“Pull for the shore, sailor,Pull for the shore!”
“Pull for the shore, sailor,Pull for the shore!”
As he felt his feet touch bottom, Bayard’s strength gave way. Men ran out as far as they could stand in the undertow, and seized and held and dragged—some the rescuer, some the rescued; and so they all came dripping up the beach.
The rope dropped upon the pebbles—cut to a single strand.
Bayard was with difficulty persuaded to release his rigid clutch from the shoulder of the fisherman, who fell in a shapeless mass at his preserver’s feet. The light of the tar fire flared on the man’s bloated face. It was Job Slip.
“Where’s the other?” asked Bayard faintly. “There were two.”
He dimly saw through streams of water, that something else had happened; that men were running over the rocks and collecting in a cleft, and stooping down to look, and that most of them turned away as soon as they had looked.
The old woman’s was the only quiet figure of them all. She had not left her place upon the cliff, but stood bent and stiff, staring straight ahead. He thought he heard a girl’s voice say:—
“Hush! Don’t talk so loud. She doesn’t know—it’s Johnny; and he’s been battered to jelly on the rocks.”
“Mr. Bayard, sir,” said Job, who had crawled up and got as far as his knees, “I wasn’t wuth it.”
“That’s so,” said a candid bystander with an oath.
“Thenbeworth it!” said Bayard in a loud voice. He seemed to have thrown all that remained to him of soul and body into those four words; as he spoke them, he lifted his dripping arms high above his head, as if he appealed from the drunkard to the sky; then he sank.
The gentlest hands in the crowd caught him, and the kindest hearts on the coast throbbed when the old captain called:—
“Boys! Stand back! Stir up the fire! Where’s the dry blankets? There’s plenty to ’tend to Johnny. Dead folks can bury their dead folks. Hurry up them dry clo’es an’ that there Jamaiky ginger! This here’s a livin’ man. Just a drop, sir—here. I’ll hold ye kinder easy. Can’t?What?—Sho!... Boys, the parson’s hurt.”
At that moment a sound solemn and sinister reverberated from the tower of the lighthouse. The iron lips of the fog bell opened and spoke.
Captain Hap had reached the years when a trip to the Grand Banks is hard work, dory fishing off the coast a doubtful pleasure, and even yachting in an industrial capacity is a burden. He had a quick eye, a kind heart, a soft foot, and the gentle touch strangely enough sometimes to be found in hands that have hauled in the cod-line and the main-sheet for fifty years. In short, Captain Hap made an excellent nurse, and sometimes served his day and generation in that capacity.
Bayard lay on the straw mattress under the photograph of Leonardo’s Christ, and thoughtfully watched Captain Hap. It was the first day that conversation had presented itself to the sick man in the light of a privilege; and he worked up to the luxury slowly through intervals of delicious silence.
“Captain Hap, I am quite well now—as you see. I must speak next Sunday.”
“Call it Sunday arter,” suggested Captain Hap.
“It was only a scratch on the head—wasn’t it, Cap’n? And this cold. Itisa bad cold.”
“For a cold, yes, sir; quite a cold. You see, it anchored onto your lungs; there air folks that call such colds inflammation. That there cut on the head was a beautiful cut, sir; it healed as healthy as a collie dog’s, or a year-old baby’s. We’ll have you round, now, sir, before you can say Cap’n Hap!”
“Cap’n Hap?”
“Well, sir?”
“You’ve done something for me—I don’t know just what; whether it’s my life that’s saved, or only a big doctor’s bill.”
“Ask Mrs. Granite, sir, and that there handy girl of hers; we’re all in it. You kept the whole crew on deck for a few days. You was a sick man—for a spell.”
“Captain, I am a well man now; and there’s one thing I will know. I’ve asked you before. I’ve asked when I was out of my head, and I’ve asked when I was in it, and I’ve never got an answer yet.NowI’m going to have it.”
“Be you?” said Captain Hap. His small, dark, soft eyes twinkled gently; but they took on lustre of metal across the iris; as if a spark of iron or flint had hit them.
“It is time,” said Bayard, “that I knew all about it.”
“Meaning”—began the captain softly.
“Meaning everything,” said Bayard impatiently. “The whole story. It’s the best thing for me. I dream about it so.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed your dreams was bad,” replied the nurse soothingly.
“Captain, where’s the Clara Em?”
“To the bottom,” responded the fisherman cheerfully.
“And the men? The crew? Her captain? Job Slip? How many were drowned? Out with it, Cap’n! I’m not very easy to deceive, when I’m in my senses. You may as well tell me everything.”
“Mebbe I mought,” observed the captain. “Sometimes it’s the best way. There wasn’t but one of ’em drowned, sir,—more’s the pity.”
Bayard uttered an exclamation of shocked rebuke and indignation; but the old captain sat rocking to and fro in Mrs. Granite’s best wooden rocking-chair, with the placid expression of those who rest from their labors, and are not afraid that their works should follow them.
“Fellars that’ll take a new fisherman—a regular dandy like that—and smash her onto Ragged Rock, bein’ in the condition those fellars were, ain’tworthsavin’!” said the seaman severely. “Your treasurer here, J. B. S. Bond, he says last time he come to see you, says he: ’The whole of ’em warn’tworthour minister!’”
“I must speak to Mr. Bond about that,” said the young man with a clerical ring in his voice. “It wasn’t a proper thing for him to say.—Who was drowned, Captain Hap?”
“Only Johnny,” replied the captain indifferently. “He was born drunk, Johnny was; his father was so before him; and three uncles. He ain’t any great loss.”
“Did you see Johnny’s mother, Captain,—on the cliff, there,—that night?”
“I didn’t take notice of her particular,” replied Captain Hap comfortably. “I see several women round. There’s usually a good many on the rocks, such times.”
“Well, you’ve got me,” said Bayard with a smiling sigh. “I’m a little too weak to play the parson on you yet, you Christian heathen—you stony-hearted minister of mercy!”
“Sho!” said the captain. “’Tain’t fair to call names. I can’t hit back; on a sick man.”
“Very well,” said Bayard, sinking back on his thin, small pillows. “Just go ahead and tell me the whole business, then. Where is Job Slip?”
“Off haddockin’.”
“Sober?”
“So far. He’s come over here half a dozen times, but the doctor wouldn’t let him up to see you. His wife come, too. That woman, she’d kiss the popples[1]underneath your rubber-boots.”
“Where’s Johnny’s mother?”
“They took her to the Widders’ Home yesterday. Some of ’em screeches all the way over. Folks say she never said nothing.”
