Читать книгу A Singular Life - Elizabeth Stuart Phelps - Страница 9

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The real crises of life are those that the stories leave untold. It is not the sudden blow, but the learning how to bear the bruise afterwards, that constitutes experience; not the delirium of fever, but the weariness of convalescence. What does one do the Monday morning after the funeral? How does one meet the grocery bills when the property is gone? How does a man act when his reputation is ruined by the span of an afternoon? Fiction does not tell us, but fact omits nothing of the grim details; spares not the least stroke of that black perplexity which, next to the insecurity of life, is the hardest thing about it.

You men of affairs, give a moment’s manly sympathy to the position of a young fellow like yourselves, halting just over the line between education and a life’s work, trained for a calling which the worldliest soul among you respects as nobler and higher than your own, tripped at the outset by one of its lower and more ignoble accidents; a man who will not lie to God or his own soul, who has scorned the consequences of being simply true, but must bear them for all that, like other men. For the holiest dedications in this world suffer the taint thereof; and it is at once the saddest and the healthiest thing about the work of a man of God that it is subject to market laws, to fashion, to prejudice, to envy, and to poor judgment, like other work.

It seems a little thing to write about, but at the time it was not the least aspect of the great crisis into which Emanuel Bayard had arrived, that, when he came out into the strong, salt breeze of Windover that afternoon, it suddenly occurred to the heretic minister that he had nowhere to spend the night. Alas for the bright and solemn festival in which his should have been the crowned hero’s part! He heard the excited women of the parish asking each other:—

“Who is going to eat up that collation?”

“What is ever going to become of all that one-two-three-four cake?”

“Feed those old ministers now? Not a sandwich! Let ’em go home where they belong. If we’re going to have no minister, they shall have no supper! We’ll settle him in spite of ’em!”

Thus the Ladies’ Aid Association, with flushed cheeks and shrill voices. But the deacons and the pillars of the disturbed church collected in serious groups, and discussed the catastrophe with the dignity of the voting and governing sex.

Sick at heart, and longing to escape from the whole miserable scene, Bayard walked down the street alone. His steps bent blindly to the station. When he had bought his ticket to Boston, it came to him for the first time to ask himself where he was going. Home? What home? Whose? Hermon Worcester’s? That glance at his uncle’s rigid face which he had allowed himself back there in the church recurred to him. The incensed and disappointed man had suffered his smitten boy to go forth from that furnace without a sign of sympathy. He had given Emanuel one look: the pupils of his eyes were dark and dilated with indignation of the kind that a gentleman does not trust himself to express.

“I cannot go home,” said Emanuel suddenly, half aloud. “I forgot that. I shall not be wanted.”

He put his ticket in his wallet and turned away. Some people were hurrying into the station, and he strode to a side door to escape them. The handsome knob of an Oriental grapestick touched his arm. The white face of the Professor of Theology looked sternly into his.

“Suppose you come out to Cesarea with me to-night? We can talk this unfortunate affair over quietly, and—I am sure you misapprehend the real drift of some of these doctrines that disturb you. I believe I could set you right, and possibly—another examination—before a different Council”—

Bayard’s head swam for an instant. A girl in a muslin dress stood at the meeting of the arms of the great cross in the Seminary lawn. It was moonlight, and it was June, and this dreadful thing had never happened. He was in that state when a woman’s sympathy is the only one delicate enough for a man’s bruised nature to bear. He quivered at the thought of being touched by anything harsher than the compassionate approval, the indignant sorrow, the intelligent heart—

“No,” he said, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation. “Thank you, Professor—I can’t do it. I should only disappoint you. I am almost too tired to go all over the ground again. Good-by, Professor.”

He held out his hand timidly. The thin, high-veined hand of the Professor shook as he responded to the grasp.

“I didn’t know,” he said more gently, “but you would be more comfortable. Your uncle”—the Professor hesitated.

“Thank you,” said the young man again. “That was thoughtful in you. If your theology were half as tender as your heart, Professor!” added the poor fellow, trying to smile with the old audacity of Professor Carruth’s pet student. But he shook his head, and pushed out of the door into the street.

