“_They’ve sighted her!... She’s in!_”
Then came the hurrah. Shouts of joy reëchoed about him. But
Bayard’s head fell upon his breast in silence. At that moment he
was touched upon the arm by a beautiful Charter Oak cane, and,
looking up, he saw the haggard face of the Professor of Theology.
“I was belated,” thickly articulated the Professor with dry
lips. “I came straight from the lecture-room. It is the course
on the ‘Nature of Eternal Punishment,’--a most important course.
I felt it my duty to be at my desk. But--Bayard, I think I shall
substitute to-morrow my lecture (perhaps you may recall it) on the
‘Benevolence and Beneficence of God.’”
The two men leaped into the tug together, and ploughed out to the
steamer.
Helen was forward, leaning on the rail. Her thick steamer-dress
blew like muslin in the heavy wind. Her eyes met Bayard’s
first--yes, first. Her father came in second, but his were too dim
to know it.
“Mother is in the cabin, dear Papa!” cried Helen; “we have to keep
her warm and still, you know.”
His daughter’s precious kiss invited him, but the old man put Helen
gently aside, and dashed after his old wife.
For that moment Helen and Bayard stood together. Before all the
world he would have taken her in his arms, but she retreated a
little step.
“Did you get my message?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Did you answer it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought it would do just as well when I got here.”
“And you might have been--you might never have got here at all!”
cried Bayard fiercely.
“Have you been anxious?” asked Helen demurely.
He did not think it was in her to coquette with a man in a moment
like that, and he made her no reply. Then Helen looked full in his
face, and saw the havoc on it.
“Oh, you poor boy!” she whispered; “you poor, poor boy!”
* * * * *
This was in the afternoon; and he was compelled to see her carried
off to Cesarea on her father’s arm, without him. There was no help
for it; and he waited till the next day, unreconciled and nervous
in the extreme. He had been so overworn and overwrought, that his
mind took on feverish fancies.
“Something may happen by to-morrow,” he thought, “and I shall have
never--once”--
He rebuked even his own thought, even then, for daring to dream of
the touch of her lips. But the dream rode over his delicacy, and
rushed on.
At an early hour the next day he went to Cesarea, and sought her
in her father’s house. It was a cold, dry, bright day. Cesarea
shivered under her ermine. The Professor’s house was warm with the
luxurious, even warmth of the latest modern heater, envied by the
rest of the Faculty, in the old-fashioned, draughty houses of the
Professors’ Row. Flowers in the little window conservatory of the
drawing-room breathed the soft air easily, and were of rich growth
and color. Helen was watering the flowers. She colored when she
saw him, and put down the silver pitcher which she had abstracted
from the breakfast-room for the purpose of encouraging her lemon
verbena, that had, plainly, missed her while she was abroad. She
wore a purple morning-gown with plush upon it. She had a royal look.
“How early you have come!” she said half complainingly.
He paid no attention to her tone, but deliberately shut the door,
and advanced towards her.
“I have come,” he said, “to _stay_; that is--if you will let me,
Helen.”
“Apparently,” answered Helen, taking up the pitcher, “I am not
allowed a choice in the matter.”
But he saw that the silver pitcher shook in her hand.
“No,” he said firmly, “I do not mean to give you any choice. I mean
to take you. I do not mean to wait one hour more.”
He held out his arms, but suspended them, not touching her. The
very air which he imprisoned around her seemed to clasp her. She
trembled in that intangible embrace.
“It will be a poor man’s home, Helen--but you will not suffer. I
can give you common comforts. I cabled to you the very hour that I
knew.... Oh, I have trusted your trust!” he said.
“And you _may_ trust it,” whispered Helen, suddenly lifting her
eyes.
His, it seemed to her, were far above her--how blinding beautiful
joy made them!
Then his starved arms closed about her, and his lips found hers.
* * * * *
The Professor of Theology sat in his study. The winter sun struck
his loaded shelves; the backs of his books inspected him tenderly.
At the western window, on the lady’s desk which was reserved for
Mrs. Carruth, her sewing-basket stood. The Professor glanced at
it contentedly. He had never been separated from his wife so long
before, and they had been married thirty-five years. She had
unpacked that basket and taken it into the study that morning,
with a girlish eagerness to sit down and darn a stocking while the
Professor wrote.
“This is a great gratification, Statira,” he had said.
Mrs. Carruth had gone out, now, to engage in the familiar delights
of a morning contest with the Cesarea butcher, and the Professor
was alone when Emanuel Bayard sturdily knocked at the study door.
The Professor welcomed the young man with some surprise, but no
uncertain warmth. He expressed himself as grateful for the prompt
attention of his former pupil, on the joyful occasion of this
family reunion.
