Part 21

“And it was kind of you, Bayard, too--meeting the ladies on that tug. I was most agreeably surprised. I was wishing yesterday--in fact, it occurred to me what a comfort some young fellow would have been whom I could have sent down, all those anxious days. But we never had a son. Pray sit down, Mr. Bayard.... I am just reading the opinions of Olshausen on a most interesting point. I have collected valuable material in Berlin. I shall be glad to talk it over with you. I found Professor Kammelschkreiter a truly scholarly man. His views on the errors in the Revised Version are the most instructed of any I have met.”

“Professor,” said Bayard stoutly, “will you pardon me if I interrupt you for a minute? I have come on a most important matter. I am sorry to seem uncivil, but the fact is I--I cannot wait another moment, sir.... Sir, I have the honor to tell you that your daughter has consented to become my wife.”

At this truly American declaration, the Professor of Theology laid down his copy of Olshausen, and stared at the heretic missionary.

“_My_ daughter!” he gasped, “_your_ wife?--I beg your pardon,” he added, when he saw the expression of Bayard’s face. “But you have taken me altogether by surprise. I may say that such a possibility has never--no, never once so much as occurred to me.”

“I have loved her,” said Bayard tenaciously, “for three years. I have never been able to ask her to marry me till now. I think perhaps my uncle meant to make it possible for me to do so, but I do not know. I am still a poor man, sir, but I can keep her from suffering. She does me the undeserved honor to love me, and she asked me to tell you so.”

The Professor had risen and was pacing the study hotly. His face was rigid. He waved his thin, long fingers impatiently at Bayard’s words.

“Scholars do not dwell upon paltry, pecuniary facts like parents in lower circles of society!” cried the Professor with superbly unconscious hauteur. “There would have lacked nothing to my daughter’s comfort, sir, in any event--if the right man had wooed her. I was not the father to refuse him mere pecuniary aid to Helen’s happiness.”

“And I was not the lover to ask for it,” observed Bayard proudly.

“Hum--m--m,” said the Professor. He stopped his walk across the study floor, and looked at Bayard with troubled respect.

“I will not take her from you at once,” urged Bayard gently; “we will wait till fall--if I can. She has said that she will become my wife, then.”

His voice sank. He spoke the last words with a delicate reverence which would have touched a ruder father than the Professor of Theology.

“Bayard,” he said brokenly, “you always were my favorite student. I couldn’t help it. I always felt a certain tenderness for you. I respect your intellectual traits, and your spiritual quality. Poverty, sir? What is _poverty_? But, Bayard, _you are not sound_!”

Against this awful accusation Bayard had no reply; and the old Professor turned about ponderously, like a man whose body refused to obey the orders of his shocked and stricken mind.

“How can I see my daughter, _my_ daughter, the wife of a man whom the Ancient Faith has cast out?” he pleaded piteously.

He lifted his shrunken hands, as if he reasoned before an invisible tribunal. His attitude and expression were so solemn that Bayard felt it impossible to interrupt the movement by any mere lover’s plea. Perhaps, for the first time, he understood then what it meant to the old man to defend the beliefs that had ruled the world of his youth and vigor; he perceived that they, too, suffered who seemed to be the inflicters of suffering; that they, too, had their Calvary--these determined souls who doggedly died by the cross of the old Faith in whose shelter their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had lived and prayed, had battled and triumphed. Bayard felt that his own experience at that moment was an intrusion upon the sanctuary of a sacred struggle. He bowed his head before his Professor, and left the study in silence.

But Helen, who had the small reverence for the theologic drama characteristic of those who have been reared upon its stage, put her beautiful arms around his neck and, laughing, whispered:--

“Leave the whole system of Old School Orthodoxy to me! I can manage!”

“You may manage him,” smiled Bayard, “but can you manage _it_?”

“Wait a day, and see!” said Helen.

He would have waited a thousand for the kiss with which she lifted up the words.

The next day she wrote him, at Windover, where he was dutifully trying to preach as if nothing had happened:--

“Papa says I have never been quite sound myself, and that he supposes I will do as I please, as I always have.”

There followed a little love-letter, so deliciously womanly and tender, that Bayard did not for hours open the remainder of his mail. When he did so, he read what the Professor of Theology had written, after a night of prayer and vigil such as only aged parents know.

