Part 3

There came up a warm storm that week, and by Friday Cesarea Hill swam in a sea of melted snow. The two B’s and one C waded their way to their Professor’s house to tea that evening, across rills and rivers of ice-water, and through mounds of slush. Bayard sank over rubbers amid-stream more than once; he wore the usual evening shoe of society. He was always a well-dressed man, having never known any other way of living. It was different with his fellow-students. That one C, for example, who strode across the Seminary green in comfort and rubber boots, had provided, it seemed, no other method of appearance within doors. His pantaloons were tucked into the rubber boots at the knees, and had the air of intending to stay there.

“Look here, man!” gasped Bayard, as the young men removed their overcoats in the large and somewhat stately hall of the Professor’s house. “You have forgotten your shoes!”

“I have some slippers in my pockets, if you think them necessary,” replied the other. “You know more about such things than I do.”

The speaker produced a pair of slippers, worked in worsted by his sister; a white rose ornamented the toe of each. As he stooped to put them on, Bayard observed that the man wore a flannel shirt of the blue-gray tint at that time preferred by day laborers, and that he was guiltless of linen.

The three guests entered the drawing-room, headed by the flannel shirt. The one C sat down on the largest satin easy-chair, stretching his embroidered slippers on the Persian rug with such dignified unconsciousness of the unusual as one might go far to see outside of Cesarea, and might not witness once in a lifetime there. Occupied with the embarrassment of this little incident, Bayard did not notice at first that the daughter of the house was absent from the parlor. He fell to talking with his favorite Professor eagerly; they were deep in the discussion of the doctrine of election as taught in a rival seminary, by a more liberal chair, when Mrs. Carruth drew the attention of her husband to the gentleman of the flannel shirt, and seated herself by Bayard.

“I hope you are not very hungry?” she began in her literal voice. “We are waiting for my daughter. She attends the Symphony Concerts Fridays, and the coach is late to-night from the five o’clock train.”

“Oh, that coach!” laughed Bayard. “I walk--if I want my supper.”

“And so did I,” said a soft voice at his side.

“Why, Helen, Helen!” complained the Professor’s wife.

The young lady stood serenely, awaiting her father’s introduction to the three students. She bowed sedately to the other B and the C. Her eyes scintillated when she turned back to Bayard. She seemed to be brimming over with suppressed amusement. She took the chair beside him, for her mother (who never trusted Cesarea service to the exclusion of the old-fashioned, housewifely habit of looking at her table before her guests sat down) had slipped from the room.

“You _walk_ from the station--a mile--in this going?” began Bayard, laughing.

“No;” she shook her head. “I waded. But I got here. The coach had nine inside and five on top. It hasn’t come yet. I promised Father I’d be here, you see.”

Bayard’s quick eye observed that Miss Carruth was in dinner dress; her gown was silk, and purple, and fitted her remarkably well; she had a sumptuous figure; he reflected that she had taken the time and trouble to dress for these three theologues as she would have done for a dinner in town. He saw that she gave one swift glance at the man in the flannel shirt, who was absorbed in the Professor’s story about the ordination of somebody who was rejected on the doctrine of probation.

But after that she looked at the student’s head, which was good. Upon the details of his costume no eye in the drawing-room rested that evening, again. That student went out from Cesarea Seminary to be a man of influence and intellect; his name became a distinguished one, and in his prime society welcomed him proudly. But if the Professor’s family had been given the catalogue and the Inquisition to identify him, it may be questioned whether thumbscrews would have wrung his name from them. It being one of the opportunities of Christianity that it may make cultivated gentlemen out of poor and ignorant boys, Cesarea ladies take pride in their share of the process.

At tea--for Cesarea still held to her country tradition of an early dinner--Bayard found himself seated opposite the Professor’s daughter. The one C sat beside her, and she graciously proceeded to bewitch that gentleman wholly out of his wits, and half out of his theology. Bayard heard her talking about St. Augustine. She called him an interesting monomaniac.

