The summer slid, Bayard knew not how. They separated as so many
confused lovers do in the complicated situations of our later life;
wherein we love no longer in the old, outright, downright way, when
men and women took each other for better, for worse, and dared
to run the risk of loving, without feeling responsible for the
consequences. We are past all that; and whether it is the worse or
the better for us, who shall say?
At least, these two had the healthy ring to their love; in that
great and simple feeling was no delinquency or default. Bayard did
not hesitate or quibble--one day a lover, the next a prudential
committee, after the fashion of such feeble mathematicians as go by
the name of men, to-day. He was incapable of calculating his high
passion; there was no room in his soul or body for a doubt to take
on lease of life. He loved her; as the greatest of women might be
proud and humble to be loved; as the smallest would be vain to be.
He loved her too much to make her miserable; and he knew, with that
dreary, practical perception of the truth sometimes but rarely
granted to men of the seer’s temperament, that he could not make
her happy. Between love and joy a dead wall shut down; it seemed
to him to reach from the highest heavens to the waters under
the earth. What elemental chaos could rend it? What miracle was
foreordained to shatter it? Would the busy finger of God stretch
out to touch it?
“God knows,” he wrote her. “And He purposes, I am fain to believe,
if He purposes anything we do or suffer. The hour may come, and
the way _might_ clear. More incredible things have happened to men
and women loving less than we. If I can, I claim you when I can.
Oh, wait for me, and trust me! Life is so short; it is not easy.
Sometimes madness enters into me, to fling all these cold, these
cruel considerations, these things we call honor, unselfishness,
chivalry, to the gales.... Then I come to myself. I will not wrong
you. Help me to bear to live without you till I see your face
again.”
Helen wrote him noble letters; brave, womanly, and as trustful as
the swing of the earth in its orbit. It is not too much to say
that few women in her place would have shown the strong composure
of this ardent girl. The relation between acknowledged lovers
unbetrothed is one whose difficulty only an inspired delicacy can
control. Helen’s clear eyes held no shadows. The dark wing of
regret for a moment’s weakness never brushed between her heart and
this Sir Galahad who loved her like man and spirit too. Few women
reared as she had been would have trusted the man as she did; we
may add that fewer men would have deserved it.
Emanuel Bayard did. Her heart knew him for one of the sons of
light, who will not, because he cannot, cause the woman whom he
loves an hour’s regret that she has believed in him utterly and
told him so. Now, the value of a woman’s intuition in most of the
problems or relations of life cannot be overestimated; when she
loves, it is the least reliable of her attributes or qualities.
Helen in her composed way recognized this fact perfectly, but it
gave her no uneasiness.
“My own perception might fail me,” she wrote. “You could not. It is
not my own sense of what is best to do that I am trusting, in this:
it is you.”
When he read these words, he put the paper to his lips, and laid
his face upon it, and covered it from the sight even of his own
eyes.
The date of Professor Carruth’s return was set for early October.
In September Bayard received from Helen the news that her mother
had met with an accident--a fall; an arm was broken, and, at the
age of the patient, the surgeon forbade the voyage. The Professor
would get back to his lecture-room, as he must. The two ladies were
indefinitely delayed in Berlin.
* * * * *
The winter proved a bleak one, and went with Bayard as was to be
expected. The devotee had yet to learn how a woman’s absence may
work upon a lover; but of this, since he had no right to do so, he
did not complain. Headlong, fathoms down into his work he leaped,
and with the diver’s calm he did the diver’s duty. The new chapel
progressed after the manner of its kind. Bayard had peremptorily
insisted upon the severest economy of plan, demanding a building
which should be a “shelter for worship,” he said, and nothing more.
Not a waste dollar went into architecture. Not a shingle went into
debt. No mortgage desecrated the pulpit of Christlove Church. He
built what he could pay for, and nothing more. The dedication of
the building was expected to take place in the spring.
Meanwhile, his audiences grew upon his hands; and Windover First
Church looked darkly at Windover town hall. Orthodoxy, decorum,
property, position, gazed at gaping pews, and regretted that “these
temperance movements estranged themselves from the churches.”
Obscurity, poverty, religious doubt, sin and shame and repentance
jammed the aisles to hear “the Christman” interpret decency and
dignity and the beauty of holiness. He spoke to these, not with the
manner of preachers, but with the lips and heart of a man. Week
after week strange, unkempt, unlettered seamen poured in; they
stood sluggishly, like forming lava, to listen to him. Certain of
his audiences would have honored Whitefield or Robertson. Bayard’s
soul seemed that winter alight with a sacred conflagration. He
prayed and wrought for Windover as a tongue of flame goes up to
the sky--because it was the law of life and fire. It is pathetic
to think, now, how it would have comforted the man if he had known
how much they loved him--these undemonstrative people of the sea,
for whom he gave himself. The half of it was never told him.
