Part 19

“Perhaps it is not,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “At least, I will consider it, as you say.”

Four days after, an envelope from Boston was put into Bayard’s hand. It contained a typewritten letter setting forth the fact that the writer desired to contribute to the erection of the new chapel in Windover known by the name of Christlove, and representing a certain phase of home missionary effort--the inclosed sum. It was a bank draft for twenty-five hundred dollars. The writer withheld his name, and requested that no effort be made to identify him. He also desired that his contribution be used, if possible, in a conditional character, to stimulate the growth of a collection sufficient to put the building and the mission behind it, upon a suitable basis.

The following day Mr. Worcester sent to Bayard by personal check the remnant of his mother’s property. This little sum seemed as large, now, to the Beacon Street boy, as if he had been reared in one of the Vermont parsonages to which his uncle sent old overcoats; or, one might say, as if he had never left the shelter of that cottage under the pine grove in Bethlehem, where his eyes first opened upon the snow-girt hills. Self-denial speaks louder in the blood than indulgence, after all; and who knew how much of Bayard’s simple manliness in the endurance of privation he owed to the pluck of the city girl who left the world for love of one poor man, and to become the mother of another?

Bayard had scarcely adjusted his mind to these events when he received from Helen Carruth this letter:--

“MY DEAR MR. BAYARD,--My little note of sympathy with your great trouble did not deserve so prompt an answer. I thank you for it. I could not quite make up my mind to tell you, in the midst of so much care and anxiety, what I can delay no longer in saying”--

Bayard laid down the letter. The room grew black before his starting eyes.

“There is another man,” he thought. “She is engaged. She cannot bear to tell me.”

Sparks of fire leaped before his eyeballs. Black swung into purple--into gray--light returned; and he read on:--

“If I flatter myself in supposing that you might mind it a little, why, the mistake hurts nobody, neither you nor me; but the fact is we are not coming to Windover this summer. We sail for Europe next week.

“Father has decided quite suddenly, and there is nothing to be done but to go. It is something to do with Exegesis, if you please! There is a mistake in Exegesis, you know,--in the New Version. It seems to me a pretty Old Version by this time, but father has always been stirred up about it. He has been corresponding with a German Professor for a year or two on this burning subject. I have an inarticulate suspicion that, between them, they mean to write the New Testament over again. Could they do another Version? How many Versions _can_ be versed?

“I never graduated, you know; I never even attended a Cesarea Anniversary in my life (and you can’t think how it shocked the Trustees at dinner, and _that_ was such fun, so I kept on not going!), and I can’t be expected to fathom these matters. Anyhow, it is mixed up with the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, and the Effect of German Rationalism upon the Evangelical Faith. It is a reason full of capital letters and Orthodoxy,--and go he will. He won’t leave mother behind, for he is one of the men who believe in living with their wives; he’s just as dependent on his womenkind when he’s engaged in a theological row, as a boy who’s got hurt at football; and I’ve got to go to take care of the two of them. So there it is! I think there is a convention in Berlin--an Exegetical Something--anyhow, there’s a date, and live up to it we must. He has sublet the Flying Jib to the Prudential Committee of the A. B. C. F. M.--I mean to one of it, with six grandchildren. Think how they’ll punch their fists through our lace curtains! I wish you’d go down and tell Mr. Salt they shan’t have my dory. Couldn’t you manage to use it yourself? And I--I can’t take Joey Slip to the circus, nor sit down in sackcloth on the ashes of Christlove Chapel to help you.

“Truly, dear friend, I _meant_ to help this summer. And I am disappointed, if you care to know it. “Yours faithfully, “HELEN CARRUTH.

“I forgot to say that father has doubled up his lectures, and the Trustees have given him the whole summer term. This, I believe, is in view of the importance of the quarrel over the Fourth Gospel. We sail in the Scythia a week from Saturday.”

