Jane Granite came out of the kitchen door, and sat down in
the back yard underneath the clothes-lines. She sat on the
overturned salt-fish box that she kept to stand on and reach the
clothes-pins,--Jane was such a little body. She looked smaller than
usual that Monday afternoon, and shrunken, somehow; her eyes were
red, as if she had been crying. She cried a good deal on Mondays,
after Ben Trawl had come and gone on Sunday evenings.
The minister was quite himself again, and about his business. This
fact should have given Jane the keenest gratification; whereas,
in proportion as their lodger had grown well and cheerful, Jane
had turned pale and sober. When he was really ill, her plain face
wore a rapt look. For Captain Hap had remained on duty only a day
or two; Mr. Bayard had not been sick enough to need professional
nursing, this time, and it had since devolved wholly upon the women
of the household to minister to his convalescent needs.
Happy Jane! She ran up and down, she flitted to and fro, she
cooked, she ironed, she mended, she sewed, she read aloud, she ran
errands, she watched for the faintest flicker in the changes of
expression on his face: its dignity, its beauty, and its dearness
for that one precious page out of her poor story were hers. All the
rest of her life he belonged to other people and to other things:
to the drunkards and the fishermen and the services; to his books
and his lonely walks and his unapproachable thoughts; to his dreams
of the future in which Jane had no more part than the paper Cupid
on the screen, forever tasting and never eating impossible fruit;
to his memories of a past of which Jane knew that she knew no more
than she did of the etiquette at the palace of Kubla Khan in Xanadu.
Jane understood about Kubla Khan (or she thought she did, which
answers the same purpose), for she had read the poem aloud to him
one day while her mother sat sewing in the wooden rocking-chair.
Jane was “educated,” like most respectable Windover girls; she
had been through the high school of her native town; she read not
at all badly; Mr. Bayard had told her something to this effect,
and Jane sang about the house all the rest of the day. Yes; Jane
understood Kubla Khan.
Jane watched the luminous patience in the sick man’s eyes,
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man.”
She repeated the lines mechanically, with the bitter consciousness
of the half-educated of being moved by something which it was
beyond her power and her province to reconcile with the facts of
her life. She sighed when the brilliant eagerness and restlessness
of returning health replaced that large and gentle light. Bayard
had asked her mother to let Jane keep his copy of that volume; he
said he had two sets of Coleridge. He had written her name in it;
how could he guess that Jane would lock the book away in her bureau
drawer by day, and sleep with it under her pillow at night? He
tossed her a rose of common human gratitude; it fell into a girl’s
heart,--a burning coal of ravenous longing,--and ate its way.
It was summer in Windover; and Jane’s one beautiful leaf of life
had turned. Mr. Bayard had long since been able to take care of
himself; coughing still, and delicate enough, but throwing off
impatiently, as the gentlest man does, in health, the little
feminine restraints and devotions which he found necessary and even
agreeable in illness. It would not be too much to say that Jane
loved him as unselfishly as any woman ever had, or ever would;
but in proportion as his spirits rose, hers sank. She reproached
herself, poor child, that it did not make her perfectly happy to
have the minister get well. Suffering and helpless, he had needed
_her_. Busy and well, he thought of her no more. For that one time,
that cruelly little time, she, Jane Granite, of all the women in
the world, had known that precious right. To her, only to her, it
had been given to serve his daily, common wants; she had carried
up his tray, she had read or written tireless hours as his mood
decreed, or she had sat in silent study of his musing face, not one
lineament of which did muse of her.
But it was summer in Windover, and the minister was Jane’s no more.
It was one of the last of the days of a celestial June. Bayard had
lived the month of blossoms out eagerly and restlessly. His work
had grown enormously upon his hands, and required an attention
which told on every nerve. He had gone headlong into the depths of
one of those dedications which do not give a man time to come up
for air. His eye wore an elate, rapt look. His cheeks burned with a
fine fever. His personal beauty that summer was something at which
the very “dock-rats” on the wharves turned back to look. No woman
easily forgot it, and how many secretly dreamed of it, fortunately
the young man never knew. The best of men may work his share of
heart-break, and the better he is the less he will suspect it.
