Part 12

Bayard had come back, unusually tired, about noon, and had not left the house since his return. He was reading, with his back to the light, and the sea in his ears. The portière of mosquito netting, which hung now at the door between his two rooms, was pushed aside that he might see the photographed Leonardo as he liked to do. The scanty furniture of his sleeping-room had been moved about during his recent illness, so that now the picture was the only object visible from the study where he sat. The mosquito portière was white. Mrs. Granite having ineffectually urged a solferino pink, Bayard regarded this portière with the disproportionate gratitude of escape from evil.

A knock had struck the cottage door, and Jane Granite had run to answer it. She was in her tidy, blue gingham dress, but a little wet and crumply, as was to be expected on a Monday. She had snatched up a white apron, and looked like an excellent parlor-maid. For such, perhaps, the caller took her, for practical tact was not his most obtrusive quality. He was an elderly man, a gentleman; his mouth was stern, and his eyes were kind. He carried a valuable cane, and spoke with a certain air of authority, as of a man well acquainted with this world and the other too. He asked for Mr. Bayard, and would send up his card before intruding upon him; a ceremony which quite upset little Jane, and she stood crimson with embarrassment. Her discomfort was not decreased by the bewildering presence of a carriage at the gate of her mother’s garden. Beyond the rows of larkspur and feverfew, planted for the vase on Mr. Bayard’s study-table, Mr. Salt’s best carryall, splendid in spring varnish, loomed importantly. Pepper, with the misanthropy of a confirmed dyspeptic, drew the carryall, and ladies sat within it. There were two. They were covered by certain strange, rich carriage robes undreamed of by Mr. Salt; dull, silk blankets, not of Windover designs. The ladies were both handsomely dressed. One was old; but one--ah! one was young.

“Mr. Bayard is in, my dear.” The voice of the caller rose over the larkspur to the carryall. “Will you wait, or drive on?”

“We’ll drive on,” replied the younger lady rather hurriedly.

“Helen, Helen!” complained the elder. “Don’t you _know_ that Pepper is afraid of the electric cars? I’ve noticed horses are that live in the same town with them.”

Helen did not laugh at this, but her eyes twinkled irreverently. She wrapped herself in her old-gold silk blanket, and turned to watch the sea. She did not look at Mrs. Granite’s cottage.

The dignified accents of the Professor’s voice were now wafted over the larkspur bed again.

“Mr. Bayard asks if the ladies will not come up to his study, Statira? It is only one short flight. Will you do so?”

Simultaneously Bayard’s eager face flashed out of the doorway; and before Helen could assent or dissent, her mother, on the young man’s arm, was panting up between the feverfew and into the cottage. Helen followed in meek amusement.

The stairs were scarcely more than a ship’s gangway. Mrs. Carruth politely suppressed her sense of horrified inadequacy to the ascent, and she climbed up as bravely as possible. Helen’s cast-down eyes observed the uncarpeted steps of old, stained pine-wood. She was still silent when they entered the study. Bayard bustled about, offering Mrs. Carruth the bony rocking-chair with the turkey-red cushion. The Professor had already ensconced himself in the revolving study-chair, a luxury which had been recently added to the room. There remained for Helen the lounge, and Bayard, perforce, seated himself beside her. He did not remark upon the deficiency of furniture. He seemed as much above an apology for the lack of upholstery as a martyr in prison. His face was radiant with a pleasure which no paltry thought could poison. The simple occasion seemed to him one of high festivity. It would have been impossible for any one of these comfortable people to understand what it meant to the poor fellow to entertain old friends in his lonely quarters.

Helen’s eyes assumed a blank, polite look; she said as little as possible at first; she seemed adjusting herself to a shock. Mrs. Carruth warbled on about the opening of the season at the Mainsail, and the Professor inquired about the effects of the recent gales upon the fishing classes. He avoided all perilous personalities as adroitly as if he had been fencing with a German radical over the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. It was Bayard himself who boldly approached the dangerous ground.

“You came on Saturday, I suppose? I did not know anything about it till this minute.”

“We did not come till night,” observed Helen hurriedly. “Mother was very tired. We did not go out anywhere yesterday.”

“The Professor did, I’ll be bound,” smiled Bayard. “Went to church, didn’t you, Professor?”