“What became of all those men—the crew and captain?”
“Why, they waited till ebb, just as I told you. Then they come ashore, the whole twelve on ’em. The crew they come first, and Cap’n Salt—that’s Joe Salt—he follered after. There was some folks waited round to see ’em off—but it come up dreadful thick, spite of the breeze; so thick it had stems to it. You couldn’t see the vessel, not a line of her, and ’twas kinder cold and disagree’ble. So most the folks went home. But they got ashore, every man-jack of ’em alive.”
“Thank God!” breathed the sick man.
“Well,” said the captain, “that’s a matter of opinion. You’ve talked enough, sir.”
“Just one more, Cap’n Hap! Just this! This I’vegotto know. What was it—exactly—that those men did? How did they come to be in such a plight? How in the world—that beautiful new boat—and an intelligent officer at the helm, Captain—how on earth did it come about?”
“The Clara Em was sot to sail,” replied Captain Hap calmly.“That’s about all. Her owners they were sot, and her cap’n he was sot. It was the sotness done it. They’d make the market first, you see, if they got the start—and it’s a job gettin’ your crew aboard, you know. Anything to get your crew. Drunk or sober, that isn’t the point. Drunker they be, the easier to ship ’em.See? Get your crew.Get ’em anyhow! They was all full, every mother’s son of ’em. Cap’n Joe, he was the only sober soul aboard, and that’s the truth, and he knew it when he set sail. Yes—oh, yes. The storm was comin’. He knew it was breezin’ up.—Oh, yes, of course. So he got some sober men off the wharves to help him at the sheets, and he put up every stitch. Yes, sir! Every stitch he had! And out he sails—with thirteen drunken men aboard—him at the wheel, and not a hand to help him. That’s the English on’t. The boat was d——drunk, beg your pardon, Parson! He driv right out the harbor, and it was a sou’easter, and blew quite a breeze o’ wind, and you see he tacked, and set in, and he was tackin’ out, and it had breezed up consider’ble more’n he expected. So he drove right on the reef. That’s about it.”
“But why didn’t he take in sail?”
“How was he goin’ to do it with that crew? Why, he couldn’t leave the wheel to tie a reef-point.”
“But there was his anchor.”
“Did you ever try to heave one of them big anchors? It takes four men.”
“What a situation! Horrible!”
“Wall, yes; it was inconvenient—him at the wheel, and a dead drunk crew, thirteen of ’em, below. Why, they was too drunk to know whether they drowned or not.”
“Can the boat be raised? Will she ever be good for anything?”
“Kindlin’ wood,” remarked the captain dryly.
“Captain Hap,” asked Bayard feebly, “do things like this often happen?”
“Sometimes.”
“Isn’t this an extreme case?”
“Well, it don’t happen every day.”
“But things of this kind—do they occur often? Do you know of other cases?”
“Windover don’t have the monopoly of ’em by no means,” mused Captain Hap. “There was the Daredevil over on South Shore. She was launched about a year ago. She went on a trial spin one day, and everybody aboard was pretty jolly. They put all their canvas up to show her off. It was a nor’wester that day, and they driv her right before the wind. She jest plunged bows down, and driv straight to the bottom, the Daredevil did. Some said it was her name. But, Lord, rum done it.”
“What do people say—how do they take it here in Windover, this case of the Clara Em? Weren’t they indignant?”
“Wall, the insurance folks was mad.”
“No, but the people—the citizens—the Christian people—how do they feel about it?”
“Oh, they’re used to it,” said Captain Hap.
Bayard turned wearily on his hard bed. He did not answer. He looked out and towards the sea. The engraved Guido over the study-table between the little windows regarded him. St. Michael was fighting with his dragon still.
“Henever got wounded,” thought the sick man.
“Captain,” he said presently, “these rooms seem to be full of—pleasant things. Who sent them all?”
“Them geraniums and other greens? Oh, the ladies of the mission, every mother’s daughter of ’em, married and single, young an’ old. Jellies? Lord! Yes. Jellies enough to stock a branch grocery. What thereisin the female mind, come to sickness, that takes it out in jellies”—mused the captain.
“I’ve taken solid comfort out of this screen,” said Bayard gratefully. “I did suffer with the light before. Who sent that?”
“That’s Jane Granite’s idee,” replied the captain. “She seems to be a clever girl. Took an old clo’es-horse and some rolls of wall paper they had in the house. They give fifteen cents a roll for that paper. It’s kinder tasty, don’t you think? ’Specially that cherubim with blue wings settin’ on a basket of grapes.”
“That reminds me. I see—some Hamburg grapes,” said Bayard, with the indifferent air of a man who purposely puts his vital question last. He pointed to a heaping dish of hothouse fruit and other delicacies never grown in Windover.
The captain replied that those come from the Boston gentleman; they’d kept coming all along. He thought she said there was a card to ’em by the name of—
“Worcester?” asked the sick man eagerly.
That was it. Worcester.
“He hasn’t been here, has he? The gentleman hasn’t called to see me?”
The nurse shook his head, and Bayard turned his own away. He would not have believed that his heart would have leaped like that at such a little thing. He felt like a sick boy, sore andhomesick with the infinite longing for the love of kin. It was something to know that he was not utterly forgotten. He asked for one of the Boston pears, and ate it with pathetic eagerness.
“There’s been letters,” said the captain; “but the doctor’s orders are agin your seeing ’em this week. There’s quite a pile. You see, its bein’ in the papers let folks know.”
“In the papers!Whatin the papers?”
“What do you s’pose?” asked the captain proudly. “A fellar don’t swim out in the undertow off Ragged Rock to save a d—— fool of a drunken fisherman every day.”
“I’ll be split and salted!” added the fisherman-nurse, “if we didn’t have to have a watchman here three nights when you was worst, to keep the reporters off ye. Thirteen Windover fellars volunteered for the job, and they wouldn’t none of ’em take a cent for it. They said they’d set up forty nights for you.”
“Forme?” whispered the sick man. His eyes filled for the first time since the Clara Em went ashore on Ragged Rock. Something new and valuable seemed to have entered life as suddenly as the comfort of kin and the support of friends, and that bright, inspiriting atmosphere, which one calls the world, had gone from him. He had not expected that precious thing—the love of those for whom we sacrifice ourselves. He felt the first thrill of it with gratitude touching to think of, in so young and lovable a man, with life andall its brilliant and beautiful possibilities before him.
It was an April night, and sea and sky were soft in Windover.
