In his own chapel, in Angel Alley, Bayard lay in state. It was such state as the kings of the earth might envy, and its warriors and its statesmen and its poets do not know. It was said that his was the happiest dead face that ever rebuked the sadness of the living; and the fairest that they who wept for him had ever seen. Death had not marred his noble beauty; and in death or life there was no comelier man. All the city thronged to show him reverence who had lived among them baffled, doubted, and sick at heart; and it appeared that those who had done the least for him then, would have done most for him now: the people of ease; the imitators; the conformers, and the church members who never questioned their own creeds or methods; the summer strangers playing at life upon the harbor coast, and visitors from a distance where the preacher had his fame.
But when these superior and respectable persons crowded to give their tardy tribute to him, they were told that there was no room for them in the chapel; nay, they could scarcely find footing in the dust of Angel Alley. For they were held back by the sacred rights of “nearest mourners”; and Bayard’s mourners claimed him. It was said that hundreds of sunburnt men had stood waiting in the street since midnight for the opening of the doors, and the chance to enter. Then, there had passed up the steps of Christlove Chapel the great mass of the neglected and the poor, the simple and the sodden and the heart-broken, and those who had no friends but only that one man; and God had taken him. The fishermen of Windover, and the poor girls, the widows of Windover, and her orphaned children, the homeless, foreign sailors, and the discontented laborers from the wharves poured in; and the press was great.
He lay among them regally, wrapped in his purple pall. And he and Helen knew that her bridal roses withered forever out of mortal sight upon his breast. But she had given him up at this last hour to his people; he was theirs, and they were his, and what they willed they did for him, and she did not gainsay them. They covered him with their wild flowers, after the fashion of the Cape; and clumsy sailors brought big, hothouse bouquets flaring on wires and splashed with tears, “to give the minister.” And his dead heart, like his living one, was found large enough to hold them all.
One poor girl brought no flowers to Bayard’s burial. Lena brought only sobs instead, and watered his pall with her tears, and hid her face, and passed on, with her hands before it.
Now, around the bier there stood a guard of honor strange to see; for it was chosen from the Windover drunkards whom the pastor had saved and cured. Among them, Job Slip stood proudly in command at the minister’s head: the piteous type of all that misery which Bayard had died to lessen, and of that forgotten manliness which he had lived to save.
There was no dirge sung at Christlove Chapel when he was borne from it. A girl’s voice from a darkened corner of the gallery started “the minister’s hymn,” but trembled, and broke quite down. So the fishermen took it up, and tried to sing,—
“I need thee every hour.”
But they, too, faltered, for they needed him too much; and in silence, trying not to sob, with bared, bowed heads they passed out gently (for his spirit was upon them), thinking to be better men.
One of the summer people, a stranger in the town, strolling on the beach that day, was attracted by an unusual and impressive sight upon the water, and asked what that extraordinary display of the signs of public mourning meant.