“Mr. Salt is going to harness old Pepper,” she answered. Bayard said nothing. He remembered that he could not afford to drive a lady to the station; he could not offer to “take” her in the electric conveyance of the great American people. He might have spent at least three quarters of an hour more beside her. It seemed to him that he had not experienced poverty till now. The exquisite outline of his lip trembled for the instant with that pathos which would have smitten a woman to the heart if she had loved him. Helen was preoccupied with her saxifrage and her purple gloves. She did not, to all appearance, see his face at all, and he was glad of it.
He arose in silence, and walked beside her to the beach and towards the town.
“Mr. Bayard,” said Helen, with her pleasant unexpectedness, “I owe you something.”
All this while she had not mentioned the wreck or the rescue; she alone, of all people whom he had seen since he came out of his sick-room, had not inquired, nor exclaimed, nor commended, nor admired. Something in her manner—it could hardly be said what—reminded him now of this omission; he had not thought of it before.
“I owe you a recognition,” she said.
“I cancel the debt,” he answered, smiling.
“You cannot. I owe you the recognition—of a friend—for that brave and noble deed you did. Accept it, sir!”
She spread out her hands with a pretty gesture, as if she gave him something; she moved her head with a commanding and royal turn, as if her gift had value. He lifted his hat.
“I could have done no less then; but I might do more—now.”
His worn face had lightened delicately. He looked hopeful and happy.
“A man doesn’t put himself where I am, to complain,” he added. “But I don’t suppose you could even guess how solitary my position is. The right thing said in the right way gives me more courage than—people who say it can possibly understand. I have so few friends—now. If you allow me to count you among them, you do me a very womanly kindness; so then I shall oweyou”—
“I cancel the debt!” she interrupted, laughing. “Didn’t Father write to you?” she hurried on, “when you were so ill?”
“Oh, yes. The Professor’s note was the first I was allowed to read. He said all sorts of things that I didn’t deserve. He said that in spite of the flaws in my theology I had done honor to the old Seminary.”
“Really? Father will wear a crown and a harp forthatconcession. Did he give you any message from me, I wonder?”
“He said the ladies sent their regards.”
“Oh! Was that all?”
“That was all.”
“It was notquiteall,” said Helen, after a moment’s rather grave reflection. “But never mind. Probably Father thought the exegesis incorrect somewhere.”
“Perhaps he objected to the context?” asked Bayard mischievously.
“More likely he had a quarrel in the Faculty on his mind and forgot it.”
“If you had written it yourself”—suggested Bayard humbly. “But of course you had other things to do.”
Helen gave him an inscrutable look. She made no reply. They passed the fish-house, and the old clam-digger, who was sitting on his overturned basket in the sun, opening clams with a blunt knife, and singing hoarsely:—
“The woman’s ashore,The child’s at the door,The man’s at the wheel.“Storm on the track,Fog at the back,Death at the keel.“You, mate, or me,Which shall it be?God, He won’t tell.Drive on to ——!”
“The woman’s ashore,The child’s at the door,The man’s at the wheel.
“Storm on the track,Fog at the back,Death at the keel.
“You, mate, or me,Which shall it be?God, He won’t tell.Drive on to ——!”
“There is Mr. Salt,” said Helen; for the two had come slowly up in silence to the old gate,(fastened with a rope tied in a sailor’s knot), that gave the short cut across the meadow to the Mainsail summer hotel.
“He is watching for me. How sober he looks! Perhaps something dreadful has happened to Mrs. Salt. Wait a minute. Let me run in!”
She tossed her sun-umbrella, gloves, and saxifrage in a heap across Bayard’s arm, and ran like a girl or a collie swaying across the meadow in the wind. In a few minutes she walked back, flushed and laughing.
“Pepper can’t go!” she cried. “He’s got the colic. He’s swallowed a celluloid collar. Mr. Salt says he thought it was sugar. I must go right along and catch the car.”
“You have eight minutes yet,” said Bayard joyously, “and I can go too!”
The car filled up rapidly; they chatted of little things, or sat in silence. Jane Granite came aboard as they passed her mother’s door. Bayard lifted his hat to her cordially; she was at the further end of the car; she got off at a grocery store, to buy prunes, and did not look back. She had only glanced at Helen Carruth. Bayard did not notice when Jane left.
The train came in and went out. Helen stood on the platform leaning over to take her saxifrage: a royal vision, blurring and melting in purple and gold before his eyes.
The train came in and went out; her laughing eyes looked back from the frame of the car window.The train went out. He turned away and went slowly home.
Jane had not returned, and Mrs. Granite was away. The house was deserted, and the evening was coming on cold. He climbed the steep stairs wearily to his rooms, and lighted a fire, for he coughed a good deal. He had to go down into the shed and bring up the wood and coal. He was so tired when this was done that he flung himself upon the old lounge. He looked slowly about his dismal rooms: at the top curl of the iron angel on the ugly stove; at the empty, wooden rocking-chair with the bones; at the paper screen, where the Cupid on the basket of grapes sat forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit; at the study-table, where the subscription list for his quarter’s salary lay across the manuscript notes of his last night’s sermon. The great Saint Michael on the wall eyed him with that absence of curiosity which belongs to remote superiority. Bayard did not return the gaze of the picture. He took something from his vest-pocket and looked at it gently, twisting it about in his thin hands. It was a sprig of saxifrage, whose white blossom was hanging its head over upon the dry, succulent stem. Bayard got up suddenly, and put the flower in a book upon his study-table.
As he did so, a short, soft, broken sound pattered up the stairs. The door opened without the preliminary of a knock, and little Joey Slip walked seriously in. He said he had come to see the minister.He sat down sedately and ceremoniously upon the carpet-lounge. He said Marm said to say Father’s home from Georges’ drunk as a fish. He put out his little fingers and patted Bayard on the cheek, as if the minister had been the child, and Joey the old, old man.
It was night, and it was Angel Alley. One of the caprices of New England spring had taken the weather, and it had suddenly turned cold. The wind blew straight from the sea. It was going to rain. The inner harbor was full; in the dark, thick air bowsprits nodded and swung sleepily, black outlines against little glimmering swathes of grayish-yellow cut by the headlights of anchored vessels. Dories put out now and then from the schooners, and rowed lustily to the docks; these were packed with sailors or fishermen who leaped up the sides of the wharves like cats, tied the painter to invisible rings in black, slimy places, and scrambled off, leaving the dory to bob and hit the piers; or they cast the painter to the solitary oarsman, who rowed back silently to the vessel, while his gayer shipmates reeled, singing, over the wharves and disappeared in the direction of the town.
The sky was heavily clouded, and fog was stealing stealthily off the Point.
