It is manifestly as unfair to judge of a place by its March as to judge a man’s disposition by the hour before dinner. As the coldest exteriors may conceal the warmest loves, so the repelling Cesarean winter holds in store one of the most alluring summers known to inland New England. The grass is riper, the flowers richer, the ranks of elms are statelier, the skies are gentler, and the people happier than could be expected of Cesarean theology. Nay, theology itself unbends in April, softens in May, warms in June, and grows sunny and human by the time the students are graduated and turned loose upon the world,—a world which is, on the whole, so patient with their inexperience, and so ready to accept as spiritual leaders men whose own life’s lessons are yet to be learned, and whose own views of the great mysteries which they dare to interpret are so much more assured than they will be ten years later.
Emanuel Bayard and Helen Carruth walked together beneath the ancient trees that formed the great cross upon the Seminary green.
The snow professor was melted out of existence; head of ice and lecture of sleet had vanished months ago. Dandelions glittered in the long grass. Sparrows built nests under the awfulchapel eaves. It was moonlight and warm,—a June night,—and the elms cast traceries of fine shadows, like a net, about the feet of the young people; they seemed to become entangled in the meshes, as they strolled up and down and to and fro, after the simple fashion of the town; which pays no more attention to a couple sauntering in broad day, or broad moonlight, in the sight of gods and men, across the Seminary “yard,” than it does to the sparrows in the chapel eaves.
They were not lovers, these two; hardly friends, at least in the name of the thing; she was not an accessible girl, and he was a preoccupied man. A certain comfortable acquaintance, such as grows without drama in the quiet society of university towns, had brought them together, as chance led, without distinct volition on the part of either. He would graduate in three days. He had called to say good-by to the Professor’s family, and had taken Miss Helen out to see the shadows on the cross where the paths met—the mild and accepted form of dissipation in Cesarea; for Professors’ daughters. They walked without agitation, and talked without sentiment. Truth to tell, their talk was serious, above their years, and beyond their relation.
The fact was that Emanuel Bayard had that spring with difficulty received his license to preach. There was a flaw in his theology. The circumstance was momentous to him. His uncle, for one thing, had been profoundly displeased; had rebuked,remonstrated, and commanded; had indeed gone so far as to offend his nephew with threats of a nature which the young man did not divulge to Miss Carruth, for his natural reserve was deep. She had noticed that he did not confide in her as readily as the other students she had known. But he had told her enough. The Professor’s daughter, too well used to the ecclesiastical machinery and ferment of the day, was as familiar with its phases and phrases as other girls are with the steps of a cotillion or the matrimonial chances of a watering-place. She knew quite well the tremendous importance of what had happened.
“I understand,” she said in her deep, rich, almost boyish voice, “I understand it all perfectly. You wouldn’t say you did, when you didn’t.”
“HowcouldI?” interrupted Bayard.
“You couldn’t, and so they stirred up that fuss. You were more honest than the other fellows. And you were punished for it.”
“You are good to put it in that way, but what right have I to take it in that way?” urged Bayard wistfully. “The other fellows are just as good men as I; better, most of them. Fenton passed all right, and the rest. I don’t feel inclined to parade my ecclesiastical honesty and set myself above them,—in my own mind, I mean. I have dropped below them in everybody else’s; of course I know that.”
“Whom do you mean by everybody else?” demanded Helen quickly.“Your uncle, Mr. Hermon Worcester? The Trustees? The Faculty? And those old men on the council? Oh, I know them! Haven’t I dined and breakfasted on Councils and Faculties ever since we came here? Haven’t I eaten and drunken and breathed Trustees and doctrines, and what is sound, and what isn’t, and—Don’t you tell, but I never was afraid of a Trustee in my life—never! I don’t know another soul in Cesarea who isn’t,—not even my father. When I was a little girl, I used to ruffle up their beaver hats the wrong way, out in the hall, so they would look dissipated when they went over to the chapel. Then I hid behind the door to see. But I never told of it—before. You won’t tell your uncle, will you? I hid a kitten in his hat, once, and when he came out of the study the hat was walking all over the hall floor, without visible means of locomotion.”
Bayard laughed, as she had meant he should. The tense expression of his face relaxed; she watched him narrowly.
“Come,” she said in a changed tone, “take me home, please. The house is full of Anniversary company. I ought to be there.”
He turned at her command, and took her towards her father’s house. They walked in silence down the long Seminary path. She was dressed in light muslin with a violet on it, and wore ribbons that matched the violet. She had a square of white lace thrown over her bright hair. The meshes of the tracery from the elm-trees fellthickly under her quick tread. At the stone posts which guarded the great lawns, she hesitated; then set her feet resolutely out from the delicate net into the bright spaces of the open road.
“Mr. Bayard,” she said in her clear voice, “youarean honest man. It is better to be that than to be a minister.”
“If one cannot be both,” amended Bayard. “But to start in like this, with a slur attached to one’s name at the beginning,—I don’t suppose you understand how it dooms a fellow, Miss Carruth. Its equivalent would be almost enough to disbar a man in law, or to ruin him in medicine.”
“I understand the whole miserable subject!” cried Helen hotly. “I am sick to my soul of it! I wish”—She checked herself. “Let me see,” she added more calmly. “What was it they tormented you about? Eternal punishment?”
“I managed to escape on that,” said Bayard. “I don’t know anything about it, and I said so. I think, myself, there is a good deal of cheap talk afloat on that subject. Our newspapers and novels are full of it. It is about the only difficult doctrine in theology that outsiders understand the relations of; so they stick on that, and make the most of it. It is an easy way of making the Christian religion intolerable—if one wants to. My difficulty was rather with—I see you know something of our technical terms—with what we call verbal inspiration.”
“Oh yes.” Helen nodded.“Whether ‘The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation’ was inspired by Almighty God; or ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,—Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali,’ and all that. I know.... Inspired moonshine! I am a little bit of a heretic myself, Mr. Bayard; but I’m not—I’m not as honest as you; I’m not pious, either.”
“I hope you don’t thinkIampious!” began Bayard resentfully.
But she laughed sweetly in his frowning face. They stood at her father’s high stone steps. The Anniversary company were chatting in the parlors.
“Good-night,” she said in a lower tone; and then more gently, “and good-by.”
He started slightly at the word; turned as if he would have said something, but said it not. He took her hand in silence; then perceived that she had withdrawn it suddenly, coldly, it seemed, and had vanished from him up the steps of stone.
