A Singular Life

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY:

A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics.

XXVII.

THE Professor threw himself into the situation with a fatherly tenderness which went to Bayard’s heart; but the theologian was disconcerted by this glimpse into real life. He had been so occupied with the misery of the next world that he had never investigated the hell of this one. He was greatly perplexed.

“ As man to man, Bayard,” he said, “you must tell me the exact amount of truth in those womanly alarms which agitate my daughter’s heart, and to which I allowed myself to yield without, perhaps, sufficient reflection. I find it difficult to believe that any harm can actually befall you in a New England town. That Windover would really injure you ? It seems to me, in cool blood, incredible.”

“ Windover would not,” replied Bayard, smiling. “ They don’t love me, but they don’t mob a man for that. Windover won’t harm me. Did you ever hear a phrase, common along the coast, here, Professor — ; Rum done it ’ ? ”

The Cesarea Professor shook his head. “ I am not familiar with the phrase,” he urged ; “ it lacks in grammar ” —

“ What it gains in pith,” interrupted Bayard ; “ but it sums up the situation. A business that thrives on the ruin of men is not likely to be sensitive in the direction of inflicting unnecessary suffering. I have successfully offended the liquor interests of the whole vicinity. The new chapel represents to them the growth of the only power in this town which they have found reason to fear. That’s the amount of it.”

“ But the churches, Bayard — the Christian classes ? The ecclesiastical methods of restraining vice ?舡

“ The ecclesiastical methods do not shut up the saloons,” said Bayard gently. “ Angel Alley is not afraid of the churches.”

“ I am not familiar with the literature of the temperance movement,” observed the Professor helplessly. “ It is a foreign subject to me. I am not prepared to argue with you.”

“ You will find some of it on my library shelves,” said Bayard ; “ it might interest you some time to glance at it.”

“When my manuscript on the New Version is completed, I shall take pleasure in doing so,” replied the Professor politely; “but the point now is, just what, and how much, do you fear from the state of things to which you refer ? Helen is a level-headed girl. I take it for granted that she has not wrought herself into a hysterical fright without basis. I have acted on my knowledge of my daughter’s nature. I understand that, if I am uninstructed in the temperance agitation.”

“ Helen has not been misinformed, nor has she overestimated anything,” returned Bayard quietly.

“ Is it a mob you fear ? ”

“ Possibly; but probably nothing of the kind. My chief danger is one from which it is impossible to escape.”

“ And that is ” — “ Something underhanded. There is a personal element in it.”

Bayard rose, as if he would bring the conversation to a check.

“There is nothing to be done,” he said, “ nothing whatever. Everything shall go on, precisely as it is arranged. I shall not run from them.”

“ You do not think wise to defer the dedication — for a time ?舡

“ Not an hour ! The dedication will take place a week from Sunday.”

The Professor was silent. He found it a little difficult to follow the working of this young man’s mind.

“And yet,” he suggested anxiously,

“ after the marriage — to-morrow — you will take the temporary absence, the little vacation which your friends advise ? You will not think better of that, I hope, for Helen’s sake ? ”

“ I shall leave Windover for a week, for Helen’s sake,” replied Bayard gravely.

In his heart he thought that it would make but little difference ; but she should have it to remember that everything had been done. He would not be foolhardy or obstinate. The sacred rights of the wife over the man had set in upon his life. She should be gratified and comforted in every way left to the power of that love and tenderness which God has set in the soul abreast of duty and honor. He would give the agitation in Angel Alley time to cool, if cool it could. He would give himself — oh, he would give himself —

Helen, in the next room, sat waiting for him. She ran her fingers over the keys of the piano ; her foot was on the soft pedal; she sang beneath her breath: —

Bayard sought her in a great silence. He lifted her tender face, and looked down upon it with that quiver on the lower part of his own which she knew so well; which always meant emotion that he did not share with her. She did not trouble him to try to have it otherwise. She clung to him, and they clasped more solemnly than passionately.

Around the bridegroom’s look in Bayard’s face the magic circle of the seer’s loneliness was faintly drawn.

If God and love had collided — but, thank God ! He and Love were one.

“ Lord, I have groped after Thee, and to know Thy will, and to do it if I could.

I never expected to be happy. Dost Thou mean this draught of human joy for me ? ”

So prayed Bayard, while her bright head lay upon his breast with the delicate and gentle surrender of the girl who will be wife before another sun goes down.

Out upon the piazza of the Flying Jib the Professor was entertaining visitors, by whose call the lovers were not disturbed. The Reverend George Fenton had unexpectedly and vaguely appeared upon the scene. He was accompanied by a lean, thoughtful man, with clerical elbows and long rustic legs — being no other than Tompkinton of Cesarea and the army cape. Professor Carruth had taken his two old students into the confidence of the family crisis. The Reverend Mr. Fenton looked troubled.

“ I had a feeling that something was up. I have been impressed for days with a sense that I ought to see Bayard — to help him, you know — to offer him any assistance in my power. He is in such a singular position ! He leads such a singular life, Professor ! It is hard for a man situated as I am to know precisely what to do.”

“ The only thing that can be done for him, just now, that I see,” suggested the Professor dryly, “ is to find him a supply for Sunday. His marriage to my daughter will, of necessity, involve a short absence from his missionary duties.”

“ I wish I could preach for him! ” cried Fenton eagerly. “ I should like nothing better. I should love to do so much for him. He never has any supplies or vacations, like the rest of us. Now I think of it, nobody has been near his pulpit for three years, to help him out — I mean nobody whom we should recognize. I ’ve half a mind to consult my committee. The First Church ” —

“ I will preach for Bayard,” interrupted Tompkinton, with his old, slow manner. 舠 My chureh is so small —we are not important across the Cape, there — it is not necessary for me to consult my committee. I will preach for him with all my heart : in the evening, at all events ; all day, if the Professor here will find me a supply of some sort.”

