The mosquito-net portière swayed softly in the night wind. Emanuel
Bayard sat in his study and looked about the poor place, gasping,
like a man who has received or given a mortal hurt. The marred face
of the great Christ looked through the coarse, white gauze; it
seemed to scrutinize him sternly; he bowed his head before the gaze
of the picture.
The gradual descent from a spiritual height to a practical level
is, at best, a strain under which the godliest nature quivers; but
Bayard experienced the shock of a plunge. From the elation of the
past hour to the consternation of the present moment was a long
leap.
He closed his eyes to see the blood-red sunset unfurling its flag
over the broad beach; he opened them to see Mrs. Granite’s kerosene
lamp smoking on the study-table of grained pine wood. The retina
of his soul suffered an adjustment as abrupt and as severe. But an
hour ago, a thousand people had hung swaying upon the breath that
went forth from between his lips; their upturned faces offered
him that most exquisite of flatteries--the reverence of a great
audience for an orator who has mastered them. We should remember
that--the religious orator stands, both in privilege and in peril,
apart from his kind. He may suffer at once the subtlest of human
dangers, and the deepest of human joys. Bayard trembled yet with
the exaltation of that solemn hour.
Midway between earth and heaven, commissioner between man and his
Maker, he had stood transcendent, well-nigh translated. He had
floated in the adoration of his people; he had been to them one of
the sons of God; he had held their bare souls in his hand.
While his head whirled with the suffocation of the incense, he had
stumbled. He had made the misstep which to a lofty soul may give
more anguish than guilt to the low. He had fallen from the heights
of his own faith in himself, sheer over, and below the ideal which
those upon whose worshiping love he lived trustfully cherished of
him.
An hour ago, he was a man of God. Now he called himself less than a
man among men.
Bound by every claim of spiritual and of human honor to preserve
the strong silence by which a man protects a woman from himself,
and himself from her, he had weakly, to his high view it seemed
he had ignobly, broken it. He had declared love to a woman whom
he could not ask to be his wife. To crown the pity of it and the
shame, he had turned on his heel, and left her--so!
“I have done a thing for which I would have thrashed a man who
had done as much by a sister of mine!” said this young apostle
between his teeth. It did not occur to him that he might be liable
to overestimate the situation. Religious exaltation exposes a
sensitive nature to mental and spiritual excess as dangerous in
its way as physical dissipation. Bayard stood in that great desert
known only to fine souls, where the noblest side of a man seems to
take up arms against him; and where the very consecrated weapons by
which he has battled his way to purity, unselfishness, and peace
turn themselves like sentient foes and smite him. He seemed to
stand unarmed and defenceless before forces of evil whose master he
had been so long, that he looked upon their defiant faces with more
astonishment than fear.
“This is an insurrection of slaves,” he thought. He looked blindly
about his dreary room.
“Down!” he said, as if he had been speaking to dogs.
And now--what? It seemed to his quivering sensibility a proof that
he had fallen to a far depth, that the first, bare instinct of his
anguish was not to say, “What is my duty in this thing?” but, “How
shall I bear it?”
With that automatism of Christian habit which time and trouble may
teach the coldest scoffer to respect, Bayard’s hand groped for his
Bible. We have seen this touching movement in the sick, the aged,
the bereaved, and in the utterly alone; and who of us has been so
poor in spirit as to do it irreverence? In so young a man this
desolate instinct had a deep significance.
Bayard’s Bible opened at the New Testament, whose worn pages moved
apart, at a touch, like lips that would answer him.
As he took the book something fell from it to the floor. He
stooped, holding his finger between the open leaves, and picked the
object up. It was a flower--a pressed flower--the saxifrage that he
had gathered from the hem of her dress on the sand of the beach,
that April day.
The Bible fell from his knee. He snatched the dead flower to his
lips, and kissed it passionately.
“There was another, too,” he hungrily said. “There was a pansy. She
left it on the sofa pillow in this room. The pansy! the pansy!”
He took up the Bible, and searched feverishly. But he could not
find the pansy; the truth being that Jane Granite had seen it on
the study-table, and had dusted it away.
He laid the Bible down upon the table, and seized the saxifrage. He
kissed it again and again; he devoured it over and over; he held it
in the palm of his hand, and softly laid his cheek upon it....
Behind the white gauze, the Christ on the wall looked down.
Suddenly Bayard raised his haggard face. The eyes of the picture
and the eyes of the man met.
“Anything but this--everything but this--Thou knowest.” Aloud,
Bayard uttered the words as if he expected to be heard.
“Only _this_--the love of man for woman--how canst THOU understand?”
Bayard arose to his full height; he lifted his hands till they
touched the low, cracked ceiling; it seemed to him as if he lifted
them into illimitable heaven; as if he bore on them the greatest
mystery and the mightiest woe of all the race. His lips moved; only
inarticulate whispers came from them.
Then his hands fell, and his face fell into them.