Censure, and scorn, and scandal, and the fighting of foes in the
dark, he knew. The real capacity for affection and loyalty which
existed in the rough, warm heart of Windover he sometimes thought
he understood. He did not see--as we see now--that he had won this
allegiance.
This was the more obscure to him because the tension between
himself and the liquor interests of Windover was growing quietly
into a serious thing, and heavily occupied his attention. And here
we know that he was seldom deceived or blinded.
His methods were deliberate, his moves were intelligent, he ran no
stupid risks, he measured his dangers, he took them in the name
of good citizenship and good Christianity, and strode on to their
consequences with that martial step characteristic of him. Of this
chapter of the winter’s story, he wrote little or nothing to Helen.
She heard how the chapel grew, how the library gathered, and the
smoking-room was fitted; about the hope of a gymnasium, the vision
of a bowling-alley, the schedule for lectures and entertainments;
all his dreams and schemes to give homeless and tempted men shelter
and happiness under the rising roof of Christlove;--all the little
pleasures and hopes of the missionary life she shared, as Helen
had it in her to share the serious energy of a man’s life. Upon the
subject of the dangers he was silent. The extent to which these
existed she could not measure; for Helen belonged to those social
and religious circles into whose experience the facts in the remote
lives of that worthy class of people known as temperance agitators
do not enter. She had no traditions to enlighten her, and her own
joyous nature vaguely filled in the darker outlines of her lover’s
life. How should the summer girl understand the winter Windover?
She thought of Bayard’s real situation with little more vividness
than if he had been a missionary in Darkest Africa. Pleasant
sketches of Job Slip and Joey, little reminiscences of Captain Hap,
and Lena, pretty, womanly plans for replacing the burned furniture
and decorations flitted across the leisurely continental tour by
which she escorted her mother homewards. Mrs. Carruth was now quite
recovered, but had developed the theory that the dangers of a
midwinter voyage were lessened by every week’s delay. As a result,
the two ladies engaged passage in February, at the height of the
gales.
It was a bitter winter. Two hundred Windover fishermen were
drowned; and poverty of the dreariest kind sat sullenly in the
tragic town. Bayard worked till he staggered for the women and
children whom the sea bereft. Afterwards a cry went up out of
scores of desolated homes which told what the man had been and
done in Windover, when the gales went down.
One night, a short time before Helen was to sail, there happened
to Bayard one of those little mysteries which approach us so
much oftener than we recognize them, that we have never properly
classified them; and may be long yet in doing so.
He had been in his own rooms since noon; for there was a heavy
snowstorm on, and he was conscious of obvious physical inability
to brave the weather unless the call of duty should be louder than
a certain oppression on his lungs, which he had been forced of
late to recognize more often than usual. It was a gray day at Mrs.
Granite’s. Jane was sad, and coughed. Her mother had cried a good
deal of late, and said that “Jane was goin’ off like her Aunt Annie
before her.”
Ben Trawl came sullenly and seldom, now, to see the reluctant girl.
Mrs. Granite thought if Jane could go to her Aunt Annie’s second
cousin Jenny in South Carolina, for a spell, she would be cured;
but Mrs. Granite said climate was only meant for rich folks; she
said you lived and died here in Windover, if your lungs was anyways
delicate, like frozen herring packed into a box. She was almost
epigrammatic--for Mrs. Granite.
Bayard had been sitting in his study-chair, writing steadily, while
his mind, with his too sensitive sympathy, followed the fortunes of
these poor women who made him all the home he knew. It was towards
six o’clock, and darkening fast. The noise on the beach opposite
the cottage was heavy; and the breakers off Ragged Rock boomed
mightily.
Snow was falling so thickly that he could not see the water.
The fog-bell was tolling, and yells of agony came from the
whistling-buoy. It was one of the days when a man delicately
reared winces with a soreness impossible to be understood unless
experienced, from life in a place and in a position like his; when
the uncertain value of the ends of sacrifice presents itself to the
mind like the spatter from a stream of vitriol; when the question,
Is what I achieve worth its cost? burns in upon the bravest soul,
and gets no answer for its scorching.
Bayard laid down his pen and paper, and looked patiently out of the
window; putting his empty hand in his pocket as he did so.
