A Singular Life

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

But it was summer in Windover, and the minister was Jane’s no more.

It was one of the last of the days of a celestial June. Bayard had lived the month of blossoms out eagerly and restlessly. His work had grown enormously upon his hands, and required an attention which told on every nerve. He had gone headlong into the depths of one of those dedications which do not give a man time to come up for air. His eye wore an elate, rapt look. His cheeks burned with a fine fever. His personal beauty that summer was something at which the very “dock-rats” on the wharves turned back to look. No woman easily forgot it, and how many secretly dreamed of it, fortunately the young man never knew. The best of men may work his share of heart-break, and the better he is the less he will suspect it.

Bayard was far too busy to think of women. For he did not exactly think of Helen Carruth; he felt her. She did not occupy his mind so far that he experienced the need of communication with her; he had never written her so much as a note of ceremony. After her brief scintillation before him on Windover Point that April afternoon, she had melted from his horizon. Nevertheless, she had changed the tint of it. Now and then in the stress of his prosaic, thankless, yet singularly enthusiastic work, there came to the young preacher that sense of something agreeable about to happen, which makes one wake up singing in the morning of one’s hardest day’s labor, or sends one to rest dreaming quietly in the face of the crudest anxiety. The devotee, in the midst of his orisons, was aware of the footstep of possible pleasure falling lightly, distant, doubtful, towards his cell. Some good men pray the louder for this sweet and perilous prescience. Bayard worked the harder.

And it was summer in Windover. The scanty green carpet of the downs had unrolled to its full, making as much as possible of its meagre proportions, atoning in depth of color for what it lacked in breadth and length: if the cliffs and boulders were grayer for the green, the grass looked greener for the gray. The saxifrage had faded, but among the red-cupped moss the checkerberry shot up tender, reddish leaves, the white violets scented the swamps, and the famous wild roses of the Cape dashed the bayberry thickets with pink. The late apple blossoms had blushed and gone, but the leaf and the hidden fruit responded to the anxious attention of the unenthusiastic farmer who wrenched his living out of the reluctant granite soil. In front of the hotels the inevitable geraniums blazed scarlet in mathematical flower-beds; and the boarding-houses convalesced from housecleaning in striped white scrim curtains and freshly painted blue wooden pumps. The lemonade and candy stores of “the season” sprouted with the white clovers by the wayside; and the express cart of the summer boarder’s luggage blossomed with the lonely and uncomfortable hydrangea, bearing its lot in yellow jars on piazza steps. Windover Point wore a coquettish air of expectation, like a girl in her best dress who waits in a lane for an invisible admirer.

Windover Harbor was alive and alert. The summer fleets were out; the spring fleets were in. Bayard could hear the drop of anchors now, in the night, through his open windows; and the soft, pleasant splash, the home-coming and home-yearning sound which wakened the summer people, only to lull them to sleep again with a sense of poetic pleasure in a picturesque and alien life, gave to the lonely preacher of the winter Windover the little start of anxiety and responsibility which assassinates rest. He thought:—

“Another crew in! Is it Job? Or Bob? Or Jean? Will they go to Trawl’s, or get home straight? I must be off at dawn to see to this.”

On the little beach opposite Mrs. Granite’s cottage the sea sighed in the night to answer him; ebbing, it lapped the pebbles gently, as if it felt sorry for the preacher, who had not known Windover as long as it had; it inhaled and exhaled long, soft breaths, in rhythm with which his own began to grow deep and quiet; and the start from a dream of drowning in the undertow off Ragged Rock would tell him that he had slept. More often, of late, the rising tide had replied nervously; it was fitful and noisy; it panted and seemed to struggle for articulation: for the June sea was restless, and the spring gales had died hard. The tints of the harbor were still a little cool, but the woodland on the opposite shore held out an arm of rich, ripe leaf; and the careening sails warmed to the sunrise and the sunset in rose and ochre, violet and pearl, opening buds of the blossom of midsummer color that was close at hand.

Bayard was in his rooms, resting after one of these unresting nights. He had set forth at daybreak to meet an incoming schooner at the docks. It had become his habit, whenever he could, to see that the fishermen were personally conducted past the dens of Angel Alley, and taken home sober to waking wife and sleeping child. In this laborious task Job Slip’s help had been of incredible value. Job was quite sober now; and in the intervals between trips this converted Saul delighted to play the Paul to Bayard’s little group of apostles. Yet Job did not pose. He was more sincere than most better men. He took to decency as if it had been a new trade; and the novel dignity of missionary zeal sat upon him like a liberal education. The Windover word for what had happened to Job was “re-formation.” Job Slip, one says, is a reformed man. The best way to save a rascal is to give him another one to save; and Job, who was no rascal, but the ruin of a very good fellow, brilliantly illustrated this eternal law.

Bayard had come back, unusually tired, about noon, and had not left the house since his return. He was reading, with his back to the light, and the sea in his ears. The portière of mosquito netting, which hung now at the door between his two rooms, was pushed aside that he might see the photographed Leonardo as he liked to do. The scanty furniture of his sleeping-room had been moved about during his recent illness, so that now the picture was the only object visible from the study where he sat. The mosquito portière was white. Mrs. Granite having ineffectually urged a solferino pink, Bayard regarded this portière with the disproportionate gratitude of escape from evil.