So Emanuel Bayard entered into his Wilderness. Therein he was tempted like other men of God who renounce the greatest joy of life for its grandest duty. There he thirsted and hungered, and put forth no hand towards the meat or drink of human comfort; there he contended with himself, and hid his face, for he went into solitary places, and prayed apart, asking for that second strength which sustains a man in the keeping of the vow that he has not feared to take upon his soul—not knowing, till God teaches him, how easy it is to recognize, and how hard to hold, “the highest when we see it.”

---

Winter drew its yoke of ice about the shrinking shoulders of the Cape; the fleets huddled in the harbor; the fishermen drowned on the Grand Banks; Windover shivered and shriveled, and looked with wincing, winking eyes upon the blinding horizon of the winter sea; the breakers broke in white fire upon the bar; Angel Alley drank and cursed to keep warm; and the young preacher’s delicate face, patiently passing in and out beneath the white and scarlet lights of the chapel of Christlove, gathered a snowdrift of its own with the whitening of the year.

His work, like most service sustained in consecration and in common sense by one pure and strong personality, grew upon his hands; not steadily, but by means of much apparent failure.

The fame of the heretic missionary had gone abroad as such things do. It was no uncommon thing for members of the strictest sect of the Orthodox churches to stand half curious, half deferent, and wholly perplexed by what they saw and heard, and calculating the prospects of an experiment which the observer was, as a rule, too wise a man or too good a woman not to respect.

It even happened now and then that some distinguished clergyman was seen jammed between a fisherman and a drunkard in the crush by the door; taking notes of the sermon, studying the man and his methods with the humility characteristic of large men, and seldom imitated by little ones.

The Reverend George Fenton was not, but would have liked to be, one of these eminent and docile clerical visitors at the chapel of Christlove. He dared not leave his congregation, decorously scattered to listen to a sound theology, in the pews of the old First Church, to elbow his unnoticed way among the publicans and sinners who thronged his classmate’s mission; but he often wished he could. He asked himself anxiously: “What is the secret? How does the man do it?” Sometimes he envied his heretic friend the drunkards, and sailors, the reckless girls, and most of all the fishermen, sacred in the canon and to the imagination of the church,—the fishermen, once the chosen friends of Our Lord.

Bayard even fancied that Fenton looked at him a little wistfully; and that he spoke with him oftener and lingered longer when they met upon the streets of the sad and tempted town whose redemption both men, each in his own way, desired and sought, with a sincerity which this biography would not intimate was to be found only in the heart of its subject, and hero. For the Reverend George Fenton was no hypocrite, or Pharisee; the prevailing qualities of his class not being of this sort. No one rated him more generously than his heretic classmate; or looked more gently upon the respectable, dreary effort to save the world by an outgrown method, which the conformer dutifully and comfortably sustained.

“I heard a Boston man call you the Father Taylor of Windover,” one day abruptly said the clergyman to the missionary, upon the post-office steps. “Boston could no farther go, I take it. I hear your audience has outgrown your mission-room. That must be a great encouragement; you must consider it a divine leading,” added Fenton, with the touch of professional slang and jealousy not unnatural to better men than he. “But you must remember that we, too, are following the Master in our way; it’s a pretty old and useful way.”

Then up spoke Captain Hap, who stood at Bayard’s elbow.

“It’s jest about here, Mr. Fenton. You folks set out to foller Him; but our minister, he lives like Him. There’s an almighty difference.”

Another day, Fenton, with his young wife on his arm, came down Angel Alley with the air of a tourist inspecting the points of interest in a new vicinity.

“Bayard!” he exclaimed; “you look as white as a Cesarea snowdrift. You are overworked, man. What can I do, to help you?—If there is anything,” he added with genuine concern, “you’d let me know, wouldn’t you?”

“Probably not, Fenton,” replied Bayard, smiling.

“I mean it,” urged the other, flushing.

“If you do, the time may come,” said Bayard dreamily.

He glanced at his old friend,—the rosy, well-fed man; at the round face destitute of the carving of great purpose or deep anxiety; at the pretty girl with the Berkshire eyes who looked adoringly over the sleek elbow to which she clung. These two well-meaning, commonplace people seemed ennobled and beautified, as commoner far than they may be, by their human love and happiness. Bayard, in his shabby clothes, with his lonely face, watched them with a certain reverence.

