Early June came to Windover joyously that year. May had been a
gentle month, warmer than its wont, and the season was in advance
of its schedule.
Mrs. Carruth, found paling a little, and thought to be less strong
since her accident abroad, had been ordered to the seaside some
three or four weeks before the usual flitting of the family. Helen
accompanied her; the Professor ran down as often as he might,
till Anniversary Week should set him free to move his ponderously
increasing manuscript on the “Errors in the Revised Version” from
Cesarea to the clam study. The long lace curtains blew in and out
of the windows of the Flying Jib; Helen’s dory glittered in two
coats of fresh pale-yellow paint upon the float; and Helen, in
pretty summer gowns of corn color, or violet, or white, listened
on the piazza for the foot-ring of her lover. She was lovely that
spring, with the loveliness of youth and joy. Bayard watched her
through a mist of that wonder and that worship which mark the
highest altitudes of energy in a man’s life. It was said that he
had never wrought for Windover, in all his lonely time of service
there, as he did in those few glorified weeks.
It is pleasant to think that the man had this draught of human
rapture; that he tasted the brim of such joy as only the high soul
in the ardent nature knows.
Helen offered him her tenderness with a sweet reserve, alternating
between compassion for what he had suffered, and moods of pretty,
coquettish economy of his present privilege, that taunted and
enraptured him by turns. He floated on clouds; he trod on the
summer air.
Their marriage was appointed for September: it was Helen’s wish to
wait till then; and he submitted with such gentleness as it wrung
her heart, afterwards, to remember.
“We will have one perfectly happy summer,” she pleaded. “People can
be lovers but once.”
“And newly wed but once,” he answered gravely.
“Dear,” said Helen, with troubled eyes, “it shall be as you say.
_You_ shall decide.”
“God will decide it,” replied the lover unexpectedly.
His eyes had a look which Helen could not follow. She felt shut out
from it; and both were silent.
Her little dreams and plans occupied hours of their time together.
She was full of schemes for household comfort and economy, for
serving his people, for blessing Windover. She talked of what could
be done for Job Slip and Mari, Joey, Lena, Captain Hap and Johnny’s
mother, Mrs. Granite and poor Jane. Her mind dwelt much upon all
these children of the sea who had grown into his heart. “Jane,” she
said, “should have her winter in the South.” She spoke of Jane with
a reticent but special gentleness. They would rent the cottage;
they would furnish the old dreary rooms.
Helen did not come to her poor man quite empty-handed. The
Professor had too much of the pride of total depravity left in him
for that.
“I shall be able to buy my own gowns, sir, if you please!” she
announced prettily. “And I am going to send Mrs. Granite--with
Jane--to her aunt Annie’s cousin Jenny’s (was that it?) in South
Carolina, next winter, to get over that Windover cough. We’ve got
to go ourselves, if _you_ don’t stop coughing. No? We’ll see!”
“I _shall_ stop coughing,” cried Bayard joyously.
She did not contradict him, for she believed in Love the Healer, as
the young and the beloved do. So she went dreaming on.
“I came across a piece of gold tissue in Florence; it will make
such a pretty portière in place of that old mosquito-net! And we’ll
make those dismal old rooms over into”--
And Bayard, who had thought never to know Paradise on earth, but
only to toil for Heaven, closed her sentence by one ecstatic word.
The completion of the chapel, still delayed after the fashion of
contractors, was approaching the belated dedication day of which
all Windover talked, and for which a growing portion of Windover
interested itself. Bayard was over-busy for a newly betrothed
man. His hours with Helen were shortened; his brief snatches of
delight marked spaces between days of care. Erected upon the site
of the burned building, the new chapel rose sturdily in the thick
and black of Angel Alley. The old, illuminated, swinging sign
remained,--“for luck,” the fishermen said. It was to be lighted on
the day when the first service should be held in the new Christlove.
There came a long, light evening, still in the early half of June.
Bayard was holding some service or lecture in the town, and had
late appointments with his treasurer, with Job Slip, and Captain
Hap. He saw no prospect of freedom till too late an hour to call on
Helen, and had gone down to tell her so; had bade her good-night,
and left her. She had gone out rowing, in the delicious loneliness
of a much loved and never neglected girl, and was turning the bow
of the dory homewards. She drifted and rowed by turns, idle and
happy, dreamy and sweet. It was growing dark, and the boats were
setting shorewards. One, she noticed (a rough, green fishing-dory
from the town), lay, rudely held by a twist of the painter, to the
cliffs, at the left, below the float. The dory was empty. A sailor
hat and an old tan-colored reefer lay on the stern seat. Two girls
sat on the rocks, sheltered in one of the deep clefts or chasms
which cut the North Shore, talking earnestly together. One of them
had her foot upon the painter. Neither of them noticed Helen; she
glanced at them without curiosity, rowed in, tossed her painter
to the keeper of the float, and went up to the house. Her father
was in Windover that night; he and her mother were discussing the
inconceivable prospect of an Anniversary without entertaining the
Trustees; they were quite absorbed in this stupendous event. Helen
strolled out again, and off upon the cliff.
