Part 20

Obscurity, poverty, religious doubt, sin and shame and repentance jammed the aisles to hear “the Christman” interpret decency and dignity and the beauty of holiness. He spoke to these, not with the manner of preachers, but with the lips and heart of a man. Week after week strange, unkempt, unlettered seamen poured in; they stood sluggishly, like forming lava, to listen to him. Certain of his audiences would have honored Whitefield or Robertson. Bayard’s soul seemed that winter alight with a sacred conflagration. He prayed and wrought for Windover as a tongue of flame goes up to the sky--because it was the law of life and fire. It is pathetic to think, now, how it would have comforted the man if he had known how much they loved him--these undemonstrative people of the sea, for whom he gave himself. The half of it was never told him. Censure, and scorn, and scandal, and the fighting of foes in the dark, he knew. The real capacity for affection and loyalty which existed in the rough, warm heart of Windover he sometimes thought he understood. He did not see--as we see now--that he had won this allegiance.

This was the more obscure to him because the tension between himself and the liquor interests of Windover was growing quietly into a serious thing, and heavily occupied his attention. And here we know that he was seldom deceived or blinded.

His methods were deliberate, his moves were intelligent, he ran no stupid risks, he measured his dangers, he took them in the name of good citizenship and good Christianity, and strode on to their consequences with that martial step characteristic of him. Of this chapter of the winter’s story, he wrote little or nothing to Helen. She heard how the chapel grew, how the library gathered, and the smoking-room was fitted; about the hope of a gymnasium, the vision of a bowling-alley, the schedule for lectures and entertainments; all his dreams and schemes to give homeless and tempted men shelter and happiness under the rising roof of Christlove;--all the little pleasures and hopes of the missionary life she shared, as Helen had it in her to share the serious energy of a man’s life. Upon the subject of the dangers he was silent. The extent to which these existed she could not measure; for Helen belonged to those social and religious circles into whose experience the facts in the remote lives of that worthy class of people known as temperance agitators do not enter. She had no traditions to enlighten her, and her own joyous nature vaguely filled in the darker outlines of her lover’s life. How should the summer girl understand the winter Windover? She thought of Bayard’s real situation with little more vividness than if he had been a missionary in Darkest Africa. Pleasant sketches of Job Slip and Joey, little reminiscences of Captain Hap, and Lena, pretty, womanly plans for replacing the burned furniture and decorations flitted across the leisurely continental tour by which she escorted her mother homewards. Mrs. Carruth was now quite recovered, but had developed the theory that the dangers of a midwinter voyage were lessened by every week’s delay. As a result, the two ladies engaged passage in February, at the height of the gales.

It was a bitter winter. Two hundred Windover fishermen were drowned; and poverty of the dreariest kind sat sullenly in the tragic town. Bayard worked till he staggered for the women and children whom the sea bereft. Afterwards a cry went up out of scores of desolated homes which told what the man had been and done in Windover, when the gales went down.

One night, a short time before Helen was to sail, there happened to Bayard one of those little mysteries which approach us so much oftener than we recognize them, that we have never properly classified them; and may be long yet in doing so.

He had been in his own rooms since noon; for there was a heavy snowstorm on, and he was conscious of obvious physical inability to brave the weather unless the call of duty should be louder than a certain oppression on his lungs, which he had been forced of late to recognize more often than usual. It was a gray day at Mrs. Granite’s. Jane was sad, and coughed. Her mother had cried a good deal of late, and said that “Jane was goin’ off like her Aunt Annie before her.”

Ben Trawl came sullenly and seldom, now, to see the reluctant girl.

Mrs. Granite thought if Jane could go to her Aunt Annie’s second cousin Jenny in South Carolina, for a spell, she would be cured; but Mrs. Granite said climate was only meant for rich folks; she said you lived and died here in Windover, if your lungs was anyways delicate, like frozen herring packed into a box. She was almost epigrammatic--for Mrs. Granite.

