The mosquito-net portière swayed softly in the night wind. Emanuel Bayard sat in his study and looked about the poor place, gasping, like a man who has received or given a mortal hurt. The marred face of the great Christ looked through the coarse, white gauze; it seemed to scrutinize him sternly; he bowed his head before the gaze of the picture.
The gradual descent from a spiritual height to a practical level is, at best, a strain under which the godliest nature quivers; but Bayard experienced the shock of a plunge. From the elation of the past hour to the consternation of the present moment was a long leap.
He closed his eyes to see the blood-red sunset unfurling its flag over the broad beach; he opened them to see Mrs. Granite’s kerosene lamp smoking on the study-table of grained pine wood. The retina of his soul suffered an adjustment as abrupt and as severe. But an hour ago, a thousand people had hung swaying upon the breath that went forth from between his lips; their upturned faces offered him that most exquisite of flatteries—the reverence of a great audience for an orator who has mastered them. We should remember that—the religious orator stands, both in privilege and in peril, apart from his kind. He may suffer at once the subtlest of human dangers, and the deepest of human joys. Bayard trembled yet with the exaltation of that solemn hour.
Midway between earth and heaven, commissioner between man and his Maker, he had stood transcendent, well-nigh translated. He had floated in the adoration of his people; he had been to them one of the sons of God; he had held their bare souls in his hand.
While his head whirled with the suffocation of the incense, he had stumbled. He had made the misstep which to a lofty soul may give more anguish than guilt to the low. He had fallen from the heights of his own faith in himself, sheer over, and below the ideal which those upon whose worshiping love he lived trustfully cherished of him.
An hour ago, he was a man of God. Now he called himself less than a man among men.
Bound by every claim of spiritual and of human honor to preserve the strong silence by which a man protects a woman from himself, and himself from her, he had weakly, to his high view it seemed he had ignobly, broken it. He had declared love to a woman whom he could not ask to be his wife. To crown the pity of it and the shame, he had turned on his heel, and left her—so!
“I have done a thing for which I would have thrashed a man who had done as much by a sister of mine!” said this young apostle between his teeth. It did not occur to him that he might be liable to overestimate the situation. Religious exaltation exposes a sensitive nature to mental and spiritual excess as dangerous in its way as physical dissipation. Bayard stood in that great desert known only to fine souls, where the noblest side of a man seems to take up arms against him; and where the very consecrated weapons by which he has battled his way to purity, unselfishness, and peace turn themselves like sentient foes and smite him. He seemed to stand unarmed and defenceless before forces of evil whose master he had been so long, that he looked upon their defiant faces with more astonishment than fear.
“This is an insurrection of slaves,” he thought. He looked blindly about his dreary room.
“Down!” he said, as if he had been speaking to dogs.