A fiery July was followed by a scorching August. There was a long drought, and simooms of fine, irritating dust. The gasping town and inland country flocked to the coast in more than the usual force. The hotels brimmed over. Even Windover fanned herself, and lay in hammocks lazily, watching for the two o’clock east wind to stir the topsails of the schooners trying under full canvas to crawl around the Point. In Angel Alley the heat was something unprecedented; and the devil shook hands with discomfort as he is fain to, and made new comrades.

Bayard was heavily overworked. He gave himself few pleasures, after the fashion of the man; and the summer people at the Point knew him not. He was not of them, nor of their world. Afterwards, he recalled, with a kind of pain lacking little of anguish, how few in number had been his evenings in the cool parlor of the cottage, where the lace curtains blew in and out through the purple twilight, or on the impearled harbor, in the dory, when the sun went down, and he drifted with her between earth and heaven, between light and reflection, in a glamour of color, in alternations of quiet, dangerous talk, and of more dangerous silence; brief, stolen hours when duty seemed a dimming dream, and human joy the only reality, the sole value, the decreed and eternal end of life. Upon this rare and scanty substitute for happiness he fed; and from it he fled.

Between his devotions and his desertions the woman stood mute and inscrutable. And while they still moved apart, saying, “The summer is before us,” lo, the petals of the Cape roses had flown on the hot winds, the goldenrod was lifting its sword of flame on the undulating gray downs, and the summer was spent.

And yet, at every march and countermarch in the drill of duty, he was aware of her. It could not be said that she ever overstepped the invisible line which he had elected to draw between them; though it might be said that she had the fine pride which did not seem to see it. Helen had the quiet, maidenly reserve of an elder and more delicate day than ours. To throw her young enthusiasm into his work without obtruding herself upon his attention, was a difficult procedure, for which she had at once the decorum and the wit.

At unexpected crises and in unthought-of ways he came upon her footprints or her sleight-of-hand. Helen’s methods were purely her own. She followed neither law nor gospel; no rules or precedents controlled her. She relieved what suffering she chose, and omitted where she did elect; and he was sometimes astonished at the common sense of her apparent willfulness. She had no more training in sociological problems than the goldenrod upon the bosom of her white gown; yet she seldom made a serious mistake. In a word, this summer girl, playing at charity for a season’s amusement, poured a refreshing amount of novelty, vigor, ingenuity, and feminine defiance of routine into the labors of the lonely man. His too serious and anxious people found her as diverting as a pretty parlor play. A laugh ran around like a light flame whenever she came upon the sombre scene. She took a bevy of idle girls with her, and gave entertainments on which Angel Alley hung, a breathless and admiring crowd. She played, she sang, she read, she decorated. Pictures sprang on barren walls; books stood on empty shelves; games crowded the smoking-room; a piano replaced the painstaking melodeon; life and light leaped where she trod, into the poor and unpopular place. The people took to her one of the strong, loyal fancies of the coast. Unsuspected by her, or by himself, she began, even then, to be known among them as “the minister’s girl.” But this hurt nobody, neither herself nor him, and their deference to her never defaulted. In the indulgence of that summer’s serious mood, Helen seldom met, he was forced to suspect that she purposely avoided, the preacher. Often he entered a laughing home from which she had just vanished. Sometimes—but less often—he found that she had preceded him where death and trouble were. Their personal interviews were rare, and of her seeking, never.

“She is amusing herself with a novelty,” he thought. Then came the swift, unbidden question, If this is her beautiful whim, what would her dedication be?

Since, to play at helping a man’s work, though at the tip of the sceptre by which he held her back, meant sense and sympathy, fervor and courage like this, what would it be to the great and solemn purpose of his life, if she shared it, crowned queen?

It was an August evening, sultry and smoky. Forest fires had been burning for a week on the wooded side of the harbor, and the air was thick. It was Sunday, and the streets and wharves and beaches of Windover surged with vacuous eyes and irritable passions. The lock-ups were full, the saloons overflowed. The ribald song and excessive oath of the coast swept up and down like air currents. There had been several accidents and some fights. Rum ran in streams. It was one of the stifling evenings when the most decent tenement retains only the sick or the helpless, and when the occupants of questionable sailors’ boarding-houses and nameless dens crawl out like vermin fleeing from fire. It was one of the nights when the souls of women go to perdition, and when men do not argue with their vices. It was one of the nights when ease and cool, luxury and delicacy, forget the gehenna that they escape; and when only the strong few remember the weakness of the many.