A stranger stood in Angel Alley hesitating at a door, which bore above its open welcome these seven words:—
“The Church of the Love of Christ.”
“What goes on here?” the gentleman asked of a bystander.
“Better things than ever went on here before,” was the reply. “They’ve got amanup there. He ain’t no dummy in a minister’s choker.”
The stranger put another question.
“Well,” came the cordial answer, “he has several names in Angel Alley: fisherman’s friend is one of the most pop’lar. Some calls him the gospel cap’n. There’s those that prefers jest to say, the new minister. There’s one name hedon’tgo by very often, and that’s the Reverend Bayard.”
“He has no right to the title,” murmured the stranger.
“What’s that?” interposed the other quickly. The stranger made no reply.
“Some call him the Christ’s Rest man,” proceeded the bystander affably.
“That is a singular—ah—remarkable cognomen. How comes that?”
“Why, you see, the old name for this place was Seraph’s Rest—it was the wust hell in Angel Alley—see? before he took it up an’ sot to prayin’ in it. So folks got it kinder mixed with the Love of Christ up on that sign there. Some calls the place Christlove for short. I heerd an I-talian call him the Christman t’other day.”
The stranger took off his hat by instinct, it seemed unconsciously; glanced at the inscription above the door, and passed thoughtfully up the steep, bare stairs into the hall or room of worship.
The service was already in progress, for the hour was late, and the gentleman observed with an air of surprise that the place was filled. He looked about for a comfortable seat, but was forced to content himself with standing-room in the extreme rear of the hall. Crowds overflowed the wooden settees, brimmed into the aisles, and were packed, in serried rows as tight as codfish in a box, against the wall. The simile of the cod was forced upon the visitor’s mind in more senses than one. A strong whiff of salt fish assailed him on every side. This was varied by reminiscences of glue factories, taking unmistakable form. An expression of disgust crossed the stranger’s face; it quickly changed into that abstraction which indicates the presence of moral emotion too great for attention to trifles.
The usual New England religious audience was not to be seen in the Church of the Love of Christ in Angel Alley. The unusual, plainly,was. The wealth and what the “Windover Topsail” called the society of Windover were sparsely represented on those hard settees. The clean, sober faces of respectable families were out in good force; these bore the earnest, half-perplexed, wholly pathetic expression of uninfluential citizens who find themselves suddenly important to and responsible for an unpopular movement; a class of people who do not get into fiction or history, and who deserve a quality of respect and sympathy which they do not receive; the kind of person who sets us to wondering what was the personal view of the situation dully revolving in the minds of Peter and the sons of Zebedee when they put their nets to dry upon the shores of Galilee, and tramped up and down Palestine at the call of a stronger and diviner mind, wondering what it meant, and how it would all end.
These good people, not quite certain whether their own reputations were injured or bettered by the fact, sat side by side with men and women who are not known to the pews of churches. The homeless were there, and the hopeless, the sinning, the miserable, the disgraced, the neglected, the “rats” of the wharves, and the outcasts of the dens.
The stranger stood packed in, elbow to elbow between an Italian who served the country of his adoption upon the town waterworks, and a dark-browed Portuguese sailor. American fishermen, washed and shaven, in their Sunday clothes, filledthe rear seats. Against the wall, lines of rude, red faces crowded like cattle at a spring; men of the sea and the coast, men without homes or characters; that uninteresting and dangerous class which we dismiss in two idle words as the “floating population.” Some of these men were sober; some were not; others were hovering midway between the two conditions: all were orderly, and a few were listening with evidences of emotion to the hymn, in which by far the greater portion of the audience joined. A girl wearing a Tam o’ Shanter and a black fur cape, and singing in a fine, untrained contralto, held her hymn-book over the settee to the Italian.
“Come, Tony! Pass it along!” she whispered, “I can get on without it. Make ’em pile in and sing along the wall, there!”
With rude and swelling cadence the fishermen sang:—
“I need Thee every hour,Most gracious Lord.”
Their voices and their hearts rose high on one of those plaintive popular melodies of which music need never be ashamed:—
“I need Thee, oh, I need Thee,Every hour I need Thee;Oh, bless me now, my Saviour”....
The stranger, who had the appearance of a religious man, joined in the chorus heartily; he shared the book which the girl had given to theItalian, who came in a bar too late, and closed the stanza on a shrill solo,—
“I co—home to thee.”
This little accident excited a trifling smile; but it faded immediately, for the preacher had arisen. His appearance was greeted with a respect which surprised the stranger. The audience at once became grave even to reverence; the Italian cuffed a drunken Portuguese who was under the impression that responses to the service were expected of him; the girl in the Tam o’ Shanter shook a woman who giggled beside her. A fisherman whispered loudly,—
“Shut up there! The parson ain’t quite tough yet. Keep it quiet for him! Shut up there, along the wall!”
There is nothing like a brave deed to command the respect of seafaring men. Emanuel Bayard, when he plunged into the undertow after Job Slip’s drunken, drowning body, swam straight into the heart of Windover. A rough heart that is, but a warm one, none warmer on the freezing coast, and sea-going Windover had turned the sunny side of its nature, and taken the minister in. The standards by which ignorant men judge the superior classes—their superb indifference to any scale of values but their own—deserve more study than they receive.
It had never occurred to Bayard, who was only beginning to learn to understand the nature ofhis material, that he had become in three weeks the hero of the wharves and the docks, the romance of Angel Alley, the admiring gossip of the Banks and Georges’, the pride and wonder of the Windover fishermen. Quite unconscious of this “sea-change,” wrought by one simple, manly act upon his popularity, he rose to address the people. His heart was full of what he was going to say. He gave one glance the length of the hall. He saw the crowds packed by the door. He saw the swaying nets, ornamented with globes and shells and star-fish, after the fashion of the fishing-town; these decorations softened the bare walls of the audience-room. He saw the faces of the fishermen lifting themselves to him and blurring together in a gentle glow. They seemed to him, as a great preacher once said of his audience, like the face “of one impressive, pleading man,” whose life hung upon his words. He felt as if he must weigh them in some divine scales into which no dust or chaff of weakness or care for self could fall.
Something of this high consciousness crept into his face. He stood for a moment silent; his beautiful countenance, thin from recent suffering, took on the look by which a man represses noble tears.
Suddenly, before he had spoken a word, a storm of applause burst out—shook the room from wall to wall—and roared like breakers under his astonished feet. He turned pale with emotion, but the fishermen thundered on. He was still soweak that this reception almost overcame him, and involuntarily he stretched out both his hands. At the gesture the noise sank instantly; and silence, in which the sigh of the saddest soul in the room might have been heard, received the preacher.
