A Singular Life
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Title: A Singular Life
Author: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
A SINGULAR LIFE
BY
ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS
“What is that to thee? Follow thou me.”
JESUS CHRIST.
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_
1896
Copyright, 1894,
BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WARD.
_All rights reserved._
NINTH THOUSAND.
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company.
“_He hath given a boat to the shipwrecked._”
A SINGULAR LIFE.
I.
There were seven of them at the table that day, and they were
talking about heredity. At least they were talking about whatever
stood for heredity at the date of our history. The word had
penetrated to religious circles at the time; but it was still
interpreted with a free personal translation.
Perhaps there is no greater curiosity of its kind than that of
a group of theological students (chiefly in their junior year)
discussing science. It is not certain that the tendencies of the
Seminary club dinner are not in themselves materialistic. The great
law of denial belongs to the powerful forces of life, whether the
case be one of coolish baked beans, or an unrequited affection.
That the thing we have not is the thing we would have, neither you
nor I nor the junior may deny; and it is quite probable that these
young men set an undue value upon a game dinner and _entrées_,
which was not without its reactionary effect upon their philosophy.
Jaynes, for instance, had been reading Huxley. Jaynes was a stout
man, and short, with those round eyeglasses by which oculists
delight in deforming round people. He confessed that he was
impressed by the argument. He said:--
“Varieties arise, we do not know why; and if it should be probable
that the majority of varieties have arisen in a spontaneous
manner”--
“A little vinegar, Jaynes, if you please,” interrupted Tompkinton
gently. Tompkinton was long and lean. His hair was thin, and
scraggled about his ears, which were not small. His hands were
thin. His clear blue eye had an absent look. In cold weather he
wore an old army cape of his father’s. He studied much without a
fire, for the club board at the “short price” cost him two dollars
and seventy-five cents a week. His boots were old, and he had no
gloves and a cough. He came from the State of New Hampshire.
Then there was Fenton: a snug little fellow, who took honors at
Amherst; a man who never spent more than five hundred a year in
his life, yet always wore clean linen and a tolerable coat, had
a stylish cut to his hair, and went to Boston occasionally to a
concert. It was even reported that he had been to see Booth. But
the Faculty discredited the report. Besides, he had what was known
as “a gift at prayer.”
Fenton was rather a popular man, and when he spoke in answer to
Holt (who observed that _he_ considered Huxley’s Descent of Man an
infidel book) he was listened to with marked attention.
Holt was in the Special Course. He was a converted brakeman from
the Hecla and St. Mary’s, a flourishing Western railway. Holt,
being the only student present who had not received any undue
measure of collegiate culture, was treated with marked courtesy by
his more liberally educated fellow-students.
“We are reading Darwin up at my room, two or three of us, after
dinner,” observed Fenton kindly. “We should be happy to have you
join us sometimes, Holt.”
Holt blinked at the speaker with that uncertain motion of the
eyelids which means half intellectual confusion, and half personal
embarrassment. Not a man of these young Christians had smiled;
yet the Special Course student, being no natural fool, vaguely
perceived that something had gone wrong.
But Fenton was vivaciously discussing last November’s ball games
with his _vis-à-vis_, a middler whose name is unknown to history.
It was some time before he said, looking far down the long table:--
“Bayard, who is it that says it takes three generations to make a
gentleman?”
“Why, Holmes, I suppose,” answered he who was addressed. “Who else
would be likely to say it?”
“Any of the Avonsons might have said it,” observed a gentlemanly
fellow from the extreme end of the table; he returned his spoon to
his saucer as he spoke. There were several students at the club who
did not drink with their spoons in their teacups, and even laid
the knife and fork in parallels upon the plate, and this was one
of the men. He had an effective and tenderly cherished mustache.
He was, on the whole, a handsome man. It was thought that he would
settle over a city parish.
“I doubt if there was ever an Avonson who could have said it,
Bent,” replied Bayard. The Avonsons were a prominent New England
family, not unknown to diplomacy and letters, nor even to Holt of
the Hecla and St. Mary’s.
“But why, then?” persisted Bent.
“They have believed it too thoroughly and too long to say anything
so fine.”
Bent raised an interrogative eyebrow.
“You won’t understand,” returned Bayard, smiling. All the fellows
turned towards Bayard when he smiled; it was a habit they had. “You
aren’t expected to. _You_ are destined for the Episcopal Church.”
“I see the connection less than ever,” Bent maintained. “But I
scent heresy somewhere. You are doomed to the stake, Bayard. That
is clear as--as the Latin fathers. Have an apple,--do. It’s sour,
but sound. It’s Baldwin year, or we shouldn’t get them except
Sundays.”
Bayard mechanically took the apple, and laid it down untouched. His
eye wandered up the cold length of the long table decorated with
stone china. Somehow, few aspects of the theological life struck
his imagination so typically as a big vegetable dish piled with
cold, unrelieved Baldwins, to be served for after-dinner fruit
on a winter day. In the kind of mental chill which the smallest
of causes may throw over a nature like his, Bayard did not exert
himself to reply to his classmate, but fell into one of the sudden
silences for which he was marked.
“My father,” observed the New Hampshire man quietly, “was a farmer.
He dug his own potatoes the day before he enlisted. Perhaps I am no
judge, but I always thought he was a gentleman--when I was a little
boy.”
Tompkinton shouldered himself out of the conversation, asked one
of the fellows what hour the Professor had decided on for eternal
punishment, and went out into the wintry air, taking long strides
to the lecture-room, with his notebook under the old blue army
cape, of which the northwest wind flung up the scarlet side.
“Has the Professor tea’d you yet, Bent?” asked Bayard, rousing,
perhaps a little too obviously anxious to turn the channels of
conversation. Genealogical problems at best, and in picked company,
are unsafe topics; hence peculiarly dangerous at a club table of
poor theologues, half of whom must, in the nature of things, be
forcing their way into social conditions wholly unknown to their
past. Bayard was quicker than the other men to think of such things.
“Oh yes,” said Bent, with a slightly twitching mustache. “Ten of
us at a time in alphabetical order. I came the first night, being
a B. Madam his wife and Mademoiselle his daughter were present,
the only ladies against such a lot of us. I pitied them. But Miss
Carruth seemed to pity us. She showed me her photograph book, and
some Swiss pickle forks--carved. Then she asked me if I read Comte.
And then her mother asked me how many of the class had received
calls. Then the Professor told some stories about a Baptist
minister. And so by and by we came away. It was an abandoned
hour--for Cesarea. It was ten o’clock.”
“I was in town that night,” observed Bayard. “I had to send my
regrets.”
“If you were in town, why couldn’t you go?” asked the middler.
“I mean that I was out of town. I was in Boston. I had gone home,”
explained Bayard pleasantly.
“You won’t come in now till after the Z’s,” suggested Fenton
quickly; “or else you’ll be left over till the postgraduates take
turn, and the B’s come on again.”
The Baldwin apples were all eaten now, and the stone china was
disappearing from the long table in detachments. Jaynes and the
Special Course man had followed Tompkinton, and the middler and
Bent now pushed back their chairs. Bayard remained a moment to
ask after the landlady’s neuralgia,--he was one of the men who do
not economize sympathy without more effort than its repression is
usually worth,--and Fenton waited for him in the cold hall. The
two young men shoved their shoulders into their overcoats sturdily,
and walked across the Seminary green together to their rooms.
Strictly speaking, one should say the Seminary “white.” It was
midwinter, and on top of Cesarea Hill. From the four corners of the
earth the winds of heaven blew, and beat against that spot; to it
the first snowflake flew, and on it the last blizzard fell. Were
the winters longer and the summers hotter in Cesarea than in other
places? So thought the theologues in the old draughty, shaking
Seminary dormitories dignified by time and native talent with the
name of “halls.”
Young Bayard trod the icy path to his own particular hall (Galilee
was its name) with the chronic homesickness of a city-bred man
forced through a New England country winter under circumstances
which forbade him to find fault with it. His profession and his
seminary were his own choice; he had never been conscious of
wavering in it, or caught in grumbling about it, but sometimes he
felt that if he had been brought up differently,--like Tompkinton,
for instance, not to say Holt,--he should have expended less of
that vitality necessary to any kind of success in the simple
process of enduring the unfamiliar.
“How was the gale round your room last night?” inquired young
Fenton, as the two climbed the frozen terraces, and leaped over
the chains that hung between rows of stunted posts set at regular
intervals in front of the Seminary buildings. For what purpose
these stone dwarfs staggered there, no one but the founders of the
institution knew; and they had been in their graves too long to
tell.
“It made me think of my uncle’s house,” observed Bayard.
“By force of contrast? Yes. I never lived in Beacon Street. But I
can guess. I pity you in that northwest corner. My mother sent me a
soapstone by express last week. I should have been dead, I should
have been frozen stark, without it. You heat it, you know, on top
of the base-burner, and tuck it in the sheets. Then you forget
and kick it out when you’re asleep, and it thumps on the fellow’s
head in the room below, and he blackguards you for it through the
ceiling. Better get one.”
“Are you really _comfortable_--all night?” asked Bayard wistfully.
“I haven’t thought about being warm or any of those luxuries since
I came here. I expected to rough it. I mean to toughen myself.”
In his heart he was repeating certain old words which ran like
this: Endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. But they
did not come to his lips. He was as afraid of cant as too many
young theologues are of sincere simplicity.
“Oh, come, Bayard!” urged the other. “There’s where you miss
it. Why not be comfortable? I don’t see that Christianity and
misery need be identical. You are certain to have a tough time
if you go on as you begin. Talk about election, foreordination,
predestination! You take the whole set of condemnatory doctrines
into your hands and settle your own fate beforehand. A man doesn’t
leave Providence any free will who sets out in life as you do.”
“Do I strike you that way?” asked the young man anxiously. “If
there is anything I abhor, it is a gloomy clergyman!”
“There you are again! Now I’m not finding fault with you,” began
Fenton, settling his chin in his comfortable way. “Your soul is all
nerves, man. It is a ganglion. You need more tissue round it--like
me.”
The two young men stood at the foot of the bare, wooden stairs in
the cold entry of Galilee Hall, at the dividing of their ways. It
was the usual luck of the other that he should have a southwest
room, first floor. But Bayard climbed to his northwest third-story
corner uncomplainingly. It occurred to him to say that there were
objects in life as important, on the whole, as being comfortable.
But he did not. He only asked if the lectures on the Nicene Creed
were to be continued at four, and went on, shivering, to his room.
It was a bitter February afternoon, and the wind blew the wrong way
for northwest corners. Bayard had spent the day in coddling his big
base-burner, which now rewarded him by a decent glow as he entered
his study. He had no chum, and thanked God for it; he curled into
the shell of his solitude contentedly, and turned to his books
at once, plunging headlong into the gulf of the Nicene Creed. At
the end of two hours he got up, shivering. The subject was colder
than the climate, and he felt congealed to the soul. He flung open
his bedroom door. An icy breath came from that monastic cell. He
thought, “I really must get some double windows.” He had purposely
refrained all winter from this luxury lest he should seem to have
more comforts than his poorer classmates.
The early winter sunset was coming on, and Cesarea Hill was
wrapping herself in gold and purple and in silver sheen to meet it.
Bayard went to his window, and stood, with his hands locked behind
him, looking abroad.
The Seminary lawns (old Cesareans spoke of them as the Seminary
“yard”), encrusted in two feet of snow, took on the evening colors
in great sweeps, as if made by one or two strokes of a mighty
brush. The transverse paths that cut across the snow, under rows
of ancient elm-trees, had the shape of a cross. The delicate, bare
branches of the elms were etched against a blazing west. Above, the
metallic sky hung cold and clear. A few students were crossing the
lawns, tripping and slipping on the paths of gray and glittering
ice. In the wide street beyond, a number of people were breasting
the blast, valiantly prepared for a mile’s walk to the evening
mail. The night threatened to be very cold. Across the street, the
Professors’ houses stood in a serious row. Beyond them, the horizon
line ran to Wachusett, undisturbed; and the hill and valley view
melted into noble outlines under snow and sun.
Emanuel Bayard stood at his window looking across to the hills. The
setting sun shone full in his face. I see no reason why one should
hesitate to give a man full credit for personal beauty because one
chances to be his biographer, and do not hesitate to say that the
attractiveness of this young man was extraordinary.
He was of slender build, but tall, and with good square shoulders
that sturdily supported his head. He had the forehead of a student,
the carriage of a man of society, and the beauty of a myth, or a
saint, which may be the same thing. His complexion was a trifle
fair for a man; his brown hair, shot with gold, curled defiantly
all over his head; when he first decided to study theology, he
used to try to brush it straight, but he might as well have tried
to brush Antinous out of fable. He had bright, human, healthy
color, and, as has been intimated, a remarkable smile. His lips
were delicately cut; they curved and trembled with almost pitiful
responsiveness to impressions. Thought and feeling chased over his
face like the tints of a vibrating prism cast on a white surface.
It was in his eyes that the extreme sensitiveness of his nature
seemed to concentrate and strengthen into repose. His nearest
friend might have said of Bayard’s eyes, They are hazel, and said
no more. Some stranger in the street, to whom the perception of
the unusual was given, might have passed him, and said, That
man’s eyes are living light. Indeed, strangers often moved back
and looked again at him; while people who knew him best sometimes
turned away from him uncomfortably, as if he blinded them. This
power to dazzle, which we often see in merely clear-minded persons
with a well-painted iris, may not be associated in the least with
the higher nature, but even the contrary. It was the peculiarity
about Bayard that his eye seemed to be the highest as well as the
brightest fact in any given personal situation. Neither a prophet
nor a cut-throat would for an instant have questioned the spiritual
supremacy of the man.
In Paris, once, he was thrown in the way of a celebrated
adventuress, and she confessed to him, sobbing, as if he had been
her priest, within an hour. Rank is of the soul, and Bayard’s was
unmistakable. Beauty like his is as candid, in its way, as certain
forms of vice. It is impossible for him to conceal his descent who
is born a spiritual prince.
But the young man was thinking nothing of this as he faced the
cold and gleaming sky, to see the sun drop just to the north of
Wachusett, as he had done so many winter nights since he took
possession of the northwest corner of Galilee Hall. If his musing
had been strictly translated into words, “I must prove my rank,” he
would have said.
As he stood mute and rapt, seeming to bestow more brilliance than
he took from it on the afterglow that filled the grim old room, his
eye rested on the line of Professors’ houses that stood between
him and his sunset, and musingly traveled from ancient roof to
roof till it reached the house behind which the sun had dropped.
This house was not built by the pious founders, and had a certain
impertinent, worldly air as of a Professor with property, or a
committee of the Trustees who conceded more than was expected by
the Westminster Catechism to contemporaneous ease and architecture.
It was in fact a fashionable modern building, a Queen Anne country
house, neither more nor less.
As Bayard’s glance reached the home of his theological Professor
it idly fell upon the second-story front window, where signs of
motion chanced to arrest his attention. In this window the drawn
shade was slowly raised, and the lace drapery curtains parted. A
woman’s figure stood for a moment between the curtains. There were
western windows, also, to the room, and the still burning light
shot through from side to side of the wing. In it she could be seen
clearly: she stood with raised arm and hand; there was something
so warm and womanly and rich in the outlines of that remote figure
that the young man would have been no young man if his glance had
not rested upon it.
After a moment’s perceptible hesitation he turned away; then
stepped back and drew down his old white cotton shade.
II.
More than thirty years before the day of this biography, a
blue-eyed girl sat in her brother’s home in Beacon Street, weighing
the problem which even then had begun to shake the social world
every year at crocus time, Where shall we spend the summer?
When Mary Worcester’s gentle mind, wavering between the hills and
the shore with the pleasant agitation of a girl who has never known
any compulsion severer than her own young choice upon her fate,
turned in the direction of the mountain village which her mother
used to fancy, it seemed the least important of acts or facts,
and was so regarded by her brother; for Hermon Worcester was a
preoccupied young man, more absorbed in adding to his fortune,
inherited in wool, than in studying the natural history of an
attractive orphaned younger sister, left, obviously, by Providence
upon his hands.
So, properly chaperoned and luxuriously outfitted, to the hills
went Mary Worcester that conclusive summer of her life; and the
village of Bethlehem--a handful then, a hamlet, if one should
compare it with the luxurious and important place of resort known
to our own day--received, as unconsciously as she gave, the
presence of this young visitor whose lot was destined to become so
fair a leaf bound in with the village history.
They are not usually the decisions to which we give the most
thought that most control our lives, but those to which we give
the least; and this city girl glided into her country holiday as
unaware as the rest of us are when we cross the little misty space
that separates freedom from fate.
She was not an extraordinary girl; unless we should consider
extraordinary a certain kind of moral beauty to which the delicacy
of her face and form gave marked expression. Such beauty she
assuredly possessed. Her head had a certain poise never to be
found except in women to whom we may apply the beautiful adjective
“high-minded.” Her eyes and the curve of her lip bore this out; and
she had the quality of voice no more to be copied by a woman of the
world than a pure heart is to be imitated by a schemer.
She was not an intellectual woman in our modern sense of the word.
She was a bright, gentle girl; more devout than her mates who rode
with her on picnics from the hotel, but as ready to be happy as
the rest; she had a certain sweet merriment, or merry sweetness,
peculiar to herself, and of which life and trouble never entirely
robbed her. If we add to this that she had the angelic obstinacy
sometimes to be found in unobtrusive and amiable people, her story,
so far as it concerns us, need not be the enigma that it always
remained to many of those who knew her best. In this summer of
which we speak, when Miss Worcester had been for a couple of weeks
among the hills, it befell that her party, for some cause not
important enough to trace, moved into lodgings across the road from
the hotel, where they commanded a cottage otherwise occupied only
by the proprietor or tenant of the house. The cottage, after the
fashion of its kind, was white of surface, green of blinds, and
calm of demeanor. Its low front windows swept the great horizon of
Bethlehem without obstruction, and when one drew the green-paper
shade of the upper chamber in the rear, a tall pine--one of
fourscore, the picket of a rich and sombre grove--brushed into
one’s face, and eyed one like a grave, superior rustic who knew his
worth and one’s own, and was not to be distanced.
Mary Worcester, in a white, thin dress, was sitting by this window
one July day, looking down on the long fingers of the pine bough,
when she was disturbed by a sudden agitation in the green heart
of the tree. The boughs shook and parted, and the branch that lay
over upon her window-sill trembled, yielded, started, gave a smart,
stinging blow upon her bending cheek, and swept aside. She sprang
back to save her eyes, and, in doing so, perceived the top round of
a ladder rising from the tree.
She was startled for the instant; but observing that the ladder
continued to rise steadily, and had evidently higher aspirations
than her window-sill, she remained where she was. At this moment
a voice from below delicately suggested that if any of the ladies
were upstairs they might like to draw the shade, as some repairs
were necessary upon the roof. The speaker was sorry to incommode
anybody, and would withdraw as soon as possible.
Owing, perhaps, to that kind of modesty which feels an
embarrassment at being recognized, the young girl did not draw
her shade, but moved into the adjoining room while the carpenter
climbed the ladder. The doors and windows were open through, and
she stood for a moment uncertain, her light dress swaying in the
draught. Then, turning, she looked back at the mechanic. At that
moment his face and shoulders were on a level with her window. To
her surprise, she recognized the man as their host, the owner of
the cottage.
In a few moments a stout arm struck the roof over her head, and
resounding blows shook the cottage sturdily, while a few old
shingles flew past her window and troubled the pine-tree, which,
shivering at the indignity, cast them to the moss below.
To escape the clamor, Miss Worcester tossed on her straw hat and
fled below stairs. Her friends were all out and the house was
empty. She wandered about such of the lower rooms as she had the
right to enter, for a few moments, and then strolled out aimlessly
into the grove. She flung herself down on the pine needles in
the idle reverie of youth and ease and health; no graver purpose
in life than to escape the noise of a shingler’s hammer appeared
to her. When the blows upon the roof had ceased she rose and
went back. At the foot of the pine-tree, with his ladder on his
shoulder, unexpectedly stood the man.
He was a well-built man, young and attractive to the eye. He did
not look as rugged as his class, and showed, proportionately, more
refinement. His eyes were dark and large, and had the sadness of a
misunderstood dog. He raised them in one swift look to the young
girl. She drifted by in her white dress with her straw hat on her
arm; her hair was tumbled and bright; a little spot on one cheek,
where she had rested it upon her arm, burned red. She smiled and
said something, she did not know what. The mechanic lifted his old
straw hat: the little act had the ease of town-bred gentlemen;
something about it surprised the young lady, and she lingered a
moment.
“And so you mend the roof for us?” she said, with her merry
sweetness. “We thank you, sir.”
“It is my business,” replied the mechanic a little coldly. But his
eyes were not cold, and they regarded her with deferent though
daring steadiness.
“You are then the carpenter. Are you sure?” she persisted
audaciously.
“That,” replied her host, after a silence in which she heard her
own heart leap, “is for you to determine.” He bowed, shouldered the
ladder which he had let drop, and passed on into the shed with it.
His lodger, with burning cheeks, fled to her room, and drew down
the green-paper shade.
