Part 9

“People of the Church of the Love of Christ! Approach God, for He is close at heart.... Thou great God! Holy, Almighty, Merciful! Make us know how to deal with sin, in our own souls, and in the lives of others. For the sake of Thy Son whose Name we dare to bear. Amen.”

As the words of this outcry, this breath of the spirit, rose and ceased, the silence in the room was something so profound that a girl’s sigh was heard far back by the door.

The hush was stung by a long, low, sibilant sound; a single hiss insulted that sacred stillness. Then a man purple to the brows, rose and went out. It was old Trawl, whose saloon had been a landmark in Angel Alley for fifty years.

The stranger, who had been more moved than it seemed he cared to show by what he had heard and seen, passed slowly with the crowd down the long stairs, and reached the outer air. As the salt wind struck in his face, a hand was laid upon his shoulder. The young minister, looking pale and tired, but enviably calm, drew the visitor’s hand through his arm.

“I saw you, Fenton,” he said quietly, “when you first came in. You’ll come straight to my lodgings with me.... Won’t you?” he added wistfully, fancying that Fenton hesitated. “You can’t know how much it will mean to me. I haven’t seen anybody--why, I haven’t seen a fellow since I came to Windover.”

“You must lead rather an isolated life, I should think,” observed Fenton with some embarrassment, as the two stood to hail the electric car that ran by Mrs. Granite’s humble door.

“We’ll talk when we get there,” replied Bayard, rather shortly for him. “The car will be full of people,” he added apologetically. “One lives in a glass bell here. Besides, I’m a bit tired.”

He looked, indeed, exhausted, as the electric light smote his thin face; his eyes glowed like fire fed by metal, and his breath came short. He leaned his head back against the car window.

“You cough, I see,” said Fenton, who was not an expert in silence.

“Do I? Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of it.” He said nothing more until they had reached his lodgings. Fenton began to talk about the wreck and the rescue. He said the usual things in the usual way, offering, perforce, the tribute of a man to a manly deed.

Bayard nodded politely; he would not talk about it.

Jane Granite opened the door for them. She looked at the minister with mute, dog-like misery in her young eyes.

“You look dead beat out, sir,” she said. But Ben Trawl stood scowling in the door of the sitting-room; he had not chosen to go to the service, nor to allow her to go without him. Jane thought it was religious experience that made this such a disappointment to her.

“Ah, Trawl,” said the minister heartily, “I’m glad to see you here.”

He did not say, “I am sorry you were not at church,” as Ben Trawl pugnaciously expected.

Bayard led his guest upstairs, and shut and locked the study door.

“There!” he said faintly. “Now, George Fenton, talk! Tell me all about it. You can’t _think_ how I am going to enjoy this! I wish I had an easy-chair for you. Will this rocker do? If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just lie down a minute.”

He flung himself heavily upon the old carpet-covered lounge. Fenton drew up the wooden rocking-chair to the cylinder stove, in which a low fire glimmered, and put his feet on top of the stove, after the manner of Cesarea and Galilee Hall.

“Well,” he began, in his own comfortable way, “I’ve accepted the call.”

“I supposed you would,” replied Bayard, “when I heard it was under way. I am glad of it!” he said cordially. “The First Church is a fine old church. You’re just the man for them. They’ll ordain you as easily as they swallow their native chowders. You came right over from their evening service to our place to-night? You must have hurried.”

“I did,” said the guest, with a certain air of condescension. “I wanted to hear you, you know--once, at least.”

“When you are settled, you can’t come, of course,” observed Bayard quickly. “I understand that.”

“Well--you see--I shall be--you know--in a very delicate position, when I become the pastor of that church.”

Fenton’s natural complacency forsook him for the instant, and something like embarrassment rested upon his easy face; he showed it by the way he handled Mrs. Granite’s poker.

“It’s 72° in this room already,” suggested Bayard, smiling. “Would you poke that fire any more?... Oh, come, Fenton! I understand. Don’t bother your head about me, or how I may feel. A man doesn’t choose to be where I am, to waste life in considering his feelings; those are the least important items in his natural history. Just stick to your subject, man. It’s _you_ I want to hear about.”