“ Thank you, gentlemen,” observed the Professor quietly. 舠 I will accept your offer, Tompkinton, for the evening. I shall myself occupy Mr. Bayard’s pulpit in Windover town hall on Sunday morning.”

“ You, Professor ? ”

Fenton turned pale. Tompkinton gave that little lurch to his shoulders with which, for so many years, he had jerked on the army cape in cold weather. Tompkinton was well dressed now, well settled, well-to-do, but the same simple, manly fellow. There was the gentleman in this grandson of the soil, this educated farmer’s boy ; and an instinct as true as the spirit of the faith which he preached in the old, unnoticed ways, and with the old, unobserved results. Tompkinton spent his life in conducting weekly prayer-meetings, in comforting old people in trouble, and in preaching what he had been taught, as he had been taught it. But he was neither a coward nor a cad for that.

“ If I had had a little time to think of this,” protested Fenton. “ My committee are, to a man, opposed to this temperance movement, and our relation to Bayard is, of course, — you must see, Professor, — peculiar ! But perhaps ” —

“ Oh, Tompkinton and I can manage,” replied the Professor, not without a twinkle in his deep eyes. “ I don’t suppose the First Church has ever heard of us, but we will do our humble best.”

Now, as the event fell out, the Professor and Tompkinton changed their programme a little ; and when the time came to do Bayard this fraternal service, — the first of its kind ever offered to him by the clergymen of the denomination in which he was reared, — the Professor drove across the Cape in the hot sun, ten miles, to fill the Reverend Mr. Tompkinton’s little country pulpit, and Tompkinton took the morning service for his classmate.

In the evening the Professor of Theology from Cesarea Seminary occupied the desk of the heretic preacher in Windover town hall. The hall was thronged. George Fenton preached to yawning pews ; for the First Church, out of sheer, unsanctified curiosity, lurched over, and sixty of them went to hear the eminent Professor. Bayard’s own people were present in the usual summer - evening force and character.

The Professor of Theology looked uncomfortably at the massed and growing audience. He was sixty-six years old, and in all his scholarly and Christian life he had never stood before an audience like this. He opened his manuscript sermon,— he had selected a doctrinal sermon upon the Nature of the Trinity, — and began to read it with his own distinguished manner.

The audience, restrained at first by the mere effect of good elocution and a cultivated voice, were respectful for a while ; they listened hopefully, then perplexedly, then dully. Sentence after sentence, polished, and sound as the foundations of Galilee or Damascus Hall, fell softly from the lips of the Cesarea Professor upon the ears of the Windover fishermen. Doctrine upon doctrine attacked them, and they knew it not. Proof-text upon prooftext besieged them in vain.

The Professor saw the faces of his audience lengthen and fall; across the rude, red brows of the foreign sailors wonder flitted, then confusion, then dismay. Drunkards, and reformed men, and wretched girls, and the homeless, wretched people of a seaport town stood packed in rows before the Professor of Theology, and gaped upon him. Restlessness struck them, and began to run from man to man.

“ Shut up there ! ” whispered Job Slip, punching a big Swede. “ Be quiet, can’t ye, for common manners ! You ’ll disgrace Mr. Bayard ! ”

“ Be civil to the old cove, for the parson’s sake ! ” commanded Captain Hap, hitting a Finn, and stepping on the toes of a Windover seiner, who had presumed to snicker.

“ Why don’t he talk English, then ? ” protested the fisherman.

A dozen men turned and left the hall. Half a dozen followed. Some girls giggled audibly. A group of Norwegians significantly shuffled their feet on the bare floor.

The Professor of Theology laid down his manuscript. It occurred to him, at last, that his audience did not understand what he was saying. It was a dreadful moment. For the first time in his honored life he had encountered the disrespect of a congregation which he could not command. He laid down his sermon on the Nature of the Trinity, and looked the house over.

“ I am afraid,” he said distinctly, “ that I am not retaining the interest of this congregation. I am not accustomed to your needs, or to the manner in which your pastor presents the Truth to you. But for his sake you will listen to me, I am sure.”

“ Lord, yes,” said the seiner in an audible whisper ; “ we’d listen to Bunker Hill Monyment for him.”

This irreverence did not, happily, reach the ears of the Professor of Theology, who, with his famous ease of manner, proceeded to say : —

“My discourse is on the Nature of the Trinity ; and I perceive that my thoughts on this subject are not your thoughts, and that my ways of expression are not your ways, and that an interpreter is needed between this preacher and his audience. ... I have been thinking, since I stood at this desk, about the name which you give to the beautiful new chapel which your pastor will dedicate for you, God willing, next Sunday” —

From a remote corner of the hall a sound like that of a serpent arose, and fell. The Professor did not or would not hear it (no man could say which), and went firmly on : —

“ Christlove you call your chapel, I am told. You may be surprised to know it, but the fact is that the sermon which I have been preaching to you, and the thing which the tender and solemn name of your chapel signifies, are one and the same.”

舠 I don’t see how he figgers that,舡 muttered the seiner.

“ I will try to show you how,” continued the Professor, as if he had heard the fisherman.

He abandoned his manuscript on the Trinity, and plunged headlong — not in the least knowing how he was to get out again — into a short extempore talk upon the life of Christ. The fishermen listened, for the old preacher held to it till they did ; and as soon as he had commanded their respect and attention, he wisely stopped. The service came to a sudden but successful end ; and the exhausted Professor thoughtfully retired from his first, his last, his only experience in the pulpit of the Unsound. The most depressing part of the occasion was that his wife told him it was the best sermon she had heard him preach in thirty years.

But Bayard and Helen knew these things not, nor thought of them. They had been married, as it was decided, upon that Saturday, the day before. Helen’s father married them. There was no wedding party or preparation. Helen had a white gown, never worn before; Jane Granite sent some of her mother’s roses, and Mrs. Carruth, who distinguished herself by abnormal selfpossession, fastened one of the roses at Helen’s throat. It was thought best that Windover should know nothing of the marriage until the preacher and his bride had left the town; so it was the quietest little wedding that love and the law allow.

