The old clam-digger stopped, when he saw the lady in the boat. It was now quite dark. Bayard and Helen were the last people to land at the float. He gave her his hand in silence. She stood by, while he helped the keeper of the float up with the two boats. He coughed a little as he did so, and she said, rather sharply:—
“Tim! you should keep two men here, to do that work.”
Tim apologized, grumbling, and the two walked on up the pier together; still alone. At the door of the cottage, she asked him, rather timidly, if he would come in. But he excused himself, and hurried away.
When he found himself far from the hotel, and well on the way to his lodgings, Bayard drew the long breath of a man who is escaping danger. He experienced a kind of ecstatic terror. He thought of her—he thought of her till he could think no more, but fell into an ocean of feeling, tossing and deep. It seemed to have no soundings. He drowned himself in it with a perilous delight.
What would a lonely fate be, if a woman capable of understanding the highest, and serving it, capacious for tenderness, and yielding it, a woman warm, human, sweet, and as true as one’s belief in her, should pour the precious current of her love into a long life’s work? Why, a man would be a god! He would climb the inaccessible. He would achieve the undreamed and the unknown. He would not know where consecration ended, and where heaven began.
“He would be a freer man than I am,” thought Bayard, as he passed, between the larkspurs and the feverfew, up Mrs. Granite’s garden.
Mrs. Granite met him at the door; she held a kerosene lamp high in one hand; with the other she handed to him a soiled and crumpled bit of paper.
“A boy left it here, sir, not ten minutes ago, and he said you was to read it as soon as you came home. I don’t know the boy. I never saw him before, but it seemed to be something quite partikkelar.”
Bayard held the message to the lamp and read:—
A pore man in distres would take it kindly of the minester to mete him as sune as possibel to-nite to Ragged Rock. i am a miserbul Drunkhard and i want to Knock Off. i heer when folks talk with you they stop Drinkin. i wish youde talk to me so I would stop