She had but just tossed her Florentine slumber-robe of yellow silk
upon the rocks, and thrown herself upon it, when voices reached her
ear. Eavesdropping is an impossible crime on Windover Point, where
the cliffs are common trysting-ground; still, Helen experienced a
slight discomfort, and was about to exchange her rock for some less
public position, when she caught a word which struck the blood to
her heart, and back again, like a smart, stinging blow.
The voices were the voices of two girls. The stronger and the
bolder was speaking.
“So I come to tell you. Do as you please. If _you_ don’t let on, I
shall.”
“Lena!” groaned the other, “are you sure? Isn’t there some mistake?”
“Not a ---- chance of any,” replied Lena promptly. “Do you s’pose
I’d thrust myself upon you this way, and tell for nothin’? Lord,
_I_ know how decent girls feel, bein’ seen with the likes of me.
That’s why I set it after dark, and never come nigh your house.
Besides, _he’s_ there. I warn’t a-goin’ to make no talk, you better
believe, Jane Granite. I’ve seen enough o’ that.”
“Mr. Bayard says you are a--good girl, now,” faltered Jane, not
knowing what to say. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to be ashamed to
be seen with you--now. And I--I’m much obliged to you, Lena. Oh,
Lena! what ever in the world are we going to do?”
“Do?” said Lena sharply; “why, head ’em off; that’s all! It only
needs a little horse sense, and--to care enough. I’d be drownded in
the mud in the inner harbor in a land wind--I’d light a bonfire in
the powder factory, and stand by it, if that would do him any good.
I guess you would, too.”
Jane made no answer. She felt that this was a subject which could
not be touched upon with Lena. It was too dark to see how Jane
looked.
“Why,” said the other, “you’re shaking like a topsail in a breeze
o’ wind!”
“How do you mean? What is your plan? What do you mean to have me
do?” asked Jane, whose wits seemed to have dissolved in terror.
“Get him out of Windover,” coolly said Lena; “leastways for a
spell. Mebbe it’ll blow by. There ain’t but one thing I know
that’ll do it. Anyhow, there ain’t but one person.”
“I can’t think what you can mean!” feebly gasped Jane.
“_She_ can,” replied Lena tersely. Jane made a little inarticulate
moan. Lena went on rapidly.
“You go tell her. That’s what I come for. Nothin’ else--nor nobody
else--can do it. That’s your part of this infernal business. Mine’s
done. I’ve give you the warnin’. Now you go ahead.”
“Oh, are you _sure_?” repeated Jane weakly; “isn’t it _possible_
you’ve got it wrong, somehow?”
“Is it possible the dust in the street don’t hear the oaths of
Windover!” exclaimed Lena scornfully. “Do you s’pose there ain’t
a black deed doin’ or threatenin’ in Angel Alley that _I_ don’t
know? I tell you his life ain’t worth a red herrin’, no, nor a
bucketful of bait, if them fellars has their way in this town!...
It’s the loss of the license done it. It’s the last wave piled on.
It’s madded ’em to anything. It’s madded ’em to murder.... Lord,”
muttered Lena, “if it come to that, wouldn’t I be even with ’em!”
She grated her teeth, like an animal grinding a bone; took her foot
from the painter, sprang into the fishing-dory, and rowed with
quick, powerful strokes into the dark harbor.
Helen, without a moment’s hesitation, descended the cliff and
peremptorily said:--
“Jane, I heard it. Tell me all. Tell me everything, this minute.”
Jane who was sobbing bitterly, stopped like a child at a firm
word: and with more composure than she had yet shown, she gave her
version of Lena’s startling story.
Lena was right, she said; the rum people were very angry with Mr.
Bayard: he had got so many shops shut up; and other places; he had
shut up so much in Angel Alley this year. And now old Trawl had
lost his license. Folks said a man couldn’t make a decent living
there any longer.
“That’s what Ben said,” observed Jane, with a feeble sense of the
poignancy of the phrase. “A man couldn’t make an honest living
there, now. But there’s one thing,” added Jane with hanging head.
“Lena don’t know it. I couldn’t tell _Lena_. God have mercy on me,
for it’s me that helped it on!”
“I do not understand you, Jane,” replied Helen coldly; “how could
you injure Mr. Bayard, or have any connection with any plot to do
him harm?”