Angel Alley was full, that night. Half a dozen large fishermen were just in from Georges’; these had made their trip to Boston to sell their cargoes of halibut, haddock, or cod, and had run homequickly on a stiff sou’easter, or were unloading direct at their native wharves. The town overflowed with men of unmistakably nautical callings, red of face, strong of hand, unsteady of step; men with the homeless eye and the roving heart of the sea: Americans, Scotch, Swedes, Portuguese, Italians, Irish, and Finns swung up together from the wharves and swarmed over the alley, ready for a song, a laugh or a blow, as the case might be; equally prepared to smoke, to love, to quarrel, or to drink, liable to drift into a prayer-room or a bar-room, just as it happened, and there was small space to doubt which would happen; men whose highest aspiration was to find the barber and the boot-black; men who steered steadily home, thinking of their baby’s laugh, and the wife’s kiss; and men who turned neither to the right nor to the left, who lingered for neither men nor gods nor women, but pushed, with head thrust out like a dog’s on the scent, straight on to the first saloon that gaped at them.
Open and secret, lawful and unlawful, these were of an incredible number, if one should estimate the size of the short street. Angel Alley overflowed with abomination, as the tides, befouled by the town, overflowed the reeking piers of the docks. In sailors’ boarding-houses, in open bars, in hidden cellars, in billiard-rooms, in shooting-galleries, in dance-halls, and in worse, whiskey ran in rivers. At the banks of those black streams men and some women crawled and drank, flaunting orhiding their fiery thirst as the mood took them, and preying upon one another, each according to his power or his choice, as the chance of an evil hour decreed.
Girls with hard eyes and coarse mouths strutted up and down the alley in piteous numbers. Sights whose description cannot blot this page might have been detected in the shadows of the wharves and of the winding street. Men went into open doors with their full trips’ earnings in their pockets, and staggered out without a penny to their shameful names. Fifty, seventy, a hundred dollars, vanished in the carouse of a single hour. One man, a foreigner, of some nationality unknown, ran up and down, wildly calling for the police. He had been robbed of two hundred dollars in a drunken bout, last night; he had but just come to such senses as nature may have given him, and to the discovery of his loss. His wife, he said, lived over in West Windover; she warn’t well when he shipped; there was another baby,—seven young ones already,—and she couldn’t get trust at the stores, the bills had run up so long.
“Lord!” he said stupidly; “s’pose I find ’em layin’ round starved?”
He stoutly refused to go home. He swore he’d rather go to jail than face her. He sat down on the steps of old Trawl’s, sobbing openly, like a child. A little crowd gathered, one or two voices jeered at him, and some one scolded him smartly, for no one moralizes more glibly than the sot in his intervals of sobriety.
“Oh, shut up there!” cried the girl Lena. “Ain’t he miser’ble enough already? Ain’t all of us that much?—Go home, Jean!” she urged kindly; “go home to Marie. She won’t cuss you.”
“She never cussed meyet,” answered Jean doubtfully.
He got up and reeled away, wringing his stubbed hands. Lena walked up the alley, alone; her eyes were on the ground; she did not answer when one of the girls called her; she strolled on aimlessly, and one might almost say, thoughtfully.
“Better come in, Lena,” said a voice above her. She looked up. The beautiful new transparency, which was still the wonder and admiration of the fishermen coming home from Georges’ or the Banks, flashed out in strong white and scarlet lights the strange words, now grown familiar to Angel Alley:—
“The Church of the Love of Christ.”
Beneath, in the broken, moving color stood the minister; his foot was on the topmost step of the long flight; he looked pale and tired.
“Isn’t it better for you in here, than out there?” he asked gently. Lena gave one glance at his pitying eyes; then she followed that brilliance like a moth.
He stepped back and allowed her to precede him, as if she had been any other woman, the only difference being one which the girl was notlikely to notice: the minister did not lift his hat to Lena. She hung her head and went in.
“They are singing to-night—practicing for their concert,” he said. “Perhaps they might like the help of your voice.”
She made no answer, and the preacher and the street girl entered the bright hall together.
It was well filled with well-behaved and decently dressed groups of men and women; these were informally scattered about the main room and the ante-rooms, for no service was in progress; the whole bore the appearance of a people’s club, or social entertainment, whose members read or chatted, played games, or sang, as the mood took them.
A bowling-alley and a smoking-room adjoined; these last were often quite full and busy with fishermen and sailors; but that night the most of the people were listening to the singing. Music, Bayard had already learned, would lead them anywhere. At the first sound of the poor and pathetic melodeon, they had begun to collect around the net of harmony like mackerel round a weir. When Lena came into the room, the little choir were singing the old-fashioned, beautiful Ave Sanctissima which even Angel Alley knew. Lena dropped into an obscure seat, and remained silent for a time. Suddenly her fine contralto rang in,—
“’Tis midnight on the sea.Ora pro nobis,We lift our souls to thee.”
The minister, distant and pale, blurred beforeher eyes while she sang. He looked like a figure resting on a cloud in a sacred picture. He moved about among his people, tall, smiling, and shining. They looked at him with wistful, wondering tenderness. He passed in and out of the halls on errands whose nature no one asked. Occasionally he returned, bringing some huddling figure with him from the street; a homesick boy, a homeless man, a half-sodden fellow found hesitating outside of Trawl’s den, midway between madness and sanity, ready for hell or heaven, and following Bayard like a cur.
Down the dark throat of Angel Alley a man, that night, was doing a singular thing. He was a fisherman, plainly one of the recent arrivals of the anchored fleet; he was a sturdily built fellow with a well-shaped head; he had the naturally open face and attractive bearing often to be found among drinking men; at his best he must have been a handsome, graceful fellow, lovable perhaps, and loving. At his worst, he was a cringing sot. He wore, over his faded dark-red flannel shirt, the gingham jumper favored by his class; and it seemed he had lost his hat. This man was monotonously moving to and fro, covering a given portion of Angel Alley over and again, retracing his unsteady footsteps from point to point, and repeating his course with mysterious regularity. His beat covered the space between the saloon of old Trawl (which stood about midway of thealley) and the scarlet and white transparency, whose strange and sacred heraldry blazed, held straight out, an arm of fire, across the mouth of the street. Angel Alley, as we have explained, had, at the first, inclined to call the mission Christ’s Rest, for reasons of its own; but even that half-godless reminder of a history better forgotten was growing out of date. The people’s name for Emanuel Bayard’s house of worship and of welcome was fast settling into one beautiful word—Christlove.
The fisherman in the jumper wavered to and fro between Christlove and the ancient grogshop. In the dark weather the figure of the man seemed to swing from this to that like a pendulum; at moments he seemed to have no more sense or sentience. He was hurled as if he were forced by invisible machinery; he recoiled as if wound by unseen springs; now his steps quickened into a run, as he wrenched himself away from the saloon, and faced the prayer-room; then they lagged, and he crawled like a crab to the rum-shop door. His hands were clenched together. Long before it began to rain his hatless forehead was wet.
