Dear Sir, Mr. Bayard: My hart will brake to think I cause you shame for savin of a poor girl. I see that peece in the paper. It aint far to gess who done it. If it wasnt for disgrasin you Ide kill Ben Trawl tonite. I wouldnt mind hangin. I know how Ide do it too. But dont you trubble I wont shame you no more. I’ll clare out all-together. So good-bye and God bless you Sir.This is from, Yours respictfully,Lena.
Dear Sir, Mr. Bayard: My hart will brake to think I cause you shame for savin of a poor girl. I see that peece in the paper. It aint far to gess who done it. If it wasnt for disgrasin you Ide kill Ben Trawl tonite. I wouldnt mind hangin. I know how Ide do it too. But dont you trubble I wont shame you no more. I’ll clare out all-together. So good-bye and God bless you Sir.
This is from, Yours respictfully,Lena.
Bayard’s reply to Lena’s note was to go straight to the gunpowder factory, and speak with the girl. The superintendent stood by, and overheard him say, in a commanding tone:—
“Lena, you will not leave this town. You will come to the chapel as usual. You will sing with us next Sunday. You will pay no attention to anything that you hear, or see. You will never suffer yourself even tosupposethat any base, low mind or tongue can injure your pastor. You will do as I bid you, and you will become the woman you promised to. You will do this with my help or without it. Anything may happen to a person. Nothing can undo a promise.”
“Mr. Bayard, sir,” said Lena, forcing back her tears, for she was not a crying girl, “I’m a girl of my word, and I ain’t goin’ back on you. But there’s one thing I’ve got to say. Mebbe I shouldn’t have another chance, bein’ things are as they be. Ididwant to ask you, Mr. Bayard, sir, if I was to be a good girl long enough,—as long as you should set the time to make me fit,—do you suppose, Mr. Bayard, you would ever feel so as if you could touch your hat to me—same as you do to decent girls?”
The superintendent of the powder factory brushed his hand across his eyes. Bayard was much moved.
The dark, little figure of the girl, in her working-clothes, standing stolidly at her post in the most dangerous of the deadly trades, wherein no“hand” can insure his life, blurred before the minister. He thought how little life could mean to Lena, at its kindest and best.
“When the time comes,” he said gently, “I shall lift my hat to you.”
“That’s worth while,” said Lena in her short, forcible way. She turned and went back to her work.
The factory seemed to throb with the struggle of imprisoned death to burst its bars. Bayard came out into the air with the long breath which the bravest man always drew when he left the buildings.
These incidents (which are events to the solitary, missionary life) were but two days old when Joey Slip climbed the minister’s stairs, sobbing dolorously.
Rumor was running in Windover that Job was drunk again. Neither the child nor the wife could say if truth were in it, for neither had seen the man since yesterday. But Mari had dispatched the boy to the minister with the miserable news. With a smothered exclamation which Joey found it impossible to translate, Bayard snatched the child’s hand, and set forth. His face wore a terrible look. He reached the wharves in time to come directly upon Job, the centre of a ring of jeering roughs. Muddy, wet, torn, splashed with slime from the docks, hatless and raving, Job was doing his maudlin best to fight Ben Trawl, who stood at a safe distance, smiling with the cynicismof a rumseller who never drinks. Job—poor Job, the “reformed man”; Job, who had fought harder for his manhood than most sober men ever fight for anything from the baby’s crib to the broadcloth casket; Job, the “pillar” of Christlove mission, the pride and pet of the struggling people; Job, the one sure comfort of his pastor’s most discouraged hour,—Job stood there, abased and hideous.
He had lived one splendid year; he had done one glorious thing; he had achieved that for which better men than he should take off their hats to him. And there—Bayard looked at him once, and covered his face.
Job recognized him, and, frenzied as he was, sunk upon his knees in the mud, and crawled towards the minister, piteously holding up his hands. One must have been in Job’s place, or in Bayard’s, to understand what that moment was to these two men.
In the paltry scenes of what we call the society of the world, there are no actors who should criticise, as there are few who can comprehend the rôles of this plain and common tragedy.
With the eyes of a condemning angel, Bayard strode into the group, and took Job home.
“It’s clear D. T.,” said Captain Hap between his teeth.
Bayard sent for a doctor, who prescribed chloral, and said the case was serious. Mari put on a clean apron, and dusted up the rooms, and reinforced theminister, who proceeded to nurse Job for thirty-six hours. Captain Hap went home. He said he’d rather tie a slipknot round the fellar’s neck, and drawr it taut.
But when Job came to himself, poor fellow, the truth came with him. Job had been the blameless victim of one of those incredible but authenticated plots which lend blackness to the dark complexion of the liquor trade.
Job was working ashore, it seemed, for a week, being out of a chance to ship; and he had been upon the wharves, salting down fish, and came out at his nooning, with the rest, for his lunch. There was a well, in a yard, by the fish-flakes, and a dipper, chained, hung from the pump.
It came Job’s turn to drink from the dipper. And when he had drunk, the devil entered into him. For the rim of the dipper had been maliciously smeared with rum. Into the parched body of the “reformed man” the fire of that flavor ran, as flame runs through stubble in a drought.
The half-cured drunkard remembered putting down his head, and starting for the nearest grogshop on a run, with a yell. From that moment till Bayard found him, Job remembered nothing more. Such episodes of the nether world are not rare enough to be doubted, and this one is no fiction.
“I’m in for it, now,” groaned Job. “Might as well go to h—— and done with it.”
Then Bayard, haggard from watching, turnedand looked on Job. Job put his hands before his face.
“Oh,sir!” he cried. “But you see, there ain’t a wharf-rat left in Windover as ’u’d trust me now!”
“Take my hand, Job,” said the minister slowly.
Job took it, sobbing like a baby.
“Now climb up again, Job!” said Bayard in a strong voice. “I’m with you!”
Thus went the words of the shortest sermon of the minister’s life. To the end of his days, Job Slip will think it was the greatest and the best.
Captain Hap, penitent, but with no idea of saying so, came up the tenement stairs. Mari and Joey sat beside the fire. Mari was frying chunks of haddock for supper. Joey was singing in a contented little voice something that he had caught in the mission:—
“Veresawidenessin Godsmer—cyLikevewidenessof vesea....ForveloveofGod is bwoard—erVanvemeazzerof mansmineAnve heartof veE—ter—nalIsmoswonderfully kine.”
“Hear the boy!” cried Mari, laughing for the first time for many black days.
“What in the world is he singin’?” asked Joey’s father.
“Why, I’m sure it’s as plain as can be,” said Joey’s mother,—
“‘There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,Like the wideness of the sea.’
Then he says:—
“‘For the love of God is broaderThan the measure of man’s mind,And the heart of the EternalIs most wonderful and kind.’
Oh, ain’t he the clever boy?”
