“Mr. Bayard,” she said in a changed tone, “I have heard all about it from my father. I wanted to tell you, but I had no way. I am glad to have a chance to say—I am sorry for you with all my heart. And with all my soul, I honor you.”
“Do you?” said the disheartened man. “Then I honor myself the more.”
He turned now, and looked at her gratefully.This first drop of human sympathy from man or woman of his own kind was inexpressibly sweet to him. He could have raised her hand to his lips. But they were in Mrs. Rollins’s carriage, and on Beacon Street.
“Oh!” cried Helen suddenly. “Look there! No,there! See that poor,horriblefellow! Why, he’s arrested! The policemen are carrying him off.”
They had now reached Tremont Street, where the young lady had an errand which had decided her direction to the northern stations. But for the trifling circumstance that Helen Carruth had promised her mother to bring out from a famous Boston grocer’s that particular brand of olive oil which alone was worthy of a salad for the Trustees’ lunch, the event which followed would never have occurred. Thus may the worry of a too excellent housekeeper lay its petty finger upon the future of a man or of an enterprise.
Bayard looked out of the carriage window, and uttered a disturbed exclamation. Struggling in the iron grip of two policemen of assorted sizes, the form and the tongue of Job Slip were forcibly ornamenting Tremont Row.
“I must go. I must leave you. Excuse me. Drive on without me, Miss Carruth. That is a friend of mine in trouble there.”
Bayard stopped the coachman with an imperious tap, and a “Hold on, John!”
“Awhatof yours?” cried Helen.
“It is one of my people,” explained Bayard curtly. He leaped from the carriage, raised his hat, and ran.
“Just release this man, if you please,” he said to the police authoritatively. “I know him; I am his minister. I’m going on the train he meant to take. I’ll see him safely home. I’ll answer for him.”
“Well—I don’t know about that, sir,” replied the smaller policeman doubtfully.
But the larger one looked Bayard over, and made answer: “Oh, bejabers, Tim, let ’im goa!”
Job, who was not too far gone to recognize his preserver, now threw his arms affectionately around Bayard’s recoiling neck, and became unendurably maudlin. In a voice audible the width of the street, and with streaming tears and loathsome blessings, he identified Bayard as his dearest, best, nearest, and most intimate of friends. A laughing crowd collected and followed, as Bayard tried to hurry to the station, encumbered by the grip of Job’s intoxicated affection. Now falling, now staggering up, now down again, and ever firmly held, Job looked up drunkenly into the white, delicate face that seemed to rise above him by a space as far as the span between the heavens and the earth. Stupidly he was aware that the new minister was doing something by him that was not exactly usual. He began to talk in thick, hyphenated sentences about his wife and home, his boy, and the trip he had taken to Georges’. Hehad made, he averred, a hundred dollars (which was possible), and had two dollars and thirty-seven cents left (which was altogether probable). Job complained that he had been robbed in Boston of the difference, and, weeping, besought the new minister to turn back and report the theft to the police.
“We shall lose the train, Job,” said Bayard firmly. “We must get home to your wife and little boy.”
“Go wherever y’ say!” cried Job pleasantly. “Go to h—— along of you, if you say so!”
There was something so grotesque in the situation that Bayard’s soul recoiled within him. He was not used to this kind of thing. He was no Christ, but a plain human man, and a young man at that. His sense of dignity was terribly hurt. Without turning his head, he knew when the carriage drove on. He felt her eyes upon him; he knew the moment when she took them off; Job was attempting to kiss him at that particular crisis.
Bayard managed to reach the last platform of the last car as it moved out of the station, and to get his charge to Windover without an accident. He had plenty of time for reflection on the trip; but he reflected as little as possible. With his arm linked firmly through Job’s and his eyes closed, he became a seer of visions, not a thinker of thoughts. Her face leaned out of the carriage window,—faded, formed, and dimmed, and formed again.He saw the velvet on her dress, the little dash of gold color on her purple bonnet, the plain distinguished fashion of her yellow hair about her forehead. He saw the astonishment leap into her brown eyes, and that look which no sibyl could have interpreted, forming about her merry lips. He heard the coachman say, “Shall I drive on, Miss?” And the answer, “Yes, John, drive on. I must not miss the train.”
He opened his eyes, and saw the sullen horizon of the sea across the marshes, and the loathsome face of Job leaning against the casement of the car window at his side.
By the time they had reached Windover, Slip was sleepy and quite manageable. Bayard consulted his watch. It was the hour for his evening appointment with the officers of the new parish.
“Again!” he thought. He looked at the drunkard wearily. Then the flash of inspiration fired his tired face.
“Come, Job,” he said suddenly. “Never mind our suppers. Come with me.”