“Ye--es,” replied Professor Carruth, hesitating. “I never omit divine service if I am on my feet.”

“Did you hear Fenton?” asked Bayard with perfect ease of manner.

“Yes,” more boldly from the Professor, “I attended the First Church. I like to recognize The Denomination wherever I may be traveling. I always look up my old boys, of course, too. It seems to be a prosperous parish.”

“It _is_ a prosperous parish,” assented Bayard heartily. “Fenton is doing admirably with it. Did you hear him?”

“Why yes,” replied the Professor, breathing more freely. “I heard Fenton. He did well--quite well. He has not that scope of intellect which--I never considered him our _ablest_ man; but his theology is perfectly satisfactory. He preached an excellent doctrinal sermon. The audience was not so large as I could have wished; but it seemed to be of a superior quality--some of your first citizens, I should say?”

“Oh, yes, our first people all attend that church. You didn’t find many of _my_ crowd there, I presume?”

Bayard laughed easily.

“I did not recognize it,” said the Professor, “as a distinctly fishing community--from the audience; no, not from that audience.”

“Not many of my drunkards, for instance, sir? Not a strong salt-fish perfume in the First Church? Nor a whiff of old New England rum anywhere?”

“The atmosphere was irreproachable,” returned the Professor with a keen look.

Bayard glanced at Helen, who had been sitting quietly on the sofa beside him. Her eyes returned his merriment.

“Father!” she exclaimed, “Mr. Bayard does not recant. He is proud of it. He glories in his heresy. He is laughing at his martyrdom--and at us. I think you’d better ‘let up’ on him awhile.”

“Let up, Helen? Let up?” complained her mother. “That is a very questionable expression. Ask your father, my dear, if it is good English. And I’m sure Mr. Bayard will be a _gentlemanly_ heretic, whatever he is.”

Helen laughed outright, now. Bayard joined her; and the four drew breath and found themselves at their ease.

“For my part,” said Helen unexpectedly, “I should like to see Mr. Bayard’s church--if he would stoop to invite us.... I suppose,” she added thoughtfully, “one reason saints don’t stoop, is for fear the halo should tumble off. It must be so inconvenient! Don’t you ever have a stiff neck, Mr. Bayard?”

“Why, _Helen_!” cried Mrs. Carruth in genuine horror. She hastened to atone for her daughter’s rudeness to a young man who already had enough to bear. “I will come and bring Helen myself, Mr. Bayard, to hear you preach--that is, if you would like to have us.”

“Pray don’t!” protested Bayard. “The Professor’s hair would turn black again in a single night. It won’t do for you to recognize an outlaw like me, you know. Why, Fenton and I haven’t met since he came here; unless at the post-office. I understand my position. Don’t feel any delicacy about it. _I_ don’t. I can’t stop for that! I am too busy.”

The Professor of Theology colored a little.

“The ladies of my family are quite free to visit any of the places of worship around us,” he observed with some dignity. “They are not bound by the same species of ecclesiastical etiquette”--

“We must be going, Mother,” said Helen abruptly. Her cheeks were blazing; her eyes met Bayard’s with a ray of indignant sympathy which went to his head like wine. He felt the light, quick motion of her breath; the folds of her summer dress--he could not have told what she wore--fell over the carpet lounge; the hem of the dress touched his boot, and just covered the patch on it from sight. He had but glanced at her before. He looked at her now; her heightened color became her richly; her hand--she wore a driving-glove--lay upon the cretonne sofa pillow; she had picked a single flower as she came up Mrs. Granite’s garden walk. Bayard was amused to see that she had instinctively taken a deep purple pansy with a heart of gold.

A little embarrassed, Helen held out the pansy.

“I like them,” she said. “They make faces at me.”

“This one is a royal creature,” said Bayard. “It has the face of a Queen.”

“Mr. Bayard,” asked Mrs. Carruth, with the air of starting a subject of depth and force, “do you find any time to analyze flowers?”

“So far--hardly,” replied Bayard, looking Helen straight in the face.