Bayard had been sitting in his study-chair, writing steadily, while his mind, with his too sensitive sympathy, followed the fortunes of these poor women who made him all the home he knew. It was towards six o’clock, and darkening fast. The noise on the beach opposite the cottage was heavy; and the breakers off Ragged Rock boomed mightily.

Snow was falling so thickly that he could not see the water. The fog-bell was tolling, and yells of agony came from the whistling-buoy. It was one of the days when a man delicately reared winces with a soreness impossible to be understood unless experienced, from life in a place and in a position like his; when the uncertain value of the ends of sacrifice presents itself to the mind like the spatter from a stream of vitriol; when the question, Is what I achieve worth its cost? burns in upon the bravest soul, and gets no answer for its scorching.

Bayard laid down his pen and paper, and looked patiently out of the window; putting his empty hand in his pocket as he did so.

His eyes gazed into the curtain of the whirling snow. He wondered how far out to sea it extended; how many miles of it dashed between himself and Helen. It was one of the hours when she seemed to fill the world.

The snowflakes took on fantastic shapes--so! That was the way she held out her white hands. The soft trailing of her gown sounded in the room. If he turned his head, should he see her standing, a vision in purple and gold, smiling, warm, and sweet? It would be such a disappointment not to find her! Rather believe that he should, if he would, and so not stir.

Suddenly his hand in his own pocket struck an object whose character he did not at the moment recall. He drew it out and looked at it. It was the key of his old home in Beacon Street.

For three years, perhaps, he had not thought of his uncle’s words: “Keep your latch-key. You will want to use it, some day.”

Bayard regarded the latch-key steadily. The senseless thing burned his palm as if it were trying to articulate.

He never sought to explain to himself, and I see no reason why we should explain for him, the subtile meaning which went from the metal to the man.

The key said, “Go!”

And Bayard went. He made such efforts as all cool-headed people make, to buffet the inexplicable, and to resist an unreasonable impression. But, after an hour’s protest with himself, he yielded to the invisible summons.

“It is a long while since I have seen my uncle,” he reasoned. “This may be as good a time as any other to look him up.”

He dressed for the storm, and took the nine o’clock train to Boston.

It was blowing a blizzard when he arrived in town; and eleven o’clock. He took a carriage and drove to his uncle’s house. The lights were out on the front of the house, and the servants asleep. Bayard stood a moment irresolute. The folly of his undertaking presented itself to him with emphasis, now he was there. He could not tell when he had yielded to any of that class of highly wrought emotions which we call presentiments, or “leadings.” Impatient with himself, and suddenly vividly aware that Mr. Hermon Worcester was a man who particularly objected to being disturbed in his sleep, Bayard was about to call the cab back to take him away, when he perceived that the driver had started off, and was laboring heavily up Beacon Street, with the snow to the hubs of the wheels. (Who has ever fathomed the inscrutable mind of the Boston cabman who has to be snowed under, before he will get on runners?) Resisting no longer, Bayard softly put his key in the lock.

It creaked a little, for it had grown rusty in the Windover salts, but the boy’s key turned in the man’s hand, and admitted him loyally into his old home.

The hall was dark, and the house still. He brushed off the snow in silence, and stood wondering what to do next. He felt mortified at his own lack of good sense.

Why was he here? And what reason could he give for this stupendous foolishness? He dripped on the Persian rugs awhile, and, finding neither enlightenment nor consolation in this moist occupation, proceeded to take off his overcoat and hang it on his own nail on the mahogany hat-tree under the stairs. When had such a shabby overcoat put that venerable piece of furniture to the blush? Never, if one excepted the case of the Vermont clergyman who had been known to take a lunch with his benefactor, and who received a barrel of old clothes the following week. Bayard hung up his wet hat, too, in the old place, took off his shoes, and crept upstairs in his stockings, as he had done--how many hundred nights, coming home from Cambridge, late, in college days?