He took Job as he was,—torpid, sodden, disgusting, a creature of the mud, a problem of the mire. The committee sat in the anxious conclave of people embarked upon a doubtful and unpopular enterprise. Emanuel Bayard pushed Job Slip before him into the pretty parlors of the ex-treasurer of the old First Church. For the treasurer had followed the come-outers. He had joined the poor and humble people who, in fear and faith,had tremblingly organized the experiment for which, as yet, they had no other name than that they gave it in their prayers. Christ’s work, they called it, then. The treasurer was their only man of property. His jaw dropped when he saw Job.
“Gentlemen,” said the young pastor,“gentlemen, I have brought you a sample of the material under discussion. What are we going to do withthis?”
Jane Granite stood at the foot of the steep, uncarpeted stairs. She had a stone-china cup filled with tea in her hand. She had hesitation in her mind, and longing in her heart. When the minister had sent word that he would eat no supper, it was plain that something must be done. Her mother was out, and Jane had no superior intelligence to consult. For Mrs. Granite was appointed to the doom that overtakes the women of a poor and struggling religious movement; she was ex-officio beggar for the new mission; on this especial occasion she was charged with the duty of wringing a portion of the minister’s almost invisible salary out of the least unfriendly citizens of the town. The minister had observed her from his window, tugging at her black skirts as she sallied forth, ankle-deep, in the slush of the February afternoon; and his brows had darkened at the sight. For the good woman would trudge and soak five miles for—what? Possibly five dollars. How dreary the devices of small people to achieve large ends!
To the young man who had never had to think what anything cost, the cold, pecuniary facts of his position were galling past the power of these simple people to comprehend.
He did not care too much on his own account. He felt more surprise than impatience to see his coat turn shiny and frayed, and to know that he could not get another. He was learning not to mind his straw mattress as much as he did at first; and to educate himself to going without magazines, and to the quality of Mrs. Granite’s tea. When a man deliberately elects a great personal sacrifice, he does not concern himself with its details as women are more likely to do.
But there were aspects of his chosen work to which his soul was as sore as a boy’s. He could not accustom himself with the ease of a poor man’s son to the fact that a superb, supreme faith like the Christianity of Christ must beg for its living. “It degrades!” he thought, looking up from his books. “Lowell was right when he said that no man should preach who hadn’t an independent property.” His Bible fell from his clenched hand; he picked it up penitently, and tenderly smoothed the crumpled leaf at which it had opened. Half unconsciously, he glanced, and read:—
“Take no scrip in your purse;” his burning eye followed along the page; softened, and grew moist.
“Perhaps on the whole,” he said aloud, “He really knew as much about it as any American poet.”
He returned patiently to his preparation for the evening service, for he worked hard for these fishermenand drunkards—harder than he had ever worked at anything in his life. To make them one half hour’s talk, he read, he ransacked, he toiled, he thought, he dreamed, he prayed.
The only thing which he had asked leave to take from his uncle’s house, was his own library. It piled Mrs. Granite’s spare chamber from the old, brown carpet to the low and dingy ceiling. Barricades of books stood on the floor by the ugly little coal-stove; and were piled upon the stained pine table at which he sat to study in a hard wood chair with a turkey-red cushion. Of the pictures, dear to his youth, and to his trained taste, but two had come through with him in the flying leap from Beacon Street to Mrs. Granite’s. Over the table in his study a fine engraving watched him. It was Guido’s great Saint Michael. Above the straw mattress in the chilly closet where he slept hung a large photograph of Leonardo’s Christ; the one from the Last Supper, as it was found in the ruined fresco on the monastery wall.
But Jane Granite stood irresolute upon the bare, steep stairs, with the stone-china teacup in her hand.
The minister had never concentrated his mind on Jane. He was a busy man. She was a modest, quiet girl; she helped her mother “do” his rooms, and never slammed the door when she went out. He felt a certain gratitude to her, for the two women took trouble for him far beyond the merits of the meagre sum allowed them for hisbread and codfish. But for the life of him, if he had been required to, he could not have told anybody how Jane Granite looked.
When her timid knock struck the panel of his door, he started impatiently, put down his pen, and patiently bade her enter.
“I thought perhaps, sir—you would drink your tea?” pleaded Jane. “You haven’t eaten a morsel, and mother will mind it when she comes home.”
Bayard looked at her in a dazed way; trying to see the connection between forty-cent Japan tea and that beautiful thing said of Whitefield, that he “forgot all else about the men before him, but their immortality and their misery.”
“It’s getting cold,” said Jane, with quivering lip. “I stood on the stairs so long before I could make up my mind to disturb you. Let me get a hot cup, now, sir—do!”
“Why, I’ll come down!” said Bayard. “I must not make myself as troublesome as this.”
