A Singular Life

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

VII.

Jane Granite stood at the foot of the steep, uncarpeted stairs. She had a stone-china cup filled with tea in her hand. She had hesitation in her mind, and longing in her heart. When the minister had sent word that he would eat no supper, it was plain that something must be done. Her mother was out, and Jane had no superior intelligence to consult. For Mrs. Granite was appointed to the doom that overtakes the women of a poor and struggling religious movement; she was ex-officio beggar for the new mission; on this especial occasion she was charged with the duty of wringing a portion of the minister’s almost invisible salary out of the least unfriendly citizens of the town. The minister had observed her from his window, tugging at her black skirts as she sallied forth, ankle-deep, in the slush of the February afternoon; and his brows had darkened at the sight. For the good woman would trudge and soak five miles for—what? Possibly five dollars. How dreary the devices of small people to achieve large ends!

To the young man who had never had to think what anything cost, the cold, pecuniary facts of his position were galling past the power of these simple people to comprehend.

He did not care too much on his own account. He felt more surprise than impatience to see his coat turn shiny and frayed, and to know that he could not get another. He was learning not to mind his straw mattress as much as he did at first; and to educate himself to going without magazines, and to the quality of Mrs. Granite’s tea. When a man deliberately elects a great personal sacrifice, he does not concern himself with its details as women are more likely to do.

But there were aspects of his chosen work to which his soul was as sore as a boy’s. He could not accustom himself with the ease of a poor man’s son to the fact that a superb, supreme faith like the Christianity of Christ must beg for its living. “It degrades!” he thought, looking up from his books. “Lowell was right when he said that no man should preach who hadn’t an independent property.” His Bible fell from his clenched hand; he picked it up penitently, and tenderly smoothed the crumpled leaf at which it had opened. Half unconsciously, he glanced, and read:—

“Take no scrip in your purse;” his burning eye followed along the page; softened, and grew moist.

“Perhaps on the whole,” he said aloud, “He really knew as much about it as any American poet.”

He returned patiently to his preparation for the evening service, for he worked hard for these fishermen and drunkards—harder than he had ever worked at anything in his life. To make them one half hour’s talk, he read, he ransacked, he toiled, he thought, he dreamed, he prayed.

The only thing which he had asked leave to take from his uncle’s house, was his own library. It piled Mrs. Granite’s spare chamber from the old, brown carpet to the low and dingy ceiling. Barricades of books stood on the floor by the ugly little coal-stove; and were piled upon the stained pine table at which he sat to study in a hard wood chair with a turkey-red cushion. Of the pictures, dear to his youth, and to his trained taste, but two had come through with him in the flying leap from Beacon Street to Mrs. Granite’s. Over the table in his study a fine engraving watched him. It was Guido’s great Saint Michael. Above the straw mattress in the chilly closet where he slept hung a large photograph of Leonardo’s Christ; the one from the Last Supper, as it was found in the ruined fresco on the monastery wall.