He thought—but when did he not think of Helen?

He wrote; she answered; they did not meet; he worked on patiently; and the winter went. Bayard drowned himself in his work with the new and conscious ardor of supreme renunciation. He thought of the woman whom he loved, as the diver at the bottom of the sea, when the pumps refuse to work, thinks of sky and shore and sun, of air and breath.

---

One bleak, bright February night, Bayard came out from his mission, and looked about Angel Alley anxiously.

Bob was within, and Tony and Jean were safe; Job Slip was sober, and Tom, Dick, and Harry were accounted for. But Lena—Lena had not been seen at Christlove for now many weeks.

The waywardness of the girl had long been sore at Bayard’s heart, and the step which he took that night was the result of thought and deliberate purpose. Afterwards he was glad to remember that he had acted on no one of those mere sentiments or impulsive whims which are the pitfalls of a philanthropic life.

The hour was not early, decent people were scattering to their homes, and Windover was giving herself over to the creatures of the night. It was a windy night, and the snow blew in cold, white powder from the surface of drifts called heavy for the coast, and considered a sign of “a spell of weather.”

There was a full moon; and the harbor, as one looked down between the streets, showed in glints and glimpses, bright and uneasy. The bellow of the whistling-buoy nine miles out, off the coast, was audible at firesides. The wind sped straight from Cape Cod, and was as icy as death.

It was one of the nights when the women of Windover grow silent, and stand at the window with the shade raised, looking out between their hands, with anxious, seaward eyes. “God pity the men at sea!” they say who have no men at sea. But those who have say nothing. They pray. As the night wears on, and the gale increases, they weep. They do not sleep. The red light on the Point goes out, and dawn is gray. The buoy shrieks on malignantly. It “comes on thick”; and the fog-bell begins to toll. Its mighty lips utter the knell for all the unburied drowned that are, and have been, and are yet to be. Windover listens and shudders. It is one of the nights when the sheltered and the happy and the clean of life bless God for home, for peace, for fire and pillow. It is one of the nights when the soul of the gale enters into the soul of the tempted and the unbefriended, and with it seven devils worse than the first. It was one of the nights when girls like Lena are too easy or too hard to find.

Bayard sought her everywhere. She was not to be seen in Angel Alley, and he systematically and patiently searched the town. With coat-collar turned up, and hat turned down, he tried to keep warm, but the night was deadly bleak. It came on to be eleven o’clock; half past; and midnight approached. He was about to abandon his quest when he struck a trace of her, and with redoubled patience he hunted it down. He had taken no one with him in his search for Lena; in truth, he knew of no person in all that Christian town who would have wished to share that night’s repulsive errand if he had asked it. He recognized this fact with that utter absence of bitterness which is the final grace and test of dedication to an unselfish end.

“Why should I expect it?” he thought gently. “Duty is not subject to a common denominator. This is mine and not another’s.”

A policeman gave him, at last, the clew he needed; and Bayard, who had returned on his track to Angel Alley, halted before the door of a house at the end of a dark court, within a shell’s-throw of the wharves. His duty had never led him before into precisely such a place, and his soul sickened within him. He hesitated, with his foot on the steps.

“Better stay outside, sir,” suggested the policeman.

Bayard shook his head.

“Shan’t I go with you, sir? You don’t know what you’re about. Better have an officer along.”

“Stay here, within call, will you?” answered Bayard. “That will do. The law can’t do my errand.”

“Nor nothin’ else in this town but that,” returned the officer, touching his helmet.

He pointed up the Alley where the large letters of the solemn white and scarlet sign blazed all night before the chapel of Christlove. The fishermen could see it from their schooners’ decks as they dropped anchors; and it shone strangely in their weather-beaten faces as they pushed past—or sank into—the doors of the dens that lined the street.

Bayard’s eye followed the officer’s finger, lighting with that solemn radiance peculiar to himself; and with this illumination on his face he entered the place whose ways take hold on death.

The officer waited without. In an incredibly short time the minister reappeared. He was not alone. Lena followed him with hanging head.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” said Bayard quietly, touching his hat, “I shall need you no longer.”