“We’ll see,” said Job unexpectedly, putting his feet to the floor. “I ain’t a-goin’ to have the little fellar ashamed of his father, see if I be!”
“All the same,” observed Captain Hap dryly, “I wouldn’t go on the street to-night, if I was you. I’ll stay along of you a spell. The minister’s beat out. There’s enough goin’ on yet to capsize a soberer man than you be, Job. The fellar that did this here ain’t a-goin’ to stop at rims of dippers. No, sir!... Job Slip! Don’t you tech nothin’; notnothin’outside of your own house, this six month to come! Not a soda, Job! Not a tumbler o’ milk! Not a cup o’ coffee! Not a swaller o’ water! No, nor a bite of victuals. You’ll be hunted down like a rat. There’s bread buttered with phosphorus layin’ round loose for ye most anywheres. Everybody knows who done this. ’T ain’t no use to spile good English callin’ bad names. He won’t stop at nothin’ partikkelar to drawr you under.”
“But why?” asked Bayard. “Why should he hound down poor Job so?”
“To spite you, sir,” replied the captain without hesitation.
In the dead silence which followed the captain’s words, Joey’s little voice piped up again:—
“Be hushed my dark spew—itVe wussvatcancomeBut shortens vy zhour—neeAnhastingsme home.”
“Be hushed my dark spew—itVe wussvatcancomeBut shortens vy zhour—neeAnhastingsme home.”
Joey stole up merrily, and patted out the tune with his little fingers on the minister’s pale cheek.
“He says,” began Mari proudly,
“‘Be hushed, my dark spirit,The worst that can come’”—
“‘Be hushed, my dark spirit,The worst that can come’”—
But Captain Hap, who was not in a pious mood, interrupted the maternal translation.
“Folks say that they’ve got into their —— heads their license is in genooine danger. Confine yourself to prayin’ an’ singin’, an’ they don’t deny that’s what you’re hired for. Folks say if you meddle with city politics, there ain’t an insurance company in New England ’u’d take a policy on your life, sir. You might as well hear what’s goin’ on, Mr. Bayard. I don’t suspicion it’ll make no odds to you. I told ’em you wouldn’t tech the politics of this here town with a forty-fathom grapplin’-iron,—no, nor with a harbor-dredger!”
“You’re right there, Captain,” returned Bayard, smiling.
“Then ’tain’t true about the license?” asked the captain anxiously.
“I have nothing to conceal in the matter, Captain,” answered Bayard after a moment’s silence.“There are legalized crimes in Angel Alley which I shall fight till I die. But it will be slow work. I don’t do it by lobbying. I have my own methods, and you must grant me my own counsel.”
“The dawn that rises on the Trawls without their license,” slowly said the captain, “that day, sir, you may as well call on the city marshal for a body-guard. You’ll need it!”
“Oh, you and Job will answer, I fancy,” replied Bayard, laughing.
He went straight home and to bed, where he slept fitfully till nearly noon of the next day. He was so exhausted with watching and excitement, that there is a sense of relief in thinking that the man was granted this one night’s rest before that which was to be befell him.
For, at midnight of the succeeding night, he was awakened by the clang of the city bells. It was a still night, there was little wind, and the tide was calm at the ebb. The alarm was quite distinct and easily counted. One? two? three? Six? One—two—three. Six. Thirty-six. Thirty-six was the call from the business section of the town. This alarm rang in for the board of trade, Angel Alley, the wharves, and certain banks and important shops.
“A fire on the wharves, probably,” thought Bayard; he turned on his pillow; “the fire-boat will reach it in three minutes. It is likely to be some slight affair.”
One—two—three. Six. One—two—three. Six.One-two. One-two.The sounding of thegeneral alarm aroused him thoroughly. He got to the window and flung open the blinds. In the heart of the city, two miles away, a pillar of flame shot straight towards the sky, which hung above it as red as the dashed blood of a mighty slaughter.
At this moment a man came running, and leaned on Mrs. Granite’s fence, looking up through the dark.
“Mr. Bayard! Mr. Bayard!” he called loudly.
“Bob! Is that you? What is it? Where is it?”
“It’s in Angel Alley, sir.”
“Be there in a minute, Bob.”
“But, Mr. Bayard, sir—there’s them as think you’re safer where you be. Job Slip says you stay to home if you love us, Mr. Bayard!”
“Wait for me, Bob,” commanded Bayard. “I’m half dressed now.”
“But, Mr. Bayard, Mr. Bayard—you ain’t got it through your head—I said I wouldn’t be the man to tell you, and I wish to gollyswash I’d stuck to it.”
“Bob! It isn’t theMission?”
“Oh, sir—yes! They’ve set us afire!”
“Now, Bob,” said the minister, suddenly shooting up in the dark at Bob’s side, with coat and vest over his arm, “run for it! Run!”
The building was doomed from the first. The department saw that, at a glance, and concentrated its skill upon the effort to save the block.
The deed had been dexterously done. The firesprang from half a dozen places, and had been burning inwardly, it was thought, for an hour before it was discovered. The people had been too poor to hire a night-watchman.
“We trusted Providence,” muttered Captain Hap. “And this is what we get for it!”
The crowd parted before the minister when he came panting up, with Bob a rod behind. Bayard had got into his coat on the way, but he had not waited for his hat. In the glare, with his bared head and gray-white face, he gathered an unearthly radiance.
He made out to get under the ropes, and sprang up the steps of the burning building.
“No, sir!” said the chief respectfully; “you can’t get in, now. We’ve saved all we could.”
“There are some things Imusthave. I can get at them. I’ve done this before. Let me in!” commanded the minister.
All the coherent thought he had at that moment was that he must save some of the pictures—Helen’s pictures that she had given to the people. In that shock of trouble they took on a delirious preciousness to him.
“Let me into my own chapel!” he thundered. But the chief put his hand upon the preacher’s breast, and held it there.
“Not another step, Mr. Bayard. The roof will fall in five minutes. Get back, sir!”
He heard his people calling him; strong hands took hold of him; pitying faces looked at him.
“Come, Mr. Bayard,” some one said gently. “Turn away with us. Don’t see it go.”
He protested no more, but obeyed quietly. For the first time since they had known him, he faltered, and broke before his people. They led him away, like a wounded man. He covered his face when the crash came. The sparks flew far and hot over the wharves, and embers followed. The water hissed as it received them.
At the first gray of dawn, the minister was on the ground again. Evidently he had not slept. There was a storm in the sky, and slow, large flakes of snow were falling. The crowd had gone, and the Alley was deserted. Only a solitary guardian of the ruins remained. Bayard stood before them, and looked up. Now, a singular thing had happened. The electric wire which fed the illuminated sign in front of the mission had not been disconnected by the fire; it had so marvelously and beautifully happened; only a few of the little colored glass globes had been broken, and four white and scarlet words, paling before the coming day, and blurring in the snow, but burning steadily, answered the smothered tongues of fire and lips of smoke which muttered from the ruins.