His sensitive face, melted and quivering, shone down upon them tenderly. Men in drunken brawls, and men in drowning seas, and women in terrible temptation, remembered how he looked that night when the safe and the virtuous and the comfortable had forgotten.
The stranger back by the door put his hat before his face.
[1]Windover for pebbles.
[1]Windover for pebbles.
The preacher began to speak with a quietness in almost startling contrast to his own evident emotion, and to the excitement in the audience room. He made no allusion to the fact that this was his first appearance among his people since the wreck of the Clara Em, and the all but mortal illness which had followed his personal share in that catastrophe. Quite in his usual manner he conducted his Sunday evening service; a simple religious talk varied by singing, and a few words from the New Testament. Bayard never read “chapters;” a phrase sufficed, a narrative or a maxim: sometimes he stopped at a single verse. The moment that the fishermen’s eyes wandered, the book closed. It was his peculiarity that he never allowed the Bible to bore his listeners; he trained them to value it by withholding it until they did. It was long remembered of him among the people of the coast that he made use of public prayer with a reserve and a power entirely unknown to the pulpits and the vestries. The ecclesiastical “long prayer” was never heard in Angel Alley. Bayard’s prayers were brief, and few. He prayed audibly before his people only when he could not help it. It seemed sometimes as if his heart broke in the act.
On this evening, no prayer had as yet passed his lips; the stranger, with a slight frown, noticed this fact. But now, the preacher brushed aside his notes, and, clearing the desk, crossed his hands upon it, and leaned forward with a marked change of manner. Suddenly, without a hint of his purpose, the young minister’s gentle voice rose into the tones of solemn arraignment.
“I came here,” he said, “a stranger to this town and to its customs. It has taken me all this while to learn what your virtues and your vices are. I have dealt with you gently, preaching comfortable truths as I have been expected to preach them. I have worked in ignorance. I have spoken soft words. Now I speak them no more! Your sin and your shame have entered like iron into my soul. People of Windover! I accuse you in the name of Christ, whose minister I am!”
The expression of affectionate reverence with which his audience had listened to Bayard up to this moment now changed into a surprise that resembled fear. Before he had spoken ten words more, it became evident that the young preacher was directing the full force of his conscience and his intelligence to a calm and deliberate attack upon the liquor habit and the liquor traffic—one of the last of the subjects (as it is well known) conceded to be the business of a clergyman to meddle with in any community, and the very last which Windover had been trained to hear herself held to account for by her clerical teachers.At the hour when he came nearest to the adoration of those who adore without thought, when they saw him through the mist of romance, when the people, carried on a wave of hero-worship, lay for the first time at his feet, Bayard for the first time opened fire upon their favorite sin.
Shot after shot poured down from those delicate, curving lips. Broadside followed broadside, and still the fire fell. He captured for them the elusive statistics of the subject; he confronted them with its appalling facts; he pelted them with incidents such as the soul sickens to relate or to remember. He denied them the weak consolation of condoning in themselves a moral disease too well known to be the vice of the land, and of the times. He scored them with rebuke under which his leading men grew pale with alarm. Nothing could have been more unlike the conventional temperance address, yet nothing could have been more simple, manly, reasonable, and fearless.
“For every prayer that goes up to God from this room,” he said, “for every hymn, for every sacred word and vow of purity, for every longing of a man’s heart to live a noble life, there open fifty dens of shame upon this street to blast him. We are pouring holy oil upon a sea of mud. That is not good religion, and it is not good sense. We must prove our right to represent the Christian religion in Angel Alley. We must close its dens, or they ought to close our lips. I am ready to try,” he added with his winning simplicity,“if you are. I shall need your help and your advice, for I am not educated in these matters as I ought to be. I was not taught how to save drunken men in the schools where clergymen are trained. I must learn now—we must learn together—as best we can.... Oh, my people!” His voice passed from the tone of loving entreaty into that of prayer; by one of those moving transformations peculiar to himself, wherein those who heard him scarce could tell the moment when he ceased to speak to men and began to talk with God.
“People of the Church of the Love of Christ! Approach God, for He is close at heart.... Thou great God! Holy, Almighty, Merciful! Make us know how to deal with sin, in our own souls, and in the lives of others. For the sake of Thy Son whose Name we dare to bear. Amen.”
As the words of this outcry, this breath of the spirit, rose and ceased, the silence in the room was something so profound that a girl’s sigh was heard far back by the door.
The hush was stung by a long, low, sibilant sound; a single hiss insulted that sacred stillness. Then a man purple to the brows, rose and went out. It was old Trawl, whose saloon had been a landmark in Angel Alley for fifty years.
The stranger, who had been more moved than it seemed he cared to show by what he had heard and seen, passed slowly with the crowd down the long stairs, and reached the outer air. As the salt wind struck in his face, a hand was laid uponhis shoulder. The young minister, looking pale and tired, but enviably calm, drew the visitor’s hand through his arm.
“I saw you, Fenton,” he said quietly, “when you first came in. You’ll come straight to my lodgings with me.... Won’t you?” he added wistfully, fancying that Fenton hesitated. “You can’t know how much it will mean to me. I haven’t seen anybody—why, I haven’t seen a fellow since I came to Windover.”
“You must lead rather an isolated life, I should think,” observed Fenton with some embarrassment, as the two stood to hail the electric car that ran by Mrs. Granite’s humble door.
“We’ll talk when we get there,” replied Bayard, rather shortly for him. “The car will be full of people,” he added apologetically. “One lives in a glass bell here. Besides, I’m a bit tired.”
He looked, indeed, exhausted, as the electric light smote his thin face; his eyes glowed like fire fed by metal, and his breath came short. He leaned his head back against the car window.
“You cough, I see,” said Fenton, who was not an expert in silence.
“Do I? Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of it.” He said nothing more until they had reached his lodgings. Fenton began to talk about the wreck and the rescue. He said the usual things in the usual way, offering, perforce, the tribute of a man to a manly deed.
Bayard nodded politely; he would not talk about it.
Jane Granite opened the door for them. She looked at the minister with mute, dog-like misery in her young eyes.
“You look dead beat out, sir,” she said. But Ben Trawl stood scowling in the door of the sitting-room; he had not chosen to go to the service, nor to allow her to go without him. Jane thought it was religious experience that made this such a disappointment to her.
“Ah, Trawl,” said the minister heartily, “I’m glad to see you here.”
He did not say, “I am sorry you were not at church,” as Ben Trawl pugnaciously expected.