Upon the long beach of fine white sand which spanned the space between the docks and the cliffs of the wooded coast, there gathered that evening a large and unusual crowd. Angel Alley was there en masse. The wharves poured out a mighty delegation. Dories put out from anchored vessels whose prows nodded in the inner harbor, and their crews swarmed to the beach in schools, like fish to a net.

A few citizens of another sort, moved, one might say, from curiosity, innocent or malicious, joined themselves to the fishermen and sailors. Their numbers were increased by certain of the summer people from the Point, drawn from their piazzas and their hammocks by rumors of a sensation. An out-of-door service, said to be the first of its kind conducted by the remarkable young preacher of such excellent family and such eccentric career, was not without its attractions even on the hottest evening of the season. There might have been easily eight hundred or a thousand people facing the light temporary desk or pulpit which had been erected at the head of the beach for the speaker’s use.

The hour was early, and it would have been very light but for the smoke in the air, through which the sun hung, quivering and sinister, with the malevolent blood-red color of drought and blasting heat.

“Statira,” in a low tone said the puzzled voice of the Professor of Theology, “this is—I must say—really, a most extraordinary gathering. It quite impresses me.”

“I have read something somewhere it reminds me of,” mused Mrs. Carruth, with a knot between her placid brows. “Where was it, Haggai?—Helen! Helen! What have I read that is like this? I can’t think whether it is George Eliot, or Fox’s Book of Martyrs. Perhaps it is the Memoirs of Whitefield; but certainly”—

“Possibly,” suggested Helen, “it may have been the New Testament.”

“That’s it! You have it!” cried Mrs. Carruth, with mild relief. “That’s the very thing. How extraordinary! It is the New Testament I have got into my head.”

The Professor of Theology changed color slightly, but he made no answer to his wife. He was absorbed in watching the scene before him. There were many women in the crowd, but men predominated in proportion significant to the eye familiar with the painfully feminine character of New England religious audiences. Of these men, four fifths were toilers of the sea, red of face, uncertain of step, rough of hand, keen of eye, and open of heart,—

“Fearing no God but wind and wet.”

The scent of bad liquor was strong upon the heavy, windless air; oaths rippled to and fro as easily as the waves upon the beach, and (it seemed) quite as much according to the laws of Nature. Yet the men bore a decent look of personal respect for the situation. All wore their best clothes, and most were clean for the occasion. They chatted among themselves freely, paying small heed to the presence of strangers, these being regarded as inferior aliens who did not know how to man a boat in a gale.

The fisherman’s sense of his own superior position is, in any event, something delightful. In this case there was added the special aristocracy recognized in Angel Alley as belonging to Bayard’s people. Right under the ears of the Professor of Theology uprose these awful words:—

“D—— them swells. He don’t care a —— for them. We get along up to Christlove without ’em, don’t we, Bob? The parson’s ourn, anyhow. He can’t be bothered with the likes o’ them.”

“Look a’ Job Slip yonder! See the face of him, shaved like a dude. That’s him, a-passin’ round hymn-books. Who’d believe it? Job! Why, he ain’t teched a —— drop sence he swore off! Look a’ that young one of his taggin’ to his finger! That’s his wife, that bleached-out creetur in a new bunnet. See the look of her now!”

“It’s a way women have,—lookin’ like that when a man swears off,” replied a young fellow, wriggling uncomfortably. “It kinder puts my eyes out—like it was a lamp turned up too high.”

He winked hard and turned away.

“Ben Trawl! Hello, Trawl! You here? So fond of the minister as this?”

“I like to keep my eye on him,” replied Ben Trawl grimly.

Captain Hap, distributing camp-chairs for the women of the audience, turned and eyed Ben over his shoulder. The Captain’s small, keen eyes held the dignity and the scorn of age and character.

“Shut up there!” he said authoritatively. “The minister’s comin’. Trot back to your grogshop, Ben. This ain’t no place for Judases, nor yet for rummies.”