He pushed away his books, and followed her to the sitting-room, where, in default of a dining-room, and in vague deference to the antecedents of a guest popularly reported not to be used to eating in the kitchen, the meals of the family were served.
“Maybe you’d eat the fish-hash—a mouthful, sir?” asked Jane, brightening, “and there’s the stewed prunes.”
Bayard looked at her, as she ran to and fro,flushed and happy at her little victory over his supperless intentions. Jane was a trig, neat body; small, as the coast girls often are—I wonder why? whether because the mother was under-fed or over-anxious when the fleets were out? Jane Granite wore a blue gingham dress, closely fitted to a pleasant figure. She had a pleasant face, too; she had no beauty, but that certain something more attractive than beauty to many men,—a kind of compactness of feature, and an ease of outline which haunts the retina; it is not easy to describe, but we all know it. Her mother had told the minister that Jane was keeping company—that is the Windover phrase—with some one; the details had escaped his memory.
He looked at her, now, for the first time attentively, as she served his tea. She flitted to and fro lightly. She sang in the kitchen when she saw him smile. When he said, “Thank you, Jane! You have given me a delicious supper,” a charming expression crossed her face. He observed it abstractedly, and thought: How kind these good people are to me! The paper shades were up, and Jane wished to draw them when she lighted the kerosene lamp; but Bayard liked to watch the sea, as he often did at twilight. The harbor was full, for the weather was coming on wild. Clouds marshaled and broke, and retreated, and formed upon a stormy sky. The lights of anchored fleets tossed up and down in the violet-gray shadow. The breakers growled upon the opposite shore. Thebest thing about his lodging was its near and almost unobstructed view of the sea, which dashed against a slip of a beach between the wharves of Windover Point, within a thousand feet of Mrs. Granite’s cottage.
As he sat, sipping his green tea, and making believe with his hash, to save the feelings of the girl; watching the harbor steadily and quietly, the while, and saying nothing—he was startled by the apparition of a man’s face, pressed stealthily against the window-pane, and disappearing as quickly as it came. Bayard had been sitting between the window and the light. Jane was dishing out his prunes from a vegetable dish into a blue willow saucer, and had seen nothing. Wishing not to alarm the girl, he went to the window quietly, and looked out. As he did so, he perceived that the intruder had his hand on the knob of the front door. Bayard sprang, and the two met in the cottage entry.
“What are you doing here?” began Bayard, barring the way.
“I guess I’d better ask what areyoua-doin’here,” replied the other, crowding by the minister with one push of an athletic shoulder. “I’m on my own ground. I ain’t so sure of you.”
Little Jane uttered a cry, and the athletic young man strode forward, and somewhat ostentatiously put his arm about her waist.
“Ah, I see!” smiled the minister.“It is strange that we have not met before. We must often have been in the house at the same time. I am a little absent-minded. Perhaps it is my fault. A hundred pardons, Mr. ——?”
Trawl. Ben Trawl was the name. Ben Trawl was not cordial. Perhaps that would be asking too much of the lover who had been mistaken for a burglar by another man; and the young minister was already quite accustomed to the varying expressions with which a provincial town receives the leader of an unpopular cause. He recognized Ben Trawl now;—the young man who had the straight eyebrows, and who did not drink, who had been one of the crowd at the fight in Angel Alley on the ordination day which never had ordained.
The pastor found the situation embarrassing, and was glad when Mrs. Granite came in, soaked through, and tired, with drabbled skirts.
She had collected six dollars and thirty-seven cents.
Bayard ground his teeth, and escaped to his study as soon as he could. There they heard him, pacing up and down hotly, till seven o’clock. Bayard had arranged one of those piteous attempts to “amuse the people,” into which so much wealth of heart and brain is flung, with such atmospheric results. His notion of religious teaching did not end with the Bible, though it began there. The fishermen who had irreverently named the present course of talks “the Dickens,” crowded to hear them, nevertheless. The lecture of that evening (“Sydney Carton,” he called it) was a ventureupon which Bayard had expended a good deal of thought and vitality.
Poor, wet Mrs. Granite waded out again, without a murmur, to hear it; she walked beside the minister, alone; it was a long walk, for the new people met in the well-known hall near the head of Angel Alley.
“Ben Trawl’s kinder off his hook,” she explained apologetically. “He wouldn’t come along of us, nor he wouldn’t let Jane come, neither. He has them spells.”
Jane Granite watched them off with aching heart. As he closed the door, the minister smiled and lifted his hat to her. Where was there a smile likehisin all the world of men? And where a man who thought or knew so little of the magic which his beauty wrought?