“Well,” replied the guest, warming to the theme with natural enthusiasm, “the call was unanimous. Perfectly so.”

“That must be delightful.”

“Why, so it is--it is, as you say, delightful. And the salary--they’ve raised the salary to get me, Bayard. You see it had got out that I had refused--ah--hum--several calls. And they’d been without a man so long, I fancy they’re tired of it. Anyhow, I’m to have three thousand dollars.”

“That is delightful too,” said Bayard cordially. He turned over on his old lounge, coughing, and doubled the thin, cretonne pillow under his head; he watched his classmate with a half-quizzical smile; his eyes and brow were perfectly serene.

“I shall be ordained immediately,” continued Fenton eagerly, “and bring my wife. They are refitting the parsonage. I went in last night to see that the carpets and papers and all that were what they should be. I am going to be married--Bayard, I am going to be married next week.”

“And that is best of all,” said Bayard in a low voice.

“She is really a lovely girl,” observed Fenton, “though somewhat limited in her experience. I’ve known her all my life--where I came from, in the western part of the State. But I think these gentle, country girls make the best ministers’ wives. They educate up to the position rapidly.”

Bayard made no answer to this scintillation; a spark shot over his soft and laughing eyes; but his lips opened only to say, after a perceptible pause,--

“Where is Tompkinton--he of the long legs and the army cape?”

“Settled somewhere near you, I hear; over across the Cape. He has a fine parish. He’s to have two thousand--that’s doing well for a man of his stamp.”

“I don’t think Tompkinton is the kind of man to think much about the salary,” observed Bayard gravely. “He struck me as the other sort of fellow. What’s become of Bent?”

“Graduates this summer, I suppose. I hear he’s called to Roxbury. He always aimed at a Boston parish. He’s sure to boom.”

“And that brakeman--Holt? He who admired Huxley’s ‘Descent of Man’?”

“Oh, _he_ is slumming in New York city. They say he is really very useful. He has some sort of mission work, there, at the Five Points. I’m told he makes a specialty of converted burglars.”

“I haven’t been able to follow any of the boys,” said Bayard, coughing. “I can’t very well--as I am situated. It does me good to hear something about somebody. Where’s that round fellow--Jaynes? With the round glasses? I remember he always ate two Baldwins, two entire Baldwin apples.”

“Gone West, I believe. He’s admirably adapted to the West,” replied Fenton, settling his chair in his old comfortable way.

“What an assorted lot we were!” said Bayard dreamily. “And what a medley we were taught! I haven’t opened one of my note-books since I came here.”

“Oh, in _your_ work,” said Fenton, “you don’t need to read, I should think.”

Bayard’s eyes sought his library; rested lovingly on its full and well-used shelves; then turned away with the expression of one who says to a chosen friend: “We understand. Why need anything be said?” He did not otherwise reply.

“Were you ever ordained over your present charge?” asked his visitor suddenly, balancing the poker on the top curl of the iron angel that ornamented the cylinder stove. “How did you manage it? Did any of the--regular clergy--recognize the affair?”

“I was not ordained,” replied Bayard, smiling contentedly. “I sought nothing of the kind. But a few of the country ministers wished us Godspeed. There was one dear old man--he was my moderator at that Council--he came over and put his hands on my head, and gave me the blessing.”

“Oh--the charge to the pastor?”

“We didn’t call it that. We did not steal any of the old phrases. He prayed and blessed me, that was all. He is a sincere, good man, and he made something impressive out of it, my people said. At all events they were satisfied. We have to do things in our own way, you know. We are experimenting, of course.”

“I should say that was a pretty serious experiment you inaugurated to-night in your service. If you’ll allow me to say so, I should call it very ill-advised.”

“It _is_ a serious experiment,” replied Bayard gravely.

“Expect to succeed in it?”

“God knows.”

“Bound to go on with it?”

“Till I succeed or fail.”

“What do you propose? To turn temperance lecturer, and that sort of thing? I suppose you’ll be switching off your religious services into prohibition caucuses, and so forth.”

“I propose nothing of the kind. I am not a politician. I am a preacher of the Christian religion.”