“Gorry,” laughed a young skipper; “he ain’t got customers enough to okkepy him. They’re all here.”

Now there sifted through the crowd an eager, affectionate whisper.

“There! There’s the preacher. Look that way—See? That tall, thin fellar—him with the eyes.”

“That’s him! That’s him. That long-sparred fellar. Three cheers for him!” shouted the mate of a collier, flinging up his hat.

A billow of applause started along the beach. Then a woman’s voice called out:—

“Boys, he don’t like it!” and the wave of sound dropped as suddenly as it rose.

“He comes!” cried an Italian.

“So he does, Tony, so he does!” echoed the woman. “God bless him!”

“He comes,” repeated Tony. “Hush you, boys—the Christman comes!”

The Professor of Theology pressed the tips of his scholarly fingers upon his aging eyes.

It was some moments before he commanded himself, and looked up.

Bayard stood bareheaded in the color of the red sun. He was pale, notwithstanding the warmth of the evening, and had a look so worn that those who loved him most felt unspoken fear like the grip of a hand at their hearts. The transparence, the delicacy of his appearance,—bathed in the scarlet of the murky sunset, as he was,—gave him an aspect half unreal. He seemed for the moment to be a beautiful phantom rising from a mist of blood. A hush, half of reverence, half of awe, fell upon all the people; it grew so still that the lazy breath of the shallow wave at that moment spent upon the beach, could be heard stirring through the calm.

Suddenly, and before the preacher had spoken any word, the impressive silence was marred by a rude sound. It was a girl’s coarse laugh.

Then there was seen upon the beach, and quite apart from the throng, a little group of nameless women, standing with their backs to the sacred scene. Some one—Job Slip, perhaps, or Captain Hap—started with an exclamation of horror to suppress the disturbance, when the preacher’s lifted hand withstood him. To the consternation of his church officers, and to the astonishment of his audience, Bayard deliberately left the desk, and, passing through the throng, which respectfully divided before him to left and right, himself approached the women.

“Lena!... Magdalena!”

He said but that word. The girl looked up—and down. She felt as if an archangel from the heavens, commissioned with the rebuke of God, had smitten her with something far more terrible—the mercy of man.

“You disturb us, Lena,” said the preacher gently. “Come.”

She followed him; and the girls behind her. They hung their heads. Lena scrawled she knew not what with the tip of her gaudy parasol upon the beach. Her heavy eyes traced the little pebbles in the sand. For her life, she thought, she could not have lifted her smarting lids. Till that moment, perhaps, Lena had never known what shame meant. It overwhelmed her, like the deluge which one dreams may foretell the end of the world.

The street girls followed the preacher silently. He conducted them gently through the throng, and seated them quite near the desk or table which served him as a pulpit. Some of his people frowned. The girls looked abashed at this courtesy.

Bayard ignored both evidences of attention to his unexpected act, passing it by as a matter of course, and without further delay made signs to his singers, and the service began.

---

Was it magic or miracle? Was it holiness or eloquence? Did he speak with the tongue of man or of angel? Where was the secret? What was the charm? Not a man or woman of them could have answered, but not a soul of them could have gainsaid the power of the preacher; the Professor of Theology least of all. This learned man stood the service out, upon the beach, behind the camp-chairs of his wife and daughter, and knew neither fatigue nor the critical faculty, till the beautiful worship drew to its end.

Bayard’s manner was quiet, finished, and persuasive; it must have appealed to the most fastidious oratorical taste; any instructor in homiletics might have seen in it a remarkable illustration of the power of consecrated education over ignorance and vice. But Bayard’s thought threw off ecclesiastical form as naturally as the gulls, arising from the harbor in the reddening sunset, tossed off the spray from their wings. No class of men are more responsive to originality than sea-going men. Of the humdrum, the commonplace, they will naught. Cant they scorn, and at religious snobbery they laugh.

It would be difficult to say what it was in Emanuel Bayard that most attracted them: whether his sincerity or his intellect, his spirituality or his manliness; or that mystical charm which comes not of striving, or of prayer, or of education—the power of an elect personality. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that the fishermen loved him because he loved them. The idea is older than the time of this biography, but it will bear repeating.

