Immediately upon the destruction of the chapel, two things
happened. The first, was a visit from Mr. Hermon Worcester. Nothing
could have been more unexpected; and when Bayard, coming into
his lodgings one dreary afternoon, found his uncle in the bony
rocking-chair, the young man was much moved.
Mr. Worcester, not untouched by the sight of his nephew’s emotion,
held out an embarrassed hand. Bayard took it warmly. He had learned
the lesson of loneliness so thoroughly, that he was ill prepared
for the agitation of this little, common, human incident.
“You are ill, Manuel!” cried the elder man. “Good heavens, how you
have changed! I had no idea--You should have told me!” he added,
with the old autocratic accent. “I ought to have been informed....
And _this_ is how you live!”
Hermon Worcester looked slowly about him. His eye fell on the
paper screen, the mosquito-net portière, the iron angel on the
stove, the hard lounge, the old carpet, the stained wall-paper; he
scrutinized the bookcase, he glanced at the Saint Michael. When he
saw the great Christ, he coughed, and turned his face away; got up
uneasily, and went into the bedroom, where he fell to examining
the cotton comforters.
“At least,” he said sharply, “you could have sent for your own hair
mattress! Nobody has slept on it, since”--
He broke off, and returned to the skeleton rocking-chair, with an
expression of discomfiture so serious that Bayard pitied him. He
hastened to say:--
“Oh, I have done very well, very well indeed, Uncle. A man expects
to rough it, if he chooses to be a home missionary. Give yourself
no concern--now.”
If there were an almost uncontrollable accent on the last word,
Mr. Hermon Worcester failed to notice it. Something in that other
phrase had arrested his Orthodox attention. A home missionary? A
home missionary. Was it possible to regard this heretic boy in that
irreproachable light?
To the home missions of his denomination Mr. Worcester was a large
and important contributor. Now and then an ecclesiastical Dives is
to be found who gives a certain preference to the heathen of his
own land before those of India, Africa, and Japan; Mr. Worcester
had always been one of these illuminated men. Indeed, Japan,
Africa, and India had been known to reflect upon the character of
his Christianity for the reason that his checks were cashed for the
benefit of Idaho, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.
To this hour it had not occurred to Mr. Worcester that the heathen
of Windover could be properly rated as in the home missionary
field. Even the starving pastors in the northern counties of
Vermont might have gratefully called for yearly barrels of his old
clothes; but Windover? Why, that was within two hours of Boston!
And, alas, the Vermont ministers were always “sound.” In Idaho,
Tennessee, and the Carolinas, where was a corrupt theology to be
found?
But that phrase had lodged in some nick of Mr. Worcester’s mind;
and he could no more brush it off than one can brush away a seed
out of reach in the crevice of a rock. He regarded his nephew with
a certain tolerance, warmly tinged by compassion.
“The boy is a wreck,” he said to himself. “Manuel will die if this
goes on. He might have expected it. And so might I.”
The old man’s face worked. He spoke, crossly enough. Bayard
remembered that he always used to be cross when he was touched.
“What’s to happen now? Ready to give it up, Manuel?”
“I am ready to begin all over again,” replied Emanuel, smiling.
His voice had the ring that his uncle knew too well; when he was a
little fellow, and bound to do a thing whether or no, he spoke in
that tone, and always with that engaging smile.
“Who pays for this phœnix?” asked the man of business brusquely.
“I passed by your place. It is a fine heap of ashes. A curious
sight I saw there, too. That sign you hang out--those four words.”
Bayard nodded.
“It _is_ a pleasant accident. The department says it is almost
unprecedented. Oh, we shall crawl up somehow, Uncle! I don’t feel
_very_ anxious. The town hall is already hired for temporary use.
There is great excitement in the city over the whole affair. You
see, it has reached the proportions, now, of a deadlock between
the rum interest and the decent citizens. Our treasurer is
circulating some sort of a paper. I think he hopes to collect a few
hundreds--enough to tide us over till we can float off. I don’t
know just how it is all coming out. Of course we can’t expect the
help that an ordinary church would get in a similar trouble.”
“I’m glad if you recognize that fact, Manuel,” replied Mr.
