[CHAPTER XXXVII.]
THEREAFTER?
According to the view of the conventional world, the brief, sudden little passage between Mr. St. John and Angelique among the Christmas-greens was to all intents and purposes equivalent to an engagement; and yet, St. John had not actually at that time any thought of marriage.
"Then," says Mrs. Mater-familias, ruffling her plumage, in high moral style, "he is a man of no principle—and acts abominably." You are wrong, dear madam; Mr. St. John is a man of high principle, a man guided by conscience, and who would honestly sooner die than do a wrong thing.
"Well, what does he mean then, talking in this sort of way to Angie, if he has no intentions? He ought to know better."
Undoubtedly, he ought to know better, but he does not. He knows at present neither his own heart nor that of womankind, and is ignorant of the real force and meaning of what he has been saying and looking, and of the obligations which they impose on him as a man of honor. Having been, all his life, only a recluse and student, having planned his voyage of life in a study, where rocks and waves and breakers and shoals are but so many points on paper, it is not surprising that he finds himself somewhat ignorant in actual navigation, where rocks and shoals are quite another affair. It is one thing to lay down one's scheme and law of life in a study, among supposititious men and women, and another to carry it out in life among real ones, each one of whom acts upon us with the developing force of sunshine on the seed-germ.
In fact, no man knows what there is in himself till he has tried himself under the influence of other men; and if this is true of man over man, how much more of that subtle developing and revealing power of woman over man. St. John, during the first part of his life, had been possessed by that sort of distant fear of womankind which a person of acute sensibility has of that which is bright, keen, dazzling, and beyond his powers of management, and which, therefore, seems to him possessed of indefinite powers for mischief. It was something with which he felt unable to cope. He had, too, the common prejudice against fashionable girls and women as of course wanting in earnestness; and he entered upon his churchly career with a sort of hard determination to have no trifling, and to stand in no relation to this suspicious light guerrilla force of the church but that of a severe drill-sergeant.
To his astonishment, the child whom he had undertaken to drill had more than once perforce, and from the very power of her womanly nature, proved herself competent to guide him in many things which belonged to the very essence of his profession—church work. Angie had been able to enter places whence he had been excluded; able to enter by those very attractions of life and gaiety and prettiness which had first led him to set her down as unfit for serious work.
He saw with his own eyes that a bright little spirit, with twinkling ornaments, and golden hair, and a sweet voice, could go into the den of John Price in his surliest mood, could sing, and get his children to singing, till he was as persuadable in her hands as a bit of wax; that she could scold and lecture him at her pleasure, and get him to making all kinds of promises; in fact that he, St. John himself, owed his entrée into the house, and his recognition there as a clergyman, to Angie's good offices and persistent entreaties.
Instead of being leader, he was himself being led. This divine child was becoming to him a mystery of wisdom; and, so far from feeling himself competent to be her instructor, he came to occupy, as regards many of the details of his work, a most catechetical attitude towards her, and was ready to accept almost anything she told him.
St. John was, from first to last, an idealist. It was ideality that inclined him from the barren and sterile chillness of New England dogmatism to the picturesque forms and ceremonies of a warmer ritual. His conception of a church was a fair ideal; such as a poet might worship, such as this world has never seen in reality, and probably never will. His conception of a life work—of the priestly office, with all that pertains to it—belonged to that realm of poetry that is above the matter-of-fact truths of experience, and is sometimes in painful conflict with them. What wonder, then, if love, the eternal poem, the great ideal of ideals, came over him without precise limits and exact definitions—that when the divine cloud overshadowed him he "wist not what he said."