The red sun dipped, and the hot night cooled. Dusk purpled on the breathless water, and on the long beach. A thousand restless people grew as gentle as one. The outlines of the preacher’s form softened into the surrounding shadow; the features of his high face melted and wavered. Only his appealing voice remained distinct. It seemed to be the cry of a spirit more than the eloquence of a man. It pleaded as no man pleads who has not forgotten himself, as no man can plead who is not remembered of God. Fishermen stood with one foot on the beach, and one on their stranded dories, like men afraid to stir. Rude, uncomfortable men in the heart of the crowd thrust their heads forwards with breath held in, as still as figure-heads upon a wreck. The uplifted eyes of the throng took on an expression of awe. It grew dimmer, and almost dark. And then, when no one could see the pathos of his face, they knew that he was praying for their souls. Some of the men fell upon their knees; but the heads of others got no lower than their guilty breasts, where they hung like children’s. The sound of stifled sobbing mingled with the sigh of the waves.

The unseen singers, breathing upon the last words of the prayer, chanted a solemn benediction. The tide was rising slowly, and the eternal Amen of the sea responded. Suddenly a lantern flashed—and another—and light and motion broke upon the scene.

Rough men looked into one another’s wet faces, and were not ashamed. But some held their hats before their eyes. The girls in the front chairs moved away quietly, speaking to no person. But Lena separated herself from them, and disappeared in the dark. Job Slip had not arisen from his knees, and Mari, his wife, knelt by him. The woman’s expression was something touching to see, and impossible to forget. Captain Hap held a lantern up, and Bayard’s face shone out, rapt and pale.

“Behold the Christman!” said the Italian, repeating his favorite phrase in a reverent whisper.

The Professor of Theology heard it again; and repetition did not weaken its effect upon the Orthodox scholar. He removed his hat from his gray head. His wife held her delicate handkerchief to her eyes. Helen, struggling with herself, was pale with emotion. The Professor tried to speak.

“It is not,” he said, “precisely a doctrinal discourse, and his theology”—

The Professor checked himself. “It is written,” he said, “that the common people heard Him gladly. And it must be admitted that our dear young friend, His servant, seems to command that which—men older and—sounder than he, would give their lives—and fame—to—”

But there he choked, and tried to say no more.

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There ought to have been a moon that night, and the electric jets at the crest of the beach had not been lighted. By the special request of the preacher, or by the forethought of the police, in view, perhaps, of the unusual size of the crowd, the lights now sprang out.

The throng dispersed slowly. The dark sea formed a sober background to the mass of quietly moving figures. The fishermen, with one foot on their dories, leaped in, and pushed off; scattered crews gathered gently, and rowed soberly back to their schooners. Groups collected around the preacher, waiting their turns for a word from his lips, or a touch from his hand. It was evident that he was very tired, but he refused himself to no one.

The summer people walked away softly. They passed through Angel Alley on their way to take the electric car. They looked up thoughtfully at the illuminated words swinging over their heads in fire of scarlet and white:—

“The Love of Christ.”

As she passed by the door of the mission, Helen was recognized by some of the women and children, who surrounded her affectionately, begging for some little service at her hands. It seemed to be desired that she should play or sing to them. While she stood, hesitating, between her father and her mother, Bayard himself, with a group of fishermen around him, came up Angel Alley.

“I will see that she is safely taken home, Professor, if you care to let her stay,” he said. “We won’t keep her—perhaps half an hour? Will that do? The people like to hear her sing; it helps to keep them out of the street.”

“Mr. Bayard will look after her, Haggai,” replied Mrs. Carruth wearily. “I see no objections, do you?”

Mrs. Carruth was very tired. Not to give a sober Monday to all the drunkards of Angel Alley would she have felt that she could stay another hour in that mob. She never saw such sights in Cesarea; where charity took a mild, ladylike form, consisting chiefly of missionary barrels, and Dorcas societies for the families of poor students who had no business to have married.

The Professor took her away. He wanted to tell his heretic graduate what he had thought about that service on the beach; indeed, he made one effort to do so, beginning slowly:—

“My dear Bayard, your discourse this evening”—

“To h—— with ’em!” cried Captain Hap in a thunderous sea-voice, at that moment. “Mr. Bayard! Mr. Bayard, sir! Come here! Here’s them two Trawlses a-tryin’ to toll Job Slip into their place! Mr. Bayard! Mr. Bayard!”