His eyes gazed into the curtain of the whirling snow. He wondered
how far out to sea it extended; how many miles of it dashed between
himself and Helen. It was one of the hours when she seemed to fill
the world.
The snowflakes took on fantastic shapes--so! That was the way she
held out her white hands. The soft trailing of her gown sounded
in the room. If he turned his head, should he see her standing,
a vision in purple and gold, smiling, warm, and sweet? It would
be such a disappointment not to find her! Rather believe that he
should, if he would, and so not stir.
Suddenly his hand in his own pocket struck an object whose
character he did not at the moment recall. He drew it out and
looked at it. It was the key of his old home in Beacon Street.
For three years, perhaps, he had not thought of his uncle’s words:
“Keep your latch-key. You will want to use it, some day.”
Bayard regarded the latch-key steadily. The senseless thing burned
his palm as if it were trying to articulate.
He never sought to explain to himself, and I see no reason why we
should explain for him, the subtile meaning which went from the
metal to the man.
The key said, “Go!”
And Bayard went. He made such efforts as all cool-headed people
make, to buffet the inexplicable, and to resist an unreasonable
impression. But, after an hour’s protest with himself, he yielded
to the invisible summons.
“It is a long while since I have seen my uncle,” he reasoned. “This
may be as good a time as any other to look him up.”
He dressed for the storm, and took the nine o’clock train to Boston.
It was blowing a blizzard when he arrived in town; and eleven
o’clock. He took a carriage and drove to his uncle’s house. The
lights were out on the front of the house, and the servants asleep.
Bayard stood a moment irresolute. The folly of his undertaking
presented itself to him with emphasis, now he was there. He could
not tell when he had yielded to any of that class of highly wrought
emotions which we call presentiments, or “leadings.” Impatient with
himself, and suddenly vividly aware that Mr. Hermon Worcester was
a man who particularly objected to being disturbed in his sleep,
Bayard was about to call the cab back to take him away, when he
perceived that the driver had started off, and was laboring heavily
up Beacon Street, with the snow to the hubs of the wheels. (Who has
ever fathomed the inscrutable mind of the Boston cabman who has
to be snowed under, before he will get on runners?) Resisting no
longer, Bayard softly put his key in the lock.
It creaked a little, for it had grown rusty in the Windover salts,
but the boy’s key turned in the man’s hand, and admitted him
loyally into his old home.
The hall was dark, and the house still. He brushed off the snow in
silence, and stood wondering what to do next. He felt mortified at
his own lack of good sense.
Why was he here? And what reason could he give for this stupendous
foolishness? He dripped on the Persian rugs awhile, and, finding
neither enlightenment nor consolation in this moist occupation,
proceeded to take off his overcoat and hang it on his own nail on
the mahogany hat-tree under the stairs. When had such a shabby
overcoat put that venerable piece of furniture to the blush?
Never, if one excepted the case of the Vermont clergyman who had
been known to take a lunch with his benefactor, and who received a
barrel of old clothes the following week. Bayard hung up his wet
hat, too, in the old place, took off his shoes, and crept upstairs
in his stockings, as he had done--how many hundred nights, coming
home from Cambridge, late, in college days?
His uncle’s door was closed, but to his surprise, he found the door
of his own room open. He crept in. It seemed warm and pleasant--how
incredibly pleasant and natural! The register seemed to be open.
Oh, the luxury of a furnace! The wet and tired man crawled up,
feeling his way in the familiar dark, and got down by the register.
He remembered where the safety-matches used to be, that struck, and
made no sound. Groping, he found them, in their paper match-box,
set within the old bronze one. He struck one, softly, and looked
about. In the little flare he saw that the room was just as it had
always been. Nothing was changed or disturbed, except that his
books had gone to Mrs. Granite’s. His bed lay turned back, open for
the night, as it always was; the big, soft pillow, the luxurious
mattresses, the light warmth of the snowy blankets, invited him.
His mother’s picture hung over the head of his bed. Those old pipes
and silk menus and college traps and trifles were crossed on the
wall by the bureau; his gun was there, and his fishing-rods.
Bayard was about to yield to his weariness, and crawl into his
own bed, thinking to see his uncle in the morning, as a sane man
should, when his attention was attracted by a slight sound in Mr.
Worcester’s room, and something about it struck the young man
unpleasantly.
Without noise he opened the door of the bath-room intervening
between his own and his uncle’s apartments. Then he perceived a
crack of light at the threshold of Mr. Worcester’s closed door.
As he stood uncertain, and troubled, the sound which he had heard
was repeated. It seemed to resemble the effort of difficult
breathing, and was accompanied by a slight groan.