“And it was kind of you, Bayard, too--meeting the ladies on that
tug. I was most agreeably surprised. I was wishing yesterday--in
fact, it occurred to me what a comfort some young fellow would have
been whom I could have sent down, all those anxious days. But we
never had a son. Pray sit down, Mr. Bayard.... I am just reading
the opinions of Olshausen on a most interesting point. I have
collected valuable material in Berlin. I shall be glad to talk it
over with you. I found Professor Kammelschkreiter a truly scholarly
man. His views on the errors in the Revised Version are the most
instructed of any I have met.”
“Professor,” said Bayard stoutly, “will you pardon me if I
interrupt you for a minute? I have come on a most important matter.
I am sorry to seem uncivil, but the fact is I--I cannot wait
another moment, sir.... Sir, I have the honor to tell you that your
daughter has consented to become my wife.”
At this truly American declaration, the Professor of Theology laid
down his copy of Olshausen, and stared at the heretic missionary.
“_My_ daughter!” he gasped, “_your_ wife?--I beg your pardon,” he
added, when he saw the expression of Bayard’s face. “But you have
taken me altogether by surprise. I may say that such a possibility
has never--no, never once so much as occurred to me.”
“I have loved her,” said Bayard tenaciously, “for three years.
I have never been able to ask her to marry me till now. I think
perhaps my uncle meant to make it possible for me to do so, but I
do not know. I am still a poor man, sir, but I can keep her from
suffering. She does me the undeserved honor to love me, and she
asked me to tell you so.”
The Professor had risen and was pacing the study hotly. His face
was rigid. He waved his thin, long fingers impatiently at Bayard’s
words.
“Scholars do not dwell upon paltry, pecuniary facts like parents
in lower circles of society!” cried the Professor with superbly
unconscious hauteur. “There would have lacked nothing to my
daughter’s comfort, sir, in any event--if the right man had wooed
her. I was not the father to refuse him mere pecuniary aid to
Helen’s happiness.”
“And I was not the lover to ask for it,” observed Bayard proudly.
“Hum--m--m,” said the Professor. He stopped his walk across the
study floor, and looked at Bayard with troubled respect.
“I will not take her from you at once,” urged Bayard gently; “we
will wait till fall--if I can. She has said that she will become my
wife, then.”
His voice sank. He spoke the last words with a delicate reverence
which would have touched a ruder father than the Professor of
Theology.
“Bayard,” he said brokenly, “you always were my favorite student.
I couldn’t help it. I always felt a certain tenderness for you.
I respect your intellectual traits, and your spiritual quality.
Poverty, sir? What is _poverty_? But, Bayard, _you are not sound_!”
Against this awful accusation Bayard had no reply; and the old
Professor turned about ponderously, like a man whose body refused
to obey the orders of his shocked and stricken mind.
“How can I see my daughter, _my_ daughter, the wife of a man whom
the Ancient Faith has cast out?” he pleaded piteously.
He lifted his shrunken hands, as if he reasoned before an invisible
tribunal. His attitude and expression were so solemn that Bayard
felt it impossible to interrupt the movement by any mere lover’s
plea. Perhaps, for the first time, he understood then what it meant
to the old man to defend the beliefs that had ruled the world of
his youth and vigor; he perceived that they, too, suffered who
seemed to be the inflicters of suffering; that they, too, had their
Calvary--these determined souls who doggedly died by the cross of
the old Faith in whose shelter their fathers and their fathers’
fathers had lived and prayed, had battled and triumphed. Bayard
felt that his own experience at that moment was an intrusion upon
the sanctuary of a sacred struggle. He bowed his head before his
Professor, and left the study in silence.
But Helen, who had the small reverence for the theologic drama
characteristic of those who have been reared upon its stage, put
her beautiful arms around his neck and, laughing, whispered:--
“Leave the whole system of Old School Orthodoxy to me! I can
manage!”
“You may manage him,” smiled Bayard, “but can you manage _it_?”
“Wait a day, and see!” said Helen.
He would have waited a thousand for the kiss with which she lifted
up the words.
The next day she wrote him, at Windover, where he was dutifully
trying to preach as if nothing had happened:--
“Papa says I have never been quite sound myself, and that he
supposes I will do as I please, as I always have.”
There followed a little love-letter, so deliciously womanly and
tender, that Bayard did not for hours open the remainder of his
mail. When he did so, he read what the Professor of Theology had
written, after a night of prayer and vigil such as only aged
parents know.
“MY DEAR BAYARD,” the letter said,--“Take her if you must, and
God be with you both! I cannot find it in my heart to impose
the shadow of my religious convictions upon the happiness of my
child. I can battle for the Truth with men and with demons. I
cannot fight with the appeal of a woman’s love. I would give my
life to make Helen happy, and to keep her so. Do you as much!
Yours sincerely,
“HAGGAI CARRUTH.
“P.S.--We will resume our discussion on the views of Professor
Kammelschkreiter at some more convenient season.”