As day opened, the people began to collect upon the spot. Expressions of awe or of superstition were heard, as they looked up and read, serene and undisturbed against the background of the rising storm,—
“The Love of Christ.”
Immediately upon the destruction of the chapel, two things happened. The first, was a visit from Mr. Hermon Worcester. Nothing could have been more unexpected; and when Bayard, coming into his lodgings one dreary afternoon, found his uncle in the bony rocking-chair, the young man was much moved.
Mr. Worcester, not untouched by the sight of his nephew’s emotion, held out an embarrassed hand. Bayard took it warmly. He had learned the lesson of loneliness so thoroughly, that he was ill prepared for the agitation of this little, common, human incident.
“You are ill, Manuel!” cried the elder man. “Good heavens, how you have changed! I had no idea—You should have told me!” he added, with the old autocratic accent. “I ought to have been informed.... Andthisis how you live!”
Hermon Worcester looked slowly about him. His eye fell on the paper screen, the mosquito-net portière, the iron angel on the stove, the hard lounge, the old carpet, the stained wall-paper; he scrutinized the bookcase, he glanced at the Saint Michael. When he saw the great Christ, he coughed, and turned his face away; got up uneasily,and went into the bedroom, where he fell to examining the cotton comforters.
“At least,” he said sharply, “you could have sent for your own hair mattress! Nobody has slept on it, since”—
He broke off, and returned to the skeleton rocking-chair, with an expression of discomfiture so serious that Bayard pitied him. He hastened to say:—
“Oh, I have done very well, very well indeed, Uncle. A man expects to rough it, if he chooses to be a home missionary. Give yourself no concern—now.”
If there were an almost uncontrollable accent on the last word, Mr. Hermon Worcester failed to notice it. Something in that other phrase had arrested his Orthodox attention. A home missionary? A home missionary. Was it possible to regard this heretic boy in that irreproachable light?
To the home missions of his denomination Mr. Worcester was a large and important contributor. Now and then an ecclesiastical Dives is to be found who gives a certain preference to the heathen of his own land before those of India, Africa, and Japan; Mr. Worcester had always been one of these illuminated men. Indeed, Japan, Africa, and India had been known to reflect upon the character of his Christianity for the reason that his checks were cashed for the benefit of Idaho, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.
To this hour it had not occurred to Mr. Worcester that the heathen of Windover could be properly rated as in the home missionary field. Even the starving pastors in the northern counties of Vermont might have gratefully called for yearly barrels of his old clothes; but Windover? Why, that was within two hours of Boston! And, alas, the Vermont ministers were always “sound.” In Idaho, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, where was a corrupt theology to be found?
But that phrase had lodged in some nick of Mr. Worcester’s mind; and he could no more brush it off than one can brush away a seed out of reach in the crevice of a rock. He regarded his nephew with a certain tolerance, warmly tinged by compassion.
“The boy is a wreck,” he said to himself. “Manuel will die if this goes on. He might have expected it. And so might I.”
The old man’s face worked. He spoke, crossly enough. Bayard remembered that he always used to be cross when he was touched.
“What’s to happen now? Ready to give it up, Manuel?”
“I am ready to begin all over again,” replied Emanuel, smiling.
His voice had the ring that his uncle knew too well; when he was a little fellow, and bound to do a thing whether or no, he spoke in that tone, and always with that engaging smile.
“Who pays for this phœnix?” asked the manof business brusquely. “I passed by your place. It is a fine heap of ashes. A curious sight I saw there, too. That sign you hang out—those four words.”
Bayard nodded.
“Itisa pleasant accident. The department says it is almost unprecedented. Oh, we shall crawl up somehow, Uncle! I don’t feelveryanxious. The town hall is already hired for temporary use. There is great excitement in the city over the whole affair. You see, it has reached the proportions, now, of a deadlock between the rum interest and the decent citizens. Our treasurer is circulating some sort of a paper. I think he hopes to collect a few hundreds—enough to tide us over till we can float off. I don’t know just how it is all coming out. Of course we can’t expect the help that an ordinary church would get in a similar trouble.”
“I’m glad if you recognize that fact, Manuel,” replied Mr. Worcester uncomfortably. In his heart he was saying, “The boy has his mother’s splendid Worcester pride. He’ll perish here, like a starving eagle on a deserted crag, but he won’taskme!”
“You need a new building,” observed Mr. Worcester, with that quiet way of putting a startling thing which was another Worcester quality.“You seem to have made—from your own point of view, of course—what any man of affairs would call a success here. Of course, you understand, Manuel, that I cannot approve of your course. It has been the greatest grief of my life.”
Bayard hastened to observe that his comprehension of this point was not limited.
“Fromyourpoint of view, not mine, Manuel, I should, as a man of business, suggest that a new building—your own property—something to impress business men, you know; something to give material form to that—undoubtedly sincere and—however mistaken—unselfish, religious effort that you have wasted in this freezing hole.... I wonder, Manuel, if you could put the draughts on that confounded box-burner with the angel atop? I don’t know when I’ve been so chilly!”
Bayard hastened to obey this request, without intimating that the draughts were closed to save the coal. This species of political economy was quite outside of his uncle’s experience, and yet, perhaps, the man of business had more imagination than his nephew gave him credit for; he said abruptly:—
“Look here, Manuel, I’ve got to get the seven o’clock train home, you know, and I’d best do the errand I came on, at once. You know those old Virginia mines of your mother’s? There was a little stock there, you remember? It went below zero. Hasn’t been heard of for twenty years. But it remained on the inventory of the estate, you know. Well, it’s come up. There’s a new plant gone in—Northern enterprise, you know—and the stock is on the market again. There is only a trifle, a paltry two thousand, if well handled. It’s yours, you see, whatever there is of it. I came down to ask if you would like to have me force a sale for you.”
“Two thousand dollars!” cried Bayard, turning pale. “Why, it would almost build me—at least, it would furnish a new chapel. We had about so much of inside property—library, piano, pictures, settees, hymn-books, and all that—it is all a dead loss. Unfortunately, Mr. Bond had never insured it—we were so poor; every dollar tells!”
“Then he was a very bad man of business for a church—for a—missionary officer!” cried Mr. Worcester irritably; “and I hope you’ll do nothing of the kind. You could spend that amount on your personal necessities inside of six months, and then not know it, sir! You are—I hope, Manuel,” sternly, “that you will regard my wish, for once, in one respect, before I die. Don’t fling your mother’s money into the bottomless pit of this unendowed, burnt-out, unpopular enterprise! Wait awhile, Manuel. Wait a little and think it over. I don’t think, under the circumstances,” added Mr. Worcester with some genuine dignity, “that it is very much to ask.”
