A Singular Life

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

“Oh, come, Bayard!” urged the other. “There’s where you miss it. Why not be comfortable? I don’t see that Christianity and misery need be identical. You are certain to have a tough time if you go on as you begin. Talk about election, foreordination, predestination! You take the whole set of condemnatory doctrines into your hands and settle your own fate beforehand. A man doesn’t leave Providence any free will who sets out in life as you do.”

“Do I strike you that way?” asked the young man anxiously. “If there is anything I abhor, it is a gloomy clergyman!”

“There you are again! Now I’m not finding fault with you,” began Fenton, settling his chin in his comfortable way. “Your soul is all nerves, man. It is a ganglion. You need more tissue round it—like me.”

The two young men stood at the foot of the bare, wooden stairs in the cold entry of Galilee Hall, at the dividing of their ways. It was the usual luck of the other that he should have a southwest room, first floor. But Bayard climbed to his northwest third-story corner uncomplainingly. It occurred to him to say that there were objects in life as important, on the whole, as being comfortable. But he did not. He only asked if the lectures on the Nicene Creed were to be continued at four, and went on, shivering, to his room.

It was a bitter February afternoon, and the wind blew the wrong way for northwest corners. Bayard had spent the day in coddling his big base-burner, which now rewarded him by a decent glow as he entered his study. He had no chum, and thanked God for it; he curled into the shell of his solitude contentedly, and turned to his books at once, plunging headlong into the gulf of the Nicene Creed. At the end of two hours he got up, shivering. The subject was colder than the climate, and he felt congealed to the soul. He flung open his bedroom door. An icy breath came from that monastic cell. He thought, “I really must get some double windows.” He had purposely refrained all winter from this luxury lest he should seem to have more comforts than his poorer classmates.

The early winter sunset was coming on, and Cesarea Hill was wrapping herself in gold and purple and in silver sheen to meet it. Bayard went to his window, and stood, with his hands locked behind him, looking abroad.

The Seminary lawns (old Cesareans spoke of them as the Seminary “yard”), encrusted in two feet of snow, took on the evening colors in great sweeps, as if made by one or two strokes of a mighty brush. The transverse paths that cut across the snow, under rows of ancient elm-trees, had the shape of a cross. The delicate, bare branches of the elms were etched against a blazing west. Above, the metallic sky hung cold and clear. A few students were crossing the lawns, tripping and slipping on the paths of gray and glittering ice. In the wide street beyond, a number of people were breasting the blast, valiantly prepared for a mile’s walk to the evening mail. The night threatened to be very cold. Across the street, the Professors’ houses stood in a serious row. Beyond them, the horizon line ran to Wachusett, undisturbed; and the hill and valley view melted into noble outlines under snow and sun.

Emanuel Bayard stood at his window looking across to the hills. The setting sun shone full in his face. I see no reason why one should hesitate to give a man full credit for personal beauty because one chances to be his biographer, and do not hesitate to say that the attractiveness of this young man was extraordinary.

He was of slender build, but tall, and with good square shoulders that sturdily supported his head. He had the forehead of a student, the carriage of a man of society, and the beauty of a myth, or a saint, which may be the same thing. His complexion was a trifle fair for a man; his brown hair, shot with gold, curled defiantly all over his head; when he first decided to study theology, he used to try to brush it straight, but he might as well have tried to brush Antinous out of fable. He had bright, human, healthy color, and, as has been intimated, a remarkable smile. His lips were delicately cut; they curved and trembled with almost pitiful responsiveness to impressions. Thought and feeling chased over his face like the tints of a vibrating prism cast on a white surface. It was in his eyes that the extreme sensitiveness of his nature seemed to concentrate and strengthen into repose. His nearest friend might have said of Bayard’s eyes, They are hazel, and said no more. Some stranger in the street, to whom the perception of the unusual was given, might have passed him, and said, That man’s eyes are living light. Indeed, strangers often moved back and looked again at him; while people who knew him best sometimes turned away from him uncomfortably, as if he blinded them. This power to dazzle, which we often see in merely clear-minded persons with a well-painted iris, may not be associated in the least with the higher nature, but even the contrary. It was the peculiarity about Bayard that his eye seemed to be the highest as well as the brightest fact in any given personal situation. Neither a prophet nor a cut-throat would for an instant have questioned the spiritual supremacy of the man.

In Paris, once, he was thrown in the way of a celebrated adventuress, and she confessed to him, sobbing, as if he had been her priest, within an hour. Rank is of the soul, and Bayard’s was unmistakable. Beauty like his is as candid, in its way, as certain forms of vice. It is impossible for him to conceal his descent who is born a spiritual prince.