There he stood irresolute. What next? He was to have been the guest of the treasurer of the church that night, after the ordination. It was a pretty, luxurious home; he had been entertained there so often that he felt at home in it; the family had been his affectionate friends, and the children were fond of him. He thought of that comfortable guest-room with the weakest pang that he had known yet: he felt ill enough to go to bed. But they had not asked the dishonored minister, now, to be their guest. It did not occur to him, so sore at heart was he, that he had given them no opportunity.

He was about to return to the station, with a vague purpose to seek shelter in some hotel in a village where nobody knew him, when a plain, elderly woman dressed in black approached him. He recognized her as one of the obscurer people of his lost parish. She had been comforted by something he had said one Sunday; she had come timidly to tell him so, after the fashion of such women; she had known trouble, he remembered, and poverty, it was clear.

“Ah, Mrs. Granite!” he said pathetically. “Did you take all the trouble to come to say good-by to me?”

“You look so tired, sir!” sobbed Mrs. Granite. “You look down sick abed! We thought you wasn’t fit to travel to-night, sir, and if you wouldn’t mind coming home with us to get a night’s rest, Mr. Bayard? We live very poor, sir, not like you; but me and my girl, we couldn’t bear to see you going off so! We’d take it for an honor, Mr. Bayard, sir!”

“I will come,” said the weary man. And he went, at once. Certain words confusedly recurred to him as he walked silently beside Mrs. Granite, “He had not where,” they ran—“He had not where to lay his head.”

The light burned late in the clean, spare room in the cottage of the fisherman’s widow on Windover Point that night.

Early in the morning her mother sent Jane Granite running for the doctor; and by night it was well known in Windover that the new minister was ill. He was threatened with something with a Latin name; not epidemic in Windover, whose prevailing diseases are measles and alcoholism. Mrs. Granite found the minister’s anticipated malady hard to pronounce; but Jane, who had been at the high school, called it meningitis.

But here again fact dealt with Emanuel Bayard as no respectable fiction could be expected to. An interesting delirium or deadly fever might have changed the whole course of his life. Had he fallen then and there a martyr to his fate, the sympathy of the town, the interest of the denomination, the affection of his lost parish, the penitent anxiety of Mr. Hermon Worcester, would—how easily!—have marked out his future for him in flower-beds that seemed forsooth to be the vineyard of the Lord; and he might have done a deal of pleasant hoeing and trimming there, like other men, till harvest time. But floriculture is small pastime for the sinew elected to cut thickets and to blaze forests; and he arose to tear and bleed at his self-chosen brambles as God decreed.

He had not meningitis; he suffered no mortal malady; he did but lie helpless for two weeks under one of those serious nervous collapses which seem ignominy to a young man. During these critical days his people elect and lost had plenty of time to quarrel over him, or to send him currant jelly. And the wife of the treasurer was reported to have said that he ought to be in her house. But Mrs. Granite and Jane nursed him adoringly, and as soon as the doctor permitted, Jane brought the patient his mail. It contained a curt but civil letter from his uncle, regretting to learn that he had been indisposed, and requesting an interview.

As soon as he was able to travel, Emanuel went to Boston.

An unexpected incident which happened on the morning that he left Windover gave back something of the natural fire to his eyes, and he looked less ill than Mr. Worcester had expected, when they met in the library on Beacon Street.

This circumstance checked the slightly rising tide of sympathy in his uncle’s feeling; and it was with scarcely more than civility that the elder man opened the conversation.

“I wish to discuss this situation with you, Emanuel, once for all. You have for some time avoided the issue between us which is bound to come.”

“I have avoided nothing,” interrupted Emanuel proudly.

“It is the same thing. You have never met me halfway. The time has come when we must have it out. You know, of course, perfectly well what a blow this thing has been to me—the mortification—the. … After all I have done for you”—

The cold, clear-cut features of Hermon Worcester’s face became suffused; he put his hand against his heart, and gasped. For the first time it occurred to the young man that the elder, too, had suffered; with a quick exclamation of sympathy or anxiety, he turned to reply, but Mr. Worcester got to his feet, and began to pace the library hotly.