The table was served in the manner to which Bayard was used, and was abundantly lighted by candles softly shaded in yellow. In the pleasant shimmer, in her rich dress, with the lace at her throat and wrists, she seemed, by pretty force of contrast with the prevailing tone of the village, the symbol of beauty, ease, and luxury. Bayard thought how preëminent she looked beside that fellow in the shirt. He could not help wondering if she would seem as imposing in Beacon Street. After a little study of the subject he concluded that it would not make much difference. She was not precisely a beautiful woman, but she was certainly a woman of beauty. What was she? Blonde? She had too much vigor. But--yes. Her hair was as yellow as the gold lining of rich silverware. She was one of the bright, deep orange blondes; all her coloring was warm and brilliant. Only her eyes struck him as inadequate; languid, indifferent, and not concerned with her life. She gave the unusual effect of dark eyes with bright hair.

While he was thinking about her in the interludes of such chat as he could maintain with her mother, who had asked him twice whether he graduated this year, Miss Carruth turned unexpectedly and addressed him. The remark which she made was not original; it was something about the concerts: Did he not go in often? She had not asked the one C if _he_ attended the Symphony Concerts. But Mrs. Carruth now inquired of that gentleman if he liked the last preparatory lecture. The Professor was engaging the attention of the other B. And Bayard and Helen Carruth fell to conversing, undisturbed, across the pleasant table.

He felt at home despite himself, in that easy atmosphere, in that yellow light. The natural sense of luxury crept around him softly. He thought of his northwest room over there, rocking in the gale, and of the big dish of apples at the club table. He thought of the self-denials and deprivations, little and large, which had accompanied his life at Cesarea; he tried to remember why he had chosen to do this or suffered that.

His ascetic ideals swam and blurred a little before the personality of this warm, rich, human girl. There was something even in the circumstance of eating quail on toast, and sipping chocolate from a Dresden cup in an antique Dutch spoon, which was disturbing to the devout imagination--in Cesarea.

Over his sensitive face his high, grave look passed suddenly, like the reflection thrown from some unseen, passing light.

“I had better be at my room and at work,” he thought.

At that moment he became aware of a change in the expression of the Professor’s daughter. Her languid eye had awaked. She was regarding him with puzzled but evident attention. He threw off his momentary depression with ready social ease, and gayly said:--

“You look as if you were trying to classify a subject, Miss Carruth; as if you wanted to put something in its place and couldn’t do it.”

“I am,” she admitted. “I do.”

“And you succeed?”

“No.” She shook her head again. “I do not find the label. I give it up.” She laughed merrily, and Bayard joined in the laugh. But to himself he said:--

“She does me the honor to investigate me. Plainly I am not the one C. Clearly I am not the other B. Then what? She troubles herself to wonder.”

Then he remembered how many generations of theological students had been the subject of the young lady’s gracious and indifferent observation. She was, perhaps, twenty-five years old, and they had filed through that dining-room alphabetically--the A’s, the B’s, the C’s, the X’s and the Z’s--since she came, in short dresses, to Cesarea, when her father gave up his New York parish for the Chair of Theology. It occurred to Bayard that she might have ceased to find either the genus or the species theologus of thrilling personal interest, by this time.

Then the Professor mentioned to the other B a certain feature of the famous Presbyterian trial for heresy, at that time wrenching the religious world. Bayard turned to listen, and the discussion which followed soon absorbed him.

The face of the Professor of Theology grew grave as he approached the topic of his favorite heresy. Stern lines cut themselves about his fine mouth. His gentle eyes darkened. He felt keenly the responsibility of the influence that he bore over his students, even in hours of what he called social relaxation, and the necessity of defending the truth was vividly present to his trained conscience. Bayard watched his host with troubled admiration. It was with a start that he heard a woman’s voice sweetly breaking in upon the conversation. She was speaking to the guest of the flannel shirt.

“Oh, have you seen the snow professor since the rain? He’s melted into such a lovely slush!”

“Helen!” rebuked her mother plaintively. “Helen, Helen!”