And Bayard and Helen went to her old home in the glory and the blossom of the Cesarea June. And the great cross came out upon the Seminary green, for the moon was up that week.

“ It used to divide us,” she whispered ; “ it never can again.”

She wondered a little that he did not answer, but that he only held her solemnly, in the window where they stood to see the cross.

Helen’s happy nature was easily queen of her. She had begun to feel that her anxiety for Bayard’s sake was overstrained. Tragic Windover slipped from her consciousness, almost from her memory. She felt the sacred right of human joy to conquer fate, and trusted it as royally as she had trusted him. In spite of himself, he absorbed something of her warm and brilliant hopefulness. When she gave herself, she gave her ease of heart. And so the worn and worried man came to his Eden.

XXVIII.

Helen’s happy heart proved prophet ; so they said, and smiled. For there was no mob. Sunday dawned like a dream. The sun rode up without cloud or fire. The sea carried its cool June colors. The harbor wore her sweetest face. The summer people, like figures on a gay Japanese fan, moved brightly across the rocks and piers ; Bayard and Helen looked out of the windows of the Flying Jib, and watched them with that kindness of the heart for the interests of strangers which belongs to joy alone. A motionless fleet lay in the harbor, opening its silvery wings to dry them in the Sunday sun.

The fishermen had hurried home by scores to witness the dedication. Everybody had a smile for the preacher’s bride — the boarder on the rocks, the fisherman from the docks. Every child or woman to whom she had ever done a kindness in her inexperienced, warmhearted fashion remembered it and her that day. She wore the unornamented cream-white silk dress in which she had been married ; for Bayard asked it.

“ The people will like to see you so,” he said. 舠 It will give them a vision.”

All the town was alive and alert. The argument of success, always the cogent one to the average mind, was peculiarly effective in Windover. People who had never given the mission a thought before, and people who had given it many, but never a kindly one, looked at the doors of the new chapel, smothered in wild Cape roses for the solemn gala, and said, “ That affair in Angel Alley seems to prosper, spite of everything. There may be something in it, after all.”

It was expected that the churches themselves, though reserved on the subject, would be better represented at Christlove, that evening, than they cared to be ; for the young people were determined to see the dedication, and would pair off in scores to Angel Alley, leaving their elders behind, to support the ecclesiastical foundations in decorum and devotion, as by the creed and confession bound.

The attendance of other audiences was not encouraged, however, by the pastor in Angel Alley ; his own would more than fill the chapel. All the little preparations of the people went on quietly, and he brought them, as it was his will to do, without weariness or worry, to the evening. He wished the dedication of his chapel to be free from the fret and care which turn so many of our religious festivals into scrambles — I had almost said shambles, for the harm they do to exhausted women and to careworn men.

The day passed easily. Bayard himself, though moving under deep excitement, gave no evidence of it. He was as quiet as the St. Michael in the picture, whose foot was on the dragon, and whose head was in the skies.

The day went uneventfully. The evening was one of Windover’s fairest and most famous. The sky gave the ethereal colors of transparent rose - clouds, and the harbor returned them delicately. There was a slight, watery line in the northwest, but the oldest sailors scarcely noticed it. Nothing had happened in any way to hinder the movement of the ceremonial, or to mar its success. There was no mob, nor threat of any. There was no mass, no riot, no alarm. Angel Alley was decorous — if one might say so, obtrusively decorous. Captain Hap, and Job Slip, the special police, and the officers of the mission looked out of narrow lids at Angel Alley, and watched guardedly.

Not a misdemeanor disturbed the calm of this, to all appearance, now lawabiding — nay, law-adoring street. Saloon after saloon that Bayard had closed presented locked front doors to the thirstiest sailor who swaggered from the wharves in search of what he might swallow. Nameless dens that used to flourish the prosperity of their sickening trade were shut.

Old Trawl’s door was barred. The Trawls themselves were invisible. There would be no mob. So said the treasurer of the chapel. So said the Windover police. So thought the anxious Professor and his tearful wife. So said Helen, sparkling with the pretty triumph of love and joy.

“ Dear ! You see we were mistaken. They do love you here, in rough old Windover—bless it, after all! We were too anxious — I was worried ; I own it, now. I was afraid because you were so precious to me. And I could not be with you . . . if anything . . . went wrong. But now ” —

“ Now,” he said, “ nothing can go wrong. For you are mine, and I am yours, and this is forever,”

“ I am glad to hear you speak so cheerfully,” she said, catching at the lighter note in the chord of his words.

He did not answer her; and when she looked up, she was surprised at the solemn expression of his face.

“ Love,” he said. “ it is time to go. Kiss me, Helen, before we start.”

They stood at the window in her own little room in the summer cottage.

The tide was rising, and it gained quietly upon the beaches and the pier. Bayard looked out upon the sea for a moment, out to the uttermost horizon’s purple curve. Then he took his wife to his heart, and held her there : within a clasp like that no woman speaks, and Helen did not.

The Professor and his wife passed down Angel Alley. The Reverend Mr. Tompkinton, and that dear old moderator, the very orthodox but most Christian minister who had always done a brother’s deed by the heretic pastor when he could, followed the great Professor. These officers of the evening’s ceremony entered the chapel, and — not staying to leave Mrs. Carruth in a front pew, but leading her with them — passed on to the platform.

Whispers buzzed about.

“ The minister ! Where’s the minister ? Has anything happened to Mr. Bayard ? ”

For the chapel was already full. Captain Hap trotted impatiently down the aisle. Job Slip looked at the policeman in the vestibule in a worried way. But the officer stolidly signaled that all was well ; and Captain Hap and Job Slip and scores of watchers breathed again.

The congregation increased quietly. Angel Alley was unprecedentedly still.

The audience was serious and civil. All of Bayard’s own people were there, many citizens of Windover, and the young folks from the churches, as expected.