* * * * *
Bayard went to her like a man, and at once. At an hour of the
morning so early that he felt obliged to apologize for his
intrusion, his sleepless face appeared at the door of her father’s
cottage.
He had no more idea, even yet, what he should say to her than the
Saint Michael over his study-table. He felt in himself a kind of
pictorial helplessness; as if he represented something which he
was incapable of expressing. His head swam. He leaned back on
the bamboo chair in the parlor. Through the soft stirring of the
lace curtains he watched a fleet start out, and tack across the
harbor. He interested himself in the greenish-white sails of an
old schooner with a new suit on. He found it impossible to think
coherently of the interview which awaited him.
A hand fell on the latch of the door. He turned--ah!
“Good-morning, Professor,” said Bayard, rising manfully. His pale
face, if possible, turned a shade whiter. It seemed to him the
fitting sequel to his weakness that he should be called to account
by the girl’s father. “I have deserved it,” he thought.
“Ah, Bayard, this is too bad!” said the Professor of Theology,
cordially holding out his hand. “You have just missed my daughter.
I am sure she will regret it. She took the twenty minutes past
seven train.”
“Took the _train_?” panted Bayard.
“She has gone to join some friends of ours--the Rollinses, at Campo
Bello. She did not intend to leave for some days; but the mood took
her, and off she started. I think, indeed, she went without her
breakfast. Helen is whimsical at times. Do be seated! We will do
our poor best to take my daughter’s place,” pursued the Professor,
smiling indulgently; “and I’m especially glad of this opportunity,
Bayard, to tell you how much I was impressed by your discourse last
night. I don’t mind saying so at all.”
“Thank you, Professor,” said Bayard faintly.
“It was not theology, you know,” observed the Professor, still
smiling; “you can’t expect me to admit that it was sound, Bayard.
But I must say, sir, I _do_ say, that I defy any council in New
England to say it was not Christianity!”
“Thank you, Professor,” repeated Bayard, more faintly than
before. He found it impossible to talk about theology, or even
Christianity. The Professor felt rather hurt that the young man
took his leave so soon.
He had thought of inviting him into the clam study, and reading
some extracts from the essay on the State of the Unforgiven after
Death.
Bayard went back to his own rooms, and wrote to her; if he could
have done so, he would have followed her to Campo Bello by the
next boat. The pitiable fact was, that he could not raise the
money for the trip. It occurred to him to force the occasion and
borrow it--of his treasurer, of George Fenton, of his uncle; but he
dismissed these fantasies as madness, and swiftly wrote:--
I hurried to you at the first decent moment this morning; but I
was not early enough by an hour.
The reason why I do not--why I cannot follow you, by the next
train, perhaps you will understand without my being forced
to explain. I take the only method left to me of justifying
myself--if it is possible for me to do that--in your eyes.
I dare not believe--I dare not hope, that what I have done can
mean any more to _you_ than passing embarrassment to a friendship
whose value and permanence shall not be disturbed by my weakness
if I can help it.
I love you. I ought not to have told you so. I did not mean to
tell you so.
But I love you! A man situated as I am has no right to declare
his feeling for a woman like yourself. This wrong have I
done--not to you; I do not presume to dream that I could thereby
in any way wrong _you_--but to myself, and to my love for you. It
was my sacred secret; it is now your absolute possession. Do with
it--and with me--as you will.
EMANUEL BAYARD.
He dispatched this note by the first mail to Campo Bello, and
waited in such patience as he could command for such answer as she
chose to make him. He waited a miserable time. At the end of that
week came a letter in her strong, clear hand. He shut himself into
his rooms, turned the key, and read:--
MY DEAR MR. BAYARD:--I am not quite sure that I entirely
understand you. But I believe in you, altogether; and what I do
not understand, I am proud to take on trust.
The love of a man like yourself would be a tribute to any woman.
I shall count it the honor of my life that you have given it to
me. And I shall be, because of it, all the more and always,
Your loyal friend,
HELEN CARRUTH.
This composed and womanly reply did not serve to quell the
agitation in which Bayard had awaited it. He read and re-read,
studied and scrutinized the few self-contained words with a sense
of helplessness which equaled his misery. His position seemed
to him intolerable. Something undignified about it cut the proud
fellow to the quick. He had thought himself prepared for any
natural phase in the lot which he had elected. In the old language
which the devotees of ages have instinctively used, and which to
each solitary heart seems a figure of speech as new as its own
anguish, Bayard had believed himself able to “bear his cross.” He
had now to learn that, in the curious, complex interplay of human
life, a man may not be able even to wear his burden alone, and drop
decently under it when the time comes. Suppose, as the cross-bearer
crawls along in blood and dust, that the arm of the coarse wood
strikes and bruises the delicate flesh of a woman’s shoulder?
Suppose--oh, suppose the unsupposable, the maddening!
Suppose she might have been led, taught by his great love to love
him? What then?
Because a man had a duty to God, had he none to a woman?