“I always knew you were eccentric, of course, Bayard. Everybody knows that. But I never expected to see you leading such a singular life. I never took you for this sort of fanatic. It seems so--common for a man of your taste and culture, and there can be no doubt that it is unwise, from every point of view, even from your own, I should think. I don’t deny that your work impressed me, what I saw of it to-night. Your gifts tell--even here. It is a pity to have them misapplied. Now, what was your motive in that outbreak to-night? I take it, it was the first time you had tackled the subject.”

“To my shame--yes. It was the first time. I have had reasons to look into it, lately--that’s all. You see, my ignorance on the subject was colossal, to start in. We were not taught such things in the Seminary. Cesarea does as well as any of them--but no curriculum recognizes Job Slip. Oh, when I think about it--Predestination, foreordination, sanctification, election, and botheration,--and never a lesson on the Christian socialism of our day, not a lecture to tell us how to save a poor, lost woman, how to reform a drunkard, what to do with gamblers and paupers and thieves, and worse, how to apply what we believe to common life and common sense--how to lift miserable creatures, scrambling up, and falling back into the mud as fast as they can scramble--people of no religion, no morals, no decency, no hope, no joy--who never see the inside of a church”--

“They ought to,” replied Fenton severely. “That’s their fault, not ours. And all seminaries have a course on Pastoral Theology.”

“I visited sixteen of the dens of this town this last week,” replied Bayard. “I took a policeman, and went through the whole thing. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t go to church if I were they. I shall dream about what I saw--I don’t know that I shall ever stop dreaming about it. It is too horrible to tell. I wouldn’t even _speak_ what I saw men and women _live_. The old sailors who have seen a good many ports, call it a hell of a town. My own idea is, that it isn’t a particle worse than other places of its class. I fancy it’s a fair, average seaport town. Six thousand seamen sail this harbor every year. I can’t get at the number of dens they support; such figures are runaway lunatics, you understand; they have a genius for hiding; and nobody _wants_ to find them. But put it low--call it two hundred--in this little town. If it isn’t the business of a Christian church to shut them--whose is it? If it isn’t the business of religious people to look after these fellows--whose is it? I say, religious people are answerable for them, and for their vices! The best people are responsible for the worst, or there’s no meaning in the New Testament, and no sense in the Christian religion. Oh,” said Bayard, with a sound that was more like a moan than a sigh, “if Christ could come into Angel Alley--just this one street! If He could take this little piece of a worldful of human woe--modern human misery, you understand, all the new forms and phases that Palestine knew nothing about--if He could sweep it clean, and show us how to do it _now_! Think, Fenton, think, how He would go to work--what that would be!... sometimes I think it would be worth dying for.”

“It strikes me it is harder to guess than predestination,--what He would do if He were reincarnated,” replied Fenton gravely.

“It had not struck me so,” answered Bayard gently, “but there may be something in that.”

“Now,” continued Fenton, “take yourself. I fancy you believe--Do you suppose _you_ are doing the kind of thing He would set about, if He were in your place?”

“How can I tell?” replied Bayard in a voice so low that it was scarcely articulate. “How can a man _know_? All I do know is, that I try. That is what--and that is all--I try to do. And I shall keep on trying, till I die.”

He spoke with a solemnity which admitted of no light response, even from a worldly man. Fenton was not that, and his eyes filled.

“Well,” he said, after a silence, “you are a good man, Emanuel Bayard. God go with you.”

“And with you,” replied Bayard, holding out his hand. “Our roads lie different ways. We shall not talk like this again.”

“You won’t mind that? You won’t feel it,” said Fenton uncomfortably, for he had risen to leave, and the conversation hung heavily on his heart, “if I don’t run across your way, often? It would hardly do, you see. My people--the church--the circumstances”--

He brought the poker down hard upon the cerebrum of the iron angel, who resented the insult by tumbling over on the funnel; thence, with a slam, to the floor. Fenton picked up the ornament with a red face, and restored it to its place. He felt, as a man sometimes does, more rebuked than irritated by the inanimate thing.

“Good-by,” said Bayard gently. It was all he said. He still held out his hand. His classmate wrung it, and passed, with bowed head, from his presence.