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,hehad 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 ofhistheology.Hehad received three calls. As yet he had accepted none. He expected to be married in the fall, and looked for a larger salary.
Suddenly he stopped and clapped his hands to his head.
“Bayard!” he called loudly. “Bayard, come to the window a minute!”
The outline of Bayard’s fine head appeared faintly in the third-story window, against the background of his unlighted room. The moon was so bright that his face seemed to be a white flame, as he looked down on his classmates from that height.
“I brought up your mail,” said Fenton, “and forgot to tell you. You’ll find a letter lying on your table behind the third volume of Dean Alford. You keep your room so dark I was afraid you mightn’t see it.”
Bayard thanked him, and groped for the letter; but he did not light the lamp to read it; he sat on in the moonlit room, alone and still. His heart was hot within him as he remembered how thestudents talked. That vision which sets a man apart from his fellows, and thus makes him miserable or blessed, or both, beckoned to him with distant, shining finger. His face fell into his hands. Great God! what did it mean to take upon one’s self that sacred Name in which a Christian preacher stands before his fellow-men? What had common pettiness or envy, narrow fear or little weakness, to do with the soul of a teacher of holiness? How easy to quibble and evade, and fall into rank! How hard to stand apart, to look the cannon in the eye, alone!
It is not easy for men of the world, of ordinary business, pleasure, politics, and those professions whose standards are pliable, to understand the noble civil war between the nature and the position of a man like Bayard; and yet it might be worth while to try.
There is something so much higher and more delicate than our own common standards of ethics that it is refining to respect, even if we fail to comprehend, the struggles of a man who aspires to the possession of perfect spiritual honor.
Bayard had not moved nor lifted his face from his hands, when a step which he recognized heavily struck and slowly mounted the lower flight of the old stairs of Galilee Hall. It was his uncle, Trustee of Cesarea Seminary, and of the faith of its founders, returning from the home of the Professor of Hebrew, where he had been entertained on Anniversary week.
Bayard sighed and groped for a match. This interview could not be evaded, but he winced away from it in every nerve. It is easier to face the obloquy of the world than the frown of the man or woman who has brought us up.
Hermon Worcester was bitterly mortified that Emanuel had received no “call.” He had not said so, yet, but his nephew knew that this well-bred reserve had reached its last breath. As Bayard struck the light, he perceived the forgotten letter in his hand, and, perhaps thinking to defer a painful scene for a moment, said, “Your pardon, Uncle,” and tore the envelope.
The letter contained a formal and unanimous call from the seaside parish whose vacant pulpit he had been supplying for six weeks to become their pastor.
“Helen! Helen!”
The mild, cultivated whine of the Professor’s wife complained through the hot house.
Helen ran in dutiful response. It was late, and the Anniversary guests had scattered to their rooms. The girl was partly undressed for the night, and stood in her doorway gathering her cashmere wrapper about her tall, rich form. Mrs. Carruth looked through the half-open door of her own room.
“I cannot get your father out of his study, Helen,” she urged plaintively.“He has one of his headaches at the base of the brain—and those extra Faculty meetings before him this week, with all the rest. Do go down and see if you can’t send him up to bed.”
Helen buttoned her white gown to the throat, and ran softly downstairs to the study. The Professor of Theology sat at his study table with a knot between his eyes. A pile of catalogues lay before him; he was jotting down statistics with his gold pencil on old-fashioned foolscap paper. He pushed the paper aside when he saw his daughter, and held out his hand to her, smiling. She went straight to him as if she had been a little girl, and knelt beside him, crossing her hands on his knee. He put his arm around her; his stern face relaxed.
“You are to put the entire system of Orthodox theology away and come to bed, Papa,” she said, with her sweet imperiousness. “Mother says you have a headache at the base of something. It is pretty late—and it worries her. What are you doing? Counting theologues? Counting theologues! At your time of life! As if you couldn’t find anything better to do! What is this?” She caught up a stray slip of paper. “‘Deaf—deaf as an adder: 10. Blind—stone-blind: 6.’ What in the name of—Anniversary week doesthatmean?”
“That is a personal memorandum,” said the Professor, flushing. “Tear it up, Helen.”
“I know,” said Helen, nodding.“It’s a private classification of theologues. Which does it catalogue, their theology or their intellects? Come, Papa!”
“I’ll never tell you!” laughed the Professor, shutting his thin, scholarly lips. And he never did. But the laugh had gained the point, as she intended. He took his German student lamp and started upstairs. Helen walked through the long, dim hall with her two hands clasped lovingly upon his arm.
“Iambothered,” admitted the Professor, stopping at the foot of the stairs, “about one of my boys. He is rather a favorite with me. There isn’t a finer intellect in the senior class.”
“But how about his Christianity, Father?” asked the girl mischievously.
“HisChristianityis all right, so far as I know,” admitted the Professor slowly. “It is his theology that is the hitch. He isn’t sound. He has received no call.”
“Do I know him?” asked Helen in a different tone.
The Professor of Theology turned, and held his student lamp at arm’s length above his daughter’s face, which he scanned in silence before he said:—
“I am not prepared to answer that question, Helen. Whether you know him I can’t say; I really cannot say whether you know him or not. I’m not sure whether I do, myself. But I am much annoyed about the matter. It is a misfortune to the Seminary, and a mortification to the young man.”
He kissed his daughter tenderly, and went upstairs with the weary tread of a professional man at the end of a long day’s work.
Helen went to her own room and shut the door. But she did not light the candles. She sat down at her open window, in the hot, night wind. She leaned her cheek against her bare arm, from which the loose sleeve fell away. The elms were in such rich leaf that she could see the Seminary buildings only in broken outline now. But there was wind enough to lift and toss the branches, and through one of the rifts in the green wall she noticed that a light was burning in the third-story northwest corner of Galilee Hall.
It was past midnight before she went to bed. As she closed her blinds, for the first time in her life, the Professor’s daughter did deliberately, and of self-acknowledged intention, stoop to take a look at the window of a student.
“His light is still burning,” she thought. “What can be the matter?”
Then she flushed red with a beautiful self-rebuke, and fled to her white pillow.
Night deepened into perfect silence on Cesarea Hill. The last light in Galilee Hall went out. The moon rode on till morning. In the deserted green the clear-cut paths shone wide and long, and the great white cross lay as if nailed to its place, all night, between the Seminary and the Professor’s house.
