It was night, and it was Angel Alley. One of the caprices of New England spring had taken the weather, and it had suddenly turned cold. The wind blew straight from the sea. It was going to rain. The inner harbor was full; in the dark, thick air bowsprits nodded and swung sleepily, black outlines against little glimmering swathes of grayish-yellow cut by the headlights of anchored vessels. Dories put out now and then from the schooners, and rowed lustily to the docks; these were packed with sailors or fishermen who leaped up the sides of the wharves like cats, tied the painter to invisible rings in black, slimy places, and scrambled off, leaving the dory to bob and hit the piers; or they cast the painter to the solitary oarsman, who rowed back silently to the vessel, while his gayer shipmates reeled, singing, over the wharves and disappeared in the direction of the town.

The sky was heavily clouded, and fog was stealing stealthily off the Point.

Angel Alley was full, that night. Half a dozen large fishermen were just in from Georges’; these had made their trip to Boston to sell their cargoes of halibut, haddock, or cod, and had run home quickly on a stiff sou’easter, or were unloading direct at their native wharves. The town overflowed with men of unmistakably nautical callings, red of face, strong of hand, unsteady of step; men with the homeless eye and the roving heart of the sea: Americans, Scotch, Swedes, Portuguese, Italians, Irish, and Finns swung up together from the wharves and swarmed over the alley, ready for a song, a laugh or a blow, as the case might be; equally prepared to smoke, to love, to quarrel, or to drink, liable to drift into a prayer-room or a bar-room, just as it happened, and there was small space to doubt which would happen; men whose highest aspiration was to find the barber and the boot-black; men who steered steadily home, thinking of their baby’s laugh, and the wife’s kiss; and men who turned neither to the right nor to the left, who lingered for neither men nor gods nor women, but pushed, with head thrust out like a dog’s on the scent, straight on to the first saloon that gaped at them.

Open and secret, lawful and unlawful, these were of an incredible number, if one should estimate the size of the short street. Angel Alley overflowed with abomination, as the tides, befouled by the town, overflowed the reeking piers of the docks. In sailors’ boarding-houses, in open bars, in hidden cellars, in billiard-rooms, in shooting-galleries, in dance-halls, and in worse, whiskey ran in rivers. At the banks of those black streams men and some women crawled and drank, flaunting or hiding their fiery thirst as the mood took them, and preying upon one another, each according to his power or his choice, as the chance of an evil hour decreed.

Girls with hard eyes and coarse mouths strutted up and down the alley in piteous numbers. Sights whose description cannot blot this page might have been detected in the shadows of the wharves and of the winding street. Men went into open doors with their full trips’ earnings in their pockets, and staggered out without a penny to their shameful names. Fifty, seventy, a hundred dollars, vanished in the carouse of a single hour. One man, a foreigner, of some nationality unknown, ran up and down, wildly calling for the police. He had been robbed of two hundred dollars in a drunken bout, last night; he had but just come to such senses as nature may have given him, and to the discovery of his loss. His wife, he said, lived over in West Windover; she warn’t well when he shipped; there was another baby,—seven young ones already,—and she couldn’t get trust at the stores, the bills had run up so long.

“Lord!” he said stupidly; “s’pose I find ’em layin’ round starved?”

He stoutly refused to go home. He swore he’d rather go to jail than face her. He sat down on the steps of old Trawl’s, sobbing openly, like a child. A little crowd gathered, one or two voices jeered at him, and some one scolded him smartly, for no one moralizes more glibly than the sot in his intervals of sobriety.

“Oh, shut up there!” cried the girl Lena. “Ain’t he miser’ble enough already? Ain’t all of us that much?—Go home, Jean!” she urged kindly; “go home to Marie. She won’t cuss you.”

“She never cussed me yet,” answered Jean doubtfully.

He got up and reeled away, wringing his stubbed hands. Lena walked up the alley, alone; her eyes were on the ground; she did not answer when one of the girls called her; she strolled on aimlessly, and one might almost say, thoughtfully.

“Better come in, Lena,” said a voice above her. She looked up. The beautiful new transparency, which was still the wonder and admiration of the fishermen coming home from Georges’ or the Banks, flashed out in strong white and scarlet lights the strange words, now grown familiar to Angel Alley:—

“The Church of the Love of Christ.”

Beneath, in the broken, moving color stood the minister; his foot was on the topmost step of the long flight; he looked pale and tired.

“Isn’t it better for you in here, than out there?” he asked gently. Lena gave one glance at his pitying eyes; then she followed that brilliance like a moth.

He stepped back and allowed her to precede him, as if she had been any other woman, the only difference being one which the girl was not likely to notice: the minister did not lift his hat to Lena. She hung her head and went in.