“I used to study botany when I was a young lady--in New York,” observed Mrs. Carruth placidly; “it seems to me a very wholesome and refining”--

“Papa!” cried Helen, “Pepper is eating a tomato can--No, it’s a piece of--It is an apron--a gingham apron! The menu of that horse, Mr. Bayard, surpasses anything”--

“It is plainly some article belonging to the ladies of the house,” said Bayard, laughing.

He had started to rescue the apron, when Jane Granite was seen to run out and wrench that portion of her wardrobe from Pepper’s voracity.

“That,” observed Mrs. Carruth, “is the maid, I presume?”

“It is Miss Granite, my landlady’s daughter,” replied Bayard with some unnecessary dignity. Poor little Jane, red in the face, and raging at the heart, stood, with the eyes of the visitors upon her, contending with Pepper, who insisted on retaining the apron strings, and had already swallowed one halfway.

Quick to respond to the discomfort of any woman, Bayard ran down to Jane’s relief.

“It blew over from the lines,” said Jane. She lifted to him her sad, grateful eyes. She would have cried, if she had ventured to speak. Helen, from the window, looked down silently.

When Bayard came upstairs again, his visitors had risen to leave, in earnest. Helen avoided his eyes. He felt that hers had taken in every detail of his poor place: the iron angel on the ugly stove; the Cupid and the grapes upon the paper screen; the dreary, darned, brown carpet; the barren shades; the mosquito-net portière; the whole homeless, rude, poverty-smitten thing.

“You have a fine engraving of Guido’s Saint Michael, here,” observed Professor Carruth, taking out his glasses.

“And I notice--don’t I see another good picture through the gauze portière?” asked Mrs. Carruth modestly.

“That is Leonardo’s Christ,” said the Professor promptly, at a look. “It really makes a singular, I may say a beautiful, impression behind that white stuff. I never happened to see it before with such an effect. Look, Helen! It seems like a transparency--or a cloud.”

A devout expression touched Helen’s face, which had grown quite grave. She did not answer, and went downstairs behind her mother, very quietly.

Jane Granite had disappeared. Pepper was engaged in a private conflict with such portions of her wardrobe as he had succeeded in swallowing; Mrs. Carruth mounted heavily into the carryall, and Helen leaped after her. Then it appeared that the Professor had forgotten his cane, and Bayard ran back for it. As he came down, he caught a glimpse of Jane Granite in the sitting-room. She was crying.

“That is my Charter Oak cane,” observed the Professor anxiously; “the one with the handle made from the old ship Constitution. I wouldn’t have mislaid it on any account.”

“Father would rather have mislaid me,” said Helen with an air of conviction. Her mother was inviting Mr. Bayard to call on them at the Flying Jib. Helen said nothing on this point. She smiled and nodded girlishly, and Pepper bore them away.

Bayard came back upstairs three steps at a time. The sitting-room door was shut, and it did not occur to him to open it. He had quite forgotten Jane. He closed his study-door softly, and went and sat down on the carpet lounge; the pansy that she had dropped was there. He looked for it, and looked at it, then laid it gently on his study-table. He took up the cretonne pillow where her hand had lain, then put it softly down.

“I must keep my head,” thought the young man. He passed his hand over his too brilliant eyes, and went, with compressed lips, to his study-table.

But Jane Granite went out in the back yard, and sat down under the clothes-lines, on the salt-fish box. The chewed apron was in her hand. The clothes flapped in the rising wind above her head. She could not be seen from the house. Here she could cry in peace.

She was surprised to find, when she was seated there, that she did not want to cry. Her eyes, her throat, her lips, her head, seemed burning to ashes. Hot, hard, wicked wishes came for the first time in her gentle life to Jane. That purple-and-gold woman swam giddily between her and the summer sky.

Jane had known her at the first look. Her soul winced when she recognized the stranger of the electric car. Mr. Bayard had thought Jane did not notice that lady that April day. Jane had by heart every line and tint and detail of her, from the gold dagger on her bonnet to the dark purple cloth gaiter of her boots; from her pleased brown eyes, with the well-bred motion of their lids, to the pretty gestures that she made with her narrow, gloved hand. Jane looked at her own wash-day dress and parboiled fingers. The indefinable, undeniable fact of the stranger’s personal elegance crushed the girl with the sense of helpless bitterness which only women who have been poor and gone shabby can understand. The language of dress, which is to the half-educated the symbol of superiority, conveyed to Jane, in advance of any finer or truer vocabulary, the full force of the situation.

