Part 22
Helen’s hearty color was quite gone. Such a change had touched her, that Bayard uttered an exclamation of horror, and took her impetuously in his arms.
“Love, what ails you?” he cried with quick anxiety.
Arrived at the moment when she must speak, if ever, Helen’s courage and foresight failed her utterly. She found herself no nearer to knowing what to say, or how to say it, than she had been at the first moment when she heard the girls talking on the rocks. To tell him her fears, and the grounds for them, would be the fatal blunder. How could she say to a man like Bayard: “Your life is in danger. Come on a wedding-trip, and save yourself!” Yet how could she quibble, or be dumb before the truth!
Following no plan, or little, preacted part, but only the moment’s impulse of her love and her trouble, Helen broke into girlish sobs, the first that he had ever heard from her, and hid her wet face against his cheek.
“Oh,” she breathed, “I don’t know _how_ to tell you! But I am so unhappy--and I have grown so anxious about you! I don’t see ... how I can bear it ... as we are.”...
Her heart beat against his so wildly, that she could have said no more if she had tried. But she had no need to try. For he said:--
“_Would_ you marry me this summer, dear? It would make me very happy.... I have not dared to ask it.”
“I would marry you to-morrow.” Helen lifted her head, and “shame departed, shamed” from her sweet, wet face. “I would marry you to-day. I want to be near you. I want ... if anything--whatever comes.”
“Whatever comes,” he answered solemnly, “we ought to be together--now.”
Thus they deceived each other--neither owning to the tender fault--with the divine deceit of love.
Helen comforted herself that she had not said a word of threat or danger or escape, and that Bayard suspected nothing of the cloudburst which hung over him. He let her think so, smiling tenderly. For he knew it all the time; and more, far more than Helen ever knew.
XXVII.
The Professor threw himself into the situation with a fatherly tenderness which went to Bayard’s heart; but the theologian was disconcerted by this glimpse into real life. He had been so occupied with the misery of the next world that he had never investigated the hell of this one. He was greatly perplexed.
“As man to man, Bayard,” he said, “you must tell me the exact amount of truth in those womanly alarms which agitate my daughter’s heart, and to which I allowed myself to yield without, perhaps, sufficient reflection. I find it difficult to believe that any harm can actually befall you in a New England town. That Windover would really injure you? It seems to me, in cool blood, incredible.”
“_Windover_ would not,” replied Bayard, smiling. “They don’t love me, but they don’t mob a man for that. _Windover_ won’t harm me. Did you ever hear a phrase, common along the coast, here, Professor--‘_Rum done it_’?”
The Cesarea Professor shook his head. “I am not familiar with the phrase,” he urged; “it lacks in grammar”--
“What it gains in pith,” interrupted Bayard; “but it sums up the situation. A business that thrives on the ruin of men is not likely to be sensitive in the direction of inflicting unnecessary suffering. I have successfully offended the liquor interests of the whole vicinity. The new chapel represents to them the growth of the only power in this town which they have found reason to fear. That’s the amount of it.”
“But the--churches, Bayard--the Christian classes? The ecclesiastical methods of restraining vice?”
“The ecclesiastical methods do not shut up the saloons,” said Bayard gently. “Angel Alley is not afraid of the churches.”
“I am not familiar with the literature of the temperance movement,” observed the Professor helplessly. “It is a foreign subject to me. I am not prepared to argue with you.”
“You will find some of it on my library shelves,” said Bayard; “it might interest you some time to glance at it.”
“When my manuscript on the New Version is completed, I shall take pleasure in doing so,” replied the Professor politely; “but the point _now_ is, just what, and how much do you fear from the state of things to which you refer? Helen is a level-headed girl. I take it for granted that she has not wrought herself into a hysterical fright without basis. I have acted on my knowledge of my daughter’s nature. I understand _that_, if I am uninstructed in the temperance agitation.”
“Helen has not been misinformed, nor has she overestimated anything,” returned Bayard quietly.
“Is it a mob you fear?”
“Possibly; but probably nothing of the kind. My chief danger is one from which it is impossible to escape.”