“They are singing to-night—practicing for their concert,” he said. “Perhaps they might like the help of your voice.”

She made no answer, and the preacher and the street girl entered the bright hall together.

It was well filled with well-behaved and decently dressed groups of men and women; these were informally scattered about the main room and the ante-rooms, for no service was in progress; the whole bore the appearance of a people’s club, or social entertainment, whose members read or chatted, played games, or sang, as the mood took them.

A bowling-alley and a smoking-room adjoined; these last were often quite full and busy with fishermen and sailors; but that night the most of the people were listening to the singing. Music, Bayard had already learned, would lead them anywhere. At the first sound of the poor and pathetic melodeon, they had begun to collect around the net of harmony like mackerel round a weir. When Lena came into the room, the little choir were singing the old-fashioned, beautiful Ave Sanctissima which even Angel Alley knew. Lena dropped into an obscure seat, and remained silent for a time. Suddenly her fine contralto rang in,—

“’Tis midnight on the sea.
Ora pro nobis,
We lift our souls to thee.”

The minister, distant and pale, blurred before her eyes while she sang. He looked like a figure resting on a cloud in a sacred picture. He moved about among his people, tall, smiling, and shining. They looked at him with wistful, wondering tenderness. He passed in and out of the halls on errands whose nature no one asked. Occasionally he returned, bringing some huddling figure with him from the street; a homesick boy, a homeless man, a half-sodden fellow found hesitating outside of Trawl’s den, midway between madness and sanity, ready for hell or heaven, and following Bayard like a cur.

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Down the dark throat of Angel Alley a man, that night, was doing a singular thing. He was a fisherman, plainly one of the recent arrivals of the anchored fleet; he was a sturdily built fellow with a well-shaped head; he had the naturally open face and attractive bearing often to be found among drinking men; at his best he must have been a handsome, graceful fellow, lovable perhaps, and loving. At his worst, he was a cringing sot. He wore, over his faded dark-red flannel shirt, the gingham jumper favored by his class; and it seemed he had lost his hat. This man was monotonously moving to and fro, covering a given portion of Angel Alley over and again, retracing his unsteady footsteps from point to point, and repeating his course with mysterious regularity. His beat covered the space between the saloon of old Trawl (which stood about midway of the alley) and the scarlet and white transparency, whose strange and sacred heraldry blazed, held straight out, an arm of fire, across the mouth of the street. Angel Alley, as we have explained, had, at the first, inclined to call the mission Christ’s Rest, for reasons of its own; but even that half-godless reminder of a history better forgotten was growing out of date. The people’s name for Emanuel Bayard’s house of worship and of welcome was fast settling into one beautiful word—Christlove.

The fisherman in the jumper wavered to and fro between Christlove and the ancient grogshop. In the dark weather the figure of the man seemed to swing from this to that like a pendulum; at moments he seemed to have no more sense or sentience. He was hurled as if he were forced by invisible machinery; he recoiled as if wound by unseen springs; now his steps quickened into a run, as he wrenched himself away from the saloon, and faced the prayer-room; then they lagged, and he crawled like a crab to the rum-shop door. His hands were clenched together. Long before it began to rain his hatless forehead was wet.

His eyes stared straight before him. He seemed to see nothing but the two open doors between which he was vibrating. No one had happened to notice him, or, if so, his movements were taken for the vagaries of intoxication. A nerve of God knows what, in his diseased will began to throb, and he made a leap away from the saloon, and ran heavily towards the white and scarlet lights of the transparency; at the steps, he fell, and lay groveling; he could hear the singing overhead:—

“Ora pro nobis,
We lift our souls to thee.”

He tried to climb up; but something—call it his muscle, call it his will, call it his soul; it does not signify—something refused him, and he did not get beyond the second stair. Slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, his feet seemed to be dragged back. He put out his hands, as if to push at an invisible foe; he leaned over backwards, planting his great oiled boots firmly in the ground, as if resisting unseen force; but slowly, reluctantly, mysteriously, he was pulled back. At the steps of the saloon, in a blot of darkness, on the shadowed side, he sank; he got to his hands and knees like an animal, and there he crawled. If any one had been listening, the man might have been heard to sob,—

“It’s me and the rum—God and the devil—Now we’ll see!”

He rose more feebly this time, and struggled over toward the prayer-room; he wavered, and turned before he had got there, and made weakly back. Panting heavily, he crawled up the steps of the saloon, and then lurched over, and fell down into the blot whence he had come. There he lay, crying, with the arm of his brown gingham jumper before his eyes.

“Look up, Job!” said a low voice in the shadow at his side. Job Slip lifted his sodden face, swollen, red, and stained with tears. Instinctively he stretched up his hands.