“I sent Ben off last Sunday night,” said Jane humbly. “I sent him
marching for good. I told him I never could marry him. I told him
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told him what I heard on Ragged
Rock--that night--last year.”
“What did you hear on Ragged Rock?” asked Helen, still distant and
doubtful.
“Didn’t the minister ever tell you?” replied Jane. “Then I won’t.”
“Very well,” said Helen, after an agitated silence, “I shall not
urge you. But if Mr. Bayard’s life is in _real_ danger--I cannot
believe it!” cried the sheltered, happy woman. Such scenes, such
possibilities, belonged to the stage, to fiction; not to New
England life. The Professor’s daughter had a healthy antagonism in
her to the excessive, the too dramatic. Her mind grasped the facts
of the situation so slowly that the Windover girl half pitied her.
“You don’t see,” said Jane. “You don’t understand. You ain’t
brought up as we are.”
“If Mr. Bayard is in danger--” repeated Helen. “Jane!” she cried
sharply, thinking to test the girl’s sincerity and judgment,
“should you have come and told me what Lena said, if I had not
overheard it?”
“Miss Carruth,” answered Jane, with a dignity of her own, “don’t
you know there is not one of his people who would not do _anything_
to save Mr. Bayard?”
Through the dark Jane turned her little, pinched face towards this
fortunate woman, this other girl, blessed and chosen. Her dumb eyes
grew bright, and flashed fire for that once; then they smouldered,
and their spaniel look came on again.
“You ought to speak differently to me,” she said. “You should feel
sorry for me, because it’s along of Ben. I tried to keep it up--all
this while. I haven’t dared to break with him. I thought if I
broke, and we’d been keeping company so long, maybe he might do a
harm to Mr. Bayard. Then it come to me that I couldn’t, couldn’t,
_couldn’t_ bear it, not another time! And I told him so. And Ben,
he swore an awful oath to me, and cleared out. And then Lena came
and told.”
“What was it Ben swore?” asked Helen, whose sanguine heart was
beginning to sink in earnest. “This is no time for being womanly,
and--and not saying things. If it takes all the oaths in the
catalogue of Angel Alley, it is my right to know what he said, and
it is your duty to tell me!”
“Well,” said Jane stolidly, “he said: ‘Damn him to hell! If we
ain’t a-goin’ to be married, he shan’t, neither!’”
“Thank you, Jane,” said Helen gently, after a long silence. She
held out her hand; Jane took it, but dropped it quickly.
“Do you know the details? The plan? The plot--if there is a plot?”
asked Helen, without outward signs of agitation.
“Lena said they said Christlove should never be dedicated,”
answered Jane drearily. “Not if they had to put the parson out of
the way to stop it.”
“_Oh!_”
“That’s what Lena said. She thought if Mr. Bayard could be got out
of town for a spell, right away, Lena thought maybe that would set
’em off the notion of it. I told her Mr. Bayard wouldn’t go. She
said you’d see to that.”
“Yes,” said Helen softly, “I will see to that.”
Jane made no reply, but started unexpectedly to her feet. The two
girls clambered down from the cliff in silence, and began to walk
up the shore. At the path leading to the hotel, Jane paused and
shrank away.
“How you cough!” said Miss Carruth compassionately. “You are quite
wet with this heavy dew. Do come into the cottage with me.”
She put her hand affectionately on the damp shoulder of Jane’s blue
and white calico blouse.
The hotel lights reached faintly after the figures of the two. Jane
looked stunted and shrunken; Helen’s superb proportions seemed to
quench her. The fisherman’s daughter lifted her little homely face.
“I don’t suppose,” she faltered, “you’d be willing to be told.
But mother and me have done for him so long--he ain’t well, the
minister ain’t--there’s ways he likes his tea made, and we het the
bricks, come cold weather, for him--and--all those little things.
We’ve tried to take good care of Mr. Bayard! It’s been a good many
years!” said Jane piteously. It was more dreadful to her to give up
boarding the minister, than it was that he should marry the summer
lady in the gold and purple gowns.
“I suppose you and he will go somewhere?” she added bitterly.
“We shan’t forget you, Jane,” said Helen gently.
The calico blouse shoulder shook off the delicate hand that rested
upon it.
“I won’t come in,” she said. “I’ll go right home.”
Jane turned away, and walked across the cliffs. The hotel lights
fell short of her, and the darkness swallowed her undersized,
pathetic figure, as the mystery of life draws down the weak, the
uncomely, and the unloved.
Jane went home, and unlocked her bureau drawer. From beneath the
sachet-bag, on which her little pile of six handkerchiefs rested
precisely, she drew out an old copy of Coleridge. The book was
scented with the sachet, and had a sickly perfume; it was incense
to Jane. She turned the leaves to find “Alph, the sacred river;”
then shut the book, and put it back in the bureau drawer. She did
not touch it with her lips or cheek. She handled it more tenderly
than she did her Bible.