* * * * *

It was early afternoon of the next day, when Helen, standing in her window to draw the shades, glanced over automatically at the third-story northwest corner front of Galilee Hall. The room had long since been occupied by a middler with blue spectacles and a peaked beard; a long-legged fellow, who was understood to be a Hebrew scholar, and quite Old School, and was expected to fill a large parish without offending the senior deacon. Privately, Helen hated the middler. But the eye that had learned to wander at sunset across the Seminary “yard” to the window blazing in gold and glory, had slowly unlearned the lesson of its brief and pleasant habit. Even yet, on blue-white winter days, when life stood still to freeze on Cesarea Hill, Helen found herself drearily looking at the glittering glass--as one looks at the smile on a face from which the soul has fled.

It was still many hours to sunset, and the early April afternoon fell gustily and gray upon the snows of Cesarea. It was not a sunny day, and Cesarea was at her worst. Helen idly watched a figure splashing through two feet of slush “across lots” over the Seminary grounds from the Trustees’ Hotel.

“A post-graduate,” she thought, “back on a visit. Or, more likely, a minister without a pulpit, coming to Cesarea after a parish, or places to supply. Probably he has seven children and a mother-in-law to support. If he’s ‘sound’ he’ll come to Father--no--yes. Why, _yes_!”

She drew suddenly back from the window. It was Emanuel Bayard.

He waded through the slush as quickly as so tired a man could. He had walked from the station, saving his coach fare, and had made but feint of being a guest at the hotel, where he had not dined. He was not quite prepared to let Helen know that he had lunched on cold johnny-cake and dried beef, put up by Mrs. Granite in a red cotton doily, and tenderly pinned over by Jane with a safety-pin.

He lifted his eyes to the gloomy landscape for illumination, which it denied him. He knew no more than the snow professor what he should do, what he should say, no, nor why he had lapsed into this great weakness, and come to Cesarea at all. He felt as if he might make, indeed, a mortal mistake, one way or the other. He pleaded to himself that he must see her face once more, or perish. Nature was mightier than he, and drove him on, as it drives the strongest of us in those reactions from our strenuous vow and sternest purpose, for which we have lacked the simple foresight to provide in our plan of life.

There was a new snow professor, by the way, comfortably melting before the pump beside the Academy commons. He had been considered sounder than any of his predecessors, and had been supplied with a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which he perused with a corncob pipe between his lips of ice. A Westminster catechism ornamented his vest pocket. He was said to have slumped beautifully, when the thaw came.

Bayard shot a tolerant smile at the snow professor’s remains, as he came up the steps.

Helen herself answered his ring. Both of them found this so natural that neither commented upon this little act of friendliness.

The Professor was at his lecture; and Mrs. Carruth was making her final appearance at certain local Cesarea charities; principally, to-day, at the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with blankets and baby-clothes. Helen explained these facts with her usual irreverence, as she ushered her visitor into the parlor.

“If I had a fortune,” she observed, “I would found a society in Cesarea for making it a Penal Offence for a Married Man to Study for the Ministry without a Visible Income. The title is a little long, don’t you think? How could we shorten it? It’s worse than the Cruelty to Animals thing. Mr. Bayard?--why, Mr. Bayard!”

When she saw the expression of his face, her own changed with remorseful swiftness.

“You are perfectly right,” he said with sudden, smiting incisiveness. “You are more than right. It is the greatest act of folly of my life that I am here.”

He stood still, and looked at her. The despair she saw in his eyes seemed to her a measureless, bottomless thing.

“I _had_ to come,” he said. “How could I let you go, without--you _must_ see that I had to look upon your face once more. Forgive me--dear!”

Her chin trembled, at the lingering of that last, unlooked-for word.

“I have tried,” said Bayard slowly. “_You_ won’t misunderstand me if I say I have tried to do the best I can, at Windover; and I have failed in it,” he added bitterly, “from every point of view, and in every way!”

“As much as that,” said Helen, “happened to the Founder of the Christian religion. You are presumptuous if you expect anything different.”

“You are right,” answered Bayard, with that instinctive humility which was at once the strongest and the sweetest thing about him. “I accept your rebuke.”

