“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”--
“Yes,” he interrupted; “I remember that evening.”
“I mean, when you had taken me up the Seminary walk to see the
cross. When you said good-by that night, I thought I’d mention it.
But I changed my mind. You see, you hadn’t had your call, then. I
thought--I might--hurt your feelings. But we always _do_ come to
Windover. We are coming as soon as Anniversary is over. We have the
Flying Jib to ourselves--that little green cottage, you know, on
the rocks. What! Never heard of the Flying Jib? You don’t know the
summer Windover, do you?”
“Only the winter Windover, you see.”
“Nor the summer people, I suppose?”
“Only the winter people.”
“Father’s hired that old fish-house for a study,” continued Helen
with some abruptness. “He says he can’t stand the women on the
Mainsail piazzas; you can hear them over at the Flying Jib when
the wind sets our way; they discuss the desserts, and pick each
other’s characters to pieces, and compare Kensington stitches, and
neuralgia. Father is going to bring down his article on ‘The State
of the Unforgiven after Death’--There!” she said suddenly, “that
Millet sketch is walking into father’s study with his basket on his
back. The State of the Unforgiven will be a little--clammy, don’t
you think?”
Her eyes rippled like the bed of a brown brook in the sun. Bayard
laughed.
“The dear Professor!” he said.
“If father weren’t such an archangel in private life, it
wouldn’t be so funny,” observed Helen, jabbing the point of her
purple-and-gold changeable silk sun-umbrella into the sand; “I
can’t see what he wants the unconverted to be burned up _for_. Can
you?”
“The State of the Unforgiven before Death is more than I can
manage,” replied Bayard, smiling; “I have my hands full.”
“Do you like it?” asked Helen, with a pretty, puzzled knot between
her smooth brows.
“Like what? I like this.”
He looked at her; as any other man might--like those students who
used to come so often, and who suddenly called no more. Helen had
never seen that expression in his eyes. She dropped her own. She
dug little wells in the fine, white sand with her sun-umbrella
before she said,--
“I have to get the six o’clock train; you know I haven’t come to
stay, yet.”
“But you are coming!” he exclaimed with irrepressible joyousness.
She made no answer, and Bayard’s sensitive color changed.
“Do I like _what_?” he repeated in a different tone.
“Heresy and martyrdom,” said Helen serenely.
“I regret nothing, if that is what you mean; no matter what it
costs; no matter how it ends--no, not for an hour. I told the
truth, and I took the consequences; that is all. How _can_ a man
regret standing by his best convictions?”
“He might regret the convictions,” suggested Helen.
“Might he? Perhaps. Mine are so much stronger than they were when I
started in, that they race me and drag me like winged horses in a
chariot of fire.”
His eyes took on their dazzling look; like fine flash-lights they
shot forth a brilliance as burning as it was brief; then their calm
and color returned to them. Helen watched the transfiguration touch
and pass his face with a sense of something so like reverence that
it made her uncomfortable. Like many girls trained as she had been,
she had small regard for the priestly office, and none for the
priestly assumptions. The recognition of a spiritual superiority
which she felt to be so far above her that in the nature of things
she could not understand it, gave her strong nature a jar:
something within her, hitherto fixed and untroubled, shook before
it.
Bayard, without apparent consciousness of the young lady’s
thoughts, or indeed of her presence for that moment, went on
dreamily:--
“I was a theorizer, a dreamer, a theologic apprentice, a year ago.
I knew no more of real life than--that silver sea-gull making for
the lighthouse tower. I took notes about sin in the lecture-room.
Now I study misery and shame in Angel Alley. The gap between them
is as wide as the stride of that angel in Revelation--do you
remember him?--who stood with one foot upon the land and one upon
the sea. All I mind is, that I have so much more to learn than I
need have had--everything, in fact. If I had been taught, if I had
been trained--if it had not all come with that kind of shock which
benumbs a man’s brain at first, and uses up his vitality so much
faster than he can afford to spare it--but I have no convictions
that I ought to be talking like this!”
“Go on,” said Helen softly.
“Oh, to what end?” asked Bayard wearily. “That ecclesiastical
system which brought me where I am can’t be helped by one man’s
rebellion. It’s going to take a generation of us. But there is
enough that I _can_ help. It is the can-be’s, not the can’t-be’s,
that are the business of men like me.”
“I saw you with that drunken man; he had his arms about you,” said
Helen with charming irrelevance. Her untroubled brows still held
that little knot, half of perplexity, half of annoyance. It became
her, for she looked the more of a woman for it.
“Job Slip? Oh, in Boston that day; yes. I got him home to his wife
all right that night. He was sober after that for--for quite a
while. I wish you had seen that woman!” he said earnestly. “Mari
is the most miserable--and the most grateful--person that I know.