* * * * *
Left to herself, Helen felt the full force of the situation
fall upon her, in a turmoil of fear and perplexity. The whole
thing was so foreign to her nature and to the experience of her
protected life, that it seemed to her more than incredible. There
were moments when she was in danger of underrating the facts,
and letting the chances take their course--it seemed to her so
impossible that Jane and Lena should not, somehow, be mistaken.
Her mind was in a whirlwind of doubt and dismay. With a certain
coolness in emergencies characteristic of her, she tried to think
the position out, by herself. This futile process occupied perhaps
a couple of hours.
It was between eleven and twelve o’clock when the Professor, with
a start, laid down his manuscript upon the Revised Version. For
the door of the clam study had opened quietly, and revealed his
daughter’s agitated face.
“Papa,” she said, “I am in a great trouble. I have come to you
first--to know what to do--before I go to him. I’ve been thinking,”
she added,“that perhaps this is one of the things that fathers are
_for_.”
Like a little girl she dropped at his knee, and told him the whole
story.
“I couldn’t go to a man, and ask him to marry me, without letting
you know, Papa!” said the Professor’s daughter.
The Professor of Theology reached for his Charter Oak cane as a
man gropes for a staff on the edge of a precipice. The manuscript
chapter on the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel fell to the floor.
The Professor and the cane paced the clam study together feverishly.
The birds were singing when Helen and her father stopped talking,
and wearily stole back to the cottage for an hour’s rest.
“You could go right home,” said the old man gently. “The house is
open, and the servants are there. I am sure your mother will wish
it, whenever she is acquainted with the facts.”
“We won’t tell Mother, just yet, Papa--not till we must, you know.
Perhaps Mr. Bayard won’t--won’t take me!”
The Professor straightened himself, and looked about with a guilty
air. He felt as if he were party to an elopement. Eager, ardent,
boyishly sympathetic with Helen’s position, quivering with that
perfect thoughtfulness which she never found in any other than
her father’s heart, the Professor of dogmatic Orthodox Theology
flung himself into the emergency as tenderly as if he had never
written a lecture on Foreordination, or preached a sermon on the
Inconceivability of Second Probation.
It was he, indeed, and none other, who summoned Bayard to Helen’s
presence at an early hour of the morning; and to the credit of the
Department, and of the ancient Seminary in whose stern faith the
kindest graces of character and the best graciousness of manner
have never been extinguished, be it said that Professor Haggai
Carruth did not once remind Emanuel Bayard that he was meeting the
consequences of unsoundness, and the natural fate of heresy. Nobly
sparing the young man any reference to his undoubtedly deserved
misfortune, the Professor only said:--
“Helen, here is Mr. Bayard,” and softly shut the door.
* * * * *
Helen’s hearty color was quite gone. Such a change had touched
her, that Bayard uttered an exclamation of horror, and took her
impetuously in his arms.
“Love, what ails you?” he cried with quick anxiety.
Arrived at the moment when she must speak, if ever, Helen’s courage
and foresight failed her utterly. She found herself no nearer to
knowing what to say, or how to say it, than she had been at the
first moment when she heard the girls talking on the rocks. To
tell him her fears, and the grounds for them, would be the fatal
blunder. How could she say to a man like Bayard: “Your life is in
danger. Come on a wedding-trip, and save yourself!” Yet how could
she quibble, or be dumb before the truth!
Following no plan, or little, preacted part, but only the moment’s
impulse of her love and her trouble, Helen broke into girlish sobs,
the first that he had ever heard from her, and hid her wet face
against his cheek.
“Oh,” she breathed, “I don’t know _how_ to tell you! But I am so
unhappy--and I have grown so anxious about you! I don’t see ... how
I can bear it ... as we are.”...
Her heart beat against his so wildly, that she could have said no
more if she had tried. But she had no need to try. For he said:--
“_Would_ you marry me this summer, dear? It would make me very
happy.... I have not dared to ask it.”
“I would marry you to-morrow.” Helen lifted her head, and “shame
departed, shamed” from her sweet, wet face. “I would marry you
to-day. I want to be near you. I want ... if anything--whatever
comes.”
“Whatever comes,” he answered solemnly, “we ought to be
together--now.”
Thus they deceived each other--neither owning to the tender
fault--with the divine deceit of love.
Helen comforted herself that she had not said a word of threat
or danger or escape, and that Bayard suspected nothing of the
cloudburst which hung over him. He let her think so, smiling
tenderly. For he knew it all the time; and more, far more than
Helen ever knew.