“Perhaps it is not,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “At least, I will consider it, as you say.”
Four days after, an envelope from Boston was put into Bayard’s hand. It contained a typewritten letter setting forth the fact that the writer desired to contribute to the erection of the newchapel in Windover known by the name of Christlove, and representing a certain phase of home missionary effort—the inclosed sum. It was a bank draft for twenty-five hundred dollars. The writer withheld his name, and requested that no effort be made to identify him. He also desired that his contribution be used, if possible, in a conditional character, to stimulate the growth of a collection sufficient to put the building and the mission behind it, upon a suitable basis.
The following day Mr. Worcester sent to Bayard by personal check the remnant of his mother’s property. This little sum seemed as large, now, to the Beacon Street boy, as if he had been reared in one of the Vermont parsonages to which his uncle sent old overcoats; or, one might say, as if he had never left the shelter of that cottage under the pine grove in Bethlehem, where his eyes first opened upon the snow-girt hills. Self-denial speaks louder in the blood than indulgence, after all; and who knew how much of Bayard’s simple manliness in the endurance of privation he owed to the pluck of the city girl who left the world for love of one poor man, and to become the mother of another?
Bayard had scarcely adjusted his mind to these events when he received from Helen Carruth this letter:—
“My dear Mr. Bayard,—My little note of sympathy with your great trouble did not deserve so prompt an answer. I thank you for it. I could not quite make up my mind to tell you, in the midst of so much care and anxiety, what I can delay no longer in saying”—
“My dear Mr. Bayard,—My little note of sympathy with your great trouble did not deserve so prompt an answer. I thank you for it. I could not quite make up my mind to tell you, in the midst of so much care and anxiety, what I can delay no longer in saying”—
Bayard laid down the letter. The room grew black before his starting eyes.
“There is another man,” he thought. “She is engaged. She cannot bear to tell me.”
Sparks of fire leaped before his eyeballs. Black swung into purple—into gray—light returned; and he read on:—
“If I flatter myself in supposing that you might mind it a little, why, the mistake hurts nobody, neither you nor me; but the fact is we are not coming to Windover this summer. We sail for Europe next week.“Father has decided quite suddenly, and there is nothing to be done but to go. It is something to do with Exegesis, if you please! There is a mistake in Exegesis, you know,—in the New Version. It seems to me a pretty Old Version by this time, but father has always been stirred up about it. He has been corresponding with a German Professor for a year or two on this burning subject. I have an inarticulate suspicion that, between them, they mean to write the New Testament over again. Could they do another Version? How many Versionscanbe versed?“I never graduated, you know; I never even attended a Cesarea Anniversary in my life (andyou can’t think how it shocked the Trustees at dinner, andthatwas such fun, so I kept on not going!), and I can’t be expected to fathom these matters. Anyhow, it is mixed up with the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, and the Effect of German Rationalism upon the Evangelical Faith. It is a reason full of capital letters and Orthodoxy,—and go he will. He won’t leave mother behind, for he is one of the men who believe in living with their wives; he’s just as dependent on his womenkind when he’s engaged in a theological row, as a boy who’s got hurt at football; and I’ve got to go to take care of the two of them. So there it is! I think there is a convention in Berlin—an Exegetical Something—anyhow, there’s a date, and live up to it we must. He has sublet the Flying Jib to the Prudential Committee of the A. B. C. F. M.—I mean to one of it, with six grandchildren. Think how they’ll punch their fists through our lace curtains! I wish you’d go down and tell Mr. Salt they shan’t have my dory. Couldn’t you manage to use it yourself? And I—I can’t take Joey Slip to the circus, nor sit down in sackcloth on the ashes of Christlove Chapel to help you.“Truly, dear friend, Imeantto help this summer. And I am disappointed, if you care to know it.“Yours faithfully,“Helen Carruth.“I forgot to say that father has doubled up his lectures, and the Trustees have given him the whole summer term. This, I believe, is in view of the importance of the quarrel over the Fourth Gospel. We sail in the Scythia a week from Saturday.”
“If I flatter myself in supposing that you might mind it a little, why, the mistake hurts nobody, neither you nor me; but the fact is we are not coming to Windover this summer. We sail for Europe next week.
“Father has decided quite suddenly, and there is nothing to be done but to go. It is something to do with Exegesis, if you please! There is a mistake in Exegesis, you know,—in the New Version. It seems to me a pretty Old Version by this time, but father has always been stirred up about it. He has been corresponding with a German Professor for a year or two on this burning subject. I have an inarticulate suspicion that, between them, they mean to write the New Testament over again. Could they do another Version? How many Versionscanbe versed?
“I never graduated, you know; I never even attended a Cesarea Anniversary in my life (andyou can’t think how it shocked the Trustees at dinner, andthatwas such fun, so I kept on not going!), and I can’t be expected to fathom these matters. Anyhow, it is mixed up with the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, and the Effect of German Rationalism upon the Evangelical Faith. It is a reason full of capital letters and Orthodoxy,—and go he will. He won’t leave mother behind, for he is one of the men who believe in living with their wives; he’s just as dependent on his womenkind when he’s engaged in a theological row, as a boy who’s got hurt at football; and I’ve got to go to take care of the two of them. So there it is! I think there is a convention in Berlin—an Exegetical Something—anyhow, there’s a date, and live up to it we must. He has sublet the Flying Jib to the Prudential Committee of the A. B. C. F. M.—I mean to one of it, with six grandchildren. Think how they’ll punch their fists through our lace curtains! I wish you’d go down and tell Mr. Salt they shan’t have my dory. Couldn’t you manage to use it yourself? And I—I can’t take Joey Slip to the circus, nor sit down in sackcloth on the ashes of Christlove Chapel to help you.
“Truly, dear friend, Imeantto help this summer. And I am disappointed, if you care to know it.
“Yours faithfully,
“Helen Carruth.
“I forgot to say that father has doubled up his lectures, and the Trustees have given him the whole summer term. This, I believe, is in view of the importance of the quarrel over the Fourth Gospel. We sail in the Scythia a week from Saturday.”
It was early afternoon of the next day, when Helen, standing in her window to draw the shades, glanced over automatically at the third-story northwest corner front of Galilee Hall. The room had long since been occupied by a middler with blue spectacles and a peaked beard; a long-legged fellow, who was understood to be a Hebrew scholar, and quite Old School, and was expected to fill a large parish without offending the senior deacon. Privately, Helen hated the middler. But the eye that had learned to wander at sunset across the Seminary “yard” to the window blazing in gold and glory, had slowly unlearned the lesson of its brief and pleasant habit. Even yet, on blue-white winter days, when life stood still to freeze on Cesarea Hill, Helen found herself drearily looking at the glittering glass—as one looks at the smile on a face from which the soul has fled.
