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.