For love of this radiance and this wonder the heart of the coldest woman of the world might have broken. Little Jane Granite looked after him till he was drowned in the dark. She came in and stood at the window, busying herself to draw the shade. But Ben Trawl watched her with half-closed eyes; and when bright, wide eyes turn dull and narrow, beware of them!
“Come here!” said Ben, in the voice of a man who had “kept company” with a girl for three years. In Windover, the respectable young people do not flirt or intrigue; breach of troth is almost unknown among them. To walk with a girl on Sunday afternoon, and to kiss her Sunday evening, isto marry her, as a matter of course. Ben Trawl spoke in the imperious tone of the seafaring people who call a wife “my woman,” and who lie on the lounge in the kitchen while she brings the water from the well.
“You come here, Jane, and sit on the sofy alongside of me! I’ve got a word or so to say to you.”
Jane Granite came. She was frightened. She sat down beside her lover, and timidly surrendered the work-worn little hand which he seized and crushed with cruel violence within his own.
“Mr. Granite wasn’t never wholly satisfied about Ben,” Mrs. Granite was saying to the minister as they splashed through the muddy slush. “His father’s Trawl the liquor dealer, down to Angel Alley, opposite our place, a little below. But Jane says Ben don’t touch it; and he don’t. I don’t know’s I’ve any call to come between her and Ben. He’s a stiddy fellow, and able to support her,—and he’s that fond of Jane”—
“He seems to be,” said Bayard musingly. His thoughts were not with Mrs. Granite. He hardly knew what she had said. He was not used to this petty, parish atmosphere. It came hard to him. He underestimated the value of these wearisome trifles, in the large work performed by little people. Nothing in the world seemed to him of less importance than the natural history of Ben Trawl.
“The wind is east,” he said abstractedly, “and there’s a very heavy sea on.”
He cast at the harbor and the sky the anxiouslook habitual with the people of Windover; the stranger had already acquired it. He had not been a month in the fishing-town before he noticed that the women all spoke of their natural foe as “the terrible sea.”
The hall which the new people had leased for their services and entertainments had long borne the grim name of Seraph’s Rest; having been, in fact, for years, a sailors’ dance-hall of the darkest dye.
“Give us,” Bayard had said, “the worst spot in the worst street of this town. We will make it the best, or we will own ourselves defeated in our work.”
In such streets, and in such places, news has wings. There is no spot in Windover where rumor is run down so soon as in Angel Alley.
Bayard had talked perhaps half an hour, when he perceived by the restlessness in his crowded and attentive audience that something had happened. He read on for a moment:—
“‘Are you dying for him?’ she whispered. ‘And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.’”
Then, with the perfect ease which he always sought to cultivate in that place between speaker and hearer, “What is the matter?” he asked in a conversational tone.
“Sir,” said an old captain, rising, “there’s a vessel gone ashore off Ragged Rock.”
Bayard swept his book and manuscript off the desk.
“I was about to read you,” he said, “how a poor fellow with a wretched life behind him died a noble death. Perhaps we can do something as grand as he did. Anyhow, we’ll try. Come, boys!”
He thrust himself into his coat, and sprang down among the audience.
“Come on! You know the way better than I do! If there’s anything to do, we’ll do it. Lead on, boys! I’m with you!”
The audience poured into Angel Alley, with the minister in their midst. Confusion ran riot outside. The inmates of all the dens on the street were out. Unnoticed, they jostled decent citizens who had flocked as near as possible to the news-bearer. Panting and white, a hatless messenger from the lighthouse, who had run all the way at the keeper’s order to break the black word to the town, reiterated all he knew: “It’s the Clara Em! She weighed this afternoon under full canvas—and she’s struck with fourteen men aboard! I knew I couldn’t raise nobody at the old Life-Saving Station”—
“It’s t’other side the Point, anyhow!” cried a voice from the crowd.
“It’s four mile away!” yelled another.
“Good heavens, man!” cried Bayard. “You don’t propose to wait forthem?”
“I don’t see’s there’s anything we cando,” observed the old captain deliberately.“The harbor’s chockful. If anybody could do anything for ’em, some o’ them coasters—but ye see there can’t no boatliveoff Ragged Rock in a breeze o’ wind like this.”
“How far off is this wreck?” demanded Bayard, inwardly cursing his own ignorance of nautical matters and of the region. “Can’t we get up some carts and boats and ropes—and ride over there?”
“It’s a matter of three mile an’ a half,” replied the mate of a collier, “and it’s comin’ on thick. But I hev known cases where a cart—Now there’s them I-talians with their barnana carts.”
“You won’t get no fog with this here breeze,” contended a very ancient skipper.
“What’ll you bet?” said the mate of the collier.
An Italian with a fruit cart was pushed forward by the crowd; an express cart was impressed; ropes, lanterns, and a dory appeared from no one knew where, at the command of no one knew who. Bayard suggested blankets and dry clothes. The proposal seemed to cause surprise, but these supplies were volunteered from somewhere.