The following day was Sunday, and the city lodgers in a party
attended the village church. Mary Worcester, daintily dressed and
devoutly inclined, sat with her head bowed upon the rail of the
pew before her. When the village choir recited the opening fugue
she did not move; but when the minister’s voice broke the pleasant
silence that followed, and the invocatory prayer filled the
meeting-house, she lifted her eyes to the pulpit, and behold, he
who had shingled the cottage yesterday was the preacher of to-day.
The services took their usual course. The scent of lilacs came in
at the open windows of the country church. The rustic choir sang.
The minister had an educated voice and agreeable manner. He did
not preach a great sermon, but he spoke in a manly fashion, read
the Bible without affectation, and prayed like a believer. It was
not until the close of the service that he suffered his glance to
rest upon the pew occupied by his lodgers, and thus he perceived
the deepened color and the gentle agitation of her face. Their eyes
met, and the fate of their lives was sealed.
At first they read their idyl with terror in their joy. She by her
experience of the world, he by his inexperience thereof, knew what
it meant for them to plight their troth. But Almighty Love had laid
its hand upon them: not the false god, nor the sorcerer, nor the
worldling, nor the mathematician, that steal the name,--none of
these masqueraders moved them.
* * * * *
Mary Worcester and Joseph Bayard sat under the pine-trees of the
grove behind the minister’s cottage and faced their fate.
“I am a country parson,” said the young man proudly, “and a
carpenter, as your brother will remind you. I learned the trade to
put myself through college,--a fresh-water college up in Vermont.
Never mind the name. I doubt if he has ever heard of it. My father
was the schoolmaster of our village. He was poor. My mother was an
invalid for twenty years. It cost us a good deal to take care of
her. After he died, you see it fell to me. I did the best I could
for her. She died this spring. I never could go very far away from
her. She liked to see me often, and it cost a good deal to get
suitable nurses. She needed other things, of course. I was in debt,
too, for my education. I’ve been paying that off by degrees. Take
it all, I’ve got run down, somehow. Mother used to say I had her
constitution. The people here called me to supply awhile, but they
said I had too poor health to settle without trial. I don’t wonder.
They don’t want a minister to die of consumption on their hands.”
He stopped abruptly, and cast a bitter look at the young girl’s
drooping face to see how these blows struck that gentle surface.
She did not lift it, but by the space of a breath she seemed to
stir and tremble toward him.
“I love you,” said the young man, flinging his thin hands out as if
he thrust her from him. “A carpenter-parson, without a dollar or a
pulpit he can call his own, and some day doomed to be a sick man at
that! Go! I will never ask you to be my wife. Beacon Street! Do you
think there is a man in Beacon Street who will ever love you as I
do? Try it. Go and try. Go back to your brother. Tell him I scorned
to ask you to marry me--for your sake, oh my Love!”
His voice fell into the whisper of unutterable passion and
sacrifice, and he covered his face and groaned. Then Mary Worcester
lifted her unworldly eyes and looked upon him as a woman looks but
once in life, and upon but one.
“But if,” she said, “_I_ should ask _you_?”
He gasped, and sprang to his feet. Then he saw how she trembled
before him. And she stretched up her arms. So he took her to his
heart; and before the snow fell upon the hills of Bethlehem she had
become his wife.
Life dealt with them as the coldest head on Beacon Street might
have predicted. Her brother fell at first into burning anger, and
then into a frozen rage. When the thing became inevitable, he
treated her civilly, for he was a gentleman; more than that she
never sought from him, and did not receive. She married her country
parson intelligently, deliberately, and joyously, and shared his
lot without an outcry. She knew one year of blessedness, and
treasured it as a proof of paradise to come. She knew one such year
as the saddest of us would die to know, and the gladdest could not
look upon without a pang of divine envy. She knew what love, elect,
supreme, and unspotted from the world, as the old words say, can
give a woman, and can do for her. And then she reached the chapter
where the plot turns in the beautiful, delirious story, and she
read the sequel through,--a brave, proud woman, calling herself
blessed to the end.
The minister’s health failed, as was to be foreseen. He could
not keep his parish, “as she might have known,” said Hermon
Worcester to the lady (her name was Rollins, by the way) who had
chaperoned that summer party, and whom the brother had never
succeeded in forgiving. Joseph Bayard descended from his pulpit
to his carpenter’s bench, and his high-born wife did not protest.
“A man must feel that he is at work,” she said. She mentioned the
circumstance to her brother proudly when she acknowledged the last
check; for she received her mother’s inheritance duly, and spent
it rapidly. She supplied the ailing man with such comforts as
Bethlehem had never seen. She lavished all the attainable luxuries
familiar to her youth upon the invalid in the frozen mountain
home. Nothing and no one could restrain her. It was her way, and
love’s. That divine compassion which takes possession of a woman’s
soul when passion subsides from it swept a torrent of pity and
tenderness about the enfeebled man. She persuaded him at last out
of the mountain cottage which had watched their courtship and known
their honeymoon, and carried him to Italy, where she played the
last desperate chances in the game of life and love and death that
thousands of women have staked and lost before her.
In the midst of this experiment the two returned abruptly to
America, and hid themselves in the Bethlehem cottage; and there, in
the late and bitter mountain spring, their boy was born.
The baby was a year old when his father died. Mary Bayard looked at
the frozen hills across the freezing grave. In all the world only
the mountains seemed to understand her. Her brother came up to the
funeral, and politely buried the carpenter, whose widow was civilly
invited to return to the home of her youth; but she thanked him,
and shook her head.
“I will stay here among our people. They love me, some of them.
They all loved him. I have friends here. There is no kindness
kinder than that in the hearts of country neighbors. I’ve found
that out. Beacon Street has forgotten me long ago, Hermon. There is
nothing left in common between us now.”
“At least there is your birth and training!” exclaimed her brother,
flushing hotly. “I should think,” glancing around the white
cottage, crowded with little luxuries that love and ingenuity could
hardly convert into comforts (by his standard of comfort) in that
place and climate,--“I should think you would like to come back to
a good Magee furnace and a trained maid!”
“There have been times”--she began slowly, but checked herself.
“Those are gone by now. This is the place where I have been a happy
woman.”
“There is something in that,” replied the man of business in a
softer tone. He looked at her a trifle wistfully.
A certain tenderness for her returned in his heart after that. He
cared for her as he could, sometimes taking the chilly journey
to see her in winter, and spending a part of every summer in the
Bethlehem cottage.
Thus he came to discover in himself a root of interest in the boy.
When the child was three years old, he induced his sister to come
to Boston to consult a famous physician.
“She is dying of no disease,” he told the doctor irritably. “She
had fine health. That ailing fellow wore it all out. He was a heavy
burden. She carried everything--for years. She spent almost all her
property on him: it was not trusteed; it is nearly gone; I couldn’t
help it. She has spent herself in the same way. She is that kind of
woman.”
“I have seen such,” replied the physician gently, “but not too many
of them. I may as well tell you at the outset that I can probably
do nothing for her.”
Nor could he. She lingered, smiling and quiet, in her brother’s
house for a few months; then begged to be taken home. Fires were
kindled in the mountain cottage, and the affectionate villagers
brought in their house-plants to welcome her; and there, on the
morning after her return, they found her with her cheek turned upon
the soft curls of the child’s head. The boy was asleep. But he
waked when he was spoken to. It was his uncle who took him from his
mother’s arms.
They buried her beside her husband; and her husband’s people wept
about her grave, for they had loved this strange and gentle lady;
and they cut their white geraniums and heliotrope to bring to the
funeral, and sighed when they saw the cottage under the pine grove
stripped and closed. For the boy was taken to the home of his
mother’s girlhood, and reared there as she had been; delicately,
and as became a lad of gentle birth, who will do what is expected
of him, and live like the rest of his world.
III.
It had always been considered a mistake that the Professors’ houses
stood on the “morning side” of the street. But this, like many
another architectural or social criticism, was of more interest to
the critic than to the criticised. In point of fact, the western
faces of the dwellings consecrated to the Faculty received the
flood tide of the sea of sun that rose and ebbed between Cesarea
and Wachusett. A man’s study, a child’s nursery, a woman’s
sewing-room, fled the front of the house as a matter of course; and
the “afternoon side” of the dwelling welcomed them bountifully.
As Professor Carruth had been heard to say, that side of the street
on which a man is born may determine his character and fate beyond
repeal. The observation, if true, is tenfold truer of a woman, to
whom a house is a shell, a prison, or a chrysalis.
The Professor’s daughter, who had not been born in Cesarea, but
in the city of New York, took turns at viewing her father’s home
in one of these threefold aspects. On that winter day of which we
have already spoken, she might, if urged to it, have selected the
least complimentary of the three terms. The day had been bleak,
bright, and interminable. She had tried to take the morning walk
to the post-office, which all able-bodied Cesareans penitentially
performed six days in the week; and had been blown home in that
state just so far from adding another to the list of “deaths from
exposure” that one gets no sympathy, and yet so near to this result
that one must sit over the register the rest of the morning to thaw
out.
After dinner she had conscientiously resumed her study of
Herbert Spencer’s Law of Rhythm, but had tossed the book away
impatiently,--she was metaphysical only when she was bored,--and
had joined her mother at the weekly mending-basket. The cold, she
averred, had struck in. Her brain was turning to an icicle--like
that. She pointed to the snow-man which the boys in the
fitting-school had built in front of the pump that supplied their
dormitories with ice-water for toilet uses; this was carried the
length of the street in dripping pails whose overflow froze upon
one’s boots.
There had been a rain before this last freeze, and the head of the
snow-man (carefully moulded, and quite Greek) had turned into a
solid ball of ice.
This chilly gentleman rose, imposingly from behind a desk of snow.
Manuscripts of sleet lay in his frozen hand. An old silk hat, well
glazed with drippings from the elm-tree, was pitched irreverently
upon the back of his head.
“They say,” replied Mrs. Carruth complainingly, “that the snow-man
is meant to take off one of the Professors.”
“Do they? I should think he might be. Which one?” answered the
Professor’s daughter. Her languid eyes warmed into merriment. “I
call that fun.”
“I call it irreverent,” sighed the Professor’s wife. “I call it
profane.”
“Now, Mother!” The young lady laid a green, theological stocking
across her shapely knee, and pulled the toe through the foot
argumentatively. “Don’t you think that is a little over-emphasized?”
Mrs. Carruth lifted her mild, feminine countenance from that shirt
of the Professor’s which she always found absorbing,--the one whose
button-holes gave out, while the buttons stayed on. She regarded
her daughter with a puzzled disapproval. She was not used to such
phrases as “over-emphasis” when she was young.
“Helen, Helen,” she complained, “you do not realize what a trial
you are to me. If there is anything sacrilegious or heretical to
be found anywhere, you are sure to--to--you are certain to find it
interesting,” ended the mother vaguely.
“See, Mother! See!” interrupted Helen. Her laugh bubbled merrily
through the sewing-room. “Just look out of the window, and see! The
boys have stuck a whisk broom for a feather in the snow professor’s
hat! And now they’re giving him spectacles and a fountain pen. What
delicious heresy, isn’t it, Mother? Come and look!”
But after these trifling and too frequent conflicts with her
mother, Helen never failed to feel a certain reaction and
depression. She evaded the mending-basket that afternoon as soon as
possible, and slipped into her own room; which, as we have said,
was in a wing of the house, and looked from east to west. She could
not see the snow professor here. Nobody now accused her of heresy.
The shouts of the boys had begun to die away. Only the mountains
and the great intervale were peacefully visible from the warm
window. Through the cold one the Theological Seminary occupied the
perspective solidly.
Nature had done a good deal for the Christian religion, or at
least for that view of it represented by our Seminary, when
that institution was established at Cesarea, a matter of nearly
a century ago. But art had not in this instance proved herself
the handmaid of religion. The theological buildings, a row of
three,--Galilee and Damascus Halls to right and left of the ancient
chapel,--rose grimly against the cold Cesarea sky. These buildings
were all of brick, red, rectangular, and unrelieved; as barren
of ornament or broken lines as a packing-box, and yet curiously
possessed of a certain dignity of their own; such as we see in
aged country folk unfashionably dressed, but sure of their local
position. Not a tremor seemed ever to disturb the calm, red faces
of these old buildings, when the pretty chapel and the graceful
library of modern taste crept in under the elms of the Seminary
green to console the spirit of the contemporary Cesarean, who has
visited the Louvre and the Vatican as often as the salary will
allow; who has tickets to the Symphony Concerts in Boston, and
feels no longer obliged to conceal the fact that he occasionally
witnesses a Shakespearean play.
Helen Carruth, for one, did not object to the old red boxes, and
held them in respect; not for their architectural qualities, it
must be owned, nor because of the presence therein of a hundred
young men for whose united or separate personalities she had never
cared a fig. But of the Cesarean sunsets, which are justly famous,
she was observant with the enthusiasm of a girl who has so little
social occupation that a beautiful landscape is still an object of
attention, even of affection. And where does reflected sunset take
to itself the particular glory that it takes on Cesarea Hill?
The Professor’s daughter was in the habit of watching from her
eastern window to see that row of old buildings take fire from the
western sky behind her; window after window, four stories of them,
thirty-two to a front on either side, and the solemn disused chapel
in the midst. It would have been a pleasant sight to any delicate
eye; but to the girl, with her religiously trained imagination
and unoccupied fancy, it was a beautiful and a poetic one. She
had learned to watch for it on sunny days in her lonely Cesarea
winters,--between her visits to New York or Boston. Now Damascus
Hall, and now Galilee, received the onset of flame; now this floor
reflected it, and now that; certain windows became refracting
crystals, and flung the gorgeous color back; certain others drew it
in and drank it down into their glowing hearts. One--belonging to
a northwest corner room in Galilee Hall--blazed magnificently on
that evening of which we tell. It attracted her eye, and held it,
for the fiery flood rolled up against that old sash and seemed to
break there, and pour in, deep into the unseen room, deeper than
any other spot could hold. That window breathed fire as martyrs do,
in ecstasy. It seemed to inhale and exhale beauty and death like a
living thing whose doom was glory, and whose glory was doom. But
the splendid panorama was always swift; she had to catch it while
it lasted; moments unrolled and furled it. She stood with uplifted
arm between her lace curtains; her eyes smiled, and her lips were
parted. The old Bible similes of her childhood came inevitably even
upon her lighter moods. It was not religious emotion, but the power
of association and poetic perception which made her say aloud:--
“And the city had no need of the sun ... to shine in it, for the
glory of God did lighten it.”
As the words fell from her lips the sun dropped beyond Wachusett.
The fire flashed, and ran, and faded. Cold, dull, delicate colors
replaced the glory on Galilee Hall; the burst of gold had burned
out and melted; the tints of cool precious stones crept upon the
window whose display had pleased her. She passed her hand over her
eyes, for she was blinded by the dazzling effect. When she looked
again, she noticed that the old white shade in the northwest corner
room was drawn.
She turned away, feeling an unreasonable sense of discomfort, as if
she had been rebuffed in an unconscious intrusion. At that moment
she heard her father moving about his study, which was below her
room. The sound of flying slippers and the creak of his whirling
study-chair indicated that his work was over for the day, and that
he was about to take his evening pilgrimage to the post-office. His
daughter ran down to see him.
He glanced up from the arctic overshoes which he was tugging on
over his boots, with a relieved and pleasant look.
“Ah, Helen! You are just in time. I need you, my child. Just write
out some invitations for me, will you?--in your mother’s name. She
seems to be too much absorbed in some domestic duties to attend
to it, and I _must_ have those omitted men to tea this week. Your
mother says she can’t have them to-morrow on account of--I have
forgotten the reason, but it was an important one.”
“She has some preserves to scald over. Yes,” said Helen, with
ripples in her eyes, “I think they are quinces. At any rate, it is
of national importance. Friday, did you say? Certainly. I will have
them written by the time you have selected your cane, Father. Who
are these? The A’s? Or the C’s?”
“They are the B’s,” answered the Professor, looking over his
assortment of handsome canes with the serious interest of a
sophomore. If the Professor of Theology had one human weakness, it
was for handling a fine cane. This luxury was to him what horses,
yachts, and dry wines may be to different men. His daughter was
quite right in assuming that the notes of invitation would be
written before he had suited himself out of a dozen possibilities
to his delicate Oriental grapestick with the heavy ivory handle.
“They are the B’s,” he repeated abstractedly. “Two B’s, and--yes,
one C. One of the B’s I would not overlook on any account. He is
that B who was preëngaged, for some reason, in the autumn. He must
be invited again. His uncle is one of the Trustees. There’s the
catalogue; you’ll find the address--Galilee Hall, Bayard, Emanuel.
Don’t make a mistake, my dear; and I hope you will take pains to be
at home and help us entertain them.”
“I was going in to the concert,” said Helen disappointedly, pausing
with her pen suspended. “I meant to spend the night with Clara
Rollins. But--no, I won’t, Father, if you care about it.”
“Thank you, my dear,” he said gently. He kissed her as he went
out, and Helen smiled contentedly; she was deeply attached to her
father. In his home the Professor of Theology was the most loving
and beloved of men.
There came up a warm storm that week, and by Friday Cesarea Hill
swam in a sea of melted snow. The two B’s and one C waded their way
to their Professor’s house to tea that evening, across rills and
rivers of ice-water, and through mounds of slush. Bayard sank over
rubbers amid-stream more than once; he wore the usual evening shoe
of society. He was always a well-dressed man, having never known
any other way of living. It was different with his fellow-students.
That one C, for example, who strode across the Seminary green in
comfort and rubber boots, had provided, it seemed, no other method
of appearance within doors. His pantaloons were tucked into the
rubber boots at the knees, and had the air of intending to stay
there.
“Look here, man!” gasped Bayard, as the young men removed their
overcoats in the large and somewhat stately hall of the Professor’s
house. “You have forgotten your shoes!”
“I have some slippers in my pockets, if you think them necessary,”
replied the other. “You know more about such things than I do.”
The speaker produced a pair of slippers, worked in worsted by his
sister; a white rose ornamented the toe of each. As he stooped to
put them on, Bayard observed that the man wore a flannel shirt of
the blue-gray tint at that time preferred by day laborers, and that
he was guiltless of linen.
The three guests entered the drawing-room, headed by the flannel
shirt. The one C sat down on the largest satin easy-chair,
stretching his embroidered slippers on the Persian rug with such
dignified unconsciousness of the unusual as one might go far to see
outside of Cesarea, and might not witness once in a lifetime there.
Occupied with the embarrassment of this little incident, Bayard did
not notice at first that the daughter of the house was absent from
the parlor. He fell to talking with his favorite Professor eagerly;
they were deep in the discussion of the doctrine of election as
taught in a rival seminary, by a more liberal chair, when Mrs.
Carruth drew the attention of her husband to the gentleman of the
flannel shirt, and seated herself by Bayard.
“I hope you are not very hungry?” she began in her literal voice.
“We are waiting for my daughter. She attends the Symphony Concerts
Fridays, and the coach is late to-night from the five o’clock
train.”
“Oh, that coach!” laughed Bayard. “I walk--if I want my supper.”
“And so did I,” said a soft voice at his side.
“Why, Helen, Helen!” complained the Professor’s wife.
The young lady stood serenely, awaiting her father’s introduction
to the three students. She bowed sedately to the other B and the C.
Her eyes scintillated when she turned back to Bayard. She seemed
to be brimming over with suppressed amusement. She took the chair
beside him, for her mother (who never trusted Cesarea service to
the exclusion of the old-fashioned, housewifely habit of looking at
her table before her guests sat down) had slipped from the room.
“You _walk_ from the station--a mile--in this going?” began Bayard,
laughing.
“No;” she shook her head. “I waded. But I got here. The coach had
nine inside and five on top. It hasn’t come yet. I promised Father
I’d be here, you see.”
Bayard’s quick eye observed that Miss Carruth was in dinner dress;
her gown was silk, and purple, and fitted her remarkably well; she
had a sumptuous figure; he reflected that she had taken the time
and trouble to dress for these three theologues as she would have
done for a dinner in town. He saw that she gave one swift glance at
the man in the flannel shirt, who was absorbed in the Professor’s
story about the ordination of somebody who was rejected on the
doctrine of probation.
But after that she looked at the student’s head, which was good.
Upon the details of his costume no eye in the drawing-room
rested that evening, again. That student went out from Cesarea
Seminary to be a man of influence and intellect; his name became a
distinguished one, and in his prime society welcomed him proudly.
But if the Professor’s family had been given the catalogue and
the Inquisition to identify him, it may be questioned whether
thumbscrews would have wrung his name from them. It being one of
the opportunities of Christianity that it may make cultivated
gentlemen out of poor and ignorant boys, Cesarea ladies take pride
in their share of the process.
At tea--for Cesarea still held to her country tradition of an
early dinner--Bayard found himself seated opposite the Professor’s
daughter. The one C sat beside her, and she graciously proceeded to
bewitch that gentleman wholly out of his wits, and half out of his
theology. Bayard heard her talking about St. Augustine. She called
him an interesting monomaniac.
The table was served in the manner to which Bayard was used, and
was abundantly lighted by candles softly shaded in yellow. In
the pleasant shimmer, in her rich dress, with the lace at her
throat and wrists, she seemed, by pretty force of contrast with
the prevailing tone of the village, the symbol of beauty, ease,
and luxury. Bayard thought how preëminent she looked beside that
fellow in the shirt. He could not help wondering if she would seem
as imposing in Beacon Street. After a little study of the subject
he concluded that it would not make much difference. She was not
precisely a beautiful woman, but she was certainly a woman of
beauty. What was she? Blonde? She had too much vigor. But--yes. Her
hair was as yellow as the gold lining of rich silverware. She was
one of the bright, deep orange blondes; all her coloring was warm
and brilliant. Only her eyes struck him as inadequate; languid,
indifferent, and not concerned with her life. She gave the unusual
effect of dark eyes with bright hair.