Bayard led his guest upstairs, and shut and locked the study door.
“There!” he said faintly. “Now, George Fenton, talk! Tell me all about it. You can’tthinkhow I am going to enjoy this! I wish I had an easy-chair for you. Will this rocker do? If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just lie down a minute.”
He flung himself heavily upon the old carpet-covered lounge. Fenton drew up the wooden rocking-chair to the cylinder stove, in which a low fire glimmered, and put his feet on top of the stove, after the manner of Cesarea and Galilee Hall.
“Well,” he began, in his own comfortable way, “I’ve accepted the call.”
“I supposed you would,” replied Bayard, “when I heard it was under way. I am glad of it!” he said cordially.“The First Church is a fine old church. You’re just the man for them. They’ll ordain you as easily as they swallow their native chowders. You came right over from their evening service to our place to-night? You must have hurried.”
“I did,” said the guest, with a certain air of condescension. “I wanted to hear you, you know—once, at least.”
“When you are settled, you can’t come, of course,” observed Bayard quickly. “I understand that.”
“Well—you see—I shall be—you know—in a very delicate position, when I become the pastor of that church.”
Fenton’s natural complacency forsook him for the instant, and something like embarrassment rested upon his easy face; he showed it by the way he handled Mrs. Granite’s poker.
“It’s 72° in this room already,” suggested Bayard, smiling. “Would you poke that fire any more?... Oh, come, Fenton! I understand. Don’t bother your head about me, or how I may feel. A man doesn’t choose to be where I am, to waste life in considering his feelings; those are the least important items in his natural history. Just stick to your subject, man. It’syouI want to hear about.”
“Well,” replied the guest, warming to the theme with natural enthusiasm, “the call was unanimous. Perfectly so.”
“That must be delightful.”
“Why, so it is—it is, as you say, delightful. And the salary—they’ve raised the salary to get me, Bayard. You see it had got out that I had refused—ah—hum—several calls. And they’d been without a man so long, I fancy they’re tired of it. Anyhow, I’m to have three thousand dollars.”
“That is delightful too,” said Bayard cordially. He turned over on his old lounge, coughing, and doubled the thin, cretonne pillow under his head; he watched his classmate with a half-quizzical smile; his eyes and brow were perfectly serene.
“I shall be ordained immediately,” continued Fenton eagerly, “and bring my wife. They are refitting the parsonage. I went in last night to see that the carpets and papers and all that were what they should be. I am going to be married—Bayard, I am going to be married next week.”
“And that is best of all,” said Bayard in a low voice.
“She is really a lovely girl,” observed Fenton, “though somewhat limited in her experience. I’ve known her all my life—where I came from, in the western part of the State. But I think these gentle, country girls make the best ministers’ wives. They educate up to the position rapidly.”
Bayard made no answer to this scintillation; a spark shot over his soft and laughing eyes; but his lips opened only to say, after a perceptible pause,—
“Where is Tompkinton—he of the long legs and the army cape?”
“Settled somewhere near you, I hear; over across the Cape. He has a fine parish. He’s to have two thousand—that’s doing well for a man of his stamp.”
“I don’t think Tompkinton is the kind of man to think much about the salary,” observed Bayard gravely. “He struck me as the other sort of fellow. What’s become of Bent?”
“Graduates this summer, I suppose. I hear he’s called to Roxbury. He always aimed at a Boston parish. He’s sure to boom.”
“And that brakeman—Holt? He who admired Huxley’s ‘Descent of Man’?”
“Oh,heis slumming in New York city. They say he is really very useful. He has some sort of mission work, there, at the Five Points. I’m told he makes a specialty of converted burglars.”
“I haven’t been able to follow any of the boys,” said Bayard, coughing. “I can’t very well—as I am situated. It does me good to hear something about somebody. Where’s that round fellow—Jaynes? With the round glasses? I remember he always ate two Baldwins, two entire Baldwin apples.”
“Gone West, I believe. He’s admirably adapted to the West,” replied Fenton, settling his chair in his old comfortable way.
“What an assorted lot we were!” said Bayard dreamily.“And what a medley we were taught! I haven’t opened one of my note-books since I came here.”
“Oh, inyourwork,” said Fenton, “you don’t need to read, I should think.”
Bayard’s eyes sought his library; rested lovingly on its full and well-used shelves; then turned away with the expression of one who says to a chosen friend: “We understand. Why need anything be said?” He did not otherwise reply.
“Were you ever ordained over your present charge?” asked his visitor suddenly, balancing the poker on the top curl of the iron angel that ornamented the cylinder stove. “How did you manage it? Did any of the—regular clergy—recognize the affair?”
“I was not ordained,” replied Bayard, smiling contentedly. “I sought nothing of the kind. But a few of the country ministers wished us Godspeed. There was one dear old man—he was my moderator at that Council—he came over and put his hands on my head, and gave me the blessing.”
“Oh—the charge to the pastor?”
“We didn’t call it that. We did not steal any of the old phrases. He prayed and blessed me, that was all. He is a sincere, good man, and he made something impressive out of it, my people said. At all events they were satisfied. We have to do things in our own way, you know. We are experimenting, of course.”
“I should say that was a pretty serious experiment you inaugurated to-night in your service. If you’ll allow me to say so, I should call it very ill-advised.”
“Itisa serious experiment,” replied Bayard gravely.
“Expect to succeed in it?”
“God knows.”
“Bound to go on with it?”
“Till I succeed or fail.”
“What do you propose? To turn temperance lecturer, and that sort of thing? I suppose you’ll be switching off your religious services into prohibition caucuses, and so forth.”
“I propose nothing of the kind. I am not a politician. I am a preacher of the Christian religion.”
“I always knew you were eccentric, of course, Bayard. Everybody knows that. But I never expected to see you leading such a singular life. I never took you for this sort of fanatic. It seems so—common for a man of your taste and culture, and there can be no doubt that it is unwise, from every point of view, even from your own, I should think. I don’t deny that your work impressed me, what I saw of it to-night. Your gifts tell—even here. It is a pity to have them misapplied. Now, what was your motive in that outbreak to-night? I take it, it was the first time you had tackled the subject.”