I never knew what a woman could suffer till I got acquainted with
that family. They have a dear little boy. His father used to
beat him over the head with a shovel. Joey comes over to see me
sometimes, and goes to sleep on my lounge. We’re great chums.”
“You _do_ like it,” said Helen slowly. She had raised her brown
eyes while he was speaking, and watched his face with a veiled
look. “Yes; there’s no doubt about it. You do.”
“Wouldn’t you?” asked Bayard, smiling.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
She shook her head with that positiveness so charming in an
attractive woman, and so repellent in an ugly one. “When they burn
you at the stake you’ll swallow the fire and enjoy it. You’ll say,
‘Forgive them, for they don’t mean it, poor things.’ I should say,
‘Lord, punish them, for they ought to know better.’ That’s just the
difference between us. Mother must be right. She always says I am
not spiritual.”
“I don’t know but I should like to see that little boy, though,”
added Helen reluctantly; “and Mari--if she had on a clean apron.”
“She doesn’t very often. But it might happen. Why, you might go
over there with me--sometime--this summer, and see them?” suggested
Bayard eagerly.
“So you lay the first little smoking fagot, do you?--For me, too?”
She laughed.
“God forbid!” said Bayard quickly. Helen’s voice had not been as
light as her laugh; and her bright face was grave when he turned
and regarded it. She gave back his gaze without evasion, now. She
seemed to have grown indefinably older and gentler since she had
sat there on the sand beside him. Her eyes, for the first time,
now, it seemed, intentionally studied him. She took in the least
detail of his changed appearance: the shabby coat, the patch on his
boot, his linen worn and darned, the fading color of his hat. She
remembered him as the best-dressed man in Cesarea Seminary; nothing
but rude, real poverty could have so changed that fashionable and
easy student into this country parson, rusting and mended and
out-of-the-mode, and conscious of it to the last sense, as only
the town-bred man of luxurious antecedents can be of the novel
deprivation that might have been another’s native air.
“I don’t know that it is necessary to look so pale,” was all she
said. “I should think you’d tan here in this glare. I do. See!”
She held out her bare hands, and doubled them up, putting them
together to scrutinize the delicate backs of them for the effect of
an hour’s Windover sun. Her dark purple gloves and the saxifrage
lay in her lap. Bayard held the sun-umbrella over her. It gave
him a curious sense of event to perform this little courtesy; it
was so long since he had been among ladies, and lived like other
gentlemen; he felt as if he had been upon a journey in strange
lands and were coming home again. A blossom of the saxifrage fell
to the hem of her dress, and over upon the sand. He delicately
touched and took it, saying nothing.
“Does Mr. Hermon Worcester come and pour pitch and things on the
bonfire?” asked Helen suddenly.
“I thought you knew,” said Bayard, “my uncle has disinherited me.
He is not pleased with what I have done.”
“Ah! I did not know. Doesn’t he--excuse me, Mr. Bayard. It is not
my business.”
“He writes to me,” said Bayard. “He sent me things when I was sick.
He was very kind then. We have not quarreled at all. But it is some
time since I have seen him. I am very fond of my uncle. He is an
old man, you know. He was brought up so--We mustn’t blame him. He
thinks I am on the road to perdition. He doesn’t come to Windover.”
“I see,” said Helen. She leaned her head back against the boulder
and looked through half-shut lids at the dashing sea. The wind was
rising.
“I must go,” she said abruptly.
“May I take you over to the station?” he asked with boyish anxiety.
“Mr. Salt is going to harness old Pepper,” she answered. Bayard
said nothing. He remembered that he could not afford to drive
a lady to the station; he could not offer to “take” her in the
electric conveyance of the great American people. He might have
spent at least three quarters of an hour more beside her. It seemed
to him that he had not experienced poverty till now. The exquisite
outline of his lip trembled for the instant with that pathos which
would have smitten a woman to the heart if she had loved him. Helen
was preoccupied with her saxifrage and her purple gloves. She did
not, to all appearance, see his face at all, and he was glad of it.
He arose in silence, and walked beside her to the beach and towards
the town.
“Mr. Bayard,” said Helen, with her pleasant unexpectedness, “I owe
you something.”
All this while she had not mentioned the wreck or the rescue;
she alone, of all people whom he had seen since he came out of
his sick-room, had not inquired, nor exclaimed, nor commended,
nor admired. Something in her manner--it could hardly be said
what--reminded him now of this omission; he had not thought of it
before.
“I owe you a recognition,” she said.
“I cancel the debt,” he answered, smiling.
“You cannot. I owe you the recognition--of a friend--for that brave
and noble deed you did. Accept it, sir!”
