Helen was to sail for Boston the following Saturday. It lacked three days of that date. It being out of the question to reach her, now, by letter, Bayard cabled to her:—
Will meet you arrival steamer. Future clear before me. I await you.E. B.
Will meet you arrival steamer. Future clear before me. I await you.
E. B.
To this impulsive message he found himself expecting a reply. The wan missionary had burst into a boyish and eager lover. Oh, that conscientious, cruel past! He dashed it from him. He plunged into the freedom of his heart. In honor—in his delicate honor—he could win her, now.
Helen did not answer the cable message. A hundred hindrances might have prevented her; yet he had believed she would. He thought of her ardent, womanly candor, her beautiful courage, her noble trust. It did not occur to him that a woman has two natures, this for the unfortunate and that for the fortunate lover. One he had tasted; the other he had yet to know.
He vibrated restlessly to and fro between Windover and Boston, where his presence was urgently required in the settlement of his uncle’s affairs. A snowstorm set in, and increased to a gale. Tendays passed, somehow. The steamer was due in twenty-four hours. She did not arrive.
Bayard had lived in Windover long enough to acquire the intelligent fear of the sea which characterizes the coast; and when the next day went, and another, and the boat was admitted at headquarters to be three days overdue, he suffered the unspeakable. It had been nothing less than a terrible midwinter gale. Wrecks lined the coast; glasses scoured it; watchers thronged it; friends besieged the offices of the steamship company. The great line which boasted that it had never lost a life held its stanchest steamer three days—four days overdue.
It was like him that he did not overlook his duty in his trouble, but stood to his post, and remembered the little service appointed for that most miserable evening when he was expected to be with his people. Those who were present that night say that the scene was one impossible to forget. Looking more like death than life, the preacher prayed before them “to the God of the sea.”
Now, for the first time, he felt that he knew what Windover could suffer. Now the torment of women all their lives watching for returning sails entered into his soul; those aged men looking for the sons who never came back; the blurred eyes peering off Windover Point to see the half-mast flag on the schooner as she tacked up the bay; the white lips that did not ask, when the boat came to anchor,“Which is it?” because they dared not—all this, now, he understood.
His personal anguish melted into the great sum of misery in the seaport town.
“If she comes back to me,” he thought, “how I shall work for them—my poor people!”
Now, for the first time, this devout, unselfish man understood that something else than consecration is needed to do the best and greatest thing by the human want or woe that leans upon us. Now that he took hold on human experience, he saw that he had everything to learn from it. The knowledge of a great love, the lesson of the common tie that binds the race together—these taught him, and he was their docile scholar.
Five days overdue!... Six days. Bayard had gone back to Boston, to haunt the offices and the docks. Old friends met him among the white-lipped watchers, and a classmate said:—
“Thank God, Bayard,youhaven’t wife and child aboard her.”
He added:—
“Man alive! You look like the five days dead!”
Suddenly, the stir ran along the crowd, and a whisper said:—
“They’ve sighted her!... She’s in!”
Then came the hurrah. Shouts of joy reëchoed about him. But Bayard’s head fell upon his breast in silence. At that moment he was touched upon the arm by a beautiful Charter Oak cane, and,looking up, he saw the haggard face of the Professor of Theology.
“I was belated,” thickly articulated the Professor with dry lips. “I came straight from the lecture-room. It is the course on the ‘Nature of Eternal Punishment,’—a most important course. I felt it my duty to be at my desk. But—Bayard, I think I shall substitute to-morrow my lecture (perhaps you may recall it) on the ‘Benevolence and Beneficence of God.’”
The two men leaped into the tug together, and ploughed out to the steamer.
Helen was forward, leaning on the rail. Her thick steamer-dress blew like muslin in the heavy wind. Her eyes met Bayard’s first—yes, first. Her father came in second, but his were too dim to know it.
“Mother is in the cabin, dear Papa!” cried Helen; “we have to keep her warm and still, you know.”
His daughter’s precious kiss invited him, but the old man put Helen gently aside, and dashed after his old wife.
For that moment Helen and Bayard stood together. Before all the world he would have taken her in his arms, but she retreated a little step.
“Did you get my message?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Did you answer it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought it would do just as well when I got here.”
“And you might have been—you might never have got here at all!” cried Bayard fiercely.
“Have you been anxious?” asked Helen demurely.
He did not think it was in her to coquette with a man in a moment like that, and he made her no reply. Then Helen looked full in his face, and saw the havoc on it.
“Oh, you poor boy!” she whispered; “you poor, poor boy!”
This was in the afternoon; and he was compelled to see her carried off to Cesarea on her father’s arm, without him. There was no help for it; and he waited till the next day, unreconciled and nervous in the extreme. He had been so overworn and overwrought, that his mind took on feverish fancies.
“Something may happen by to-morrow,” he thought, “and I shall have never—once”—
He rebuked even his own thought, even then, for daring to dream of the touch of her lips. But the dream rode over his delicacy, and rushed on.
At an early hour the next day he went to Cesarea, and sought her in her father’s house. It was a cold, dry, bright day. Cesarea shivered under her ermine. The Professor’s house was warm with the luxurious, even warmth of the latest modern heater, envied by the rest of theFaculty, in the old-fashioned, draughty houses of the Professors’ Row. Flowers in the little window conservatory of the drawing-room breathed the soft air easily, and were of rich growth and color. Helen was watering the flowers. She colored when she saw him, and put down the silver pitcher which she had abstracted from the breakfast-room for the purpose of encouraging her lemon verbena, that had, plainly, missed her while she was abroad. She wore a purple morning-gown with plush upon it. She had a royal look.
“How early you have come!” she said half complainingly.
He paid no attention to her tone, but deliberately shut the door, and advanced towards her.
“I have come,” he said, “tostay; that is—if you will let me, Helen.”
“Apparently,” answered Helen, taking up the pitcher, “I am not allowed a choice in the matter.”
But he saw that the silver pitcher shook in her hand.
“No,” he said firmly, “I do not mean to give you any choice. I mean to take you. I do not mean to wait one hour more.”
He held out his arms, but suspended them, not touching her. The very air which he imprisoned around her seemed to clasp her. She trembled in that intangible embrace.
“It will be a poor man’s home, Helen—but you will not suffer. I can give you common comforts. I cabled to you the very hour that I knew.... Oh, I have trusted your trust!” he said.
“And youmaytrust it,” whispered Helen, suddenly lifting her eyes.
His, it seemed to her, were far above her—how blinding beautiful joy made them!
Then his starved arms closed about her, and his lips found hers.