It was still many hours to sunset, and the early April afternoon fell gustily and gray upon the snows of Cesarea. It was not a sunny day, and Cesarea was at her worst. Helen idly watched a figure splashing through two feet of slush “across lots” over the Seminary grounds from the Trustees’ Hotel.
“A post-graduate,” she thought, “back on a visit. Or, more likely, a minister without a pulpit, coming to Cesarea after a parish, or places to supply. Probably he has seven children and a mother-in-law to support. If he’s ‘sound’ he’ll come to Father—no—yes. Why,yes!”
She drew suddenly back from the window. It was Emanuel Bayard.
He waded through the slush as quickly as so tired a man could. He had walked from the station, saving his coach fare, and had made but feint of being a guest at the hotel, where he had not dined. He was not quite prepared to let Helen know that he had lunched on cold johnny-cake and dried beef, put up by Mrs. Granite in a red cotton doily, and tenderly pinned over by Jane with a safety-pin.
He lifted his eyes to the gloomy landscape for illumination, which it denied him. He knew no more than the snow professor what he should do, what he should say, no, nor why he had lapsed into this great weakness, and come to Cesarea at all. He felt as if he might make, indeed, a mortal mistake, one way or the other. He pleaded to himself that he must see her face once more, or perish. Nature was mightier than he, and drove him on, as it drives the strongest of us in those reactions from our strenuous vow and sternest purpose, for which we have lacked the simple foresight to provide in our plan of life.
There was a new snow professor, by the way,comfortably melting before the pump beside the Academy commons. He had been considered sounder than any of his predecessors, and had been supplied with a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which he perused with a corncob pipe between his lips of ice. A Westminster catechism ornamented his vest pocket. He was said to have slumped beautifully, when the thaw came.
Bayard shot a tolerant smile at the snow professor’s remains, as he came up the steps.
Helen herself answered his ring. Both of them found this so natural that neither commented upon this little act of friendliness.
The Professor was at his lecture; and Mrs. Carruth was making her final appearance at certain local Cesarea charities; principally, to-day, at the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with blankets and baby-clothes. Helen explained these facts with her usual irreverence, as she ushered her visitor into the parlor.
“If I had a fortune,” she observed, “I would found a society in Cesarea for making it a Penal Offence for a Married Man to Study for the Ministry without a Visible Income. The title is a little long, don’t you think? How could we shorten it? It’s worse than the Cruelty to Animals thing. Mr. Bayard?—why, Mr. Bayard!”
When she saw the expression of his face, her own changed with remorseful swiftness.
“You are perfectly right,” he said with sudden, smiting incisiveness.“You are more than right. It is the greatest act of folly of my life that I am here.”
He stood still, and looked at her. The despair she saw in his eyes seemed to her a measureless, bottomless thing.
“Ihadto come,” he said. “How could I let you go, without—youmustsee that I had to look upon your face once more. Forgive me—dear!”
Her chin trembled, at the lingering of that last, unlooked-for word.
“I have tried,” said Bayard slowly. “Youwon’t misunderstand me if I say I have tried to do the best I can, at Windover; and I have failed in it,” he added bitterly, “from every point of view, and in every way!”
“As much as that,” said Helen, “happened to the Founder of the Christian religion. You are presumptuous if you expect anything different.”
“You are right,” answered Bayard, with that instinctive humility which was at once the strongest and the sweetest thing about him. “I accept your rebuke.”
“Oh,” cried Helen, holding out her hands, “Icouldn’trebuke you! I”—she faltered.
“You see,” said Bayard slowly, “that’s just the difference, the awful, infinite difference. All His difficulties were from the outside.”
“How do you know that?” asked Helen quickly.
“I don’t,” replied Bayard thoughtfully.“I don’t know. But I have been accustomed to think so. Perhaps I am under the traditions yet; perhaps I am no nearer right than the other Christians I have separated myself from. But mine, you see—my obstacles, the things that make it so hard—the only thing that makes it seem impossible for me to go on—is within myself. You don’t suppose He ever loved a woman—as I—love you? It’s impossible!” cried the young man. “Why, there are times when it seems to me that if the salvation of the world hung in one scale, and you in the other—as if I—” He finished by a blinding look. Her face drooped, but did not fall. He could see her fingers tremble. “It was something,” he went on dully, “to see you; to know that I—why, all winter I have lived on it, on the knowledge that summer was coming—that you—Oh,youcan’t know!Youcan’t understand! I could bear all the rest!” he cried. “This—this—”
His sentence broke, and was never completed; for Helen looked up into his face. It was ashen, and all its muscles were set like stiffening clay. She lifted her eyes and gave them to him.
“I do understand.... Ido,” she breathed.“Would it make you any happier if you knew—if I should tell you—of course, I know what you said; that we can’t ... but would it be any easier if I should tell you that I have loved you all the time?”
To the end of her life Helen will see the look on Emanuel Bayard’s face when she had spoken these words.
With more of terror than delight, the woman’s nature sprang, for that instant, back upon itself. Would she have recalled what she had said? It is possible; for now she understood how he loved her, and perceived that she had never understood what a man’s love is.
Yet, when he spoke, it was with that absence of drama, with that repression amounting almost to commonplace, which characterize the intensest crises of experience.
“Doyou?” he said. “Haveyou?”
And at first that was all. But his voice shook, and his hand; and his face went so white that he seemed like a man smitten rather by death than by love.
Helen, in a pang of maiden fright, had moved away from him, and retreated to the sofa; he sank beside her silently. Leaning forward a little, he covered his eyes with one hand. The other rested on the cushion within an inch of her purple dress; he did not touch her; he did not touch it. Helen felt sorry, seeing him so troubled and wrung; her heart went out in a throb of that maternal compassionwhich is never absent from the love of any woman for any man.
“Oh,” she sighed, “I meant to make you happy, to give you comfort! And now I have made you unhappy!”
“You have made me the happiest of all miserable men!”
He raised his head, and looked at her till hers was the face to fall.
“Oh, don’t!” she pleaded. “Not likethat!”
But he paid no heed to this entreaty. The soul of the saint and the heart of the man made duel together; and the man won, and exulted in it, and wondered how he dared; but his gaze devoured her willfully. The first embrace of the eyes—more delicate, more deferent, and at once less guarded than the meeting of hands or clasp of arms—he gave her, and did not restrain it. Before it, Helen felt more helpless than if he had touched her. She seemed to herself to be annihilated in his love.
“Happy?” he said exultingly, “you deify me! You have made a god of me!”
“No,” she shook her head with a little teasing smile, “I have made a man of you.”
“Then they are one thing and the same!” cried the lover. “Let me hear you say it. Tell it to me again!”
She was silent, and she crimsoned to the brows.
“You are not sure!” he accused her.“You want to take it back. It was a madness, an impulse. You don’t mean it. You do not, you have not loved me.... Howcouldyou?” he added humbly. “You know I never counted on it, never expected, did not trust myself to think of it—all this while.”