“To my shame—yes. It was the first time. I have had reasons to look into it, lately—that’s all. You see, my ignorance on the subject was colossal, to start in. We were not taught such things in the Seminary. Cesarea does as well as any of them—but no curriculum recognizes Job Slip. Oh, when I think about it—Predestination, foreordination, sanctification, election, and botheration,—and never a lesson on the Christian socialism of our day, not a lecture to tell us how to save a poor, lost woman, how to reform a drunkard, what to do with gamblers and paupers and thieves, and worse, how to apply what we believe to common life and common sense—how to lift miserable creatures, scrambling up, and falling back into the mud as fast as they can scramble—people of no religion, no morals, no decency, no hope, no joy—who never see the inside of a church”—
“They ought to,” replied Fenton severely. “That’s their fault, not ours. And all seminaries have a course on Pastoral Theology.”
“I visited sixteen of the dens of this town this last week,” replied Bayard.“I took a policeman, and went through the whole thing. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t go to church if I were they. I shall dream about what I saw—I don’t know that I shall ever stop dreaming about it. It is too horrible to tell. I wouldn’t evenspeakwhat I saw men and womenlive. The old sailors who have seen a good many ports, call it a hell of a town. My own idea is, that it isn’t a particle worse than other places of its class. I fancy it’s a fair, average seaport town. Six thousand seamen sail this harbor every year. I can’t get at the number of dens they support; such figures are runaway lunatics, you understand; they have a genius for hiding; and nobodywantsto find them. But put it low—call it two hundred—in this little town. If it isn’t the business of a Christian church to shut them—whose is it? If it isn’t the business of religious people to look after these fellows—whose is it? I say, religious people are answerable for them, and for their vices! The best people are responsible for the worst, or there’s no meaning in the New Testament, and no sense in the Christian religion. Oh,” said Bayard, with a sound that was more like a moan than a sigh, “if Christ could come into Angel Alley—just this one street! If He could take this little piece of a worldful of human woe—modern human misery, you understand, all the new forms and phases that Palestine knew nothing about—if He could sweep it clean, and show us how to do itnow! Think, Fenton, think, how He would go to work—what that would be!... sometimes I think it would be worth dying for.”
“It strikes me it is harder to guess than predestination,—what He would do if He were reincarnated,” replied Fenton gravely.
“It had not struck me so,” answered Bayard gently, “but there may be something in that.”
“Now,” continued Fenton,“take yourself. I fancy you believe—Do you supposeyouare doing the kind of thing He would set about, if He were in your place?”
“How can I tell?” replied Bayard in a voice so low that it was scarcely articulate. “How can a manknow? All I do know is, that I try. That is what—and that is all—I try to do. And I shall keep on trying, till I die.”
He spoke with a solemnity which admitted of no light response, even from a worldly man. Fenton was not that, and his eyes filled.
“Well,” he said, after a silence, “you are a good man, Emanuel Bayard. God go with you.”
“And with you,” replied Bayard, holding out his hand. “Our roads lie different ways. We shall not talk like this again.”
“You won’t mind that? You won’t feel it,” said Fenton uncomfortably, for he had risen to leave, and the conversation hung heavily on his heart, “if I don’t run across your way, often? It would hardly do, you see. My people—the church—the circumstances”—
He brought the poker down hard upon the cerebrum of the iron angel, who resented the insult by tumbling over on the funnel; thence, with a slam, to the floor. Fenton picked up the ornament with a red face, and restored it to its place. He felt, as a man sometimes does, more rebuked than irritated by the inanimate thing.
“Good-by,” said Bayard gently. It was all he said. He still held out his hand. His classmatewrung it, and passed, with bowed head, from his presence.
The happy weather held over into the next day; and the harbor wore her celestial smile. The gentleness of summer clothed in the colors of spring rested upon the wooded coast beyond the long cliff-outline, upon the broken scallops of the beaches, and the moss-green piers of the docks, upon the waves swelling without foam, and the patched sails of the anchored fleet unfurled to dry. The water still held the blue and gray tints that betoken cold weather too recently past or too soon returning to be forgotten. But the wind was south; and the saxifrage was in bud upon the downs in the clefts of the broken rocks between the boulders.
Bayard was a weak and weary man that day,—the events of the previous evening had told upon him more than he would have supposed possible,—and he gave himself a luxury. He put the world and the evil of it from his heart and brain, and went out on Windover Point, to sun himself, alone; crawling along, poor fellow, at a sad pace, stopping often to rest, and panting as he pushed on. He had been an athletic lad, a vigorous, hearty man; illness and its subtle train of physical and mental consequences spoke in the voices of strangers to him.
“They will pass on,” he thought.
Bayard was such a lovable, cordial, human man,that the isolation of his life in Windover had affected him more than it might have done a natural recluse. Solitude is the final test of character as well as of nature.
The romance of consecration has its glamour as well as the romance of love. Bayard had felt his way into this beautiful mist with a stout, good sense which is rare in the devotee, and which was perhaps his most remarkable quality. This led him to accept without fruitless resistance a lot which was pathetically alien to him. He was no gray-bearded saint, on whose leathern tongue joy had turned to ashes; to whom renunciation was the last throw left in the game of life. He was a young man, ardent, eager, buoyant, confiding in hope because he had not tested it; believing in happiness because he had not known it: full of untried, untamed capacity for human delight, and with the instinct (generations old) of a luxurious training toward human ease. He had cut the silken cords between himself and the world of his old habits, ambitions, and friends with a steady stroke; he had smitten the soft network like a man, and flung it from him like a spirit; but there were hours when he felt as if he were bleeding to death, inwardly, from sheer desolation.
“That call of George Fenton’s upset me last night,” he said aloud, as he sank down at the base of a big boulder in the warm sand. He sometimes talked to the sea; nothing else in Windover could understand him; he was acquiring some of thehabits of lonely people who live apart from their own class. How impossible it would have been in Cambridge, in Boston, or in Cesarea to be caught talking aloud! His pale face flushed, and he drew his hat over it, thanking Heaven that rocks were deaf and the downs were dumb, that the sun would never tell, and the harbor was too busy to listen. He had lain there in the sand for some time, as motionless as a mollusk at low water.
“All a man needs is a little common rest,” he thought. The April sun seemed to sink into his brain and heart with the healing touch that nothing human ever gives. He pushed his hat away from his face, and looked up gratefully, as if he had been caressed.
As he did so, he heard footsteps upon the crisp, red-cupped moss that surrounded the base of the boulder. He rose instinctively, and confronted a woman—a lady. She had been walking far and fast, and had glorious color. The skirt of her purple gown was splashed with little sticks and burrs and bits of moss; her hands were full of saxifrage. She was trying in the rising wind to hold a sun-umbrella over her head, for she wore the street or traveling dress of the town, and her little bonnet gave her as much protection from the sun as a purple butterfly whose wings were dashed with gold.