The Professor of Theology sat in his study. The winter sun struck his loaded shelves; the backs of his books inspected him tenderly. At the western window, on the lady’s desk which was reserved for Mrs. Carruth, her sewing-basket stood. The Professor glanced at it contentedly. He had never been separated from his wife so long before, and they had been married thirty-five years. She had unpacked that basket and taken it into the study that morning, with a girlish eagerness to sit down and darn a stocking while the Professor wrote.
“This is a great gratification, Statira,” he had said.
Mrs. Carruth had gone out, now, to engage in the familiar delights of a morning contest with the Cesarea butcher, and the Professor was alone when Emanuel Bayard sturdily knocked at the study door.
The Professor welcomed the young man with some surprise, but no uncertain warmth. He expressed himself as grateful for the prompt attention of his former pupil, on the joyful occasion of this family reunion.
“And it was kind of you, Bayard, too—meeting the ladies on that tug. I was most agreeably surprised. I was wishing yesterday—in fact, it occurred to me what a comfort some young fellow would have been whom I could have sent down, all those anxious days. But we never had a son. Pray sit down, Mr. Bayard.... I am just reading the opinions of Olshausen on a most interesting point. I have collected valuable material in Berlin. I shall be glad to talk it over with you. I found Professor Kammelschkreiter a truly scholarly man. His views on the errors in the Revised Version are the most instructed of any I have met.”
“Professor,” said Bayard stoutly, “will you pardon me if I interrupt you for a minute? I have come on a most important matter. I am sorry to seem uncivil, but the fact is I—I cannot wait another moment, sir.... Sir, I have the honor to tell you that your daughter has consented to become my wife.”
At this truly American declaration, the Professor of Theology laid down his copy of Olshausen, and stared at the heretic missionary.
“Mydaughter!” he gasped, “yourwife?—I beg your pardon,” he added, when he saw the expression of Bayard’s face. “But you have taken me altogether by surprise. I may say that such a possibility has never—no, never once so much as occurred to me.”
“I have loved her,” said Bayard tenaciously,“for three years. I have never been able to ask her to marry me till now. I think perhaps my uncle meant to make it possible for me to do so, but I do not know. I am still a poor man, sir, but I can keep her from suffering. She does me the undeserved honor to love me, and she asked me to tell you so.”
The Professor had risen and was pacing the study hotly. His face was rigid. He waved his thin, long fingers impatiently at Bayard’s words.
“Scholars do not dwell upon paltry, pecuniary facts like parents in lower circles of society!” cried the Professor with superbly unconscious hauteur. “There would have lacked nothing to my daughter’s comfort, sir, in any event—if the right man had wooed her. I was not the father to refuse him mere pecuniary aid to Helen’s happiness.”
“And I was not the lover to ask for it,” observed Bayard proudly.
“Hum—m—m,” said the Professor. He stopped his walk across the study floor, and looked at Bayard with troubled respect.
“I will not take her from you at once,” urged Bayard gently; “we will wait till fall—if I can. She has said that she will become my wife, then.”
His voice sank. He spoke the last words with a delicate reverence which would have touched a ruder father than the Professor of Theology.
“Bayard,” he said brokenly,“you always were my favorite student. I couldn’t help it. I always felt a certain tenderness for you. I respect your intellectual traits, and your spiritual quality. Poverty, sir? What ispoverty? But, Bayard,you are not sound!”
Against this awful accusation Bayard had no reply; and the old Professor turned about ponderously, like a man whose body refused to obey the orders of his shocked and stricken mind.
“How can I see my daughter,mydaughter, the wife of a man whom the Ancient Faith has cast out?” he pleaded piteously.
He lifted his shrunken hands, as if he reasoned before an invisible tribunal. His attitude and expression were so solemn that Bayard felt it impossible to interrupt the movement by any mere lover’s plea. Perhaps, for the first time, he understood then what it meant to the old man to defend the beliefs that had ruled the world of his youth and vigor; he perceived that they, too, suffered who seemed to be the inflicters of suffering; that they, too, had their Calvary—these determined souls who doggedly died by the cross of the old Faith in whose shelter their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had lived and prayed, had battled and triumphed. Bayard felt that his own experience at that moment was an intrusion upon the sanctuary of a sacred struggle. He bowed his head before his Professor, and left the study in silence.
But Helen, who had the small reverence for the theologic drama characteristic of those who have been reared upon its stage, put her beautiful arms around his neck and, laughing, whispered:—
“Leave the whole system of Old School Orthodoxy to me! I can manage!”
“You may manage him,” smiled Bayard, “but can you manageit?”
“Wait a day, and see!” said Helen.
He would have waited a thousand for the kiss with which she lifted up the words.
The next day she wrote him, at Windover, where he was dutifully trying to preach as if nothing had happened:—
“Papa says I have never been quite sound myself, and that he supposes I will do as I please, as I always have.”
There followed a little love-letter, so deliciously womanly and tender, that Bayard did not for hours open the remainder of his mail. When he did so, he read what the Professor of Theology had written, after a night of prayer and vigil such as only aged parents know.
“My dear Bayard,” the letter said,—“Take her if you must, and God be with you both! I cannot find it in my heart to impose the shadow of my religious convictions upon the happiness of my child. I can battle for the Truth with men and with demons. I cannot fight with the appeal of a woman’s love. I would give my life to make Helen happy, and to keep her so. Do you as much!Yours sincerely,“Haggai Carruth.“P. S.—We will resume our discussion on the views of Professor Kammelschkreiter at some more convenient season.”
“My dear Bayard,” the letter said,—“Take her if you must, and God be with you both! I cannot find it in my heart to impose the shadow of my religious convictions upon the happiness of my child. I can battle for the Truth with men and with demons. I cannot fight with the appeal of a woman’s love. I would give my life to make Helen happy, and to keep her so. Do you as much!
Yours sincerely,
“Haggai Carruth.
“P. S.—We will resume our discussion on the views of Professor Kammelschkreiter at some more convenient season.”
Early June came to Windover joyously that year. May had been a gentle month, warmer than its wont, and the season was in advance of its schedule.
Mrs. Carruth, found paling a little, and thought to be less strong since her accident abroad, had been ordered to the seaside some three or four weeks before the usual flitting of the family. Helen accompanied her; the Professor ran down as often as he might, till Anniversary Week should set him free to move his ponderously increasing manuscript on the “Errors in the Revised Version” from Cesarea to the clam study. The long lace curtains blew in and out of the windows of the Flying Jib; Helen’s dory glittered in two coats of fresh pale-yellow paint upon the float; and Helen, in pretty summer gowns of corn color, or violet, or white, listened on the piazza for the foot-ring of her lover. She was lovely that spring, with the loveliness of youth and joy. Bayard watched her through a mist of that wonder and that worship which mark the highest altitudes of energy in a man’s life. It was said that he had never wrought for Windover, in all his lonely time of service there, as he did in those few glorified weeks.