“MY DEAR BAYARD,” the letter said,--“Take her if you must, and God be with you both! I cannot find it in my heart to impose the shadow of my religious convictions upon the happiness of my child. I can battle for the Truth with men and with demons. I cannot fight with the appeal of a woman’s love. I would give my life to make Helen happy, and to keep her so. Do you as much! Yours sincerely, “HAGGAI CARRUTH.

“P.S.--We will resume our discussion on the views of Professor Kammelschkreiter at some more convenient season.”

XXVI.

Early June came to Windover joyously that year. May had been a gentle month, warmer than its wont, and the season was in advance of its schedule.

Mrs. Carruth, found paling a little, and thought to be less strong since her accident abroad, had been ordered to the seaside some three or four weeks before the usual flitting of the family. Helen accompanied her; the Professor ran down as often as he might, till Anniversary Week should set him free to move his ponderously increasing manuscript on the “Errors in the Revised Version” from Cesarea to the clam study. The long lace curtains blew in and out of the windows of the Flying Jib; Helen’s dory glittered in two coats of fresh pale-yellow paint upon the float; and Helen, in pretty summer gowns of corn color, or violet, or white, listened on the piazza for the foot-ring of her lover. She was lovely that spring, with the loveliness of youth and joy. Bayard watched her through a mist of that wonder and that worship which mark the highest altitudes of energy in a man’s life. It was said that he had never wrought for Windover, in all his lonely time of service there, as he did in those few glorified weeks.

It is pleasant to think that the man had this draught of human rapture; that he tasted the brim of such joy as only the high soul in the ardent nature knows.

Helen offered him her tenderness with a sweet reserve, alternating between compassion for what he had suffered, and moods of pretty, coquettish economy of his present privilege, that taunted and enraptured him by turns. He floated on clouds; he trod on the summer air.

Their marriage was appointed for September: it was Helen’s wish to wait till then; and he submitted with such gentleness as it wrung her heart, afterwards, to remember.

“We will have one perfectly happy summer,” she pleaded. “People can be lovers but once.”

“And newly wed but once,” he answered gravely.

“Dear,” said Helen, with troubled eyes, “it shall be as you say. _You_ shall decide.”

“God will decide it,” replied the lover unexpectedly.

His eyes had a look which Helen could not follow. She felt shut out from it; and both were silent.

Her little dreams and plans occupied hours of their time together. She was full of schemes for household comfort and economy, for serving his people, for blessing Windover. She talked of what could be done for Job Slip and Mari, Joey, Lena, Captain Hap and Johnny’s mother, Mrs. Granite and poor Jane. Her mind dwelt much upon all these children of the sea who had grown into his heart. “Jane,” she said, “should have her winter in the South.” She spoke of Jane with a reticent but special gentleness. They would rent the cottage; they would furnish the old dreary rooms.

Helen did not come to her poor man quite empty-handed. The Professor had too much of the pride of total depravity left in him for that.

“I shall be able to buy my own gowns, sir, if you please!” she announced prettily. “And I am going to send Mrs. Granite--with Jane--to her aunt Annie’s cousin Jenny’s (was that it?) in South Carolina, next winter, to get over that Windover cough. We’ve got to go ourselves, if _you_ don’t stop coughing. No? We’ll see!”

“I _shall_ stop coughing,” cried Bayard joyously.

She did not contradict him, for she believed in Love the Healer, as the young and the beloved do. So she went dreaming on.

“I came across a piece of gold tissue in Florence; it will make such a pretty portière in place of that old mosquito-net! And we’ll make those dismal old rooms over into”--

And Bayard, who had thought never to know Paradise on earth, but only to toil for Heaven, closed her sentence by one ecstatic word.

The completion of the chapel, still delayed after the fashion of contractors, was approaching the belated dedication day of which all Windover talked, and for which a growing portion of Windover interested itself. Bayard was over-busy for a newly betrothed man. His hours with Helen were shortened; his brief snatches of delight marked spaces between days of care. Erected upon the site of the burned building, the new chapel rose sturdily in the thick and black of Angel Alley. The old, illuminated, swinging sign remained,--“for luck,” the fishermen said. It was to be lighted on the day when the first service should be held in the new Christlove.