But the Professor smiled,--a warm smile peculiar to himself. He shot a tender look across the table at his daughter. He did not resume the subject of the Presbyterian trial.

“The trouble with the snow professor,” suggested Bayard, “is that he had the ice in his head, but the sun at his heart.”

Helen Carruth turned quickly towards him. Her glance lingered into a look distinctly personal and indistinctly grateful. She made no answer, but her eyes and the student’s understood each other.

IV.

It is manifestly as unfair to judge of a place by its March as to judge a man’s disposition by the hour before dinner. As the coldest exteriors may conceal the warmest loves, so the repelling Cesarean winter holds in store one of the most alluring summers known to inland New England. The grass is riper, the flowers richer, the ranks of elms are statelier, the skies are gentler, and the people happier than could be expected of Cesarean theology. Nay, theology itself unbends in April, softens in May, warms in June, and grows sunny and human by the time the students are graduated and turned loose upon the world,--a world which is, on the whole, so patient with their inexperience, and so ready to accept as spiritual leaders men whose own life’s lessons are yet to be learned, and whose own views of the great mysteries which they dare to interpret are so much more assured than they will be ten years later.

Emanuel Bayard and Helen Carruth walked together beneath the ancient trees that formed the great cross upon the Seminary green.

The snow professor was melted out of existence; head of ice and lecture of sleet had vanished months ago. Dandelions glittered in the long grass. Sparrows built nests under the awful chapel eaves. It was moonlight and warm,--a June night,--and the elms cast traceries of fine shadows, like a net, about the feet of the young people; they seemed to become entangled in the meshes, as they strolled up and down and to and fro, after the simple fashion of the town; which pays no more attention to a couple sauntering in broad day, or broad moonlight, in the sight of gods and men, across the Seminary “yard,” than it does to the sparrows in the chapel eaves.

They were not lovers, these two; hardly friends, at least in the name of the thing; she was not an accessible girl, and he was a preoccupied man. A certain comfortable acquaintance, such as grows without drama in the quiet society of university towns, had brought them together, as chance led, without distinct volition on the part of either. He would graduate in three days. He had called to say good-by to the Professor’s family, and had taken Miss Helen out to see the shadows on the cross where the paths met--the mild and accepted form of dissipation in Cesarea; for Professors’ daughters. They walked without agitation, and talked without sentiment. Truth to tell, their talk was serious, above their years, and beyond their relation.

The fact was that Emanuel Bayard had that spring with difficulty received his license to preach. There was a flaw in his theology. The circumstance was momentous to him. His uncle, for one thing, had been profoundly displeased; had rebuked, remonstrated, and commanded; had indeed gone so far as to offend his nephew with threats of a nature which the young man did not divulge to Miss Carruth, for his natural reserve was deep. She had noticed that he did not confide in her as readily as the other students she had known. But he had told her enough. The Professor’s daughter, too well used to the ecclesiastical machinery and ferment of the day, was as familiar with its phases and phrases as other girls are with the steps of a cotillion or the matrimonial chances of a watering-place. She knew quite well the tremendous importance of what had happened.

“I understand,” she said in her deep, rich, almost boyish voice, “I understand it all perfectly. You wouldn’t say you did, when you didn’t.”

“How _could_ I?” interrupted Bayard.

“You couldn’t, and so they stirred up that fuss. You were more honest than the other fellows. And you were punished for it.”

“You are good to put it in that way, but what right have I to take it in that way?” urged Bayard wistfully. “The other fellows are just as good men as I; better, most of them. Fenton passed all right, and the rest. I don’t feel inclined to parade my ecclesiastical honesty and set myself above them,--in my own mind, I mean. I have dropped below them in everybody else’s; of course I know that.”