His eyes stared straight before him. He seemed to see nothing but the two open doors between which he was vibrating. No one had happened to notice him, or, if so, his movements were taken for the vagaries of intoxication. A nerve of God knows what, in his diseased will began to throb, and he made a leap away fromthe saloon, and ran heavily towards the white and scarlet lights of the transparency; at the steps, he fell, and lay groveling; he could hear the singing overhead:—
“Ora pro nobis,We lift our souls to thee.”
He tried to climb up; but something—call it his muscle, call it his will, call it his soul; it does not signify—something refused him, and he did not get beyond the second stair. Slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, his feet seemed to be dragged back. He put out his hands, as if to push at an invisible foe; he leaned over backwards, planting his great oiled boots firmly in the ground, as if resisting unseen force; but slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, he was pulled back. At the steps of the saloon, in a blot of darkness, on the shadowed side, he sank; he got to his hands and knees like an animal, and there he crawled. If any one had been listening, the man might have been heard to sob,—
“It’s me and the rum—God and the devil—Now we’ll see!”
He rose more feebly this time, and struggled over toward the prayer-room; he wavered, and turned before he had got there, and made weakly back. Panting heavily, he crawled up the steps of the saloon, and then lurched over, and fell down into the blot whence he had come. There he lay, crying, with the arm of his brown gingham jumper before his eyes.
“Look up, Job!” said a low voice in the shadow at his side. Job Slip lifted his sodden face, swollen, red, and stained with tears. Instinctively he stretched up his hands.
“Oh, sir!” was all he said.
Bayard stood towering above him; he had his grand Saint Michael look, half of scorn and half of pity.
Job had not seen his face before since the night when it suddenly rose on a great wave, like that of another drowning man, making towards him in the undertow off Ragged Rock. Job put up his hands, now, before his own face. He told Mari, long afterwards, that the minister blinded him.
“Get up!” said Bayard, much in the tone in which he had said it the day he knocked Job down.
Job crawled up.
“Come here!” said the preacher sternly. He held out his white hand; Job put his wet and fishy palm into it; Bayard drew that through his own arm, and led him away without another word. Old Trawl came muttering to the door, and stood with his hand over his eyes, shutting out the glare of the bar-room within, to watch them. Ben looked over his shoulder, scowling. Father and son muttered unpleasantly together, as the minister and the drunkard moved off, and melted into the fine, dark rain.
Bayard led his man down towards the wharves.It was dark, there, and still; there was a secluded spot, which he knew of, under a salt-house at the head of a long pier but seldom used at night. The fine rain was uncertain, and took moods. As the two came down the larynx of the Alley, the drizzle had dripped off into a soft mist. Bayard heard Captain Hap across the street giving utterance to his favorite phrase:—
“It’s comin’ on thick; so thick it has stems to it.”
The captain looked after the minister and the drunkard with disapproval in his keen, dark eyes.
“Better look out, Mr. Bayard!” he called, with the freedom of a nurse too recently dismissed not to feel responsible for his patient. “It ain’t no night for you to be settin’ round on the docks. You cough, sir! Him you’ve got in tow ain’t worth it—no, nor twenty like him!”
“That’s a fact,” said Job humbly, stopping short.
“Come on, Job,” Bayard answered decidedly.
So they came under the salt-house, and sat down. Both were silent at first. Job wiped off an old fish-keg with the sleeve of his jumper, and offered this piece of furniture to the minister; the fisherman perched himself on the edge of a big broken pile which reared its gray head above the wharf; the rising tide flapped with a sinister sound under his feet which hung over, recklessly swinging. Job looked down into the black water. He was man enough still to estimate what he had done, andmiserable enough to quench the shame and fire in him together by a leap. Men do such things, in crises such as Job had reached, far oftener than we may suppose. Job said nothing. Bayard watched him closely.
“Well, Job?” he said at last; not sternly, as he had spoken at Trawl’s door.
“I haven’t touched it before, sir, not a drop till last night,” said Job with sullen dreariness. “I was countin’ on it how I should see you the fust time since—I thought of it all the way home from Georges’. I was so set to see you I couldn’t wait to get ashore to see you. I took a clean jump from the dory to the landin’. I upsot the dory and two men.... Mr. Bayard, sir, the cap’n’s right. I ain’t wuth it. You’d better let me drownded off the Clara Em.”
“Tell me how it happened,” said Bayard gently. Job shook his head.
“You know’s well’s I, sir. We come ashore, and Trawl, he had one of his —— runners to the wharf. Ben was there, bossin’ the —— job.”
The minister listened to this profanity without proffering a rebuke. His teeth were set; he looked as if he would have liked to say as much, himself.
“There was a fellar there had made two hundred dollars to his trip. He treated. So I said I didn’t want any. But I hankered for it till it seemed I’d die there on the spot before ’em. Ben, he sent a bar-boy after me come to say I needn’t drink unless I pleased, but not to be onsocial, and to come along with the crowd. So I said, No, I was a goin’ home to my wife and kid. When the fellar was gone, I see he’d slipped a bottle into my coat pocket. It was a pint bottle XXX. The cork was loose and it leaked. So I put it back, for I swore I wouldn’t touch it, and I got a little on my fingers. I put ’em in my mouth to lick ’em off—and, sir, before God, that’s all I know—till I come to, to-day. The hanker got me, and that’s all I know. I must ha’ ben at it all night. Seems to me I went home an’ licked my wife and come away ag’in, but I ain’t sure. I must ha’ ben on a reg’lar toot. I’m a —— drunken fool, and the quicker you let me go to —— the better.”
Job leaned over and gazed at the water quietly. There was a look about his jaw which Bayard did not like. He came out from under the salt-house and moved the keg close beside the broken pile.
“What were you doing when I found you? I’ve been looking for you everywhere—last night, and all day.”
“I was havin’ it out,” said Job doggedly.
“Having?”—
“It lays between me and the rum, God and the devil. I was set to see which would beat.”
“Why didn’t you come straight over to see me?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’tput your feet up those steps and walk in?”
“No, sir. I couldn’t do it. I come over twenty times. I couldn’t get no further. Ihadto come back to Trawl’s.I had to do it!”
Job brought his clenched hand down heavily on his knee.
“You can’t onderstand, sir,” he said drearily. “You ain’t a drinkin’ man.”
“I sometimes wish I had been,” said the minister unexpectedly. “I must understand these things.”
“God forbid!” said Job solemnly. He stretched his shaking arm out with a beautiful gesture, and put it around Bayard, as if he were shielding from taint a woman or some pure being from an unknown world.