While he was thinking about her in the interludes of such chat
as he could maintain with her mother, who had asked him twice
whether he graduated this year, Miss Carruth turned unexpectedly
and addressed him. The remark which she made was not original;
it was something about the concerts: Did he not go in often? She
had not asked the one C if _he_ attended the Symphony Concerts.
But Mrs. Carruth now inquired of that gentleman if he liked the
last preparatory lecture. The Professor was engaging the attention
of the other B. And Bayard and Helen Carruth fell to conversing,
undisturbed, across the pleasant table.
He felt at home despite himself, in that easy atmosphere, in that
yellow light. The natural sense of luxury crept around him softly.
He thought of his northwest room over there, rocking in the gale,
and of the big dish of apples at the club table. He thought of
the self-denials and deprivations, little and large, which had
accompanied his life at Cesarea; he tried to remember why he had
chosen to do this or suffered that.
His ascetic ideals swam and blurred a little before the personality
of this warm, rich, human girl. There was something even in the
circumstance of eating quail on toast, and sipping chocolate from
a Dresden cup in an antique Dutch spoon, which was disturbing to
the devout imagination--in Cesarea.
Over his sensitive face his high, grave look passed suddenly, like
the reflection thrown from some unseen, passing light.
“I had better be at my room and at work,” he thought.
At that moment he became aware of a change in the expression of the
Professor’s daughter. Her languid eye had awaked. She was regarding
him with puzzled but evident attention. He threw off his momentary
depression with ready social ease, and gayly said:--
“You look as if you were trying to classify a subject, Miss
Carruth; as if you wanted to put something in its place and
couldn’t do it.”
“I am,” she admitted. “I do.”
“And you succeed?”
“No.” She shook her head again. “I do not find the label. I give it
up.” She laughed merrily, and Bayard joined in the laugh. But to
himself he said:--
“She does me the honor to investigate me. Plainly I am not the one
C. Clearly I am not the other B. Then what? She troubles herself to
wonder.”
Then he remembered how many generations of theological students
had been the subject of the young lady’s gracious and indifferent
observation. She was, perhaps, twenty-five years old, and they had
filed through that dining-room alphabetically--the A’s, the B’s,
the C’s, the X’s and the Z’s--since she came, in short dresses,
to Cesarea, when her father gave up his New York parish for the
Chair of Theology. It occurred to Bayard that she might have ceased
to find either the genus or the species theologus of thrilling
personal interest, by this time.
Then the Professor mentioned to the other B a certain feature of
the famous Presbyterian trial for heresy, at that time wrenching
the religious world. Bayard turned to listen, and the discussion
which followed soon absorbed him.
The face of the Professor of Theology grew grave as he approached
the topic of his favorite heresy. Stern lines cut themselves about
his fine mouth. His gentle eyes darkened. He felt keenly the
responsibility of the influence that he bore over his students,
even in hours of what he called social relaxation, and the
necessity of defending the truth was vividly present to his trained
conscience. Bayard watched his host with troubled admiration. It
was with a start that he heard a woman’s voice sweetly breaking in
upon the conversation. She was speaking to the guest of the flannel
shirt.
“Oh, have you seen the snow professor since the rain? He’s melted
into such a lovely slush!”
“Helen!” rebuked her mother plaintively. “Helen, Helen!”
But the Professor smiled,--a warm smile peculiar to himself. He
shot a tender look across the table at his daughter. He did not
resume the subject of the Presbyterian trial.
“The trouble with the snow professor,” suggested Bayard, “is that
he had the ice in his head, but the sun at his heart.”
Helen Carruth turned quickly towards him. Her glance lingered into
a look distinctly personal and indistinctly grateful. She made no
answer, but her eyes and the student’s understood each other.
IV.
It is manifestly as unfair to judge of a place by its March as to
judge a man’s disposition by the hour before dinner. As the coldest
exteriors may conceal the warmest loves, so the repelling Cesarean
winter holds in store one of the most alluring summers known to
inland New England. The grass is riper, the flowers richer, the
ranks of elms are statelier, the skies are gentler, and the people
happier than could be expected of Cesarean theology. Nay, theology
itself unbends in April, softens in May, warms in June, and grows
sunny and human by the time the students are graduated and turned
loose upon the world,--a world which is, on the whole, so patient
with their inexperience, and so ready to accept as spiritual
leaders men whose own life’s lessons are yet to be learned, and
whose own views of the great mysteries which they dare to interpret
are so much more assured than they will be ten years later.
Emanuel Bayard and Helen Carruth walked together beneath the
ancient trees that formed the great cross upon the Seminary green.
The snow professor was melted out of existence; head of ice and
lecture of sleet had vanished months ago. Dandelions glittered
in the long grass. Sparrows built nests under the awful chapel
eaves. It was moonlight and warm,--a June night,--and the elms cast
traceries of fine shadows, like a net, about the feet of the young
people; they seemed to become entangled in the meshes, as they
strolled up and down and to and fro, after the simple fashion of
the town; which pays no more attention to a couple sauntering in
broad day, or broad moonlight, in the sight of gods and men, across
the Seminary “yard,” than it does to the sparrows in the chapel
eaves.
They were not lovers, these two; hardly friends, at least in the
name of the thing; she was not an accessible girl, and he was a
preoccupied man. A certain comfortable acquaintance, such as grows
without drama in the quiet society of university towns, had brought
them together, as chance led, without distinct volition on the part
of either. He would graduate in three days. He had called to say
good-by to the Professor’s family, and had taken Miss Helen out
to see the shadows on the cross where the paths met--the mild and
accepted form of dissipation in Cesarea; for Professors’ daughters.
They walked without agitation, and talked without sentiment. Truth
to tell, their talk was serious, above their years, and beyond
their relation.
The fact was that Emanuel Bayard had that spring with difficulty
received his license to preach. There was a flaw in his theology.
The circumstance was momentous to him. His uncle, for one thing,
had been profoundly displeased; had rebuked, remonstrated, and
commanded; had indeed gone so far as to offend his nephew with
threats of a nature which the young man did not divulge to Miss
Carruth, for his natural reserve was deep. She had noticed that
he did not confide in her as readily as the other students she
had known. But he had told her enough. The Professor’s daughter,
too well used to the ecclesiastical machinery and ferment of the
day, was as familiar with its phases and phrases as other girls
are with the steps of a cotillion or the matrimonial chances of a
watering-place. She knew quite well the tremendous importance of
what had happened.
“I understand,” she said in her deep, rich, almost boyish voice,
“I understand it all perfectly. You wouldn’t say you did, when you
didn’t.”
“How _could_ I?” interrupted Bayard.
“You couldn’t, and so they stirred up that fuss. You were more
honest than the other fellows. And you were punished for it.”
“You are good to put it in that way, but what right have I to
take it in that way?” urged Bayard wistfully. “The other fellows
are just as good men as I; better, most of them. Fenton passed
all right, and the rest. I don’t feel inclined to parade my
ecclesiastical honesty and set myself above them,--in my own mind,
I mean. I have dropped below them in everybody else’s; of course I
know that.”
“Whom do you mean by everybody else?” demanded Helen quickly.
“Your uncle, Mr. Hermon Worcester? The Trustees? The Faculty? And
those old men on the council? Oh, I know them! Haven’t I dined and
breakfasted on Councils and Faculties ever since we came here?
Haven’t I eaten and drunken and breathed Trustees and doctrines,
and what is sound, and what isn’t, and--Don’t you tell, but I
never was afraid of a Trustee in my life--never! I don’t know
another soul in Cesarea who isn’t,--not even my father. When I was
a little girl, I used to ruffle up their beaver hats the wrong
way, out in the hall, so they would look dissipated when they went
over to the chapel. Then I hid behind the door to see. But I never
told of it--before. You won’t tell your uncle, will you? I hid a
kitten in his hat, once, and when he came out of the study the
hat was walking all over the hall floor, without visible means of
locomotion.”
Bayard laughed, as she had meant he should. The tense expression of
his face relaxed; she watched him narrowly.
“Come,” she said in a changed tone, “take me home, please. The
house is full of Anniversary company. I ought to be there.”
He turned at her command, and took her towards her father’s house.
They walked in silence down the long Seminary path. She was dressed
in light muslin with a violet on it, and wore ribbons that matched
the violet. She had a square of white lace thrown over her bright
hair. The meshes of the tracery from the elm-trees fell thickly
under her quick tread. At the stone posts which guarded the great
lawns, she hesitated; then set her feet resolutely out from the
delicate net into the bright spaces of the open road.
“Mr. Bayard,” she said in her clear voice, “you _are_ an honest
man. It is better to be that than to be a minister.”
“If one cannot be both,” amended Bayard. “But to start in like
this, with a slur attached to one’s name at the beginning,--I don’t
suppose you understand how it dooms a fellow, Miss Carruth. Its
equivalent would be almost enough to disbar a man in law, or to
ruin him in medicine.”
“I understand the whole miserable subject!” cried Helen hotly. “I
am sick to my soul of it! I wish”--She checked herself. “Let me
see,” she added more calmly. “What was it they tormented you about?
Eternal punishment?”
“I managed to escape on that,” said Bayard. “I don’t know anything
about it, and I said so. I think, myself, there is a good deal of
cheap talk afloat on that subject. Our newspapers and novels are
full of it. It is about the only difficult doctrine in theology
that outsiders understand the relations of; so they stick on that,
and make the most of it. It is an easy way of making the Christian
religion intolerable--if one wants to. My difficulty was rather
with--I see you know something of our technical terms--with what we
call verbal inspiration.”
“Oh yes.” Helen nodded. “Whether ‘The Lord will have war with
Amalek from generation to generation’ was inspired by Almighty
God; or ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,--Reuben, Gad, and Asher,
and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali,’ and all that. I know.... Inspired
moonshine! I am a little bit of a heretic myself, Mr. Bayard; but
I’m not--I’m not as honest as you; I’m not pious, either.”
“I hope you don’t think _I_ am _pious_!” began Bayard resentfully.
But she laughed sweetly in his frowning face. They stood at her
father’s high stone steps. The Anniversary company were chatting in
the parlors.
“Good-night,” she said in a lower tone; and then more gently, “and
good-by.”
He started slightly at the word; turned as if he would have said
something, but said it not. He took her hand in silence; then
perceived that she had withdrawn it suddenly, coldly, it seemed,
and had vanished from him up the steps of stone.
He walked back to Galilee Hall slowly. His bent eyes traced the
net of shadows around his reluctant feet. What was that? Inspired
moonshine? Inspired moonshine! He lifted his face and looked abroad
on Cesarea Hill.
His head was heavy, and his heart throbbed. Perhaps at that moment,
if he had been asked which was the greater mystery, God or woman,
this honest man could not have answered.
With sudden hunger for solitude, he went to his room. But it
was full of fellow-students. Fenton was there, and Tompkinton,
Jaynes, Bent, and Holt, and the middler. They received him noisily,
and he sat down among them. They related the stories current
in denominational circles,--ecclesiastical jokes and rumors of
sectarian conflicts; they interchanged gossip about who was called
where, and what churches were said to lack supplies, the figures
of salaries, the statistics of revivals, and the prospects of
settlement open to the senior class.
Bayard listened silently. His heart was not with them, nor in their
talk. Yet he criticised himself for criticising them. Besides, _he_
had received no call to settle anywhere.
Almost alone among the intellectual men of his class, he found
himself, at the end of his preparatory education, undesired and
unsummoned by the churches to fill a pulpit of them all.
He had done his share, like the rest, of that preliminary preaching
which decides the future of a man in his profession; but he
stood, on the eve of his graduation, among his mates, marked and
quivering,--this sensitive fellow,--that most miserable of all
educated, restless, and wretched young men with whom our land
abounds, “a minister without a call.”
He had said nothing to Helen Carruth about this. A man does not
tell a woman such things until he has to.
Something in his face struck the students quiet after a while, and
they dropped away from the room. His friend Fenton made the move.
“It is said,” he whispered to Tompkinton, as they clattered down
the dusty stairs of Galilee Hall, “that his trouble with that New
Hampshire Council has followed him. It is reported that his license
did not come easily. It has got abroad that he is not sound.
Nothing could be more unfortunate--or more unnecessary,” added
Fenton in his too cheerful voice. There had been no doubt of _his_
theology. _He_ had received three calls. As yet he had accepted
none. He expected to be married in the fall, and looked for a
larger salary.
Suddenly he stopped and clapped his hands to his head.
“Bayard!” he called loudly. “Bayard, come to the window a minute!”
The outline of Bayard’s fine head appeared faintly in the
third-story window, against the background of his unlighted room.
The moon was so bright that his face seemed to be a white flame, as
he looked down on his classmates from that height.
“I brought up your mail,” said Fenton, “and forgot to tell you.
You’ll find a letter lying on your table behind the third volume of
Dean Alford. You keep your room so dark I was afraid you mightn’t
see it.”
Bayard thanked him, and groped for the letter; but he did not
light the lamp to read it; he sat on in the moonlit room, alone
and still. His heart was hot within him as he remembered how the
students talked. That vision which sets a man apart from his
fellows, and thus makes him miserable or blessed, or both, beckoned
to him with distant, shining finger. His face fell into his hands.
Great God! what did it mean to take upon one’s self that sacred
Name in which a Christian preacher stands before his fellow-men?
What had common pettiness or envy, narrow fear or little weakness,
to do with the soul of a teacher of holiness? How easy to quibble
and evade, and fall into rank! How hard to stand apart, to look the
cannon in the eye, alone!
It is not easy for men of the world, of ordinary business,
pleasure, politics, and those professions whose standards are
pliable, to understand the noble civil war between the nature and
the position of a man like Bayard; and yet it might be worth while
to try.
There is something so much higher and more delicate than our own
common standards of ethics that it is refining to respect, even if
we fail to comprehend, the struggles of a man who aspires to the
possession of perfect spiritual honor.
Bayard had not moved nor lifted his face from his hands, when a
step which he recognized heavily struck and slowly mounted the
lower flight of the old stairs of Galilee Hall. It was his uncle,
Trustee of Cesarea Seminary, and of the faith of its founders,
returning from the home of the Professor of Hebrew, where he had
been entertained on Anniversary week.
Bayard sighed and groped for a match. This interview could not be
evaded, but he winced away from it in every nerve. It is easier to
face the obloquy of the world than the frown of the man or woman
who has brought us up.
Hermon Worcester was bitterly mortified that Emanuel had received
no “call.” He had not said so, yet, but his nephew knew that this
well-bred reserve had reached its last breath. As Bayard struck the
light, he perceived the forgotten letter in his hand, and, perhaps
thinking to defer a painful scene for a moment, said, “Your pardon,
Uncle,” and tore the envelope.
The letter contained a formal and unanimous call from the seaside
parish whose vacant pulpit he had been supplying for six weeks to
become their pastor.
* * * * *
“Helen! Helen!”
The mild, cultivated whine of the Professor’s wife complained
through the hot house.
Helen ran in dutiful response. It was late, and the Anniversary
guests had scattered to their rooms. The girl was partly undressed
for the night, and stood in her doorway gathering her cashmere
wrapper about her tall, rich form. Mrs. Carruth looked through the
half-open door of her own room.
“I cannot get your father out of his study, Helen,” she urged
plaintively. “He has one of his headaches at the base of the
brain--and those extra Faculty meetings before him this week, with
all the rest. Do go down and see if you can’t send him up to bed.”
Helen buttoned her white gown to the throat, and ran softly
downstairs to the study. The Professor of Theology sat at his
study table with a knot between his eyes. A pile of catalogues lay
before him; he was jotting down statistics with his gold pencil on
old-fashioned foolscap paper. He pushed the paper aside when he
saw his daughter, and held out his hand to her, smiling. She went
straight to him as if she had been a little girl, and knelt beside
him, crossing her hands on his knee. He put his arm around her; his
stern face relaxed.
“You are to put the entire system of Orthodox theology away and
come to bed, Papa,” she said, with her sweet imperiousness. “Mother
says you have a headache at the base of something. It is pretty
late--and it worries her. What are you doing? Counting theologues?
Counting theologues! At your time of life! As if you couldn’t find
anything better to do! What is this?” She caught up a stray slip of
paper. “‘Deaf--deaf as an adder: 10. Blind--stone-blind: 6.’ What
in the name of--Anniversary week does _that_ mean?”
“That is a personal memorandum,” said the Professor, flushing.
“Tear it up, Helen.”
“I know,” said Helen, nodding. “It’s a private classification
of theologues. Which does it catalogue, their theology or their
intellects? Come, Papa!”
“I’ll never tell you!” laughed the Professor, shutting his thin,
scholarly lips. And he never did. But the laugh had gained the
point, as she intended. He took his German student lamp and started
upstairs. Helen walked through the long, dim hall with her two
hands clasped lovingly upon his arm.
“I _am_ bothered,” admitted the Professor, stopping at the foot of
the stairs, “about one of my boys. He is rather a favorite with me.
There isn’t a finer intellect in the senior class.”
“But how about his Christianity, Father?” asked the girl
mischievously.
“His _Christianity_ is all right, so far as I know,” admitted the
Professor slowly. “It is his theology that is the hitch. He isn’t
sound. He has received no call.”
“Do I know him?” asked Helen in a different tone.
The Professor of Theology turned, and held his student lamp at
arm’s length above his daughter’s face, which he scanned in silence
before he said:--
“I am not prepared to answer that question, Helen. Whether you know
him I can’t say; I really cannot say whether you know him or not.
I’m not sure whether I do, myself. But I am much annoyed about the
matter. It is a misfortune to the Seminary, and a mortification to
the young man.”
He kissed his daughter tenderly, and went upstairs with the weary
tread of a professional man at the end of a long day’s work.
Helen went to her own room and shut the door. But she did not light
the candles. She sat down at her open window, in the hot, night
wind. She leaned her cheek against her bare arm, from which the
loose sleeve fell away. The elms were in such rich leaf that she
could see the Seminary buildings only in broken outline now. But
there was wind enough to lift and toss the branches, and through
one of the rifts in the green wall she noticed that a light was
burning in the third-story northwest corner of Galilee Hall.
It was past midnight before she went to bed. As she closed her
blinds, for the first time in her life, the Professor’s daughter
did deliberately, and of self-acknowledged intention, stoop to take
a look at the window of a student.
“His light is still burning,” she thought. “What can be the matter?”
Then she flushed red with a beautiful self-rebuke, and fled to her
white pillow.
Night deepened into perfect silence on Cesarea Hill. The last light
in Galilee Hall went out. The moon rode on till morning. In the
deserted green the clear-cut paths shone wide and long, and the
great white cross lay as if nailed to its place, all night, between
the Seminary and the Professor’s house.
V.
“Goshamighty, stand off there! Who in ---- are _you_?”
This candid remark was addressed by a fisherman in blue flannel
shirtsleeves to a gentleman in afternoon dress. It was in the month
of September, and the fleets were busy in and off the harbor of the
fishing-town. The autumn trips were well under sail, and the docks
and streets of Windover buzzed and reeled with crews just anchored
or about to weigh. At the juncture of the principal business avenue
of the town with its principal nautical street--from a date passing
the memory of living citizens irreverently named Angel Alley--a
fight was in brisk progress. This was so common an incident in that
part of the town that the residents had paid little attention to
it. But the stranger, being a stranger, had paused and asked for a
policeman.
The bystanders stared.
“There ain’t none nigher’n the station,” replied a girl who was
watching the fight with evident relish. She wore a pert sailor hat
of soiled white straw, set on one side of her head, and carried
her hands in the pockets of a crumpled tan-colored reefer. Her
eyes were handsome and bold. The crowd jostled her freely, which
did not seem to trouble her. “There’s a fellow just arrested,”
she explained cheerfully, “for smashing his wife with a coal-hod;
they’re busy with him down to the station. He fit all the way over.
It took four cops to hold him. Most the folks are gone over there
to see the other game. This fun here won’t be spoiled just yet
awhile.”
Something in the expression with which the gentleman regarded her
attracted the girl’s attention. She took her hands out of her
pockets, and scanned him with a dull surprise; then, with a motion
which one could not call abashed, but which fell short of her
previous ease of manner, she turned her back and walked a little
away towards the edge of the crowd.
The fight was at its hottest. Two men, an Italian laborer and
an American fisherman, were somewhat seriously belaboring each
other, to their own undisguised satisfaction and the acclamation
of the bystanders. Both were evidently more or less drunk. An open
grogshop gaped behind them. Similar places of entertainment, with
others less easily described, lined both sides of Angel Alley,
multiplying fruitfully, till the wharves joined their grimy hands
and barred the way to this black fertility.
It was a windy day; the breeze was rising, and the unseen sea could
be heard moaning beyond.
