“I need Thee every hour,
Most gracious Lord.”
Their voices and their hearts rose high on one of those plaintive popular melodies of which music need never be ashamed:—
“I need Thee, oh, I need Thee,
Every hour I need Thee;
Oh, bless me now, my Saviour”....
The stranger, who had the appearance of a religious man, joined in the chorus heartily; he shared the book which the girl had given to the Italian, who came in a bar too late, and closed the stanza on a shrill solo,—
“I co—home to thee.”
This little accident excited a trifling smile; but it faded immediately, for the preacher had arisen. His appearance was greeted with a respect which surprised the stranger. The audience at once became grave even to reverence; the Italian cuffed a drunken Portuguese who was under the impression that responses to the service were expected of him; the girl in the Tam o’ Shanter shook a woman who giggled beside her. A fisherman whispered loudly,—
“Shut up there! The parson ain’t quite tough yet. Keep it quiet for him! Shut up there, along the wall!”
There is nothing like a brave deed to command the respect of seafaring men. Emanuel Bayard, when he plunged into the undertow after Job Slip’s drunken, drowning body, swam straight into the heart of Windover. A rough heart that is, but a warm one, none warmer on the freezing coast, and sea-going Windover had turned the sunny side of its nature, and taken the minister in. The standards by which ignorant men judge the superior classes—their superb indifference to any scale of values but their own—deserve more study than they receive.
It had never occurred to Bayard, who was only beginning to learn to understand the nature of his material, that he had become in three weeks the hero of the wharves and the docks, the romance of Angel Alley, the admiring gossip of the Banks and Georges’, the pride and wonder of the Windover fishermen. Quite unconscious of this “sea-change,” wrought by one simple, manly act upon his popularity, he rose to address the people. His heart was full of what he was going to say. He gave one glance the length of the hall. He saw the crowds packed by the door. He saw the swaying nets, ornamented with globes and shells and star-fish, after the fashion of the fishing-town; these decorations softened the bare walls of the audience-room. He saw the faces of the fishermen lifting themselves to him and blurring together in a gentle glow. They seemed to him, as a great preacher once said of his audience, like the face “of one impressive, pleading man,” whose life hung upon his words. He felt as if he must weigh them in some divine scales into which no dust or chaff of weakness or care for self could fall.
Something of this high consciousness crept into his face. He stood for a moment silent; his beautiful countenance, thin from recent suffering, took on the look by which a man represses noble tears.