His uncle’s door was closed, but to his surprise, he found the door of his own room open. He crept in. It seemed warm and pleasant--how incredibly pleasant and natural! The register seemed to be open. Oh, the luxury of a furnace! The wet and tired man crawled up, feeling his way in the familiar dark, and got down by the register. He remembered where the safety-matches used to be, that struck, and made no sound. Groping, he found them, in their paper match-box, set within the old bronze one. He struck one, softly, and looked about. In the little flare he saw that the room was just as it had always been. Nothing was changed or disturbed, except that his books had gone to Mrs. Granite’s. His bed lay turned back, open for the night, as it always was; the big, soft pillow, the luxurious mattresses, the light warmth of the snowy blankets, invited him. His mother’s picture hung over the head of his bed. Those old pipes and silk menus and college traps and trifles were crossed on the wall by the bureau; his gun was there, and his fishing-rods.

Bayard was about to yield to his weariness, and crawl into his own bed, thinking to see his uncle in the morning, as a sane man should, when his attention was attracted by a slight sound in Mr. Worcester’s room, and something about it struck the young man unpleasantly.

Without noise he opened the door of the bath-room intervening between his own and his uncle’s apartments. Then he perceived a crack of light at the threshold of Mr. Worcester’s closed door.

As he stood uncertain, and troubled, the sound which he had heard was repeated. It seemed to resemble the effort of difficult breathing, and was accompanied by a slight groan.

Then a thick voice called,--

“Partredge?”

“Partredge always did sleep like the dead,” thought Bayard. “I hope he doesn’t neglect my uncle, now he is growing old.”

“Nancy?” summoned the voice again.

Nancy always woke easily and good-naturedly. But Nancy heard nothing now. Bayard, afraid to shock the old man by so astounding an appearance, was moving quickly and quietly to find the servants, when something caused him to change his purpose. Apparently, Mr. Worcester had tried to reach the bell--it was one of the old-fashioned kind, with a long, embroidered bell-handle--he had partly crossed the room, when Bayard intercepted the fall, and caught him.

The gas was lighted, and recognition was instant. Without shock, it seemed without surprise, Hermon Worcester lay back in the young man’s arms, and smiled pleasantly into his face.

“I _thought_ you would use the latch-key--some night,” he said with difficulty. “You’ve chosen the right one, Manuel. The servants did not hear--and--I’m afraid I’m not--quite--well, my boy.”

After this, he said nothing; but lingered for three days, without evident suffering, and with evident content, making signs that Manuel should not leave him; which he did not, to the end.

Hermon Worcester passed on serenely, in the Faith, and the prominence and usefulness thereof; though the last prayer that he heard on earth came from the lips of the affectionate heretic in whose arms he died.

Bayard had been so long out of the world and the ways of it, that it did not occur to him, till he received the summons of the family lawyer, that he would be required to be present at the reading of his uncle’s will.

“As the nearest of kin, my dear sir,” suggested the attorney, “the occasion will immediately concern you, doubtless.”

Bayard bowed, in silence. He did not think it necessary to explain to the attorney that he had been, for a long time, aware of the fact of his disinheritance.

“Possibly Uncle may have left me his library,” he thought, “or the furniture of my old room.”

He had, indeed, received the library. The rest of Hermon Worcester’s fortune, barring the usual souvenirs to relatives, had been divided between Mr. Worcester’s favorite home missionary associations and Cesarea Seminary, of which he had been, for thirty years, trustee.

The house on Beacon Street, with its contents, went unreservedly, “and affectionately,” the testator had expressed it, to his nephew, Emanuel Bayard.

“I think,” observed the lawyer at the first decent opportunity, “that Mr. Worcester intended, or--hoped that you might make your plans of life in accordance with such circumstances as would enable you to keep, and to keep up, the homestead.”

“But of course,” added the attorney, shrewdly reading Bayard’s silent face, “that might be--as you say--impossible.”

“I said nothing,” replied Bayard in a low voice.

“The place is yours, without conditions,” pursued the lawyer, with polite indifference. “It can be sold, or converted into income--rented, if you please, if ever unfortunately necessary. It would seem a pity. It would bring so little. But still, it could, of course, be done.”

