He looked at her, now, for the first time attentively, as she served his tea. She flitted to and fro lightly. She sang in the kitchen when she saw him smile. When he said, “Thank you, Jane! You have given me a delicious supper,” a charming expression crossed her face. He observed it abstractedly, and thought: How kind these good people are to me! The paper shades were up, and Jane wished to draw them when she lighted the kerosene lamp; but Bayard liked to watch the sea, as he often did at twilight. The harbor was full, for the weather was coming on wild. Clouds marshaled and broke, and retreated, and formed upon a stormy sky. The lights of anchored fleets tossed up and down in the violet-gray shadow. The breakers growled upon the opposite shore. The best thing about his lodging was its near and almost unobstructed view of the sea, which dashed against a slip of a beach between the wharves of Windover Point, within a thousand feet of Mrs. Granite’s cottage.
As he sat, sipping his green tea, and making believe with his hash, to save the feelings of the girl; watching the harbor steadily and quietly, the while, and saying nothing—he was startled by the apparition of a man’s face, pressed stealthily against the window-pane, and disappearing as quickly as it came. Bayard had been sitting between the window and the light. Jane was dishing out his prunes from a vegetable dish into a blue willow saucer, and had seen nothing. Wishing not to alarm the girl, he went to the window quietly, and looked out. As he did so, he perceived that the intruder had his hand on the knob of the front door. Bayard sprang, and the two met in the cottage entry.
“What are you doing here?” began Bayard, barring the way.
“I guess I’d better ask what are you a-doin’ here,” replied the other, crowding by the minister with one push of an athletic shoulder. “I’m on my own ground. I ain’t so sure of you.”
Little Jane uttered a cry, and the athletic young man strode forward, and somewhat ostentatiously put his arm about her waist.
“Ah, I see!” smiled the minister. “It is strange that we have not met before. We must often have been in the house at the same time. I am a little absent-minded. Perhaps it is my fault. A hundred pardons, Mr. ——?”
Trawl. Ben Trawl was the name. Ben Trawl was not cordial. Perhaps that would be asking too much of the lover who had been mistaken for a burglar by another man; and the young minister was already quite accustomed to the varying expressions with which a provincial town receives the leader of an unpopular cause. He recognized Ben Trawl now;—the young man who had the straight eyebrows, and who did not drink, who had been one of the crowd at the fight in Angel Alley on the ordination day which never had ordained.
The pastor found the situation embarrassing, and was glad when Mrs. Granite came in, soaked through, and tired, with drabbled skirts.
She had collected six dollars and thirty-seven cents.
Bayard ground his teeth, and escaped to his study as soon as he could. There they heard him, pacing up and down hotly, till seven o’clock. Bayard had arranged one of those piteous attempts to “amuse the people,” into which so much wealth of heart and brain is flung, with such atmospheric results. His notion of religious teaching did not end with the Bible, though it began there. The fishermen who had irreverently named the present course of talks “the Dickens,” crowded to hear them, nevertheless. The lecture of that evening (“Sydney Carton,” he called it) was a venture upon which Bayard had expended a good deal of thought and vitality.