“Pile in, boys!” cried the minister, in a ringing voice. He sprang into one of the carts, and it filled in a moment. One of the horses became frightened at the hubbub and reared. Men swore and women shrieked. In the momentary delay, a hand reached over the wheel, and plucked at Bayard’s sleeve. He flashed the lantern in his hand, and saw a woman’s strained, set face. Itwas Job Slip’s wife, Mari, with the little boy crying at her skirts.
“Sir,” she said hoarsely, “if it’s the Clara Em, he’s aboard of her—for they shipped him at five o’clock, though they see the storm a-comin’—and him as drunk as death. But it’s true—he got it at Trawl’s—I see ’em lift him acrost the wharf an’ sling him over int’ the dory.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Bayard with set teeth. He reached over the wheel as the horses started, plunging, and wrung the hand of the drunkard’s wife. He could not trust himself to say more. Such a vision of what life meant to such a woman swept through Angel Alley upon the wings of the gale, that he felt like a man whose eyes have beheld a panorama on a stage in hell.
Many people, as the carts rolled through the town, followed on foot, among them a few women whose husbands, or lovers, or brothers were known to be aboard the Clara Em.
“Here’s anoldwoman with a boy aboard! Seems you might find room in one them wagons for her!” cried a young voice. It was the girl known to Windover only by the name of Lena; she for whom the “terrible sea” could have no horrors; the one woman of them from whom no betrothed lover could sail away; to whom no husband should return.
“She’s right about that. We must manage somehow!” called Bayard. Strong hands leaned out and swept the old woman up over the wheel, and the horses galloped on.
There was neither rain nor snow; but the storm, in the seaman’s sense of the word, was approaching its height. The wind had now become a gale, and blew southeast. The sky was ominously black. To Bayard’s sensitive and excited imagination, as he looked out from the reeling wagon, the mouth of the harbor seemed to gape and grin; the lights of the fleet, furled and anchored for dear life, lost their customary pleasant look, and snapped and shone like teeth in the throat of a monster.
The wagons rolled on madly; the horses, lashed to their limit of speed, leaped down Windover Point. They had now left the road, and were dashing across the downs which stretched a mile farther to the eastern shore. The roughness of the route had become appalling, but a Cape horse is as used to boulders as a Cape fisherman; neither wagon overset, though both rolled like foundering ships. The lanterns cut swathes of light in the blackness which bounding wheels and racing heels mowed down before them.
Walls of darkness rose ahead, and at its outermost, uttermost margin roared the sea. It seemed to Bayard as if the rescuing party were plunging into eternal mystery.
The old woman whose son was aboard the Clara Em crouched at the minister’s feet. Both sat in the dory, which filled the wagon, and which was packed with passengers. The old woman’s bare hands were clenched together, and her lips shutlike iron hinges. Bayard wondered at her massive silence. It was something primeval, solemn, outside of his experience. The women of the shore, in stress like hers, would weep, would sob, or shriek. But to the women of the sea this anguish was as old as life itself: to it they were born, and of it they were doomed to die; they bore it as they did the climate of the freezing Cape.
“That there saving service couldn’t ha’ done nothin’ agin’ a wreck on Ragged Rock if they wanted to,” observed the old captain (they called him Captain Hap), peering from the wagon towards the harbor shore. “It’s jest’s I told ye; they’re too fur—five mile across.”
“But why is there no station nearer?” demanded Bayard with the warmth of inexperience. “Why is nothing put over here—if this reef is so bad—where it is needed?”
“Wall,” said Captain Hap, with deliberation, “that’s a nateral question for a land-lubber. Every seaman knows there ain’t noneedof gettin’ wrecked on that there reef. It’s as plain as the beard on your face. Windover Light to the west’ard, Twin Lights to the east’ard,—a fog bell, and a bell-buoy, and a whistlin’-buoy,—Lord! why,everybodyknows how to keep off Ragged Rock!”
“Then how did this vessel happen to strike?” persisted Bayard. The men interchanged glances, and no one answered him.
“Hi there! Look, look! I see her! I see her spars!” yelled a young fellow on the front seat of the wagon. “It’s her! It’s the Clara Em!... Lord A’mighty! what in —— was they thinkin’ of? She’s got on full canvas! See her! see her! see her! See her lights! It’sher, and she’s bumpin’ on the reef!”
Cries of horror ran from lip to lip. The driver lashed his horses onward, and the men in the wagons flung their lanterns to and fro in uncontrollable excitement. Some leaped over the wheels and ran shouting against the gale.
“Clara Em, ahoy! Clara Em, aho—o—oy!”