There came a long, light evening, still in the early half of June. Bayard was holding some service or lecture in the town, and had late appointments with his treasurer, with Job Slip, and Captain Hap. He saw no prospect of freedom till too late an hour to call on Helen, and had gone down to tell her so; had bade her good-night, and left her. She had gone out rowing, in the delicious loneliness of a much loved and never neglected girl, and was turning the bow of the dory homewards. She drifted and rowed by turns, idle and happy, dreamy and sweet. It was growing dark, and the boats were setting shorewards. One, she noticed (a rough, green fishing-dory from the town), lay, rudely held by a twist of the painter, to the cliffs, at the left, below the float. The dory was empty. A sailor hat and an old tan-colored reefer lay on the stern seat. Two girls sat on the rocks, sheltered in one of the deep clefts or chasms which cut the North Shore, talking earnestly together. One of them had her foot upon the painter. Neither of them noticed Helen; she glanced at them without curiosity, rowed in, tossed her painter to the keeper of the float, and went up to the house. Her father was in Windover that night; he and her mother were discussing the inconceivable prospect of an Anniversary without entertaining the Trustees; they were quite absorbed in this stupendous event. Helen strolled out again, and off upon the cliff.

She had but just tossed her Florentine slumber-robe of yellow silk upon the rocks, and thrown herself upon it, when voices reached her ear. Eavesdropping is an impossible crime on Windover Point, where the cliffs are common trysting-ground; still, Helen experienced a slight discomfort, and was about to exchange her rock for some less public position, when she caught a word which struck the blood to her heart, and back again, like a smart, stinging blow.

The voices were the voices of two girls. The stronger and the bolder was speaking.

“So I come to tell you. Do as you please. If _you_ don’t let on, I shall.”

“Lena!” groaned the other, “are you sure? Isn’t there some mistake?”

“Not a ---- chance of any,” replied Lena promptly. “Do you s’pose I’d thrust myself upon you this way, and tell for nothin’? Lord, _I_ know how decent girls feel, bein’ seen with the likes of me. That’s why I set it after dark, and never come nigh your house. Besides, _he’s_ there. I warn’t a-goin’ to make no talk, you better believe, Jane Granite. I’ve seen enough o’ that.”

“Mr. Bayard says you are a--good girl, now,” faltered Jane, not knowing what to say. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to be ashamed to be seen with you--now. And I--I’m much obliged to you, Lena. Oh, Lena! what ever in the world are we going to do?”

“Do?” said Lena sharply; “why, head ’em off; that’s all! It only needs a little horse sense, and--to care enough. I’d be drownded in the mud in the inner harbor in a land wind--I’d light a bonfire in the powder factory, and stand by it, if that would do him any good. I guess you would, too.”

Jane made no answer. She felt that this was a subject which could not be touched upon with Lena. It was too dark to see how Jane looked.

“Why,” said the other, “you’re shaking like a topsail in a breeze o’ wind!”

“How do you mean? What is your plan? What do you mean to have me do?” asked Jane, whose wits seemed to have dissolved in terror.

“Get him out of Windover,” coolly said Lena; “leastways for a spell. Mebbe it’ll blow by. There ain’t but one thing I know that’ll do it. Anyhow, there ain’t but one person.”

“I can’t think what you can mean!” feebly gasped Jane.

“_She_ can,” replied Lena tersely. Jane made a little inarticulate moan. Lena went on rapidly.

“You go tell her. That’s what I come for. Nothin’ else--nor nobody else--can do it. That’s your part of this infernal business. Mine’s done. I’ve give you the warnin’. Now you go ahead.”

“Oh, are you _sure_?” repeated Jane weakly; “isn’t it _possible_ you’ve got it wrong, somehow?”

“Is it possible the dust in the street don’t hear the oaths of Windover!” exclaimed Lena scornfully. “Do you s’pose there ain’t a black deed doin’ or threatenin’ in Angel Alley that _I_ don’t know? I tell you his life ain’t worth a red herrin’, no, nor a bucketful of bait, if them fellars has their way in this town!... It’s the loss of the license done it. It’s the last wave piled on. It’s madded ’em to anything. It’s madded ’em to murder.... Lord,” muttered Lena, “if it come to that, wouldn’t I be even with ’em!”