“Goshamighty, stand off there! Who in —— areyou?”
This candid remark was addressed by a fisherman in blue flannel shirtsleeves to a gentleman in afternoon dress. It was in the month of September, and the fleets were busy in and off the harbor of the fishing-town. The autumn trips were well under sail, and the docks and streets of Windover buzzed and reeled with crews just anchored or about to weigh. At the juncture of the principal business avenue of the town with its principal nautical street—from a date passing the memory of living citizens irreverently named Angel Alley—a fight was in brisk progress. This was so common an incident in that part of the town that the residents had paid little attention to it. But the stranger, being a stranger, had paused and asked for a policeman.
The bystanders stared.
“There ain’t none nigher’n the station,” replied a girl who was watching the fight with evident relish. She wore a pert sailor hat of soiled white straw, set on one side of her head, and carried her hands in the pockets of a crumpled tan-colored reefer. Her eyes were handsome and bold. Thecrowd jostled her freely, which did not seem to trouble her. “There’s a fellow just arrested,” she explained cheerfully, “for smashing his wife with a coal-hod; they’re busy with him down to the station. He fit all the way over. It took four cops to hold him. Most the folks are gone over there to see the other game. This fun here won’t be spoiled just yet awhile.”
Something in the expression with which the gentleman regarded her attracted the girl’s attention. She took her hands out of her pockets, and scanned him with a dull surprise; then, with a motion which one could not call abashed, but which fell short of her previous ease of manner, she turned her back and walked a little away towards the edge of the crowd.
The fight was at its hottest. Two men, an Italian laborer and an American fisherman, were somewhat seriously belaboring each other, to their own undisguised satisfaction and the acclamation of the bystanders. Both were evidently more or less drunk. An open grogshop gaped behind them. Similar places of entertainment, with others less easily described, lined both sides of Angel Alley, multiplying fruitfully, till the wharves joined their grimy hands and barred the way to this black fertility.
It was a windy day; the breeze was rising, and the unseen sea could be heard moaning beyond.
Just as the stranger, with the indiscretion of youth and inexperience, was about to step into thering and try to stop the row, a child pushed through the crowd. It was a boy; a little fellow, barely four or five years old. He ducked under the elbows and between the legs of the spectators with an adroitness which proclaimed him the son of a sailor, and ran straight to the combatants, crying:
“Father! Fa—ther! Marm says to please to stop! She says to ax you topleaseto stop, and come home wiv you’ little boy!”
He ran between the two men, and put up his little dirty fingers upon his father’s big, clenched hand; he repeated piteously, “Father, Fa—ther, Fa—ther!”
But more than this the little fellow had not time to say. The father’s dark, red face turned a sudden, ominous purple, and before any person of them all could stay him his brutal hand had turned upon the child.
Cries of shame and horror rose from the crowd; a woman’s shriek echoed from a window across the street, and the screams of the boy pierced the bedlam. The Italian, partly sobered, had slunk back.
“Stop him! Part them! Hold him, somebody! He’ll kill the child!” yelled the bystanders, and not a man of them stirred.
“Why, it’s only ababy!” cried the girl in the reefer, running up. “He’ll murder it! Oh, if I was aman!” she raved, wringing her hands.
At that moment, before one could have lifted the eyelash to see how it fell, a well-aimed blow struck the brute beneath the ear. He fell.
Hands snatched the writhing child away; his mother’s arms and screams received him; and over the fallen man a slight, tall figure was seen to tower. The stranger had thrown down his valise, and tossed off his silk hat. His delicate face was as white as a star. He quivered with holy rage. He trampled on the fellow with one foot, and ground him down; he had the attitude of the St. Michael in Guido’s great picture. He had that scorn and all that beauty.
A geyser of oaths spurted from the prostrate ruffian. The stranger stooped, and pinned him skillfully until they ceased.
“Now,” he said calmly, “get up. Get up, I say!” He released his clenched white hand from the other’s grimy flesh.
“He’ll thresh the life outen ye!” protested a voice from the increasing crowd. “You don’t know Job Slip ’s well ’s we do. He’ll make short work on ye, sir, if you darst let go him.”
“No, he won’t,” replied the stranger quietly. “He respects a good blow when he feels it. He knows how it ought to be planted. He would do as much himself, if he saw a man killing his own child. Wouldn’t you, Job Slip?”
He stepped back fearlessly and folded his arms. The rapidly sobering sot struggled to his feet, and instinctively squared off; looked at the gentleman blindly for a moment, then dropped his huge arms.
“Goshamighty!” he said,“who in —— areyou?”
He took one of the stranger’s delicate hands in his black and bleeding palms, and critically examined it.
“That?Why, my woman’s paw is stronger ’n’ bigger ’nthat!” contemptuously. “And you didn’t overdo it neither. Pity! If you’d only made it manslaughter—why, I could ha’ sent ye up on my antumortim deppysition.”
“Oh, I knew better than that,” replied the stranger calmly, turning for his hat. He thought of the boxing-lessons that he used to take on the Back Bay, years ago. Some one in the crowd brushed off the hat with the back of a dusty elbow, and handed it respectfully to the gentleman. The girl in the reefer picked up his valise.
“I’ve kep’ my eye on it, for you,” she said in a softened voice.
“Well,” said Job Slip slowly, “I guessI’ll keep my eye onhim.”
“Do!” answered the stranger heartily. “I wish you would. They don’t fight where I’m going.”
“Who be you, anyway?” demanded Job Slip with undisguised admiration. He had not made up his mind yet whether to spring at the other’s throat, or to offer him a drink.
“I’m in too much of a hurry to tell you now,” answered the gentleman quietly. “I’ve missed the most important engagement of my life—to save your child.”
“He’s goin’ to his weddin’,” muttered a voicebehind him. The girl started the chorus of a song which he had never heard before, and was not anxious to hear again.
“You have a good voice,” he said, turning. “You can put it to a better use than that.”
She stared at him, but made him no reply. The crowd parted and scattered, and he came through into the main street.
“Sir! Sir!” called a woman’s voice from a window over his head.
The young man looked up. The mother of the little boy held the child upon the window-sill for him to see.
“He ain’t much hurt!” she cried. “I thought you’d like to know it. It’s all along of you. God go with you, sir! God bless you, sir!”