Tears sprang to the minister’s eyes. He took the drunkard’s dirty hand, and clasped it warmly. The two men sat in silence. Job looked at the water. Bayard looked steadily at Job.
“Come,” he said at length, in his usual tone. “It is beginning to rain, in earnest. I’m notquitestrong yet. I suppose I must not sit here. Take my arm, and come home to Mari and Joey.”
Job acquiesced hopelessly. He knew that it would happen all over again. They walked on mutely; their steps fell with a hollow sound upon the deserted pier; the water sighed as they passed, like the involuntary witness of irreclaimable tragedy.
Suddenly, Bayard dropped Job’s hand, and spoke in a ringing voice:—
“Job Slip, get down upon your knees—just where you stand!”
Job hesitated.
“Down!” cried Bayard.
Job obeyed, as if he had been a dog.
“Now, lift up your hands—so—to the sky.”
As if the minister had been a cut-throat, Job obeyed again.
“Now pray,” commanded Bayard.
“I don’t know—how to,” stammered Job.
“Pray! Pray!” repeated Bayard.
“I’ve forgot the way you do it, sir!”
“No matter how other people do it! This is your affair. Pray your own way. Pray anyhow. Butpray!”
“I haven’t done such a thing since I was—since I used to say: ‘Eenty Deenty Donty,’—no, that ain’t it, neither. ‘Now I lay me?’ That’s more like it. But that don’t seem appropriate to the circumstances, sir.”
“Try again, Job.”
“’Tain’t no use, Mr. Bayard. I’m a goner. If I couldn’t keep sober for you, I ain’t ergointer for no Creetur I never see nor spoke to,—nor no man ever see nor spoke to,—a thousand fathoms up overhead.”
Job lifted his trembling arms high and higher towards the dark sky.
“Pray!” reiterated Bayard.
“I can’t do it, sir!”
“Pray!” commanded Bayard.
“Oh,—God!” gasped Job.
Bayard took off his hat. Job’s arms fell; his face dropped into them; he shook from head to foot.
“There!” he cried, “I done it.... I’ll do it again. God! God!God!”
Bayard bowed his head. Moments passed before he said, solemnly,—
“Job Slip, I saved your life, didn’t I?”
“You committed that mistake, sir.”
“It belongs to me, then.Youbelong to me. I take you. I give you to God.”
He dropped upon his knees beside the drunkard in the rain.
“Lord,” he said, in a tone of infinite sweetness, “here is a poor perishing man. Save him! He has given himself to Thee.”
“The parson did that, Lord,” sobbed Job. “Don’t give me no credit for it!”
“Save him!” continued Bayard, who seemed hardly to have heard the drunkard’s interruption. “Save me this one man! I have tried, and failed, and I am discouraged to the bottom of my heart. But I cannot give him up. I will never give him up till he is dead, or I am. If I cannot do any other thing in Windover, for Christ’s sake, save me this one drunken man!”
Bayard lifted his face in a noble agony. Job hid his own before that Gethsemane.
“Does the parson care so much—asthat?” thought the fisherman.
The rain dashed on Bayard’s white face. He rose from his knees.
“Job Slip,” he said, “you have signed a contract which you can never break. Your vow lies between God and you. I am the witness. I have bound you over to a clean life. Go and sin no more.—I’ll risk you now,” added Bayard, quietly. “I shall not even walk home with you. You have fifteen rum-shops to meet before you get back to your wife and child. Pass them! They all stand with open doors, and the men you know are around these doors. You will not enter one of them. You will go straight home; and to-morrow you will send me written testimony from Mari, your wife,—I want her to write it, Job,—that you did as I bade you, and came home sober. Now go, and God go with you.”
As Bayard turned to give the drunkard his hand, he stumbled a little over something on the dark pier. Job had not risen from his knees, but stooped, and put his lips to the minister’s patched shoe.
“This is to sertify that my Husband come home last nite sober and haint ben on a Bat sence, god bless you ennyhow.Maria Slip.”
“This is to sertify that my Husband come home last nite sober and haint ben on a Bat sence, god bless you ennyhow.
Maria Slip.”
This legend, written in a laborious chirography on a leaf torn from a grocer’s pass-book, was putinto Bayard’s hand at noon of the next day. Joey brought it; he had counted upon a nap on the study lounge, and was rather disappointed to find it occupied. Mrs. Granite said she had sent for Cap’n Hap; she said the minister’s temperature had gone up to a hundred and twenty, and she should think it would.
Jane Granite came out of the kitchen door, and sat down in the back yard underneath the clothes-lines. She sat on the overturned salt-fish box that she kept to stand on and reach the clothes-pins,—Jane was such a little body. She looked smaller than usual that Monday afternoon, and shrunken, somehow; her eyes were red, as if she had been crying. She cried a good deal on Mondays, after Ben Trawl had come and gone on Sunday evenings.
The minister was quite himself again, and about his business. This fact should have given Jane the keenest gratification; whereas, in proportion as their lodger had grown well and cheerful, Jane had turned pale and sober. When he was really ill, her plain face wore a rapt look. For Captain Hap had remained on duty only a day or two; Mr. Bayard had not been sick enough to need professional nursing, this time, and it had since devolved wholly upon the women of the household to minister to his convalescent needs.
Happy Jane! She ran up and down, she flitted to and fro, she cooked, she ironed, she mended, she sewed, she read aloud, she ran errands, she watched for the faintest flicker in the changes ofexpression on his face: its dignity, its beauty, and its dearness for that one precious page out of her poor story were hers. All the rest of her life he belonged to other people and to other things: to the drunkards and the fishermen and the services; to his books and his lonely walks and his unapproachable thoughts; to his dreams of the future in which Jane had no more part than the paper Cupid on the screen, forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit; to his memories of a past of which Jane knew that she knew no more than she did of the etiquette at the palace of Kubla Khan in Xanadu.
Jane understood about Kubla Khan (or she thought she did, which answers the same purpose), for she had read the poem aloud to him one day while her mother sat sewing in the wooden rocking-chair. Jane was “educated,” like most respectable Windover girls; she had been through the high school of her native town; she read not at all badly; Mr. Bayard had told her something to this effect, and Jane sang about the house all the rest of the day. Yes; Jane understood Kubla Khan.
Jane watched the luminous patience in the sick man’s eyes,
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man.”
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man.”
She repeated the lines mechanically, with the bitter consciousness of the half-educated of being moved by something which it was beyond her power andher province to reconcile with the facts of her life. She sighed when the brilliant eagerness and restlessness of returning health replaced that large and gentle light. Bayard had asked her mother to let Jane keep his copy of that volume; he said he had two sets of Coleridge. He had written her name in it; how could he guess that Jane would lock the book away in her bureau drawer by day, and sleep with it under her pillow at night? He tossed her a rose of common human gratitude; it fell into a girl’s heart,—a burning coal of ravenous longing,—and ate its way.