“What do you call a little?” asked Bayard.

“Oh, enough for a small fresh-water Professor or retail grocer to get along on, if he knew how,” replied the Back Bay lawyer carelessly.

He mentioned the figures.

The house was old, and in need of repair; the furniture out of date, and worn. The probable values were not large, as the attorney said. To the pastor from Angel Alley their possession seemed to represent the shock of nature involved in a miracle.

XXV.

Helen was to sail for Boston the following Saturday. It lacked three days of that date. It being out of the question to reach her, now, by letter, Bayard cabled to her:--

Will meet you arrival steamer. Future clear before me. I await you. E. B.

To this impulsive message he found himself expecting a reply. The wan missionary had burst into a boyish and eager lover. Oh, that conscientious, cruel past! He dashed it from him. He plunged into the freedom of his heart. In honor--in his delicate honor--he could win her, now.

Helen did not answer the cable message. A hundred hindrances might have prevented her; yet he had believed she would. He thought of her ardent, womanly candor, her beautiful courage, her noble trust. It did not occur to him that a woman has two natures, this for the unfortunate and that for the fortunate lover. One he had tasted; the other he had yet to know.

He vibrated restlessly to and fro between Windover and Boston, where his presence was urgently required in the settlement of his uncle’s affairs. A snowstorm set in, and increased to a gale. Ten days passed, somehow. The steamer was due in twenty-four hours. She did not arrive.

Bayard had lived in Windover long enough to acquire the intelligent fear of the sea which characterizes the coast; and when the next day went, and another, and the boat was admitted at headquarters to be three days overdue, he suffered the unspeakable. It had been nothing less than a terrible midwinter gale. Wrecks lined the coast; glasses scoured it; watchers thronged it; friends besieged the offices of the steamship company. The great line which boasted that it had never lost a life held its stanchest steamer three days--four days overdue.

It was like him that he did not overlook his duty in his trouble, but stood to his post, and remembered the little service appointed for that most miserable evening when he was expected to be with his people. Those who were present that night say that the scene was one impossible to forget. Looking more like death than life, the preacher prayed before them “to the God of the sea.”

Now, for the first time, he felt that he knew what Windover could suffer. Now the torment of women all their lives watching for returning sails entered into his soul; those aged men looking for the sons who never came back; the blurred eyes peering off Windover Point to see the half-mast flag on the schooner as she tacked up the bay; the white lips that did not ask, when the boat came to anchor, “Which is it?” because they dared not--all this, now, he understood.

His personal anguish melted into the great sum of misery in the seaport town.

“If she comes back to me,” he thought, “how I shall work for them--my poor people!”

Now, for the first time, this devout, unselfish man understood that something else than consecration is needed to do the best and greatest thing by the human want or woe that leans upon us. Now that he took hold on human experience, he saw that he had everything to learn from it. The knowledge of a great love, the lesson of the common tie that binds the race together--these taught him, and he was their docile scholar.

Five days overdue!... Six days. Bayard had gone back to Boston, to haunt the offices and the docks. Old friends met him among the white-lipped watchers, and a classmate said:--

“Thank God, Bayard, _you_ haven’t wife and child aboard her.”

He added:--

“Man alive! You look like the five days dead!”

Suddenly, the stir ran along the crowd, and a whisper said:--

“_They’ve sighted her!... She’s in!_”

Then came the hurrah. Shouts of joy reëchoed about him. But Bayard’s head fell upon his breast in silence. At that moment he was touched upon the arm by a beautiful Charter Oak cane, and, looking up, he saw the haggard face of the Professor of Theology.

“I was belated,” thickly articulated the Professor with dry lips. “I came straight from the lecture-room. It is the course on the ‘Nature of Eternal Punishment,’--a most important course. I felt it my duty to be at my desk. But--Bayard, I think I shall substitute to-morrow my lecture (perhaps you may recall it) on the ‘Benevolence and Beneficence of God.’”