He had put on his hat, but removed it at these words, and stood uncovered before the drunkard’s wife. She could not know how much it meant to him—that day. Without looking back he strode up the street. The Italian ran out and watched him. Job Slip hesitated for a moment; then he did the same, following the young man with perplexed and sodden eyes. The Italian stood amiably beside his late antagonist. Both men had forgotten what they fought about, now. A little group from the vanishing crowd joined them. The mother in the window—a gaunt Madonna—shaded her eyes with her hand to see the departing figure of the unknown while she pressed the bruised and sobbing child against her breast.The stranger halted at the steps of the old First Church of Windover; then ran up lightly, and disappeared within the open doors.
“I’ll be split and salted!” said a young man who had not been drinking, “if I don’t believe that’s the new parson come to town!”
The speaker had black eyebrows which met in a straight and heavy line.
“I’ll be ——!” said Job Slip.
The church was thronged. Citizens and strangers jostled each other in the porch, the vestibules, and the aisles. It was one of those religious festivals so dear to the heart of New England, and so perplexing to gayer people. No metropolitan play could have collected a crowd like this in Windover.
The respectability of the town was out in force. The richest fish firms, the largest ship-owners, and the oldest families shed the little light of local glory upon the occasion. Most of them, in fact, were members of the parish. Windover had what an irreverent outsider had termed her codocracy. The examination—to be followed that evening by the ordination—of the new minister was an affair of note. Windover is not the only town on the map where the social leaders are fond of patronizing whatever ecclesiastical interests are dependent on the generosity of their pockets and the importance of their names. Nothing tends to the growth of a religious sect so much as the belief that the individual is important to it.
Upon the platform, decorated by the Ladies’ Aid Society with taste, piety, and goldenrod, sat the Council called to examine and to ordain Emanuel Bayard to the ministry of Christ. These were venerable men; they drove in from the surrounding parishes in their buggies, or took the trains from remoter towns. A few city names had responded; one or two of them were eminent. The columns of the “Windover Topsail” had these already set up in display type, and the reporters in the galleries dashed them off on yellow slips of paper.
As the minister-elect, panting with his haste, ran up the steps and into the church, the first thing that he perceived was the eye of one of his Cesarea Professors fastened sternly upon him. It gave him the feeling of a naughty little boy who was late to school. This guilty sensation was not lessened by a vision of the back of his uncle’s bald head in an eminent seat among the lay delegates, and by the sight of the jeweled Swiss repeater, familiar to his infancy, too visibly suspended from Mr. Hermon Worcester’s hand. The church clock (wearing for the occasion a wreath of purple asters, which had received an unfortunate lurch to one side, and gave that pious timepiece a tipsy air) charitably maintained that Bayard was but seven minutes late. The impatience of the Council and the anxiety of the audience seemed to aver that an hour would not cover, nor eternity pardon, the young man’s delay. He dropped his valiseinto the hand of the sexton, and strode up the broad aisle. The dust of the street fight still showed upon his fashionable clothes. His cheeks were flushed with his fine color. His disordered hair clung to his white forehead in curls that the straitest sect of the Pharisees could not have straightened. Every woman in the audience noticed this, and liked him the better for it. But the Council was composed of straight-haired men.
Somebody beckoned him into the minister’s room to repair damages: and as he crossed the platform to do so, Bayard stooped and exchanged a few whispered words with the moderator. The wrinkled face of that gentleman changed visibly. He rose at once and said:—
“It is due to our brother and to the audience to state that your minister-elect desires me to make his apologies to this parish for a tardiness which he found to be unavoidable,—morally unavoidable, I might say. And I should observe,” added the moderator, hesitating, “that I have been requestednotto explain the nature of the case, but I shall take it upon myself to defy this injunction, and to state that an act of Christian mercy detained our brother. I do not think,” said the moderator, dropping suddenly from the ecclesiastical to the human tone, “that it is every man who would have done it, under the circumstances; and I do not consider it any less creditable for that.”
A sound of relief stirred through the house as the moderator sat down. The audience ceasedtwisting its head to look at the tipsy clock, thus enabling the Ladies’ Aid Association to get that aster wreath for the first time out of mind. Mr. Hermon Worcester’s watch went back to its comfortable fob. A smile melted across the anxious face of Professor Haggai Carruth of Cesarea. The minister-elect reappeared with plumage properly smoothed, and the proceedings of the day set in, with the usual decorum of the denomination.
It is not a ceremonious sect, that of the Congregationalism of New England; and its polity allows much diversity upon occasions like these, whose programme depends a good deal upon the preference of the moderator. Bayard’s moderator was a gray-haired, kind-hearted, plain country minister, the oldest man in the Council, and one of the best. It was not his intention to subject the young man to one of the ecclesiastical roastings at that time in vogue, and for the course of events which followed he was not responsible. This was a matter of small moment at the time; but Bayard had afterwards occasion to remember it.
He listened dreamily to the conventional preliminary exercises of the afternoon. His mind was in a turmoil which poorly prepared the young man for the intellectual and emotional strain of the day. That scene in the street flashed and faded and reappeared before him, like the dark lantern which an evil hand brings into a sacred place. The blow of the man’s fist upon the child seemed to fall crashing upon his own flesh.Across the crescendo of the chorus of the hymn the cry of the little boy ran in piteous discord. The organ rolled up the oaths of the wharves. While the good, gray-haired moderator was praying, Bayard was shocked to find that the song of the street girl ran through his burning brain. The gaunt Madonna in the window of the drunkard’s home seemed to be stamped—a dark photographic letter-head—upon the license to preach the Christian religion which he was required (with more than usual precision) to produce.
“Why,” said a sour voice suddenly at his elbow, “why do you consider yourself a child of God?”
Bayard recalled himself with a start to the fact that the personal examination of the day had begun, and that the opening shot had come from the least important and most crabbed man in the Council. And now for three quivering hours the young man stood the fire of the most ingenious ecclesiastical inquisition which had been witnessed in that part of the State for many a year.
At first it rather amused him than otherwise, and he bore it with great good nature.
He was patient beyond his years with the small clergyman from the small interior parish, whose hobby was that theological students were not properly taught their Bibles, and who had invented a precious catechism of his own, calculated to prove to the audience how little they or the candidate knew of Boanerges, Gog and Magog,and the four beasts which are the chief zoological ornaments of the Apocalypse. Having treated these burning questions satisfactorily, Bayard fenced awhile with the learned clergyman who was alive only in the dead languages, and who put the candidate through his Greek and Hebrew paces as if he had been a college boy.