Just as the stranger, with the indiscretion of youth and
inexperience, was about to step into the ring and try to stop
the row, a child pushed through the crowd. It was a boy; a little
fellow, barely four or five years old. He ducked under the elbows
and between the legs of the spectators with an adroitness which
proclaimed him the son of a sailor, and ran straight to the
combatants, crying:
“Father! Fa--ther! Marm says to please to stop! She says to ax you
to _please_ to stop, and come home wiv you’ little boy!”
He ran between the two men, and put up his little dirty fingers
upon his father’s big, clenched hand; he repeated piteously,
“Father, Fa--ther, Fa--ther!”
But more than this the little fellow had not time to say. The
father’s dark, red face turned a sudden, ominous purple, and before
any person of them all could stay him his brutal hand had turned
upon the child.
Cries of shame and horror rose from the crowd; a woman’s shriek
echoed from a window across the street, and the screams of the boy
pierced the bedlam. The Italian, partly sobered, had slunk back.
“Stop him! Part them! Hold him, somebody! He’ll kill the child!”
yelled the bystanders, and not a man of them stirred.
“Why, it’s only a _baby_!” cried the girl in the reefer, running
up. “He’ll murder it! Oh, if I was a _man_!” she raved, wringing
her hands.
At that moment, before one could have lifted the eyelash to see how
it fell, a well-aimed blow struck the brute beneath the ear. He
fell.
Hands snatched the writhing child away; his mother’s arms and
screams received him; and over the fallen man a slight, tall figure
was seen to tower. The stranger had thrown down his valise, and
tossed off his silk hat. His delicate face was as white as a star.
He quivered with holy rage. He trampled on the fellow with one
foot, and ground him down; he had the attitude of the St. Michael
in Guido’s great picture. He had that scorn and all that beauty.
A geyser of oaths spurted from the prostrate ruffian. The stranger
stooped, and pinned him skillfully until they ceased.
“Now,” he said calmly, “get up. Get up, I say!” He released his
clenched white hand from the other’s grimy flesh.
“He’ll thresh the life outen ye!” protested a voice from the
increasing crowd. “You don’t know Job Slip ’s well ’s we do. He’ll
make short work on ye, sir, if you darst let go him.”
“No, he won’t,” replied the stranger quietly. “He respects a good
blow when he feels it. He knows how it ought to be planted. He
would do as much himself, if he saw a man killing his own child.
Wouldn’t you, Job Slip?”
He stepped back fearlessly and folded his arms. The rapidly
sobering sot struggled to his feet, and instinctively squared off;
looked at the gentleman blindly for a moment, then dropped his huge
arms.
“Goshamighty!” he said, “who in ---- are _you_?”
He took one of the stranger’s delicate hands in his black and
bleeding palms, and critically examined it.
“_That?_ Why, my woman’s paw is stronger ’n’ bigger ’n _that_!”
contemptuously. “And you didn’t overdo it neither. Pity! If you’d
only made it manslaughter--why, I could ha’ sent ye up on my
antumortim deppysition.”
“Oh, I knew better than that,” replied the stranger calmly, turning
for his hat. He thought of the boxing-lessons that he used to take
on the Back Bay, years ago. Some one in the crowd brushed off the
hat with the back of a dusty elbow, and handed it respectfully to
the gentleman. The girl in the reefer picked up his valise.
“I’ve kep’ my eye on it, for you,” she said in a softened voice.
“Well,” said Job Slip slowly, “I guess _I_’ll keep my eye on _him_.”
“Do!” answered the stranger heartily. “I wish you would. They don’t
fight where I’m going.”
“Who be you, anyway?” demanded Job Slip with undisguised
admiration. He had not made up his mind yet whether to spring at
the other’s throat, or to offer him a drink.
“I’m in too much of a hurry to tell you now,” answered the
gentleman quietly. “I’ve missed the most important engagement of my
life--to save your child.”
“He’s goin’ to his weddin’,” muttered a voice behind him. The girl
started the chorus of a song which he had never heard before, and
was not anxious to hear again.
“You have a good voice,” he said, turning. “You can put it to a
better use than that.”
She stared at him, but made him no reply. The crowd parted and
scattered, and he came through into the main street.
“Sir! Sir!” called a woman’s voice from a window over his head.
The young man looked up. The mother of the little boy held the
child upon the window-sill for him to see.
“He ain’t much hurt!” she cried. “I thought you’d like to know it.
It’s all along of you. God go with you, sir! God bless you, sir!”
He had put on his hat, but removed it at these words, and stood
uncovered before the drunkard’s wife. She could not know how much
it meant to him--that day. Without looking back he strode up the
street. The Italian ran out and watched him. Job Slip hesitated
for a moment; then he did the same, following the young man with
perplexed and sodden eyes. The Italian stood amiably beside his
late antagonist. Both men had forgotten what they fought about,
now. A little group from the vanishing crowd joined them. The
mother in the window--a gaunt Madonna--shaded her eyes with her
hand to see the departing figure of the unknown while she pressed
the bruised and sobbing child against her breast. The stranger
halted at the steps of the old First Church of Windover; then ran
up lightly, and disappeared within the open doors.
“I’ll be split and salted!” said a young man who had not been
drinking, “if I don’t believe that’s the new parson come to town!”
The speaker had black eyebrows which met in a straight and heavy
line.
“I’ll be ----!” said Job Slip.
* * * * *
The church was thronged. Citizens and strangers jostled each other
in the porch, the vestibules, and the aisles. It was one of those
religious festivals so dear to the heart of New England, and
so perplexing to gayer people. No metropolitan play could have
collected a crowd like this in Windover.
The respectability of the town was out in force. The richest fish
firms, the largest ship-owners, and the oldest families shed the
little light of local glory upon the occasion. Most of them, in
fact, were members of the parish. Windover had what an irreverent
outsider had termed her codocracy. The examination--to be followed
that evening by the ordination--of the new minister was an affair
of note. Windover is not the only town on the map where the social
leaders are fond of patronizing whatever ecclesiastical interests
are dependent on the generosity of their pockets and the importance
of their names. Nothing tends to the growth of a religious sect so
much as the belief that the individual is important to it.
Upon the platform, decorated by the Ladies’ Aid Society with
taste, piety, and goldenrod, sat the Council called to examine and
to ordain Emanuel Bayard to the ministry of Christ. These were
venerable men; they drove in from the surrounding parishes in their
buggies, or took the trains from remoter towns. A few city names
had responded; one or two of them were eminent. The columns of the
“Windover Topsail” had these already set up in display type, and
the reporters in the galleries dashed them off on yellow slips of
paper.
As the minister-elect, panting with his haste, ran up the steps and
into the church, the first thing that he perceived was the eye of
one of his Cesarea Professors fastened sternly upon him. It gave
him the feeling of a naughty little boy who was late to school.
This guilty sensation was not lessened by a vision of the back of
his uncle’s bald head in an eminent seat among the lay delegates,
and by the sight of the jeweled Swiss repeater, familiar to his
infancy, too visibly suspended from Mr. Hermon Worcester’s hand.
The church clock (wearing for the occasion a wreath of purple
asters, which had received an unfortunate lurch to one side, and
gave that pious timepiece a tipsy air) charitably maintained that
Bayard was but seven minutes late. The impatience of the Council
and the anxiety of the audience seemed to aver that an hour
would not cover, nor eternity pardon, the young man’s delay. He
dropped his valise into the hand of the sexton, and strode up the
broad aisle. The dust of the street fight still showed upon his
fashionable clothes. His cheeks were flushed with his fine color.
His disordered hair clung to his white forehead in curls that the
straitest sect of the Pharisees could not have straightened. Every
woman in the audience noticed this, and liked him the better for
it. But the Council was composed of straight-haired men.
Somebody beckoned him into the minister’s room to repair damages:
and as he crossed the platform to do so, Bayard stooped and
exchanged a few whispered words with the moderator. The wrinkled
face of that gentleman changed visibly. He rose at once and said:--
“It is due to our brother and to the audience to state that your
minister-elect desires me to make his apologies to this parish for
a tardiness which he found to be unavoidable,--morally unavoidable,
I might say. And I should observe,” added the moderator,
hesitating, “that I have been requested _not_ to explain the
nature of the case, but I shall take it upon myself to defy this
injunction, and to state that an act of Christian mercy detained
our brother. I do not think,” said the moderator, dropping suddenly
from the ecclesiastical to the human tone, “that it is every man
who would have done it, under the circumstances; and I do not
consider it any less creditable for that.”
A sound of relief stirred through the house as the moderator sat
down. The audience ceased twisting its head to look at the tipsy
clock, thus enabling the Ladies’ Aid Association to get that aster
wreath for the first time out of mind. Mr. Hermon Worcester’s watch
went back to its comfortable fob. A smile melted across the anxious
face of Professor Haggai Carruth of Cesarea. The minister-elect
reappeared with plumage properly smoothed, and the proceedings of
the day set in, with the usual decorum of the denomination.
It is not a ceremonious sect, that of the Congregationalism of New
England; and its polity allows much diversity upon occasions like
these, whose programme depends a good deal upon the preference of
the moderator. Bayard’s moderator was a gray-haired, kind-hearted,
plain country minister, the oldest man in the Council, and one of
the best. It was not his intention to subject the young man to one
of the ecclesiastical roastings at that time in vogue, and for the
course of events which followed he was not responsible. This was
a matter of small moment at the time; but Bayard had afterwards
occasion to remember it.
He listened dreamily to the conventional preliminary exercises of
the afternoon. His mind was in a turmoil which poorly prepared
the young man for the intellectual and emotional strain of the
day. That scene in the street flashed and faded and reappeared
before him, like the dark lantern which an evil hand brings into
a sacred place. The blow of the man’s fist upon the child seemed
to fall crashing upon his own flesh. Across the crescendo of
the chorus of the hymn the cry of the little boy ran in piteous
discord. The organ rolled up the oaths of the wharves. While the
good, gray-haired moderator was praying, Bayard was shocked to find
that the song of the street girl ran through his burning brain.
The gaunt Madonna in the window of the drunkard’s home seemed to
be stamped--a dark photographic letter-head--upon the license to
preach the Christian religion which he was required (with more than
usual precision) to produce.
“Why,” said a sour voice suddenly at his elbow, “why do you
consider yourself a child of God?”
Bayard recalled himself with a start to the fact that the personal
examination of the day had begun, and that the opening shot had
come from the least important and most crabbed man in the Council.
And now for three quivering hours the young man stood the fire
of the most ingenious ecclesiastical inquisition which had been
witnessed in that part of the State for many a year.
At first it rather amused him than otherwise, and he bore it with
great good nature.
He was patient beyond his years with the small clergyman from the
small interior parish, whose hobby was that theological students
were not properly taught their Bibles, and who had invented a
precious catechism of his own, calculated to prove to the audience
how little they or the candidate knew of Boanerges, Gog and Magog,
and the four beasts which are the chief zoological ornaments of the
Apocalypse. Having treated these burning questions satisfactorily,
Bayard fenced awhile with the learned clergyman who was alive only
in the dead languages, and who put the candidate through his Greek
and Hebrew paces as if he had been a college boy.
Bayard had felt no serious concern as to the outcome of the
examination, a mere form, a husk, a shell, with which it was not
worth a man’s while to quarrel. The people of the church--he had
already begun to call them his people--were enthusiastically and
lovingly pledged to him. He smiled into their familiar faces over
the heads of his inquisitors, and manfully and cheerfully stood his
ground. All, in fact, went well enough, until the theology of the
young man came under investigation. Then a cloud no bigger than a
man’s tongue, if one may say so, appeared to darken the interior
of Windover First Church. The oldest and deafest men in the
Council pricked up their ears. The youngest and best-natured grew
uneasy. The candidate’s people looked at him anxiously. His uncle
flushed; Professor Carruth coughed sternly. The moderator ruled and
overruled, and tried with troubled kindness to quench the warming
flame of ecclesiastical censure in which many a bright, devout
young life goes out.
Suddenly Bayard awoke to the fact that the smoke was curling in the
fagots at his feet; that the stake was at his back, the chains upon
his hands; that he was in danger of being precondemned for heresy
in the hearts of those gray old men, his elder brothers in the
church, and disgraced before the eyes of the people who had loved
and chosen him.
The house was now so full and so still that a sigh could be heard;
and when a group from the street pushed noisily in, and stood by
the entrance, impatient expressions leaped from pew to pew. Bayard
looked up at the disturbance. There by the green baize doors stood
the Italian, Job Slip, and the young fellow (with the eyebrows) who
did not drink, two or three other spectators of the fight, and the
girl in the reefer. An uninvited delegation from Angel Alley, these
children of the devil had crept among those godly men and women,
and stared about.
“A circumstance,” complained Mr. Hermon Worcester afterwards to
Professor Carruth, “which might not happen on such an occasion in
our New England churches once in twenty years.”
Bayard had been singularly gentle and patient with his tormentors
up to this moment. But now he gathered himself, and fought for his
life like a man. Brand after brand, the inventions of theology were
flung hissing upon him.
Did he believe that heathen, unacquainted with Christ, were saved?
What did he hold became of the souls of those who died in infancy?
If they happened to be born dead, what was their fate?
Explain his views on the doctrine of Justification by Faith.
State explicitly his conception of the Trinity. Had none? Ah--ah!
Were the three Persons in the Trinity separate as qualities or as
natures? Did not _know_? Ah--ah.
State the precise nature, province, and character of each Person.
Did not feel qualified to do so? Ha--hum.
What was the difference between Arianism and Socinianism?
Did the Son exist coördinate with, and yet subordinate to the
Father?
What is the distinction between the attributes and the faculties of
the Deity?
Did an impenitent person ever pray?
Describe the doctrine of Free Will.
Is a sinner ever able to repent, of his own choice?
Is he punished for not being able to do so?
Is the human race responsible for the guilt of Adam?
Why not?
Explain the process of sanctification, and the exact province of
the Holy Spirit.
Carefully elucidate your views on Total Depravity.
Could a man--did we understand you?--become regenerate without
waiting for the compelling action of the Holy Spirit?
Is there any Scriptural ground for belief in the possibility of a
second probation? What? Please repeat that reply.
Did not the first sin of a child justly expose him to eternal
punishment? _What?_
At this point in the trial, Bayard was acutely conscious of the
controlled voice of Professor Carruth, who had asked no question
up to that moment. Dear old Professor! he was trying to haul his
favorite student out of the fire before it was too late.
“But,” he asked gently, “is not one act of sin an infinite wrong?”
“I believe it is; or it may reasonably become so.”
“Is it not a wrong committed against an Infinite Being?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Does not an infinite wrong committed against an Infinite Being
deserve an infinite punishment?” pleaded the Professor of Theology.
“You have taught me so, sir.”
A rustle swept the house. The stern face of the Professor melted in
its sudden, winning fashion. He drew in his breath. At least, the
reputation of the Department was secured!
“Do you not believe what you have been taught?”
“Professor,” said Bayard, smiling, “do you?”
It being well known that the now conservative Professor of Theology
had been the liberal and the progressive of his first youth, this
reply created a slight smile. But the Professor did not smile. The
crisis was too serious.
“The candidate does not deny the doctrine,” he urged. “He will
undoubtedly grow into it as other men have done before him.”
“Whether men are eternally damned”--began Bayard.
“Job,” whispered the Italian back by the door, “he swear at ’em!”
“No, he ain’t,” said the sober fellow. “It’s the way they talk in
churches.”
“What tongue is it they do speak?” persisted the Italian.
“Blamed if I know,” whispered Job Slip with unusual decorum. “I
think it’s High Dutch.”
“No, it ain’t; it’s Latin,” corrected the sober fellow. “I can make
out a word now and then. They translate parts as they go along.
It’s darn queer gibberish, ain’t it? I guess the natives used to
talk like that in Bible times.”
“All this row,” said Job Slip, whose befuddled brain was actively
busy with the personal fate of a minister who could knock him down,
“all this d---- row’s along of me. It’s because he was late to
meetin’!”
The Italian nodded seriously. But the girl in the reefer said:--
“Shut up there! The second round’s on, now.”
“Explain the difference between verbal and plenary inspiration,”
demanded the small clergyman in a small, suspicious voice.
“There! I _said_ it was High Dutch!” whispered Job Slip
triumphantly.
“Explain the difference,” repeated the small clergyman.
The candidate explained.
“Is every word of the Old and New Testament of the Scriptures
equally inspired by Almighty God?”
“Please give me your definition of inspiration,” said Bayard,
wheeling upon his questioner.
The small clergyman objected that this was the candidate’s business.
“It is one of the maxims of civil law that definitions are
dangerous,” replied Bayard with a smile. But it was no time for
smiling, and he knew it. He parried for a little in the usual
technicalities of the schools; but it was without hope or interest.
He knew now how it would all end. But he was not conscious of a
moment’s hesitation. His soul seemed elate, remote from his fate.
He looked out across the lake of faces upturned to his. He had
now grown quite pale, and the natural fairness of his skin and
delicacy of his features added to the effect of transparence which
his high face gave. The dullest eye in the audience observed, and
the coldest lip long afterwards acknowledged, the remarkable beauty
of the man. With a sudden and impressive gesture of the hand, as
if he cast the whole merciless scene away from him, he stepped
unexpectedly forward, and in a ringing voice he said:--
“Fathers and brothers of the church! I believe in God Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ his Son, our
Lord and Saviour. I believe in the sacredness and authority of the
Bible, which contains the lesson and the history of His life. I
believe in the guilt and the misery of sin, and I have spent the
best years of my youth in your institutions of sacred learning,
seeking to be taught how to teach my fellow-men to be better. I
solemnly believe in the Life Eternal, and that its happiness and
holiness are the gifts of Jesus Christ to the race; or to such of
us as prove fit survivors, capable of immortality. I do not presume
to explain how or why this is or may be so; for behold we are shown
mysteries, of which this is one. If I am permitted to guide the
people who have loved and chosen me, I expect to teach them many
truths which I do not understand. I shall teach them none which I
do not believe. Fathers and brothers, I show you my soul! Deal with
me as you will!”
He stood for a space, tall, white, still, with that look--half
angel, half human--which was peculiar to his face in moments of
exaltation. His dazzling eyes blazed for an instant upon his
tormentors, then fell upon his people and grew dim. He saw their
uplifted faces pleadingly turned to him: troubled men whom he
had been able to guide; bereaved women whom he had known how to
comfort. Oh, his people! Tears were on their cheeks. Their faces
swam before him. How dear, in those few months that he had served
them, they had grown! To stand disgraced before them, a stigma
on his Christian name forever, their faith deceived, their trust
disappointed,--his people, to be his no more!
“God!” he said in his heart. “Was there any other way?”
An instant’s darkness swept over him, and his soul staggered in it.
Then, to the fine, inner ear of the spirit the answer came:--
“In honor, between Me and thee, thou hast no other way.”
The troubled voice of the moderator now recalled him, using the
quaint phrase of elder times for such occasion made and provided:
“The Council will now be by themselves.”
In three quarters of an hour the Council returned and reported
upon the examination. Emanuel Bayard was refused ordination to the
Christian ministry by a majority of five.
Now, the savage that lurks in the gentlest assemblage of men sprang
with a war-cry upon the decorum of the crowded church. Agitated
beyond self-control, the people split into factions, and resolved
themselves into committees; they wept, they quarreled, they prayed,
and they condemned by turns. The gray-haired moderator and the
dejected Professor, themselves paler than the rejected candidate,
sought to convert the confusion into something like order
wherewith to close the exercises of that miserable day. Daring the
momentary silence which their united efforts had enforced, a thick
voice from the swaying crowd was distinctly heard.
Job Slip, who had somehow managed to take an extra drop from his
pocket bottle during the electric disturbance of the last half
hour, was staggering up the broad aisle, with the Italian and the
sober man at either elbow.
“Lemme go!” cried Job, with an air of unprecedented politeness.
“Lemme get up thar whar I ken make a speech. D---- ye, I won’t cuss
ye, for this is a meetin’-house, but I _will_ make my speech!”
“Hush, Job!” said the girl in the sailor hat. She came forward
before all the people and laid her hand upon the drunkard’s arm.
“Hush, Job, hush! You bother the minister. Come away, Job, come
away. Mari’s here, and the young one. Come along to your wife, Job
Slip!”
“I’ll join my wife when I get ready,” said Job solemnly, “for it’s
proper that I should; but I ain’t a-goin’ to stand by an’ see a man
that licked me licked out’n his rights an’ not do nothin’ for him!
No, sir! Gentlemen,” cried Job pleasantly, assuming an oratorical
attitude and facing round upon the disturbed house, “I’ll stick
up for the minister every time. It ain’t _his_ fault he was late
to meetin’. You hadn’t oughter kick him out for that, now! It’s
all along of me, gentlemen! I drink--and he--ye see--don’t. I was
threshin’ the life out’n my little boy down to Angel Alley, and
he knocked me down for’t. Fact, sir! That there little minister,
he knocked _me_ down. I’ll stand by him every round now, you bet!
_I_’ll see’t he gets his rights in his own meetin’-house!”
Half a dozen hands were at Job’s mouth; a dozen more dragged him
back. The Council sprang to their feet in horror. But Job squared
off, and eyed these venerable Christians with the moral superiority
of his condition. He pushed on towards the pulpit.
“Come on, Tony!” he cried to the Italian. “Come, Ben! You, Lena!”
He beckoned to the girl, who had shrunk back. “Tell Mari an’ Joey
to foller on! Won’t hear us, won’t they? Well, we’ll see! There
ain’t a cove of the lot of _them_ could knock me down! Jest to
save a little fellar’s bones! Gentlemen! look a’ here. Look at us.