Worcester uncomfortably. In his heart he was saying, “The boy has
his mother’s splendid Worcester pride. He’ll perish here, like a
starving eagle on a deserted crag, but he won’t _ask_ me!”
“You need a new building,” observed Mr. Worcester, with that quiet
way of putting a startling thing which was another Worcester
quality. “You seem to have made--from your own point of view,
of course--what any man of affairs would call a success here. Of
course, you understand, Manuel, that I cannot approve of your
course. It has been the greatest grief of my life.”
Bayard hastened to observe that his comprehension of this point was
not limited.
“From _your_ point of view, not mine, Manuel, I should, as a man of
business, suggest that a new building--your own property--something
to impress business men, you know; something to give material form
to that--undoubtedly sincere and--however mistaken--unselfish,
religious effort that you have wasted in this freezing hole.... I
wonder, Manuel, if you could put the draughts on that confounded
box-burner with the angel atop? I don’t know when I’ve been so
chilly!”
Bayard hastened to obey this request, without intimating that the
draughts were closed to save the coal. This species of political
economy was quite outside of his uncle’s experience, and yet,
perhaps, the man of business had more imagination than his nephew
gave him credit for; he said abruptly:--
“Look here, Manuel, I’ve got to get the seven o’clock train home,
you know, and I’d best do the errand I came on, at once. You know
those old Virginia mines of your mother’s? There was a little stock
there, you remember? It went below zero. Hasn’t been heard of for
twenty years. But it remained on the inventory of the estate, you
know. Well, it’s come up. There’s a new plant gone in--Northern
enterprise, you know--and the stock is on the market again. There
is only a trifle, a paltry two thousand, if well handled. It’s
yours, you see, whatever there is of it. I came down to ask if you
would like to have me force a sale for you.”
“Two thousand dollars!” cried Bayard, turning pale. “Why, it would
almost build me--at least, it would furnish a new chapel. We
had about so much of inside property--library, piano, pictures,
settees, hymn-books, and all that--it is all a dead loss.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bond had never insured it--we were so poor;
every dollar tells!”
“Then he was a very bad man of business for a church--for
a--missionary officer!” cried Mr. Worcester irritably; “and I
hope you’ll do nothing of the kind. You could spend that amount
on your personal necessities inside of six months, and then not
know it, sir! You are--I hope, Manuel,” sternly, “that you will
regard my wish, for once, in one respect, before I die. Don’t fling
your mother’s money into the bottomless pit of this unendowed,
burnt-out, unpopular enterprise! Wait awhile, Manuel. Wait a little
and think it over. I don’t think, under the circumstances,” added
Mr. Worcester with some genuine dignity, “that it is very much to
ask.”
“Perhaps it is not,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “At least, I will
consider it, as you say.”
Four days after, an envelope from Boston was put into Bayard’s
hand. It contained a typewritten letter setting forth the fact that
the writer desired to contribute to the erection of the new chapel
in Windover known by the name of Christlove, and representing a
certain phase of home missionary effort--the inclosed sum. It was
a bank draft for twenty-five hundred dollars. The writer withheld
his name, and requested that no effort be made to identify him.
He also desired that his contribution be used, if possible, in a
conditional character, to stimulate the growth of a collection
sufficient to put the building and the mission behind it, upon a
suitable basis.
The following day Mr. Worcester sent to Bayard by personal check
the remnant of his mother’s property. This little sum seemed as
large, now, to the Beacon Street boy, as if he had been reared
in one of the Vermont parsonages to which his uncle sent old
overcoats; or, one might say, as if he had never left the shelter
of that cottage under the pine grove in Bethlehem, where his eyes
first opened upon the snow-girt hills. Self-denial speaks louder
in the blood than indulgence, after all; and who knew how much of
Bayard’s simple manliness in the endurance of privation he owed to
the pluck of the city girl who left the world for love of one poor
man, and to become the mother of another?
Bayard had scarcely adjusted his mind to these events when he
received from Helen Carruth this letter:--
“MY DEAR MR. BAYARD,--My little note of sympathy with your
great trouble did not deserve so prompt an answer. I thank you
for it. I could not quite make up my mind to tell you, in the
midst of so much care and anxiety, what I can delay no longer in
saying”--
Bayard laid down the letter. The room grew black before his
starting eyes.