She lifted her head proudly.
“I have nothing to take back. It was not an impulse. I am not that kind of woman. I have been meaning to tell you—when you gave me the chance. I love you. I have loved you ever since—”
She stopped.
“Since when? How long have you loved me? Come! Speak! Iwillknow!” commanded Bayard deliriously.
“Oh, what is going to be gained if I tell you?” Helen gave him a prisoner’s look. She turned her head from side to side rebelliously, as if she had flown into a cage whose door was now unexpectedly shut.
“I meant to make you happy. All I say seems to make everything worse. I shall tell you nothing more.”
“You will tell me,” he said in a tone of calm authority, “all I ask. It is my affair whether I am happy or wretched. Yours is to obey my wish: because you love me, Helen.”
His imperious voice fell to a depth of tenderness in which her soul and body seemed to sink and drown.
“I have loved you,” she whispered,“ever since that night,—the first time I saw you here, in my father’s house.”
“Now, sir!” she added, with her sudden, pretty willfulness, “make the most of it. I’m not ashamed of it, either. But I shall be ashamed ofyouif—this—if after I’ve said itall, it doesn’t make you happy.... That’s all I care for,” she said quietly. “It is all I care for in this world.”
“Oh, what shall we do?” pleaded Bayard.
“You have your work,” said Helen dreamily, “and I your love.”
Her voice sank to a whisper.
“Is that enough for you?” demanded the man. “I shall perish of it, I shall perish!”
Something in his tone and expression caused Helen to regard him keenly. He looked so wasted, so haggard, that her heart stood still, and said to her,—“This is truer than he knows.”
“No,” she answered with a sweet, womanly composure, “it is not enough for me.”
“And yet,” he said with the brutality of the tormented, “I cannot, I must not, ask you to be my”—
She put the tips of her fingers to his lips to check the word. He seized her hand and held it there; then, for he came to himself, he relinquished it, and laid it down.
“Dear,” said Helen, “I shouldn’t mind it ... to be poor. I want you to understand—to know how it is. I have never felt ... any other way. It shall be just as you say,” she added with a gentleness which gave a beautiful dignity to herwords. “We need not ... do it, because I say this. But I wanted you to know—that I was notafraidof a hard life with you.”
“Oh, you cannot understand,” he groaned. “It is no picturesque poverty you would have to meet. It would mean cold, hunger, misery you’ve never thought of, cruel suffering—for you. It would mean all that a man has no right to ask a woman to endure for him,becausehe loves her ... as I love you.”
“I could starve,” said Helen.
“God help us!” cried the man. Nothing else came to his dry lips.
Then Helen answered him in these strong and quiet words: “I told you I would trust you, and I shall do it to the end. When you are ready for me, I shall come. I am not afraid—of anything, except that you should suffer and that I could not comfort you. If you never see the way to think it right ... I can wait. I love you; and I am yours to take or leave.”
“This,” whispered Bayard reverently, for he could have knelt before her, “is a woman’s love! I am unworthy of it—and of you.”
“Oh, there is the other kind of woman,” said Helen, trying rather unsuccessfully to smile. “This is onlymyway of loving. I am not ashamed of it.”
“Ashamed of it? It honors you! It glorifies you!”
He held out his arms; but she did not swervetowards them; they dropped. She seemed to him encompassed in a shining cloud, in which her own celestial tenderness and candor had wrapped and protected her.
“Love me!” he pleaded. “Love me, trust me, till we can think. I must do right byyou, whatever it means tome.”
“We love each other,” repeated Helen, holding out her hands, “and I trust you. Let us live on that a little while, till we—till you”—
But she faltered, and her courage forsook her when she looked up into his face. All the anguish of the man that the woman cannot share, and may not understand, started out in visible lines and signs upon his features; all the solemn responsibility for her, for himself, and for the unknown consequences of their sacred passion; the solitary burden, which it is his to wear in the name of love, and which presses hardest upon him whose spirit is higher and stronger than mere human joy.
But at this moment a sound was heard upon the stone steps of the Queen Anne house. It was the footfall of the Professor himself, returning from his closing lecture of the series on Eschatology. Mrs. Carruth pattered behind him with short, stout steps. She had wound the affairs of the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with Blankets, to a condition in which they could run along without her till the exegetical trip to the German Professor’s in Berlin should be over, and the slush of Cesarea should know her again.
The summer slid, Bayard knew not how. They separated as so many confused lovers do in the complicated situations of our later life; wherein we love no longer in the old, outright, downright way, when men and women took each other for better, for worse, and dared to run the risk of loving, without feeling responsible for the consequences. We are past all that; and whether it is the worse or the better for us, who shall say?
At least, these two had the healthy ring to their love; in that great and simple feeling was no delinquency or default. Bayard did not hesitate or quibble—one day a lover, the next a prudential committee, after the fashion of such feeble mathematicians as go by the name of men, to-day. He was incapable of calculating his high passion; there was no room in his soul or body for a doubt to take on lease of life. He loved her; as the greatest of women might be proud and humble to be loved; as the smallest would be vain to be.
He loved her too much to make her miserable; and he knew, with that dreary, practical perception of the truth sometimes but rarely granted to men of the seer’s temperament, that he could not make her happy. Between love and joy a dead wall shut down; it seemed to him to reach from thehighest heavens to the waters under the earth. What elemental chaos could rend it? What miracle was foreordained to shatter it? Would the busy finger of God stretch out to touch it?
“God knows,” he wrote her. “And He purposes, I am fain to believe, if He purposes anything we do or suffer. The hour may come, and the waymightclear. More incredible things have happened to men and women loving less than we. If I can, I claim you when I can. Oh, wait for me, and trust me! Life is so short; it is not easy. Sometimes madness enters into me, to fling all these cold, these cruel considerations, these things we call honor, unselfishness, chivalry, to the gales.... Then I come to myself. I will not wrong you. Help me to bear to live without you till I see your face again.”
Helen wrote him noble letters; brave, womanly, and as trustful as the swing of the earth in its orbit. It is not too much to say that few women in her place would have shown the strong composure of this ardent girl. The relation between acknowledged lovers unbetrothed is one whose difficulty only an inspired delicacy can control. Helen’s clear eyes held no shadows. The dark wing of regret for a moment’s weakness never brushed between her heart and this Sir Galahad who loved her like man and spirit too. Few women reared as she had been would have trusted the man as she did; we may add that fewer men would have deserved it.
Emanuel Bayard did. Her heart knew him for one of the sons of light, who will not, because he cannot, cause the woman whom he loves an hour’s regret that she has believed in him utterly and told him so. Now, the value of a woman’s intuition in most of the problems or relations of life cannot be overestimated; when she loves, it is the least reliable of her attributes or qualities. Helen in her composed way recognized this fact perfectly, but it gave her no uneasiness.