Bayard was far too busy to think of women. For he did not exactly
think of Helen Carruth; he felt her. She did not occupy his mind so
far that he experienced the need of communication with her; he had
never written her so much as a note of ceremony. After her brief
scintillation before him on Windover Point that April afternoon,
she had melted from his horizon. Nevertheless, she had changed the
tint of it. Now and then in the stress of his prosaic, thankless,
yet singularly enthusiastic work, there came to the young preacher
that sense of something agreeable about to happen, which makes
one wake up singing in the morning of one’s hardest day’s labor,
or sends one to rest dreaming quietly in the face of the crudest
anxiety. The devotee, in the midst of his orisons, was aware of the
footstep of possible pleasure falling lightly, distant, doubtful,
towards his cell. Some good men pray the louder for this sweet and
perilous prescience. Bayard worked the harder.
And it was summer in Windover. The scanty green carpet of the
downs had unrolled to its full, making as much as possible of its
meagre proportions, atoning in depth of color for what it lacked
in breadth and length: if the cliffs and boulders were grayer for
the green, the grass looked greener for the gray. The saxifrage
had faded, but among the red-cupped moss the checkerberry shot up
tender, reddish leaves, the white violets scented the swamps, and
the famous wild roses of the Cape dashed the bayberry thickets with
pink. The late apple blossoms had blushed and gone, but the leaf
and the hidden fruit responded to the anxious attention of the
unenthusiastic farmer who wrenched his living out of the reluctant
granite soil. In front of the hotels the inevitable geraniums
blazed scarlet in mathematical flower-beds; and the boarding-houses
convalesced from housecleaning in striped white scrim curtains and
freshly painted blue wooden pumps. The lemonade and candy stores
of “the season” sprouted with the white clovers by the wayside;
and the express cart of the summer boarder’s luggage blossomed with
the lonely and uncomfortable hydrangea, bearing its lot in yellow
jars on piazza steps. Windover Point wore a coquettish air of
expectation, like a girl in her best dress who waits in a lane for
an invisible admirer.
Windover Harbor was alive and alert. The summer fleets were out;
the spring fleets were in. Bayard could hear the drop of anchors
now, in the night, through his open windows; and the soft, pleasant
splash, the home-coming and home-yearning sound which wakened the
summer people, only to lull them to sleep again with a sense of
poetic pleasure in a picturesque and alien life, gave to the lonely
preacher of the winter Windover the little start of anxiety and
responsibility which assassinates rest. He thought:--
“Another crew in! Is it Job? Or Bob? Or Jean? Will they go to
Trawl’s, or get home straight? I must be off at dawn to see to
this.”
On the little beach opposite Mrs. Granite’s cottage the sea sighed
in the night to answer him; ebbing, it lapped the pebbles gently,
as if it felt sorry for the preacher, who had not known Windover
as long as it had; it inhaled and exhaled long, soft breaths, in
rhythm with which his own began to grow deep and quiet; and the
start from a dream of drowning in the undertow off Ragged Rock
would tell him that he had slept. More often, of late, the rising
tide had replied nervously; it was fitful and noisy; it panted and
seemed to struggle for articulation: for the June sea was restless,
and the spring gales had died hard. The tints of the harbor were
still a little cool, but the woodland on the opposite shore held
out an arm of rich, ripe leaf; and the careening sails warmed to
the sunrise and the sunset in rose and ochre, violet and pearl,
opening buds of the blossom of midsummer color that was close at
hand.
Bayard was in his rooms, resting after one of these unresting
nights. He had set forth at daybreak to meet an incoming schooner
at the docks. It had become his habit, whenever he could, to see
that the fishermen were personally conducted past the dens of Angel
Alley, and taken home sober to waking wife and sleeping child. In
this laborious task Job Slip’s help had been of incredible value.
Job was quite sober now; and in the intervals between trips this
converted Saul delighted to play the Paul to Bayard’s little group
of apostles. Yet Job did not pose. He was more sincere than most
better men. He took to decency as if it had been a new trade; and
the novel dignity of missionary zeal sat upon him like a liberal
education. The Windover word for what had happened to Job was
“re-formation.” Job Slip, one says, is a reformed man. The best
way to save a rascal is to give him another one to save; and Job,
who was no rascal, but the ruin of a very good fellow, brilliantly
illustrated this eternal law.
Bayard had come back, unusually tired, about noon, and had not left
the house since his return. He was reading, with his back to the
light, and the sea in his ears. The portière of mosquito netting,
which hung now at the door between his two rooms, was pushed aside
that he might see the photographed Leonardo as he liked to do. The
scanty furniture of his sleeping-room had been moved about during
his recent illness, so that now the picture was the only object
visible from the study where he sat. The mosquito portière was
white. Mrs. Granite having ineffectually urged a solferino pink,
Bayard regarded this portière with the disproportionate gratitude
of escape from evil.