* * * * *

The happy weather held over into the next day; and the harbor wore her celestial smile. The gentleness of summer clothed in the colors of spring rested upon the wooded coast beyond the long cliff-outline, upon the broken scallops of the beaches, and the moss-green piers of the docks, upon the waves swelling without foam, and the patched sails of the anchored fleet unfurled to dry. The water still held the blue and gray tints that betoken cold weather too recently past or too soon returning to be forgotten. But the wind was south; and the saxifrage was in bud upon the downs in the clefts of the broken rocks between the boulders.

Bayard was a weak and weary man that day,--the events of the previous evening had told upon him more than he would have supposed possible,--and he gave himself a luxury. He put the world and the evil of it from his heart and brain, and went out on Windover Point, to sun himself, alone; crawling along, poor fellow, at a sad pace, stopping often to rest, and panting as he pushed on. He had been an athletic lad, a vigorous, hearty man; illness and its subtle train of physical and mental consequences spoke in the voices of strangers to him.

“They will pass on,” he thought.

Bayard was such a lovable, cordial, human man, that the isolation of his life in Windover had affected him more than it might have done a natural recluse. Solitude is the final test of character as well as of nature.

The romance of consecration has its glamour as well as the romance of love. Bayard had felt his way into this beautiful mist with a stout, good sense which is rare in the devotee, and which was perhaps his most remarkable quality. This led him to accept without fruitless resistance a lot which was pathetically alien to him. He was no gray-bearded saint, on whose leathern tongue joy had turned to ashes; to whom renunciation was the last throw left in the game of life. He was a young man, ardent, eager, buoyant, confiding in hope because he had not tested it; believing in happiness because he had not known it: full of untried, untamed capacity for human delight, and with the instinct (generations old) of a luxurious training toward human ease. He had cut the silken cords between himself and the world of his old habits, ambitions, and friends with a steady stroke; he had smitten the soft network like a man, and flung it from him like a spirit; but there were hours when he felt as if he were bleeding to death, inwardly, from sheer desolation.

“That call of George Fenton’s upset me last night,” he said aloud, as he sank down at the base of a big boulder in the warm sand. He sometimes talked to the sea; nothing else in Windover could understand him; he was acquiring some of the habits of lonely people who live apart from their own class. How impossible it would have been in Cambridge, in Boston, or in Cesarea to be caught talking aloud! His pale face flushed, and he drew his hat over it, thanking Heaven that rocks were deaf and the downs were dumb, that the sun would never tell, and the harbor was too busy to listen. He had lain there in the sand for some time, as motionless as a mollusk at low water.

“All a man needs is a little common rest,” he thought. The April sun seemed to sink into his brain and heart with the healing touch that nothing human ever gives. He pushed his hat away from his face, and looked up gratefully, as if he had been caressed.

As he did so, he heard footsteps upon the crisp, red-cupped moss that surrounded the base of the boulder. He rose instinctively, and confronted a woman--a lady. She had been walking far and fast, and had glorious color. The skirt of her purple gown was splashed with little sticks and burrs and bits of moss; her hands were full of saxifrage. She was trying in the rising wind to hold a sun-umbrella over her head, for she wore the street or traveling dress of the town, and her little bonnet gave her as much protection from the sun as a purple butterfly whose wings were dashed with gold.

Oddly enough, he recognized the costume before he did the wearer; so incredible did he find it that she should stand there living, glowing, laughing,--a sumptuous beauty, stamped against the ascetic sky of Windover.

“_You!_” he cried.

“Oh, I did not expect--I did not think”--she stammered. He had never seen Helen Carruth disconcerted. But she blushed like a schoolgirl when she gave him, saxifrage and all, her ungloved hand.

XI.

“Mother sent me!--I came down for her and father!” began Helen Carruth abruptly. Then she thought how that sounded--as if she need be supposed to apologize for or explain the circumstance that she happened to find one of her father’s old students sunning himself upon a given portion of the New England coast; and she blushed again. When she saw the sudden, upward motion of Bayard’s heavy eyelids, she could have set her pretty teeth through her tongue, for vexation at her little _faux pas_. From sheer embarrassment, she laughed it off.

“I haven’t heard anybody laugh like that since I came to Windover,” said Bayard, drawing a long breath. “Do give me an encore!”

“Now, then, you are laughing at me!”

