment, Eva came up in her authoritative way as mistress of ceremonies, took Mr. St. John by the arm, and, walking across with him, seated him by Sibyl Selwyn, introduced them to each other, and left them. St. John was embarrassed, but Sibyl received him with the perfect composure in which she sat enthroned.

"Arthur St. John," she said, "I am glad to meet thee. I am interested in thy work among the poor of this quarter, and have sought the Lord for thee in it."

"I am sure I thank you," said St. John, thus suddenly reduced to primitive elements and spoken to on the simple plane of his unvarnished humanity. It is seldom, after we come to mature years and have gone out into the world, that any one addresses us simply by our name without prefix or addition of ceremony. It is the province only of rarest intimacy or nearest relationship, and it was long since St. John had been with friend or relation who could thus address him. It took him back to childhood and his mother's knee. He was struggling with a vague sense of embarrassment, when he remembered the curt and almost rude manner in which he had repelled her overture to speak in his chapel, and the contempt he had felt for her at the time. In the presence of the clear, saintly face, it seemed as if he had been unconsciously guilty of violating a shrine. He longed to apologize, but he did not know how to begin.

"I feel," he said, "that I am inexperienced and that the work is very great. You," he added, "have had longer knowledge of it than I; perhaps I might learn something of you."

"Thou wilt be led," said Sibyl, with the same assured calmness, "be not afraid."

"I am sorry – I was sorry," said St. John, hesitating, "to refuse the help you offered in speaking in my chapel, but it is contrary to the rules of the church."

"Be not troubled. Thee follows thy light. Thee can do no otherways. Thee is but young yet," she said, with a motherly smile.

"I did not know you personally then," he said. "I should like to talk more with you, some time. I should esteem it a favor to have you tell me some of your experiences."

"Some time, if we can sit together in stillness, I might have something given me for thee; this is not the time," said Sibyl, with quiet graciousness.

A light laugh seemed to cut into the gravity of the conversation.

Both turned. Angelique was the center of a gay group to whom she was telling a droll story. Angie had a gift for this sort of thing; and Miss Dorcas and Mrs. Betsey, Mrs. Van Arsdel and Mr. Van Arsdel were gathered around her as, with half-pantomime, half-mimicry, she was giving a street scene in one of her Sunday-school visitations. St. John laughed too; he could not help it. In a moment, however, he seemed to recollect himself, and sighed and said:

"It seems sometimes strange to me that we can allow ourselves to laugh in a world like this. She is only a child or she couldn't."

Sibyl looked tenderly at Angelique. "It is her gift," she said. "She is one of the children of the bride-chamber, who cannot mourn because the bridegroom is with them. It would be better for thee, Arthur St. John, to be more a child. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

St. John was impressed by the calm decision of this woman's manner, and the atmosphere of peace and assurance around her. The half-mystical character of her words fell in with his devout tendencies, and that strange, indefinable something that invests some persons with influence seemed to be with her, and he murmured to himself the words from Comus —

 
"She fables not, and I do feel her words
Set off by some superior power."
 

Mr. St. John had not for a moment during that whole evening lost the consciousness that Angelique was in the room. Through that double sense by which two trains of thought can be going on at the same time, he was sensible of her presence and of what she was doing, through all his talks with other people. He had given one glance, when he came into the room, to the place where she was sitting and entertaining Mrs. Betsey, and without any apparent watchfulness he was yet conscious of every movement she made from time to time. He knew when she dropped her handkerchief, he knew when she rose to get down another book, and when she came to the table and poured for Mrs. Betsey another cup of tea. A subtle exhilaration was in the air. He knew not why everything seemed so bright and cheerful; it is as when a violet or an orange blossom, hid in a distant part of a room, fills the air with a vague deliciousness.

He dwelt dreamily on Sibyl's half mystical words, and felt as if an interpreting angel had sanctioned the charm that he found in this bright, laughing child. He liked to call her a child to himself, it was a pleasant little nook into which he could retreat from a too severe scrutiny of his feelings towards her; for, quite unknown to himself, St. John's heart was fast slipping off into the good old way of Eden.

But we leave him for a peep at other parties. It is amusing to think how many people in one evening company are weaving and winding threads upon their own private, separate spools. Jim Fellows, in the dining-room, was saying to Alice:

"I'm going to bring Hal Stephens and Ben Hubert to you this evening; and by George, Alice, I want you to look after them a little, as you can. They are raw newspaper boys, tumbled into New York; and nobody cares a hang for them. Nobody does care a hang for any stranger body, you know. They haven't a decent place to visit, nor a woman to say a word to them; and yet I tell you they're good fellows. Everybody curses newspaper reporters and that sort of fellow. Nobody has a good word for them. It's small salary, and many kicks and cuffs they get at first; and yet that's the only way to get on the papers, and make a man of yourself at last; and so, as I've got up above the low rounds, I want to help the boys that are down there, and I'll tell you, Alice, it'll do 'em lots of good to know you."

And so Alice was gracious to the new-comers and made them welcome, and showed them pictures, and drew them out to talk, and made them feel that they were entertaining her.

Some women have this power of divining what a man can say, and giving him courage to say it. Alice was one of these; people wondered when they left her how they had been made to talk so well. It was the best and truest part of every one's nature that she gave courage and voice to. This power of young girls to ennoble young men is unhappily one of which too often they are unconscious. Too often the woman, instead of being a teacher in the higher life, is only a flatterer of the weaknesses and lower propensities of the men whose admiration she seeks.

St. John felt frightened and embarrassed with his message to Angie. He had dwelt on it, all his way to the house, as an auspicious key to a conversation which he anticipated with pleasure; yet the evening rolled by, and though he walked round and round, and nearer and nearer, and conversed with this and that one, he did not come to the point of speaking to Angie. Sometimes she was talking to somebody else and he waited; sometimes she was not with anybody else, and then he waited lest his joining her should be remarked. He did not stop to ask himself why on earth it should be remarked any more than if he had spoken to Alice or Eva, or anybody else, but he felt as if it would be.

At last, however, after making several circles about the table where she sat with Mrs. Betsey, he sat down by them, and delivered his message with a formal precision, as if he had been giving her a summons. Angie was all sympathy and sweetness, and readily said she would go and see the poor woman the very next day, and then an awkward pause ensued. She was a little afraid of him as a preternaturally good man, and began to wonder whether she had been laughing too loud, or otherwise misbehaving, in the gaiety of her heart, that evening.