Part 10

“Yes,” he interrupted; “I remember that evening.”

“I mean, when you had taken me up the Seminary walk to see the cross. When you said good-by that night, I thought I’d mention it. But I changed my mind. You see, you hadn’t had your call, then. I thought--I might--hurt your feelings. But we always _do_ come to Windover. We are coming as soon as Anniversary is over. We have the Flying Jib to ourselves--that little green cottage, you know, on the rocks. What! Never heard of the Flying Jib? You don’t know the summer Windover, do you?”

“Only the winter Windover, you see.”

“Nor the summer people, I suppose?”

“Only the winter people.”

“Father’s hired that old fish-house for a study,” continued Helen with some abruptness. “He says he can’t stand the women on the Mainsail piazzas; you can hear them over at the Flying Jib when the wind sets our way; they discuss the desserts, and pick each other’s characters to pieces, and compare Kensington stitches, and neuralgia. Father is going to bring down his article on ‘The State of the Unforgiven after Death’--There!” she said suddenly, “that Millet sketch is walking into father’s study with his basket on his back. The State of the Unforgiven will be a little--clammy, don’t you think?”

Her eyes rippled like the bed of a brown brook in the sun. Bayard laughed.

“The dear Professor!” he said.

“If father weren’t such an archangel in private life, it wouldn’t be so funny,” observed Helen, jabbing the point of her purple-and-gold changeable silk sun-umbrella into the sand; “I can’t see what he wants the unconverted to be burned up _for_. Can you?”

“The State of the Unforgiven before Death is more than I can manage,” replied Bayard, smiling; “I have my hands full.”

“Do you like it?” asked Helen, with a pretty, puzzled knot between her smooth brows.

“Like what? I like this.”

He looked at her; as any other man might--like those students who used to come so often, and who suddenly called no more. Helen had never seen that expression in his eyes. She dropped her own. She dug little wells in the fine, white sand with her sun-umbrella before she said,--

“I have to get the six o’clock train; you know I haven’t come to stay, yet.”

“But you are coming!” he exclaimed with irrepressible joyousness.

She made no answer, and Bayard’s sensitive color changed.

“Do I like _what_?” he repeated in a different tone.

“Heresy and martyrdom,” said Helen serenely.

“I regret nothing, if that is what you mean; no matter what it costs; no matter how it ends--no, not for an hour. I told the truth, and I took the consequences; that is all. How _can_ a man regret standing by his best convictions?”

“He might regret the convictions,” suggested Helen.

“Might he? Perhaps. Mine are so much stronger than they were when I started in, that they race me and drag me like winged horses in a chariot of fire.”

His eyes took on their dazzling look; like fine flash-lights they shot forth a brilliance as burning as it was brief; then their calm and color returned to them. Helen watched the transfiguration touch and pass his face with a sense of something so like reverence that it made her uncomfortable. Like many girls trained as she had been, she had small regard for the priestly office, and none for the priestly assumptions. The recognition of a spiritual superiority which she felt to be so far above her that in the nature of things she could not understand it, gave her strong nature a jar: something within her, hitherto fixed and untroubled, shook before it.

Bayard, without apparent consciousness of the young lady’s thoughts, or indeed of her presence for that moment, went on dreamily:--

“I was a theorizer, a dreamer, a theologic apprentice, a year ago. I knew no more of real life than--that silver sea-gull making for the lighthouse tower. I took notes about sin in the lecture-room. Now I study misery and shame in Angel Alley. The gap between them is as wide as the stride of that angel in Revelation--do you remember him?--who stood with one foot upon the land and one upon the sea. All I mind is, that I have so much more to learn than I need have had--everything, in fact. If I had been taught, if I had been trained--if it had not all come with that kind of shock which benumbs a man’s brain at first, and uses up his vitality so much faster than he can afford to spare it--but I have no convictions that I ought to be talking like this!”

“Go on,” said Helen softly.