It is pleasant to think that the man had this draught of human rapture; that he tasted the brim of such joy as only the high soul in the ardent nature knows.
Helen offered him her tenderness with a sweet reserve, alternating between compassion for what he had suffered, and moods of pretty, coquettish economy of his present privilege, that taunted and enraptured him by turns. He floated on clouds; he trod on the summer air.
Their marriage was appointed for September: it was Helen’s wish to wait till then; and he submitted with such gentleness as it wrung her heart, afterwards, to remember.
“We will have one perfectly happy summer,” she pleaded. “People can be lovers but once.”
“And newly wed but once,” he answered gravely.
“Dear,” said Helen, with troubled eyes, “it shall be as you say.Youshall decide.”
“God will decide it,” replied the lover unexpectedly.
His eyes had a look which Helen could not follow. She felt shut out from it; and both were silent.
Her little dreams and plans occupied hours of their time together. She was full of schemes for household comfort and economy, for serving his people, for blessing Windover. She talked of what could be done for Job Slip and Mari, Joey, Lena, Captain Hap and Johnny’s mother, Mrs. Granite and poor Jane. Her mind dweltmuch upon all these children of the sea who had grown into his heart. “Jane,” she said, “should have her winter in the South.” She spoke of Jane with a reticent but special gentleness. They would rent the cottage; they would furnish the old dreary rooms.
Helen did not come to her poor man quite empty-handed. The Professor had too much of the pride of total depravity left in him for that.
“I shall be able to buy my own gowns, sir, if you please!” she announced prettily. “And I am going to send Mrs. Granite—with Jane—to her aunt Annie’s cousin Jenny’s (was that it?) in South Carolina, next winter, to get over that Windover cough. We’ve got to go ourselves, ifyoudon’t stop coughing. No? We’ll see!”
“Ishallstop coughing,” cried Bayard joyously.
She did not contradict him, for she believed in Love the Healer, as the young and the beloved do. So she went dreaming on.
“I came across a piece of gold tissue in Florence; it will make such a pretty portière in place of that old mosquito-net! And we’ll make those dismal old rooms over into”—
And Bayard, who had thought never to know Paradise on earth, but only to toil for Heaven, closed her sentence by one ecstatic word.
The completion of the chapel, still delayed after the fashion of contractors, was approaching the belated dedication day of which all Windover talked, and for which a growing portion of Windoverinterested itself. Bayard was over-busy for a newly betrothed man. His hours with Helen were shortened; his brief snatches of delight marked spaces between days of care. Erected upon the site of the burned building, the new chapel rose sturdily in the thick and black of Angel Alley. The old, illuminated, swinging sign remained,—“for luck,” the fishermen said. It was to be lighted on the day when the first service should be held in the new Christlove.
There came a long, light evening, still in the early half of June. Bayard was holding some service or lecture in the town, and had late appointments with his treasurer, with Job Slip, and Captain Hap. He saw no prospect of freedom till too late an hour to call on Helen, and had gone down to tell her so; had bade her good-night, and left her. She had gone out rowing, in the delicious loneliness of a much loved and never neglected girl, and was turning the bow of the dory homewards. She drifted and rowed by turns, idle and happy, dreamy and sweet. It was growing dark, and the boats were setting shorewards. One, she noticed (a rough, green fishing-dory from the town), lay, rudely held by a twist of the painter, to the cliffs, at the left, below the float. The dory was empty. A sailor hat and an old tan-colored reefer lay on the stern seat. Two girls sat on the rocks, sheltered in one of the deep clefts or chasms which cut the North Shore, talking earnestly together. One of them had her foot upon thepainter. Neither of them noticed Helen; she glanced at them without curiosity, rowed in, tossed her painter to the keeper of the float, and went up to the house. Her father was in Windover that night; he and her mother were discussing the inconceivable prospect of an Anniversary without entertaining the Trustees; they were quite absorbed in this stupendous event. Helen strolled out again, and off upon the cliff.
She had but just tossed her Florentine slumber-robe of yellow silk upon the rocks, and thrown herself upon it, when voices reached her ear. Eavesdropping is an impossible crime on Windover Point, where the cliffs are common trysting-ground; still, Helen experienced a slight discomfort, and was about to exchange her rock for some less public position, when she caught a word which struck the blood to her heart, and back again, like a smart, stinging blow.
The voices were the voices of two girls. The stronger and the bolder was speaking.
“So I come to tell you. Do as you please. Ifyoudon’t let on, I shall.”
“Lena!” groaned the other, “are you sure? Isn’t there some mistake?”
“Not a —— chance of any,” replied Lena promptly.“Do you s’pose I’d thrust myself upon you this way, and tell for nothin’? Lord,Iknow how decent girls feel, bein’ seen with the likes of me. That’s why I set it after dark, and never come nigh your house. Besides,he’sthere. I warn’t a-goin’ to make no talk, you better believe, Jane Granite. I’ve seen enough o’ that.”
“Mr. Bayard says you are a—good girl, now,” faltered Jane, not knowing what to say. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to be ashamed to be seen with you—now. And I—I’m much obliged to you, Lena. Oh, Lena! what ever in the world are we going to do?”
“Do?” said Lena sharply; “why, head ’em off; that’s all! It only needs a little horse sense, and—to care enough. I’d be drownded in the mud in the inner harbor in a land wind—I’d light a bonfire in the powder factory, and stand by it, if that would do him any good. I guess you would, too.”
Jane made no answer. She felt that this was a subject which could not be touched upon with Lena. It was too dark to see how Jane looked.
“Why,” said the other, “you’re shaking like a topsail in a breeze o’ wind!”
“How do you mean? What is your plan? What do you mean to have me do?” asked Jane, whose wits seemed to have dissolved in terror.
“Get him out of Windover,” coolly said Lena; “leastways for a spell. Mebbe it’ll blow by. There ain’t but one thing I know that’ll do it. Anyhow, there ain’t but one person.”
“I can’t think what you can mean!” feebly gasped Jane.
“Shecan,” replied Lena tersely. Jane made a little inarticulate moan. Lena went on rapidly.
“You go tell her. That’s what I come for. Nothin’ else—nor nobody else—can do it. That’s your part of this infernal business. Mine’s done. I’ve give you the warnin’. Now you go ahead.”
“Oh, are yousure?” repeated Jane weakly; “isn’t itpossibleyou’ve got it wrong, somehow?”
