Suddenly, before he had spoken a word, a storm of applause burst out—shook the room from wall to wall—and roared like breakers under his astonished feet. He turned pale with emotion, but the fishermen thundered on. He was still so weak that this reception almost overcame him, and involuntarily he stretched out both his hands. At the gesture the noise sank instantly; and silence, in which the sigh of the saddest soul in the room might have been heard, received the preacher.
His sensitive face, melted and quivering, shone down upon them tenderly. Men in drunken brawls, and men in drowning seas, and women in terrible temptation, remembered how he looked that night when the safe and the virtuous and the comfortable had forgotten.
The stranger back by the door put his hat before his face.
[1] Windover for pebbles.
X.
The preacher began to speak with a quietness in almost startling contrast to his own evident emotion, and to the excitement in the audience room. He made no allusion to the fact that this was his first appearance among his people since the wreck of the Clara Em, and the all but mortal illness which had followed his personal share in that catastrophe. Quite in his usual manner he conducted his Sunday evening service; a simple religious talk varied by singing, and a few words from the New Testament. Bayard never read “chapters;” a phrase sufficed, a narrative or a maxim: sometimes he stopped at a single verse. The moment that the fishermen’s eyes wandered, the book closed. It was his peculiarity that he never allowed the Bible to bore his listeners; he trained them to value it by withholding it until they did. It was long remembered of him among the people of the coast that he made use of public prayer with a reserve and a power entirely unknown to the pulpits and the vestries. The ecclesiastical “long prayer” was never heard in Angel Alley. Bayard’s prayers were brief, and few. He prayed audibly before his people only when he could not help it. It seemed sometimes as if his heart broke in the act.