It was summer in Windover; and Jane’s one beautiful leaf of life had turned. Mr. Bayard had long since been able to take care of himself; coughing still, and delicate enough, but throwing off impatiently, as the gentlest man does, in health, the little feminine restraints and devotions which he found necessary and even agreeable in illness. It would not be too much to say that Jane loved him as unselfishly as any woman ever had, or ever would; but in proportion as his spirits rose, hers sank. She reproached herself, poor child, that it did not make her perfectly happy to have the minister get well. Suffering and helpless, he had neededher. Busy and well, he thought of her no more. For that one time, that cruelly little time, she, Jane Granite, of all the women in the world, had known that precious right. To her, only to her, it had been given to serve his daily, common wants; she had carried up his tray, she had read orwritten tireless hours as his mood decreed, or she had sat in silent study of his musing face, not one lineament of which did muse of her.
But it was summer in Windover, and the minister was Jane’s no more.
It was one of the last of the days of a celestial June. Bayard had lived the month of blossoms out eagerly and restlessly. His work had grown enormously upon his hands, and required an attention which told on every nerve. He had gone headlong into the depths of one of those dedications which do not give a man time to come up for air. His eye wore an elate, rapt look. His cheeks burned with a fine fever. His personal beauty that summer was something at which the very “dock-rats” on the wharves turned back to look. No woman easily forgot it, and how many secretly dreamed of it, fortunately the young man never knew. The best of men may work his share of heart-break, and the better he is the less he will suspect it.
Bayard was far too busy to think of women. For he did not exactly think of Helen Carruth; he felt her. She did not occupy his mind so far that he experienced the need of communication with her; he had never written her so much as a note of ceremony. After her brief scintillation before him on Windover Point that April afternoon, she had melted from his horizon. Nevertheless, she had changed the tint of it. Now and then in the stress of his prosaic, thankless, yet singularlyenthusiastic work, there came to the young preacher that sense of something agreeable about to happen, which makes one wake up singing in the morning of one’s hardest day’s labor, or sends one to rest dreaming quietly in the face of the crudest anxiety. The devotee, in the midst of his orisons, was aware of the footstep of possible pleasure falling lightly, distant, doubtful, towards his cell. Some good men pray the louder for this sweet and perilous prescience. Bayard worked the harder.
And it was summer in Windover. The scanty green carpet of the downs had unrolled to its full, making as much as possible of its meagre proportions, atoning in depth of color for what it lacked in breadth and length: if the cliffs and boulders were grayer for the green, the grass looked greener for the gray. The saxifrage had faded, but among the red-cupped moss the checkerberry shot up tender, reddish leaves, the white violets scented the swamps, and the famous wild roses of the Cape dashed the bayberry thickets with pink. The late apple blossoms had blushed and gone, but the leaf and the hidden fruit responded to the anxious attention of the unenthusiastic farmer who wrenched his living out of the reluctant granite soil. In front of the hotels the inevitable geraniums blazed scarlet in mathematical flower-beds; and the boarding-houses convalesced from housecleaning in striped white scrim curtains and freshly painted blue wooden pumps. The lemonade and candy stores of “the season” sproutedwith the white clovers by the wayside; and the express cart of the summer boarder’s luggage blossomed with the lonely and uncomfortable hydrangea, bearing its lot in yellow jars on piazza steps. Windover Point wore a coquettish air of expectation, like a girl in her best dress who waits in a lane for an invisible admirer.
Windover Harbor was alive and alert. The summer fleets were out; the spring fleets were in. Bayard could hear the drop of anchors now, in the night, through his open windows; and the soft, pleasant splash, the home-coming and home-yearning sound which wakened the summer people, only to lull them to sleep again with a sense of poetic pleasure in a picturesque and alien life, gave to the lonely preacher of the winter Windover the little start of anxiety and responsibility which assassinates rest. He thought:—
“Another crew in! Is it Job? Or Bob? Or Jean? Will they go to Trawl’s, or get home straight? I must be off at dawn to see to this.”
On the little beach opposite Mrs. Granite’s cottage the sea sighed in the night to answer him; ebbing, it lapped the pebbles gently, as if it felt sorry for the preacher, who had not known Windover as long as it had; it inhaled and exhaled long, soft breaths, in rhythm with which his own began to grow deep and quiet; and the start from a dream of drowning in the undertow off Ragged Rock would tell him that he had slept. More often, of late, the rising tide had replied nervously;it was fitful and noisy; it panted and seemed to struggle for articulation: for the June sea was restless, and the spring gales had died hard. The tints of the harbor were still a little cool, but the woodland on the opposite shore held out an arm of rich, ripe leaf; and the careening sails warmed to the sunrise and the sunset in rose and ochre, violet and pearl, opening buds of the blossom of midsummer color that was close at hand.
Bayard was in his rooms, resting after one of these unresting nights. He had set forth at daybreak to meet an incoming schooner at the docks. It had become his habit, whenever he could, to see that the fishermen were personally conducted past the dens of Angel Alley, and taken home sober to waking wife and sleeping child. In this laborious task Job Slip’s help had been of incredible value. Job was quite sober now; and in the intervals between trips this converted Saul delighted to play the Paul to Bayard’s little group of apostles. Yet Job did not pose. He was more sincere than most better men. He took to decency as if it had been a new trade; and the novel dignity of missionary zeal sat upon him like a liberal education. The Windover word for what had happened to Job was “re-formation.” Job Slip, one says, is a reformed man. The best way to save a rascal is to give him another one to save; and Job, who was no rascal, but the ruin of a very good fellow, brilliantly illustrated this eternal law.
Bayard had come back, unusually tired, about noon, and had not left the house since his return. He was reading, with his back to the light, and the sea in his ears. The portière of mosquito netting, which hung now at the door between his two rooms, was pushed aside that he might see the photographed Leonardo as he liked to do. The scanty furniture of his sleeping-room had been moved about during his recent illness, so that now the picture was the only object visible from the study where he sat. The mosquito portière was white. Mrs. Granite having ineffectually urged a solferino pink, Bayard regarded this portière with the disproportionate gratitude of escape from evil.
A knock had struck the cottage door, and Jane Granite had run to answer it. She was in her tidy, blue gingham dress, but a little wet and crumply, as was to be expected on a Monday. She had snatched up a white apron, and looked like an excellent parlor-maid. For such, perhaps, the caller took her, for practical tact was not his most obtrusive quality. He was an elderly man, a gentleman; his mouth was stern, and his eyes were kind. He carried a valuable cane, and spoke with a certain air of authority, as of a man well acquainted with this world and the other too. He asked for Mr. Bayard, and would send up his card before intruding upon him; a ceremony which quite upset little Jane, and she stood crimson with embarrassment. Her discomfort was not decreased by the bewildering presence of a carriage at thegate of her mother’s garden. Beyond the rows of larkspur and feverfew, planted for the vase on Mr. Bayard’s study-table, Mr. Salt’s best carryall, splendid in spring varnish, loomed importantly. Pepper, with the misanthropy of a confirmed dyspeptic, drew the carryall, and ladies sat within it. There were two. They were covered by certain strange, rich carriage robes undreamed of by Mr. Salt; dull, silk blankets, not of Windover designs. The ladies were both handsomely dressed. One was old; but one—ah! one was young.