“Whom do you mean by everybody else?” demanded Helen quickly. “Your uncle, Mr. Hermon Worcester? The Trustees? The Faculty? And those old men on the council? Oh, I know them! Haven’t I dined and breakfasted on Councils and Faculties ever since we came here? Haven’t I eaten and drunken and breathed Trustees and doctrines, and what is sound, and what isn’t, and--Don’t you tell, but I never was afraid of a Trustee in my life--never! I don’t know another soul in Cesarea who isn’t,--not even my father. When I was a little girl, I used to ruffle up their beaver hats the wrong way, out in the hall, so they would look dissipated when they went over to the chapel. Then I hid behind the door to see. But I never told of it--before. You won’t tell your uncle, will you? I hid a kitten in his hat, once, and when he came out of the study the hat was walking all over the hall floor, without visible means of locomotion.”

Bayard laughed, as she had meant he should. The tense expression of his face relaxed; she watched him narrowly.

“Come,” she said in a changed tone, “take me home, please. The house is full of Anniversary company. I ought to be there.”

He turned at her command, and took her towards her father’s house. They walked in silence down the long Seminary path. She was dressed in light muslin with a violet on it, and wore ribbons that matched the violet. She had a square of white lace thrown over her bright hair. The meshes of the tracery from the elm-trees fell thickly under her quick tread. At the stone posts which guarded the great lawns, she hesitated; then set her feet resolutely out from the delicate net into the bright spaces of the open road.

“Mr. Bayard,” she said in her clear voice, “you _are_ an honest man. It is better to be that than to be a minister.”

“If one cannot be both,” amended Bayard. “But to start in like this, with a slur attached to one’s name at the beginning,--I don’t suppose you understand how it dooms a fellow, Miss Carruth. Its equivalent would be almost enough to disbar a man in law, or to ruin him in medicine.”

“I understand the whole miserable subject!” cried Helen hotly. “I am sick to my soul of it! I wish”--She checked herself. “Let me see,” she added more calmly. “What was it they tormented you about? Eternal punishment?”

“I managed to escape on that,” said Bayard. “I don’t know anything about it, and I said so. I think, myself, there is a good deal of cheap talk afloat on that subject. Our newspapers and novels are full of it. It is about the only difficult doctrine in theology that outsiders understand the relations of; so they stick on that, and make the most of it. It is an easy way of making the Christian religion intolerable--if one wants to. My difficulty was rather with--I see you know something of our technical terms--with what we call verbal inspiration.”

“Oh yes.” Helen nodded. “Whether ‘The Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation’ was inspired by Almighty God; or ‘Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,--Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali,’ and all that. I know.... Inspired moonshine! I am a little bit of a heretic myself, Mr. Bayard; but I’m not--I’m not as honest as you; I’m not pious, either.”

“I hope you don’t think _I_ am _pious_!” began Bayard resentfully.

But she laughed sweetly in his frowning face. They stood at her father’s high stone steps. The Anniversary company were chatting in the parlors.

“Good-night,” she said in a lower tone; and then more gently, “and good-by.”

He started slightly at the word; turned as if he would have said something, but said it not. He took her hand in silence; then perceived that she had withdrawn it suddenly, coldly, it seemed, and had vanished from him up the steps of stone.

He walked back to Galilee Hall slowly. His bent eyes traced the net of shadows around his reluctant feet. What was that? Inspired moonshine? Inspired moonshine! He lifted his face and looked abroad on Cesarea Hill.

His head was heavy, and his heart throbbed. Perhaps at that moment, if he had been asked which was the greater mystery, God or woman, this honest man could not have answered.

With sudden hunger for solitude, he went to his room. But it was full of fellow-students. Fenton was there, and Tompkinton, Jaynes, Bent, and Holt, and the middler. They received him noisily, and he sat down among them. They related the stories current in denominational circles,--ecclesiastical jokes and rumors of sectarian conflicts; they interchanged gossip about who was called where, and what churches were said to lack supplies, the figures of salaries, the statistics of revivals, and the prospects of settlement open to the senior class.

Bayard listened silently. His heart was not with them, nor in their talk. Yet he criticised himself for criticising them. Besides, _he_ had received no call to settle anywhere.

Almost alone among the intellectual men of his class, he found himself, at the end of his preparatory education, undesired and unsummoned by the churches to fill a pulpit of them all.