Then, came the throng from the wharves. Then, came the crowd from the streets. Then, came the rough, red faces from foreign ports, and from the high seas, and from the Grand Banks and Georges’. There, came all the homeless, neglected, tossed, and tempted people whom Bayard loved, and who loved him. There, came the outcast, and the forgotten, and the unclean of heart and body. There, came the wretches whom no one else thought of, or cared for. There, came the poor girls who frequented no other house of worship, but were always welcomed here. There, came the common people, who heard him gladly ; for to them he spoke, and for them he lived.

The preacher walked down Angel Alley with his wife, in her white dress, upon his arm. The alley was thronged with spectators who did not or who could not enter the chapel. Two policemen stepped forward to escort the minister, but he waved them back. He and Helen walked quietly to the chapel steps, and were about to enter, when a slight disturbance in the crowd, at their immediate side, caused Bayard to look round. A girl was struggling with an officer, to get near enough to speak to the minister.

舠 Get back there ! ” commanded the policeman. “ Keep back, I say ! This is no place nor time for the likes of you to pester the minister ! ”

“ Let her come! ” ordered Bayard authoritatively. For it was Lena. The girl was pale, and her handsome eyes had a ferocious look.

“I ’ve got something to tell him,” announced Lena, with calm determination.

舠 It’s important, or I would n’t bother him, is it likely ? I ain’t no such a fool nor flat.”

She approached, at Bayard’s beck, and said a few words in a tone so low that even the wife upon his arm did not understand them.

“ Lena still feels a little anxious,” said Bayard aloud, distinctly. “ Have you any wishes to express, Helen? ”

But Helen, smiling, shook her head. She felt exalted and not afraid. She would have gone with him to death ; but she did not think about death. She did not believe that his angels would suffer a pebble of Windover to dash against him, nor that a curl of his gold-brown head would come to harm. His mood ruled her utterly. His own exaltation, his beauty, his calm, his spiritual power, made clouds before her eyes, on which he moved as a god.

So they entered the chapel together. As they did so, Bayard turned, and looked back. Before all the people there, the preacher lifted his hat to Lena, and passed on.

The girl’s dark face dropped upon her breast, as if she made obeisance before him ; then she lifted it with the touching pride of lost self-respect regained. Her lips moved. “ He thinks I’m fit, at last,” said Lena.

The preacher and his young wife passed through the rose-wreathed door, and into the chapel. Roses were there, too; their pale, pink lamps burned all over the chapel, wherever hand could reach or foot could climb. This was the decoration chosen to welcome the June bride to Windover — the people’s flower, the blossom of the rocks and downs.

It was a pleasant chapel. The library, the gymnasium, the bowling-alley, opened from the prayer-room. Pictures and books and games and lounging-places for tired fellows were part of Bayard’s Christianity. Many a fisherman, smoking in the room below, where an oath turned a man out and a coarse phrase was never heard, would listen to the singing of old hymns, above him, and lay his pipe down, and wonder what the music meant, and catch a line he used to hear his mother sing, and so steal up to hear the rest, and sing the loudest of them all, perhaps, before the hymn was done.

Bayard moved up among his silent people to his place. His wife went with him, and he led her to her mother’s side, at his right hand.

“ In any event,” he thought, “ I could reach her in a moment.”

His eyes sought hers for that instant. She neither blushed nor paled, but had her sweet composure. In her bridal white she looked like the lily of his life’s work, the angel of his worried heart. It seemed to him as if peace and hope came with her, as purity and honor dwelt in her presence. He felt happier and stronger for knowing that she was so near him now, and with a brightening brow he gave the signal for opening the evening’s service.

It was a short and pleasant service. The eminent Professor, cordially recognized by the rough audience that he had not allowed to conquer him last Sunday, contributed his most distinguished manner, his best good sense, and the least possible evidence of his theology to the dedicating hour. The old moderator and the pastor’s classmate from across the Cape added their heartiest help. Most of the congregation omitted to notice that the clergymen from the city were not present. They were not missed. Who could say if they had been invited to dedicate Emanuel Bayard’s chapel ? He had pulled along without them for three years. He was incapable of resentment, but it was still possible that habit had its way with the missionary, and that in his hour of success he had simply forgotten them, as in his time of distress and failure they had forgotten him. Who could blame him ?

But all the little trouble of the past had melted from his mind and heart; both were clear and happy when he rose at last to address his people. His delicate lips had but parted to speak to them when there started such a storm of welcome from the fishermen as well-nigh swept his self-possession from him. He was not prepared for it, and he seemed almost disturbed. From aisle to aisle, from wall to wall, the wind of sound rose and rolled upon him. At last it became articulate, and here and there words defined themselves.

“ God bless him ! ”

“ Bless our dear young parson ! ”

“ Windover fishermen stand by him every time ! ”

“ Blessin’s on him, anyhow ! ”

“ Christlove’s good enough for us ! ” But when he smiled upon them, they grew quiet, as they had done once before — that evening after the wreck and rescue off Ragged Rock; for these two were the only occasions when the applause of his people had got the better of their pastor.

When he began to speak, it was not without emotion, but in a voice so low that the house had to hold its breath to hear him.

He began by thanking the fishermen of Windover for their trust and their friendship. Both, he said, he valued, and more than they would ever know. Of his own struggles and troubles, of the bitter years that he had toiled among them, he said no word. He spoke of the kindness of Windover, not of its neglect. He spoke of the strength and the goodness of the city rather than of its weakness and its wrong. He spoke of the warm heart of the people, of their readiness to help any need which they understood and in whose claim they believed. He told how generous they were in emergencies. 舠 You give money,” he said, “ more lavishly than any town I have ever known. When the gales have struck, and the fleets gone down, and when, with widows and orphans starving on my heart and hands, I have asked for bread, Windover has never given them a stone. Your poor have spent themselves utterly upon your poorest, and your rich have not refused. Windover gives gloriously,” said Bayard, “ and I am glad and proud to say so.”