Oddly enough, he recognized the costume before he did the wearer; so incredible did he find it that she should stand there living, glowing, laughing,—asumptuous beauty, stamped against the ascetic sky of Windover.
“You!” he cried.
“Oh, I did not expect—I did not think”—she stammered. He had never seen Helen Carruth disconcerted. But she blushed like a schoolgirl when she gave him, saxifrage and all, her ungloved hand.
“Mother sent me!—I came down for her and father!” began Helen Carruth abruptly. Then she thought how that sounded—as if she need be supposed to apologize for or explain the circumstance that she happened to find one of her father’s old students sunning himself upon a given portion of the New England coast; and she blushed again. When she saw the sudden, upward motion of Bayard’s heavy eyelids, she could have set her pretty teeth through her tongue, for vexation at her littlefaux pas. From sheer embarrassment, she laughed it off.
“I haven’t heard anybody laugh like that since I came to Windover,” said Bayard, drawing a long breath. “Do give me an encore!”
“Now, then, you are laughing at me!”
“Upon the word of a poor heretic parson—no. You can’t think how it sounds. It sinks in—like the sun.”
“But I don’t feel like laughing any more. I’ve got all over it. I’m afraid I can’t oblige you.”
“Why not? You used to be good-natured, I thought—in Cesarea, ages ago.”
“You are enough to drive the laugh out of a faun,” said the young lady soberly.“Pray sit down again on your sand sofa. I did not know you had been so ill. Put on your hat, Mr. Bayard. Good society does not require ghosts to stand bareheaded at the seacoast in April.”
“I don’t move in good society any longer. I am not expected to know anything about its customs. Sit down beside me, a minute—and I will. No—stay. Perhaps you will take cold? I wish I had some wraps. My coat”—
“WhenItakeyourcoat”—began the healthy girl. He had already flung his overcoat upon the dry, warm sand. She gave it back to him. Then she saw the color start into his pale face.
“Oh, forgive me!” she said quickly. “I did not mean—Mr. Bayard, I never was ill in my life.”
“Nor I, either, before now,” pleaded Bayard rather piteously.
“Who called it the ‘insolence of health’? I did not mean to be impertinent, if you will take the trouble to believe me. I fail to grasp the situation, that’s all. I am simply obtuse—blunt—blunt as a clam.”
She waved her sun-umbrella dejectedly towards the beach where a solitary clam-digger, a bent, picturesque old man, was seeking his next chowder.
“The amount of it is,” said Miss Carruth more in her usual manner,“that I was taken a little by surprise. You used to look so—different. You are greatly changed, Mr. Bayard. Being a heretic does not agree with you.”
“I have had a little touch of something they call pneumonia down here,” observed Bayard carelessly. “I’ve been out only a few days.”
She made no answer at first; Bayard was looking at the clam-digger, but he felt that she was looking at him. She had seated herself on the sand beside him; she was now quite her usual self; her momentary embarrassment had disappeared like a sail around the Point—a graceful, vanishing thing of whose motion one thinks afterwards. He did not suppose that she was there to sympathize with him, but he was vaguely aware of a certain unbridged gap in the subject, when she unexpectedly said,—
“You have not asked me what I came to Windover for.”
“Windover does not belong to me, Miss Carruth; nor”—a ray of disused mischief sprang to his eyes. Did he start to say, “Nor you?” He might have been capable of it as far back as Harvard, or even in junior year at Cesarea. That flash of human nonsense changed his appearance to an almost startling extent.
“Why now,” she laughed, “I think I could recognize you without an introduction.”
“But you haven’t told me why youdidcome to Windover.”
“It doesn’t signify. You exhibit no interest in the subject, sir.”
“You are here,” he answered, looking at her. “That fact preoccupied me.”
This reply was without precedent in her experience of him; and she gave no sign, whether of pleasure or displeasure, of its effect upon her. She looked straight at the clam-digger, who was shouldering his basket laboriously upon his bent back, making a sombre, Millet sketch against the cheerful, afternoon sky.
“I came down to engage our rooms,” she said lightly. “We are coming here, you know, this summer. We board at the Mainsail. I had to have it out with Mrs. Salt about the mosquito bars. Mother wouldn’t come last year because the mosquito bars had holes, and let in hornets and a mouse. You understand,” she added, with something of unnecessary emphasis, “we always come here summers.”
“I understand nothing at all!” said Bayard breathlessly. “You were not here last summer, when I was candidating in the First Church.”
“That, I tell you, was on account of the hornets and the mouse; the mouse clinched it; he waked her walking up her sleeve one morning. So we went to Campo Bello the year after. But wealwayscome to Windover.”
“For instance, how many seasons constitute ‘always’?”
“Three. This will be four. Father likes it above everything. So did mother before the mouse epoch. She got to feeling hornets in her shoes whenever she put them on. I wonder father never told you we always come to Windover.”
“The Professor had other things in his mind when he talked to me,—second probation, and the dangers of modern German exegesis.”
“Yes, I know. Dear papa! Windover isn’t a doctrine.”
“I wonderyounever told me you always came to Windover.”
“Oh, I left that to Father,” replied the young lady demurely. “I did come near it, though, once. Do you remember that evening”—
“Yes,” he interrupted; “I remember that evening.”
“I mean, when you had taken me up the Seminary walk to see the cross. When you said good-by that night, I thought I’d mention it. But I changed my mind. You see, you hadn’t had your call, then. I thought—I might—hurt your feelings. But we alwaysdocome to Windover. We are coming as soon as Anniversary is over. We have the Flying Jib to ourselves—that little green cottage, you know, on the rocks. What! Never heard of the Flying Jib? You don’t know the summer Windover, do you?”
“Only the winter Windover, you see.”
“Nor the summer people, I suppose?”
“Only the winter people.”
“Father’s hired that old fish-house for a study,” continued Helen with some abruptness.“He says he can’t stand the women on the Mainsail piazzas; you can hear them over at the Flying Jib when the wind sets our way; they discuss the desserts, and pick each other’s characters to pieces, and compare Kensington stitches, and neuralgia. Father is going to bring down his article on ‘The State of the Unforgiven after Death’—There!” she said suddenly, “that Millet sketch is walking into father’s study with his basket on his back. The State of the Unforgiven will be a little—clammy, don’t you think?”
Her eyes rippled like the bed of a brown brook in the sun. Bayard laughed.
“The dear Professor!” he said.