The two men leaped into the tug together, and ploughed out to the steamer.

Helen was forward, leaning on the rail. Her thick steamer-dress blew like muslin in the heavy wind. Her eyes met Bayard’s first--yes, first. Her father came in second, but his were too dim to know it.

“Mother is in the cabin, dear Papa!” cried Helen; “we have to keep her warm and still, you know.”

His daughter’s precious kiss invited him, but the old man put Helen gently aside, and dashed after his old wife.

For that moment Helen and Bayard stood together. Before all the world he would have taken her in his arms, but she retreated a little step.

“Did you get my message?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Did you answer it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I thought it would do just as well when I got here.”

“And you might have been--you might never have got here at all!” cried Bayard fiercely.

“Have you been anxious?” asked Helen demurely.

He did not think it was in her to coquette with a man in a moment like that, and he made her no reply. Then Helen looked full in his face, and saw the havoc on it.

“Oh, you poor boy!” she whispered; “you poor, poor boy!”

* * * * *

This was in the afternoon; and he was compelled to see her carried off to Cesarea on her father’s arm, without him. There was no help for it; and he waited till the next day, unreconciled and nervous in the extreme. He had been so overworn and overwrought, that his mind took on feverish fancies.

“Something may happen by to-morrow,” he thought, “and I shall have never--once”--

He rebuked even his own thought, even then, for daring to dream of the touch of her lips. But the dream rode over his delicacy, and rushed on.

At an early hour the next day he went to Cesarea, and sought her in her father’s house. It was a cold, dry, bright day. Cesarea shivered under her ermine. The Professor’s house was warm with the luxurious, even warmth of the latest modern heater, envied by the rest of the Faculty, in the old-fashioned, draughty houses of the Professors’ Row. Flowers in the little window conservatory of the drawing-room breathed the soft air easily, and were of rich growth and color. Helen was watering the flowers. She colored when she saw him, and put down the silver pitcher which she had abstracted from the breakfast-room for the purpose of encouraging her lemon verbena, that had, plainly, missed her while she was abroad. She wore a purple morning-gown with plush upon it. She had a royal look.

“How early you have come!” she said half complainingly.

He paid no attention to her tone, but deliberately shut the door, and advanced towards her.

“I have come,” he said, “to _stay_; that is--if you will let me, Helen.”

“Apparently,” answered Helen, taking up the pitcher, “I am not allowed a choice in the matter.”

But he saw that the silver pitcher shook in her hand.

“No,” he said firmly, “I do not mean to give you any choice. I mean to take you. I do not mean to wait one hour more.”

He held out his arms, but suspended them, not touching her. The very air which he imprisoned around her seemed to clasp her. She trembled in that intangible embrace.

“It will be a poor man’s home, Helen--but you will not suffer. I can give you common comforts. I cabled to you the very hour that I knew.... Oh, I have trusted your trust!” he said.

“And you _may_ trust it,” whispered Helen, suddenly lifting her eyes.

His, it seemed to her, were far above her--how blinding beautiful joy made them!

Then his starved arms closed about her, and his lips found hers.

* * * * *

The Professor of Theology sat in his study. The winter sun struck his loaded shelves; the backs of his books inspected him tenderly. At the western window, on the lady’s desk which was reserved for Mrs. Carruth, her sewing-basket stood. The Professor glanced at it contentedly. He had never been separated from his wife so long before, and they had been married thirty-five years. She had unpacked that basket and taken it into the study that morning, with a girlish eagerness to sit down and darn a stocking while the Professor wrote.

“This is a great gratification, Statira,” he had said.

Mrs. Carruth had gone out, now, to engage in the familiar delights of a morning contest with the Cesarea butcher, and the Professor was alone when Emanuel Bayard sturdily knocked at the study door.

The Professor welcomed the young man with some surprise, but no uncertain warmth. He expressed himself as grateful for the prompt attention of his former pupil, on the joyful occasion of this family reunion.