“Mr. Bayard is in, my dear.” The voice of the caller rose over the larkspur to the carryall. “Will you wait, or drive on?”
“We’ll drive on,” replied the younger lady rather hurriedly.
“Helen, Helen!” complained the elder. “Don’t youknowthat Pepper is afraid of the electric cars? I’ve noticed horses are that live in the same town with them.”
Helen did not laugh at this, but her eyes twinkled irreverently. She wrapped herself in her old-gold silk blanket, and turned to watch the sea. She did not look at Mrs. Granite’s cottage.
The dignified accents of the Professor’s voice were now wafted over the larkspur bed again.
“Mr. Bayard asks if the ladies will not come up to his study, Statira? It is only one short flight. Will you do so?”
Simultaneously Bayard’s eager face flashed outof the doorway; and before Helen could assent or dissent, her mother, on the young man’s arm, was panting up between the feverfew and into the cottage. Helen followed in meek amusement.
The stairs were scarcely more than a ship’s gangway. Mrs. Carruth politely suppressed her sense of horrified inadequacy to the ascent, and she climbed up as bravely as possible. Helen’s cast-down eyes observed the uncarpeted steps of old, stained pine-wood. She was still silent when they entered the study. Bayard bustled about, offering Mrs. Carruth the bony rocking-chair with the turkey-red cushion. The Professor had already ensconced himself in the revolving study-chair, a luxury which had been recently added to the room. There remained for Helen the lounge, and Bayard, perforce, seated himself beside her. He did not remark upon the deficiency of furniture. He seemed as much above an apology for the lack of upholstery as a martyr in prison. His face was radiant with a pleasure which no paltry thought could poison. The simple occasion seemed to him one of high festivity. It would have been impossible for any one of these comfortable people to understand what it meant to the poor fellow to entertain old friends in his lonely quarters.
Helen’s eyes assumed a blank, polite look; she said as little as possible at first; she seemed adjusting herself to a shock. Mrs. Carruth warbled on about the opening of the season at the Mainsail, and the Professor inquired about the effectsof the recent gales upon the fishing classes. He avoided all perilous personalities as adroitly as if he had been fencing with a German radical over the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. It was Bayard himself who boldly approached the dangerous ground.
“You came on Saturday, I suppose? I did not know anything about it till this minute.”
“We did not come till night,” observed Helen hurriedly. “Mother was very tired. We did not go out anywhere yesterday.”
“The Professor did, I’ll be bound,” smiled Bayard. “Went to church, didn’t you, Professor?”
“Ye—es,” replied Professor Carruth, hesitating. “I never omit divine service if I am on my feet.”
“Did you hear Fenton?” asked Bayard with perfect ease of manner.
“Yes,” more boldly from the Professor, “I attended the First Church. I like to recognize The Denomination wherever I may be traveling. I always look up my old boys, of course, too. It seems to be a prosperous parish.”
“Itisa prosperous parish,” assented Bayard heartily. “Fenton is doing admirably with it. Did you hear him?”
“Why yes,” replied the Professor, breathing more freely.“I heard Fenton. He did well—quite well. He has not that scope of intellect which—I never considered him ourablestman; but his theology is perfectly satisfactory. He preached an excellent doctrinal sermon. The audience was not so large as I could have wished; but it seemed to be of a superior quality—some of your first citizens, I should say?”
“Oh, yes, our first people all attend that church. You didn’t find many ofmycrowd there, I presume?”
Bayard laughed easily.
“I did not recognize it,” said the Professor, “as a distinctly fishing community—from the audience; no, not from that audience.”
“Not many of my drunkards, for instance, sir? Not a strong salt-fish perfume in the First Church? Nor a whiff of old New England rum anywhere?”
“The atmosphere was irreproachable,” returned the Professor with a keen look.
Bayard glanced at Helen, who had been sitting quietly on the sofa beside him. Her eyes returned his merriment.
“Father!” she exclaimed, “Mr. Bayard does not recant. He is proud of it. He glories in his heresy. He is laughing at his martyrdom—and at us. I think you’d better ‘let up’ on him awhile.”
“Let up, Helen? Let up?” complained her mother. “That is a very questionable expression. Ask your father, my dear, if it is good English. And I’m sure Mr. Bayard will be agentlemanlyheretic, whatever he is.”
Helen laughed outright, now. Bayard joinedher; and the four drew breath and found themselves at their ease.
“For my part,” said Helen unexpectedly, “I should like to see Mr. Bayard’s church—if he would stoop to invite us.... I suppose,” she added thoughtfully, “one reason saints don’t stoop, is for fear the halo should tumble off. It must be so inconvenient! Don’t you ever have a stiff neck, Mr. Bayard?”
“Why,Helen!” cried Mrs. Carruth in genuine horror. She hastened to atone for her daughter’s rudeness to a young man who already had enough to bear. “I will come and bring Helen myself, Mr. Bayard, to hear you preach—that is, if you would like to have us.”
“Pray don’t!” protested Bayard. “The Professor’s hair would turn black again in a single night. It won’t do for you to recognize an outlaw like me, you know. Why, Fenton and I haven’t met since he came here; unless at the post-office. I understand my position. Don’t feel any delicacy about it.Idon’t. I can’t stop for that! I am too busy.”
The Professor of Theology colored a little.
“The ladies of my family are quite free to visit any of the places of worship around us,” he observed with some dignity. “They are not bound by the same species of ecclesiastical etiquette”—
“We must be going, Mother,” said Helen abruptly. Her cheeks were blazing; her eyes met Bayard’s with a ray of indignant sympathy whichwent to his head like wine. He felt the light, quick motion of her breath; the folds of her summer dress—he could not have told what she wore—fell over the carpet lounge; the hem of the dress touched his boot, and just covered the patch on it from sight. He had but glanced at her before. He looked at her now; her heightened color became her richly; her hand—she wore a driving-glove—lay upon the cretonne sofa pillow; she had picked a single flower as she came up Mrs. Granite’s garden walk. Bayard was amused to see that she had instinctively taken a deep purple pansy with a heart of gold.
A little embarrassed, Helen held out the pansy.
“I like them,” she said. “They make faces at me.”
“This one is a royal creature,” said Bayard. “It has the face of a Queen.”
