“I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord.”
Their voices and their hearts rose high on one of those plaintive
popular melodies of which music need never be ashamed:--
“I need Thee, oh, I need Thee,
Every hour I need Thee;
Oh, bless me now, my Saviour”....
The stranger, who had the appearance of a religious man, joined in
the chorus heartily; he shared the book which the girl had given to
the Italian, who came in a bar too late, and closed the stanza on
a shrill solo,--
“I co--home to thee.”
This little accident excited a trifling smile; but it faded
immediately, for the preacher had arisen. His appearance was
greeted with a respect which surprised the stranger. The audience
at once became grave even to reverence; the Italian cuffed a
drunken Portuguese who was under the impression that responses to
the service were expected of him; the girl in the Tam o’ Shanter
shook a woman who giggled beside her. A fisherman whispered
loudly,--
“Shut up there! The parson ain’t quite tough yet. Keep it quiet for
him! Shut up there, along the wall!”
There is nothing like a brave deed to command the respect of
seafaring men. Emanuel Bayard, when he plunged into the undertow
after Job Slip’s drunken, drowning body, swam straight into the
heart of Windover. A rough heart that is, but a warm one, none
warmer on the freezing coast, and sea-going Windover had turned the
sunny side of its nature, and taken the minister in. The standards
by which ignorant men judge the superior classes--their superb
indifference to any scale of values but their own--deserve more
study than they receive.
It had never occurred to Bayard, who was only beginning to learn to
understand the nature of his material, that he had become in three
weeks the hero of the wharves and the docks, the romance of Angel
Alley, the admiring gossip of the Banks and Georges’, the pride
and wonder of the Windover fishermen. Quite unconscious of this
“sea-change,” wrought by one simple, manly act upon his popularity,
he rose to address the people. His heart was full of what he was
going to say. He gave one glance the length of the hall. He saw
the crowds packed by the door. He saw the swaying nets, ornamented
with globes and shells and star-fish, after the fashion of the
fishing-town; these decorations softened the bare walls of the
audience-room. He saw the faces of the fishermen lifting themselves
to him and blurring together in a gentle glow. They seemed to him,
as a great preacher once said of his audience, like the face “of
one impressive, pleading man,” whose life hung upon his words. He
felt as if he must weigh them in some divine scales into which no
dust or chaff of weakness or care for self could fall.
Something of this high consciousness crept into his face. He stood
for a moment silent; his beautiful countenance, thin from recent
suffering, took on the look by which a man represses noble tears.
Suddenly, before he had spoken a word, a storm of applause burst
out--shook the room from wall to wall--and roared like breakers
under his astonished feet. He turned pale with emotion, but the
fishermen thundered on. He was still so weak that this reception
almost overcame him, and involuntarily he stretched out both his
hands. At the gesture the noise sank instantly; and silence, in
which the sigh of the saddest soul in the room might have been
heard, received the preacher.
His sensitive face, melted and quivering, shone down upon them
tenderly. Men in drunken brawls, and men in drowning seas, and
women in terrible temptation, remembered how he looked that night
when the safe and the virtuous and the comfortable had forgotten.
The stranger back by the door put his hat before his face.