Bayard had felt no serious concern as to the outcome of the examination, a mere form, a husk, a shell, with which it was not worth a man’s while to quarrel. The people of the church—he had already begun to call them his people—were enthusiastically and lovingly pledged to him. He smiled into their familiar faces over the heads of his inquisitors, and manfully and cheerfully stood his ground. All, in fact, went well enough, until the theology of the young man came under investigation. Then a cloud no bigger than a man’s tongue, if one may say so, appeared to darken the interior of Windover First Church. The oldest and deafest men in the Council pricked up their ears. The youngest and best-natured grew uneasy. The candidate’s people looked at him anxiously. His uncle flushed; Professor Carruth coughed sternly. The moderator ruled and overruled, and tried with troubled kindness to quench the warming flame of ecclesiastical censure in which many a bright, devout young life goes out.
Suddenly Bayard awoke to the fact that the smoke was curling in the fagots at his feet; that the stake was at his back, the chains upon hishands; that he was in danger of being precondemned for heresy in the hearts of those gray old men, his elder brothers in the church, and disgraced before the eyes of the people who had loved and chosen him.
The house was now so full and so still that a sigh could be heard; and when a group from the street pushed noisily in, and stood by the entrance, impatient expressions leaped from pew to pew. Bayard looked up at the disturbance. There by the green baize doors stood the Italian, Job Slip, and the young fellow (with the eyebrows) who did not drink, two or three other spectators of the fight, and the girl in the reefer. An uninvited delegation from Angel Alley, these children of the devil had crept among those godly men and women, and stared about.
“A circumstance,” complained Mr. Hermon Worcester afterwards to Professor Carruth, “which might not happen on such an occasion in our New England churches once in twenty years.”
Bayard had been singularly gentle and patient with his tormentors up to this moment. But now he gathered himself, and fought for his life like a man. Brand after brand, the inventions of theology were flung hissing upon him.
Did he believe that heathen, unacquainted with Christ, were saved?
What did he hold became of the souls of those who died in infancy?
If they happened to be born dead, what was their fate?
Explain his views on the doctrine of Justification by Faith.
State explicitly his conception of the Trinity. Had none? Ah—ah!
Were the three Persons in the Trinity separate as qualities or as natures? Did notknow? Ah—ah.
State the precise nature, province, and character of each Person. Did not feel qualified to do so? Ha—hum.
What was the difference between Arianism and Socinianism?
Did the Son exist coördinate with, and yet subordinate to the Father?
What is the distinction between the attributes and the faculties of the Deity?
Did an impenitent person ever pray?
Describe the doctrine of Free Will.
Is a sinner ever able to repent, of his own choice?
Is he punished for not being able to do so?
Is the human race responsible for the guilt of Adam?
Why not?
Explain the process of sanctification, and the exact province of the Holy Spirit.
Carefully elucidate your views on Total Depravity.
Could a man—did we understand you?—become regenerate without waiting for the compelling action of the Holy Spirit?
Is there any Scriptural ground for belief in the possibility of a second probation? What? Please repeat that reply.
Did not the first sin of a child justly expose him to eternal punishment?What?
At this point in the trial, Bayard was acutely conscious of the controlled voice of Professor Carruth, who had asked no question up to that moment. Dear old Professor! he was trying to haul his favorite student out of the fire before it was too late.
“But,” he asked gently, “is not one act of sin an infinite wrong?”
“I believe it is; or it may reasonably become so.”
“Is it not a wrong committed against an Infinite Being?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Does not an infinite wrong committed against an Infinite Being deserve an infinite punishment?” pleaded the Professor of Theology.
“You have taught me so, sir.”
A rustle swept the house. The stern face of the Professor melted in its sudden, winning fashion. He drew in his breath. At least, the reputation of the Department was secured!
“Do you not believe what you have been taught?”
“Professor,” said Bayard, smiling, “do you?”
It being well known that the now conservative Professor of Theology had been the liberal andthe progressive of his first youth, this reply created a slight smile. But the Professor did not smile. The crisis was too serious.
“The candidate does not deny the doctrine,” he urged. “He will undoubtedly grow into it as other men have done before him.”
“Whether men are eternally damned”—began Bayard.
“Job,” whispered the Italian back by the door, “he swear at ’em!”
“No, he ain’t,” said the sober fellow. “It’s the way they talk in churches.”
“What tongue is it they do speak?” persisted the Italian.
“Blamed if I know,” whispered Job Slip with unusual decorum. “I think it’s High Dutch.”
“No, it ain’t; it’s Latin,” corrected the sober fellow. “I can make out a word now and then. They translate parts as they go along. It’s darn queer gibberish, ain’t it? I guess the natives used to talk like that in Bible times.”
“All this row,” said Job Slip, whose befuddled brain was actively busy with the personal fate of a minister who could knock him down, “all this d—— row’s along of me. It’s because he was late to meetin’!”
The Italian nodded seriously. But the girl in the reefer said:—
“Shut up there! The second round’s on, now.”
“Explain the difference between verbal and plenary inspiration,” demanded the small clergyman in a small, suspicious voice.
“There! Isaidit was High Dutch!” whispered Job Slip triumphantly.
“Explain the difference,” repeated the small clergyman.
The candidate explained.
“Is every word of the Old and New Testament of the Scriptures equally inspired by Almighty God?”
“Please give me your definition of inspiration,” said Bayard, wheeling upon his questioner.
The small clergyman objected that this was the candidate’s business.
“It is one of the maxims of civil law that definitions are dangerous,” replied Bayard with a smile. But it was no time for smiling, and he knew it. He parried for a little in the usual technicalities of the schools; but it was without hope or interest. He knew now how it would all end. But he was not conscious of a moment’s hesitation. His soul seemed elate, remote from his fate. He looked out across the lake of faces upturned to his. He had now grown quite pale, and the natural fairness of his skin and delicacy of his features added to the effect of transparence which his high face gave. The dullest eye in the audience observed, and the coldest lip long afterwards acknowledged, the remarkable beauty of the man. With a sudden and impressive gesture of the hand, as if he cast the whole mercilessscene away from him, he stepped unexpectedly forward, and in a ringing voice he said:—
“Fathers and brothers of the church! I believe in God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ his Son, our Lord and Saviour. I believe in the sacredness and authority of the Bible, which contains the lesson and the history of His life. I believe in the guilt and the misery of sin, and I have spent the best years of my youth in your institutions of sacred learning, seeking to be taught how to teach my fellow-men to be better. I solemnly believe in the Life Eternal, and that its happiness and holiness are the gifts of Jesus Christ to the race; or to such of us as prove fit survivors, capable of immortality. I do not presume to explain how or why this is or may be so; for behold we are shown mysteries, of which this is one. If I am permitted to guide the people who have loved and chosen me, I expect to teach them many truths which I do not understand. I shall teach them none which I do not believe. Fathers and brothers, I show you my soul! Deal with me as you will!”