“There is another man,” he thought. “She is engaged. She cannot
bear to tell me.”
Sparks of fire leaped before his eyeballs. Black swung into
purple--into gray--light returned; and he read on:--
“If I flatter myself in supposing that you might mind it a
little, why, the mistake hurts nobody, neither you nor me; but
the fact is we are not coming to Windover this summer. We sail
for Europe next week.
“Father has decided quite suddenly, and there is nothing to be
done but to go. It is something to do with Exegesis, if you
please! There is a mistake in Exegesis, you know,--in the New
Version. It seems to me a pretty Old Version by this time,
but father has always been stirred up about it. He has been
corresponding with a German Professor for a year or two on this
burning subject. I have an inarticulate suspicion that, between
them, they mean to write the New Testament over again. Could they
do another Version? How many Versions _can_ be versed?
“I never graduated, you know; I never even attended a Cesarea
Anniversary in my life (and you can’t think how it shocked the
Trustees at dinner, and _that_ was such fun, so I kept on not
going!), and I can’t be expected to fathom these matters. Anyhow,
it is mixed up with the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel, and
the Effect of German Rationalism upon the Evangelical Faith. It
is a reason full of capital letters and Orthodoxy,--and go he
will. He won’t leave mother behind, for he is one of the men who
believe in living with their wives; he’s just as dependent on
his womenkind when he’s engaged in a theological row, as a boy
who’s got hurt at football; and I’ve got to go to take care of
the two of them. So there it is! I think there is a convention in
Berlin--an Exegetical Something--anyhow, there’s a date, and live
up to it we must. He has sublet the Flying Jib to the Prudential
Committee of the A. B. C. F. M.--I mean to one of it, with six
grandchildren. Think how they’ll punch their fists through our
lace curtains! I wish you’d go down and tell Mr. Salt they shan’t
have my dory. Couldn’t you manage to use it yourself? And I--I
can’t take Joey Slip to the circus, nor sit down in sackcloth on
the ashes of Christlove Chapel to help you.
“Truly, dear friend, I _meant_ to help this summer. And I am
disappointed, if you care to know it.
“Yours faithfully,
“HELEN CARRUTH.
“I forgot to say that father has doubled up his lectures, and the
Trustees have given him the whole summer term. This, I believe, is
in view of the importance of the quarrel over the Fourth Gospel.
We sail in the Scythia a week from Saturday.”
* * * * *
It was early afternoon of the next day, when Helen, standing in
her window to draw the shades, glanced over automatically at the
third-story northwest corner front of Galilee Hall. The room had
long since been occupied by a middler with blue spectacles and a
peaked beard; a long-legged fellow, who was understood to be a
Hebrew scholar, and quite Old School, and was expected to fill a
large parish without offending the senior deacon. Privately, Helen
hated the middler. But the eye that had learned to wander at sunset
across the Seminary “yard” to the window blazing in gold and glory,
had slowly unlearned the lesson of its brief and pleasant habit.
Even yet, on blue-white winter days, when life stood still to
freeze on Cesarea Hill, Helen found herself drearily looking at the
glittering glass--as one looks at the smile on a face from which
the soul has fled.
It was still many hours to sunset, and the early April afternoon
fell gustily and gray upon the snows of Cesarea. It was not a sunny
day, and Cesarea was at her worst. Helen idly watched a figure
splashing through two feet of slush “across lots” over the Seminary
grounds from the Trustees’ Hotel.
“A post-graduate,” she thought, “back on a visit. Or, more
likely, a minister without a pulpit, coming to Cesarea after
a parish, or places to supply. Probably he has seven children
and a mother-in-law to support. If he’s ‘sound’ he’ll come to
Father--no--yes. Why, _yes_!”
She drew suddenly back from the window. It was Emanuel Bayard.
He waded through the slush as quickly as so tired a man could. He
had walked from the station, saving his coach fare, and had made
but feint of being a guest at the hotel, where he had not dined.
He was not quite prepared to let Helen know that he had lunched on
cold johnny-cake and dried beef, put up by Mrs. Granite in a red
cotton doily, and tenderly pinned over by Jane with a safety-pin.