“My own perception might fail me,” she wrote. “You could not. It is not my own sense of what is best to do that I am trusting, in this: it is you.”
When he read these words, he put the paper to his lips, and laid his face upon it, and covered it from the sight even of his own eyes.
The date of Professor Carruth’s return was set for early October. In September Bayard received from Helen the news that her mother had met with an accident—a fall; an arm was broken, and, at the age of the patient, the surgeon forbade the voyage. The Professor would get back to his lecture-room, as he must. The two ladies were indefinitely delayed in Berlin.
The winter proved a bleak one, and went with Bayard as was to be expected. The devotee had yet to learn how a woman’s absence may work upon a lover; but of this, since he had no right to do so, he did not complain. Headlong, fathomsdown into his work he leaped, and with the diver’s calm he did the diver’s duty. The new chapel progressed after the manner of its kind. Bayard had peremptorily insisted upon the severest economy of plan, demanding a building which should be a “shelter for worship,” he said, and nothing more. Not a waste dollar went into architecture. Not a shingle went into debt. No mortgage desecrated the pulpit of Christlove Church. He built what he could pay for, and nothing more. The dedication of the building was expected to take place in the spring.
Meanwhile, his audiences grew upon his hands; and Windover First Church looked darkly at Windover town hall. Orthodoxy, decorum, property, position, gazed at gaping pews, and regretted that “these temperance movements estranged themselves from the churches.”
Obscurity, poverty, religious doubt, sin and shame and repentance jammed the aisles to hear “the Christman” interpret decency and dignity and the beauty of holiness. He spoke to these, not with the manner of preachers, but with the lips and heart of a man. Week after week strange, unkempt, unlettered seamen poured in; they stood sluggishly, like forming lava, to listen to him. Certain of his audiences would have honored Whitefield or Robertson. Bayard’s soul seemed that winter alight with a sacred conflagration. He prayed and wrought for Windover as a tongue of flame goes up to the sky—because itwas the law of life and fire. It is pathetic to think, now, how it would have comforted the man if he had known how much they loved him—these undemonstrative people of the sea, for whom he gave himself. The half of it was never told him. Censure, and scorn, and scandal, and the fighting of foes in the dark, he knew. The real capacity for affection and loyalty which existed in the rough, warm heart of Windover he sometimes thought he understood. He did not see—as we see now—that he had won this allegiance.
This was the more obscure to him because the tension between himself and the liquor interests of Windover was growing quietly into a serious thing, and heavily occupied his attention. And here we know that he was seldom deceived or blinded.
His methods were deliberate, his moves were intelligent, he ran no stupid risks, he measured his dangers, he took them in the name of good citizenship and good Christianity, and strode on to their consequences with that martial step characteristic of him. Of this chapter of the winter’s story, he wrote little or nothing to Helen. She heard how the chapel grew, how the library gathered, and the smoking-room was fitted; about the hope of a gymnasium, the vision of a bowling-alley, the schedule for lectures and entertainments; all his dreams and schemes to give homeless and tempted men shelter and happiness under the rising roof of Christlove;—all the little pleasures andhopes of the missionary life she shared, as Helen had it in her to share the serious energy of a man’s life. Upon the subject of the dangers he was silent. The extent to which these existed she could not measure; for Helen belonged to those social and religious circles into whose experience the facts in the remote lives of that worthy class of people known as temperance agitators do not enter. She had no traditions to enlighten her, and her own joyous nature vaguely filled in the darker outlines of her lover’s life. How should the summer girl understand the winter Windover? She thought of Bayard’s real situation with little more vividness than if he had been a missionary in Darkest Africa. Pleasant sketches of Job Slip and Joey, little reminiscences of Captain Hap, and Lena, pretty, womanly plans for replacing the burned furniture and decorations flitted across the leisurely continental tour by which she escorted her mother homewards. Mrs. Carruth was now quite recovered, but had developed the theory that the dangers of a midwinter voyage were lessened by every week’s delay. As a result, the two ladies engaged passage in February, at the height of the gales.
It was a bitter winter. Two hundred Windover fishermen were drowned; and poverty of the dreariest kind sat sullenly in the tragic town. Bayard worked till he staggered for the women and children whom the sea bereft. Afterwards a cry went up out of scores of desolated homeswhich told what the man had been and done in Windover, when the gales went down.
One night, a short time before Helen was to sail, there happened to Bayard one of those little mysteries which approach us so much oftener than we recognize them, that we have never properly classified them; and may be long yet in doing so.
He had been in his own rooms since noon; for there was a heavy snowstorm on, and he was conscious of obvious physical inability to brave the weather unless the call of duty should be louder than a certain oppression on his lungs, which he had been forced of late to recognize more often than usual. It was a gray day at Mrs. Granite’s. Jane was sad, and coughed. Her mother had cried a good deal of late, and said that “Jane was goin’ off like her Aunt Annie before her.”
Ben Trawl came sullenly and seldom, now, to see the reluctant girl.
Mrs. Granite thought if Jane could go to her Aunt Annie’s second cousin Jenny in South Carolina, for a spell, she would be cured; but Mrs. Granite said climate was only meant for rich folks; she said you lived and died here in Windover, if your lungs was anyways delicate, like frozen herring packed into a box. She was almost epigrammatic—for Mrs. Granite.
Bayard had been sitting in his study-chair, writing steadily, while his mind, with his too sensitive sympathy, followed the fortunes of these poor women who made him all the home he knew. Itwas towards six o’clock, and darkening fast. The noise on the beach opposite the cottage was heavy; and the breakers off Ragged Rock boomed mightily.
Snow was falling so thickly that he could not see the water. The fog-bell was tolling, and yells of agony came from the whistling-buoy. It was one of the days when a man delicately reared winces with a soreness impossible to be understood unless experienced, from life in a place and in a position like his; when the uncertain value of the ends of sacrifice presents itself to the mind like the spatter from a stream of vitriol; when the question, Is what I achieve worth its cost? burns in upon the bravest soul, and gets no answer for its scorching.
Bayard laid down his pen and paper, and looked patiently out of the window; putting his empty hand in his pocket as he did so.
His eyes gazed into the curtain of the whirling snow. He wondered how far out to sea it extended; how many miles of it dashed between himself and Helen. It was one of the hours when she seemed to fill the world.
The snowflakes took on fantastic shapes—so! That was the way she held out her white hands. The soft trailing of her gown sounded in the room. If he turned his head, should he see her standing, a vision in purple and gold, smiling, warm, and sweet? It would be such a disappointment not to find her! Rather believe that he should, if he would, and so not stir.
Suddenly his hand in his own pocket struck an object whose character he did not at the moment recall. He drew it out and looked at it. It was the key of his old home in Beacon Street.
For three years, perhaps, he had not thought of his uncle’s words: “Keep your latch-key. You will want to use it, some day.”
