“I don’t see how he figgers that,” muttered the seiner.
“I will try to show you how,” continued the Professor, as if he had heard the fisherman.
He abandoned his manuscript on the Trinity, and plunged headlong—not in the least knowing how he was to get out again—into a short extempore talk upon the life of Christ. The fishermen listened, for the old preacher held to it till they did; and as soon as he had commanded their respect and attention, he wisely stopped. The service came to a sudden but successful end; and the exhausted Professor thoughtfully retired from his first, his last, his only experience in the pulpit of the Unsound. The most depressing part of the occasion was that his wife told him it was the best sermon she had heard him preach in thirty years.
But Bayard and Helen knew these things not, nor thought of them. They had been married, as it was decided, upon that Saturday, the day before. Helen’s father married them. There was no wedding party, no preparation. Helen had a white gown, never worn before; Jane Granite sent some of her mother’s roses, and Mrs. Carruth, who distinguished herself by abnormal self-possession, fastened one of the roses at Helen’s throat. It was thought best that Windover should know nothing of the marriage until the preacher and his bride had left the town; so it was the quietest little wedding that love and the law allow.
And Bayard and Helen went to her old home in the glory and the blossom of the Cesarea June. And the great cross came out upon the Seminary green, for the moon was up that week.
“It used to divide us,” she whispered; “it never can again.”
She wondered a little that he did not answer; but that he only held her solemnly, in the window where they stood to see the cross.
Helen’s happy nature was easily queen of her. She had begun to feel that her anxiety for Bayard’s sake was overstrained. Tragic Windover slipped from her consciousness, almost from her memory. She felt the sacred right of human joy to conquer fate, and trusted it as royally as she had trusted him. In spite of himself, he absorbed something of her warm and brilliant hopefulness. When she gave herself, she gave her ease of heart. And so the worn and worried man came to his Eden.