“Look here, Manuel, I’ve got to get the seven o’clock train home, you know, and I’d best do the errand I came on, at once. You know those old Virginia mines of your mother’s? There was a little stock there, you remember? It went below zero. Hasn’t been heard of for twenty years. But it remained on the inventory of the estate, you know. Well, it’s come up. There’s a new plant gone in—Northern enterprise, you know—and the stock is on the market again. There is only a trifle, a paltry two thousand, if well handled. It’s yours, you see, whatever there is of it. I came down to ask if you would like to have me force a sale for you.”
“Two thousand dollars!” cried Bayard, turning pale. “Why, it would almost build me—at least, it would furnish a new chapel. We had about so much of inside property—library, piano, pictures, settees, hymn-books, and all that—it is all a dead loss. Unfortunately, Mr. Bond had never insured it—we were so poor; every dollar tells!”
“Then he was a very bad man of business for a church—for a—missionary officer!” cried Mr. Worcester irritably; “and I hope you’ll do nothing of the kind. You could spend that amount on your personal necessities inside of six months, and then not know it, sir! You are—I hope, Manuel,” sternly, “that you will regard my wish, for once, in one respect, before I die. Don’t fling your mother’s money into the bottomless pit of this unendowed, burnt-out, unpopular enterprise! Wait awhile, Manuel. Wait a little and think it over. I don’t think, under the circumstances,” added Mr. Worcester with some genuine dignity, “that it is very much to ask.”
“Perhaps it is not,” replied Bayard thoughtfully. “At least, I will consider it, as you say.”
Four days after, an envelope from Boston was put into Bayard’s hand. It contained a typewritten letter setting forth the fact that the writer desired to contribute to the erection of the new chapel in Windover known by the name of Christlove, and representing a certain phase of home missionary effort—the inclosed sum. It was a bank draft for twenty-five hundred dollars. The writer withheld his name, and requested that no effort be made to identify him. He also desired that his contribution be used, if possible, in a conditional character, to stimulate the growth of a collection sufficient to put the building and the mission behind it, upon a suitable basis.
The following day Mr. Worcester sent to Bayard by personal check the remnant of his mother’s property. This little sum seemed as large, now, to the Beacon Street boy, as if he had been reared in one of the Vermont parsonages to which his uncle sent old overcoats; or, one might say, as if he had never left the shelter of that cottage under the pine grove in Bethlehem, where his eyes first opened upon the snow-girt hills. Self-denial speaks louder in the blood than indulgence, after all; and who knew how much of Bayard’s simple manliness in the endurance of privation he owed to the pluck of the city girl who left the world for love of one poor man, and to become the mother of another?
Bayard had scarcely adjusted his mind to these events when he received from Helen Carruth this letter:—
“My dear Mr. Bayard,—My little note of sympathy with your great trouble did not deserve so prompt an answer. I thank you for it. I could not quite make up my mind to tell you, in the midst of so much care and anxiety, what I can delay no longer in saying”—