The Supply at Saint Agatha's

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

The people stared in one another's faces for an astounded moment, and then, without words, with hanging heads, they moved to the open air and melted out of the church.

The sexton rushed up to the vestryman, pale with fear.

"Sir," he whispered, "he is not in the vestry-room. He has taken himself away—God knows whither. What are we to do?"

"Trust him," replied the church officer, with a face of peace, "and God who sent him. Who he may be, I know no more than you; but that he is a man of God I know. He is about his Father's business. Do not meddle with it."

"Lord forbid!" cried the sexton. "I'd sooner meddle with something I can understand."

Upon the afternoon of that long-remembered Sunday there was seen in Saint Agatha's the strangest sight that those ancient walls had witnessed since the corner-stone was laid with a silver trowel in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost "whom we, this people, worship."

Before the chimes rang for the vesper service, the house was filled. Before the bronze lips of the bells were mute, the pews were packed. Before the stranger reappeared, the nave and the transept overflowed. The startled sexton was a leaf before the wind of the surging crowd. He could not even enforce the fire-laws, and the very aisles were jammed. Who carried the story? How do such wraiths of rumors fly?

Every member of that church not absent from town or known to be ill in his bed sought his pew that afternoon. Many indeed left their sick-rooms to be present at that long-remembered service. But no man or woman of these came alone. Each brought a chosen companion; many, two or three; some came accompanied by half a dozen worshipers: and upon these invited guests Saint Agatha's looked with an astonishment that seemed to be half shame; for up those velvet aisles there moved an array of human faces at which the very angels and virtues in the painted windows seemed to turn their heads and stare.

Such wretchedness, such pallor, hunger, cold, envy, sickness, sin, and shame were as unknown to those dedicated and decorated walls as the inmates of hell. Rags and disease, uncleanliness and woe and want, trod the house of God as if they had the right there. Every pew in the church was thrown open. Tattered blanket shawls jostled velvet cloaks, and worn little tan-colored reefers, half concealing the shivering cotton blouses of last summer, rubbed against sealskin furs that swept from throat to foot. Wretched men, called in by the throb of repentance that follows a debauch, lifted their haggard eyes to the chancel from the pews of the wardens, and women of the town sat gently beside the "first ladies" of the parish and of the city. There were a few ragged children in the audience, wan and shrewd, sitting drearily beside mothers to whom they did not cling. The pew of our friend, the vestryman, was filled to overflowing. The wife with the under lip sat beside him, and did not protest. She had herself gone with him to the hospital to select their guests. For their pew was filled with the crippled and other sick who could neither walk nor afford to ride, and whom their own carriage had brought to Saint Agatha's. One of these, a woman, came on crutches, and the lady helped her, not knowing in the least how to do it; and a man who had not used his feet for six years was lifted in by the pew-owner and his coachman and butler, and carried the length of the broad aisle.

The church, as we say, was packed long before the preacher appeared. He came punctually to his appointment, like any ordinary man. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was declining when he glided across the chancel. Already shadows were lying heavily in the corners of the church and under the galleries on the darker side. A few lights were glimmering about the chancel, but these served only to illuminate the stranger's form and face; they did not lighten the mass of hushed and appealing humanity before him.