She grated her teeth, like an animal grinding a bone; took her foot from the painter, sprang into the fishing-dory, and rowed with quick, powerful strokes into the dark harbor.

Helen, without a moment’s hesitation, descended the cliff and peremptorily said:--

“Jane, I heard it. Tell me all. Tell me everything, this minute.”

Jane who was sobbing bitterly, stopped like a child at a firm word: and with more composure than she had yet shown, she gave her version of Lena’s startling story.

Lena was right, she said; the rum people were very angry with Mr. Bayard: he had got so many shops shut up; and other places; he had shut up so much in Angel Alley this year. And now old Trawl had lost his license. Folks said a man couldn’t make a decent living there any longer.

“That’s what Ben said,” observed Jane, with a feeble sense of the poignancy of the phrase. “A man couldn’t make an honest living there, now. But there’s one thing,” added Jane with hanging head. “Lena don’t know it. I couldn’t tell _Lena_. God have mercy on me, for it’s me that helped it on!”

“I do not understand you, Jane,” replied Helen coldly; “how could you injure Mr. Bayard, or have any connection with any plot to do him harm?”

“I sent Ben off last Sunday night,” said Jane humbly. “I sent him marching for good. I told him I never could marry him. I told him I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told him what I heard on Ragged Rock--that night--last year.”

“What did you hear on Ragged Rock?” asked Helen, still distant and doubtful.

“Didn’t the minister ever tell you?” replied Jane. “Then I won’t.”

“Very well,” said Helen, after an agitated silence, “I shall not urge you. But if Mr. Bayard’s life is in _real_ danger--I cannot believe it!” cried the sheltered, happy woman. Such scenes, such possibilities, belonged to the stage, to fiction; not to New England life. The Professor’s daughter had a healthy antagonism in her to the excessive, the too dramatic. Her mind grasped the facts of the situation so slowly that the Windover girl half pitied her.

“You don’t see,” said Jane. “You don’t understand. You ain’t brought up as we are.”

“If Mr. Bayard is in danger--” repeated Helen. “Jane!” she cried sharply, thinking to test the girl’s sincerity and judgment, “should you have come and told me what Lena said, if I had not overheard it?”

“Miss Carruth,” answered Jane, with a dignity of her own, “don’t you know there is not one of his people who would not do _anything_ to save Mr. Bayard?”

Through the dark Jane turned her little, pinched face towards this fortunate woman, this other girl, blessed and chosen. Her dumb eyes grew bright, and flashed fire for that once; then they smouldered, and their spaniel look came on again.

“You ought to speak differently to me,” she said. “You should feel sorry for me, because it’s along of Ben. I tried to keep it up--all this while. I haven’t dared to break with him. I thought if I broke, and we’d been keeping company so long, maybe he might do a harm to Mr. Bayard. Then it come to me that I couldn’t, couldn’t, _couldn’t_ bear it, not another time! And I told him so. And Ben, he swore an awful oath to me, and cleared out. And then Lena came and told.”

“What was it Ben swore?” asked Helen, whose sanguine heart was beginning to sink in earnest. “This is no time for being womanly, and--and not saying things. If it takes all the oaths in the catalogue of Angel Alley, it is my right to know what he said, and it is your duty to tell me!”

“Well,” said Jane stolidly, “he said: ‘Damn him to hell! If we ain’t a-goin’ to be married, he shan’t, neither!’”

“Thank you, Jane,” said Helen gently, after a long silence. She held out her hand; Jane took it, but dropped it quickly.

“Do you know the details? The plan? The plot--if there is a plot?” asked Helen, without outward signs of agitation.

“Lena said they said Christlove should never be dedicated,” answered Jane drearily. “Not if they had to put the parson out of the way to stop it.”

“_Oh!_”

“That’s what Lena said. She thought if Mr. Bayard could be got out of town for a spell, right away, Lena thought maybe that would set ’em off the notion of it. I told her Mr. Bayard wouldn’t go. She said you’d see to that.”

“Yes,” said Helen softly, “I will see to that.”

Jane made no reply, but started unexpectedly to her feet. The two girls clambered down from the cliff in silence, and began to walk up the shore. At the path leading to the hotel, Jane paused and shrank away.

