There he stood irresolute. What next? He was to have been the guest of the treasurer of the church that night, after the ordination. It was a pretty, luxurious home; he had been entertained there so often that he felt at home in it; the family had been his affectionate friends, and the children were fond of him. He thought of that comfortable guest-room with the weakest pang that he had known yet: he felt ill enough to go to bed. But they had not asked the dishonored minister, now, to be their guest. It did not occur to him, so sore at heart was he, that he had given them no opportunity.
He was about to return to the station, with a vague purpose to seek shelter in some hotel in a village where nobody knew him, when a plain, elderly woman dressed in black approached him. He recognized her as one of the obscurer people of his lost parish. She had been comforted by something he had said one Sunday; she had come timidly to tell him so, after the fashion of such women; she had known trouble, he remembered, and poverty, it was clear.
“Ah, Mrs. Granite!” he said pathetically. “Did you take all the trouble to come to say good-by to me?”
“You look so tired, sir!” sobbed Mrs. Granite. “You look down sick abed! We thought you wasn’t fit to travel to-night, sir, and if you wouldn’t mind coming home with us to get a night’s rest, Mr. Bayard? We live very poor, sir, not like you; but me and my girl, we couldn’t bear to see you going off so! We’d take it for an honor, Mr. Bayard, sir!”
“I will come,” said the weary man. And he went, at once. Certain words confusedly recurred to him as he walked silently beside Mrs. Granite, “He had not where,” they ran,—“He had not where to lay his head.”
The light burned late in the clean, spare room in the cottage of the fisherman’s widow on Windover Point that night.
Early in the morning her mother sent Jane Granite running for the doctor; and by night it was well known in Windover that the new minister was ill. He was threatened with something with a Latin name; not epidemic in Windover, whose prevailing diseases are measles and alcoholism. Mrs. Granite found the minister’s anticipated malady hard to pronounce; but Jane, who had been at the high school, called it meningitis.
But here again fact dealt with Emanuel Bayard as no respectable fiction could be expected to. An interesting delirium or deadly fever might have changed the whole course of his life. Had he fallen then and there a martyr to his fate, the sympathy of the town, the interest of the denomination, the affection of his lost parish, the penitent anxiety of Mr. Hermon Worcester, would—how easily!—have marked out his future for him in flower-beds that seemed forsooth to be the vineyard of the Lord; and he might have done a deal of pleasant hoeing and trimming there, like other men, till harvest time. But floriculture is small pastime for the sinew elected to cut thickets and to blaze forests; and he arose to tear and bleed at his self-chosen brambles as God decreed.
He had not meningitis; he suffered no mortal malady; he did but lie helpless for two weeks under one of those serious nervous collapses which seem ignominy to a young man. During these critical days his people elect and lost had plenty of time to quarrel over him, or to send him currant jelly. And the wife of the treasurer was reported to have said that he ought to be in her house. But Mrs. Granite and Jane nursed him adoringly, and as soon as the doctor permitted, Jane brought the patient his mail. It contained a curt but civil letter from his uncle, regretting to learn that he had been indisposed, and requesting an interview.
As soon as he was able to travel, Emanuel went to Boston.