“And that is?”--
“Something underhanded. There is a personal element in it.”
Bayard rose, as if he would bring the conversation to a check.
“There is nothing to be done,” he said, “nothing whatever. Everything shall go on, precisely as it is arranged. I shall not run from them.”
“You do not think wise to defer the dedication--for a time?”
“Not an hour! The dedication will take place a week from Sunday.”
The Professor was silent. He found it a little difficult to follow the working of this young man’s mind.
“And yet,” he suggested anxiously, “after the marriage--to-morrow--you will take the temporary absence, the little vacation which your friends advise? You will not think better of that, I hope, for Helen’s sake?”
“I shall leave Windover for a week, for Helen’s sake,” replied Bayard gravely.
In his heart he thought that it would make but little difference; but she should have it to remember that everything had been done. He would not be foolhardy or obstinate. The sacred rights of the wife over the man had set in upon his life She should be gratified and comforted in every way left to the power of that love and tenderness which God has set in the soul abreast of duty and honor. He would give the agitation in Angel Alley time to cool, if cool it could. He would give himself--oh, he would give himself--
Helen, in the next room, sat waiting for him. She ran her fingers over the keys of the piano; her foot was on the soft pedal; she sang beneath her breath,--
“Komm beglücke mich? ... Beglücke mich!”
Bayard sought her in a great silence. He lifted her tender face, and looked down upon it with that quiver on the lower part of his own which she knew so well; which always meant emotion that he did not share with her. She did not trouble him to try to have it otherwise. She clung to him, and they clasped more solemnly than passionately.
Around the bridegroom’s look in Bayard’s face, the magic circle of the seer’s loneliness was faintly drawn.
If God and love had collided--but, thank God! He and Love were one.
“Lord, I have groped after Thee, and to know Thy will, and to do it if I could. I never expected to be happy. Dost Thou mean this draught of human joy for _me_?”
So prayed Bayard, while her bright head lay upon his breast with the delicate and gentle surrender of the girl who will be wife before another sun goes down.
Out upon the piazza of the Flying Jib the Professor was entertaining visitors, by whose call the lovers were not disturbed. The Reverend George Fenton had unexpectedly and vaguely appeared upon the scene. He was accompanied by a lean, thoughtful man, with clerical elbows and long, rustic legs, being no other than Tompkinton of Cesarea and the army cape. Professor Carruth had taken his two old students into the confidence of the family crisis. The Reverend Mr. Fenton looked troubled.
“I had a feeling that something was wrong. I have been impressed for days with a sense that I ought to see Bayard--to help him, you know--to offer him any assistance in my power. He is in such a singular position! He leads such a singular life, Professor! It is hard for a man situated as I am, to know precisely what _to_ do.”
“The only thing that can be done for him, just now, that I see,” suggested the Professor dryly, “is to find him a supply for Sunday. His marriage to my daughter will, of necessity, involve a short absence from his missionary duties.”
“I wish I could preach for him!” cried Fenton eagerly. “I should like nothing better. I should love to do so much for him. He never has any supplies or vacations, like the rest of us. Now I think of it, nobody has been near his pulpit for three years, to help him out--I mean nobody whom _we_ should recognize. I’ve half a mind to consult my committee. The First Church”--
“_I_ will preach for Bayard,” interrupted Tompkinton with his old, slow manner. “My church is so small--we are not important across the Cape, there--it is not necessary for me to consult my committee. I will preach for him with all my heart; in the evening at all events--all day, if the Professor here will find me a supply of some sort.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” observed the Professor quietly; “I will accept your offer, Tompkinton, for the evening. I shall myself occupy Mr. Bayard’s pulpit in Windover town hall on Sunday morning.”
“_You_, Professor?”
Fenton turned pale. Tompkinton gave that little lurch to his shoulders with which, for so many years, he had jerked on the army cape in cold weather. Tompkinton was well dressed, now, well settled, well to do, but the same simple, manly fellow. There was the gentleman in this grandson of the soil, this educated farmer’s boy; and an instinct as true as the spirit of the faith which he preached in the old, unnoticed ways, and with the old, unobserved results. Tompkinton spent his life in conducting weekly prayer meetings, in comforting old people in trouble, and in preaching what he had been taught, as he had been taught it. But he was neither a coward nor a cad for that.