“Is it possible the dust in the street don’t hear the oaths of Windover!” exclaimed Lena scornfully. “Do you s’pose there ain’t a black deed doin’ or threatenin’ in Angel Alley thatIdon’t know? I tell you his life ain’t worth a red herrin’, no, nor a bucketful of bait, if them fellars has their way in this town!... It’s the loss of the license done it. It’s the last wave piled on. It’s madded ’em to anything. It’s madded ’em to murder.... Lord,” muttered Lena, “if it come to that, wouldn’t I be even with ’em!”
She grated her teeth, like an animal grinding a bone; took her foot from the painter, sprang into the fishing-dory, and rowed with quick, powerful strokes into the dark harbor.
Helen, without a moment’s hesitation, descended the cliff and peremptorily said:—
“Jane, I heard it. Tell me all. Tell me everything, this minute.”
Jane who was sobbing bitterly, stopped like a child at a firm word: and with more composure than she had yet shown, she gave her version of Lena’s startling story.
Lena was right, she said; the rum people were very angry with Mr. Bayard: he had got so manyshops shut up; and other places; he had shut up so much in Angel Alley this year. And now old Trawl had lost his license. Folks said a man couldn’t make a decent living there any longer.
“That’s what Ben said,” observed Jane, with a feeble sense of the poignancy of the phrase. “A man couldn’t make an honest living there, now. But there’s one thing,” added Jane with hanging head. “Lena don’t know it. I couldn’t tellLena. God have mercy on me, for it’s me that helped it on!”
“I do not understand you, Jane,” replied Helen coldly; “how could you injure Mr. Bayard, or have any connection with any plot to do him harm?”
“I sent Ben off last Sunday night,” said Jane humbly. “I sent him marching for good. I told him I never could marry him. I told him I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told him what I heard on Ragged Rock—that night—last year.”
“What did you hear on Ragged Rock?” asked Helen, still distant and doubtful.
“Didn’t the minister ever tell you?” replied Jane. “Then I won’t.”
“Very well,” said Helen, after an agitated silence, “I shall not urge you. But if Mr. Bayard’s life is inrealdanger—I cannot believe it!” cried the sheltered, happy woman. Such scenes, such possibilities, belonged to the stage, to fiction; not to New England life. The Professor’s daughterhad a healthy antagonism in her to the excessive, the too dramatic. Her mind grasped the facts of the situation so slowly that the Windover girl half pitied her.
“You don’t see,” said Jane. “You don’t understand. You ain’t brought up as we are.”
“If Mr. Bayard is in danger—” repeated Helen. “Jane!” she cried sharply, thinking to test the girl’s sincerity and judgment, “should you have come and told me what Lena said, if I had not overheard it?”
“Miss Carruth,” answered Jane, with a dignity of her own, “don’t you know there is not one of his people who would not doanythingto save Mr. Bayard?”
Through the dark Jane turned her little, pinched face towards this fortunate woman, this other girl, blessed and chosen. Her dumb eyes grew bright, and flashed fire for that once; then they smouldered, and their spaniel look came on again.
“You ought to speak differently to me,” she said. “You should feel sorry for me, because it’s along of Ben. I tried to keep it up—all this while. I haven’t dared to break with him. I thought if I broke, and we’d been keeping company so long, maybe he might do a harm to Mr. Bayard. Then it come to me that I couldn’t, couldn’t,couldn’tbear it, not another time! And I told him so. And Ben, he swore an awful oath to me, and cleared out. And then Lena came and told.”
“What was it Ben swore?” asked Helen, whosesanguine heart was beginning to sink in earnest. “This is no time for being womanly, and—and not saying things. If it takes all the oaths in the catalogue of Angel Alley, it is my right to know what he said, and it is your duty to tell me!”
“Well,” said Jane stolidly, “he said: ‘Damn him to hell! If we ain’t a-goin’ to be married, he shan’t, neither!’”
“Thank you, Jane,” said Helen gently, after a long silence. She held out her hand; Jane took it, but dropped it quickly.
“Do you know the details? The plan? The plot—if there is a plot?” asked Helen, without outward signs of agitation.
“Lena said they said Christlove should never be dedicated,” answered Jane drearily. “Not if they had to put the parson out of the way to stop it.”
“Oh!”
“That’s what Lena said. She thought if Mr. Bayard could be got out of town for a spell, right away, Lena thought maybe that would set ’em off the notion of it. I told her Mr. Bayard wouldn’t go. She said you’d see to that.”
“Yes,” said Helen softly, “I will see to that.”
Jane made no reply, but started unexpectedly to her feet. The two girls clambered down from the cliff in silence, and began to walk up the shore. At the path leading to the hotel, Jane paused and shrank away.
“How you cough!” said Miss Carruth compassionately.“You are quite wet with this heavy dew. Do come into the cottage with me.”
She put her hand affectionately on the damp shoulder of Jane’s blue and white calico blouse.
The hotel lights reached faintly after the figures of the two. Jane looked stunted and shrunken; Helen’s superb proportions seemed to quench her. The fisherman’s daughter lifted her little homely face.
“I don’t suppose,” she faltered, “you’d be willing to be told. But mother and me have done for him so long—he ain’t well, the minister ain’t—there’s ways he likes his tea made, and we het the bricks, come cold weather, for him—and—all those little things. We’ve tried to take good care of Mr. Bayard! It’s been a good many years!” said Jane piteously. It was more dreadful to her to give up boarding the minister, than it was that he should marry the summer lady in the gold and purple gowns.
“I suppose you and he will go somewhere?” she added bitterly.
“We shan’t forget you, Jane,” said Helen gently.
The calico blouse shoulder shook off the delicate hand that rested upon it.
“I won’t come in,” she said. “I’ll go right home.”
Jane turned away, and walked across the cliffs. The hotel lights fell short of her, and the darkness swallowed her undersized, pathetic figure, as themystery of life draws down the weak, the uncomely, and the unloved.
Jane went home, and unlocked her bureau drawer. From beneath the sachet-bag, on which her little pile of six handkerchiefs rested precisely, she drew out an old copy of Coleridge. The book was scented with the sachet, and had a sickly perfume; it was incense to Jane. She turned the leaves to find “Alph, the sacred river;” then shut the book, and put it back in the bureau drawer. She did not touch it with her lips or cheek. She handled it more tenderly than she did her Bible.
Left to herself, Helen felt the full force of the situation fall upon her, in a turmoil of fear and perplexity. The whole thing was so foreign to her nature and to the experience of her protected life, that it seemed to her more than incredible. There were moments when she was in danger of underrating the facts, and letting the chances take their course—it seemed to her so impossible that Jane and Lena should not, somehow, be mistaken.