Their faults, he told them, they had, and he was not there to condone what he had never overlooked. One, above the rest, they had to answer for; and what that was — did he need to name ?

舠 It is not your sin alone,” he said firmly. “ It is the sin of seaport towns ; it is the sin of cities ; it is the sin of New England ; it is the sin of the nation ;— but it is the sin of Windover, and my business is with Windover sins. I have fought it since I came among you, without an hour’s wavering of purpose, and without an hour’s fear of the result; and at all costs, at any cost, I shall fight it till I go from you. For God has set me among you, not to minister to your self-satisfaction, but to your needs.”

Bayard paused here, and regarded his people with a long look. Their faces blurred before him for a moment, for his heart was full. He saw them all, in the distinctness with which the public speaker perceives familiar sights ; every trifle upon the map of his audience started out.

He saw Captain Hap, anxious and wrinkled, doing usher’s duty by the door

— Captain Hap, neither pious nor godless, but ready to live for the parson or to die for him, and caring little which ; the good fellow, true with the allegiance of age and a loyal nature — dear Captain Hap !

Bayard saw Job Slip, pale with the chronic pallor of the reformed drunkard

— poor Job, who drank not now, neither did he taste, but bore the thirst of his terrible desert, trusting in the minister and God Almighty, in the succession of the phrase.

Mari was there, incapable and patient, her face and figure stamped with the indefinable something that marks the drunkard’s wife. And Joey, serious and old — little Joey ! Bob was there, and Jean, and Tony, and all the familiar faces from the wharves. Mrs. Granite, in her rusty black, sat tearfully on a front settee, with Jane beside her. Jane looked at the minister, before all the people, as she never ventured to look at home. But nobody noticed Jane. Bayard did but glance at her pinched, adoring face ; he dared not dwell upon it.

Ben Trawl was not to be seen in the audience. But Lena was. She stood the service through, for she had come in too late to find a seat; she stood behind Johnny’s mother, who wore Helen’s crape bonnet and veil, poor old lady, with a brown bombazine dress. Lena had a worried look. She did not remove her eyes from the preacher. Lena sang that day, when the people started 舠 the minister’s hymn : ” —

Her fine voice rose like a solo; it had a certain solitariness about it which was touching to hear.

The melody of the hymn died away into the hush in which Bayard rose again, for it came to his heart to bless his people and his chapel in one of his rare prayers.

“ Lord,” he said, “ Thou art the God of the sea and its perils, of the land and its sorrow. Draw near to these sea-people who tread upon the shore of Thy mercy. I dedicate them to Thee. Father, take them from my hands ! Lift them up! Hold them, that they fall not. Comfort their troubles. Forgive their sins. Take them ! Take my people from my heart! . . . Lord, I consecrate this house of worship, for their sakes, and in Christ’s name, and for Christ’s love, to Thee, and to Thy service. . . . Father ! Thou knowest how I have loved this people ” —

Bayard’s voice broke. It was the only time in all those years. His prayer remained unfinished. The sobs of his people answered him : and his silence was his benediction upon them.

The audience moved out quietly. It was now dark. The lights in the chapel had been noiselessly lighted. The jets of the illuminated words above the door were blazing.

The Professor and the clergymen and Helen’s mother stepped apart and out into the street; none of them spoke to Bayard, for his look forbade them. The Professor of Theology was greatly moved. Signs of tears more natural than evangelical were on his aged face. Bayard, lingering but a moment, came down the aisle with his wife upon his arm.

“ Love,” she whispered, “ it is over, and all is well.”

“Yes,” he answered, smiling, “it is over, and it is well.”

They came down and out upon the steps. Bayard stood uncovered beneath the white and scarlet lights, which spelled the words —

“THE LOVE OF CHRIST.”

He gave one glance down Angel Alley. It was packed ; his people were massed to protect him. Beyond them, marshaled into the darkness and scarcely distinguishable from it, hovered certain sullen groups of frowning men. Not a hand was raised. Not a cry was heard. No. There was to be no mob. He had to meet, not violence, but mute and serried Hate.

Helen clung to his arm with a start. She looked up into his face. Its more than earthly radiance hushed the cry upon her lips. He was transfigured before her. For that moment, all the people — they who loved and they who loved him not — saw him glorified, there, beneath the sacred words whose pure and blazing fires seemed to them the symbol of his soul.

Then, from the darkest dark of Angel Alley a terrible oath split the air. Something struck him; and he fell.

XXIX.

Half a thousand men gave chase ; but the assailant had escaped to the common shelter of the coasting town. He had taken to the water.

It was now quite dark; clouds had gathered ; the wind had risen suddenly ; thunder was heard. A fierce gust tore the dust of Angel Alley, and hurled it after the fleeing criminal ; as if even the earth that he trod rejected him. In this blinding and suffocating whirlwind the pursuers stumbled over each other, and ran at haphazard. The police swept every skulking-place, dividing their forces between the alley and the docks. But their man, who was shrewd enough, had evaded them; it was clear that he had marked out an intelligent map of escape, and had been able to follow it.

The baffled police, thinking at least to pacify the angry people behind them, kept up that appearance of energy, with that absence of expectation, for which their race is distinguished.

An officer who was stealthily studying the docks far to the westward, and alone, suddenly stopped. A cry for help reached him ; and it was a woman’s cry. The voice kept up an interrupted iteration : —

“Police! Help! — Murder! Sergeant! — Help ! Help ! ” as if choked off, or strangled in the intervals.

The sergeant, following the sound as well as he could, leaped down the long, empty wharf from whose direction the cry seemed to come, and peered over the slimy edge. The storm was passing noisily up the sky, and the darkness was of the deepest.

Out of its hollow a girl’s voice uprose : “ Sergeant ! Sergeant ! He’s drowning me ! But I’ve got him ! ” and bubbled away into silence.

At that moment there was lightning, and the outlines of two figures struggling in the water could be distinctly seen.