He turned, with the girl beside him, and crossed the Alley. The officer, with a low whistle, lingered a moment, and watched the astounding pair. In the full moonlight, in the sight of all whom it did or did not concern, Bayard walked up and down the street with Lena. It was now near to the stroke of midnight. The two could be seen conversing earnestly. Lena did not raise her eyes. The minister watched her eagerly. They paced up and down. Men staggering home from their sprees stood stupidly and stared at the two. Old Trawl came to his door and saw them, and called Ben, who looked, and swore the mighty oath of utter intellectual confusion. The minister nodded to Ben, and spoke once or twice to some sailor who awaited salutation; but he suffered no interruption of his interview with the girl. In the broad moonlight he continued quietly to walk up and down Angel Alley, with the street-girl at his side.

“Lena,” Bayard had begun, “I have been trying to help the people in this Alley for almost a year and a half, and I have met with nothing to discourage me as much as you do. Some men and women have grown better, and some have not changed at all. You are growing worse.”

“That’s so,” assented Lena. “It’s as true as Hell.”

“I begin to think,” replied the minister, “that it must be partly my fault. It seems to me as if I must have failed, somehow, or made some mistake—or you would be a better girl, after all this time. Do you think of anything—Come, Lena! Give your best attention to the subject—Do you think of anything that I could do, which I have not done, to induce you to be a decent woman?”

“I tried, for you!” muttered Lena. “I tried; you know I did!”

“Yes, I know you did; and I appreciated it. You failed, that was all. You are discouraged, and so am I. Now, tell me! What else can I do, to make a good girl of you? For it’s got to be done, you see,” he added firmly. “I can’t have this any longer. You disgrace the chapel, and the people, and me. It makes me unhappy, Lena.”

“Mr. Bayard! Mr. Bayard!” said Lena with trembling lip, “I’ll go drown in the outer harbor. I ain’t fit to live ... if you care. I didn’t suppose you cared.”

“You are not fit to die, Lena,” returned Bayard gently. “And I do care. I have always thought you were born to be a fine woman. There’s something I like about you. You are generous, and brave, and kind-hearted. Then see what a voice you have! You might have been a singer, Lena, and sung noble things—the music that makes people purer and better. You might have”....

“Oh, my God!” cried Lena; “I was singin’ in that—in there—to-night. They’re always after me to sing ’em into damnation.”

“Lena,” said Bayard in a thrilling tone, “look into my face!”

She obeyed him. High above her short stature Bayard’s delicate countenance looked down at the girl. All the loathing, all the horror, all the repulsion that was in him for the sin he suffered the sinner to see for the first time. His tender face darkened and quivered, shrinking like some live thing that she tormented.

“Oh,” wailed Lena, “am I like that—to you? Is it as bad as that?”

“It is as bad as that,” answered the minister solemnly.

“Then I’ll go drown,” said Lena dully; “I might as well.”

“No,” he said quietly. “You will not drown. You will live, and make yourself a girl whom I can respect.”

“Would you ever respect me—respect me, if I was to be—if I was to do what you say?” asked Lena in a low, controlled tone.

“I should respect you from my soul,” said Bayard.

“Would you—would you be willing to—would you feel ashamed to shake hands with me, Mr. Bayard,—if I was a different girl?”

“I will shake hands with you now,” returned the minister quietly, “if you will give me your word of honor that you will never, from this hour”—

“I will never, from this hour, so help me God!” said Lena solemnly.

“So help her, God!” echoed Bayard.

He lifted his hand above her head, as if in prayer and blessing; then gently extended it. The girl’s cold, purple fingers shook as he touched them. She held her bare hand up in the moonlight, as if to bathe it in whiteness.

“Mr. Bayard, sir,” she said in her ordinary voice, “it is a bargain.”

Bayard winced, in spite of himself, at the words; but he looked at Lena’s face, and when he saw its expression he felt ashamed of his own recoil.

“Very well,” he answered, adopting her business-like tone, “so it is. Now, then, Lena! What next? What are you going to do? Have you any home—any friends—anywhere to turn?”

“I have no friend on all God’s earth but you, sir,” said Lena drearily, “but I guess I’ll manage, somehow. I can mostly do what I set out to.”

“Your mother?” asked Bayard gently.

“She died when my baby was born, sir. She died of the shame of it. I was fifteen year old.”

“Oh! and the—the man? The father of your child?”

“He was a gentleman. He was a married man. I worked for him, in a shop. He ain’t dead. But I’d sooner go to hell than look to him.”

