“Blessin’s on him, anyhow!”
“Christlove’s good enough for us!”
But when he smiled upon them, they grew quiet, as they had done once before—that evening after the wreck and rescue off Ragged Rock; for these two were the only occasions when the applause of his people had got the better of their pastor.
When he began to speak, it was not without emotion, but in a voice so low that the house had to hold its breath to hear him.
He began by thanking the fishermen of Windover for their trust and their friendship. Both, he said, he valued, and more than they would ever know. Of his own struggles and troubles, of the bitter years that he had toiled among them, he said no word. He spoke of the kindness of Windover, not of its neglect. He spoke of the strength and the goodness of the city, rather than of its weakness and its error. He spoke of the warm heart of the people, of their readiness to help any need which they understood, and in whose claim they believed. He told how generous they were in emergencies. “You give money,” he said, “more lavishly than any town I have ever known. When the gales have struck, and the fleets gone down, and when, with widows and orphans starving on my heart and hands, I have asked for bread, Windover has never given them a stone. Your poor have spent themselves utterly upon your poorest, and your rich have not refused. Windover gives gloriously,” said Bayard, “and I am glad and proud to say so.”
Their faults, he told them, they had, and he was not there to condone what he had never overlooked. One, above the rest, they had to answer for; and what that was—did he need to name?
“It is not your sin alone,” he said firmly. “It is the sin of seaport towns; it is the sin of cities; it is the sin of New England; it is the sin of the Nation;—but it is the sin of Windover, and my business is with Windover sins. I have fought it since I came among you, without an hour’s wavering of purpose, and without an hour’s fear of the result; and at all costs, at any cost, I shall fight it till I go from you. For God has set me among you, not to minister to your self-satisfaction, but to your needs.”
Bayard paused here, and regarded his people with a long look. Their faces blurred before him for a moment, for his heart was full. He saw them all, in the distinctness with which the public speaker perceives familiar sights; every trifle upon the map of his audience started out.
He saw Captain Hap, anxious and wrinkled, doing usher’s duty by the door—Captain Hap, neither pious nor godless, but ready to live for the parson or to die for him, and caring little which; the good fellow, true with the allegiance of age and a loyal nature—dear Captain Hap!
Bayard saw Job Slip, pale with the chronic pallor of the reformed drunkard—poor Job, who drank not now, neither did he taste; but bore the thirst of his terrible desert, trusting in the minister and God Almighty,—in the succession of the phrase.