_We’re the delegation from Angel Alley, Sir._ Now, sir, what are
you pious a-goin’ to do with _us_?”
But a white, firm hand was laid upon Job’s shoulder. Pale, shining,
frowning, Bayard stood beside him.
“Come, Job,” he said gently, “come out with me, and we will talk it
over.”
The broad aisle quickly cleared, and the rejected minister left the
church with the drunkard’s hand upon his arm. The remainder of the
delegation from Angel Alley followed quietly, and the soft, green
baize doors closed upon them.
“Say,” said Job Slip, recovering a portion of his scattered senses
in the open air,--“say, I thought you said they didn’t fight where
you was goin’?”
The drunkard’s wife stood outside. She was crying. Bayard looked at
her. He did not know what to say. Just then he felt a tug at the
tail of his coat, and small, warm fingers crept into his cold hand.
He looked down. It was the little boy.
VI.
The real crises of life are those that the stories leave untold.
It is not the sudden blow, but the learning how to bear the bruise
afterwards, that constitutes experience; not the delirium of fever,
but the weariness of convalescence. What does one do the Monday
morning after the funeral? How does one meet the grocery bills when
the property is gone? How does a man act when his reputation is
ruined by the span of an afternoon? Fiction does not tell us, but
fact omits nothing of the grim details; spares not the least stroke
of that black perplexity which, next to the insecurity of life, is
the hardest thing about it.
You men of affairs, give a moment’s manly sympathy to the position
of a young fellow like yourselves, halting just over the line
between education and a life’s work, trained for a calling which
the worldliest soul among you respects as nobler and higher than
your own, tripped at the outset by one of its lower and more
ignoble accidents; a man who will not lie to God or his own soul,
who has scorned the consequences of being simply true, but must
bear them for all that, like other men. For the holiest dedications
in this world suffer the taint thereof; and it is at once the
saddest and the healthiest thing about the work of a man of God
that it is subject to market laws, to fashion, to prejudice, to
envy, and to poor judgment, like other work.
It seems a little thing to write about, but at the time it was not
the least aspect of the great crisis into which Emanuel Bayard
had arrived, that, when he came out into the strong, salt breeze
of Windover that afternoon, it suddenly occurred to the heretic
minister that he had nowhere to spend the night. Alas for the
bright and solemn festival in which his should have been the
crowned hero’s part! He heard the excited women of the parish
asking each other:--
“Who is going to eat up that collation?”
“What is ever going to become of all that one-two-three-four cake?”
“Feed those old ministers _now_? Not a sandwich! Let ’em go home
where they belong. If we’re going to have no minister, they shall
have no supper! We’ll settle him in spite of ’em!”
Thus the Ladies’ Aid Association, with flushed cheeks and shrill
voices. But the deacons and the pillars of the disturbed church
collected in serious groups, and discussed the catastrophe with the
dignity of the voting and governing sex.
Sick at heart, and longing to escape from the whole miserable
scene, Bayard walked down the street alone. His steps bent blindly
to the station. When he had bought his ticket to Boston, it came to
him for the first time to ask himself where he was going. Home?
What home? Whose? Hermon Worcester’s? That glance at his uncle’s
rigid face which he had allowed himself back there in the church
recurred to him. The incensed and disappointed man had suffered
his smitten boy to go forth from that furnace without a sign of
sympathy. He had given Emanuel one look: the pupils of his eyes
were dark and dilated with indignation of the kind that a gentleman
does not trust himself to express.
“I cannot go home,” said Emanuel suddenly, half aloud. “I forgot
that. I shall not be wanted.”
He put his ticket in his wallet and turned away. Some people were
hurrying into the station, and he strode to a side door to escape
them. The handsome knob of an Oriental grapestick touched his arm.
The white face of the Professor of Theology looked sternly into his.
“Suppose you come out to Cesarea with me to-night? We can
talk this unfortunate affair over quietly, and--I am sure you
misapprehend the real drift of some of these doctrines that disturb
you. I believe I could set you right, and possibly--another
examination--before a different Council”--
Bayard’s head swam for an instant. A girl in a muslin dress stood
at the meeting of the arms of the great cross in the Seminary lawn.
It was moonlight, and it was June, and this dreadful thing had
never happened. He was in that state when a woman’s sympathy is
the only one delicate enough for a man’s bruised nature to bear. He
quivered at the thought of being touched by anything harsher than
the compassionate approval, the indignant sorrow, the intelligent
heart--
“No,” he said, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation. “Thank you,
Professor--I can’t do it. I should only disappoint you. I am almost
too tired to go all over the ground again. Good-by, Professor.”
He held out his hand timidly. The thin, high-veined hand of the
Professor shook as he responded to the grasp.
“I didn’t know,” he said more gently, “but you would be more
comfortable. Your uncle”--the Professor hesitated.
“Thank you,” said the young man again. “That was thoughtful in you.
If your theology were half as tender as your heart, Professor!”
added the poor fellow, trying to smile with the old audacity of
Professor Carruth’s pet student. But he shook his head, and pushed
out of the door into the street.
There he stood irresolute. What next? He was to have been the guest
of the treasurer of the church that night, after the ordination.
It was a pretty, luxurious home; he had been entertained there
so often that he felt at home in it; the family had been his
affectionate friends, and the children were fond of him. He thought
of that comfortable guest-room with the weakest pang that he
had known yet: he felt ill enough to go to bed. But they had not
asked the dishonored minister, now, to be their guest. It did not
occur to him, so sore at heart was he, that he had given them no
opportunity.
He was about to return to the station, with a vague purpose to seek
shelter in some hotel in a village where nobody knew him, when a
plain, elderly woman dressed in black approached him. He recognized
her as one of the obscurer people of his lost parish. She had been
comforted by something he had said one Sunday; she had come timidly
to tell him so, after the fashion of such women; she had known
trouble, he remembered, and poverty, it was clear.
“Ah, Mrs. Granite!” he said pathetically. “Did you take all the
trouble to come to say good-by to _me_?”
“You look so tired, sir!” sobbed Mrs. Granite. “You look down sick
abed! We thought you wasn’t fit to travel to-night, sir, and if
you wouldn’t mind coming home with us to get a night’s rest, Mr.
Bayard? We live very poor, sir, not like you; but me and my girl,
we couldn’t _bear_ to see you going off so! We’d take it for an
honor, Mr. Bayard, sir!”
“I will come,” said the weary man. And he went, at once. Certain
words confusedly recurred to him as he walked silently beside Mrs.
Granite, “He had not where,” they ran,--“He had not where to lay
his head.”
The light burned late in the clean, spare room in the cottage of
the fisherman’s widow on Windover Point that night.
Early in the morning her mother sent Jane Granite running for
the doctor; and by night it was well known in Windover that the
new minister was ill. He was threatened with something with a
Latin name; not epidemic in Windover, whose prevailing diseases
are measles and alcoholism. Mrs. Granite found the minister’s
anticipated malady hard to pronounce; but Jane, who had been at the
high school, called it meningitis.
But here again fact dealt with Emanuel Bayard as no respectable
fiction could be expected to. An interesting delirium or deadly
fever might have changed the whole course of his life. Had he
fallen then and there a martyr to his fate, the sympathy of the
town, the interest of the denomination, the affection of his lost
parish, the penitent anxiety of Mr. Hermon Worcester, would--how
easily!--have marked out his future for him in flower-beds that
seemed forsooth to be the vineyard of the Lord; and he might have
done a deal of pleasant hoeing and trimming there, like other men,
till harvest time. But floriculture is small pastime for the sinew
elected to cut thickets and to blaze forests; and he arose to tear
and bleed at his self-chosen brambles as God decreed.
He had not meningitis; he suffered no mortal malady; he did but
lie helpless for two weeks under one of those serious nervous
collapses which seem ignominy to a young man. During these critical
days his people elect and lost had plenty of time to quarrel over
him, or to send him currant jelly. And the wife of the treasurer
was reported to have said that he ought to be in her house. But
Mrs. Granite and Jane nursed him adoringly, and as soon as the
doctor permitted, Jane brought the patient his mail. It contained a
curt but civil letter from his uncle, regretting to learn that he
had been indisposed, and requesting an interview.
As soon as he was able to travel, Emanuel went to Boston.
An unexpected incident which happened on the morning that he left
Windover gave back something of the natural fire to his eyes, and
he looked less ill than Mr. Worcester had expected, when they met
in the library on Beacon Street.
This circumstance checked the slightly rising tide of sympathy in
his uncle’s feeling; and it was with scarcely more than civility
that the elder man opened the conversation.
“I wish to discuss this situation with you, Emanuel, once for all.
You have for some time avoided the issue between us which is bound
to come.”
“I have avoided nothing,” interrupted Emanuel proudly.
“It is the same thing. You have never met me halfway. The time has
come when we must have it out. You know, of course, perfectly well
what a blow this thing has been to me--the mortification--the....
After all I have done for you”--
The cold, clear-cut features of Hermon Worcester’s face became
suffused; he put his hand against his heart, and gasped. For the
first time it occurred to the young man that the elder, too, had
suffered; with a quick exclamation of sympathy or anxiety, he
turned to reply, but Mr. Worcester got to his feet, and began to
pace the library hotly.
“What do you propose to do?” he cried. “Seven years of
higher education, and--how many trips to Europe? And all
the--that--feeling a man has for a child he has brought up--wasted,
worse than wasted! What do you propose to do? Thirty years old, and
a failure at the start! A disgrace to the faith of your fathers! A
blot on an old religious name! Come, now! what next?... I suppose
I could find you a place to sweep a store,” added Hermon Worcester
bitingly.
Emanuel had flushed darkly, and then his swift pallor came on.
“Uncle,” he said distinctly, “I think this interview we have been
preparing for so long may as well be dispensed with. It seems to me
quite useless. I can only grieve you, sir; and you cannot comfort
me.”
“Comfort!” sneered the other, with his least agreeable expression;
for Hermon Worcester had many, in frequent use.
“Well,” said Emanuel, “yes. There are times when even a heretic may
need something of that sort. But I was about to say that I think it
idle for us to talk. My plans are now quite formed.”
“Indeed, sir!” said Mr. Worcester, stopping short.
“I have been invited by a minority of my people to start a new work
in Windover, of which they propose that I shall become the leader.”
“Not the pastor!” observed Mr. Worcester.
“Yes, the pastor,--that was the word. It will be a work quite
independent of the old church.”
“And of the old faith, eh?”
“Of the old traditions, some of them,” replied Emanuel gently; “not
of the old truth, I hope. I cannot hope for your sympathy in this
step. I have decided to take it. It strikes me, Uncle, that we had
better not discuss the matter.”
“His mother before him!” cried Hermon Worcester, violently striding
up and down the velvet carpet of the library, “I went through it
with his mother before him,--this abhorrent indifference to the
demands of birth and training, this scandal, this withdrawal from
the world, this publicity given to family differences, the whole
miserable business! She for love, and you for--I suppose you call
it religion! I can’t go through it again, and I won’t! It is asking
too much of me!”
“I ask nothing of you, Uncle,” said the young man, rising.
“You’ll end in infidelity, sir. You will be an agnostic in a year’s
time. You’ll be preaching positivism! I will have nothing to do
with it! I warned you before, Manuel,--back there in Cesarea. I
am forced to repeat myself. Under the circumstances, you will not
expect a dollar from me. I would as soon leave my property to
an atheist club as to you, and your second probations, and your
uninspired Bibles!”
Mr. Worcester snapped in the private drawer of his desk, and locked
it with unnecessary force and symbolism.
“I don’t forbid you my house, mind. I sha’n’t turn you into the
street. You’ll starve into your senses fast enough on any salary
that the rabble down in that fishing-town can raise for you. When
you do--come back to me. Keep your latch-key in your pocket. You
will want to use it some day.”
“I must run my chances, sir,” said Bayard in a voice so low that
it was scarcely audible. Instinctively he drew his latch-key from
his pocket and held it out; but Mr. Hermon Worcester did not deign
to notice it. “I have never thought about your money, Uncle. I’m
not that kind of fellow, exactly. You have always been good to me,
Uncle Hermon!” He choked, and held out his hand to say good-by.
“But look here--see here--you’ll stay to dinner? You’ll go up to
your room, Manuel?” stammered the elder man. “I explicitly told
you that I didn’t drive you out of your home. I don’t desire any
scene--any unnecessary scandal. I wish you to understand that you
are not turned into the street.”
“I have promised to be in Windover this evening, to settle this
matter,” replied Bayard. He looked over his uncle’s head, through
the old, purple, Beacon Street glass, upon the waters of Charles
River; then softly closed the library door, looked for a moment
about the dark, familiar hall, took his hat from the peg on the
carved mahogany tree where he had hung his cap when he was a little
boy in Latin School, and went down the long, stone steps.
It occurred to him to go back and tell Partredge and Nancy to look
after his uncle carefully, but he remembered that he had no reason
to give them for his indefinite absence, bethought himself of his
uncle’s horror of airing family affairs before servants, and so
went on.
He walked up the street slowly, for he was weak yet. At the door of
an old friend, he was tempted to pause and rest, but collected his
senses, and struggled on.
He turned to look for a cab; then remembered that he had no longer
fifty cents to waste upon so mere a luxury as the economy of
physical strength. It was his first lesson in poverty,--that a
sick man must walk, because he could not afford to ride. Besides,
it proved to be a private carriage that he had seen. The elderly
coachman, evidently a family retainer, had just shut the door and
clambered to the box; he was waiting to tuck the green cloth robe
deliberately about his elegant legs, when a low exclamation from
the coach window caused Bayard to look back.
Helen Carruth had opened the door, and stood, irresolute, with one
foot upon the step, as if half her mind were in, and half were out
the carriage. She was richly dressed in purple cloth, and had that
fashionable air which he could not conceive of her as dispensing
with if she were a missionary in Tahiti. She looked vivid, vital,
warm, and somehow, gorgeous to him.
“_You?_” she cried joyously; then seemed to recall herself, and
stepped back.
He went up to her at once.
“I have been staying with Clara Rollins for a week,” she hastened
to say. “I am just going home. It’s her afternoon at the Portuguese
Mission, so she could not see me off. I did not know you were in
town, Mr. Bayard.”
“I am not,” said Bayard, smiling wanly. “I am on my way to
Windover; I am late to my train now.”
“Why, jump in!” said the young lady heartily. “We are going the
same way; and I’m sure Mrs. Rollins would be delighted to have
you. _She_’s at the Woman’s Branch.”
“The Woman’s who?” asked Bayard, laughing for the first time for
many days. He had hesitated for a moment; then stepped into the
carriage, and shut the door.
“I presume you’ve been in this vehicle before?” began Miss Carruth.
He nodded, smiling still.
“At intervals, as far back as I can remember. Miss Clara and I used
to go to the same dancing-school.”
“Mrs. Rollins was saying only yesterday what an age it was since
they had seen you--Mr. Bayard!” she broke off, “you look ill. You
are ill.”
He had sunk back upon the olive satin cushions. The familiar sense
of luxury and ease came upon him like a wave of mortal weakness.
For a moment he did not trust himself to look at the girl beside
him. Her beauty, her gayety, her health, her freedom from care,
something even in her personal elegance overcame him. She seemed to
whirl before his eyes, the laughing figure of a happy Fortune, the
dainty symbol of the life that he had left and lost. The deliberate
coachman was now driving rapidly, and they were well on their way
over Beacon Hill. She gave Bayard one of her long, steady looks.
Something of timidity stole over her vivacious face.
“Mr. Bayard,” she said in a changed tone, “I have heard all about
it from my father. I wanted to tell you, but I had no way. I am
glad to have a chance to say--I am sorry for you with all my heart.
And with all my soul, I honor you.”
“Do you?” said the disheartened man. “Then I honor myself the more.”
He turned now, and looked at her gratefully. This first drop of
human sympathy from man or woman of his own kind was inexpressibly
sweet to him. He could have raised her hand to his lips. But they
were in Mrs. Rollins’s carriage, and on Beacon Street.
“Oh!” cried Helen suddenly. “Look there! No, _there_! See that
poor, _horrible_ fellow! Why, he’s arrested! The policemen are
carrying him off.”
They had now reached Tremont Street, where the young lady had an
errand which had decided her direction to the northern stations.
But for the trifling circumstance that Helen Carruth had promised
her mother to bring out from a famous Boston grocer’s that
particular brand of olive oil which alone was worthy of a salad
for the Trustees’ lunch, the event which followed would never have
occurred. Thus may the worry of a too excellent housekeeper lay its
petty finger upon the future of a man or of an enterprise.
Bayard looked out of the carriage window, and uttered a disturbed
exclamation. Struggling in the iron grip of two policemen of
assorted sizes, the form and the tongue of Job Slip were forcibly
ornamenting Tremont Row.
“I must go. I must leave you. Excuse me. Drive on without me, Miss
Carruth. That is a friend of mine in trouble there.”
Bayard stopped the coachman with an imperious tap, and a “Hold on,
John!”
“A _what_ of yours?” cried Helen.
“It is one of my people,” explained Bayard curtly. He leaped from
the carriage, raised his hat, and ran.
“Just release this man, if you please,” he said to the police
authoritatively. “I know him; I am his minister. I’m going on the
train he meant to take. I’ll see him safely home. I’ll answer for
him.”
“Well--I don’t know about that, sir,” replied the smaller policeman
doubtfully.
But the larger one looked Bayard over, and made answer: “Oh,
bejabers, Tim, let ’im goa!”
Job, who was not too far gone to recognize his preserver, now threw
his arms affectionately around Bayard’s recoiling neck, and became
unendurably maudlin. In a voice audible the width of the street,
and with streaming tears and loathsome blessings, he identified
Bayard as his dearest, best, nearest, and most intimate of friends.
A laughing crowd collected and followed, as Bayard tried to hurry
to the station, encumbered by the grip of Job’s intoxicated
affection. Now falling, now staggering up, now down again, and
ever firmly held, Job looked up drunkenly into the white, delicate
face that seemed to rise above him by a space as far as the span
between the heavens and the earth. Stupidly he was aware that
the new minister was doing something by him that was not exactly
usual. He began to talk in thick, hyphenated sentences about his
wife and home, his boy, and the trip he had taken to Georges’. He
had made, he averred, a hundred dollars (which was possible), and
had two dollars and thirty-seven cents left (which was altogether
probable). Job complained that he had been robbed in Boston of the
difference, and, weeping, besought the new minister to turn back
and report the theft to the police.
“We shall lose the train, Job,” said Bayard firmly. “We must get
home to your wife and little boy.”
“Go wherever y’ say!” cried Job pleasantly. “Go to h---- along of
you, if you say so!”
There was something so grotesque in the situation that Bayard’s
soul recoiled within him. He was not used to this kind of thing. He
was no Christ, but a plain human man, and a young man at that. His
sense of dignity was terribly hurt. Without turning his head, he
knew when the carriage drove on. He felt her eyes upon him; he knew
the moment when she took them off; Job was attempting to kiss him
at that particular crisis.
Bayard managed to reach the last platform of the last car as it
moved out of the station, and to get his charge to Windover without
an accident. He had plenty of time for reflection on the trip; but
he reflected as little as possible. With his arm linked firmly
through Job’s and his eyes closed, he became a seer of visions,
not a thinker of thoughts. Her face leaned out of the carriage
window,--faded, formed, and dimmed, and formed again. He saw the
velvet on her dress, the little dash of gold color on her purple
bonnet, the plain distinguished fashion of her yellow hair about
her forehead. He saw the astonishment leap into her brown eyes, and
that look which no sibyl could have interpreted, forming about her
merry lips. He heard the coachman say, “Shall I drive on, Miss?”
And the answer, “Yes, John, drive on. I must not miss the train.”
He opened his eyes, and saw the sullen horizon of the sea across
the marshes, and the loathsome face of Job leaning against the
casement of the car window at his side.
By the time they had reached Windover, Slip was sleepy and quite
manageable. Bayard consulted his watch. It was the hour for his
evening appointment with the officers of the new parish.
“_Again!_” he thought. He looked at the drunkard wearily. Then the
flash of inspiration fired his tired face.
“Come, Job,” he said suddenly. “Never mind our suppers. Come with
me.”
He took Job as he was,--torpid, sodden, disgusting, a creature
of the mud, a problem of the mire. The committee sat in the
anxious conclave of people embarked upon a doubtful and unpopular
enterprise. Emanuel Bayard pushed Job Slip before him into the
pretty parlors of the ex-treasurer of the old First Church. For the
treasurer had followed the come-outers. He had joined the poor and
humble people who, in fear and faith, had tremblingly organized
the experiment for which, as yet, they had no other name than that
they gave it in their prayers. Christ’s work, they called it, then.
The treasurer was their only man of property. His jaw dropped when
he saw Job.
“Gentlemen,” said the young pastor, “gentlemen, I have brought you
a sample of the material under discussion. What are we going to do
with _this_?”
VII.
Jane Granite stood at the foot of the steep, uncarpeted stairs.