“Mr. Bayard,” asked Mrs. Carruth, with the air of starting a subject of depth and force, “do you find any time to analyze flowers?”
“So far—hardly,” replied Bayard, looking Helen straight in the face.
“I used to study botany when I was a young lady—in New York,” observed Mrs. Carruth placidly; “it seems to me a very wholesome and refining”—
“Papa!” cried Helen, “Pepper is eating a tomato can—No, it’s a piece of—It is an apron—a gingham apron! The menu of that horse, Mr. Bayard, surpasses anything”—
“It is plainly some article belonging to the ladies of the house,” said Bayard, laughing.
He had started to rescue the apron, when Jane Granite was seen to run out and wrench that portion of her wardrobe from Pepper’s voracity.
“That,” observed Mrs. Carruth, “is the maid, I presume?”
“It is Miss Granite, my landlady’s daughter,” replied Bayard with some unnecessary dignity. Poor little Jane, red in the face, and raging at the heart, stood, with the eyes of the visitors upon her, contending with Pepper, who insisted on retaining the apron strings, and had already swallowed one halfway.
Quick to respond to the discomfort of any woman, Bayard ran down to Jane’s relief.
“It blew over from the lines,” said Jane. She lifted to him her sad, grateful eyes. She would have cried, if she had ventured to speak. Helen, from the window, looked down silently.
When Bayard came upstairs again, his visitors had risen to leave, in earnest. Helen avoided his eyes. He felt that hers had taken in every detail of his poor place: the iron angel on the ugly stove; the Cupid and the grapes upon the paper screen; the dreary, darned, brown carpet; the barren shades; the mosquito-net portière; the whole homeless, rude, poverty-smitten thing.
“You have a fine engraving of Guido’s Saint Michael, here,” observed Professor Carruth, taking out his glasses.
“And I notice—don’t I see another good picture through the gauze portière?” asked Mrs. Carruth modestly.
“That is Leonardo’s Christ,” said the Professor promptly, at a look. “It really makes a singular, I may say a beautiful, impression behind that white stuff. I never happened to see it before with such an effect. Look, Helen! It seems like a transparency—or a cloud.”
A devout expression touched Helen’s face, which had grown quite grave. She did not answer, and went downstairs behind her mother, very quietly.
Jane Granite had disappeared. Pepper was engaged in a private conflict with such portions of her wardrobe as he had succeeded in swallowing; Mrs. Carruth mounted heavily into the carryall, and Helen leaped after her. Then it appeared that the Professor had forgotten his cane, and Bayard ran back for it. As he came down, he caught a glimpse of Jane Granite in the sitting-room. She was crying.
“That is my Charter Oak cane,” observed the Professor anxiously; “the one with the handle made from the old ship Constitution. I wouldn’t have mislaid it on any account.”
“Father would rather have mislaid me,” said Helen with an air of conviction. Her mother was inviting Mr. Bayard to call on them at the Flying Jib. Helen said nothing on this point. She smiled and nodded girlishly, and Pepper bore them away.
Bayard came back upstairs three steps at a time. The sitting-room door was shut, and it did not occur to him to open it. He had quite forgotten Jane. He closed his study-door softly, and went and sat down on the carpet lounge; the pansy that she had dropped was there. He looked for it, and looked at it, then laid it gently on his study-table. He took up the cretonne pillow where her hand had lain, then put it softly down.
“I must keep my head,” thought the young man. He passed his hand over his too brilliant eyes, and went, with compressed lips, to his study-table.
But Jane Granite went out in the back yard, and sat down under the clothes-lines, on the salt-fish box. The chewed apron was in her hand. The clothes flapped in the rising wind above her head. She could not be seen from the house. Here she could cry in peace.
She was surprised to find, when she was seated there, that she did not want to cry. Her eyes, her throat, her lips, her head, seemed burning to ashes. Hot, hard, wicked wishes came for the first time in her gentle life to Jane. That purple-and-gold woman swam giddily between her and the summer sky.
Jane had known her at the first look. Her soul winced when she recognized the stranger of the electric car. Mr. Bayard had thought Jane did not notice that lady that April day. Jane had byheart every line and tint and detail of her, from the gold dagger on her bonnet to the dark purple cloth gaiter of her boots; from her pleased brown eyes, with the well-bred motion of their lids, to the pretty gestures that she made with her narrow, gloved hand. Jane looked at her own wash-day dress and parboiled fingers. The indefinable, undeniable fact of the stranger’s personal elegance crushed the girl with the sense of helpless bitterness which only women who have been poor and gone shabby can understand. The language of dress, which is to the half-educated the symbol of superiority, conveyed to Jane, in advance of any finer or truer vocabulary, the full force of the situation.
“She is different,” thought Jane.
These three words said it all. Jane dropped her face in her soaked and wrinkled fingers. The damp clothes flapped persistently about her neat, brown head, as if trying to arouse her with the useless diversion of things that one is quite used to. Jane thought of Ben Trawl, it is true, but without any distinct sense of disloyalty or remorse. She experienced the ancient and always inexplicable emotion not peculiar to Jane: she might have lived on in relative content, not in the least disturbed by any consciousness of her own ties, as long as the calm eyes she worshiped reflected the image of no other woman. Now something in Jane’s heart seemed to snap and let lava through.
Oh, purple and gold, gall and wormwood, beautyand daintiness, heart-ache and fear! Had the Queen come to the palace of Kubla Khan? Let Alph, the sacred river, run! Who was she, Jane Granite, that she should stem the sweeping current?
“... Cryingagain? This is a nice way to greet a fellar,” said roughly a sudden voice in Jane’s dulled ear.
Ben Trawl lifted the damp clothes, strode through between the poles, and stood beside his promised wife. His face was ominously dark.
It is not so hard to endure suffering as to resist ease. The passion for martyrdom sweeps everything before it, as long as it is challenged by no stronger force. Emanuel Bayard had lived for a year upon the elixir of a spiritual exaltation such as has carried men to a glowing death, or through a tortured life without a throb of weakness. He had yet to adjust his nature to the antidote of common human comfort.
Like most of the subtler experiences of life, this came so naturally that, at first, he scarcely knew it by sight or name.
It was not a noteworthy matter to show the courtesies of civilized life to the family of his old Professor. Bayard reminded himself of this as he walked down the Point.
It was quite a week before he found leisure to attend to this simple, social obligation. His duties in Angel Alley had been many and laborious; it did not occur to him to shorten a service or an entertainment; to omit a visit to the wharves when the crews came in, or to put by the emergency of a drunkard’s wife to a more convenient season because he had in view that which had grown so rare to the young man, now—the experience of apersonal luxury. Like a much older and more ascetic man than he was, he counted the beads on his rosary of labors conscientiously through. Then he hurried to her.