Mr. Bayard held out his hand to his Professor, and, smiling, shook his head. Then he vanished down the Alley. He had lingered only to say these words in Helen’s ear:—

“Go into the chapel and stay there till I come for you. Look after Lena—will you? I want her kept inside. Get her to singing with you, if you can.”

He called back over his shoulder:—

“I will bring her home, Mrs. Carruth, in half an hour. I will row her home, myself. I have a boat here.”

Professor Carruth stood for a moment watching the thronged, bright doorway into which his daughter had disappeared. The fishermen and the drunkards, the Windover widows in their crape and calico, the plain, obscure, respectable parishioners, and the girls from the street moved in together beneath the white and scarlet lights. Helen’s voice sounded suddenly through the open windows. She sang:—

“I need Thee every hour.
Stay Thou near by.”

“Hello, Bob,” said a voice in the street. “That’s the minister’s hymn.” Groups of men moved over from the grogshop to the chapel door. They collected, and increased in numbers. One man struck into the chorus, on a low bass,—

“Stay near me, O my Saviour.”

Another voice joined; and another. Up and down the street the men took the music up. From Angel Alley without, and Christlove within, the voices of the people met and mingled in “the parson’s hymn.”

The Professor of Theology glanced at the illuminated words above his head.

“It is growing chilly. I am sure you will take cold,” complained his wife. With bared, gray head the Professor walked out of Angel Alley, and his old wife clung silently to his arm. She felt that this was one of the moments when Mr. Carruth should not be spoken to.

Bayard brought Helen home as he had promised; and it was but a little beyond the half of the hour when his dory bumped against the float. He rowed her over the dim harbor with long, skillful strokes; Helen fancied that they were not as strong as they might have been; he seemed to her almost exhausted. They had exchanged but a few words. Midway of the harbor she had said abruptly,—

“Mr. Bayard, I cannot keep it to myself! I must tell you how what you said this evening on the beach—how that service made me feel.”

“Don’t!” said Bayard quickly. Helen shrank back into the stern of the dory; she felt, for the moment, terribly wounded.

“Forgive me!” he pleaded. “I didn’t feel as if I could bear it—that’s all.”

“I am not in the habit of making a fool of myself over ministers,” replied Helen hotly. “I never told one I liked his sermon, yet, in all my life. I was going to say—I meant to say—I will say!” she cried, sitting up very straight, “Mr. Bayard, you are better than I am; truly, infinitely, solemnly better. I’ve never even tried to be what you are. You’ve done me good, as well as Job, and Lena, and the rest. I won’t go away without saying it,—and I’m going away this week.... There!”

She drew a long breath and leaned back.

Bayard rowed on for some moments in inscrutable silence. It was too dark to see the expression of his face. When he spoke, it was in a half-articulate, tired way.

“I did not know. Are you coming back?”

“I am going to Campo Bello with the Rollinses,” replied Helen briefly. “I don’t expect to come back again this year.”

“I wonder I had not thought of it,” said Bayard slowly. “I did not,” he added.

“The people will miss you,” he suggested, after a miserable pause.

“Oh, they will get used to that,” said Helen.

“And I?” he asked, in a tone whose anguish smote suddenly upon her ears, like a mortal cry. “What is to become of me?”

“You’ll get used to it, too,” she said, thrusting out her hands in that way she had.

His oars dropped across his knees.

Before either of them could speak or think or reason, he had caught one of her outstretched hands. It lay, warm, soft, quivering,—a terrible temptation in the grasp of the devotee.

He could have devoured it—her—soul and body; he could have killed her with kisses; he could have murdered her with love.

Instead, he laid Helen’s hand down gently. He did not so much as lift it to his starving lips. He laid it down upon her own lap quite solemnly, as if he relinquished something unspeakably precious. He took up his oars, and rowed her home.

Neither had spoken again. Helen’s heart beat wildly. She dared not look at him. Under the solitary lantern of the deserted float she felt his strong gaze upon her, and it looked, not with the eyes of angels, but with the eyes of a man.

“Oh, my dear, I love you!” he breathed in a broken voice.

Saying this, and only this, he led her to her father’s door, and left her.

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