But the old woman at Bayard’s feet sat still. Her lips only moved. She stared straight ahead.
“Is she praying? or freezing? Perhaps she’s out of her mind,” thought Bayard.
He gently pulled her blanket-shawl closer over her bare head, and wrapped it around her before he sprang from the wagon.
There was but little depth of snow upon the downs and cliffs, but such as remained served to reflect and to magnify all possible sources of light. These were few enough and sorely needed. The Windover Light, a revolving lantern of the second power, is red and strong. It flashed rapidly, now blood-red and now lamp-black. Bayard thought of the pillar of fire and cloud that led the ancient people. There should have been by rights a moon; and breaks in battalions of clouds, at rare intervals, let through a shimmer paler than darkness, though darker than light. Such a reduction of the black tone of the night had mercifully befallen, when the staggering wagons clattered and stopped upon the large, oval pebbles of the beach.
The fog, which is shy of a gale, especially at that season of the year, had not yet come in, and the vessel could be clearly seen. She lay upon the reef, broadside to the breakers; she did not pitch, but, to a nautical eye, her air of repose was the bad thing about her. She was plainly held fast. Her red port-light, still burning, showed as each wave went down, and the gray outlines of her rigging could be discerned. Her foremast had broken off about five feet from the deck, and thespar, held by the rigging, was ramming the sides of the vessel.
The astonishing rumor was literally true. The Clara Em—one of the famous fishermen of which Windover was too proud to be vain; the Clara Em, newly-built and nobly furnished, none of your old-time schooners, clumsy of hulk and rotten of timbers, but the fastest runner on the coast, the stanchest keel that cleft the harbor, fine in her lines as a yacht, and firm in her beams as an ocean steamer—the Clara Em, fearing neither gods nor men nor weather, and bound for Georges’ on a three weeks’ fresh-fishing trip, had deliberately weighed anchor in the teeth of a March southeaster, and had flung all her clean, green-white sails to the gale. As nearly as could be made out from the shore, she had every stitch up, and not a reef to her face, and she lay over against the rock like a great eagle whose wings were broken. Even a landsman could comprehend the nature of this dare-devil act; and Bayard, running to lend a hand to slide the dory from the wagon, uttered an exclamation of indignant horror.
“How did this happen? Were they mad?”
“Full,” replied the old captain laconically.
“Yes, I see she’s under full sail. But why?” he persisted innocently.
The old captain, with a curious expression, flashed a lantern in the young minister’s face, but made no reply.
Cries could now be heard from the vessel; forthe wind, being dead off, bore sounds from sea to shore which could by no means travel from shore to sea. Ragged Rock was a rough spot in the kindest weather; and in that gale, and with the wind in that direction, the roar and power of the surf were great. But it should be remembered that the blow had not been of long duration; hence the sea was not what it would be in a few hours if the gale should hold. In this fact lay the only possible chance of extending rescue in any form to the shipwrecked crew.
“Clara Em! Aho—oy—oy!” yelled a dozen voices. But the united throats of all Windover could not have made themselves articulate to the straining ears upon the schooner.
“Where’s yer crew? Show up, there! Can’t ye donothin’for yerselves? Where’s yer dories? Hey? What? Clara Em! Aho—oy—oy!”
“They’re deef as the two years’ drownded,” said the old captain. “An’ they ain’t two hundred feet from shore.”
“Why, then, surely we can save them!” cried Bayard joyfully. But no man assented to the cheerful words.
The dory, a strong specimen of its kind, was now out of the wagon, and a score of arms dragged it over the pebbles. The surf dashed far up the beach, splashing men, boat, wagon, horses. Against the cliff the spray rose a hundred feet, hissing, into the air. The old captain eyed the sea and measured the incoming rollers with his deep-set eye.
“Ye cayn’t do it,” he pronounced. “There ain’t a dory in Windover can live inthat”—he pointed his gaunt arm at the breakers.
“Anyhow, we’ll try!” rang out a strong voice. Cries from the wreck arose again. Some of the younger men pushed the dory off. Bayard sprang to join them.
“I can row!” he cried with boyish eagerness; “I was stroke at Harvard!”
“This ain’t Charles River,” replied one of the men; “better stand back, Parson.”
They kindly withstood him, and leaped in without him, four of them, seamen born and bred. They ran the dory out into the surf. He held his lantern high to light them. In their wet oil-skins their rough, wild outlines looked like divers, or like myths of the deep. They leaped in and seized the oars with one of the wild cries of the sailor who goes to his duty, his dinner, or his death, by the rhythm of a song or the thrill of a shout. The dory rose on a tremendous comber, trembled, turned, whirled, and sank from sight. Then came yells, and a crash.
“There!” howled Captain Hap, stamping his foot, “I told ye so!”