She had a stone-china cup filled with tea in her hand. She had
hesitation in her mind, and longing in her heart. When the
minister had sent word that he would eat no supper, it was plain
that something must be done. Her mother was out, and Jane had no
superior intelligence to consult. For Mrs. Granite was appointed
to the doom that overtakes the women of a poor and struggling
religious movement; she was ex-officio beggar for the new mission;
on this especial occasion she was charged with the duty of wringing
a portion of the minister’s almost invisible salary out of the
least unfriendly citizens of the town. The minister had observed
her from his window, tugging at her black skirts as she sallied
forth, ankle-deep, in the slush of the February afternoon; and his
brows had darkened at the sight. For the good woman would trudge
and soak five miles for--what? Possibly five dollars. How dreary
the devices of small people to achieve large ends!
To the young man who had never had to think what anything cost, the
cold, pecuniary facts of his position were galling past the power
of these simple people to comprehend.
He did not care too much on his own account. He felt more surprise
than impatience to see his coat turn shiny and frayed, and to know
that he could not get another. He was learning not to mind his
straw mattress as much as he did at first; and to educate himself
to going without magazines, and to the quality of Mrs. Granite’s
tea. When a man deliberately elects a great personal sacrifice, he
does not concern himself with its details as women are more likely
to do.
But there were aspects of his chosen work to which his soul was as
sore as a boy’s. He could not accustom himself with the ease of a
poor man’s son to the fact that a superb, supreme faith like the
Christianity of Christ must beg for its living. “It degrades!” he
thought, looking up from his books. “Lowell was right when he said
that no man should preach who hadn’t an independent property.” His
Bible fell from his clenched hand; he picked it up penitently, and
tenderly smoothed the crumpled leaf at which it had opened. Half
unconsciously, he glanced, and read:--
“Take no scrip in your purse;” his burning eye followed along the
page; softened, and grew moist.
“Perhaps on the whole,” he said aloud, “He really knew as much
about it as any American poet.”
He returned patiently to his preparation for the evening service,
for he worked hard for these fishermen and drunkards--harder than
he had ever worked at anything in his life. To make them one half
hour’s talk, he read, he ransacked, he toiled, he thought, he
dreamed, he prayed.
The only thing which he had asked leave to take from his uncle’s
house, was his own library. It piled Mrs. Granite’s spare chamber
from the old, brown carpet to the low and dingy ceiling. Barricades
of books stood on the floor by the ugly little coal-stove; and were
piled upon the stained pine table at which he sat to study in a
hard wood chair with a turkey-red cushion. Of the pictures, dear to
his youth, and to his trained taste, but two had come through with
him in the flying leap from Beacon Street to Mrs. Granite’s. Over
the table in his study a fine engraving watched him. It was Guido’s
great Saint Michael. Above the straw mattress in the chilly closet
where he slept hung a large photograph of Leonardo’s Christ; the
one from the Last Supper, as it was found in the ruined fresco on
the monastery wall.
But Jane Granite stood irresolute upon the bare, steep stairs, with
the stone-china teacup in her hand.
The minister had never concentrated his mind on Jane. He was a
busy man. She was a modest, quiet girl; she helped her mother “do”
his rooms, and never slammed the door when she went out. He felt a
certain gratitude to her, for the two women took trouble for him
far beyond the merits of the meagre sum allowed them for his bread
and codfish. But for the life of him, if he had been required to,
he could not have told anybody how Jane Granite looked.
When her timid knock struck the panel of his door, he started
impatiently, put down his pen, and patiently bade her enter.
“I thought perhaps, sir--you would drink your tea?” pleaded Jane.
“You haven’t eaten a morsel, and mother will mind it when she comes
home.”
Bayard looked at her in a dazed way; trying to see the connection
between forty-cent Japan tea and that beautiful thing said of
Whitefield, that he “forgot all else about the men before him, but
their immortality and their misery.”
“It’s getting cold,” said Jane, with quivering lip. “I stood on the
stairs so long before I could make up my mind to disturb you. Let
me get a hot cup, now, sir--do!”
“Why, I’ll come down!” said Bayard. “I must not make myself as
troublesome as this.”
He pushed away his books, and followed her to the sitting-room,
where, in default of a dining-room, and in vague deference to the
antecedents of a guest popularly reported not to be used to eating
in the kitchen, the meals of the family were served.
“Maybe you’d eat the fish-hash--a mouthful, sir?” asked Jane,
brightening, “and there’s the stewed prunes.”
Bayard looked at her, as she ran to and fro, flushed and happy
at her little victory over his supperless intentions. Jane was a
trig, neat body; small, as the coast girls often are--I wonder why?
whether because the mother was under-fed or over-anxious when the
fleets were out? Jane Granite wore a blue gingham dress, closely
fitted to a pleasant figure. She had a pleasant face, too; she had
no beauty, but that certain something more attractive than beauty
to many men,--a kind of compactness of feature, and an ease of
outline which haunts the retina; it is not easy to describe, but we
all know it. Her mother had told the minister that Jane was keeping
company--that is the Windover phrase--with some one; the details
had escaped his memory.
He looked at her, now, for the first time attentively, as she
served his tea. She flitted to and fro lightly. She sang in the
kitchen when she saw him smile. When he said, “Thank you, Jane! You
have given me a delicious supper,” a charming expression crossed
her face. He observed it abstractedly, and thought: How kind these
good people are to me! The paper shades were up, and Jane wished to
draw them when she lighted the kerosene lamp; but Bayard liked to
watch the sea, as he often did at twilight. The harbor was full,
for the weather was coming on wild. Clouds marshaled and broke, and
retreated, and formed upon a stormy sky. The lights of anchored
fleets tossed up and down in the violet-gray shadow. The breakers
growled upon the opposite shore. The best thing about his lodging
was its near and almost unobstructed view of the sea, which dashed
against a slip of a beach between the wharves of Windover Point,
within a thousand feet of Mrs. Granite’s cottage.
As he sat, sipping his green tea, and making believe with his hash,
to save the feelings of the girl; watching the harbor steadily
and quietly, the while, and saying nothing--he was startled by
the apparition of a man’s face, pressed stealthily against the
window-pane, and disappearing as quickly as it came. Bayard had
been sitting between the window and the light. Jane was dishing out
his prunes from a vegetable dish into a blue willow saucer, and
had seen nothing. Wishing not to alarm the girl, he went to the
window quietly, and looked out. As he did so, he perceived that the
intruder had his hand on the knob of the front door. Bayard sprang,
and the two met in the cottage entry.
“What are you doing here?” began Bayard, barring the way.
“I guess I’d better ask what are _you_ a-doin’ _here_,” replied
the other, crowding by the minister with one push of an athletic
shoulder. “I’m on my own ground. I ain’t so sure of you.”
Little Jane uttered a cry, and the athletic young man strode
forward, and somewhat ostentatiously put his arm about her waist.
“Ah, I see!” smiled the minister. “It is strange that we have not
met before. We must often have been in the house at the same time.
I am a little absent-minded. Perhaps it is my fault. A hundred
pardons, Mr. ----?”
Trawl. Ben Trawl was the name. Ben Trawl was not cordial. Perhaps
that would be asking too much of the lover who had been mistaken
for a burglar by another man; and the young minister was already
quite accustomed to the varying expressions with which a provincial
town receives the leader of an unpopular cause. He recognized Ben
Trawl now;--the young man who had the straight eyebrows, and who
did not drink, who had been one of the crowd at the fight in Angel
Alley on the ordination day which never had ordained.
The pastor found the situation embarrassing, and was glad when Mrs.
Granite came in, soaked through, and tired, with drabbled skirts.
She had collected six dollars and thirty-seven cents.
Bayard ground his teeth, and escaped to his study as soon as he
could. There they heard him, pacing up and down hotly, till seven
o’clock. Bayard had arranged one of those piteous attempts to
“amuse the people,” into which so much wealth of heart and brain
is flung, with such atmospheric results. His notion of religious
teaching did not end with the Bible, though it began there. The
fishermen who had irreverently named the present course of talks
“the Dickens,” crowded to hear them, nevertheless. The lecture of
that evening (“Sydney Carton,” he called it) was a venture upon
which Bayard had expended a good deal of thought and vitality.
Poor, wet Mrs. Granite waded out again, without a murmur, to hear
it; she walked beside the minister, alone; it was a long walk, for
the new people met in the well-known hall near the head of Angel
Alley.
“Ben Trawl’s kinder off his hook,” she explained apologetically.
“He wouldn’t come along of us, nor he wouldn’t let Jane come,
neither. He has them spells.”
Jane Granite watched them off with aching heart. As he closed the
door, the minister smiled and lifted his hat to her. Where was
there a smile like _his_ in all the world of men? And where a man
who thought or knew so little of the magic which his beauty wrought?
For love of this radiance and this wonder the heart of the coldest
woman of the world might have broken. Little Jane Granite looked
after him till he was drowned in the dark. She came in and stood
at the window, busying herself to draw the shade. But Ben Trawl
watched her with half-closed eyes; and when bright, wide eyes turn
dull and narrow, beware of them!
“Come here!” said Ben, in the voice of a man who had “kept company”
with a girl for three years. In Windover, the respectable young
people do not flirt or intrigue; breach of troth is almost unknown
among them. To walk with a girl on Sunday afternoon, and to kiss
her Sunday evening, is to marry her, as a matter of course. Ben
Trawl spoke in the imperious tone of the seafaring people who call
a wife “my woman,” and who lie on the lounge in the kitchen while
she brings the water from the well.
“You come here, Jane, and sit on the sofy alongside of me! I’ve got
a word or so to say to you.”
Jane Granite came. She was frightened. She sat down beside her
lover, and timidly surrendered the work-worn little hand which he
seized and crushed with cruel violence within his own.
“Mr. Granite wasn’t never wholly satisfied about Ben,” Mrs. Granite
was saying to the minister as they splashed through the muddy
slush. “His father’s Trawl the liquor dealer, down to Angel Alley,
opposite our place, a little below. But Jane says Ben don’t touch
it; and he don’t. I don’t know’s I’ve any call to come between her
and Ben. He’s a stiddy fellow, and able to support her,--and he’s
that fond of Jane”--
“He seems to be,” said Bayard musingly. His thoughts were not
with Mrs. Granite. He hardly knew what she had said. He was not
used to this petty, parish atmosphere. It came hard to him. He
underestimated the value of these wearisome trifles, in the large
work performed by little people. Nothing in the world seemed to him
of less importance than the natural history of Ben Trawl.
“The wind is east,” he said abstractedly, “and there’s a very heavy
sea on.”
He cast at the harbor and the sky the anxious look habitual with
the people of Windover; the stranger had already acquired it. He
had not been a month in the fishing-town before he noticed that the
women all spoke of their natural foe as “the terrible sea.”
The hall which the new people had leased for their services and
entertainments had long borne the grim name of Seraph’s Rest;
having been, in fact, for years, a sailors’ dance-hall of the
darkest dye.
“Give us,” Bayard had said, “the worst spot in the worst street
of this town. We will make it the best, or we will own ourselves
defeated in our work.”
In such streets, and in such places, news has wings. There is no
spot in Windover where rumor is run down so soon as in Angel Alley.
Bayard had talked perhaps half an hour, when he perceived by the
restlessness in his crowded and attentive audience that something
had happened. He read on for a moment:--
“_‘Are you dying for him?’ she whispered. ‘And his wife and child.
Hush! Yes.’_”
Then, with the perfect ease which he always sought to cultivate in
that place between speaker and hearer, “What is the matter?” he
asked in a conversational tone.
“Sir,” said an old captain, rising, “there’s a vessel gone ashore
off Ragged Rock.”
Bayard swept his book and manuscript off the desk.
“I was about to read you,” he said, “how a poor fellow with a
wretched life behind him died a noble death. Perhaps we can do
something as grand as he did. Anyhow, we’ll try. Come, boys!”
He thrust himself into his coat, and sprang down among the audience.
“Come on! You know the way better than I do! If there’s anything to
do, we’ll do it. Lead on, boys! I’m with you!”
The audience poured into Angel Alley, with the minister in their
midst. Confusion ran riot outside. The inmates of all the dens
on the street were out. Unnoticed, they jostled decent citizens
who had flocked as near as possible to the news-bearer. Panting
and white, a hatless messenger from the lighthouse, who had run
all the way at the keeper’s order to break the black word to the
town, reiterated all he knew: “It’s the Clara Em! She weighed
this afternoon under full canvas--and she’s struck with fourteen
men aboard! I knew I couldn’t raise nobody at the old Life-Saving
Station”--
“It’s t’other side the Point, anyhow!” cried a voice from the crowd.
“It’s four mile away!” yelled another.
“Good heavens, man!” cried Bayard. “You don’t propose to wait for
_them_?”
“I don’t see’s there’s anything we can _do_,” observed the old
captain deliberately. “The harbor’s chockful. If anybody could do
anything for ’em, some o’ them coasters--but ye see there can’t no
boat _live_ off Ragged Rock in a breeze o’ wind like this.”
“How far off is this wreck?” demanded Bayard, inwardly cursing his
own ignorance of nautical matters and of the region. “Can’t we get
up some carts and boats and ropes--and ride over there?”
“It’s a matter of three mile an’ a half,” replied the mate of a
collier, “and it’s comin’ on thick. But I hev known cases where a
cart--Now there’s them I-talians with their barnana carts.”
“You won’t get no fog with this here breeze,” contended a very
ancient skipper.
“What’ll you bet?” said the mate of the collier.
An Italian with a fruit cart was pushed forward by the crowd; an
express cart was impressed; ropes, lanterns, and a dory appeared
from no one knew where, at the command of no one knew who. Bayard
suggested blankets and dry clothes. The proposal seemed to cause
surprise, but these supplies were volunteered from somewhere.
“Pile in, boys!” cried the minister, in a ringing voice. He sprang
into one of the carts, and it filled in a moment. One of the horses
became frightened at the hubbub and reared. Men swore and women
shrieked. In the momentary delay, a hand reached over the wheel,
and plucked at Bayard’s sleeve. He flashed the lantern in his hand,
and saw a woman’s strained, set face. It was Job Slip’s wife,
Mari, with the little boy crying at her skirts.
“Sir,” she said hoarsely, “if it’s the Clara Em, he’s aboard of
her--for they shipped him at five o’clock, though they see the
storm a-comin’--and him as drunk as death. But it’s true--he got it
at Trawl’s--I see ’em lift him acrost the wharf an’ sling him over
int’ the dory.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Bayard with set teeth. He reached over the
wheel as the horses started, plunging, and wrung the hand of the
drunkard’s wife. He could not trust himself to say more. Such a
vision of what life meant to such a woman swept through Angel Alley
upon the wings of the gale, that he felt like a man whose eyes have
beheld a panorama on a stage in hell.
Many people, as the carts rolled through the town, followed on
foot, among them a few women whose husbands, or lovers, or brothers
were known to be aboard the Clara Em.
“Here’s an _old_ woman with a boy aboard! Seems you might find
room in one them wagons for her!” cried a young voice. It was the
girl known to Windover only by the name of Lena; she for whom the
“terrible sea” could have no horrors; the one woman of them from
whom no betrothed lover could sail away; to whom no husband should
return.
“She’s right about that. We must manage somehow!” called Bayard.
Strong hands leaned out and swept the old woman up over the wheel,
and the horses galloped on.
There was neither rain nor snow; but the storm, in the seaman’s
sense of the word, was approaching its height. The wind had now
become a gale, and blew southeast. The sky was ominously black. To
Bayard’s sensitive and excited imagination, as he looked out from
the reeling wagon, the mouth of the harbor seemed to gape and grin;
the lights of the fleet, furled and anchored for dear life, lost
their customary pleasant look, and snapped and shone like teeth in
the throat of a monster.
The wagons rolled on madly; the horses, lashed to their limit of
speed, leaped down Windover Point. They had now left the road, and
were dashing across the downs which stretched a mile farther to the
eastern shore. The roughness of the route had become appalling,
but a Cape horse is as used to boulders as a Cape fisherman;
neither wagon overset, though both rolled like foundering ships.
The lanterns cut swathes of light in the blackness which bounding
wheels and racing heels mowed down before them.
Walls of darkness rose ahead, and at its outermost, uttermost
margin roared the sea. It seemed to Bayard as if the rescuing party
were plunging into eternal mystery.
The old woman whose son was aboard the Clara Em crouched at the
minister’s feet. Both sat in the dory, which filled the wagon, and
which was packed with passengers. The old woman’s bare hands were
clenched together, and her lips shut like iron hinges. Bayard
wondered at her massive silence. It was something primeval, solemn,
outside of his experience. The women of the shore, in stress like
hers, would weep, would sob, or shriek. But to the women of the sea
this anguish was as old as life itself: to it they were born, and
of it they were doomed to die; they bore it as they did the climate
of the freezing Cape.
“That there saving service couldn’t ha’ done nothin’ agin’ a wreck
on Ragged Rock if they wanted to,” observed the old captain (they
called him Captain Hap), peering from the wagon towards the harbor
shore. “It’s jest’s I told ye; they’re too fur--five mile across.”
“But why is there no station nearer?” demanded Bayard with the
warmth of inexperience. “Why is nothing put over here--if this reef
is so bad--where it is needed?”
“Wall,” said Captain Hap, with deliberation, “that’s a nateral
question for a land-lubber. Every seaman knows there ain’t no
_need_ of gettin’ wrecked on that there reef. It’s as plain as
the beard on your face. Windover Light to the west’ard, Twin
Lights to the east’ard,--a fog bell, and a bell-buoy, and a
whistlin’-buoy,--Lord! why, _everybody_ knows how to keep off
Ragged Rock!”
“Then how did this vessel happen to strike?” persisted Bayard. The
men interchanged glances, and no one answered him.
“Hi there! Look, look! I see her! I see her spars!” yelled a young
fellow on the front seat of the wagon. “It’s her! It’s the Clara
Em!... Lord A’mighty! what in ---- was they thinkin’ of? She’s got
on full canvas! See her! see her! see her! See her lights! It’s
_her_, and she’s bumpin’ on the reef!”
Cries of horror ran from lip to lip. The driver lashed his horses
onward, and the men in the wagons flung their lanterns to and fro
in uncontrollable excitement. Some leaped over the wheels and ran
shouting against the gale.
“Clara Em, ahoy! Clara Em, aho--o--oy!”
But the old woman at Bayard’s feet sat still. Her lips only moved.
She stared straight ahead.
“Is she praying? or freezing? Perhaps she’s out of her mind,”
thought Bayard.
He gently pulled her blanket-shawl closer over her bare head, and
wrapped it around her before he sprang from the wagon.
VIII.
There was but little depth of snow upon the downs and cliffs, but
such as remained served to reflect and to magnify all possible
sources of light. These were few enough and sorely needed. The
Windover Light, a revolving lantern of the second power, is red
and strong. It flashed rapidly, now blood-red and now lamp-black.
Bayard thought of the pillar of fire and cloud that led the ancient
people. There should have been by rights a moon; and breaks in
battalions of clouds, at rare intervals, let through a shimmer
paler than darkness, though darker than light. Such a reduction
of the black tone of the night had mercifully befallen, when the
staggering wagons clattered and stopped upon the large, oval
pebbles of the beach.
The fog, which is shy of a gale, especially at that season of the
year, had not yet come in, and the vessel could be clearly seen.
She lay upon the reef, broadside to the breakers; she did not
pitch, but, to a nautical eye, her air of repose was the bad thing
about her. She was plainly held fast. Her red port-light, still
burning, showed as each wave went down, and the gray outlines of
her rigging could be discerned. Her foremast had broken off about
five feet from the deck, and the spar, held by the rigging, was
ramming the sides of the vessel.
The astonishing rumor was literally true. The Clara Em--one of the
famous fishermen of which Windover was too proud to be vain; the
Clara Em, newly-built and nobly furnished, none of your old-time
schooners, clumsy of hulk and rotten of timbers, but the fastest
runner on the coast, the stanchest keel that cleft the harbor,
fine in her lines as a yacht, and firm in her beams as an ocean
steamer--the Clara Em, fearing neither gods nor men nor weather,
and bound for Georges’ on a three weeks’ fresh-fishing trip, had
deliberately weighed anchor in the teeth of a March southeaster,
and had flung all her clean, green-white sails to the gale. As
nearly as could be made out from the shore, she had every stitch
up, and not a reef to her face, and she lay over against the
rock like a great eagle whose wings were broken. Even a landsman
could comprehend the nature of this dare-devil act; and Bayard,
running to lend a hand to slide the dory from the wagon, uttered an
exclamation of indignant horror.
“How did this happen? Were they mad?”
“Full,” replied the old captain laconically.
“Yes, I see she’s under full sail. But why?” he persisted
innocently.
The old captain, with a curious expression, flashed a lantern in
the young minister’s face, but made no reply.
Cries could now be heard from the vessel; for the wind, being dead
off, bore sounds from sea to shore which could by no means travel
from shore to sea. Ragged Rock was a rough spot in the kindest
weather; and in that gale, and with the wind in that direction, the
roar and power of the surf were great. But it should be remembered
that the blow had not been of long duration; hence the sea was not
what it would be in a few hours if the gale should hold. In this
fact lay the only possible chance of extending rescue in any form
to the shipwrecked crew.
“Clara Em! Aho--oy--oy!” yelled a dozen voices. But the united
throats of all Windover could not have made themselves articulate
to the straining ears upon the schooner.
“Where’s yer crew? Show up, there! Can’t ye do _nothin’_ for
yerselves? Where’s yer dories? Hey? What? Clara Em! Aho--oy--oy!”