“She is different,” thought Jane.

These three words said it all. Jane dropped her face in her soaked and wrinkled fingers. The damp clothes flapped persistently about her neat, brown head, as if trying to arouse her with the useless diversion of things that one is quite used to. Jane thought of Ben Trawl, it is true, but without any distinct sense of disloyalty or remorse. She experienced the ancient and always inexplicable emotion not peculiar to Jane: she might have lived on in relative content, not in the least disturbed by any consciousness of her own ties, as long as the calm eyes she worshiped reflected the image of no other woman. Now something in Jane’s heart seemed to snap and let lava through.

Oh, purple and gold, gall and wormwood, beauty and daintiness, heart-ache and fear! Had the Queen come to the palace of Kubla Khan? Let Alph, the sacred river, run! Who was she, Jane Granite, that she should stem the sweeping current?

“... Crying _again_? This is a nice way to greet a fellar,” said roughly a sudden voice in Jane’s dulled ear.

Ben Trawl lifted the damp clothes, strode through between the poles, and stood beside his promised wife. His face was ominously dark.

XIV.

It is not so hard to endure suffering as to resist ease. The passion for martyrdom sweeps everything before it, as long as it is challenged by no stronger force. Emanuel Bayard had lived for a year upon the elixir of a spiritual exaltation such as has carried men to a glowing death, or through a tortured life without a throb of weakness. He had yet to adjust his nature to the antidote of common human comfort.

Like most of the subtler experiences of life, this came so naturally that, at first, he scarcely knew it by sight or name.

It was not a noteworthy matter to show the courtesies of civilized life to the family of his old Professor. Bayard reminded himself of this as he walked down the Point.

It was quite a week before he found leisure to attend to this simple, social obligation. His duties in Angel Alley had been many and laborious; it did not occur to him to shorten a service or an entertainment; to omit a visit to the wharves when the crews came in, or to put by the emergency of a drunkard’s wife to a more convenient season because he had in view that which had grown so rare to the young man, now--the experience of a personal luxury. Like a much older and more ascetic man than he was, he counted the beads on his rosary of labors conscientiously through. Then he hurried to her.

Now, to women of leisure nothing is so incomprehensible as the preoccupation of a seriously busy man. Bayard had not counted upon this feminine fact: indeed, he lived in a world where feminine whim was an element as much outside his calculation as the spring fashions of the planet Uranus. He was quite at a loss when Miss Carruth received him distantly.

The Flying Jib was, as to its exterior, an ugly little cottage run out on the neck of the jutting reef that formed the chief attraction of the Mainsail Hotel. The interior of the Flying Jib varied from a dreary lodge to a summer home, according to the nature of the occupants. It seemed to Bayard that season absurdly charming. He had lived so long out of his natural world, that the photographs and rugs, the draperies, the flowers, the embroidery, the work-baskets, the bric-a-brac, the mere presence of taste and of ladies, appeared to him at first essential luxury. He looked about him with a sigh of delight, while Mrs. Carruth went to call her daughter, who had gone over to the fish-house study with the Professor, and who could be seen idling along home over the meadow, a stately figure in a pale, yellow summer dress, with a shade hat, and pansies on it.

As we say, that young lady at first received Bayard coolly. She sauntered into the little parlor with her hands full of sweet-briar, nodded to him politely, and excused herself at once to arrange her flowers. This took her some time. Mrs. Carruth entertained him placidly. Helen’s eyes saw but did not seem to see the slightest motion of his nervous hand, each tone of expression that ran over his sensitive face. He had looked so eager and happy when she came; almost boyishly thirsting for that little pleasure! She had that terrible inability to understand the facts of his life or feeling which is responsible for most of the friction between two half-attracted or half-separating human beings. But when she saw the light die from his eyes, when she saw that hurt look which she knew quite well, settle about the lower part of his face, Helen was ashamed of herself. Mrs. Carruth was mildly introducing the subject of mosquito bars; theirs, she said, were all on the second story; the supply didn’t go round, and the Professor objected to them; so the hornets--

“Mother,” said Helen, “I wonder if Mr. Bayard wouldn’t like to have us show him the clam study?”