Her mind was in a whirlwind of doubt and dismay. With a certain coolness in emergencies characteristic of her, she tried to think the position out, by herself. This futile process occupied perhaps a couple of hours.
It was between eleven and twelve o’clock when the Professor, with a start, laid down his manuscript upon the Revised Version. For the door of theclam study had opened quietly, and revealed his daughter’s agitated face.
“Papa,” she said, “I am in a great trouble. I have come to you first—to know what to do—before I go to him. I’ve been thinking,” she added,“that perhaps this is one of the things that fathers arefor.”
Like a little girl she dropped at his knee, and told him the whole story.
“I couldn’t go to a man, and ask him to marry me, without letting you know, Papa!” said the Professor’s daughter.
The Professor of Theology reached for his Charter Oak cane as a man gropes for a staff on the edge of a precipice. The manuscript chapter on the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel fell to the floor. The Professor and the cane paced the clam study together feverishly.
The birds were singing when Helen and her father stopped talking, and wearily stole back to the cottage for an hour’s rest.
“You could go right home,” said the old man gently. “The house is open, and the servants are there. I am sure your mother will wish it, whenever she is acquainted with the facts.”
“We won’t tell Mother, just yet, Papa—not till we must, you know. Perhaps Mr. Bayard won’t—won’t take me!”
The Professor straightened himself, and looked about with a guilty air. He felt as if he were party to an elopement. Eager, ardent, boyishlysympathetic with Helen’s position, quivering with that perfect thoughtfulness which she never found in any other than her father’s heart, the Professor of dogmatic Orthodox Theology flung himself into the emergency as tenderly as if he had never written a lecture on Foreordination, or preached a sermon on the Inconceivability of Second Probation.
It was he, indeed, and none other, who summoned Bayard to Helen’s presence at an early hour of the morning; and to the credit of the Department, and of the ancient Seminary in whose stern faith the kindest graces of character and the best graciousness of manner have never been extinguished, be it said that Professor Haggai Carruth did not once remind Emanuel Bayard that he was meeting the consequences of unsoundness, and the natural fate of heresy. Nobly sparing the young man any reference to his undoubtedly deserved misfortune, the Professor only said:—
“Helen, here is Mr. Bayard,” and softly shut the door.
Helen’s hearty color was quite gone. Such a change had touched her, that Bayard uttered an exclamation of horror, and took her impetuously in his arms.
“Love, what ails you?” he cried with quick anxiety.
Arrived at the moment when she must speak, if ever, Helen’s courage and foresight failed herutterly. She found herself no nearer to knowing what to say, or how to say it, than she had been at the first moment when she heard the girls talking on the rocks. To tell him her fears, and the grounds for them, would be the fatal blunder. How could she say to a man like Bayard: “Your life is in danger. Come on a wedding-trip, and save yourself!” Yet how could she quibble, or be dumb before the truth!
Following no plan, or little, preacted part, but only the moment’s impulse of her love and her trouble, Helen broke into girlish sobs, the first that he had ever heard from her, and hid her wet face against his cheek.
“Oh,” she breathed, “I don’t knowhowto tell you! But I am so unhappy—and I have grown so anxious about you! I don’t see ... how I can bear it ... as we are.”...
Her heart beat against his so wildly, that she could have said no more if she had tried. But she had no need to try. For he said:—
“Wouldyou marry me this summer, dear? It would make me very happy.... I have not dared to ask it.”
“I would marry you to-morrow.” Helen lifted her head, and “shame departed, shamed” from her sweet, wet face. “I would marry you to-day. I want to be near you. I want ... if anything—whatever comes.”
“Whatever comes,” he answered solemnly,“we ought to be together—now.”
Thus they deceived each other—neither owning to the tender fault—with the divine deceit of love.
Helen comforted herself that she had not said a word of threat or danger or escape, and that Bayard suspected nothing of the cloudburst which hung over him. He let her think so, smiling tenderly. For he knew it all the time; and more, far more than Helen ever knew.
The Professor threw himself into the situation with a fatherly tenderness which went to Bayard’s heart; but the theologian was disconcerted by this glimpse into real life. He had been so occupied with the misery of the next world that he had never investigated the hell of this one. He was greatly perplexed.
“As man to man, Bayard,” he said, “you must tell me the exact amount of truth in those womanly alarms which agitate my daughter’s heart, and to which I allowed myself to yield without, perhaps, sufficient reflection. I find it difficult to believe that any harm can actually befall you in a New England town. That Windover would really injure you? It seems to me, in cool blood, incredible.”
“Windoverwould not,” replied Bayard, smiling. “They don’t love me, but they don’t mob a man for that.Windoverwon’t harm me. Did you ever hear a phrase, common along the coast, here, Professor—‘Rum done it’?”
The Cesarea Professor shook his head. “I am not familiar with the phrase,” he urged; “it lacks in grammar”—
“What it gains in pith,” interrupted Bayard;“but it sums up the situation. A business that thrives on the ruin of men is not likely to be sensitive in the direction of inflicting unnecessary suffering. I have successfully offended the liquor interests of the whole vicinity. The new chapel represents to them the growth of the only power in this town which they have found reason to fear. That’s the amount of it.”
“But the—churches, Bayard—the Christian classes? The ecclesiastical methods of restraining vice?”
“The ecclesiastical methods do not shut up the saloons,” said Bayard gently. “Angel Alley is not afraid of the churches.”
“I am not familiar with the literature of the temperance movement,” observed the Professor helplessly. “It is a foreign subject to me. I am not prepared to argue with you.”
“You will find some of it on my library shelves,” said Bayard; “it might interest you some time to glance at it.”
“When my manuscript on the New Version is completed, I shall take pleasure in doing so,”replied the Professor politely; “but the pointnowis, just what, and how much do you fear from the state of things to which you refer? Helen is a level-headed girl. I take it for granted that she has not wrought herself into a hysterical fright without basis. I have acted on my knowledge of my daughter’s nature. I understandthat, if I am uninstructed in the temperance agitation.”
“Helen has not been misinformed, nor has she overestimated anything,” returned Bayard quietly.
“Is it a mob you fear?”
“Possibly; but probably nothing of the kind. My chief danger is one from which it is impossible to escape.”
“And that is?”—
“Something underhanded. There is a personal element in it.”
Bayard rose, as if he would bring the conversation to a check.
“There is nothing to be done,” he said, “nothing whatever. Everything shall go on, precisely as it is arranged. I shall not run from them.”
“You do not think wise to defer the dedication—for a time?”
“Not an hour! The dedication will take place a week from Sunday.”
