Helen was to sail for Boston the following Saturday. It lacked
three days of that date. It being out of the question to reach her,
now, by letter, Bayard cabled to her:--
Will meet you arrival steamer. Future clear before me. I await
you.
E. B.
To this impulsive message he found himself expecting a reply. The
wan missionary had burst into a boyish and eager lover. Oh, that
conscientious, cruel past! He dashed it from him. He plunged into
the freedom of his heart. In honor--in his delicate honor--he could
win her, now.
Helen did not answer the cable message. A hundred hindrances might
have prevented her; yet he had believed she would. He thought of
her ardent, womanly candor, her beautiful courage, her noble trust.
It did not occur to him that a woman has two natures, this for the
unfortunate and that for the fortunate lover. One he had tasted;
the other he had yet to know.
He vibrated restlessly to and fro between Windover and Boston,
where his presence was urgently required in the settlement of his
uncle’s affairs. A snowstorm set in, and increased to a gale. Ten
days passed, somehow. The steamer was due in twenty-four hours. She
did not arrive.
Bayard had lived in Windover long enough to acquire the intelligent
fear of the sea which characterizes the coast; and when the next
day went, and another, and the boat was admitted at headquarters
to be three days overdue, he suffered the unspeakable. It had been
nothing less than a terrible midwinter gale. Wrecks lined the
coast; glasses scoured it; watchers thronged it; friends besieged
the offices of the steamship company. The great line which boasted
that it had never lost a life held its stanchest steamer three
days--four days overdue.
It was like him that he did not overlook his duty in his trouble,
but stood to his post, and remembered the little service appointed
for that most miserable evening when he was expected to be with his
people. Those who were present that night say that the scene was
one impossible to forget. Looking more like death than life, the
preacher prayed before them “to the God of the sea.”
Now, for the first time, he felt that he knew what Windover could
suffer. Now the torment of women all their lives watching for
returning sails entered into his soul; those aged men looking for
the sons who never came back; the blurred eyes peering off Windover
Point to see the half-mast flag on the schooner as she tacked up
the bay; the white lips that did not ask, when the boat came to
anchor, “Which is it?” because they dared not--all this, now, he
understood.
His personal anguish melted into the great sum of misery in the
seaport town.
“If she comes back to me,” he thought, “how I shall work for
them--my poor people!”
Now, for the first time, this devout, unselfish man understood
that something else than consecration is needed to do the best
and greatest thing by the human want or woe that leans upon us.
Now that he took hold on human experience, he saw that he had
everything to learn from it. The knowledge of a great love, the
lesson of the common tie that binds the race together--these taught
him, and he was their docile scholar.
Five days overdue!... Six days. Bayard had gone back to Boston,
to haunt the offices and the docks. Old friends met him among the
white-lipped watchers, and a classmate said:--
“Thank God, Bayard, _you_ haven’t wife and child aboard her.”