“Oh, to what end?” asked Bayard wearily. “That ecclesiastical system which brought me where I am can’t be helped by one man’s rebellion. It’s going to take a generation of us. But there is enough that I _can_ help. It is the can-be’s, not the can’t-be’s, that are the business of men like me.”

“I saw you with that drunken man; he had his arms about you,” said Helen with charming irrelevance. Her untroubled brows still held that little knot, half of perplexity, half of annoyance. It became her, for she looked the more of a woman for it.

“Job Slip? Oh, in Boston that day; yes. I got him home to his wife all right that night. He was sober after that for--for quite a while. I wish you had seen that woman!” he said earnestly. “Mari is the most miserable--and the most grateful--person that I know. I never knew what a woman could suffer till I got acquainted with that family. They have a dear little boy. His father used to beat him over the head with a shovel. Joey comes over to see me sometimes, and goes to sleep on my lounge. We’re great chums.”

“You _do_ like it,” said Helen slowly. She had raised her brown eyes while he was speaking, and watched his face with a veiled look. “Yes; there’s no doubt about it. You do.”

“Wouldn’t you?” asked Bayard, smiling.

“No, I shouldn’t.”

She shook her head with that positiveness so charming in an attractive woman, and so repellent in an ugly one. “When they burn you at the stake you’ll swallow the fire and enjoy it. You’ll say, ‘Forgive them, for they don’t mean it, poor things.’ I should say, ‘Lord, punish them, for they ought to know better.’ That’s just the difference between us. Mother must be right. She always says I am not spiritual.”

“I don’t know but I should like to see that little boy, though,” added Helen reluctantly; “and Mari--if she had on a clean apron.”

“She doesn’t very often. But it might happen. Why, you might go over there with me--sometime--this summer, and see them?” suggested Bayard eagerly.

“So you lay the first little smoking fagot, do you?--For me, too?”

She laughed.

“God forbid!” said Bayard quickly. Helen’s voice had not been as light as her laugh; and her bright face was grave when he turned and regarded it. She gave back his gaze without evasion, now. She seemed to have grown indefinably older and gentler since she had sat there on the sand beside him. Her eyes, for the first time, now, it seemed, intentionally studied him. She took in the least detail of his changed appearance: the shabby coat, the patch on his boot, his linen worn and darned, the fading color of his hat. She remembered him as the best-dressed man in Cesarea Seminary; nothing but rude, real poverty could have so changed that fashionable and easy student into this country parson, rusting and mended and out-of-the-mode, and conscious of it to the last sense, as only the town-bred man of luxurious antecedents can be of the novel deprivation that might have been another’s native air.

“I don’t know that it is necessary to look so pale,” was all she said. “I should think you’d tan here in this glare. I do. See!”

She held out her bare hands, and doubled them up, putting them together to scrutinize the delicate backs of them for the effect of an hour’s Windover sun. Her dark purple gloves and the saxifrage lay in her lap. Bayard held the sun-umbrella over her. It gave him a curious sense of event to perform this little courtesy; it was so long since he had been among ladies, and lived like other gentlemen; he felt as if he had been upon a journey in strange lands and were coming home again. A blossom of the saxifrage fell to the hem of her dress, and over upon the sand. He delicately touched and took it, saying nothing.

“Does Mr. Hermon Worcester come and pour pitch and things on the bonfire?” asked Helen suddenly.

“I thought you knew,” said Bayard, “my uncle has disinherited me. He is not pleased with what I have done.”

“Ah! I did not know. Doesn’t he--excuse me, Mr. Bayard. It is not my business.”

“He writes to me,” said Bayard. “He sent me things when I was sick. He was very kind then. We have not quarreled at all. But it is some time since I have seen him. I am very fond of my uncle. He is an old man, you know. He was brought up so--We mustn’t blame him. He thinks I am on the road to perdition. He doesn’t come to Windover.”

“I see,” said Helen. She leaned her head back against the boulder and looked through half-shut lids at the dashing sea. The wind was rising.

“I must go,” she said abruptly.

“May I take you over to the station?” he asked with boyish anxiety.