The Professor was silent. He found it a little difficult to follow the working of this young man’s mind.
“And yet,” he suggested anxiously, “after the marriage—to-morrow—you will take the temporary absence, the little vacation which your friends advise? You will not think better of that, I hope, for Helen’s sake?”
“I shall leave Windover for a week, for Helen’s sake,” replied Bayard gravely.
In his heart he thought that it would make but little difference; but she should have it to remember that everything had been done. He would not be foolhardy or obstinate. The sacred rights of the wife over the man had set in upon his lifeShe should be gratified and comforted in every way left to the power of that love and tenderness which God has set in the soul abreast of duty and honor. He would give the agitation in Angel Alley time to cool, if cool it could. He would give himself—oh, he would give himself—
Helen, in the next room, sat waiting for him. She ran her fingers over the keys of the piano; her foot was on the soft pedal; she sang beneath her breath,—
“Komm beglücke mich?... Beglücke mich!”
Bayard sought her in a great silence. He lifted her tender face, and looked down upon it with that quiver on the lower part of his own which she knew so well; which always meant emotion that he did not share with her. She did not trouble him to try to have it otherwise. She clung to him, and they clasped more solemnly than passionately.
Around the bridegroom’s look in Bayard’s face, the magic circle of the seer’s loneliness was faintly drawn.
If God and love had collided—but, thank God! He and Love were one.
“Lord, I have groped after Thee, and to know Thy will, and to do it if I could. I never expected to be happy. Dost Thou mean this draught of human joy forme?”
So prayed Bayard, while her bright head lay upon his breast with the delicate and gentle surrenderof the girl who will be wife before another sun goes down.
Out upon the piazza of the Flying Jib the Professor was entertaining visitors, by whose call the lovers were not disturbed. The Reverend George Fenton had unexpectedly and vaguely appeared upon the scene. He was accompanied by a lean, thoughtful man, with clerical elbows and long, rustic legs, being no other than Tompkinton of Cesarea and the army cape. Professor Carruth had taken his two old students into the confidence of the family crisis. The Reverend Mr. Fenton looked troubled.
“I had a feeling that something was wrong. I have been impressed for days with a sense that I ought to see Bayard—to help him, you know—to offer him any assistance in my power. He is in such a singular position! He leads such a singular life, Professor! It is hard for a man situated as I am, to know precisely whattodo.”
“The only thing that can be done for him, just now, that I see,” suggested the Professor dryly, “is to find him a supply for Sunday. His marriage to my daughter will, of necessity, involve a short absence from his missionary duties.”
“I wish I could preach for him!” cried Fenton eagerly.“I should like nothing better. I should love to do so much for him. He never has any supplies or vacations, like the rest of us. Now I think of it, nobody has been near his pulpit for three years, to help him out—I mean nobody whomweshould recognize. I’ve half a mind to consult my committee. The First Church”—
“Iwill preach for Bayard,” interrupted Tompkinton with his old, slow manner. “My church is so small—we are not important across the Cape, there—it is not necessary for me to consult my committee. I will preach for him with all my heart; in the evening at all events—all day, if the Professor here will find me a supply of some sort.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” observed the Professor quietly; “I will accept your offer, Tompkinton, for the evening. I shall myself occupy Mr. Bayard’s pulpit in Windover town hall on Sunday morning.”
“You, Professor?”
Fenton turned pale. Tompkinton gave that little lurch to his shoulders with which, for so many years, he had jerked on the army cape in cold weather. Tompkinton was well dressed, now, well settled, well to do, but the same simple, manly fellow. There was the gentleman in this grandson of the soil, this educated farmer’s boy; and an instinct as true as the spirit of the faith which he preached in the old, unnoticed ways, and with the old, unobserved results. Tompkinton spent his life in conducting weekly prayer meetings, in comforting old people in trouble, and in preaching what he had been taught, as he had been taught it. But he was neither a coward nor a cad for that.
“If I had had a little time to think of this,” protested Fenton. “My committee are, to a man, opposed to this temperance movement, and our relation to Bayard is, of course,—you must see, Professor,—peculiar! But perhaps”—
“Oh, Tompkinton and I can manage,” replied the Professor, not without a twinkle in his deep eyes. “I don’t suppose the First Church has ever heard of us, but we will do our humble best.”
Now, as the event fell out, the Professor and Tompkinton changed their programme a little; and when the time came to do Bayard this fraternal service,—the first of its kind ever offered to him by the clergymen of the denomination in which he was reared,—the Professor drove across the Cape in the hot sun, ten miles, to fill the Reverend Mr. Tompkinton’s little, country pulpit, and Tompkinton took the morning service for his classmate.
In the evening the Professor of Theology from Cesarea Seminary occupied the desk of the heretic preacher in Windover town hall. The hall was thronged. George Fenton preached to yawning pews; for the First Church, out of sheer, unsanctified curiosity, lurched over, and sixty of them went to hear the distinguished Professor. Bayard’s own people were present in the usual summer evening force and character.
The Professor of Theology looked uncomfortably at the massed and growing audience. He was sixty-eight years old, and in all his scholarlyand Christian life he had never stood before an audience like this. He opened his manuscript sermon,—he had selected a doctrinal sermon upon the Nature of the Trinity,—and began to read it with his own distinguished manner.
The audience, restrained at first by the mere effect of good elocution and a cultivated voice, were respectful for awhile; they listened hopefully; then perplexedly; then dully. Sentence after sentence, polished, and sound as the foundations of Galilee or Damascus Hall, fell softly from the lips of the Cesarea Professor upon the ears of the Windover fishermen. Doctrine upon doctrine attacked them, and they knew it not. Proof-text upon proof-text bombarded them in vain.
The Professor saw the faces of his audience lengthen and fall; across the rude, red brows of the foreign sailors wonder flitted; then confusion; then dismay. Drunkards and reformed men and wretched girls, and the homeless, wretched people of a seaport town, stood packed in rows before the Professor of Theology, and gaped upon him. Restlessness struck them, and began to run from man to man.
“Shut up there!” whispered Job Slip, punching a big Swede. “Be quiet, can’t ye, for common manners! You’ll disgrace Mr. Bayard!”
“Be civil to the old cove, for the parson’s sake!” commanded Captain Hap, hitting a Finn, and stepping on the toes of a Windover seiner, who had presumed to snicker.
“Why don’t he talk English then?” protested the fisherman.
A dozen men turned and left the hall. Half a dozen followed. Some girls giggled audibly. A group of Norwegians significantly shuffled their feet on the bare floor.
