A Singular Life

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

He walked back to Galilee Hall slowly. His bent eyes traced the net of shadows around his reluctant feet. What was that? Inspired moonshine? Inspired moonshine! He lifted his face and looked abroad on Cesarea Hill.

His head was heavy, and his heart throbbed. Perhaps at that moment, if he had been asked which was the greater mystery, God or woman, this honest man could not have answered.

With sudden hunger for solitude, he went to his room. But it was full of fellow-students. Fenton was there, and Tompkinton, Jaynes, Bent, and Holt, and the middler. They received him noisily, and he sat down among them. They related the stories current in denominational circles,—ecclesiastical jokes and rumors of sectarian conflicts; they interchanged gossip about who was called where, and what churches were said to lack supplies, the figures of salaries, the statistics of revivals, and the prospects of settlement open to the senior class.

Bayard listened silently. His heart was not with them, nor in their talk. Yet he criticised himself for criticising them. Besides, he had received no call to settle anywhere.

Almost alone among the intellectual men of his class, he found himself, at the end of his preparatory education, undesired and unsummoned by the churches to fill a pulpit of them all.

He had done his share, like the rest, of that preliminary preaching which decides the future of a man in his profession; but he stood, on the eve of his graduation, among his mates, marked and quivering,—this sensitive fellow,—that most miserable of all educated, restless, and wretched young men with whom our land abounds, “a minister without a call.”

He had said nothing to Helen Carruth about this. A man does not tell a woman such things until he has to.

Something in his face struck the students quiet after a while, and they dropped away from the room. His friend Fenton made the move.

“It is said,” he whispered to Tompkinton, as they clattered down the dusty stairs of Galilee Hall, “that his trouble with that New Hampshire Council has followed him. It is reported that his license did not come easily. It has got abroad that he is not sound. Nothing could be more unfortunate—or more unnecessary,” added Fenton in his too cheerful voice. There had been no doubt of his theology. He had received three calls. As yet he had accepted none. He expected to be married in the fall, and looked for a larger salary.