“Oh, sir!” was all he said.

Bayard stood towering above him; he had his grand Saint Michael look, half of scorn and half of pity.

Job had not seen his face before since the night when it suddenly rose on a great wave, like that of another drowning man, making towards him in the undertow off Ragged Rock. Job put up his hands, now, before his own face. He told Mari, long afterwards, that the minister blinded him.

“Get up!” said Bayard, much in the tone in which he had said it the day he knocked Job down.

Job crawled up.

“Come here!” said the preacher sternly. He held out his white hand; Job put his wet and fishy palm into it; Bayard drew that through his own arm, and led him away without another word. Old Trawl came muttering to the door, and stood with his hand over his eyes, shutting out the glare of the bar-room within, to watch them. Ben looked over his shoulder, scowling. Father and son muttered unpleasantly together, as the minister and the drunkard moved off, and melted into the fine, dark rain.

Bayard led his man down towards the wharves. It was dark, there, and still; there was a secluded spot, which he knew of, under a salt-house at the head of a long pier but seldom used at night. The fine rain was uncertain, and took moods. As the two came down the larynx of the Alley, the drizzle had dripped off into a soft mist. Bayard heard Captain Hap across the street giving utterance to his favorite phrase:—

“It’s comin’ on thick; so thick it has stems to it.”

The captain looked after the minister and the drunkard with disapproval in his keen, dark eyes.

“Better look out, Mr. Bayard!” he called, with the freedom of a nurse too recently dismissed not to feel responsible for his patient. “It ain’t no night for you to be settin’ round on the docks. You cough, sir! Him you’ve got in tow ain’t worth it—no, nor twenty like him!”

“That’s a fact,” said Job humbly, stopping short.

“Come on, Job,” Bayard answered decidedly.

So they came under the salt-house, and sat down. Both were silent at first. Job wiped off an old fish-keg with the sleeve of his jumper, and offered this piece of furniture to the minister; the fisherman perched himself on the edge of a big broken pile which reared its gray head above the wharf; the rising tide flapped with a sinister sound under his feet which hung over, recklessly swinging. Job looked down into the black water. He was man enough still to estimate what he had done, and miserable enough to quench the shame and fire in him together by a leap. Men do such things, in crises such as Job had reached, far oftener than we may suppose. Job said nothing. Bayard watched him closely.

“Well, Job?” he said at last; not sternly, as he had spoken at Trawl’s door.

“I haven’t touched it before, sir, not a drop till last night,” said Job with sullen dreariness. “I was countin’ on it how I should see you the fust time since—I thought of it all the way home from Georges’. I was so set to see you I couldn’t wait to get ashore to see you. I took a clean jump from the dory to the landin’. I upsot the dory and two men.... Mr. Bayard, sir, the cap’n’s right. I ain’t wuth it. You’d better let me drownded off the Clara Em.”

“Tell me how it happened,” said Bayard gently. Job shook his head.

“You know’s well’s I, sir. We come ashore, and Trawl, he had one of his —— runners to the wharf. Ben was there, bossin’ the —— job.”

The minister listened to this profanity without proffering a rebuke. His teeth were set; he looked as if he would have liked to say as much, himself.

“There was a fellar there had made two hundred dollars to his trip. He treated. So I said I didn’t want any. But I hankered for it till it seemed I’d die there on the spot before ’em. Ben, he sent a bar-boy after me come to say I needn’t drink unless I pleased, but not to be onsocial, and to come along with the crowd. So I said, No, I was a goin’ home to my wife and kid. When the fellar was gone, I see he’d slipped a bottle into my coat pocket. It was a pint bottle XXX. The cork was loose and it leaked. So I put it back, for I swore I wouldn’t touch it, and I got a little on my fingers. I put ’em in my mouth to lick ’em off—and, sir, before God, that’s all I know—till I come to, to-day. The hanker got me, and that’s all I know. I must ha’ ben at it all night. Seems to me I went home an’ licked my wife and come away ag’in, but I ain’t sure. I must ha’ ben on a reg’lar toot. I’m a —— drunken fool, and the quicker you let me go to —— the better.”

Job leaned over and gazed at the water quietly. There was a look about his jaw which Bayard did not like. He came out from under the salt-house and moved the keg close beside the broken pile.

“What were you doing when I found you? I’ve been looking for you everywhere—last night, and all day.”

“I was havin’ it out,” said Job doggedly.

“Having?”—

“It lays between me and the rum, God and the devil. I was set to see which would beat.”

“Why didn’t you come straight over to see me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t put your feet up those steps and walk in?”