“She’s over!”
“She’s busted!”
“She’s smashed to kindlin’ wood!”
“Here they be! Here they come! Haul ’em in!”
The others ran out into the surf and helped thebrave fellows, soaked and discomfited, up the beach. They were badly bruised, and one of them was bleeding.
The pedestrians from the town had now come up; groups of men, and the few women; and a useless crowd stood staring at the vessel. A big third wave rolled over and smashed the port light.
“It’s been going on all these ages,” thought Bayard,—“the helpless shore against the almighty sea.”
“Only two hundred feet away!” he cried; “Ican’tsee whysomethingcan’t be done! I say, somethingshall!—Where are your ropes? Where are your wits? Where is all your education to this kind of thing? Are you going to let them drown before your eyes?”
“There ain’t no need of goin’ so far’s that,” said the old captain with the aggravating serenity of his class. “If she holds till it ebbs they can clomber ashore, every man-jack of ’em. Ragged Rock ain’t an island except at flood. It’s a long, pinted tongue o’rock runnin’ along,—so. You don’t onderstand it, Parson. Why, they could eeny mostwalkashore, come mornin’, if she holds.”
“It’s a good pull from now till sun-up,” objected a fisherman. “And it’s the question if she don’t break up.”
“Anyhow, I’m going to try,” insisted Bayard. A rope ran out through his hands,—shot highinto the air,—fell into the wind, and dropped into the breakers. It had carried about ten feet. For the gale had taken the stout cable between its teeth, and tossed it, as a dog does a skein of silk, played with it, shook it to and fro, and hurled it away. The black lips of the clouds closing over the moon, seemed to open and grin as the old captain said:—
“You ken keep on tryin’ long’s you hev the inclination. Mebbe the women-folks will feel better for’t; but you cay—n’t do it.”
“Can’t get a rope to a boat two hundred feet away?” demanded Bayard.
“Not without apparatus,—no, sir! Not in a blow like this here.” The old seaman raised his voice to a bellow to make himself audible twelve feet away. “Why, it’s reelly quite a breeze o’ wind,” he said.
“Then whatcanwe do?” persisted Bayard, facing the beach in great agitation. “What are we here for, anyhow?”
“We ken watch for ’em to come ashore,” replied the captain grimly.
Turning, in a ferment half of anger, half of horror, to the younger men, Bayard saw that some one was trying to start a bonfire. Driftwood had been collected from dry spots in the rocks—or had a bucket of coal-tar been brought by some thoughtful hand? And in a little cave at the foot of the cliff, a woman, upon her knees in the shallow snow, was sheltering a tiny blazewithin her two hands. It was the girl Lena. She wore a woolen cap, of the fashion called a Tam o’ Shanter, and a coarse fur shoulder cape. Her rude face showed suddenly in the flaming light. It was full of anxious kindliness. He heard her say:—
“It’ll hearten ’em anyhow. It’ll show ’em they ain’t deserted of God and men-folks too.”
“Where’s my old lady?” added the girl, looking about. “I want to get her up to this fire. She’s freezing somewheres.”
“Look alive, Lena! Here she is!” called one of the fishermen. He pointed to the cliff that hung over Ragged Rock. The old woman stood on the summit and on the edge. How she had climbed there, Heaven knew; no one had seen or aided her; she stood, bent and rigid, with her blanket shawl about her head. Her gray hair blew back from her forehead in two lean locks. Black against the darkness, stone carved out from stone, immovable, dumb, a statue of the storm, she stared out straight before her. She seemed a spirit of the wind and wet, a solemn figure-head, an anathema, or a prayer; symbol of a thousand watchers frozen on a thousand shores:—woman as the sea has made her.
The girl had clambered up the cliff like a cat, and could be seen putting her arms around the old woman, and pleading with her. Lena did indeed succeed so far as to persuade her down to the fire, where she chafed the poor old creature’s hands,and held to her shrunken lips a bottle of Jamaica ginger that some fisherman’s wife had brought. But the old woman refused.
“Keep it for Johnny,” she said, “till he gets ashore.” It was the only thing she had been heard to say that night.
She pushed the ginger away, and crawled back to her solitary station on the cliff. Some one said: “Let be! Let her be!”
And some one else said:—
“Whar’s the use?”
At that moment a voice arose:—
“There’s the cap’n! There’s Joe Salt, cap’n of the Clara Em! He’s acrosst the bowsprit signalin’! He’s tryin’ to communicate!”
“We haven’t seen another living figure moving across that vessel,” said Bayard, whose inexperience was as much perplexed as his humanity was distressed and thwarted by the situation. “I see one man—on the bows—yes. But where are the rest? You don’t suppose they’re washed overboard already?—Oh, this is horrible!” he cried.