“I’d about as soon you would”—the minister said in his heart. But his lips answered only,—“You poor girl! You poor, poor, miserable girl!”

Then, for the first time, Lena broke down, and began to cry, there, on the streets, in the sight of every one.

“I must find you work—shelter—home—with some lady. I will do whatever can be done. Rely on me!” cried Bayard helplessly.

He began to realize what he had done, in undertaking Lena’s “case” without the help of a woman. Confusedly he ran over in his mind the names of the Christian women whom he knew, to whom he could turn in this emergency. He thought of Helen Carruth; but an image of the Professor’s wife, her mother, being asked to introduce Lena into the domestic machinery of a Cesarea household, half amused and half embittered him. He remembered the wife of his church treasurer, a kindly woman, trained now to doing the unexpected for Christ’s sake.

“I will speak to Mrs. Bond. I will consider the matter. Perhaps there may be some position—some form of household service,” he ventured, with the groping masculine idea that a domestic career was the only one open to a girl like Lena.

Then Lena laughed.

“Thank you, sir. But I ain’t no more fit for housework than I be for a jeweler’s trade, or floss embroidery, or a front pew in Heaven. There ain’t a lady in Christendom would put up with me. I wouldn’t like it, either,” said Lena candidly. “There’s only one thing I would like. It’s just come over me, standin’ here. I guess I’ll manage.”

“I shall wish to know,” observed Bayard anxiously, “what you are going to do, and where you will be.”

“I’ll take a room I know of,” said Lena. “It ain’t in Angel Alley. It’s a decent place. I’ll get Johnny’s mother to come along o’ me. She’s dead sick of the Widders’ Home. She’s kinder fond of me, Johnny’s mother is, and she can take in or go out, to help a bit. Then I’ll go over to the powder factory.”

“The powder factory?” echoed the puzzled pastor.

“The gunpowder factory, over to the Cut,” said Lena. “They’re kinder short of hands. It ain’t a popular business. The pay’s good, and Lord, I shouldn’t care! The sooner I blow up, the safer I’ll be. I guess I’d like it, too. I always thought I should.”

“Very well,” said the minister helplessly. “That may answer, till we can find something better.”

It was now past twelve o’clock, and the night was growing bitterly cold. Bayard said good-night to Lena, and they separated opposite Trawl’s door.

He went shivering home, and stirred up his fire. He was cold to the heart. That discreet afterthought which is the enemy of too many of our noble decisions, tormented him. He turned to his books, and taking one which was lying open upon the study-table read:—

“He spoke much about the wrongs of women; and it is very touching to know that during the last year of his life he frequently went forth at night, and endeavored to redeem the fallen women of Brighton.”...

It was not three days from this time that Captain Hap approached the minister on the Alley, with a sober and anxious face. He held in his hand a copy of the “Windover Topsail.” His rough finger trembled as it pressed the paragraph which he handed in silence for Bayard to read:—

---

“We regret to learn that a certain prominent citizen of this place who has been laboring among the sailors and fishermen in a quasi-clerical capacity, is so unfortunate as to find his name associated with a most unpleasant scandal arising out of his acquaintance with the disreputable women of the district in which he labors. We wish the Reverend gentleman well out of his scrape, but may take occasion to suggest that such self-elected censors of our society and institutions must learn somehow that they cannot touch pitch and not be defiled, any more than ordinary men who do not make their pretensions to holiness.”

“Well?” said Bayard, quietly returning the paper.

Job Slip had joined them, and read the paragraph over the Captain’s shoulder. Job was white to the lips with the virile rage of a man of the sea.

“I’ve shipped here, and I’ve coasted there, and I’ve sailed eenymost around the world,” slowly said Captain Hap. “I never in my life—and I’m comin’ on seventy-five year old—I never knew no town I wouldn’t d’ruther see a scandal a-goin’ in, than this here. It’s Hell let loose on ye,” added the Captain grimly.

“Find me the fellar that put up that job!” roared Job Slip, rolling up his sleeves.

“He ain’t fur to seek,” answered the Captain with a short laugh.

“He’s the devil and all his angels smithered into one!” raved Job.

“That’s drawrin’ of it mild,” said Captain Hap.

“This—low—matter does not trouble me,” observed Bayard, smiling with genuine and beautiful remoteness.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Captain Hap; “that’s all you know!”