The Professor of Theology laid down his manuscript. It occurred to him, at last, that his audience did not understand what he was saying. It was a dreadful moment. For the first time in his honored life he had encountered the disrespect of a congregation which he could not command. He laid down his sermon on the Nature of the Trinity, and looked the house over.
“I am afraid,” he said distinctly, “that I am not retaining the interest of this congregation. I am not accustomed to your needs, or to the manner in which your pastor presents the Truth to you. But for his sake, you will listen to me, I am sure.”
“Lord, yes,” said the seiner in an audible whisper; “we’d listen to Bunker Hill Monyment forhim.”
This irreverence did not, happily, reach the ears of the Professor of Theology, who, with his famous ease of manner, proceeded to say:—
“My discourse is on the Nature of the Trinity; and I perceive that my thoughts on this subject are not your thoughts, and that my ways of expression are not your ways, and that an interpreter is needed between this preacher and his audience.... I have been thinking, since I stood at this desk, about the name which you give to the beautiful new chapel which your pastor will dedicate for you, God willing, next Sunday”—
From a remote corner of the hall a sound like that of a serpent arose, and fell. The Professor did not or would not hear it (no man could say which), and went firmly on.
“Christlove you call your chapel, I am told. You may be surprised to know it, but the fact is that the sermon which I have been preaching to you, and the thing which the tender and solemn name of your chapel signifies, are one and the same.”
“I don’t see how he figgers that,” muttered the seiner.
“I will try to show you how,” continued the Professor, as if he had heard the fisherman.
He abandoned his manuscript on the Trinity, and plunged headlong—not in the least knowing how he was to get out again—into a short extempore talk upon the life of Christ. The fishermen listened, for the old preacher held to it till they did; and as soon as he had commanded their respect and attention, he wisely stopped. The service came to a sudden but successful end; and the exhausted Professor thoughtfully retired from his first, his last, his only experience in the pulpit of the Unsound. The most depressing part of the occasion was that his wife told him it was the best sermon she had heard him preach in thirty years.
But Bayard and Helen knew these things not,nor thought of them. They had been married, as it was decided, upon that Saturday, the day before. Helen’s father married them. There was no wedding party, no preparation. Helen had a white gown, never worn before; Jane Granite sent some of her mother’s roses, and Mrs. Carruth, who distinguished herself by abnormal self-possession, fastened one of the roses at Helen’s throat. It was thought best that Windover should know nothing of the marriage until the preacher and his bride had left the town; so it was the quietest little wedding that love and the law allow.
And Bayard and Helen went to her old home in the glory and the blossom of the Cesarea June. And the great cross came out upon the Seminary green, for the moon was up that week.
“It used to divide us,” she whispered; “it never can again.”
She wondered a little that he did not answer; but that he only held her solemnly, in the window where they stood to see the cross.
Helen’s happy nature was easily queen of her. She had begun to feel that her anxiety for Bayard’s sake was overstrained. Tragic Windover slipped from her consciousness, almost from her memory. She felt the sacred right of human joy to conquer fate, and trusted it as royally as she had trusted him. In spite of himself, he absorbed something of her warm and brilliant hopefulness. When she gave herself, she gave her ease of heart. And so the worn and worried man came to his Eden.
Helen’s happy heart proved prophet; so they said, and smiled. For there was no mob. Sunday dawned like a dream. The sun rode up without cloud or fire. The sea carried its cool, June colors. The harbor wore her sweetest face. The summer people, like figures on a gay Japanese fan, moved brightly across the rocks and piers; Bayard and Helen looked out of the windows of the Flying Jib, and watched them with that kindness of the heart for the interests of strangers which belongs to joy alone. A motionless fleet lay in the harbor, opening its silvery wings to dry them in the Sunday sun.
The fishermen had hurried home by scores to witness the dedication. Everybody had a smile for the preacher’s bride,—the boarder on the rocks, the fisherman from the docks.
Every child or woman to whom she had ever done a kindness in her inexperienced, warm-hearted fashion, remembered it and her that day. She wore the unornamented cream-white silk dress in which she had been married; for Bayard asked it.
“The people will like to see you so,” he said. “It will give them a vision.”
All the town was alive and alert. The argument of success, always the cogent one to the average mind, was peculiarly effective in Windover.People who had never given the mission a thought before, and people who had given it many, but never a kindly one, looked at the doors of the new chapel, smothered in wild Cape roses for the solemn gala, and said: “That affair in Angel Alley seems to prosper, spite of everything. There may be something in it, after all.”
It was expected that the churches themselves, though reserved on the subject, would be better represented at Christlove that evening, than they cared to be; for the young people were determined to see the dedication, and would pair off in scores to Angel Alley, leaving their elders behind, to support the ecclesiastical foundations in decorum and devotion, as by the creed and confession bound.
The attendance of other audiences was not encouraged, however, by the pastor in Angel Alley; his own would more than fill the chapel. All the little preparations of the people went on quietly, and he brought them, as it was his will to do, without weariness or worry, to the evening. He wished the dedication of his chapel to be free from the fret and care which turn so many of our religious festivals into scrambles,—I had almost said, shambles, for the harm they do to exhausted women, and to careworn men.
The day passed easily. Bayard himself, though moving under deep excitement, gave no evidence of it. He was as quiet as the Saint Michael in the picture, whose foot was on the dragon, and whose head was in the skies.
The day passed uneventfully. The evening was one of Windover’s fairest and most famous. The sky gave the ethereal colors of transparent rose-clouds, and the harbor returned them delicately. There was a slight, watery line in the northwest, but the oldest sailors scarcely noticed it. Nothing had happened in any way to hinder the movement of the ceremonial, or to mar its success. There was no mob, nor threat of any. There was no mass, no riot, no alarm. Angel Alley was decorous—if one might say so, obtrusively decorous. Captain Hap, and Job Slip, the special police, and the officers of the mission looked out of narrow lids at Angel Alley, and watched guardedly.
Not a misdemeanor disturbed the calm of this, to all appearance, now law-abiding—nay, law-adoring street. Saloon after saloon that Bayard had closed presented locked front doors to the thirstiest sailor who swaggered from the wharves in search of what he might swallow. Nameless dens that used to flourish the prosperity of their sickening trade were shut.
Old Trawl’s door was barred. The Trawls themselves were invisible. There would be no mob. So said the treasurer of the chapel. So said the Windover police. So thought the anxious Professor, and his tearful wife. So said Helen, sparkling with the pretty triumph of love and joy.
“Dear! You see we were mistaken. Theydolove you here, in rough old Windover—bless it, after all! We were too anxious—I was worried; I own it, now. I was afraid because you were so precious to me. And I could not be with you ... if anything ... went wrong. Butnow”—
“Now,” he said, “nothingcango wrong. For you are mine, and I am yours, and this is forever.”