“Mr. Salt is going to harness old Pepper,” she answered. Bayard said nothing. He remembered that he could not afford to drive a lady to the station; he could not offer to “take” her in the electric conveyance of the great American people. He might have spent at least three quarters of an hour more beside her. It seemed to him that he had not experienced poverty till now. The exquisite outline of his lip trembled for the instant with that pathos which would have smitten a woman to the heart if she had loved him. Helen was preoccupied with her saxifrage and her purple gloves. She did not, to all appearance, see his face at all, and he was glad of it.

He arose in silence, and walked beside her to the beach and towards the town.

“Mr. Bayard,” said Helen, with her pleasant unexpectedness, “I owe you something.”

All this while she had not mentioned the wreck or the rescue; she alone, of all people whom he had seen since he came out of his sick-room, had not inquired, nor exclaimed, nor commended, nor admired. Something in her manner--it could hardly be said what--reminded him now of this omission; he had not thought of it before.

“I owe you a recognition,” she said.

“I cancel the debt,” he answered, smiling.

“You cannot. I owe you the recognition--of a friend--for that brave and noble deed you did. Accept it, sir!”

She spread out her hands with a pretty gesture, as if she gave him something; she moved her head with a commanding and royal turn, as if her gift had value. He lifted his hat.

“I could have done no less then; but I might do more--now.”

His worn face had lightened delicately. He looked hopeful and happy.

“A man doesn’t put himself where I am, to complain,” he added. “But I don’t suppose you could even guess how solitary my position is. The right thing said in the right way gives me more courage than--people who say it can possibly understand. I have so few friends--now. If you allow me to count you among them, you do me a very womanly kindness; so then I shall owe _you_”--

“I cancel the debt!” she interrupted, laughing. “Didn’t Father write to you?” she hurried on, “when you were so ill?”

“Oh, yes. The Professor’s note was the first I was allowed to read. He said all sorts of things that I didn’t deserve. He said that in spite of the flaws in my theology I had done honor to the old Seminary.”

“Really? Father will wear a crown and a harp for _that_ concession. Did he give you any message from me, I wonder?”

“He said the ladies sent their regards.”

“Oh! Was that all?”

“That was all.”

“It was not _quite_ all,” said Helen, after a moment’s rather grave reflection. “But never mind. Probably Father thought the exegesis incorrect somewhere.”

“Perhaps he objected to the context?” asked Bayard mischievously.

“More likely he had a quarrel in the Faculty on his mind and forgot it.”

“If you had written it yourself”--suggested Bayard humbly. “But of course you had other things to do.”

Helen gave him an inscrutable look. She made no reply. They passed the fish-house, and the old clam-digger, who was sitting on his overturned basket in the sun, opening clams with a blunt knife, and singing hoarsely:--

“The woman’s ashore, The child’s at the door, The man’s at the wheel.

“Storm on the track, Fog at the back, Death at the keel.

“You, mate, or me, Which shall it be? God, He won’t tell. Drive on to ----!”

“There is Mr. Salt,” said Helen; for the two had come slowly up in silence to the old gate, (fastened with a rope tied in a sailor’s knot), that gave the short cut across the meadow to the Mainsail summer hotel.

“He is watching for me. How sober he looks! Perhaps something dreadful has happened to Mrs. Salt. Wait a minute. Let me run in!”

She tossed her sun-umbrella, gloves, and saxifrage in a heap across Bayard’s arm, and ran like a girl or a collie swaying across the meadow in the wind. In a few minutes she walked back, flushed and laughing.

“Pepper can’t go!” she cried. “He’s got the colic. He’s swallowed a celluloid collar. Mr. Salt says he thought it was sugar. I must go right along and catch the car.”

“You have eight minutes yet,” said Bayard joyously, “and I can go too!”

The car filled up rapidly; they chatted of little things, or sat in silence. Jane Granite came aboard as they passed her mother’s door. Bayard lifted his hat to her cordially; she was at the further end of the car; she got off at a grocery store, to buy prunes, and did not look back. She had only glanced at Helen Carruth. Bayard did not notice when Jane left.