“Upon the word of a poor heretic parson--no. You can’t think how it sounds. It sinks in--like the sun.”

“But I don’t feel like laughing any more. I’ve got all over it. I’m afraid I can’t oblige you.”

“Why not? You used to be good-natured, I thought--in Cesarea, ages ago.”

“You are enough to drive the laugh out of a faun,” said the young lady soberly. “Pray sit down again on your sand sofa. I did not know you had been so ill. Put on your hat, Mr. Bayard. Good society does not require ghosts to stand bareheaded at the seacoast in April.”

“I don’t move in good society any longer. I am not expected to know anything about its customs. Sit down beside me, a minute--and I will. No--stay. Perhaps you will take cold? I wish I had some wraps. My coat”--

“When _I_ take _your_ coat”--began the healthy girl. He had already flung his overcoat upon the dry, warm sand. She gave it back to him. Then she saw the color start into his pale face.

“Oh, forgive me!” she said quickly. “I did not mean--Mr. Bayard, I never was ill in my life.”

“Nor I, either, before now,” pleaded Bayard rather piteously.

“Who called it the ‘insolence of health’? I did not mean to be impertinent, if you will take the trouble to believe me. I fail to grasp the situation, that’s all. I am simply obtuse--blunt--blunt as a clam.”

She waved her sun-umbrella dejectedly towards the beach where a solitary clam-digger, a bent, picturesque old man, was seeking his next chowder.

“The amount of it is,” said Miss Carruth more in her usual manner, “that I was taken a little by surprise. You used to look so--different. You are greatly changed, Mr. Bayard. Being a heretic does not agree with you.”

“I have had a little touch of something they call pneumonia down here,” observed Bayard carelessly. “I’ve been out only a few days.”

She made no answer at first; Bayard was looking at the clam-digger, but he felt that she was looking at him. She had seated herself on the sand beside him; she was now quite her usual self; her momentary embarrassment had disappeared like a sail around the Point--a graceful, vanishing thing of whose motion one thinks afterwards. He did not suppose that she was there to sympathize with him, but he was vaguely aware of a certain unbridged gap in the subject, when she unexpectedly said,--

“You have not asked me what I came to Windover for.”

“Windover does not belong to me, Miss Carruth; nor”--a ray of disused mischief sprang to his eyes. Did he start to say, “Nor you?” He might have been capable of it as far back as Harvard, or even in junior year at Cesarea. That flash of human nonsense changed his appearance to an almost startling extent.

“Why now,” she laughed, “I think I could recognize you without an introduction.”

“But you haven’t told me why you _did_ come to Windover.”

“It doesn’t signify. You exhibit no interest in the subject, sir.”

“You are here,” he answered, looking at her. “That fact preoccupied me.”

This reply was without precedent in her experience of him; and she gave no sign, whether of pleasure or displeasure, of its effect upon her. She looked straight at the clam-digger, who was shouldering his basket laboriously upon his bent back, making a sombre, Millet sketch against the cheerful, afternoon sky.

“I came down to engage our rooms,” she said lightly. “We are coming here, you know, this summer. We board at the Mainsail. I had to have it out with Mrs. Salt about the mosquito bars. Mother wouldn’t come last year because the mosquito bars had holes, and let in hornets and a mouse. You understand,” she added, with something of unnecessary emphasis, “we always come here summers.”

“I understand nothing at all!” said Bayard breathlessly. “You were not here last summer, when I was candidating in the First Church.”

“That, I tell you, was on account of the hornets and the mouse; the mouse clinched it; he waked her walking up her sleeve one morning. So we went to Campo Bello the year after. But we _always_ come to Windover.”

“For instance, how many seasons constitute ‘always’?”

“Three. This will be four. Father likes it above everything. So did mother before the mouse epoch. She got to feeling hornets in her shoes whenever she put them on. I wonder father never told you we always come to Windover.”

“The Professor had other things in his mind when he talked to me,--second probation, and the dangers of modern German exegesis.”

“Yes, I know. Dear papa! Windover isn’t a doctrine.”

“I wonder _you_ never told me you always came to Windover.”

“Oh, I left that to Father,” replied the young lady demurely. “I did come near it, though, once. Do you remember that evening”--