“I am glad to hear you speak so cheerfully,” she said, catching at the lighter note in the chord of his words.
He did not answer her; and when she looked up, she was surprised at the solemn expression of his face.
“Love,” he said, “it is time to go. Kiss me, Helen, before we start.”
They stood at the window in her own little room in the summer cottage.
The tide was rising, and it gained quietly upon the beaches and the pier. Bayard looked out upon the sea, for a moment, out to the uttermost horizon’s purple curve. Then he took his wife to his heart, and held her there; within a clasp like that, no woman speaks, and Helen did not.
The Professor and his wife passed down Angel Alley. The Reverend Mr. Tompkinton and that dear old moderator, the very Orthodox but most Christian minister who had always done a brother’s deed by the heretic pastor when he could, followed the great Professor. These officers of the evening’s ceremony entered the chapel, and—not staying to leave Mrs. Carruth in a front pew, but leading her with them—passed on to the platform.
Whispers buzzed about.
“The minister! Where’s the minister? Has anything happened to Mr. Bayard?”
For the chapel was already full. Captain Hap trotted impatiently down the aisle. Job Slip looked at the policeman in the vestibule in a worried way. But the officer stolidly signaled that all was well; and Captain Hap and Job Slip and scores of watchers breathed again.
The congregation increased quietly. Angel Alley was unprecedentedly still. The audience was serious and civil. All of Bayard’s own people were there—many citizens of Windover—and the young folks from the churches, as expected.
Then, came the throng from the wharves. Then, came the crowd from the streets. Then, came the rough, red faces from foreign ports, and from the high seas, and from the Grand Banks, and Georges’. There came all the homeless, neglected, tossed, and tempted people whom Bayard loved, and who loved him. There came the outcast, and the forgotten, and the unclean of heart and body. There came the wretches whom no one else thought of, or cared for. There came the poor girls who frequented no other house of worship, but were always welcomed here. There came the common people, who heard him gladly; for to them he spoke, and for them he lived.
The preacher walked down Angel Alley with his wife, in her white dress, upon his arm. The Alley was thronged with spectators who did not orwho could not enter the chapel. Two policemen stepped forward to escort the minister, but he waved them back. He and Helen walked quietly to the chapel steps, and were about to enter, when a slight disturbance in the crowd, at their immediate side, caused Bayard to look around. A girl was struggling with an officer, to get near enough to speak to the minister.
“Get back there!” commanded the policeman. “Keep back, I say! This is no place nor time for the likes ofyouto pester the minister!”
“Let her come!” ordered Bayard authoritatively. For it was Lena. The girl was pale, and her handsome eyes had a ferocious look.
“I’ve got something to tell him,” announced Lena with calm determination. “It’s important, or I wouldn’t bother him, is it likely? I ain’t no such a fool nor flat.”
She approached, at Bayard’s beck, and said a few words in a tone so low that even the wife upon his arm did not understand them.
“Lena still feels a little anxious,” said Bayard aloud, distinctly. “Have you any wishes to express, Helen?”
But Helen, smiling, shook her head. She felt exalted and not afraid. She would have gone with him to death; but she did not think about death. She did not believe that his angels would suffer a pebble of Windover to dash against him; nor that a curl of his gold-brown head would come to harm. His mood ruled her utterly. His own exaltation,his beauty, his calm, his spiritual power, made clouds before her eyes, on which he moved as a god.
So they entered the chapel, together. As they did so, Bayard turned, and looked back. Before all the people there, the preacher lifted his hat to Lena, and passed on.
The girl’s dark face dropped upon her breast, as if she made obeisance before him; then she lifted it with the touching pride of lost self-respect regained. Her lips moved. “He thinks I’m fit, at last,” said Lena.
The preacher and his young wife passed through the rose-wreathed door, and into the chapel. Roses were there, too; their pale, pink lamps burned all over the chapel, wherever hand could reach, or foot could climb. This was the decoration chosen to welcome the June bride to Windover—the people’s flower, the blossom of the rocks and downs.
It was a pleasant chapel. The library, the gymnasium, the bowling-alley, opened from the prayer-room. Pictures and books and games and lounging-places for tired fellows were part of Bayard’s Christianity. Many a fisherman, smoking in the room below, where an oath turned a man out, and a coarse phrase was never heard, would listen to the singing of old hymns, above him, and lay his pipe down, and wonder what the music meant, and catch a line he used to hear his mother sing, and so steal up to hear the rest; and sing the loudest of them all, perhaps, before the hymn was done.
Bayard moved up among his silent people, to his place. His wife went with him, and he led her to her mother’s side, at his right hand.
“In any event,” he thought, “I could reach her in a moment.”
His eyes sought hers for that instant. She neither blushed nor paled, but had her sweet composure. In her bridal white, she looked like the lily of his life’s work, the angel of his worried heart. It seemed to him as if peace and hope came with her, as purity and honor dwelt in her presence. He felt happier and stronger for knowing that she was so near him, now, and, with a brightening brow he gave the signal for opening the evening’s service.
It was a short and pleasant service. The great Professor, cordially recognized by the rough audience that he had not allowed to conquer him last Sunday, contributed his most distinguished manner, his best good sense, and the least possible evidence of his theology to the dedicating hour. The old moderator and the pastor’s classmate from across the Cape added their heartiest help. Most of the congregation omitted to notice that the clergymen from the city were not present. They were not missed. Who could say if they had been invited to dedicate Emanuel Bayard’s chapel? He had pulled along without them for three years. He was incapable of resentment, but it was still possible that habit had its way with the missionary, and that, in his hour of success he had simply forgottenthem, as in his time of distress and failure they had forgotten him. Who could blame him?
But all the little trouble of the past had melted from his mind and heart; both were clear and happy when he rose, at last, to address his people. His delicate lips had but parted to speak to them, when there started such a storm of welcome from the fishermen as well-nigh swept his self-possession from him. He was not prepared for it, and he seemed almost disturbed. From aisle to aisle, from wall to wall, the wind of sound rose and rolled upon him. At last it became articulate, and here and there words defined themselves.
“God bless him!”
“Bless our dear young parson!”
“Windover fishermen stand by him every time!”
“Blessin’s on him, anyhow!”
“Christlove’s good enough for us!”
But when he smiled upon them, they grew quiet, as they had done once before—that evening after the wreck and rescue off Ragged Rock; for these two were the only occasions when the applause of his people had got the better of their pastor.
When he began to speak, it was not without emotion, but in a voice so low that the house had to hold its breath to hear him.