These two persons were Lena and Ben Trawl. They seemed to have each other in a mutual death-grip. The girl’s hands were at the man’s throat. He dashed her under and under the water. But her clutch did not relax by a finger. He held her down. But Lena held on.

舠 After I ’ve strangled you ! ” gasped Lena.

“舠 you ! ” muttered the man.

“ Drown, then !

Her head went under; her mouth filled ; this time she could not struggle up; her ears rang; her brain burst. But the little fingers on the big throat clutched on. Then she felt herself caught from above — air came, and breath with it — and Ben swore faintly.

“ Undo your hands, Lena,” said the sergeant. “ We’ve got him. You don’t want to hang him before his time.舡

Another flash of lightning revealed the sea and sky, the docks and the officers, and Ben, purple and breathing hard, stretched upon the wharf. Lena heard the snap of the handcuffs upon his wrists; and then she heard and saw no more.

The sergeant touched the girl’s dripping and unconscious figure with a respect never shown to Lena in Windover police circles before.

“ She might not come to, yet,舡 he said ; “ she’s nigh enough to a drowned girl. Get a woman, can’t you, somebody ? ”

“The man’s all we can manage,” replied a brother officer. “ Get him to the station the back way — here ! Give a hand there ! Quick ! We ’ll have lynch law here in just about ten minutes, if you ain’t spry. Hark ! D’ ye hear that ? ”

A muffled roar came down the throat of Angel Alley. It grew, and approached. It was the cry of all Windover raging to avenge the Christian hero whom it learned, too late, to honor.

“ Anyhow, he ’ll hang for it,” muttered Lena, when she came to herself in her decent room. Johnny’s mother was moaning over her. Lena pushed the old woman gently away, and commanded the retreating officer: —

“ Say, won’t he ? Out with it! ”

“ Well,” replied the officer in a comfortable tone, “ a good deal depends. Liquor men ain’t skerce in this county. He ’d get twenty witnesses to swear to an alibi as easy as he’d get one.’’

“ Let’em swear,” said Lena. “ I see him do it. I saw him heave the stone.”

“ That might alter the case, and again it might n’t,” said the officer ; “it would depend on the value of the testimony — previous reputation, and so on.舡

Lena groaned.

“ But I caught him by the arm! I stood alongside of him. I was watching for it. I thought I ’d be able to stop him. I’m pretty strong. I grabbed him — but he flung me off and stamped on me. I see him heave the rock. See ! there’s the mark, where he kicked me. Then he ran, and I after him. I can swear to it before earth and heaven. I see him fling that rock ! ”

“ You see,” observed the officer, “ it ain’t a case of manslaughter just yet. The minister was breathing when they moved him.”

They carried him to his own rooms, for it was not thought possible to move him further. He had not spoken, or stirred, but his pulse indicated that a good reserve of life remained in him. The wound was in the lung. The stone was a large and jagged one, with a cruel edge. It had struck with malignant power, and by one of those extraordinary aims which seem to be left for hate and chance to achieve.

His wife had caught him as he fell. She had uttered one cry ; after that her lips had opened only once, and only to say that she assented to her father’s proposal for the removal of her husband to Mrs. Granite’s house, and that she entreated them to find some gentle method of transportation over the rough road. For Windover was a town of many churches, but of no hospital.

Oddly, the only quite coherent thought she had was of a man she had heard about, a carpenter, who fell from a staging on the other side of the Cape. He was put into an express cart and driven home, a seven-mile gallop, over the rudest road in the State, to his wife ; naturally, he was dead when he got there. Bayard had been called to see the widow.

Captain Hap stepped up (on tiptoe, as if he had been in a sick-room), and whispered to the surgeon who had been summoned to Angel Alley.

“ That will do,” said the surgeon. “ It has never been tried that I know of, but it is worth trying — most modern ideas are—if practicable.”

“ The fishermen hev cleared the car, the company has cleared the track, and the motorman is one of his people,” said Captain Hap ; “ an’ there s enough of us to carry him from here to heaven so — so lovin’ly, he ’d never feel a jolt.”

The old captain made no effort to wipe the tears which rained down his wrinkled cheeks. He and Job Slip, with Mr. Bond and Bob and Tony, took hold of the stretcher ; they looked about, to choose, out of a hundred volunteers, the sixth strong hand.

The Reverend George Fenton, agitated and trembling, forced his way through the parting crowd, and pleaded piteously to be allowed to offer his assistance in carrying his wounded classmate.

舠 I have never lifted a hand to help him since I came to Windover ! ” cried Fenton, in the voice of a man who would rather that the whole world heard what he said and knew how he felt. “ Let me have this chance before it is too late ! . . . I ’m not worthy to touch his bier,” added Fenton brokenly.

They gave way to his pleading, and it was done as he asked. Then the wounded man was carried gently to the electric car — “ the people’s carriage.” The fishermen, as the captain said, had captured it; they stood with bowed heads, as the stretcher passed through them, sobbing like children. Throngs of them followed the slowly moving car, which carried Bayard tenderly to his own door. It was said afterwards that scores of them watched all night outside the cottage, peering for some sign of how it fared with him ; but they were so still that one might hardly tell their figures from the shadows of the night.

The wind had continued to rise, but the thunder had passed on, and the shower was almost over when Bayard’s bearers lifted him across the threshold of Mrs. Granite’s door. At that moment one belated flash ran over earth and sea and sky. It was a red flash, and a mighty one. By its crimson light the fishermen saw his face for that last instant; it lay turned over on the stretcher, quietly, towards his wife. The red color dyed her bridal white, and the terrible composure of her attitude was revealed ; her hand was fast in his ; she seemed to communicate, God knew how, with the unconscious man.

The flash went out, and darkness fell again.

“Then God shut the door,” muttered an old and religious fisherman who stood weeping by the fence, among the larkspurs.