“They’re deef as the two years’ drownded,” said the old captain.
“An’ they ain’t two hundred feet from shore.”
“Why, then, surely we can save them!” cried Bayard joyfully. But no
man assented to the cheerful words.
The dory, a strong specimen of its kind, was now out of the wagon,
and a score of arms dragged it over the pebbles. The surf dashed
far up the beach, splashing men, boat, wagon, horses. Against the
cliff the spray rose a hundred feet, hissing, into the air. The old
captain eyed the sea and measured the incoming rollers with his
deep-set eye.
“Ye cayn’t do it,” he pronounced. “There ain’t a dory in Windover
can live in _that_”--he pointed his gaunt arm at the breakers.
“Anyhow, we’ll try!” rang out a strong voice. Cries from the wreck
arose again. Some of the younger men pushed the dory off. Bayard
sprang to join them.
“I can row!” he cried with boyish eagerness; “I was stroke at
Harvard!”
“This ain’t Charles River,” replied one of the men; “better stand
back, Parson.”
They kindly withstood him, and leaped in without him, four of
them, seamen born and bred. They ran the dory out into the surf.
He held his lantern high to light them. In their wet oil-skins
their rough, wild outlines looked like divers, or like myths of the
deep. They leaped in and seized the oars with one of the wild cries
of the sailor who goes to his duty, his dinner, or his death, by
the rhythm of a song or the thrill of a shout. The dory rose on a
tremendous comber, trembled, turned, whirled, and sank from sight.
Then came yells, and a crash.
“There!” howled Captain Hap, stamping his foot, “I told ye so!”
“She’s over!”
“She’s busted!”
“She’s smashed to kindlin’ wood!”
“Here they be! Here they come! Haul ’em in!”
The others ran out into the surf and helped the brave fellows,
soaked and discomfited, up the beach. They were badly bruised, and
one of them was bleeding.
The pedestrians from the town had now come up; groups of men, and
the few women; and a useless crowd stood staring at the vessel. A
big third wave rolled over and smashed the port light.
“It’s been going on all these ages,” thought Bayard,--“the helpless
shore against the almighty sea.”
“Only two hundred feet away!” he cried; “I _can’t_ see why
_something_ can’t be done! I say, something _shall_!--Where are
your ropes? Where are your wits? Where is all your education to
this kind of thing? Are you going to let them drown before your
eyes?”
“There ain’t no need of goin’ so far’s that,” said the old captain
with the aggravating serenity of his class. “If she holds till it
ebbs they can clomber ashore, every man-jack of ’em. Ragged Rock
ain’t an island except at flood. It’s a long, pinted tongue o’rock
runnin’ along,--so. You don’t onderstand it, Parson. Why, they
could eeny most _walk_ ashore, come mornin’, if she holds.”
“It’s a good pull from now till sun-up,” objected a fisherman. “And
it’s the question if she don’t break up.”
“Anyhow, I’m going to try,” insisted Bayard. A rope ran out through
his hands,--shot high into the air,--fell into the wind, and
dropped into the breakers. It had carried about ten feet. For the
gale had taken the stout cable between its teeth, and tossed it, as
a dog does a skein of silk, played with it, shook it to and fro,
and hurled it away. The black lips of the clouds closing over the
moon, seemed to open and grin as the old captain said:--
“You ken keep on tryin’ long’s you hev the inclination. Mebbe the
women-folks will feel better for’t; but you cay--n’t do it.”
“Can’t get a rope to a boat two hundred feet away?” demanded Bayard.
“Not without apparatus,--no, sir! Not in a blow like this here.”
The old seaman raised his voice to a bellow to make himself audible
twelve feet away. “Why, it’s reelly quite a breeze o’ wind,” he
said.
“Then what _can_ we do?” persisted Bayard, facing the beach in
great agitation. “What are we here for, anyhow?”
“We ken watch for ’em to come ashore,” replied the captain grimly.
Turning, in a ferment half of anger, half of horror, to the younger
men, Bayard saw that some one was trying to start a bonfire.
Driftwood had been collected from dry spots in the rocks--or had
a bucket of coal-tar been brought by some thoughtful hand? And in
a little cave at the foot of the cliff, a woman, upon her knees
in the shallow snow, was sheltering a tiny blaze within her two
hands. It was the girl Lena. She wore a woolen cap, of the fashion
called a Tam o’ Shanter, and a coarse fur shoulder cape. Her rude
face showed suddenly in the flaming light. It was full of anxious
kindliness. He heard her say:--
“It’ll hearten ’em anyhow. It’ll show ’em they ain’t deserted of
God and men-folks too.”
“Where’s my old lady?” added the girl, looking about. “I want to
get her up to this fire. She’s freezing somewheres.”
“Look alive, Lena! Here she is!” called one of the fishermen. He
pointed to the cliff that hung over Ragged Rock. The old woman
stood on the summit and on the edge. How she had climbed there,
Heaven knew; no one had seen or aided her; she stood, bent and
rigid, with her blanket shawl about her head. Her gray hair blew
back from her forehead in two lean locks. Black against the
darkness, stone carved out from stone, immovable, dumb, a statue
of the storm, she stared out straight before her. She seemed a
spirit of the wind and wet, a solemn figure-head, an anathema,
or a prayer; symbol of a thousand watchers frozen on a thousand
shores:--woman as the sea has made her.
The girl had clambered up the cliff like a cat, and could be seen
putting her arms around the old woman, and pleading with her. Lena
did indeed succeed so far as to persuade her down to the fire,
where she chafed the poor old creature’s hands, and held to her
shrunken lips a bottle of Jamaica ginger that some fisherman’s wife
had brought. But the old woman refused.
“Keep it for Johnny,” she said, “till he gets ashore.” It was the
only thing she had been heard to say that night.
She pushed the ginger away, and crawled back to her solitary
station on the cliff. Some one said: “Let be! Let her be!”
And some one else said:--
“Whar’s the use?”
At that moment a voice arose:--
“There’s the cap’n! There’s Joe Salt, cap’n of the Clara Em! He’s
acrosst the bowsprit signalin’! He’s tryin’ to communicate!”
“We haven’t seen another living figure moving across that vessel,”
said Bayard, whose inexperience was as much perplexed as his
humanity was distressed and thwarted by the situation. “I see one
man--on the bows--yes. But where are the rest? You don’t suppose
they’re washed overboard already?--Oh, this is horrible!” he cried.
He was overwhelmed at the comparative, almost indifferent calmness
of his fellow-townsmen.
The light-keeper and the old captain had run out upon the reef.
They held both hands to their ears. The shouts from the vessel
continued. Every man held his breath. The whirling blast, like the
cone of a mighty phonograph, bore a faint articulation from the
wreck.
“Oh!” cried the young minister. “He says they’re all sunk!”
He was shocked to hear a laugh issue from the lips of Captain Hap,
and to see, in the light of the fire, something like a smile upon
the keeper’s face.
“You don’t understand, sir,” said one of the fishermen
respectfully. “He says they’re all--”
“May as well out with it, Bob,” said another. “The parson’s got to
get his initiation someways. Cap’n Salt says they’re drunk, sir.
The crew of the Clara Em is all drunk.”
At this moment a terrible shriek rang above the roar of the storm.
It came from the old woman on the top of the cliff.
Her eyes had been the first, but they were not the only ones now,
to perceive the signs of arousing life upon the wreck.
A second man was seen to climb across the bows, to pause for an
instant, and then to plunge. He went out of sight in a moment.
The inrolling surf glittered in the blaze of the bonfires like a
cataract of flame. The swimmer reappeared, struggled, threw up his
arms and disappeared.
“I have stood this as long as I can,” said Bayard in a low, firm
voice. “Give me a rope! Tie it around me, some of you, and hold on!
I’m going to try to save that man.”
“I’ll go, myself,” said one of the fishermen slowly.
“Bob,” replied the minister, “how many children have you?”
“Eleven, sir.”
“Stay where you are, then,” said Bayard. “Such things are for
lonely men.”
“Bring the rope!” he commanded. “Tie it yourselves--you know
how--in one of your sailor’s knots; something that will hold. I’m a
good swimmer. I saved a man once on a yachting trip. Quick, there!
Faster!”
“There’s another!” cried the light-keeper. “There’s a second
feller jumped overboard--swimming for his life! Look, look, look!
He’s sunk--no he ain’t, he ain’t! He’s bearing down against the
rocks--My God! Look at him, look, look, look!”
Busy hands were at the rope about the minister’s waist; they worked
slowly, from sheer reluctance to do the deed. Bayard stamped the
beach with divine impatience. His head whirled with such exaltation
that he scarcely knew who touched him; he made out to perceive that
Ben Trawl was one of the men who offered to tie the bow-line; he
heard the old captain say, shortly:--
“I’ll do it myself!”
He thought he heard little Jane Granite cry out; and that she
begged him not to go, “for his people’s sake,” and that Ben Trawl
roughly silenced her. Strangely, the words that he had been
reading--what ages since!--in the hall in Angel Alley spun through
his mind.
“‘Are you dying for him?’ she whispered. ‘And his wife and child.
Hush. Yes!’”
* * * * *
So! This is the “terrible sea!” This is what drowning means; this
mortal chill, this crashing weight upon the lungs, the heart, this
fighting for a man’s breath,--this asphyxia--this conflict with
wind and water, night and might--this being hurled out into chaos,
gaining a foot, and losing three--this sight of something human
yonder hurtling towards you on the billow which bears you back from
it--this struggling on again, and sweeping back, and battling out!
Blessing on the “gentleman’s muscle,” trained in college days to do
man’s work! Thanks to the waters of old Charles River and of merry
Newport for their unforgotten lessons! Thank God for that wasted
liberal education,--yes, and liberal recreation,--if it teach the
arm, and fire the nerve, and educate the soul to save a drunken
sailor now.
But save? Can human power save that sodden creature--only wit
enough left in him to keep afloat and drift, dashing inward on the
rocks? He swirls like a chip. But his cry is the mortal cry of
flesh and blood.
Bayard’s strangling lips move:--
“_Now Almighty Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth_”--
There were mad shouts upon the beach. A score of iron hands held
to the line; and fifty men said to their souls: “That is a hero’s
deed.” Some one flung the rest of the pailful of tar upon the fire,
and it blazed up. The swimmer saw the yellow color touch the comber
that broke above his head. The rope tightened like the hand of
death upon his chest. Caught, perhaps? Ah, there! It has grazed
the reef, and the teeth of the rock are gnawing at it; so a mastiff
gnaws at the tether of his chained foe, to have the fight out
unimpeded.
“If it cuts through, I am gone,” thought Bayard.--“_And Jesus
Christ Thy Son, our Lord and Saviour._”--
“Haul in! Haul in, I say! Quick! Haul ’em in for life’s sake,
boys!--She tautens to the weight of two. _The parson’s got him!_”
The old captain jumped up and down on the pebbles like a boy. Wet
and glittering, through hands of steel, the line sped in.
“Does she hold? Is she cut? Haul in, haul in, haul in!”
The men broke into one of their sudden, natural choruses, moving
rhythmically to the measure of their song:--
“Pull for the shore, sailor,
Pull for the shore!”
As he felt his feet touch bottom, Bayard’s strength gave way. Men
ran out as far as they could stand in the undertow, and seized and
held and dragged--some the rescuer, some the rescued; and so they
all came dripping up the beach.
The rope dropped upon the pebbles--cut to a single strand.
Bayard was with difficulty persuaded to release his rigid clutch
from the shoulder of the fisherman, who fell in a shapeless mass at
his preserver’s feet. The light of the tar fire flared on the man’s
bloated face. It was Job Slip.
“Where’s the other?” asked Bayard faintly. “There were two.”
He dimly saw through streams of water, that something else had
happened; that men were running over the rocks and collecting in a
cleft, and stooping down to look, and that most of them turned away
as soon as they had looked.
The old woman’s was the only quiet figure of them all. She had not
left her place upon the cliff, but stood bent and stiff, staring
straight ahead. He thought he heard a girl’s voice say:--
“Hush! Don’t talk so loud. She doesn’t know--it’s Johnny; and he’s
been battered to jelly on the rocks.”
* * * * *
“Mr. Bayard, sir,” said Job, who had crawled up and got as far as
his knees, “I wasn’t wuth it.”
“That’s so,” said a candid bystander with an oath.
“Then _be_ worth it!” said Bayard in a loud voice. He seemed to
have thrown all that remained to him of soul and body into those
four words; as he spoke them, he lifted his dripping arms high
above his head, as if he appealed from the drunkard to the sky;
then he sank.
The gentlest hands in the crowd caught him, and the kindest hearts
on the coast throbbed when the old captain called:--
“Boys! Stand back! Stir up the fire! Where’s the dry blankets?
There’s plenty to ’tend to Johnny. Dead folks can bury their dead
folks. Hurry up them dry clo’es an’ that there Jamaiky ginger! This
here’s a livin’ man. Just a drop, sir--here. I’ll hold ye kinder
easy. Can’t? _What?_--Sho!... Boys, the parson’s hurt.”
At that moment a sound solemn and sinister reverberated from the
tower of the lighthouse. The iron lips of the fog bell opened and
spoke.
IX.
Captain Hap had reached the years when a trip to the Grand Banks is
hard work, dory fishing off the coast a doubtful pleasure, and even
yachting in an industrial capacity is a burden. He had a quick eye,
a kind heart, a soft foot, and the gentle touch strangely enough
sometimes to be found in hands that have hauled in the cod-line
and the main-sheet for fifty years. In short, Captain Hap made an
excellent nurse, and sometimes served his day and generation in
that capacity.
Bayard lay on the straw mattress under the photograph of Leonardo’s
Christ, and thoughtfully watched Captain Hap. It was the first
day that conversation had presented itself to the sick man in the
light of a privilege; and he worked up to the luxury slowly through
intervals of delicious silence.
“Captain Hap, I am quite well now--as you see. I must speak next
Sunday.”
“Call it Sunday arter,” suggested Captain Hap.
“It was only a scratch on the head--wasn’t it, Cap’n? And this
cold. It _is_ a bad cold.”
“For a cold, yes, sir; quite a cold. You see, it anchored onto
your lungs; there air folks that call such colds inflammation.
That there cut on the head was a beautiful cut, sir; it healed as
healthy as a collie dog’s, or a year-old baby’s. We’ll have you
round, now, sir, before you can say Cap’n Hap!”
“Cap’n Hap?”
“Well, sir?”
“You’ve done something for me--I don’t know just what; whether it’s
my life that’s saved, or only a big doctor’s bill.”
“Ask Mrs. Granite, sir, and that there handy girl of hers; we’re
all in it. You kept the whole crew on deck for a few days. You was
a sick man--for a spell.”
“Captain, I am a well man now; and there’s one thing I will know.
I’ve asked you before. I’ve asked when I was out of my head, and
I’ve asked when I was in it, and I’ve never got an answer yet.
_Now_ I’m going to have it.”
“Be you?” said Captain Hap. His small, dark, soft eyes twinkled
gently; but they took on lustre of metal across the iris; as if a
spark of iron or flint had hit them.
“It is time,” said Bayard, “that I knew all about it.”
“Meaning”--began the captain softly.
“Meaning everything,” said Bayard impatiently. “The whole story.
It’s the best thing for me. I dream about it so.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed your dreams was bad,” replied the nurse
soothingly.
“Captain, where’s the Clara Em?”
“To the bottom,” responded the fisherman cheerfully.
“And the men? The crew? Her captain? Job Slip? How many were
drowned? Out with it, Cap’n! I’m not very easy to deceive, when I’m
in my senses. You may as well tell me everything.”
“Mebbe I mought,” observed the captain. “Sometimes it’s the best
way. There wasn’t but one of ’em drowned, sir,--more’s the pity.”
Bayard uttered an exclamation of shocked rebuke and indignation;
but the old captain sat rocking to and fro in Mrs. Granite’s best
wooden rocking-chair, with the placid expression of those who rest
from their labors, and are not afraid that their works should
follow them.
“Fellars that’ll take a new fisherman--a regular dandy like
that--and smash her onto Ragged Rock, bein’ in the condition those
fellars were, ain’t _worth_ savin’!” said the seaman severely.
“Your treasurer here, J. B. S. Bond, he says last time he come to
see you, says he: ’The whole of ’em warn’t _worth_ our minister!’”
“I must speak to Mr. Bond about that,” said the young man with a
clerical ring in his voice. “It wasn’t a proper thing for him to
say.--Who was drowned, Captain Hap?”
“Only Johnny,” replied the captain indifferently. “He was born
drunk, Johnny was; his father was so before him; and three uncles.
He ain’t any great loss.”
“Did you see Johnny’s mother, Captain,--on the cliff, there,--that
night?”
“I didn’t take notice of her particular,” replied Captain Hap
comfortably. “I see several women round. There’s usually a good
many on the rocks, such times.”
“Well, you’ve got me,” said Bayard with a smiling sigh. “I’m a
little too weak to play the parson on you yet, you Christian
heathen--you stony-hearted minister of mercy!”
“Sho!” said the captain. “’Tain’t fair to call names. I can’t hit
back; on a sick man.”
“Very well,” said Bayard, sinking back on his thin, small pillows.
“Just go ahead and tell me the whole business, then. Where is Job
Slip?”
“Off haddockin’.”
“Sober?”
“So far. He’s come over here half a dozen times, but the doctor
wouldn’t let him up to see you. His wife come, too. That woman,
she’d kiss the popples[1] underneath your rubber-boots.”
“Where’s Johnny’s mother?”
“They took her to the Widders’ Home yesterday. Some of ’em
screeches all the way over. Folks say she never said nothing.”
“What became of all those men--the crew and captain?”
“Why, they waited till ebb, just as I told you. Then they come
ashore, the whole twelve on ’em. The crew they come first, and
Cap’n Salt--that’s Joe Salt--he follered after. There was some
folks waited round to see ’em off--but it come up dreadful thick,
spite of the breeze; so thick it had stems to it. You couldn’t
see the vessel, not a line of her, and ’twas kinder cold and
disagree’ble. So most the folks went home. But they got ashore,
every man-jack of ’em alive.”
“Thank God!” breathed the sick man.
“Well,” said the captain, “that’s a matter of opinion. You’ve
talked enough, sir.”
“Just one more, Cap’n Hap! Just this! This I’ve _got_ to know. What
was it--exactly--that those men did? How did they come to be in
such a plight? How in the world--that beautiful new boat--and an
intelligent officer at the helm, Captain--how on earth did it come
about?”
“The Clara Em was sot to sail,” replied Captain Hap calmly.
“That’s about all. Her owners they were sot, and her cap’n he was
sot. It was the sotness done it. They’d make the market first,
you see, if they got the start--and it’s a job gettin’ your crew
aboard, you know. Anything to get your crew. Drunk or sober, that
isn’t the point. Drunker they be, the easier to ship ’em. _See? Get
your crew._ Get ’em anyhow! They was all full, every mother’s son
of ’em. Cap’n Joe, he was the only sober soul aboard, and that’s
the truth, and he knew it when he set sail. Yes--oh, yes. The storm
was comin’. He knew it was breezin’ up.--Oh, yes, of course. So
he got some sober men off the wharves to help him at the sheets,
and he put up every stitch. Yes, sir! Every stitch he had! And
out he sails--with thirteen drunken men aboard--him at the wheel,
and not a hand to help him. That’s the English on’t. The boat was
d----drunk, beg your pardon, Parson! He driv right out the harbor,
and it was a sou’easter, and blew quite a breeze o’ wind, and you
see he tacked, and set in, and he was tackin’ out, and it had
breezed up consider’ble more’n he expected. So he drove right on
the reef. That’s about it.”
“But why didn’t he take in sail?”
“How was he goin’ to do it with that crew? Why, he couldn’t leave
the wheel to tie a reef-point.”
“But there was his anchor.”
“Did you ever try to heave one of them big anchors? It takes four
men.”
“What a situation! Horrible!”
“Wall, yes; it was inconvenient--him at the wheel, and a dead drunk
crew, thirteen of ’em, below. Why, they was too drunk to know
whether they drowned or not.”
“Can the boat be raised? Will she ever be good for anything?”
“Kindlin’ wood,” remarked the captain dryly.
“Captain Hap,” asked Bayard feebly, “do things like this often
happen?”
“Sometimes.”
“Isn’t this an extreme case?”
“Well, it don’t happen every day.”
“But things of this kind--do they occur often? Do you know of other
cases?”
“Windover don’t have the monopoly of ’em by no means,” mused
Captain Hap. “There was the Daredevil over on South Shore. She was
launched about a year ago. She went on a trial spin one day, and
everybody aboard was pretty jolly. They put all their canvas up to
show her off. It was a nor’wester that day, and they driv her right
before the wind. She jest plunged bows down, and driv straight to
the bottom, the Daredevil did. Some said it was her name. But,
Lord, rum done it.”
“What do people say--how do they take it here in Windover, this
case of the Clara Em? Weren’t they indignant?”
“Wall, the insurance folks was mad.”
“No, but the people--the citizens--the Christian people--how do
they feel about it?”
“Oh, they’re used to it,” said Captain Hap.
Bayard turned wearily on his hard bed. He did not answer. He looked
out and towards the sea. The engraved Guido over the study-table
between the little windows regarded him. St. Michael was fighting
with his dragon still.