“If father weren’t such an archangel in private life, it wouldn’t be so funny,” observed Helen, jabbing the point of her purple-and-gold changeable silk sun-umbrella into the sand; “I can’t see what he wants the unconverted to be burned upfor. Can you?”
“The State of the Unforgiven before Death is more than I can manage,” replied Bayard, smiling; “I have my hands full.”
“Do you like it?” asked Helen, with a pretty, puzzled knot between her smooth brows.
“Like what? I like this.”
He looked at her; as any other man might—like those students who used to come so often, and who suddenly called no more. Helen had never seen that expression in his eyes. She dropped her own. She dug little wells in the fine, white sand with her sun-umbrella before she said,—
“I have to get the six o’clock train; you know I haven’t come to stay, yet.”
“But you are coming!” he exclaimed with irrepressible joyousness.
She made no answer, and Bayard’s sensitive color changed.
“Do I likewhat?” he repeated in a different tone.
“Heresy and martyrdom,” said Helen serenely.
“I regret nothing, if that is what you mean; no matter what it costs; no matter how it ends—no, not for an hour. I told the truth, and I took the consequences; that is all. Howcana man regret standing by his best convictions?”
“He might regret the convictions,” suggested Helen.
“Might he? Perhaps. Mine are so much stronger than they were when I started in, that they race me and drag me like winged horses in a chariot of fire.”
His eyes took on their dazzling look; like fine flash-lights they shot forth a brilliance as burning as it was brief; then their calm and color returned to them. Helen watched the transfiguration touch and pass his face with a sense of something so like reverence that it made her uncomfortable. Like many girls trained as she had been, she had small regard for the priestly office, and none for the priestly assumptions. The recognition of a spiritual superiority which she felt to be so far above her that in the nature of things she could notunderstand it, gave her strong nature a jar: something within her, hitherto fixed and untroubled, shook before it.
Bayard, without apparent consciousness of the young lady’s thoughts, or indeed of her presence for that moment, went on dreamily:—
“I was a theorizer, a dreamer, a theologic apprentice, a year ago. I knew no more of real life than—that silver sea-gull making for the lighthouse tower. I took notes about sin in the lecture-room. Now I study misery and shame in Angel Alley. The gap between them is as wide as the stride of that angel in Revelation—do you remember him?—who stood with one foot upon the land and one upon the sea. All I mind is, that I have so much more to learn than I need have had—everything, in fact. If I had been taught, if I had been trained—if it had not all come with that kind of shock which benumbs a man’s brain at first, and uses up his vitality so much faster than he can afford to spare it—but I have no convictions that I ought to be talking like this!”
“Go on,” said Helen softly.
“Oh, to what end?” asked Bayard wearily. “That ecclesiastical system which brought me where I am can’t be helped by one man’s rebellion. It’s going to take a generation of us. But there is enough that Icanhelp. It is the can-be’s, not the can’t-be’s, that are the business of men like me.”
“I saw you with that drunken man; he had his arms about you,” said Helen with charming irrelevance. Her untroubled brows still held that little knot, half of perplexity, half of annoyance. It became her, for she looked the more of a woman for it.
“Job Slip? Oh, in Boston that day; yes. I got him home to his wife all right that night. He was sober after that for—for quite a while. I wish you had seen that woman!” he said earnestly. “Mari is the most miserable—and the most grateful—person that I know. I never knew what a woman could suffer till I got acquainted with that family. They have a dear little boy. His father used to beat him over the head with a shovel. Joey comes over to see me sometimes, and goes to sleep on my lounge. We’re great chums.”
“Youdolike it,” said Helen slowly. She had raised her brown eyes while he was speaking, and watched his face with a veiled look. “Yes; there’s no doubt about it. You do.”
“Wouldn’t you?” asked Bayard, smiling.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
She shook her head with that positiveness so charming in an attractive woman, and so repellent in an ugly one. “When they burn you at the stake you’ll swallow the fire and enjoy it. You’ll say, ‘Forgive them, for they don’t mean it, poor things.’ I should say, ‘Lord, punish them, for they ought to know better.’ That’s just the difference between us. Mother must be right. She always says I am not spiritual.”
“I don’t know but I should like to see that little boy, though,” added Helen reluctantly; “and Mari—if she had on a clean apron.”
“She doesn’t very often. But it might happen. Why, you might go over there with me—sometime—this summer, and see them?” suggested Bayard eagerly.
“So you lay the first little smoking fagot, do you?—For me, too?”
She laughed.
“God forbid!” said Bayard quickly. Helen’s voice had not been as light as her laugh; and her bright face was grave when he turned and regarded it. She gave back his gaze without evasion, now. She seemed to have grown indefinably older and gentler since she had sat there on the sand beside him. Her eyes, for the first time, now, it seemed, intentionally studied him. She took in the least detail of his changed appearance: the shabby coat, the patch on his boot, his linen worn and darned, the fading color of his hat. She remembered him as the best-dressed man in Cesarea Seminary; nothing but rude, real poverty could have so changed that fashionable and easy student into this country parson, rusting and mended and out-of-the-mode, and conscious of it to the last sense, as only the town-bred man of luxurious antecedents can be of the novel deprivation that might have been another’s native air.
“I don’t know that it is necessary to look so pale,” was all she said.“I should think you’d tan here in this glare. I do. See!”
She held out her bare hands, and doubled them up, putting them together to scrutinize the delicate backs of them for the effect of an hour’s Windover sun. Her dark purple gloves and the saxifrage lay in her lap. Bayard held the sun-umbrella over her. It gave him a curious sense of event to perform this little courtesy; it was so long since he had been among ladies, and lived like other gentlemen; he felt as if he had been upon a journey in strange lands and were coming home again. A blossom of the saxifrage fell to the hem of her dress, and over upon the sand. He delicately touched and took it, saying nothing.
“Does Mr. Hermon Worcester come and pour pitch and things on the bonfire?” asked Helen suddenly.
“I thought you knew,” said Bayard, “my uncle has disinherited me. He is not pleased with what I have done.”
“Ah! I did not know. Doesn’t he—excuse me, Mr. Bayard. It is not my business.”
“He writes to me,” said Bayard. “He sent me things when I was sick. He was very kind then. We have not quarreled at all. But it is some time since I have seen him. I am very fond of my uncle. He is an old man, you know. He was brought up so—We mustn’t blame him. He thinks I am on the road to perdition. He doesn’t come to Windover.”
“I see,” said Helen. She leaned her head back against the boulder and looked through half-shutlids at the dashing sea. The wind was rising.
“I must go,” she said abruptly.
“May I take you over to the station?” he asked with boyish anxiety.