He had done his share, like the rest, of that preliminary preaching which decides the future of a man in his profession; but he stood, on the eve of his graduation, among his mates, marked and quivering,--this sensitive fellow,--that most miserable of all educated, restless, and wretched young men with whom our land abounds, “a minister without a call.”

He had said nothing to Helen Carruth about this. A man does not tell a woman such things until he has to.

Something in his face struck the students quiet after a while, and they dropped away from the room. His friend Fenton made the move.

“It is said,” he whispered to Tompkinton, as they clattered down the dusty stairs of Galilee Hall, “that his trouble with that New Hampshire Council has followed him. It is reported that his license did not come easily. It has got abroad that he is not sound. Nothing could be more unfortunate--or more unnecessary,” added Fenton in his too cheerful voice. There had been no doubt of _his_ theology. _He_ had received three calls. As yet he had accepted none. He expected to be married in the fall, and looked for a larger salary.

Suddenly he stopped and clapped his hands to his head.

“Bayard!” he called loudly. “Bayard, come to the window a minute!”

The outline of Bayard’s fine head appeared faintly in the third-story window, against the background of his unlighted room. The moon was so bright that his face seemed to be a white flame, as he looked down on his classmates from that height.

“I brought up your mail,” said Fenton, “and forgot to tell you. You’ll find a letter lying on your table behind the third volume of Dean Alford. You keep your room so dark I was afraid you mightn’t see it.”

Bayard thanked him, and groped for the letter; but he did not light the lamp to read it; he sat on in the moonlit room, alone and still. His heart was hot within him as he remembered how the students talked. That vision which sets a man apart from his fellows, and thus makes him miserable or blessed, or both, beckoned to him with distant, shining finger. His face fell into his hands. Great God! what did it mean to take upon one’s self that sacred Name in which a Christian preacher stands before his fellow-men? What had common pettiness or envy, narrow fear or little weakness, to do with the soul of a teacher of holiness? How easy to quibble and evade, and fall into rank! How hard to stand apart, to look the cannon in the eye, alone!

It is not easy for men of the world, of ordinary business, pleasure, politics, and those professions whose standards are pliable, to understand the noble civil war between the nature and the position of a man like Bayard; and yet it might be worth while to try.

There is something so much higher and more delicate than our own common standards of ethics that it is refining to respect, even if we fail to comprehend, the struggles of a man who aspires to the possession of perfect spiritual honor.

Bayard had not moved nor lifted his face from his hands, when a step which he recognized heavily struck and slowly mounted the lower flight of the old stairs of Galilee Hall. It was his uncle, Trustee of Cesarea Seminary, and of the faith of its founders, returning from the home of the Professor of Hebrew, where he had been entertained on Anniversary week.

Bayard sighed and groped for a match. This interview could not be evaded, but he winced away from it in every nerve. It is easier to face the obloquy of the world than the frown of the man or woman who has brought us up.

Hermon Worcester was bitterly mortified that Emanuel had received no “call.” He had not said so, yet, but his nephew knew that this well-bred reserve had reached its last breath. As Bayard struck the light, he perceived the forgotten letter in his hand, and, perhaps thinking to defer a painful scene for a moment, said, “Your pardon, Uncle,” and tore the envelope.

The letter contained a formal and unanimous call from the seaside parish whose vacant pulpit he had been supplying for six weeks to become their pastor.

* * * * *

“Helen! Helen!”

The mild, cultivated whine of the Professor’s wife complained through the hot house.

Helen ran in dutiful response. It was late, and the Anniversary guests had scattered to their rooms. The girl was partly undressed for the night, and stood in her doorway gathering her cashmere wrapper about her tall, rich form. Mrs. Carruth looked through the half-open door of her own room.

“I cannot get your father out of his study, Helen,” she urged plaintively. “He has one of his headaches at the base of the brain--and those extra Faculty meetings before him this week, with all the rest. Do go down and see if you can’t send him up to bed.”