He stood for a space, tall, white, still, with that look—half angel, half human—which was peculiar to his face in moments of exaltation. His dazzling eyes blazed for an instant upon his tormentors, then fell upon his people and grew dim. He saw their uplifted faces pleadingly turned to him: troubled men whom he had been able to guide; bereaved women whom he had known howto comfort. Oh, his people! Tears were on their cheeks. Their faces swam before him. How dear, in those few months that he had served them, they had grown! To stand disgraced before them, a stigma on his Christian name forever, their faith deceived, their trust disappointed,—his people, to be his no more!
“God!” he said in his heart. “Was there any other way?”
An instant’s darkness swept over him, and his soul staggered in it. Then, to the fine, inner ear of the spirit the answer came:—
“In honor, between Me and thee, thou hast no other way.”
The troubled voice of the moderator now recalled him, using the quaint phrase of elder times for such occasion made and provided: “The Council will now be by themselves.”
In three quarters of an hour the Council returned and reported upon the examination. Emanuel Bayard was refused ordination to the Christian ministry by a majority of five.
Now, the savage that lurks in the gentlest assemblage of men sprang with a war-cry upon the decorum of the crowded church. Agitated beyond self-control, the people split into factions, and resolved themselves into committees; they wept, they quarreled, they prayed, and they condemned by turns. The gray-haired moderator and the dejected Professor, themselves paler than the rejected candidate, sought to convert the confusion intosomething like order wherewith to close the exercises of that miserable day. Daring the momentary silence which their united efforts had enforced, a thick voice from the swaying crowd was distinctly heard.
Job Slip, who had somehow managed to take an extra drop from his pocket bottle during the electric disturbance of the last half hour, was staggering up the broad aisle, with the Italian and the sober man at either elbow.
“Lemme go!” cried Job, with an air of unprecedented politeness. “Lemme get up thar whar I ken make a speech. D—— ye, I won’t cuss ye, for this is a meetin’-house, but Iwillmake my speech!”
“Hush, Job!” said the girl in the sailor hat. She came forward before all the people and laid her hand upon the drunkard’s arm. “Hush, Job, hush! You bother the minister. Come away, Job, come away. Mari’s here, and the young one. Come along to your wife, Job Slip!”
“I’ll join my wife when I get ready,” said Job solemnly, “for it’s proper that I should; but I ain’t a-goin’ to stand by an’ see a man that licked me licked out’n his rights an’ not do nothin’ for him! No, sir! Gentlemen,” cried Job pleasantly, assuming an oratorical attitude and facing round upon the disturbed house,“I’ll stick up for the minister every time. It ain’thisfault he was late to meetin’. You hadn’t oughter kick him out for that, now! It’s all along of me, gentlemen! I drink—and he—ye see—don’t. I was threshin’ the life out’n my little boy down to Angel Alley, and he knocked me down for’t. Fact, sir! That there little minister, he knockedmedown. I’ll stand by him every round now, you bet!I’ll see’t he gets his rights in his own meetin’-house!”
Half a dozen hands were at Job’s mouth; a dozen more dragged him back. The Council sprang to their feet in horror. But Job squared off, and eyed these venerable Christians with the moral superiority of his condition. He pushed on towards the pulpit.
“Come on, Tony!” he cried to the Italian. “Come, Ben! You, Lena!” He beckoned to the girl, who had shrunk back. “Tell Mari an’ Joey to foller on! Won’t hear us, won’t they? Well, we’ll see! There ain’t a cove of the lot ofthemcould knock me down! Jest to save a little fellar’s bones! Gentlemen! look a’ here. Look at us.We’re the delegation from Angel Alley, Sir.Now, sir, what are you pious a-goin’ to do withus?”
But a white, firm hand was laid upon Job’s shoulder. Pale, shining, frowning, Bayard stood beside him.
“Come, Job,” he said gently, “come out with me, and we will talk it over.”
The broad aisle quickly cleared, and the rejected minister left the church with the drunkard’s hand upon his arm. The remainder of the delegationfrom Angel Alley followed quietly, and the soft, green baize doors closed upon them.
“Say,” said Job Slip, recovering a portion of his scattered senses in the open air,—“say, I thought you said they didn’t fight where you was goin’?”
The drunkard’s wife stood outside. She was crying. Bayard looked at her. He did not know what to say. Just then he felt a tug at the tail of his coat, and small, warm fingers crept into his cold hand. He looked down. It was the little boy.
The real crises of life are those that the stories leave untold. It is not the sudden blow, but the learning how to bear the bruise afterwards, that constitutes experience; not the delirium of fever, but the weariness of convalescence. What does one do the Monday morning after the funeral? How does one meet the grocery bills when the property is gone? How does a man act when his reputation is ruined by the span of an afternoon? Fiction does not tell us, but fact omits nothing of the grim details; spares not the least stroke of that black perplexity which, next to the insecurity of life, is the hardest thing about it.
You men of affairs, give a moment’s manly sympathy to the position of a young fellow like yourselves, halting just over the line between education and a life’s work, trained for a calling which the worldliest soul among you respects as nobler and higher than your own, tripped at the outset by one of its lower and more ignoble accidents; a man who will not lie to God or his own soul, who has scorned the consequences of being simply true, but must bear them for all that, like other men. For the holiest dedications in this world suffer the taint thereof; and it is at once the saddest and thehealthiest thing about the work of a man of God that it is subject to market laws, to fashion, to prejudice, to envy, and to poor judgment, like other work.
It seems a little thing to write about, but at the time it was not the least aspect of the great crisis into which Emanuel Bayard had arrived, that, when he came out into the strong, salt breeze of Windover that afternoon, it suddenly occurred to the heretic minister that he had nowhere to spend the night. Alas for the bright and solemn festival in which his should have been the crowned hero’s part! He heard the excited women of the parish asking each other:—
“Who is going to eat up that collation?”
“What is ever going to become of all that one-two-three-four cake?”