“_He_ never got wounded,” thought the sick man.
“Captain,” he said presently, “these rooms seem to be full
of--pleasant things. Who sent them all?”
“Them geraniums and other greens? Oh, the ladies of the mission,
every mother’s daughter of ’em, married and single, young an’ old.
Jellies? Lord! Yes. Jellies enough to stock a branch grocery. What
there _is_ in the female mind, come to sickness, that takes it out
in jellies”--mused the captain.
“I’ve taken solid comfort out of this screen,” said Bayard
gratefully. “I did suffer with the light before. Who sent that?”
“That’s Jane Granite’s idee,” replied the captain. “She seems to
be a clever girl. Took an old clo’es-horse and some rolls of wall
paper they had in the house. They give fifteen cents a roll for
that paper. It’s kinder tasty, don’t you think? ’Specially that
cherubim with blue wings settin’ on a basket of grapes.”
“That reminds me. I see--some Hamburg grapes,” said Bayard, with
the indifferent air of a man who purposely puts his vital question
last. He pointed to a heaping dish of hothouse fruit and other
delicacies never grown in Windover.
The captain replied that those come from the Boston gentleman;
they’d kept coming all along. He thought she said there was a card
to ’em by the name of--
“Worcester?” asked the sick man eagerly.
That was it. Worcester.
“He hasn’t been here, has he? The gentleman hasn’t called to see
me?”
The nurse shook his head, and Bayard turned his own away. He would
not have believed that his heart would have leaped like that at
such a little thing. He felt like a sick boy, sore and homesick
with the infinite longing for the love of kin. It was something to
know that he was not utterly forgotten. He asked for one of the
Boston pears, and ate it with pathetic eagerness.
“There’s been letters,” said the captain; “but the doctor’s orders
are agin your seeing ’em this week. There’s quite a pile. You see,
its bein’ in the papers let folks know.”
“In the papers! _What_ in the papers?”
“What do you s’pose?” asked the captain proudly. “A fellar don’t
swim out in the undertow off Ragged Rock to save a d---- fool of a
drunken fisherman every day.”
“I’ll be split and salted!” added the fisherman-nurse, “if we
didn’t have to have a watchman here three nights when you was
worst, to keep the reporters off ye. Thirteen Windover fellars
volunteered for the job, and they wouldn’t none of ’em take a cent
for it. They said they’d set up forty nights for you.”
“For _me_?” whispered the sick man. His eyes filled for the first
time since the Clara Em went ashore on Ragged Rock. Something new
and valuable seemed to have entered life as suddenly as the comfort
of kin and the support of friends, and that bright, inspiriting
atmosphere, which one calls the world, had gone from him. He had
not expected that precious thing--the love of those for whom we
sacrifice ourselves. He felt the first thrill of it with gratitude
touching to think of, in so young and lovable a man, with life and
all its brilliant and beautiful possibilities before him.
* * * * *
It was an April night, and sea and sky were soft in Windover.
A stranger stood in Angel Alley hesitating at a door, which bore
above its open welcome these seven words:--
“THE CHURCH OF THE LOVE OF CHRIST.”
“What goes on here?” the gentleman asked of a bystander.
“Better things than ever went on here before,” was the reply.
“They’ve got a _man_ up there. He ain’t no dummy in a minister’s
choker.”
The stranger put another question.
“Well,” came the cordial answer, “he has several names in Angel
Alley: fisherman’s friend is one of the most pop’lar. Some calls
him the gospel cap’n. There’s those that prefers jest to say, the
new minister. There’s one name he _don’t_ go by very often, and
that’s the Reverend Bayard.”
“He has no right to the title,” murmured the stranger.
“What’s that?” interposed the other quickly. The stranger made no
reply.
“Some call him the Christ’s Rest man,” proceeded the bystander
affably.
“That is a singular--ah--remarkable cognomen. How comes that?”
“Why, you see, the old name for this place was Seraph’s Rest--it
was the wust hell in Angel Alley--see? before he took it up an’ sot
to prayin’ in it. So folks got it kinder mixed with the Love of
Christ up on that sign there. Some calls the place Christlove for
short. I heerd an I-talian call him the Christman t’other day.”
The stranger took off his hat by instinct, it seemed unconsciously;
glanced at the inscription above the door, and passed thoughtfully
up the steep, bare stairs into the hall or room of worship.
The service was already in progress, for the hour was late, and
the gentleman observed with an air of surprise that the place was
filled. He looked about for a comfortable seat, but was forced to
content himself with standing-room in the extreme rear of the hall.
Crowds overflowed the wooden settees, brimmed into the aisles, and
were packed, in serried rows as tight as codfish in a box, against
the wall. The simile of the cod was forced upon the visitor’s mind
in more senses than one. A strong whiff of salt fish assailed him
on every side. This was varied by reminiscences of glue factories,
taking unmistakable form. An expression of disgust crossed the
stranger’s face; it quickly changed into that abstraction which
indicates the presence of moral emotion too great for attention to
trifles.
The usual New England religious audience was not to be seen in the
Church of the Love of Christ in Angel Alley. The unusual, plainly,
was. The wealth and what the “Windover Topsail” called the society
of Windover were sparsely represented on those hard settees. The
clean, sober faces of respectable families were out in good force;
these bore the earnest, half-perplexed, wholly pathetic expression
of uninfluential citizens who find themselves suddenly important
to and responsible for an unpopular movement; a class of people
who do not get into fiction or history, and who deserve a quality
of respect and sympathy which they do not receive; the kind of
person who sets us to wondering what was the personal view of the
situation dully revolving in the minds of Peter and the sons of
Zebedee when they put their nets to dry upon the shores of Galilee,
and tramped up and down Palestine at the call of a stronger and
diviner mind, wondering what it meant, and how it would all end.
These good people, not quite certain whether their own reputations
were injured or bettered by the fact, sat side by side with men and
women who are not known to the pews of churches. The homeless were
there, and the hopeless, the sinning, the miserable, the disgraced,
the neglected, the “rats” of the wharves, and the outcasts of the
dens.
The stranger stood packed in, elbow to elbow between an Italian
who served the country of his adoption upon the town waterworks,
and a dark-browed Portuguese sailor. American fishermen, washed
and shaven, in their Sunday clothes, filled the rear seats.
Against the wall, lines of rude, red faces crowded like cattle
at a spring; men of the sea and the coast, men without homes or
characters; that uninteresting and dangerous class which we dismiss
in two idle words as the “floating population.” Some of these men
were sober; some were not; others were hovering midway between
the two conditions: all were orderly, and a few were listening
with evidences of emotion to the hymn, in which by far the greater
portion of the audience joined. A girl wearing a Tam o’ Shanter and
a black fur cape, and singing in a fine, untrained contralto, held
her hymn-book over the settee to the Italian.
“Come, Tony! Pass it along!” she whispered, “I can get on without
it. Make ’em pile in and sing along the wall, there!”
With rude and swelling cadence the fishermen sang:--
“I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord.”
Their voices and their hearts rose high on one of those plaintive
popular melodies of which music need never be ashamed:--
“I need Thee, oh, I need Thee,
Every hour I need Thee;
Oh, bless me now, my Saviour”....
The stranger, who had the appearance of a religious man, joined in
the chorus heartily; he shared the book which the girl had given to
the Italian, who came in a bar too late, and closed the stanza on
a shrill solo,--
“I co--home to thee.”
This little accident excited a trifling smile; but it faded
immediately, for the preacher had arisen. His appearance was
greeted with a respect which surprised the stranger. The audience
at once became grave even to reverence; the Italian cuffed a
drunken Portuguese who was under the impression that responses to
the service were expected of him; the girl in the Tam o’ Shanter
shook a woman who giggled beside her. A fisherman whispered
loudly,--
“Shut up there! The parson ain’t quite tough yet. Keep it quiet for
him! Shut up there, along the wall!”
There is nothing like a brave deed to command the respect of
seafaring men. Emanuel Bayard, when he plunged into the undertow
after Job Slip’s drunken, drowning body, swam straight into the
heart of Windover. A rough heart that is, but a warm one, none
warmer on the freezing coast, and sea-going Windover had turned the
sunny side of its nature, and taken the minister in. The standards
by which ignorant men judge the superior classes--their superb
indifference to any scale of values but their own--deserve more
study than they receive.
It had never occurred to Bayard, who was only beginning to learn to
understand the nature of his material, that he had become in three
weeks the hero of the wharves and the docks, the romance of Angel
Alley, the admiring gossip of the Banks and Georges’, the pride
and wonder of the Windover fishermen. Quite unconscious of this
“sea-change,” wrought by one simple, manly act upon his popularity,
he rose to address the people. His heart was full of what he was
going to say. He gave one glance the length of the hall. He saw
the crowds packed by the door. He saw the swaying nets, ornamented
with globes and shells and star-fish, after the fashion of the
fishing-town; these decorations softened the bare walls of the
audience-room. He saw the faces of the fishermen lifting themselves
to him and blurring together in a gentle glow. They seemed to him,
as a great preacher once said of his audience, like the face “of
one impressive, pleading man,” whose life hung upon his words. He
felt as if he must weigh them in some divine scales into which no
dust or chaff of weakness or care for self could fall.
Something of this high consciousness crept into his face. He stood
for a moment silent; his beautiful countenance, thin from recent
suffering, took on the look by which a man represses noble tears.
Suddenly, before he had spoken a word, a storm of applause burst
out--shook the room from wall to wall--and roared like breakers
under his astonished feet. He turned pale with emotion, but the
fishermen thundered on. He was still so weak that this reception
almost overcame him, and involuntarily he stretched out both his
hands. At the gesture the noise sank instantly; and silence, in
which the sigh of the saddest soul in the room might have been
heard, received the preacher.
His sensitive face, melted and quivering, shone down upon them
tenderly. Men in drunken brawls, and men in drowning seas, and
women in terrible temptation, remembered how he looked that night
when the safe and the virtuous and the comfortable had forgotten.
The stranger back by the door put his hat before his face.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Windover for pebbles.
X.
The preacher began to speak with a quietness in almost startling
contrast to his own evident emotion, and to the excitement in the
audience room. He made no allusion to the fact that this was his
first appearance among his people since the wreck of the Clara Em,
and the all but mortal illness which had followed his personal
share in that catastrophe. Quite in his usual manner he conducted
his Sunday evening service; a simple religious talk varied by
singing, and a few words from the New Testament. Bayard never read
“chapters;” a phrase sufficed, a narrative or a maxim: sometimes
he stopped at a single verse. The moment that the fishermen’s eyes
wandered, the book closed. It was his peculiarity that he never
allowed the Bible to bore his listeners; he trained them to value
it by withholding it until they did. It was long remembered of him
among the people of the coast that he made use of public prayer
with a reserve and a power entirely unknown to the pulpits and
the vestries. The ecclesiastical “long prayer” was never heard
in Angel Alley. Bayard’s prayers were brief, and few. He prayed
audibly before his people only when he could not help it. It seemed
sometimes as if his heart broke in the act.
On this evening, no prayer had as yet passed his lips; the
stranger, with a slight frown, noticed this fact. But now, the
preacher brushed aside his notes, and, clearing the desk, crossed
his hands upon it, and leaned forward with a marked change of
manner. Suddenly, without a hint of his purpose, the young
minister’s gentle voice rose into the tones of solemn arraignment.
“I came here,” he said, “a stranger to this town and to its
customs. It has taken me all this while to learn what your virtues
and your vices are. I have dealt with you gently, preaching
comfortable truths as I have been expected to preach them. I have
worked in ignorance. I have spoken soft words. Now I speak them
no more! Your sin and your shame have entered like iron into my
soul. People of Windover! I accuse you in the name of Christ, whose
minister I am!”
The expression of affectionate reverence with which his audience
had listened to Bayard up to this moment now changed into a
surprise that resembled fear. Before he had spoken ten words
more, it became evident that the young preacher was directing the
full force of his conscience and his intelligence to a calm and
deliberate attack upon the liquor habit and the liquor traffic--one
of the last of the subjects (as it is well known) conceded to be
the business of a clergyman to meddle with in any community, and
the very last which Windover had been trained to hear herself held
to account for by her clerical teachers. At the hour when he came
nearest to the adoration of those who adore without thought, when
they saw him through the mist of romance, when the people, carried
on a wave of hero-worship, lay for the first time at his feet,
Bayard for the first time opened fire upon their favorite sin.
Shot after shot poured down from those delicate, curving lips.
Broadside followed broadside, and still the fire fell. He captured
for them the elusive statistics of the subject; he confronted
them with its appalling facts; he pelted them with incidents such
as the soul sickens to relate or to remember. He denied them
the weak consolation of condoning in themselves a moral disease
too well known to be the vice of the land, and of the times. He
scored them with rebuke under which his leading men grew pale
with alarm. Nothing could have been more unlike the conventional
temperance address, yet nothing could have been more simple, manly,
reasonable, and fearless.
“For every prayer that goes up to God from this room,” he said,
“for every hymn, for every sacred word and vow of purity, for every
longing of a man’s heart to live a noble life, there open fifty
dens of shame upon this street to blast him. We are pouring holy
oil upon a sea of mud. That is not good religion, and it is not
good sense. We must prove our right to represent the Christian
religion in Angel Alley. We must close its dens, or they ought
to close our lips. I am ready to try,” he added with his winning
simplicity, “if you are. I shall need your help and your advice,
for I am not educated in these matters as I ought to be. I was
not taught how to save drunken men in the schools where clergymen
are trained. I must learn now--we must learn together--as best
we can.... Oh, my people!” His voice passed from the tone of
loving entreaty into that of prayer; by one of those moving
transformations peculiar to himself, wherein those who heard him
scarce could tell the moment when he ceased to speak to men and
began to talk with God.
“People of the Church of the Love of Christ! Approach God, for He
is close at heart.... Thou great God! Holy, Almighty, Merciful!
Make us know how to deal with sin, in our own souls, and in the
lives of others. For the sake of Thy Son whose Name we dare to
bear. Amen.”
As the words of this outcry, this breath of the spirit, rose and
ceased, the silence in the room was something so profound that a
girl’s sigh was heard far back by the door.
The hush was stung by a long, low, sibilant sound; a single hiss
insulted that sacred stillness. Then a man purple to the brows,
rose and went out. It was old Trawl, whose saloon had been a
landmark in Angel Alley for fifty years.
The stranger, who had been more moved than it seemed he cared to
show by what he had heard and seen, passed slowly with the crowd
down the long stairs, and reached the outer air. As the salt wind
struck in his face, a hand was laid upon his shoulder. The young
minister, looking pale and tired, but enviably calm, drew the
visitor’s hand through his arm.
“I saw you, Fenton,” he said quietly, “when you first came in.
You’ll come straight to my lodgings with me.... Won’t you?” he
added wistfully, fancying that Fenton hesitated. “You can’t know
how much it will mean to me. I haven’t seen anybody--why, I haven’t
seen a fellow since I came to Windover.”
“You must lead rather an isolated life, I should think,” observed
Fenton with some embarrassment, as the two stood to hail the
electric car that ran by Mrs. Granite’s humble door.
“We’ll talk when we get there,” replied Bayard, rather shortly for
him. “The car will be full of people,” he added apologetically.
“One lives in a glass bell here. Besides, I’m a bit tired.”
He looked, indeed, exhausted, as the electric light smote his thin
face; his eyes glowed like fire fed by metal, and his breath came
short. He leaned his head back against the car window.
“You cough, I see,” said Fenton, who was not an expert in silence.
“Do I? Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of it.” He said nothing more until
they had reached his lodgings. Fenton began to talk about the
wreck and the rescue. He said the usual things in the usual way,
offering, perforce, the tribute of a man to a manly deed.
Bayard nodded politely; he would not talk about it.
Jane Granite opened the door for them. She looked at the minister
with mute, dog-like misery in her young eyes.
“You look dead beat out, sir,” she said. But Ben Trawl stood
scowling in the door of the sitting-room; he had not chosen to go
to the service, nor to allow her to go without him. Jane thought it
was religious experience that made this such a disappointment to
her.
“Ah, Trawl,” said the minister heartily, “I’m glad to see you here.”
He did not say, “I am sorry you were not at church,” as Ben Trawl
pugnaciously expected.
Bayard led his guest upstairs, and shut and locked the study door.
“There!” he said faintly. “Now, George Fenton, talk! Tell me all
about it. You can’t _think_ how I am going to enjoy this! I wish I
had an easy-chair for you. Will this rocker do? If you don’t mind,
I think I’ll just lie down a minute.”
He flung himself heavily upon the old carpet-covered lounge. Fenton
drew up the wooden rocking-chair to the cylinder stove, in which a
low fire glimmered, and put his feet on top of the stove, after the
manner of Cesarea and Galilee Hall.
“Well,” he began, in his own comfortable way, “I’ve accepted the
call.”
“I supposed you would,” replied Bayard, “when I heard it was under
way. I am glad of it!” he said cordially. “The First Church is a
fine old church. You’re just the man for them. They’ll ordain you
as easily as they swallow their native chowders. You came right
over from their evening service to our place to-night? You must
have hurried.”
“I did,” said the guest, with a certain air of condescension. “I
wanted to hear you, you know--once, at least.”
“When you are settled, you can’t come, of course,” observed Bayard
quickly. “I understand that.”
“Well--you see--I shall be--you know--in a very delicate position,
when I become the pastor of that church.”
Fenton’s natural complacency forsook him for the instant, and
something like embarrassment rested upon his easy face; he showed
it by the way he handled Mrs. Granite’s poker.
“It’s 72° in this room already,” suggested Bayard, smiling. “Would
you poke that fire any more?... Oh, come, Fenton! I understand.
Don’t bother your head about me, or how I may feel. A man doesn’t
choose to be where I am, to waste life in considering his feelings;
those are the least important items in his natural history. Just
stick to your subject, man. It’s _you_ I want to hear about.”
“Well,” replied the guest, warming to the theme with natural
enthusiasm, “the call was unanimous. Perfectly so.”
“That must be delightful.”
“Why, so it is--it is, as you say, delightful. And the
salary--they’ve raised the salary to get me, Bayard. You see it had
got out that I had refused--ah--hum--several calls. And they’d been
without a man so long, I fancy they’re tired of it. Anyhow, I’m to
have three thousand dollars.”
“That is delightful too,” said Bayard cordially. He turned over on
his old lounge, coughing, and doubled the thin, cretonne pillow
under his head; he watched his classmate with a half-quizzical
smile; his eyes and brow were perfectly serene.
“I shall be ordained immediately,” continued Fenton eagerly, “and
bring my wife. They are refitting the parsonage. I went in last
night to see that the carpets and papers and all that were what
they should be. I am going to be married--Bayard, I am going to be
married next week.”
“And that is best of all,” said Bayard in a low voice.
“She is really a lovely girl,” observed Fenton, “though somewhat
limited in her experience. I’ve known her all my life--where I came
from, in the western part of the State. But I think these gentle,
country girls make the best ministers’ wives. They educate up to
the position rapidly.”
Bayard made no answer to this scintillation; a spark shot over his
soft and laughing eyes; but his lips opened only to say, after a
perceptible pause,--
“Where is Tompkinton--he of the long legs and the army cape?”
“Settled somewhere near you, I hear; over across the Cape. He has a
fine parish. He’s to have two thousand--that’s doing well for a man
of his stamp.”
“I don’t think Tompkinton is the kind of man to think much about
the salary,” observed Bayard gravely. “He struck me as the other
sort of fellow. What’s become of Bent?”
“Graduates this summer, I suppose. I hear he’s called to Roxbury.
He always aimed at a Boston parish. He’s sure to boom.”
“And that brakeman--Holt? He who admired Huxley’s ‘Descent of Man’?”
“Oh, _he_ is slumming in New York city. They say he is really
very useful. He has some sort of mission work, there, at the Five
Points. I’m told he makes a specialty of converted burglars.”
“I haven’t been able to follow any of the boys,” said Bayard,
coughing. “I can’t very well--as I am situated. It does me good to
hear something about somebody. Where’s that round fellow--Jaynes?
With the round glasses? I remember he always ate two Baldwins, two
entire Baldwin apples.”
“Gone West, I believe. He’s admirably adapted to the West,” replied
Fenton, settling his chair in his old comfortable way.
“What an assorted lot we were!” said Bayard dreamily. “And what a
medley we were taught! I haven’t opened one of my note-books since
I came here.”
“Oh, in _your_ work,” said Fenton, “you don’t need to read, I
should think.”
Bayard’s eyes sought his library; rested lovingly on its full and
well-used shelves; then turned away with the expression of one
who says to a chosen friend: “We understand. Why need anything be
said?” He did not otherwise reply.
“Were you ever ordained over your present charge?” asked his
visitor suddenly, balancing the poker on the top curl of the iron
angel that ornamented the cylinder stove. “How did you manage it?
Did any of the--regular clergy--recognize the affair?”
“I was not ordained,” replied Bayard, smiling contentedly. “I
sought nothing of the kind. But a few of the country ministers
wished us Godspeed. There was one dear old man--he was my moderator
at that Council--he came over and put his hands on my head, and
gave me the blessing.”
“Oh--the charge to the pastor?”
“We didn’t call it that. We did not steal any of the old phrases.
He prayed and blessed me, that was all. He is a sincere, good man,
and he mad
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