“If I had had a little time to think of this,” protested Fenton. “My committee are, to a man, opposed to this temperance movement, and our relation to Bayard is, of course,--you must see, Professor,--peculiar! But perhaps”--
“Oh, Tompkinton and I can manage,” replied the Professor, not without a twinkle in his deep eyes. “I don’t suppose the First Church has ever heard of us, but we will do our humble best.”
Now, as the event fell out, the Professor and Tompkinton changed their programme a little; and when the time came to do Bayard this fraternal service,--the first of its kind ever offered to him by the clergymen of the denomination in which he was reared,--the Professor drove across the Cape in the hot sun, ten miles, to fill the Reverend Mr. Tompkinton’s little, country pulpit, and Tompkinton took the morning service for his classmate.
In the evening the Professor of Theology from Cesarea Seminary occupied the desk of the heretic preacher in Windover town hall. The hall was thronged. George Fenton preached to yawning pews; for the First Church, out of sheer, unsanctified curiosity, lurched over, and sixty of them went to hear the distinguished Professor. Bayard’s own people were present in the usual summer evening force and character.
The Professor of Theology looked uncomfortably at the massed and growing audience. He was sixty-eight years old, and in all his scholarly and Christian life he had never stood before an audience like this. He opened his manuscript sermon,--he had selected a doctrinal sermon upon the Nature of the Trinity,--and began to read it with his own distinguished manner.
The audience, restrained at first by the mere effect of good elocution and a cultivated voice, were respectful for awhile; they listened hopefully; then perplexedly; then dully. Sentence after sentence, polished, and sound as the foundations of Galilee or Damascus Hall, fell softly from the lips of the Cesarea Professor upon the ears of the Windover fishermen. Doctrine upon doctrine attacked them, and they knew it not. Proof-text upon proof-text bombarded them in vain.
The Professor saw the faces of his audience lengthen and fall; across the rude, red brows of the foreign sailors wonder flitted; then confusion; then dismay. Drunkards and reformed men and wretched girls, and the homeless, wretched people of a seaport town, stood packed in rows before the Professor of Theology, and gaped upon him. Restlessness struck them, and began to run from man to man.
“Shut up there!” whispered Job Slip, punching a big Swede. “Be quiet, can’t ye, for common manners! You’ll disgrace Mr. Bayard!”
“Be civil to the old cove, for the parson’s sake!” commanded Captain Hap, hitting a Finn, and stepping on the toes of a Windover seiner, who had presumed to snicker.
“Why don’t he talk English then?” protested the fisherman.
A dozen men turned and left the hall. Half a dozen followed. Some girls giggled audibly. A group of Norwegians significantly shuffled their feet on the bare floor.
The Professor of Theology laid down his manuscript. It occurred to him, at last, that his audience did not understand what he was saying. It was a dreadful moment. For the first time in his honored life he had encountered the disrespect of a congregation which he could not command. He laid down his sermon on the Nature of the Trinity, and looked the house over.
“I am afraid,” he said distinctly, “that I am not retaining the interest of this congregation. I am not accustomed to your needs, or to the manner in which your pastor presents the Truth to you. But for his sake, you will listen to me, I am sure.”
“Lord, yes,” said the seiner in an audible whisper; “we’d listen to Bunker Hill Monyment for _him_.”
This irreverence did not, happily, reach the ears of the Professor of Theology, who, with his famous ease of manner, proceeded to say:--
“My discourse is on the Nature of the Trinity; and I perceive that my thoughts on this subject are not your thoughts, and that my ways of expression are not your ways, and that an interpreter is needed between this preacher and his audience.... I have been thinking, since I stood at this desk, about the name which you give to the beautiful new chapel which your pastor will dedicate for you, God willing, next Sunday”--
From a remote corner of the hall a sound like that of a serpent arose, and fell. The Professor did not or would not hear it (no man could say which), and went firmly on.