A knock had struck the cottage door, and Jane Granite had run
to answer it. She was in her tidy, blue gingham dress, but a
little wet and crumply, as was to be expected on a Monday. She
had snatched up a white apron, and looked like an excellent
parlor-maid. For such, perhaps, the caller took her, for practical
tact was not his most obtrusive quality. He was an elderly man, a
gentleman; his mouth was stern, and his eyes were kind. He carried
a valuable cane, and spoke with a certain air of authority, as of a
man well acquainted with this world and the other too. He asked for
Mr. Bayard, and would send up his card before intruding upon him; a
ceremony which quite upset little Jane, and she stood crimson with
embarrassment. Her discomfort was not decreased by the bewildering
presence of a carriage at the gate of her mother’s garden. Beyond
the rows of larkspur and feverfew, planted for the vase on Mr.
Bayard’s study-table, Mr. Salt’s best carryall, splendid in spring
varnish, loomed importantly. Pepper, with the misanthropy of a
confirmed dyspeptic, drew the carryall, and ladies sat within
it. There were two. They were covered by certain strange, rich
carriage robes undreamed of by Mr. Salt; dull, silk blankets, not
of Windover designs. The ladies were both handsomely dressed. One
was old; but one--ah! one was young.
“Mr. Bayard is in, my dear.” The voice of the caller rose over the
larkspur to the carryall. “Will you wait, or drive on?”
“We’ll drive on,” replied the younger lady rather hurriedly.
“Helen, Helen!” complained the elder. “Don’t you _know_ that Pepper
is afraid of the electric cars? I’ve noticed horses are that live
in the same town with them.”
Helen did not laugh at this, but her eyes twinkled irreverently.
She wrapped herself in her old-gold silk blanket, and turned to
watch the sea. She did not look at Mrs. Granite’s cottage.
The dignified accents of the Professor’s voice were now wafted over
the larkspur bed again.
“Mr. Bayard asks if the ladies will not come up to his study,
Statira? It is only one short flight. Will you do so?”
Simultaneously Bayard’s eager face flashed out of the doorway;
and before Helen could assent or dissent, her mother, on the
young man’s arm, was panting up between the feverfew and into the
cottage. Helen followed in meek amusement.
The stairs were scarcely more than a ship’s gangway. Mrs. Carruth
politely suppressed her sense of horrified inadequacy to the
ascent, and she climbed up as bravely as possible. Helen’s
cast-down eyes observed the uncarpeted steps of old, stained
pine-wood. She was still silent when they entered the study. Bayard
bustled about, offering Mrs. Carruth the bony rocking-chair with
the turkey-red cushion. The Professor had already ensconced himself
in the revolving study-chair, a luxury which had been recently
added to the room. There remained for Helen the lounge, and Bayard,
perforce, seated himself beside her. He did not remark upon the
deficiency of furniture. He seemed as much above an apology for
the lack of upholstery as a martyr in prison. His face was radiant
with a pleasure which no paltry thought could poison. The simple
occasion seemed to him one of high festivity. It would have been
impossible for any one of these comfortable people to understand
what it meant to the poor fellow to entertain old friends in his
lonely quarters.
Helen’s eyes assumed a blank, polite look; she said as little as
possible at first; she seemed adjusting herself to a shock. Mrs.
Carruth warbled on about the opening of the season at the Mainsail,
and the Professor inquired about the effects of the recent gales
upon the fishing classes. He avoided all perilous personalities as
adroitly as if he had been fencing with a German radical over the
authenticity of the Fourth Gospel. It was Bayard himself who boldly
approached the dangerous ground.
“You came on Saturday, I suppose? I did not know anything about it
till this minute.”
“We did not come till night,” observed Helen hurriedly. “Mother was
very tired. We did not go out anywhere yesterday.”
“The Professor did, I’ll be bound,” smiled Bayard. “Went to church,
didn’t you, Professor?”
“Ye--es,” replied Professor Carruth, hesitating. “I never omit
divine service if I am on my feet.”
“Did you hear Fenton?” asked Bayard with perfect ease of manner.
“Yes,” more boldly from the Professor, “I attended the First
Church. I like to recognize The Denomination wherever I may be
traveling. I always look up my old boys, of course, too. It seems
to be a prosperous parish.”
“It _is_ a prosperous parish,” assented Bayard heartily. “Fenton is
doing admirably with it. Did you hear him?”
“Why yes,” replied the Professor, breathing more freely. “I heard
Fenton. He did well--quite well. He has not that scope of intellect
which--I never considered him our _ablest_ man; but his theology is
perfectly satisfactory. He preached an excellent doctrinal sermon.