The wind went down, and the tide went out. Bayard’s pulse and breath fell with the sea, and the June dawn came. The tide came in, and the wind arose, and it was evening. Then he moaned, and turned, and it was made out that he tried to say, “ Helen ? — was Helen hurt ? ” Then the soul came into his eyes, and they saw her.

He did not sink away that day, nor the next, and the evening and the morning were the third day in the chamber where death and life made duel for him.

He suffered, it is hard to think how much; but the fine courage in his habit of living clung on. The injury was not, necessarily, a fatal one. The great consulting surgeon called from Boston said, “ The patient may live.” He added, “ But the vitality is low; it has been sapped to the roots. And the lung is weak. There has been a Strain some time ; the organ has received a lesion.舡

Then Job Slip, when he heard this, thought of the minister’s cough, which dated from that battle with the surf off Ragged Rock. And the value of his own cheap life, bought at a price so precious, overwhelmed the man. He would have died a hundred deaths for the pastor. Instead, he had to do the harder thing. It was asked of him to live, and to remember.

In all those days (they were eight in number) Jane Granite’s small, soft eyes took on a strange expression ; it was not unlike that we see in a dog who is admitted to the presence of a sick or injured master. God was merciful to Jane. The pastor had come back. To live or to die, he had come. It was hers again to work, to watch, to run, to slave for him; she looked at the new wife without a pang of envy; she came or went under Helen’s orders ; she poured out her heart in that last torrent of self-forgetful service, and thanked God for the precious chance, and asked no more. She had the spaniel suffering, but she had the spaniel happiness.

For seven days and nights he lay in his shabby rooms, a royal sufferer. The Christ above his bed looked down with solemn tenderness ; in his moments of consciousness (but these were few) he glanced at the picture.

Helen had not left his room, either day or night. Leaning upon one arm on the edge of the narrow bed, she watched for the lifting of an eyelid, for the motion of a hand, for the ebbing or the rising of a breath. Sometimes he knew her, and seemed to try to say to her how comforting it was to him to have her there, in the dreary old rooms, where he had dreamed of her sumptuous presence, where they meant to begin their life and love together.

But he could not talk. She found herself already anticipating the habit of those whom the eternal silence bereaves, recalling every precious phrase that his lips had uttered in those last days ; she repeated to herself the words which he had said to her on Sunday morning —

“ Nothing can harm us now ; for you are mine, and I am yours, and this is forever.”

As the seventh day broke he grew perceptibly stronger. Helen yielded to her father’s entreaties, and for a moment absented herself from the sick-room — for she was greatly overworn — to drink a breath of morning air. She sat down on the step at the front door of the cottage. She noticed the larkspur in the garden, blue and tall; bees were humming through it; the sound of the tide came up loudly. Jane Granite came and offered her something, she could not have said what; Helen tried to drink it, but pushed the cup away, and went hurriedly upstairs again.

A cot had now been moved in for her beside Bayard’s narrow bed. She sat down on the edge of it, between her father and her husband. The Professor stirred to step softly out.

“ Dear Professor ! ” said Bayard suddenly. He looked at the Christ on the wall, and smiled. “We meant — the same thing — after all,” he whispered.

Then he put his hand in his wife’s, and slept.

It came on to be the evening of the eighth day. He had grown stronger all the day, but he suffered much.

“ Folks are keepin’ of him back by their prayers,” said the religious old fisherman who leaned every day upon the garden fence. “ He can’t pass. 舡

But Job Slip and Captain Hap, who sat upon the doorsteps, listening from dawn to dark for any sign from Bayard’s room, said nothing at all.

It came to be evening, and the tide had risen with the wind. The sea railed all night long. Helen sat alone with her husband.

He did not wander that night, but watched her face whenever he was not asleep.

“ Kiss me, Helen,” he sighed at midnight.

She stopped and kissed him, but her lips took the air from him, and he struggled for it.

“ You poor, poor girl! ” he said.

The wind went down, and the tide went out. The dawn came with the ebb. Bayard fell into a sleep so gentle that Helen’s heart leaped with hope. She stole out into the study. Captain Hap was there ; his shoes were off; he stepped without noise. The sunrise made a roselight in the rooms.

“ It is real sleep,” breathed Helen.

Don’t wake him, Captain.”

But when the old sailor-nurse would have taken her place for the morning watch, she shook her head. She went back and lay down on the cot beside her husband; he moved his hand as if he groped for hers, and she was sorry that he had missed it for a moment.

舠 It shall not happen again,” she thought.

Then exhaustion and vigil overcame her, for she had watched for many nights, and, thinking that she waked, she slept.

When she came to herself it was broad, bright day. Her hand had a strange feeling; when she tried, she could not move it, for he held it fast. There were people in the room — her father, her mother, Captain Hap. She stirred a little, leaning towards her husband’s pillow.

“ Dear, are you better this morning? ”

But some one came up, and gently laid a hand upon her eyes.

XXX.

Job Slip went down to the water, and it was dark. He walked apart, and took himself into that solitary place on the wharves which he remembered, where he had knelt in the rain, one night, and said “ God,” for Mr. Bayard.

A mackerel keg was there, the same one, perhaps ; he overturned it, and sat down, and tried to understand. Job had not been able to understand since Mr. Bayard was hurt. Thought came to him slowly, and with pain like that caused by the return of congested blood to its channels.

“ He is dead,” said Job. “ Lord A’mighty, he ain’t alive ! Seems I could n’t get it into my head. They’ve killed him. He’s goin’ to be buried.”

Job clenched his gnarled hands together, and shook them at the sky ; then they dropped.

“Seems like shakin’ fists at him,” thought Job. “ I ain’t a-goin’ to. S’posen he’s up yander ? That’s the idee. Lord A’mighty, what do you mean by it? You didn’t stop to think of us reformed men, did you, when you let this happen ?

. . . For Christ’s sake. Amen,” added Job, under the impression that he had been giving utterance to a prayer.