“How you cough!” said Miss Carruth compassionately. “You are quite wet with this heavy dew. Do come into the cottage with me.”

She put her hand affectionately on the damp shoulder of Jane’s blue and white calico blouse.

The hotel lights reached faintly after the figures of the two. Jane looked stunted and shrunken; Helen’s superb proportions seemed to quench her. The fisherman’s daughter lifted her little homely face.

“I don’t suppose,” she faltered, “you’d be willing to be told. But mother and me have done for him so long--he ain’t well, the minister ain’t--there’s ways he likes his tea made, and we het the bricks, come cold weather, for him--and--all those little things. We’ve tried to take good care of Mr. Bayard! It’s been a good many years!” said Jane piteously. It was more dreadful to her to give up boarding the minister, than it was that he should marry the summer lady in the gold and purple gowns.

“I suppose you and he will go somewhere?” she added bitterly.

“We shan’t forget you, Jane,” said Helen gently.

The calico blouse shoulder shook off the delicate hand that rested upon it.

“I won’t come in,” she said. “I’ll go right home.”

Jane turned away, and walked across the cliffs. The hotel lights fell short of her, and the darkness swallowed her undersized, pathetic figure, as the mystery of life draws down the weak, the uncomely, and the unloved.

Jane went home, and unlocked her bureau drawer. From beneath the sachet-bag, on which her little pile of six handkerchiefs rested precisely, she drew out an old copy of Coleridge. The book was scented with the sachet, and had a sickly perfume; it was incense to Jane. She turned the leaves to find “Alph, the sacred river;” then shut the book, and put it back in the bureau drawer. She did not touch it with her lips or cheek. She handled it more tenderly than she did her Bible.

* * * * *

Left to herself, Helen felt the full force of the situation fall upon her, in a turmoil of fear and perplexity. The whole thing was so foreign to her nature and to the experience of her protected life, that it seemed to her more than incredible. There were moments when she was in danger of underrating the facts, and letting the chances take their course--it seemed to her so impossible that Jane and Lena should not, somehow, be mistaken.

Her mind was in a whirlwind of doubt and dismay. With a certain coolness in emergencies characteristic of her, she tried to think the position out, by herself. This futile process occupied perhaps a couple of hours.

It was between eleven and twelve o’clock when the Professor, with a start, laid down his manuscript upon the Revised Version. For the door of the clam study had opened quietly, and revealed his daughter’s agitated face.

“Papa,” she said, “I am in a great trouble. I have come to you first--to know what to do--before I go to him. I’ve been thinking,” she added,“that perhaps this is one of the things that fathers are _for_.”

Like a little girl she dropped at his knee, and told him the whole story.

“I couldn’t go to a man, and ask him to marry me, without letting you know, Papa!” said the Professor’s daughter.

The Professor of Theology reached for his Charter Oak cane as a man gropes for a staff on the edge of a precipice. The manuscript chapter on the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel fell to the floor. The Professor and the cane paced the clam study together feverishly.

The birds were singing when Helen and her father stopped talking, and wearily stole back to the cottage for an hour’s rest.

“You could go right home,” said the old man gently. “The house is open, and the servants are there. I am sure your mother will wish it, whenever she is acquainted with the facts.”

“We won’t tell Mother, just yet, Papa--not till we must, you know. Perhaps Mr. Bayard won’t--won’t take me!”

The Professor straightened himself, and looked about with a guilty air. He felt as if he were party to an elopement. Eager, ardent, boyishly sympathetic with Helen’s position, quivering with that perfect thoughtfulness which she never found in any other than her father’s heart, the Professor of dogmatic Orthodox Theology flung himself into the emergency as tenderly as if he had never written a lecture on Foreordination, or preached a sermon on the Inconceivability of Second Probation.

It was he, indeed, and none other, who summoned Bayard to Helen’s presence at an early hour of the morning; and to the credit of the Department, and of the ancient Seminary in whose stern faith the kindest graces of character and the best graciousness of manner have never been extinguished, be it said that Professor Haggai Carruth did not once remind Emanuel Bayard that he was meeting the consequences of unsoundness, and the natural fate of heresy. Nobly sparing the young man any reference to his undoubtedly deserved misfortune, the Professor only said:--

“Helen, here is Mr. Bayard,” and softly shut the door.

* * * * *