“No, sir. I couldn’t do it. I come over twenty times. I couldn’t get no further. I had to come back to Trawl’s. I had to do it!”

Job brought his clenched hand down heavily on his knee.

“You can’t onderstand, sir,” he said drearily. “You ain’t a drinkin’ man.”

“I sometimes wish I had been,” said the minister unexpectedly. “I must understand these things.”

“God forbid!” said Job solemnly. He stretched his shaking arm out with a beautiful gesture, and put it around Bayard, as if he were shielding from taint a woman or some pure being from an unknown world.

Tears sprang to the minister’s eyes. He took the drunkard’s dirty hand, and clasped it warmly. The two men sat in silence. Job looked at the water. Bayard looked steadily at Job.

“Come,” he said at length, in his usual tone. “It is beginning to rain, in earnest. I’m not quite strong yet. I suppose I must not sit here. Take my arm, and come home to Mari and Joey.”

Job acquiesced hopelessly. He knew that it would happen all over again. They walked on mutely; their steps fell with a hollow sound upon the deserted pier; the water sighed as they passed, like the involuntary witness of irreclaimable tragedy.

Suddenly, Bayard dropped Job’s hand, and spoke in a ringing voice:—

“Job Slip, get down upon your knees—just where you stand!”

Job hesitated.

“Down!” cried Bayard.

Job obeyed, as if he had been a dog.

“Now, lift up your hands—so—to the sky.”

As if the minister had been a cut-throat, Job obeyed again.

“Now pray,” commanded Bayard.

“I don’t know—how to,” stammered Job.

“Pray! Pray!” repeated Bayard.

“I’ve forgot the way you do it, sir!”

“No matter how other people do it! This is your affair. Pray your own way. Pray anyhow. But pray!”

“I haven’t done such a thing since I was—since I used to say: ‘Eenty Deenty Donty,’—no, that ain’t it, neither. ‘Now I lay me?’ That’s more like it. But that don’t seem appropriate to the circumstances, sir.”

“Try again, Job.”

“’Tain’t no use, Mr. Bayard. I’m a goner. If I couldn’t keep sober for you, I ain’t ergointer for no Creetur I never see nor spoke to,—nor no man ever see nor spoke to,—a thousand fathoms up overhead.”

Job lifted his trembling arms high and higher towards the dark sky.

“Pray!” reiterated Bayard.

“I can’t do it, sir!”

“Pray!” commanded Bayard.

“Oh,—God!” gasped Job.

Bayard took off his hat. Job’s arms fell; his face dropped into them; he shook from head to foot.

“There!” he cried, “I done it.... I’ll do it again. God! God! God!”

Bayard bowed his head. Moments passed before he said, solemnly,—

“Job Slip, I saved your life, didn’t I?”

“You committed that mistake, sir.”

“It belongs to me, then. You belong to me. I take you. I give you to God.”

He dropped upon his knees beside the drunkard in the rain.

“Lord,” he said, in a tone of infinite sweetness, “here is a poor perishing man. Save him! He has given himself to Thee.”

“The parson did that, Lord,” sobbed Job. “Don’t give me no credit for it!”

“Save him!” continued Bayard, who seemed hardly to have heard the drunkard’s interruption. “Save me this one man! I have tried, and failed, and I am discouraged to the bottom of my heart. But I cannot give him up. I will never give him up till he is dead, or I am. If I cannot do any other thing in Windover, for Christ’s sake, save me this one drunken man!”

Bayard lifted his face in a noble agony. Job hid his own before that Gethsemane.

“Does the parson care so much—as that?” thought the fisherman.

The rain dashed on Bayard’s white face. He rose from his knees.

“Job Slip,” he said, “you have signed a contract which you can never break. Your vow lies between God and you. I am the witness. I have bound you over to a clean life. Go and sin no more.—I’ll risk you now,” added Bayard, quietly. “I shall not even walk home with you. You have fifteen rum-shops to meet before you get back to your wife and child. Pass them! They all stand with open doors, and the men you know are around these doors. You will not enter one of them. You will go straight home; and to-morrow you will send me written testimony from Mari, your wife,—I want her to write it, Job,—that you did as I bade you, and came home sober. Now go, and God go with you.”

As Bayard turned to give the drunkard his hand, he stumbled a little over something on the dark pier. Job had not risen from his knees, but stooped, and put his lips to the minister’s patched shoe.

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This legend, written in a laborious chirography on a leaf torn from a grocer’s pass-book, was put into Bayard’s hand at noon of the next day. Joey brought it; he had counted upon a nap on the study lounge, and was rather disappointed to find it occupied. Mrs. Granite said she had sent for Cap’n Hap; she said the minister’s temperature had gone up to a hundred and twenty, and she should think it would.

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