He lifted his eyes to the gloomy landscape for illumination, which
it denied him. He knew no more than the snow professor what he
should do, what he should say, no, nor why he had lapsed into this
great weakness, and come to Cesarea at all. He felt as if he might
make, indeed, a mortal mistake, one way or the other. He pleaded to
himself that he must see her face once more, or perish. Nature was
mightier than he, and drove him on, as it drives the strongest of
us in those reactions from our strenuous vow and sternest purpose,
for which we have lacked the simple foresight to provide in our
plan of life.
There was a new snow professor, by the way, comfortably melting
before the pump beside the Academy commons. He had been considered
sounder than any of his predecessors, and had been supplied
with a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which he perused
with a corncob pipe between his lips of ice. A Westminster
catechism ornamented his vest pocket. He was said to have slumped
beautifully, when the thaw came.
Bayard shot a tolerant smile at the snow professor’s remains, as he
came up the steps.
Helen herself answered his ring. Both of them found this so natural
that neither commented upon this little act of friendliness.
The Professor was at his lecture; and Mrs. Carruth was making her
final appearance at certain local Cesarea charities; principally,
to-day, at the Association for Assisting Indigent Married Students
with blankets and baby-clothes. Helen explained these facts with
her usual irreverence, as she ushered her visitor into the parlor.
“If I had a fortune,” she observed, “I would found a society in
Cesarea for making it a Penal Offence for a Married Man to Study
for the Ministry without a Visible Income. The title is a little
long, don’t you think? How could we shorten it? It’s worse than the
Cruelty to Animals thing. Mr. Bayard?--why, Mr. Bayard!”
When she saw the expression of his face, her own changed with
remorseful swiftness.
“You are perfectly right,” he said with sudden, smiting
incisiveness. “You are more than right. It is the greatest act of
folly of my life that I am here.”
He stood still, and looked at her. The despair she saw in his eyes
seemed to her a measureless, bottomless thing.
“I _had_ to come,” he said. “How could I let you go, without--you
_must_ see that I had to look upon your face once more. Forgive
me--dear!”
Her chin trembled, at the lingering of that last, unlooked-for word.
“I have tried,” said Bayard slowly. “_You_ won’t misunderstand me
if I say I have tried to do the best I can, at Windover; and I have
failed in it,” he added bitterly, “from every point of view, and in
every way!”
“As much as that,” said Helen, “happened to the Founder of the
Christian religion. You are presumptuous if you expect anything
different.”
“You are right,” answered Bayard, with that instinctive humility
which was at once the strongest and the sweetest thing about him.
“I accept your rebuke.”
“Oh,” cried Helen, holding out her hands, “I _couldn’t_ rebuke you!
I”--she faltered.
“You see,” said Bayard slowly, “that’s just the difference, the
awful, infinite difference. All His difficulties were from the
outside.”
“How do you know that?” asked Helen quickly.
“I don’t,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “I don’t know. But I have
been accustomed to think so. Perhaps I am under the traditions
yet; perhaps I am no nearer right than the other Christians I have
separated myself from. But mine, you see--my obstacles, the things
that make it so hard--the only thing that makes it seem impossible
for me to go on--is within myself. You don’t suppose He ever loved
a woman--as I--love you? It’s impossible!” cried the young man.
“Why, there are times when it seems to me that if the salvation of
the world hung in one scale, and you in the other--as if I--” He
finished by a blinding look. Her face drooped, but did not fall.
He could see her fingers tremble. “It was something,” he went on
dully, “to see you; to know that I--why, all winter I have lived on
it, on the knowledge that summer was coming--that you--Oh, _you_
can’t know! _You_ can’t understand! I could bear all the rest!” he
cried. “This--this--”
His sentence broke, and was never completed; for Helen looked up
into his face. It was ashen, and all its muscles were set like
stiffening clay. She lifted her eyes and gave them to him.
“I do understand.... I _do_,” she breathed. “Would it make you any
happier if you knew--if I should tell you--of course, I know what
you said; that we can’t ... but would it be any easier if I should
tell you that I have loved you all the time?”