A Singular Life

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

And yet, at every march and countermarch in the drill of duty, he was aware of her. It could not be said that she ever overstepped the invisible line which he had elected to draw between them; though it might be said that she had the fine pride which did not seem to see it. Helen had the quiet, maidenly reserve of an elder and more delicate day than ours. To throw her young enthusiasm into his work without obtruding herself upon his attention, was a difficult procedure, for which she had at once the decorum and the wit.

At unexpected crises and in unthought-of ways he came upon her footprints or her sleight-of-hand. Helen’s methods were purely her own. She followed neither law nor gospel; no rules or precedents controlled her. She relieved what suffering she chose, and omitted where she did elect; and he was sometimes astonished at the common sense of her apparent willfulness. She had no more training in sociological problems than the goldenrod upon the bosom of her white gown; yet she seldom made a serious mistake. In a word, this summer girl, playing at charity for a season’s amusement, poured a refreshing amount of novelty, vigor, ingenuity, and feminine defiance of routine into the labors of the lonely man. His too serious and anxious people found her as diverting as a pretty parlor play. A laugh ran around like a light flame whenever she came upon the sombre scene. She took a bevy of idle girls with her, and gave entertainments on which Angel Alley hung, a breathless and admiring crowd. She played, she sang, she read, she decorated. Pictures sprang on barren walls; books stood on empty shelves; games crowded the smoking-room; a piano replaced the painstaking melodeon; life and light leaped where she trod, into the poor and unpopular place. The people took to her one of the strong, loyal fancies of the coast. Unsuspected by her, or by himself, she began, even then, to be known among them as “the minister’s girl.” But this hurt nobody, neither herself nor him, and their deference to her never defaulted. In the indulgence of that summer’s serious mood, Helen seldom met, he was forced to suspect that she purposely avoided, the preacher. Often he entered a laughing home from which she had just vanished. Sometimes—but less often—he found that she had preceded him where death and trouble were. Their personal interviews were rare, and of her seeking, never.

“She is amusing herself with a novelty,” he thought. Then came the swift, unbidden question, If this is her beautiful whim, what would her dedication be?

Since, to play at helping a man’s work, though at the tip of the sceptre by which he held her back, meant sense and sympathy, fervor and courage like this, what would it be to the great and solemn purpose of his life, if she shared it, crowned queen?

It was an August evening, sultry and smoky. Forest fires had been burning for a week on the wooded side of the harbor, and the air was thick. It was Sunday, and the streets and wharves and beaches of Windover surged with vacuous eyes and irritable passions. The lock-ups were full, the saloons overflowed. The ribald song and excessive oath of the coast swept up and down like air currents. There had been several accidents and some fights. Rum ran in streams. It was one of the stifling evenings when the most decent tenement retains only the sick or the helpless, and when the occupants of questionable sailors’ boarding-houses and nameless dens crawl out like vermin fleeing from fire. It was one of the nights when the souls of women go to perdition, and when men do not argue with their vices. It was one of the nights when ease and cool, luxury and delicacy, forget the gehenna that they escape; and when only the strong few remember the weakness of the many.

Upon the long beach of fine white sand which spanned the space between the docks and the cliffs of the wooded coast, there gathered that evening a large and unusual crowd. Angel Alley was there en masse. The wharves poured out a mighty delegation. Dories put out from anchored vessels whose prows nodded in the inner harbor, and their crews swarmed to the beach in schools, like fish to a net.

A few citizens of another sort, moved, one might say, from curiosity, innocent or malicious, joined themselves to the fishermen and sailors. Their numbers were increased by certain of the summer people from the Point, drawn from their piazzas and their hammocks by rumors of a sensation. An out-of-door service, said to be the first of its kind conducted by the remarkable young preacher of such excellent family and such eccentric career, was not without its attractions even on the hottest evening of the season. There might have been easily eight hundred or a thousand people facing the light temporary desk or pulpit which had been erected at the head of the beach for the speaker’s use.

The hour was early, and it would have been very light but for the smoke in the air, through which the sun hung, quivering and sinister, with the malevolent blood-red color of drought and blasting heat.