The train came in and went out. Helen stood on the platform leaning over to take her saxifrage: a royal vision, blurring and melting in purple and gold before his eyes.

The train came in and went out; her laughing eyes looked back from the frame of the car window. The train went out. He turned away and went slowly home.

Jane had not returned, and Mrs. Granite was away. The house was deserted, and the evening was coming on cold. He climbed the steep stairs wearily to his rooms, and lighted a fire, for he coughed a good deal. He had to go down into the shed and bring up the wood and coal. He was so tired when this was done that he flung himself upon the old lounge. He looked slowly about his dismal rooms: at the top curl of the iron angel on the ugly stove; at the empty, wooden rocking-chair with the bones; at the paper screen, where the Cupid on the basket of grapes sat forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit; at the study-table, where the subscription list for his quarter’s salary lay across the manuscript notes of his last night’s sermon. The great Saint Michael on the wall eyed him with that absence of curiosity which belongs to remote superiority. Bayard did not return the gaze of the picture. He took something from his vest-pocket and looked at it gently, twisting it about in his thin hands. It was a sprig of saxifrage, whose white blossom was hanging its head over upon the dry, succulent stem. Bayard got up suddenly, and put the flower in a book upon his study-table.

As he did so, a short, soft, broken sound pattered up the stairs. The door opened without the preliminary of a knock, and little Joey Slip walked seriously in. He said he had come to see the minister. He sat down sedately and ceremoniously upon the carpet-lounge. He said Marm said to say Father’s home from Georges’ drunk as a fish. He put out his little fingers and patted Bayard on the cheek, as if the minister had been the child, and Joey the old, old man.

XII.

It was night, and it was Angel Alley. One of the caprices of New England spring had taken the weather, and it had suddenly turned cold. The wind blew straight from the sea. It was going to rain. The inner harbor was full; in the dark, thick air bowsprits nodded and swung sleepily, black outlines against little glimmering swathes of grayish-yellow cut by the headlights of anchored vessels. Dories put out now and then from the schooners, and rowed lustily to the docks; these were packed with sailors or fishermen who leaped up the sides of the wharves like cats, tied the painter to invisible rings in black, slimy places, and scrambled off, leaving the dory to bob and hit the piers; or they cast the painter to the solitary oarsman, who rowed back silently to the vessel, while his gayer shipmates reeled, singing, over the wharves and disappeared in the direction of the town.

The sky was heavily clouded, and fog was stealing stealthily off the Point.

Angel Alley was full, that night. Half a dozen large fishermen were just in from Georges’; these had made their trip to Boston to sell their cargoes of halibut, haddock, or cod, and had run home quickly on a stiff sou’easter, or were unloading direct at their native wharves. The town overflowed with men of unmistakably nautical callings, red of face, strong of hand, unsteady of step; men with the homeless eye and the roving heart of the sea: Americans, Scotch, Swedes, Portuguese, Italians, Irish, and Finns swung up together from the wharves and swarmed over the alley, ready for a song, a laugh or a blow, as the case might be; equally prepared to smoke, to love, to quarrel, or to drink, liable to drift into a prayer-room or a bar-room, just as it happened, and there was small space to doubt which would happen; men whose highest aspiration was to find the barber and the boot-black; men who steered steadily home, thinking of their baby’s laugh, and the wife’s kiss; and men who turned neither to the right nor to the left, who lingered for neither men nor gods nor women, but pushed, with head thrust out like a dog’s on the scent, straight on to the first saloon that gaped at them.

Open and secret, lawful and unlawful, these were of an incredible number, if one should estimate the size of the short street. Angel Alley overflowed with abomination, as the tides, befouled by the town, overflowed the reeking piers of the docks. In sailors’ boarding-houses, in open bars, in hidden cellars, in billiard-rooms, in shooting-galleries, in dance-halls, and in worse, whiskey ran in rivers. At the banks of those black streams men and some women crawled and drank, flaunting or hiding their fiery thirst as the mood took them, and preying upon one another, each according to his power or his choice, as the chance of an evil hour decreed.