“Feed those old ministersnow? Not a sandwich! Let ’em go home where they belong. If we’re going to have no minister, they shall have no supper! We’ll settle him in spite of ’em!”
Thus the Ladies’ Aid Association, with flushed cheeks and shrill voices. But the deacons and the pillars of the disturbed church collected in serious groups, and discussed the catastrophe with the dignity of the voting and governing sex.
Sick at heart, and longing to escape from the whole miserable scene, Bayard walked down the street alone. His steps bent blindly to the station. When he had bought his ticket to Boston, it came to him for the first time to ask himselfwhere he was going. Home? What home? Whose? Hermon Worcester’s? That glance at his uncle’s rigid face which he had allowed himself back there in the church recurred to him. The incensed and disappointed man had suffered his smitten boy to go forth from that furnace without a sign of sympathy. He had given Emanuel one look: the pupils of his eyes were dark and dilated with indignation of the kind that a gentleman does not trust himself to express.
“I cannot go home,” said Emanuel suddenly, half aloud. “I forgot that. I shall not be wanted.”
He put his ticket in his wallet and turned away. Some people were hurrying into the station, and he strode to a side door to escape them. The handsome knob of an Oriental grapestick touched his arm. The white face of the Professor of Theology looked sternly into his.
“Suppose you come out to Cesarea with me to-night? We can talk this unfortunate affair over quietly, and—I am sure you misapprehend the real drift of some of these doctrines that disturb you. I believe I could set you right, and possibly—another examination—before a different Council”—
Bayard’s head swam for an instant. A girl in a muslin dress stood at the meeting of the arms of the great cross in the Seminary lawn. It was moonlight, and it was June, and this dreadful thing had never happened. He was in that statewhen a woman’s sympathy is the only one delicate enough for a man’s bruised nature to bear. He quivered at the thought of being touched by anything harsher than the compassionate approval, the indignant sorrow, the intelligent heart—
“No,” he said, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation. “Thank you, Professor—I can’t do it. I should only disappoint you. I am almost too tired to go all over the ground again. Good-by, Professor.”
He held out his hand timidly. The thin, high-veined hand of the Professor shook as he responded to the grasp.
“I didn’t know,” he said more gently, “but you would be more comfortable. Your uncle”—the Professor hesitated.
“Thank you,” said the young man again. “That was thoughtful in you. If your theology were half as tender as your heart, Professor!” added the poor fellow, trying to smile with the old audacity of Professor Carruth’s pet student. But he shook his head, and pushed out of the door into the street.
There he stood irresolute. What next? He was to have been the guest of the treasurer of the church that night, after the ordination. It was a pretty, luxurious home; he had been entertained there so often that he felt at home in it; the family had been his affectionate friends, and the children were fond of him. He thought of that comfortable guest-room with the weakest pangthat he had known yet: he felt ill enough to go to bed. But they had not asked the dishonored minister, now, to be their guest. It did not occur to him, so sore at heart was he, that he had given them no opportunity.
He was about to return to the station, with a vague purpose to seek shelter in some hotel in a village where nobody knew him, when a plain, elderly woman dressed in black approached him. He recognized her as one of the obscurer people of his lost parish. She had been comforted by something he had said one Sunday; she had come timidly to tell him so, after the fashion of such women; she had known trouble, he remembered, and poverty, it was clear.
“Ah, Mrs. Granite!” he said pathetically. “Did you take all the trouble to come to say good-by tome?”
“You look so tired, sir!” sobbed Mrs. Granite. “You look down sick abed! We thought you wasn’t fit to travel to-night, sir, and if you wouldn’t mind coming home with us to get a night’s rest, Mr. Bayard? We live very poor, sir, not like you; but me and my girl, we couldn’tbearto see you going off so! We’d take it for an honor, Mr. Bayard, sir!”
“I will come,” said the weary man. And he went, at once. Certain words confusedly recurred to him as he walked silently beside Mrs. Granite, “He had not where,” they ran,—“He had not where to lay his head.”
The light burned late in the clean, spare room in the cottage of the fisherman’s widow on Windover Point that night.
Early in the morning her mother sent Jane Granite running for the doctor; and by night it was well known in Windover that the new minister was ill. He was threatened with something with a Latin name; not epidemic in Windover, whose prevailing diseases are measles and alcoholism. Mrs. Granite found the minister’s anticipated malady hard to pronounce; but Jane, who had been at the high school, called it meningitis.
But here again fact dealt with Emanuel Bayard as no respectable fiction could be expected to. An interesting delirium or deadly fever might have changed the whole course of his life. Had he fallen then and there a martyr to his fate, the sympathy of the town, the interest of the denomination, the affection of his lost parish, the penitent anxiety of Mr. Hermon Worcester, would—how easily!—have marked out his future for him in flower-beds that seemed forsooth to be the vineyard of the Lord; and he might have done a deal of pleasant hoeing and trimming there, like other men, till harvest time. But floriculture is small pastime for the sinew elected to cut thickets and to blaze forests; and he arose to tear and bleed at his self-chosen brambles as God decreed.
He had not meningitis; he suffered no mortal malady; he did but lie helpless for two weeksunder one of those serious nervous collapses which seem ignominy to a young man. During these critical days his people elect and lost had plenty of time to quarrel over him, or to send him currant jelly. And the wife of the treasurer was reported to have said that he ought to be in her house. But Mrs. Granite and Jane nursed him adoringly, and as soon as the doctor permitted, Jane brought the patient his mail. It contained a curt but civil letter from his uncle, regretting to learn that he had been indisposed, and requesting an interview.
As soon as he was able to travel, Emanuel went to Boston.
An unexpected incident which happened on the morning that he left Windover gave back something of the natural fire to his eyes, and he looked less ill than Mr. Worcester had expected, when they met in the library on Beacon Street.
This circumstance checked the slightly rising tide of sympathy in his uncle’s feeling; and it was with scarcely more than civility that the elder man opened the conversation.
“I wish to discuss this situation with you, Emanuel, once for all. You have for some time avoided the issue between us which is bound to come.”
“I have avoided nothing,” interrupted Emanuel proudly.
“It is the same thing. You have never met me halfway. The time has come when we must have it out. You know, of course, perfectly well what a blow this thing has been to me—the mortification—the.... After all I have done for you”—
The cold, clear-cut features of Hermon Worcester’s face became suffused; he put his hand against his heart, and gasped. For the first time it occurred to the young man that the elder, too, had suffered; with a quick exclamation of sympathy or anxiety, he turned to reply, but Mr. Worcester got to his feet, and began to pace the library hotly.