Bayard regarded the latch-key steadily. The senseless thing burned his palm as if it were trying to articulate.
He never sought to explain to himself, and I see no reason why we should explain for him, the subtile meaning which went from the metal to the man.
The key said, “Go!”
And Bayard went. He made such efforts as all cool-headed people make, to buffet the inexplicable, and to resist an unreasonable impression. But, after an hour’s protest with himself, he yielded to the invisible summons.
“It is a long while since I have seen my uncle,” he reasoned. “This may be as good a time as any other to look him up.”
He dressed for the storm, and took the nine o’clock train to Boston.
It was blowing a blizzard when he arrived in town; and eleven o’clock. He took a carriage and drove to his uncle’s house. The lights were out on the front of the house, and the servants asleep. Bayard stood a moment irresolute. The folly of his undertaking presented itself to him with emphasis,now he was there. He could not tell when he had yielded to any of that class of highly wrought emotions which we call presentiments, or “leadings.” Impatient with himself, and suddenly vividly aware that Mr. Hermon Worcester was a man who particularly objected to being disturbed in his sleep, Bayard was about to call the cab back to take him away, when he perceived that the driver had started off, and was laboring heavily up Beacon Street, with the snow to the hubs of the wheels. (Who has ever fathomed the inscrutable mind of the Boston cabman who has to be snowed under, before he will get on runners?) Resisting no longer, Bayard softly put his key in the lock.
It creaked a little, for it had grown rusty in the Windover salts, but the boy’s key turned in the man’s hand, and admitted him loyally into his old home.
The hall was dark, and the house still. He brushed off the snow in silence, and stood wondering what to do next. He felt mortified at his own lack of good sense.
Why was he here? And what reason could he give for this stupendous foolishness? He dripped on the Persian rugs awhile, and, finding neither enlightenment nor consolation in this moist occupation, proceeded to take off his overcoat and hang it on his own nail on the mahogany hat-tree under the stairs. When had such a shabby overcoat put that venerable piece of furniture to the blush?Never, if one excepted the case of the Vermont clergyman who had been known to take a lunch with his benefactor, and who received a barrel of old clothes the following week. Bayard hung up his wet hat, too, in the old place, took off his shoes, and crept upstairs in his stockings, as he had done—how many hundred nights, coming home from Cambridge, late, in college days?
His uncle’s door was closed, but to his surprise, he found the door of his own room open. He crept in. It seemed warm and pleasant—how incredibly pleasant and natural! The register seemed to be open. Oh, the luxury of a furnace! The wet and tired man crawled up, feeling his way in the familiar dark, and got down by the register. He remembered where the safety-matches used to be, that struck, and made no sound. Groping, he found them, in their paper match-box, set within the old bronze one. He struck one, softly, and looked about. In the little flare he saw that the room was just as it had always been. Nothing was changed or disturbed, except that his books had gone to Mrs. Granite’s. His bed lay turned back, open for the night, as it always was; the big, soft pillow, the luxurious mattresses, the light warmth of the snowy blankets, invited him. His mother’s picture hung over the head of his bed. Those old pipes and silk menus and college traps and trifles were crossed on the wall by the bureau; his gun was there, and his fishing-rods.
Bayard was about to yield to his weariness, andcrawl into his own bed, thinking to see his uncle in the morning, as a sane man should, when his attention was attracted by a slight sound in Mr. Worcester’s room, and something about it struck the young man unpleasantly.
Without noise he opened the door of the bath-room intervening between his own and his uncle’s apartments. Then he perceived a crack of light at the threshold of Mr. Worcester’s closed door.
As he stood uncertain, and troubled, the sound which he had heard was repeated. It seemed to resemble the effort of difficult breathing, and was accompanied by a slight groan.
Then a thick voice called,—
“Partredge?”
“Partredge always did sleep like the dead,” thought Bayard. “I hope he doesn’t neglect my uncle, now he is growing old.”
“Nancy?” summoned the voice again.
Nancy always woke easily and good-naturedly. But Nancy heard nothing now. Bayard, afraid to shock the old man by so astounding an appearance, was moving quickly and quietly to find the servants, when something caused him to change his purpose. Apparently, Mr. Worcester had tried to reach the bell—it was one of the old-fashioned kind, with a long, embroidered bell-handle—he had partly crossed the room, when Bayard intercepted the fall, and caught him.
The gas was lighted, and recognition was instant. Without shock, it seemed without surprise, HermonWorcester lay back in the young man’s arms, and smiled pleasantly into his face.
“Ithoughtyou would use the latch-key—some night,” he said with difficulty. “You’ve chosen the right one, Manuel. The servants did not hear—and—I’m afraid I’m not—quite—well, my boy.”
After this, he said nothing; but lingered for three days, without evident suffering, and with evident content, making signs that Manuel should not leave him; which he did not, to the end.
Hermon Worcester passed on serenely, in the Faith, and the prominence and usefulness thereof; though the last prayer that he heard on earth came from the lips of the affectionate heretic in whose arms he died.
Bayard had been so long out of the world and the ways of it, that it did not occur to him, till he received the summons of the family lawyer, that he would be required to be present at the reading of his uncle’s will.
“As the nearest of kin, my dear sir,” suggested the attorney, “the occasion will immediately concern you, doubtless.”
Bayard bowed, in silence. He did not think it necessary to explain to the attorney that he had been, for a long time, aware of the fact of his disinheritance.
“Possibly Uncle may have left me his library,” he thought, “or the furniture of my old room.”
He had, indeed, received the library. The restof Hermon Worcester’s fortune, barring the usual souvenirs to relatives, had been divided between Mr. Worcester’s favorite home missionary associations and Cesarea Seminary, of which he had been, for thirty years, trustee.
The house on Beacon Street, with its contents, went unreservedly, “and affectionately,” the testator had expressed it, to his nephew, Emanuel Bayard.
“I think,” observed the lawyer at the first decent opportunity, “that Mr. Worcester intended, or—hoped that you might make your plans of life in accordance with such circumstances as would enable you to keep, and to keep up, the homestead.”
“But of course,” added the attorney, shrewdly reading Bayard’s silent face, “that might be—as you say—impossible.”
“I said nothing,” replied Bayard in a low voice.
“The place is yours, without conditions,” pursued the lawyer, with polite indifference. “It can be sold, or converted into income—rented, if you please, if ever unfortunately necessary. It would seem a pity. It would bring so little. But still, it could, of course, be done.”
“What do you call a little?” asked Bayard.
“Oh, enough for a small fresh-water Professor or retail grocer to get along on, if he knew how,” replied the Back Bay lawyer carelessly.
He mentioned the figures.
The house was old, and in need of repair; the furnitureout of date, and worn. The probable values were not large, as the attorney said. To the pastor from Angel Alley their possession seemed to represent the shock of nature involved in a miracle.