He was overwhelmed at the comparative, almost indifferent calmness of his fellow-townsmen.
The light-keeper and the old captain had run out upon the reef. They held both hands to their ears. The shouts from the vessel continued. Every man held his breath. The whirling blast, like the cone of a mighty phonograph, bore a faint articulation from the wreck.
“Oh!” cried the young minister.“He says they’re all sunk!”
He was shocked to hear a laugh issue from the lips of Captain Hap, and to see, in the light of the fire, something like a smile upon the keeper’s face.
“You don’t understand, sir,” said one of the fishermen respectfully. “He says they’re all—”
“May as well out with it, Bob,” said another. “The parson’s got to get his initiation someways. Cap’n Salt says they’re drunk, sir. The crew of the Clara Em is all drunk.”
At this moment a terrible shriek rang above the roar of the storm. It came from the old woman on the top of the cliff.
Her eyes had been the first, but they were not the only ones now, to perceive the signs of arousing life upon the wreck.
A second man was seen to climb across the bows, to pause for an instant, and then to plunge. He went out of sight in a moment. The inrolling surf glittered in the blaze of the bonfires like a cataract of flame. The swimmer reappeared, struggled, threw up his arms and disappeared.
“I have stood this as long as I can,” said Bayard in a low, firm voice. “Give me a rope! Tie it around me, some of you, and hold on! I’m going to try to save that man.”
“I’ll go, myself,” said one of the fishermen slowly.
“Bob,” replied the minister, “how many children have you?”
“Eleven, sir.”
“Stay where you are, then,” said Bayard.“Such things are for lonely men.”
“Bring the rope!” he commanded. “Tie it yourselves—you know how—in one of your sailor’s knots; something that will hold. I’m a good swimmer. I saved a man once on a yachting trip. Quick, there! Faster!”
“There’s another!” cried the light-keeper. “There’s a second feller jumped overboard—swimming for his life! Look, look, look! He’s sunk—no he ain’t, he ain’t! He’s bearing down against the rocks—My God! Look at him, look, look, look!”
Busy hands were at the rope about the minister’s waist; they worked slowly, from sheer reluctance to do the deed. Bayard stamped the beach with divine impatience. His head whirled with such exaltation that he scarcely knew who touched him; he made out to perceive that Ben Trawl was one of the men who offered to tie the bow-line; he heard the old captain say, shortly:—
“I’ll do it myself!”
He thought he heard little Jane Granite cry out; and that she begged him not to go, “for his people’s sake,” and that Ben Trawl roughly silenced her. Strangely, the words that he had been reading—what ages since!—in the hall in Angel Alley spun through his mind.
“‘Are you dying for him?’ she whispered. ‘And his wife and child. Hush. Yes!’”
So! This is the “terrible sea!” This is what drowning means; this mortal chill, this crashingweight upon the lungs, the heart, this fighting for a man’s breath,—this asphyxia—this conflict with wind and water, night and might—this being hurled out into chaos, gaining a foot, and losing three—this sight of something human yonder hurtling towards you on the billow which bears you back from it—this struggling on again, and sweeping back, and battling out!
Blessing on the “gentleman’s muscle,” trained in college days to do man’s work! Thanks to the waters of old Charles River and of merry Newport for their unforgotten lessons! Thank God for that wasted liberal education,—yes, and liberal recreation,—if it teach the arm, and fire the nerve, and educate the soul to save a drunken sailor now.
But save? Can human power save that sodden creature—only wit enough left in him to keep afloat and drift, dashing inward on the rocks? He swirls like a chip. But his cry is the mortal cry of flesh and blood.
Bayard’s strangling lips move:—
“Now Almighty Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth”—
There were mad shouts upon the beach. A score of iron hands held to the line; and fifty men said to their souls: “That is a hero’s deed.” Some one flung the rest of the pailful of tar upon the fire, and it blazed up. The swimmer saw the yellow color touch the comber that broke above his head. The rope tightened like the hand of deathupon his chest. Caught, perhaps? Ah, there! It has grazed the reef, and the teeth of the rock are gnawing at it; so a mastiff gnaws at the tether of his chained foe, to have the fight out unimpeded.
“If it cuts through, I am gone,” thought Bayard.—“And Jesus Christ Thy Son, our Lord and Saviour.”—
“Haul in! Haul in, I say! Quick! Haul ’em in for life’s sake, boys!—She tautens to the weight of two.The parson’s got him!”
The old captain jumped up and down on the pebbles like a boy. Wet and glittering, through hands of steel, the line sped in.
“Does she hold? Is she cut? Haul in, haul in, haul in!”
The men broke into one of their sudden, natural choruses, moving rhythmically to the measure of their song:—