Part 2

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.