“Christlove you call your chapel, I am told. You may be surprised to know it, but the fact is that the sermon which I have been preaching to you, and the thing which the tender and solemn name of your chapel signifies, are one and the same.”
“I don’t see how he figgers that,” muttered the seiner.
“I will try to show you how,” continued the Professor, as if he had heard the fisherman.
He abandoned his manuscript on the Trinity, and plunged headlong--not in the least knowing how he was to get out again--into a short extempore talk upon the life of Christ. The fishermen listened, for the old preacher held to it till they did; and as soon as he had commanded their respect and attention, he wisely stopped. The service came to a sudden but successful end; and the exhausted Professor thoughtfully retired from his first, his last, his only experience in the pulpit of the Unsound. The most depressing part of the occasion was that his wife told him it was the best sermon she had heard him preach in thirty years.
* * * * *
But Bayard and Helen knew these things not, nor thought of them. They had been married, as it was decided, upon that Saturday, the day before. Helen’s father married them. There was no wedding party, no preparation. Helen had a white gown, never worn before; Jane Granite sent some of her mother’s roses, and Mrs. Carruth, who distinguished herself by abnormal self-possession, fastened one of the roses at Helen’s throat. It was thought best that Windover should know nothing of the marriage until the preacher and his bride had left the town; so it was the quietest little wedding that love and the law allow.
And Bayard and Helen went to her old home in the glory and the blossom of the Cesarea June. And the great cross came out upon the Seminary green, for the moon was up that week.
“It used to divide us,” she whispered; “it never can again.”
She wondered a little that he did not answer; but that he only held her solemnly, in the window where they stood to see the cross.
Helen’s happy nature was easily queen of her. She had begun to feel that her anxiety for Bayard’s sake was overstrained. Tragic Windover slipped from her consciousness, almost from her memory. She felt the sacred right of human joy to conquer fate, and trusted it as royally as she had trusted him. In spite of himself, he absorbed something of her warm and brilliant hopefulness. When she gave herself, she gave her ease of heart. And so the worn and worried man came to his Eden.
XXVIII.
Helen’s happy heart proved prophet; so they said, and smiled. For there was no mob. Sunday dawned like a dream. The sun rode up without cloud or fire. The sea carried its cool, June colors. The harbor wore her sweetest face. The summer people, like figures on a gay Japanese fan, moved brightly across the rocks and piers; Bayard and Helen looked out of the windows of the Flying Jib, and watched them with that kindness of the heart for the interests of strangers which belongs to joy alone. A motionless fleet lay in the harbor, opening its silvery wings to dry them in the Sunday sun.
The fishermen had hurried home by scores to witness the dedication. Everybody had a smile for the preacher’s bride,--the boarder on the rocks, the fisherman from the docks.
Every child or woman to whom she had ever done a kindness in her inexperienced, warm-hearted fashion, remembered it and her that day. She wore the unornamented cream-white silk dress in which she had been married; for Bayard asked it.
“The people will like to see you so,” he said. “It will give them a vision.”
All the town was alive and alert. The argument of success, always the cogent one to the average mind, was peculiarly effective in Windover. People who had never given the mission a thought before, and people who had given it many, but never a kindly one, looked at the doors of the new chapel, smothered in wild Cape roses for the solemn gala, and said: “That affair in Angel Alley seems to prosper, spite of everything. There may be something in it, after all.”
It was expected that the churches themselves, though reserved on the subject, would be better represented at Christlove that evening, than they cared to be; for the young people were determined to see the dedication, and would pair off in scores to Angel Alley, leaving their elders behind, to support the ecclesiastical foundations in decorum and devotion, as by the creed and confession bound.
The attendance of other audiences was not encouraged, however, by the pastor in Angel Alley; his own would more than fill the chapel. All the little preparations of the people went on quietly, and he brought them, as it was his will to do, without weariness or worry, to the evening. He wished the dedication of his chapel to be free from the fret and care which turn so many of our religious festivals into scrambles,--I had almost said, shambles, for the harm they do to exhausted women, and to careworn men.