Now, to women of leisure nothing is so incomprehensible as the preoccupation of a seriously busy man. Bayard had not counted upon this feminine fact: indeed, he lived in a world where feminine whim was an element as much outside his calculation as the spring fashions of the planet Uranus. He was quite at a loss when Miss Carruth received him distantly.
The Flying Jib was, as to its exterior, an ugly little cottage run out on the neck of the jutting reef that formed the chief attraction of the Mainsail Hotel. The interior of the Flying Jib varied from a dreary lodge to a summer home, according to the nature of the occupants. It seemed to Bayard that season absurdly charming. He had lived so long out of his natural world, that the photographs and rugs, the draperies, the flowers, the embroidery, the work-baskets, the bric-a-brac, the mere presence of taste and of ladies, appeared to him at first essential luxury. He looked about him with a sigh of delight, while Mrs. Carruth went to call her daughter, who had gone over to the fish-house study with the Professor, and who could be seen idling along home over the meadow, a stately figure in a pale, yellow summer dress, with a shade hat, and pansies on it.
As we say, that young lady at first received Bayardcoolly. She sauntered into the little parlor with her hands full of sweet-briar, nodded to him politely, and excused herself at once to arrange her flowers. This took her some time. Mrs. Carruth entertained him placidly. Helen’s eyes saw but did not seem to see the slightest motion of his nervous hand, each tone of expression that ran over his sensitive face. He had looked so eager and happy when she came; almost boyishly thirsting for that little pleasure! She had that terrible inability to understand the facts of his life or feeling which is responsible for most of the friction between two half-attracted or half-separating human beings. But when she saw the light die from his eyes, when she saw that hurt look which she knew quite well, settle about the lower part of his face, Helen was ashamed of herself. Mrs. Carruth was mildly introducing the subject of mosquito bars; theirs, she said, were all on the second story; the supply didn’t go round, and the Professor objected to them; so the hornets—
“Mother,” said Helen, “I wonder if Mr. Bayard wouldn’t like to have us show him the clam study?”
“Your father said he should be at work on the ‘State of the Unforgiven after Death,’” replied Mrs. Carruth. “I don’t know that we ought to disturb him; do you think we ought, Helen?”
“He was whittling a piece of mahogany for the head of a cane when I left him,” said Helen irreverently;“he stole it out of the cabin of that old wreck in the inner harbor. Do you think a Professor of Theology could be forgiven after death for sneak-thieving, Mr. Bayard?”
She abandoned the idea of visiting the clam study, however, and seated herself with frank graciousness by their visitor. Mrs. Carruth having strolled away presently to keep some elderly tryst among the piazza ladies of the hotel, the young people were left alone.
They sat for a moment in sudden, rather awkward silence. Helen looked like a tall June lily, in her summer gown; she had taken her hat off; her hair was a little tumbled and curly; the wind blew in strong from the sea, tossing the lace curtains of the Flying Jib like sails on a toy boat. The scent of the sweet-briar was delicately defined in the room. Bayard looked at her without any attempt to speak. She answered his silent question by saying, abruptly:—
“You know you’llhaveto forgive me, whether you want to, or not.”
“Forgive you?”
“Why, for being vexed. Iwasa little, at first. But I needn’t have been such a schoolgirl as to show it.”
“If you would be so kind as to tell me what I can possibly have done to—deserve your displeasure—” began Bayard helplessly.
“If a man doesn’t understand without being told, I’ve noticed hecan’tunderstand when he is told.... Why didn’t you wait till next fall before you came to see us, Mr. Bayard?”
“Oh!” said Bayard. His happy look came back to his tired face, as if a magic lantern had shifted a beautiful slide. “Isthatit?”
He laughed delightedly. “Why, I suppose I must have seemed rude—neglectful, at any rate. But I’ve noticed that if a woman doesn’t understand without being told, she makes up for it by her readiness of comprehension when she is told.”
“What a nice, red coal!” smiled Helen. “The top of my head feels quite warm. Dear me! Isn’t there a spot burned bald?”
She felt anxiously of her pretty hair.
“Come over and see my work,” said Bayard, “and you’ll never ask me again why I didn’t do anything I—would so much rather do.”
“I never asked you before!” flashed Helen.
“You did me an honor that I shall remember,” said Bayard gravely.
“Oh, please don’t! Pray forget it as soon as you can,” cried Helen, with red cheeks.
“You can’t know, you see youcan’tknow, how a man situated as I am prizes the signs of the simplest human friendship that is sincere and womanly.”
So said Bayard quietly. Helen drew a little quick breath. She seemed reconciled now, to herself, and to him. They began to talk at once, quite fast and freely. Afterwards he tried to remember what it had all been about, but he found it not easy; the evening passed on wings; he felt the atmosphere of this little pleasure witha delight impossible to be understood by a man who had not known and graced society and left it. Now and then he spoke of his work, but Helen did not exhibit a marked interest in the subject.
Bayard drew the modest inference that he had obtruded his own affairs with the obtuseness common to missionaries and other zealots; he roused himself to disused conversation, and to the forgotten topics of the world. It did not occur to him that this was precisely what she intended. The young lady drew him out, and drew him on. They chatted about Cesarea and Beacon Street, about Art, Clubs, Magazine literature, and the Symphony Concerts, like the ordinary social human being.
“You see I have been out of it so long!” pleaded Bayard.
“Not yet a year,” corrected Helen.
“It seems to me twenty,” he mused.
“You don’t go to see your uncle, yet?”
“I met him once or twice down town. I have not been home, yet. But that would make no difference. I have no leisure for—all these little things.”
He said the words with such an utter absence of affectation that it was impossible either to smile or to take offence at them. Helen regarded him gravely.
“There were two or three superb concerts this winter. I thought of you. I wished you had come in”—
“Did you take that trouble?” he asked eagerly.
“I don’t think I ever heard Schubert played better in my life,” she went on, without noticing the interruption. “Schoeffelowski does do The Serenade divinely.”
“I used to care for that more than for any other music in the world, I think,” he answered slowly.
“I play poorly,” said Helen, “and I sing worse, and the piano is rented of a Windover schoolgirl. But I have got some of his renderings by heart—if you would care for it.”
“It is plain,” replied Bayard, flushing, “that I no longer move in good society. It did not even occur to me to ask you. I should enjoy it—it would rest me more than anything I can think of. Not that that matters, of course—but I should be more grateful than it is possible for you to understand.”
Helen went to the piano without ado, and began to sing the great serenade. She played with feeling, and had a sweet, not a strong voice; it had the usual amateur culture, no more, but it had a quality not so usual. She sang with a certain sumptuous delicacy (if the words may be conjoined) by which Bayard found himself unexpectedly moved. He sat with his hand over his eyes, and she sang quite through.