“What do you propose to do?” he cried. “Seven years of higher education, and—how many trips to Europe? And all the—that—feeling a man has for a child he has brought up—wasted, worse than wasted! What do you propose to do? Thirty years old, and a failure at the start! A disgrace to the faith of your fathers! A blot on an old religious name! Come, now! what next? … I suppose I could find you a place to sweep a store,” added Hermon Worcester bitingly.

Emanuel had flushed darkly, and then his swift pallor came on.

“Uncle,” he said distinctly, “I think this interview we have been preparing for so long may as well be dispensed with. It seems to me quite useless. I can only grieve you, sir; and you cannot comfort me.”

“Comfort!” sneered the other, with his least agreeable expression; for Hermon Worcester had many, in frequent use.

“Well,” said Emanuel, “yes. There are times when even a heretic may need something of that sort. But I was about to say that I think it idle for us to talk. My plans are now quite formed.”

“Indeed, sir!” said Mr. Worcester, stopping short.

“I have been invited by a minority of my people to start a new work in Windover, of which they propose that I shall become the leader.”

“Not the pastor!” observed Mr. Worcester.

“Yes, the pastor—that was the word. It will be a work quite independent of the old church.”

“And of the old faith, eh?”

“Of the old traditions, some of them,” replied Emanuel gently; “not of the old truth, I hope. I cannot hope for your sympathy in this step. I have decided to take it. It strikes me, Uncle, that we had better not discuss the matter.”

“His mother before him!” cried Hermon Worcester, violently striding up and down the velvet carpet of the library, “I went through it with his mother before him—this abhorrent indifference to the demands of birth and training, this scandal, this withdrawal from the world, this publicity given to family differences, the whole miserable business! She for love, and you for—I suppose you call it religion! I can’t go through it again, and I won’t! It is asking too much of me!”

“I ask nothing of you, Uncle,” said the young man, rising.

“You’ll end in infidelity, sir. You will be an agnostic in a year’s time. You’ll be preaching positivism! I will have nothing to do with it! I warned you before, Manuel—back there in Cesarea. I am forced to repeat myself. Under the circumstances, you will not expect a dollar from me. I would as soon leave my property to an atheist club as to you, and your second probations, and your uninspired Bibles!”

Mr. Worcester snapped in the private drawer of his desk, and locked it with unnecessary force and symbolism.

“I don’t forbid you my house, mind. I sha’n’t turn you into the street. You’ll starve into your senses fast enough on any salary that the rabble down in that fishing-town can raise for you. When you do—come back to me. Keep your latch-key in your pocket. You will want to use it some day.”

“I must run my chances, sir,” said Bayard in a voice so low that it was scarcely audible. Instinctively he drew his latch-key from his pocket and held it out; but Mr. Hermon Worcester did not deign to notice it. “I have never thought about your money, Uncle. I’m not that kind of fellow, exactly. You have always been good to me, Uncle Hermon!” He choked, and held out his hand to say good-by.

“But look here—see here—you’ll stay to dinner? You’ll go up to your room, Manuel?” stammered the elder man. “I explicitly told you that I didn’t drive you out of your home. I don’t desire any scene—any unnecessary scandal. I wish you to understand that you are not turned into the street.”

“I have promised to be in Windover this evening, to settle this matter,” replied Bayard. He looked over his uncle’s head, through the old, purple, Beacon Street glass, upon the waters of Charles River; then softly closed the library door, looked for a moment about the dark, familiar hall, took his hat from the peg on the carved mahogany tree where he had hung his cap when he was a little boy in Latin School, and went down the long, stone steps.

It occurred to him to go back and tell Partredge and Nancy to look after his uncle carefully, but he remembered that he had no reason to give them for his indefinite absence, bethought himself of his uncle’s horror of airing family affairs before servants, and so went on.

He walked up the street slowly, for he was weak yet. At the door of an old friend, he was tempted to pause and rest, but collected his senses, and struggled on.