The day passed easily. Bayard himself, though moving under deep excitement, gave no evidence of it. He was as quiet as the Saint Michael in the picture, whose foot was on the dragon, and whose head was in the skies.
The day passed uneventfully. The evening was one of Windover’s fairest and most famous. The sky gave the ethereal colors of transparent rose-clouds, and the harbor returned them delicately. There was a slight, watery line in the northwest, but the oldest sailors scarcely noticed it. Nothing had happened in any way to hinder the movement of the ceremonial, or to mar its success. There was no mob, nor threat of any. There was no mass, no riot, no alarm. Angel Alley was decorous--if one might say so, obtrusively decorous. Captain Hap, and Job Slip, the special police, and the officers of the mission looked out of narrow lids at Angel Alley, and watched guardedly.
Not a misdemeanor disturbed the calm of this, to all appearance, now law-abiding--nay, law-adoring street. Saloon after saloon that Bayard had closed presented locked front doors to the thirstiest sailor who swaggered from the wharves in search of what he might swallow. Nameless dens that used to flourish the prosperity of their sickening trade were shut.
Old Trawl’s door was barred. The Trawls themselves were invisible. There would be no mob. So said the treasurer of the chapel. So said the Windover police. So thought the anxious Professor, and his tearful wife. So said Helen, sparkling with the pretty triumph of love and joy.
“Dear! You see we were mistaken. They _do_ love you here, in rough old Windover--bless it, after all! We were too anxious--I was worried; I own it, now. I was afraid because you were so precious to me. And I could not be with you ... if anything ... went wrong. But _now_”--
“Now,” he said, “nothing _can_ go wrong. For you are mine, and I am yours, and this is forever.”
“I am glad to hear you speak so cheerfully,” she said, catching at the lighter note in the chord of his words.
He did not answer her; and when she looked up, she was surprised at the solemn expression of his face.
“Love,” he said, “it is time to go. Kiss me, Helen, before we start.”
They stood at the window in her own little room in the summer cottage.
The tide was rising, and it gained quietly upon the beaches and the pier. Bayard looked out upon the sea, for a moment, out to the uttermost horizon’s purple curve. Then he took his wife to his heart, and held her there; within a clasp like that, no woman speaks, and Helen did not.
* * * * *
The Professor and his wife passed down Angel Alley. The Reverend Mr. Tompkinton and that dear old moderator, the very Orthodox but most Christian minister who had always done a brother’s deed by the heretic pastor when he could, followed the great Professor. These officers of the evening’s ceremony entered the chapel, and--not staying to leave Mrs. Carruth in a front pew, but leading her with them--passed on to the platform.
Whispers buzzed about.
“The minister! Where’s the minister? Has anything happened to Mr. Bayard?”
For the chapel was already full. Captain Hap trotted impatiently down the aisle. Job Slip looked at the policeman in the vestibule in a worried way. But the officer stolidly signaled that all was well; and Captain Hap and Job Slip and scores of watchers breathed again.
The congregation increased quietly. Angel Alley was unprecedentedly still. The audience was serious and civil. All of Bayard’s own people were there--many citizens of Windover--and the young folks from the churches, as expected.
Then, came the throng from the wharves. Then, came the crowd from the streets. Then, came the rough, red faces from foreign ports, and from the high seas, and from the Grand Banks, and Georges’. There came all the homeless, neglected, tossed, and tempted people whom Bayard loved, and who loved him. There came the outcast, and the forgotten, and the unclean of heart and body. There came the wretches whom no one else thought of, or cared for. There came the poor girls who frequented no other house of worship, but were always welcomed here. There came the common people, who heard him gladly; for to them he spoke, and for them he lived.
The preacher walked down Angel Alley with his wife, in her white dress, upon his arm. The Alley was thronged with spectators who did not or who could not enter the chapel. Two policemen stepped forward to escort the minister, but he waved them back. He and Helen walked quietly to the chapel steps, and were about to enter, when a slight disturbance in the crowd, at their immediate side, caused Bayard to look around. A girl was struggling with an officer, to get near enough to speak to the minister.