“Oh,” cried Helen, holding out her hands, “I _couldn’t_ rebuke you! I”--she faltered.

“You see,” said Bayard slowly, “that’s just the difference, the awful, infinite difference. All His difficulties were from the outside.”

“How do you know that?” asked Helen quickly.

“I don’t,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “I don’t know. But I have been accustomed to think so. Perhaps I am under the traditions yet; perhaps I am no nearer right than the other Christians I have separated myself from. But mine, you see--my obstacles, the things that make it so hard--the only thing that makes it seem impossible for me to go on--is within myself. You don’t suppose He ever loved a woman--as I--love you? It’s impossible!” cried the young man. “Why, there are times when it seems to me that if the salvation of the world hung in one scale, and you in the other--as if I--” He finished by a blinding look. Her face drooped, but did not fall. He could see her fingers tremble. “It was something,” he went on dully, “to see you; to know that I--why, all winter I have lived on it, on the knowledge that summer was coming--that you--Oh, _you_ can’t know! _You_ can’t understand! I could bear all the rest!” he cried. “This--this--”

His sentence broke, and was never completed; for Helen looked up into his face. It was ashen, and all its muscles were set like stiffening clay. She lifted her eyes and gave them to him.

“I do understand.... I _do_,” she breathed. “Would it make you any happier if you knew--if I should tell you--of course, I know what you said; that we can’t ... but would it be any easier if I should tell you that I have loved you all the time?”

XXIII.

To the end of her life Helen will see the look on Emanuel Bayard’s face when she had spoken these words.

With more of terror than delight, the woman’s nature sprang, for that instant, back upon itself. Would she have recalled what she had said? It is possible; for now she understood how he loved her, and perceived that she had never understood what a man’s love is.

Yet, when he spoke, it was with that absence of drama, with that repression amounting almost to commonplace, which characterize the intensest crises of experience.

“_Do_ you?” he said. “_Have_ you?”

And at first that was all. But his voice shook, and his hand; and his face went so white that he seemed like a man smitten rather by death than by love.

Helen, in a pang of maiden fright, had moved away from him, and retreated to the sofa; he sank beside her silently. Leaning forward a little, he covered his eyes with one hand. The other rested on the cushion within an inch of her purple dress; he did not touch her; he did not touch it. Helen felt sorry, seeing him so troubled and wrung; her heart went out in a throb of that maternal compassion which is never absent from the love of any woman for any man.

“Oh,” she sighed, “I meant to make you happy, to give you comfort! And now I have made you unhappy!”

“You have made me the happiest of all miserable men!”

He raised his head, and looked at her till hers was the face to fall.

“Oh, don’t!” she pleaded. “Not like _that_!”

But he paid no heed to this entreaty. The soul of the saint and the heart of the man made duel together; and the man won, and exulted in it, and wondered how he dared; but his gaze devoured her willfully. The first embrace of the eyes--more delicate, more deferent, and at once less guarded than the meeting of hands or clasp of arms--he gave her, and did not restrain it. Before it, Helen felt more helpless than if he had touched her. She seemed to herself to be annihilated in his love.

“Happy?” he said exultingly, “you deify me! You have made a god of me!”

“No,” she shook her head with a little teasing smile, “I have made a man of you.”

“Then they are one thing and the same!” cried the lover. “Let me hear you say it. Tell it to me again!”

She was silent, and she crimsoned to the brows.

“You are not sure!” he accused her. “You want to take it back. It was a madness, an impulse. You don’t mean it. You do not, you have not loved me.... How _could_ you?” he added humbly. “You know I never counted on it, never expected, did not trust myself to think of it--all this while.”

She lifted her head proudly.

“I have nothing to take back. It was not an impulse. I am not that kind of woman. I have been meaning to tell you--when you gave me the chance. I love you. I have loved you ever since--”

She stopped.

“Since when? How long have you loved me? Come! Speak! I _will_ know!” commanded Bayard deliriously.