Girls with hard eyes and coarse mouths strutted up and down the alley in piteous numbers. Sights whose description cannot blot this page might have been detected in the shadows of the wharves and of the winding street. Men went into open doors with their full trips’ earnings in their pockets, and staggered out without a penny to their shameful names. Fifty, seventy, a hundred dollars, vanished in the carouse of a single hour. One man, a foreigner, of some nationality unknown, ran up and down, wildly calling for the police. He had been robbed of two hundred dollars in a drunken bout, last night; he had but just come to such senses as nature may have given him, and to the discovery of his loss. His wife, he said, lived over in West Windover; she warn’t well when he shipped; there was another baby,--seven young ones already,--and she couldn’t get trust at the stores, the bills had run up so long.

“Lord!” he said stupidly; “s’pose I find ’em layin’ round starved?”

He stoutly refused to go home. He swore he’d rather go to jail than face her. He sat down on the steps of old Trawl’s, sobbing openly, like a child. A little crowd gathered, one or two voices jeered at him, and some one scolded him smartly, for no one moralizes more glibly than the sot in his intervals of sobriety.

“Oh, shut up there!” cried the girl Lena. “Ain’t he miser’ble enough already? Ain’t all of us that much?--Go home, Jean!” she urged kindly; “go home to Marie. She won’t cuss you.”

“She never cussed me _yet_,” answered Jean doubtfully.

He got up and reeled away, wringing his stubbed hands. Lena walked up the alley, alone; her eyes were on the ground; she did not answer when one of the girls called her; she strolled on aimlessly, and one might almost say, thoughtfully.

“Better come in, Lena,” said a voice above her. She looked up. The beautiful new transparency, which was still the wonder and admiration of the fishermen coming home from Georges’ or the Banks, flashed out in strong white and scarlet lights the strange words, now grown familiar to Angel Alley:--

“THE CHURCH OF THE LOVE OF CHRIST.”

Beneath, in the broken, moving color stood the minister; his foot was on the topmost step of the long flight; he looked pale and tired.

“Isn’t it better for you in here, than out there?” he asked gently. Lena gave one glance at his pitying eyes; then she followed that brilliance like a moth.

He stepped back and allowed her to precede him, as if she had been any other woman, the only difference being one which the girl was not likely to notice: the minister did not lift his hat to Lena. She hung her head and went in.

“They are singing to-night--practicing for their concert,” he said. “Perhaps they might like the help of your voice.”

She made no answer, and the preacher and the street girl entered the bright hall together.

It was well filled with well-behaved and decently dressed groups of men and women; these were informally scattered about the main room and the ante-rooms, for no service was in progress; the whole bore the appearance of a people’s club, or social entertainment, whose members read or chatted, played games, or sang, as the mood took them.

A bowling-alley and a smoking-room adjoined; these last were often quite full and busy with fishermen and sailors; but that night the most of the people were listening to the singing. Music, Bayard had already learned, would lead them anywhere. At the first sound of the poor and pathetic melodeon, they had begun to collect around the net of harmony like mackerel round a weir. When Lena came into the room, the little choir were singing the old-fashioned, beautiful Ave Sanctissima which even Angel Alley knew. Lena dropped into an obscure seat, and remained silent for a time. Suddenly her fine contralto rang in,--

“’Tis midnight on the sea. Ora pro nobis, We lift our souls to thee.”

The minister, distant and pale, blurred before her eyes while she sang. He looked like a figure resting on a cloud in a sacred picture. He moved about among his people, tall, smiling, and shining. They looked at him with wistful, wondering tenderness. He passed in and out of the halls on errands whose nature no one asked. Occasionally he returned, bringing some huddling figure with him from the street; a homesick boy, a homeless man, a half-sodden fellow found hesitating outside of Trawl’s den, midway between madness and sanity, ready for hell or heaven, and following Bayard like a cur.

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