The waywardness of the girl had long been sore at Bayard’s heart, and the step which he took that night was the result of thought and deliberate purpose. Afterwards he was glad to remember that he had acted on no one of those mere sentiments or impulsive whims which are the pitfalls of a philanthropic life.
The hour was not early, decent people were scattering to their homes, and Windover was giving herself over to the creatures of the night. It was a windy night, and the snow blew in cold, white powder from the surface of drifts called heavy for the coast, and considered a sign of “a spell of weather.”
There was a full moon; and the harbor, as one looked down between the streets, showed in glints and glimpses, bright and uneasy. The bellow of the whistling-buoy nine miles out, off the coast, was audible at firesides. The wind sped straight from Cape Cod, and was as icy as death.
It was one of the nights when the women of Windover grow silent, and stand at the window with the shade raised, looking out between their hands, with anxious, seaward eyes. “God pity the men at sea!” they say who have no men at sea. But those who have say nothing. They pray. As the night wears on, and the gale increases, they weep. They do not sleep. The red light on the Point goes out, and dawn is gray. The buoy shrieks on malignantly. It “comes on thick”; and the fog-bell begins to toll. Its mighty lips utter the knell for all the unburied drowned that are, and have been, and are yet to be. Windover listens and shudders. It is one of the nights when the sheltered and the happy and the clean of life bless God for home, for peace, for fire and pillow. It is one of the nights when the soul of the gale enters into the soul of the tempted and the unbefriended, and with it seven devils worse than the first. It was one of the nights when girls like Lena are too easy or too hard to find.
Bayard sought her everywhere. She was not to be seen in Angel Alley, and he systematically and patiently searched the town. With coat-collar turned up, and hat turned down, he tried to keep warm, but the night was deadly bleak. It came on to be eleven o’clock; half past; and midnight approached. He was about to abandon his quest when he struck a trace of her, and with redoubled patience he hunted it down. He had taken no one with him in his search for Lena; in truth, he knew of no person in all that Christian town who would have wished to share that night’s repulsive errand if he had asked it. He recognized this fact with that utter absence of bitterness which is the final grace and test of dedication to an unselfish end.
“Why should I expect it?” he thought gently. “Duty is not subject to a common denominator. This is mine and not another’s.”
A policeman gave him, at last, the clew he needed; and Bayard, who had returned on his track to Angel Alley, halted before the door of a house at the end of a dark court, within a shell’s-throw of the wharves. His duty had never led him before into precisely such a place, and his soul sickened within him. He hesitated, with his foot on the steps.
“Better stay outside, sir,” suggested the policeman.
Bayard shook his head.
“Shan’t I go with you, sir? You don’t know what you’re about. Better have an officer along.”