“Oh, what is going to be gained if I tell you?” Helen gave him a prisoner’s look. She turned her head from side to side rebelliously, as if she had flown into a cage whose door was now unexpectedly shut.

“I meant to make you happy. All I say seems to make everything worse. I shall tell you nothing more.”

“You will tell me,” he said in a tone of calm authority, “all I ask. It is my affair whether I am happy or wretched. Yours is to obey my wish: because you love me, Helen.”

His imperious voice fell to a depth of tenderness in which her soul and body seemed to sink and drown.

“I have loved you,” she whispered, “ever since that night,--the first time I saw you here, in my father’s house.”

“Now, sir!” she added, with her sudden, pretty willfulness, “make the most of it. I’m not ashamed of it, either. But I shall be ashamed of _you_ if--this--if after I’ve said it _all_, it doesn’t make you happy.... That’s all I care for,” she said quietly. “It is all I care for in this world.”

“Oh, what shall we do?” pleaded Bayard.

“You have your work,” said Helen dreamily, “and I your love.”

Her voice sank to a whisper.

“Is that enough for you?” demanded the man. “I shall perish of it, I shall perish!”

Something in his tone and expression caused Helen to regard him keenly. He looked so wasted, so haggard, that her heart stood still, and said to her,--“This is truer than he knows.”

“No,” she answered with a sweet, womanly composure, “it is not enough for me.”

“And yet,” he said with the brutality of the tormented, “I cannot, I must not, ask you to be my”--

She put the tips of her fingers to his lips to check the word. He seized her hand and held it there; then, for he came to himself, he relinquished it, and laid it down.

“Dear,” said Helen, “I shouldn’t mind it ... to be poor. I want you to understand--to know how it is. I have never felt ... any other way. It shall be just as you say,” she added with a gentleness which gave a beautiful dignity to her words. “We need not ... do it, because I say this. But I wanted you to know--that I was not _afraid_ of a hard life with you.”

“Oh, you cannot understand,” he groaned. “It is no picturesque poverty you would have to meet. It would mean cold, hunger, misery you’ve never thought of, cruel suffering--for you. It would mean all that a man has no right to ask a woman to endure for him, _because_ he loves her ... as I love you.”

“I could starve,” said Helen.

“God help us!” cried the man. Nothing else came to his dry lips.

Then Helen answered him in these strong and quiet words: “I told you I would trust you, and I shall do it to the end. When you are ready for me, I shall come. I am not afraid--of anything, except that you should suffer and that I could not comfort you. If you never see the way to think it right ... I can wait. I love you; and I am yours to take or leave.”

“This,” whispered Bayard reverently, for he could have knelt before her, “is a woman’s love! I am unworthy of it--and of you.”

“Oh, there is the other kind of woman,” said Helen, trying rather unsuccessfully to smile. “This is only _my_ way of loving. I am not ashamed of it.”

“Ashamed of it? It honors you! It glorifies you!”

He held out his arms; but she did not swerve towards them; they dropped. She seemed to him encompassed in a shining cloud, in which her own celestial tenderness and candor had wrapped and protected her.

“Love me!” he pleaded. “Love me, trust me, till we can think. I must do right by _you_, whatever it means to _me_.”

“We love each other,” repeated Helen, holding out her hands, “and I trust you. Let us live on that a little while, till we--till you”--

But she faltered, and her courage forsook her when she looked up into his face. All the anguish of the man that the woman cannot share, and may not understand, started out in visible lines and signs upon his features; all the solemn responsibility for her, for himself, and for the unknown consequences of their sacred passion; the solitary burden, which it is his to wear in the name of love, and which presses hardest upon him whose spirit is higher and stronger than mere human joy.

But at this moment a sound was heard upon the stone steps of the Queen Anne house. It was the footfall of the Professor himself, returning from his closing lecture of the series on Eschatology. Mrs. Carruth pattered behind him with short, stout steps. She had wound the affairs of the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students with Blankets, to a condition in which they could run along without her till the exegetical trip to the German Professor’s in Berlin should be over, and the slush of Cesarea should know her again.