The audience was not so large as I could have wished; but it seemed
to be of a superior quality--some of your first citizens, I should
say?”
“Oh, yes, our first people all attend that church. You didn’t find
many of _my_ crowd there, I presume?”
Bayard laughed easily.
“I did not recognize it,” said the Professor, “as a distinctly
fishing community--from the audience; no, not from that audience.”
“Not many of my drunkards, for instance, sir? Not a strong
salt-fish perfume in the First Church? Nor a whiff of old New
England rum anywhere?”
“The atmosphere was irreproachable,” returned the Professor with a
keen look.
Bayard glanced at Helen, who had been sitting quietly on the sofa
beside him. Her eyes returned his merriment.
“Father!” she exclaimed, “Mr. Bayard does not recant. He is
proud of it. He glories in his heresy. He is laughing at his
martyrdom--and at us. I think you’d better ‘let up’ on him awhile.”
“Let up, Helen? Let up?” complained her mother. “That is a very
questionable expression. Ask your father, my dear, if it is good
English. And I’m sure Mr. Bayard will be a _gentlemanly_ heretic,
whatever he is.”
Helen laughed outright, now. Bayard joined her; and the four drew
breath and found themselves at their ease.
“For my part,” said Helen unexpectedly, “I should like to see Mr.
Bayard’s church--if he would stoop to invite us.... I suppose,” she
added thoughtfully, “one reason saints don’t stoop, is for fear the
halo should tumble off. It must be so inconvenient! Don’t you ever
have a stiff neck, Mr. Bayard?”
“Why, _Helen_!” cried Mrs. Carruth in genuine horror. She hastened
to atone for her daughter’s rudeness to a young man who already had
enough to bear. “I will come and bring Helen myself, Mr. Bayard, to
hear you preach--that is, if you would like to have us.”
“Pray don’t!” protested Bayard. “The Professor’s hair would turn
black again in a single night. It won’t do for you to recognize an
outlaw like me, you know. Why, Fenton and I haven’t met since he
came here; unless at the post-office. I understand my position.
Don’t feel any delicacy about it. _I_ don’t. I can’t stop for that!
I am too busy.”
The Professor of Theology colored a little.
“The ladies of my family are quite free to visit any of the places
of worship around us,” he observed with some dignity. “They are not
bound by the same species of ecclesiastical etiquette”--
“We must be going, Mother,” said Helen abruptly. Her cheeks were
blazing; her eyes met Bayard’s with a ray of indignant sympathy
which went to his head like wine. He felt the light, quick motion
of her breath; the folds of her summer dress--he could not have
told what she wore--fell over the carpet lounge; the hem of the
dress touched his boot, and just covered the patch on it from
sight. He had but glanced at her before. He looked at her now;
her heightened color became her richly; her hand--she wore a
driving-glove--lay upon the cretonne sofa pillow; she had picked a
single flower as she came up Mrs. Granite’s garden walk. Bayard was
amused to see that she had instinctively taken a deep purple pansy
with a heart of gold.
A little embarrassed, Helen held out the pansy.
“I like them,” she said. “They make faces at me.”
“This one is a royal creature,” said Bayard. “It has the face of a
Queen.”
“Mr. Bayard,” asked Mrs. Carruth, with the air of starting a
subject of depth and force, “do you find any time to analyze
flowers?”
“So far--hardly,” replied Bayard, looking Helen straight in the
face.
“I used to study botany when I was a young lady--in New York,”
observed Mrs. Carruth placidly; “it seems to me a very wholesome
and refining”--
“Papa!” cried Helen, “Pepper is eating a tomato can--No, it’s a
piece of--It is an apron--a gingham apron! The menu of that horse,
Mr. Bayard, surpasses anything”--
“It is plainly some article belonging to the ladies of the house,”
said Bayard, laughing.
He had started to rescue the apron, when Jane Granite was seen
to run out and wrench that portion of her wardrobe from Pepper’s
voracity.
“That,” observed Mrs. Carruth, “is the maid, I presume?”
“It is Miss Granite, my landlady’s daughter,” replied Bayard with
some unnecessary dignity. Poor little Jane, red in the face, and
raging at the heart, stood, with the eyes of the visitors upon
her, contending with Pepper, who insisted on retaining the apron
strings, and had already swallowed one halfway.
Quick to respond to the discomfort of any woman, Bayard ran down to
Jane’s relief.
“It blew over from the lines,” said Jane. She lifted to him her
sad, grateful eyes. She would have cried, if she had ventured to
speak. Helen, from the window, looked down silently.