She spread out her hands with a pretty gesture, as if she gave him
something; she moved her head with a commanding and royal turn, as
if her gift had value. He lifted his hat.
“I could have done no less then; but I might do more--now.”
His worn face had lightened delicately. He looked hopeful and happy.
“A man doesn’t put himself where I am, to complain,” he added.
“But I don’t suppose you could even guess how solitary my position
is. The right thing said in the right way gives me more courage
than--people who say it can possibly understand. I have so few
friends--now. If you allow me to count you among them, you do me a
very womanly kindness; so then I shall owe _you_”--
“I cancel the debt!” she interrupted, laughing. “Didn’t Father
write to you?” she hurried on, “when you were so ill?”
“Oh, yes. The Professor’s note was the first I was allowed to read.
He said all sorts of things that I didn’t deserve. He said that
in spite of the flaws in my theology I had done honor to the old
Seminary.”
“Really? Father will wear a crown and a harp for _that_ concession.
Did he give you any message from me, I wonder?”
“He said the ladies sent their regards.”
“Oh! Was that all?”
“That was all.”
“It was not _quite_ all,” said Helen, after a moment’s rather grave
reflection. “But never mind. Probably Father thought the exegesis
incorrect somewhere.”
“Perhaps he objected to the context?” asked Bayard mischievously.
“More likely he had a quarrel in the Faculty on his mind and forgot
it.”
“If you had written it yourself”--suggested Bayard humbly. “But of
course you had other things to do.”
Helen gave him an inscrutable look. She made no reply. They passed
the fish-house, and the old clam-digger, who was sitting on his
overturned basket in the sun, opening clams with a blunt knife, and
singing hoarsely:--
“The woman’s ashore,
The child’s at the door,
The man’s at the wheel.
“Storm on the track,
Fog at the back,
Death at the keel.
“You, mate, or me,
Which shall it be?
God, He won’t tell.
Drive on to ----!”
“There is Mr. Salt,” said Helen; for the two had come slowly up in
silence to the old gate, (fastened with a rope tied in a sailor’s
knot), that gave the short cut across the meadow to the Mainsail
summer hotel.
“He is watching for me. How sober he looks! Perhaps something
dreadful has happened to Mrs. Salt. Wait a minute. Let me run in!”
She tossed her sun-umbrella, gloves, and saxifrage in a heap across
Bayard’s arm, and ran like a girl or a collie swaying across the
meadow in the wind. In a few minutes she walked back, flushed and
laughing.
“Pepper can’t go!” she cried. “He’s got the colic. He’s swallowed a
celluloid collar. Mr. Salt says he thought it was sugar. I must go
right along and catch the car.”
“You have eight minutes yet,” said Bayard joyously, “and I can go
too!”
The car filled up rapidly; they chatted of little things, or sat in
silence. Jane Granite came aboard as they passed her mother’s door.
Bayard lifted his hat to her cordially; she was at the further end
of the car; she got off at a grocery store, to buy prunes, and did
not look back. She had only glanced at Helen Carruth. Bayard did
not notice when Jane left.
The train came in and went out. Helen stood on the platform leaning
over to take her saxifrage: a royal vision, blurring and melting in
purple and gold before his eyes.
The train came in and went out; her laughing eyes looked back from
the frame of the car window. The train went out. He turned away
and went slowly home.
Jane had not returned, and Mrs. Granite was away. The house was
deserted, and the evening was coming on cold. He climbed the steep
stairs wearily to his rooms, and lighted a fire, for he coughed a
good deal. He had to go down into the shed and bring up the wood
and coal. He was so tired when this was done that he flung himself
upon the old lounge. He looked slowly about his dismal rooms: at
the top curl of the iron angel on the ugly stove; at the empty,
wooden rocking-chair with the bones; at the paper screen, where the
Cupid on the basket of grapes sat forever tasting and never eating
impossible fruit; at the study-table, where the subscription list
for his quarter’s salary lay across the manuscript notes of his
last night’s sermon. The great Saint Michael on the wall eyed him
with that absence of curiosity which belongs to remote superiority.
Bayard did not return the gaze of the picture. He took something
from his vest-pocket and looked at it gently, twisting it about in
his thin hands. It was a sprig of saxifrage, whose white blossom
was hanging its head over upon the dry, succulent stem. Bayard got
up suddenly, and put the flower in a book upon his study-table.
As he did so, a short, soft, broken sound pattered up the stairs.
The door opened without the preliminary of a knock, and little Joey
Slip walked seriously in. He said he had come to see the minister.
He sat down sedately and ceremoniously upon the carpet-lounge. He
said Marm said to say Father’s home from Georges’ drunk as a fish.
He put out his little fingers and patted Bayard on the cheek, as if
the minister had been the child, and Joey the old, old man.