“What do you propose to do?” he cried. “Seven years of higher education, and—how many trips to Europe? And all the—that—feeling a man has for a child he has brought up—wasted, worse than wasted! What do you propose to do? Thirty years old, and a failure at the start! A disgrace to the faith of your fathers! A blot on an old religious name! Come, now! what next?... I suppose I could find you a place to sweep a store,” added Hermon Worcester bitingly.
Emanuel had flushed darkly, and then his swift pallor came on.
“Uncle,” he said distinctly, “I think this interview we have been preparing for so long may as well be dispensed with. It seems to me quite useless. I can only grieve you, sir; and you cannot comfort me.”
“Comfort!” sneered the other, with his least agreeable expression; for Hermon Worcester had many, in frequent use.
“Well,” said Emanuel, “yes. There are times when even a heretic may need something of that sort. But I was about to say that I think it idle for us to talk. My plans are now quite formed.”
“Indeed, sir!” said Mr. Worcester, stopping short.
“I have been invited by a minority of my people to start a new work in Windover, of which they propose that I shall become the leader.”
“Not the pastor!” observed Mr. Worcester.
“Yes, the pastor,—that was the word. It will be a work quite independent of the old church.”
“And of the old faith, eh?”
“Of the old traditions, some of them,” replied Emanuel gently; “not of the old truth, I hope. I cannot hope for your sympathy in this step. I have decided to take it. It strikes me, Uncle, that we had better not discuss the matter.”
“His mother before him!” cried Hermon Worcester, violently striding up and down the velvet carpet of the library, “I went through it with his mother before him,—this abhorrent indifference to the demands of birth and training, this scandal, this withdrawal from the world, this publicity given to family differences, the whole miserable business! She for love, and you for—I suppose you call it religion! I can’t go through it again, and I won’t! It is asking too much of me!”
“I ask nothing of you, Uncle,” said the young man, rising.
“You’ll end in infidelity, sir. You will be an agnostic in a year’s time. You’ll be preaching positivism! I will have nothing to do with it! I warned you before, Manuel,—back there in Cesarea. I am forced to repeat myself. Under the circumstances, you will not expect a dollar from me. I would as soon leave my property to an atheist club as to you, and your second probations, and your uninspired Bibles!”
Mr. Worcester snapped in the private drawer of his desk, and locked it with unnecessary force and symbolism.
“I don’t forbid you my house, mind. I sha’n’t turn you into the street. You’ll starve into your senses fast enough on any salary that the rabble down in that fishing-town can raise for you. When you do—come back to me. Keep your latch-key in your pocket. You will want to use it some day.”
“I must run my chances, sir,” said Bayard in a voice so low that it was scarcely audible. Instinctively he drew his latch-key from his pocket and held it out; but Mr. Hermon Worcester did not deign to notice it. “I have never thought about your money, Uncle. I’m not that kind of fellow, exactly. You have always been good to me, Uncle Hermon!” He choked, and held out his hand to say good-by.
“But look here—see here—you’ll stay to dinner? You’ll go up to your room, Manuel?” stammered the elder man.“I explicitly told you that I didn’t drive you out of your home. I don’t desire any scene—any unnecessary scandal. I wish you to understand that you are not turned into the street.”
“I have promised to be in Windover this evening, to settle this matter,” replied Bayard. He looked over his uncle’s head, through the old, purple, Beacon Street glass, upon the waters of Charles River; then softly closed the library door, looked for a moment about the dark, familiar hall, took his hat from the peg on the carved mahogany tree where he had hung his cap when he was a little boy in Latin School, and went down the long, stone steps.
It occurred to him to go back and tell Partredge and Nancy to look after his uncle carefully, but he remembered that he had no reason to give them for his indefinite absence, bethought himself of his uncle’s horror of airing family affairs before servants, and so went on.
He walked up the street slowly, for he was weak yet. At the door of an old friend, he was tempted to pause and rest, but collected his senses, and struggled on.
He turned to look for a cab; then remembered that he had no longer fifty cents to waste upon so mere a luxury as the economy of physical strength. It was his first lesson in poverty,—that a sick man must walk, because he could not afford to ride. Besides, it proved to be a private carriage that he had seen. The elderly coachman, evidently a family retainer, had just shut the doorand clambered to the box; he was waiting to tuck the green cloth robe deliberately about his elegant legs, when a low exclamation from the coach window caused Bayard to look back.
Helen Carruth had opened the door, and stood, irresolute, with one foot upon the step, as if half her mind were in, and half were out the carriage. She was richly dressed in purple cloth, and had that fashionable air which he could not conceive of her as dispensing with if she were a missionary in Tahiti. She looked vivid, vital, warm, and somehow, gorgeous to him.
“You?” she cried joyously; then seemed to recall herself, and stepped back.
He went up to her at once.
“I have been staying with Clara Rollins for a week,” she hastened to say. “I am just going home. It’s her afternoon at the Portuguese Mission, so she could not see me off. I did not know you were in town, Mr. Bayard.”
“I am not,” said Bayard, smiling wanly. “I am on my way to Windover; I am late to my train now.”
“Why, jump in!” said the young lady heartily. “We are going the same way; and I’m sure Mrs. Rollins would be delighted to have you.She’s at the Woman’s Branch.”
“The Woman’s who?” asked Bayard, laughing for the first time for many days. He had hesitated for a moment; then stepped into the carriage, and shut the door.
“I presume you’ve been in this vehicle before?” began Miss Carruth.
He nodded, smiling still.
“At intervals, as far back as I can remember. Miss Clara and I used to go to the same dancing-school.”
“Mrs. Rollins was saying only yesterday what an age it was since they had seen you—Mr. Bayard!” she broke off, “you look ill. You are ill.”
He had sunk back upon the olive satin cushions. The familiar sense of luxury and ease came upon him like a wave of mortal weakness. For a moment he did not trust himself to look at the girl beside him. Her beauty, her gayety, her health, her freedom from care, something even in her personal elegance overcame him. She seemed to whirl before his eyes, the laughing figure of a happy Fortune, the dainty symbol of the life that he had left and lost. The deliberate coachman was now driving rapidly, and they were well on their way over Beacon Hill. She gave Bayard one of her long, steady looks. Something of timidity stole over her vivacious face.