When Bayard came upstairs again, his visitors had risen to leave,
in earnest. Helen avoided his eyes. He felt that hers had taken in
every detail of his poor place: the iron angel on the ugly stove;
the Cupid and the grapes upon the paper screen; the dreary, darned,
brown carpet; the barren shades; the mosquito-net portière; the
whole homeless, rude, poverty-smitten thing.
“You have a fine engraving of Guido’s Saint Michael, here,”
observed Professor Carruth, taking out his glasses.
“And I notice--don’t I see another good picture through the gauze
portière?” asked Mrs. Carruth modestly.
“That is Leonardo’s Christ,” said the Professor promptly, at
a look. “It really makes a singular, I may say a beautiful,
impression behind that white stuff. I never happened to see
it before with such an effect. Look, Helen! It seems like a
transparency--or a cloud.”
A devout expression touched Helen’s face, which had grown quite
grave. She did not answer, and went downstairs behind her mother,
very quietly.
Jane Granite had disappeared. Pepper was engaged in a private
conflict with such portions of her wardrobe as he had succeeded in
swallowing; Mrs. Carruth mounted heavily into the carryall, and
Helen leaped after her. Then it appeared that the Professor had
forgotten his cane, and Bayard ran back for it. As he came down,
he caught a glimpse of Jane Granite in the sitting-room. She was
crying.
“That is my Charter Oak cane,” observed the Professor anxiously;
“the one with the handle made from the old ship Constitution. I
wouldn’t have mislaid it on any account.”
“Father would rather have mislaid me,” said Helen with an air of
conviction. Her mother was inviting Mr. Bayard to call on them at
the Flying Jib. Helen said nothing on this point. She smiled and
nodded girlishly, and Pepper bore them away.
Bayard came back upstairs three steps at a time. The sitting-room
door was shut, and it did not occur to him to open it. He had quite
forgotten Jane. He closed his study-door softly, and went and sat
down on the carpet lounge; the pansy that she had dropped was
there. He looked for it, and looked at it, then laid it gently on
his study-table. He took up the cretonne pillow where her hand had
lain, then put it softly down.
“I must keep my head,” thought the young man. He passed his hand
over his too brilliant eyes, and went, with compressed lips, to his
study-table.
But Jane Granite went out in the back yard, and sat down under the
clothes-lines, on the salt-fish box. The chewed apron was in her
hand. The clothes flapped in the rising wind above her head. She
could not be seen from the house. Here she could cry in peace.
She was surprised to find, when she was seated there, that she did
not want to cry. Her eyes, her throat, her lips, her head, seemed
burning to ashes. Hot, hard, wicked wishes came for the first time
in her gentle life to Jane. That purple-and-gold woman swam giddily
between her and the summer sky.
Jane had known her at the first look. Her soul winced when she
recognized the stranger of the electric car. Mr. Bayard had thought
Jane did not notice that lady that April day. Jane had by heart
every line and tint and detail of her, from the gold dagger on
her bonnet to the dark purple cloth gaiter of her boots; from her
pleased brown eyes, with the well-bred motion of their lids, to
the pretty gestures that she made with her narrow, gloved hand.
Jane looked at her own wash-day dress and parboiled fingers. The
indefinable, undeniable fact of the stranger’s personal elegance
crushed the girl with the sense of helpless bitterness which only
women who have been poor and gone shabby can understand. The
language of dress, which is to the half-educated the symbol of
superiority, conveyed to Jane, in advance of any finer or truer
vocabulary, the full force of the situation.
“She is different,” thought Jane.
These three words said it all. Jane dropped her face in her soaked
and wrinkled fingers. The damp clothes flapped persistently about
her neat, brown head, as if trying to arouse her with the useless
diversion of things that one is quite used to. Jane thought of Ben
Trawl, it is true, but without any distinct sense of disloyalty
or remorse. She experienced the ancient and always inexplicable
emotion not peculiar to Jane: she might have lived on in relative
content, not in the least disturbed by any consciousness of her own
ties, as long as the calm eyes she worshiped reflected the image of
no other woman. Now something in Jane’s heart seemed to snap and
let lava through.
Oh, purple and gold, gall and wormwood, beauty and daintiness,
heart-ache and fear! Had the Queen come to the palace of Kubla
Khan? Let Alph, the sacred river, run! Who was she, Jane Granite,
that she should stem the sweeping current?
“... Crying _again_? This is a nice way to greet a fellar,” said
roughly a sudden voice in Jane’s dulled ear.
Ben Trawl lifted the damp clothes, strode through between the
poles, and stood beside his promised wife. His face was ominously
dark.