XXIV.

The summer slid, Bayard knew not how. They separated as so many confused lovers do in the complicated situations of our later life; wherein we love no longer in the old, outright, downright way, when men and women took each other for better, for worse, and dared to run the risk of loving, without feeling responsible for the consequences. We are past all that; and whether it is the worse or the better for us, who shall say?

At least, these two had the healthy ring to their love; in that great and simple feeling was no delinquency or default. Bayard did not hesitate or quibble--one day a lover, the next a prudential committee, after the fashion of such feeble mathematicians as go by the name of men, to-day. He was incapable of calculating his high passion; there was no room in his soul or body for a doubt to take on lease of life. He loved her; as the greatest of women might be proud and humble to be loved; as the smallest would be vain to be.

He loved her too much to make her miserable; and he knew, with that dreary, practical perception of the truth sometimes but rarely granted to men of the seer’s temperament, that he could not make her happy. Between love and joy a dead wall shut down; it seemed to him to reach from the highest heavens to the waters under the earth. What elemental chaos could rend it? What miracle was foreordained to shatter it? Would the busy finger of God stretch out to touch it?

“God knows,” he wrote her. “And He purposes, I am fain to believe, if He purposes anything we do or suffer. The hour may come, and the way _might_ clear. More incredible things have happened to men and women loving less than we. If I can, I claim you when I can. Oh, wait for me, and trust me! Life is so short; it is not easy. Sometimes madness enters into me, to fling all these cold, these cruel considerations, these things we call honor, unselfishness, chivalry, to the gales.... Then I come to myself. I will not wrong you. Help me to bear to live without you till I see your face again.”

Helen wrote him noble letters; brave, womanly, and as trustful as the swing of the earth in its orbit. It is not too much to say that few women in her place would have shown the strong composure of this ardent girl. The relation between acknowledged lovers unbetrothed is one whose difficulty only an inspired delicacy can control. Helen’s clear eyes held no shadows. The dark wing of regret for a moment’s weakness never brushed between her heart and this Sir Galahad who loved her like man and spirit too. Few women reared as she had been would have trusted the man as she did; we may add that fewer men would have deserved it.

Emanuel Bayard did. Her heart knew him for one of the sons of light, who will not, because he cannot, cause the woman whom he loves an hour’s regret that she has believed in him utterly and told him so. Now, the value of a woman’s intuition in most of the problems or relations of life cannot be overestimated; when she loves, it is the least reliable of her attributes or qualities. Helen in her composed way recognized this fact perfectly, but it gave her no uneasiness.

“My own perception might fail me,” she wrote. “You could not. It is not my own sense of what is best to do that I am trusting, in this: it is you.”

When he read these words, he put the paper to his lips, and laid his face upon it, and covered it from the sight even of his own eyes.

The date of Professor Carruth’s return was set for early October. In September Bayard received from Helen the news that her mother had met with an accident--a fall; an arm was broken, and, at the age of the patient, the surgeon forbade the voyage. The Professor would get back to his lecture-room, as he must. The two ladies were indefinitely delayed in Berlin.

* * * * *

The winter proved a bleak one, and went with Bayard as was to be expected. The devotee had yet to learn how a woman’s absence may work upon a lover; but of this, since he had no right to do so, he did not complain. Headlong, fathoms down into his work he leaped, and with the diver’s calm he did the diver’s duty. The new chapel progressed after the manner of its kind. Bayard had peremptorily insisted upon the severest economy of plan, demanding a building which should be a “shelter for worship,” he said, and nothing more. Not a waste dollar went into architecture. Not a shingle went into debt. No mortgage desecrated the pulpit of Christlove Church. He built what he could pay for, and nothing more. The dedication of the building was expected to take place in the spring.

Meanwhile, his audiences grew upon his hands; and Windover First Church looked darkly at Windover town hall. Orthodoxy, decorum, property, position, gazed at gaping pews, and regretted that “these temperance movements estranged themselves from the churches.”