“Mr. Bayard?” called Job aloud. He slipped off the keg and got upon his knees. As he changed his position, the fisherman vaguely noticed the headlight of the schooner on which he was to have taken his trip, that night. “ There goes the Tilly E. Salt,” he said, interrupting himself ; “ she ’s got to weigh without me, this time. I’m guard of honor for the — the — I can’t sag it! ” groaned Job. “ It’s oncredible, him bein’ in a — him put in a — Lord ! he’s the livin’est man I ever set my eyes on ; he CAN’T die ! . . . Mr. Bayard ? Mr. Bayard, sir ? ”

Job paused, as if he expected to be answered. The water dashed loudly against the old pier. The distant cry of the buoy came over the harbor. The splash of retreating oars sounded faintly somewhere, through the dark.

“ He’s livin’ along,” said Job, after some thought. “ He can’t get fur out of Angel Alley. He would n’t be happy. He’d miss us, someways; he’s so used to us. He’s hoverin’ in them hymn-toons and that gymnasium he set so much by. I ’ll bet he is. He’s lingerin’ in us poor devils he’s spent three year makin’ men of. . . . He’s a-livin’ here.”

Job struck his own broad breast, and then he struck it again. A shudder passed over his big frame; and then came the storm. He had not wept before since Mr. Bayard died. The paroxysm wearied and weakened him, and it was the piteous fact that these were the next words which passed the lips of the half - healed drunkard : “ God A’mighty, if I only had a drink ! ”

Two hours afterwards Job Slip came up the wharves; he came as he went, alone ; he walked with a steady step; he held his head high in the dark. He whispered as he walked : —

“ I did n’t — no, I did n’t do it. . . . Bein’ left so — I ’ve alwers had you, sir, before, you know. It makes a sight o’ difference when a man hain’t anybody but God. He ’s a kinder stranger. I did n’t know one spell there — but I was goin’ under. . . . You won’t desert a fellar, will you — yander ? I ’ll do you credit, sir, see if I don’t. I won’t disgrace you,舒d if I will ! ”

At that moment Job shied suddenly, like a horse, clear from one side of the wharf to the other. He cried aloud, —

“ Why, why, what’s here ? What’s got me ? ”

Fingers touched him, but they were of flesh ; little fingers, but they were warm, and curled confidingly in Job’s big hand.

“Joey? You? Little Joey ! Why, father’s sonny boy ! You come just in the right time, Joey. I was kinder lonesome. I miss the minister. I ain’t — just feelin’ right.”

“ Fa—ther,” said Joey pleasantly, “ Marin said to find you, for she said she fought you’d need you little boy.”

“ And so I do, my son, and so I do ! ” cried Job.

With Joey’s little fingers clasped in his, Job walked up Angel Alley, past the doors of the dens that were closed, and the doors that were open still ; and if the ghost of the dear, dead minister had swept visibly before Job and Joey, no man could have tempted or disturbed them less.

In his own chapel in Angel Alley Bayard lay in state. It was such state as the kings of the earth might envy, and its warriors and its statesmen and its poets do not know. It was said that his was the happiest dead face that ever rebuked the sadness of the living, and the fairest that they who wept for him had ever seen. Death had not marred his noble beauty; and in death or life there was no comelier man. All the city thronged to show him reverence who had lived among them, baffled, doubted, and sick at heart ; and it appeared that those who had done the least for him then would have done most for him now : the people of ease ; the imitators ; the conformers, and the church members who never questioned their own creeds or methods; the summer strangers playing at life upon the harbor coast, and visitors from a distance where the preacher had his fame.

But when these superior and respectable persons crowded to give their tardy tribute to him, they were told that there was no room for them in the chapel; nay, they could scarcely find footing in the dust of Angel Alley. For they were held back by the sacred rights of “ nearest mourners ; ” and Bayard’s mourners claimed him. It was said that hundreds of sunburnt men had stood waiting in the street since midnight for the opening of the doors, and the chance to enter. Then there had passed up the steps of Christlove Chapel the great mass of the neglected and the poor, the simple and the sodden and the heartbroken, and those who had no friends but only that one man ; and God had taken him. The fishermen of Windover and the poor girls, the widows of Windover and her orphaned children, the homeless foreign sailors and the discontented laborers from the wharves, poured in ; and the press was great.

He lay among them royally, wrapped in his purple pall. And he and Helen knew that her bridal roses withered forever out of mortal sight upon his breast. But she had given him up at this last hour to his people ; he was theirs, and they were his, and what they willed they did for him, and she did not gainsay them. They covered him with their wild flowers, after the fashion of the Cape ; and clumsy sailors brought big hothouse bouquets flaring on wires and splashed with tears, “ to give the minister.” And his dead heart, like his living one, was found large enough to hold them all.

One poor girl brought no flowers to Bayard’s burial. Lena brought only sobs instead, and watered his pall with her tears, and hid her face, and passed on with her hands before it.

Now, around the bier there stood a guard of honor strange to see; for it was chosen from the Windover drunkards whom the pastor had saved and cured. Among them, Job Slip stood proudly in command at the minister’s head : the piteous type of all that misery which Bayard had died to lessen, and of that forgotten manliness which he had lived to save.

There was no dirge sung at Christlove Chapel when he was borne from it. A girl’s voice from a darkened corner of the gallery started “ the minister’s hymn,” but trembled, and broke quite down. So the fishermen took it up, and tried to sing—

“I need thee every hour.”

But they too faltered, for they needed him too much ; and in silence, trying not to sob, with bared, bowed heads they passed out gently (for his spirit was upon them), thinking to be better men.

One of the summer people, a stranger in the town, strolling on the beach that day, was attracted by an unusual and impressive sight upon the water, and asked what that extraordinary display of the signs of public mourning meant.

An Italian, standing by, made answer : —

“The Christman is dead.”

The man tried to explain further, but choked, and pointed seaward, and turned away.

For, from every main in the harbor, as far as eye could see, the flags of Windover floated at half-mast. The fishermen had done him this honor, reserved only for the great of the earth and for their own dead mates, and most sacred for these last.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.