“Your father said he should be at work on the ‘State of the Unforgiven after Death,’” replied Mrs. Carruth. “I don’t know that we ought to disturb him; do you think we ought, Helen?”

“He was whittling a piece of mahogany for the head of a cane when I left him,” said Helen irreverently; “he stole it out of the cabin of that old wreck in the inner harbor. Do you think a Professor of Theology could be forgiven after death for sneak-thieving, Mr. Bayard?”

She abandoned the idea of visiting the clam study, however, and seated herself with frank graciousness by their visitor. Mrs. Carruth having strolled away presently to keep some elderly tryst among the piazza ladies of the hotel, the young people were left alone.

They sat for a moment in sudden, rather awkward silence. Helen looked like a tall June lily, in her summer gown; she had taken her hat off; her hair was a little tumbled and curly; the wind blew in strong from the sea, tossing the lace curtains of the Flying Jib like sails on a toy boat. The scent of the sweet-briar was delicately defined in the room. Bayard looked at her without any attempt to speak. She answered his silent question by saying, abruptly:--

“You know you’ll _have_ to forgive me, whether you want to, or not.”

“Forgive you?”

“Why, for being vexed. I _was_ a little, at first. But I needn’t have been such a schoolgirl as to show it.”

“If you would be so kind as to tell me what I can possibly have done to--deserve your displeasure--” began Bayard helplessly.

“If a man doesn’t understand without being told, I’ve noticed he _can’t_ understand when he is told.... Why didn’t you wait till next fall before you came to see us, Mr. Bayard?”

“Oh!” said Bayard. His happy look came back to his tired face, as if a magic lantern had shifted a beautiful slide. “Is _that_ it?”

He laughed delightedly. “Why, I suppose I must have seemed rude--neglectful, at any rate. But I’ve noticed that if a woman doesn’t understand without being told, she makes up for it by her readiness of comprehension when she is told.”

“What a nice, red coal!” smiled Helen. “The top of my head feels quite warm. Dear me! Isn’t there a spot burned bald?”

She felt anxiously of her pretty hair.

“Come over and see my work,” said Bayard, “and you’ll never ask me again why I didn’t do anything I--would so much rather do.”

“I never asked you before!” flashed Helen.

“You did me an honor that I shall remember,” said Bayard gravely.

“Oh, please don’t! Pray forget it as soon as you can,” cried Helen, with red cheeks.

“You can’t know, you see you _can’t_ know, how a man situated as I am prizes the signs of the simplest human friendship that is sincere and womanly.”

So said Bayard quietly. Helen drew a little quick breath. She seemed reconciled now, to herself, and to him. They began to talk at once, quite fast and freely. Afterwards he tried to remember what it had all been about, but he found it not easy; the evening passed on wings; he felt the atmosphere of this little pleasure with a delight impossible to be understood by a man who had not known and graced society and left it. Now and then he spoke of his work, but Helen did not exhibit a marked interest in the subject.

Bayard drew the modest inference that he had obtruded his own affairs with the obtuseness common to missionaries and other zealots; he roused himself to disused conversation, and to the forgotten topics of the world. It did not occur to him that this was precisely what she intended. The young lady drew him out, and drew him on. They chatted about Cesarea and Beacon Street, about Art, Clubs, Magazine literature, and the Symphony Concerts, like the ordinary social human being.

“You see I have been out of it so long!” pleaded Bayard.

“Not yet a year,” corrected Helen.

“It seems to me twenty,” he mused.

“You don’t go to see your uncle, yet?”

“I met him once or twice down town. I have not been home, yet. But that would make no difference. I have no leisure for--all these little things.”

He said the words with such an utter absence of affectation that it was impossible either to smile or to take offence at them. Helen regarded him gravely.

“There were two or three superb concerts this winter. I thought of you. I wished you had come in”--

“Did you take that trouble?” he asked eagerly.

“I don’t think I ever heard Schubert played better in my life,” she went on, without noticing the interruption. “Schoeffelowski does do The Serenade divinely.”

“I used to care for that more than for any other music in the world, I think,” he answered slowly.

“I play poorly,” said Helen, “and I sing worse, and the piano is rented of a Windover schoolgirl. But I have got some of his renderings by heart--if you would care for it.”