On this evening, no prayer had as yet passed his lips; the stranger, with a slight frown, noticed this fact. But now, the preacher brushed aside his notes, and, clearing the desk, crossed his hands upon it, and leaned forward with a marked change of manner. Suddenly, without a hint of his purpose, the young minister’s gentle voice rose into the tones of solemn arraignment.
“I came here,” he said, “a stranger to this town and to its customs. It has taken me all this while to learn what your virtues and your vices are. I have dealt with you gently, preaching comfortable truths as I have been expected to preach them. I have worked in ignorance. I have spoken soft words. Now I speak them no more! Your sin and your shame have entered like iron into my soul. People of Windover! I accuse you in the name of Christ, whose minister I am!”
The expression of affectionate reverence with which his audience had listened to Bayard up to this moment now changed into a surprise that resembled fear. Before he had spoken ten words more, it became evident that the young preacher was directing the full force of his conscience and his intelligence to a calm and deliberate attack upon the liquor habit and the liquor traffic—one of the last of the subjects (as it is well known) conceded to be the business of a clergyman to meddle with in any community, and the very last which Windover had been trained to hear herself held to account for by her clerical teachers. At the hour when he came nearest to the adoration of those who adore without thought, when they saw him through the mist of romance, when the people, carried on a wave of hero-worship, lay for the first time at his feet, Bayard for the first time opened fire upon their favorite sin.
Shot after shot poured down from those delicate, curving lips. Broadside followed broadside, and still the fire fell. He captured for them the elusive statistics of the subject; he confronted them with its appalling facts; he pelted them with incidents such as the soul sickens to relate or to remember. He denied them the weak consolation of condoning in themselves a moral disease too well known to be the vice of the land, and of the times. He scored them with rebuke under which his leading men grew pale with alarm. Nothing could have been more unlike the conventional temperance address, yet nothing could have been more simple, manly, reasonable, and fearless.
“For every prayer that goes up to God from this room,” he said, “for every hymn, for every sacred word and vow of purity, for every longing of a man’s heart to live a noble life, there open fifty dens of shame upon this street to blast him. We are pouring holy oil upon a sea of mud. That is not good religion, and it is not good sense. We must prove our right to represent the Christian religion in Angel Alley. We must close its dens, or they ought to close our lips. I am ready to try,” he added with his winning simplicity, “if you are. I shall need your help and your advice, for I am not educated in these matters as I ought to be. I was not taught how to save drunken men in the schools where clergymen are trained. I must learn now—we must learn together—as best we can.... Oh, my people!” His voice passed from the tone of loving entreaty into that of prayer; by one of those moving transformations peculiar to himself, wherein those who heard him scarce could tell the moment when he ceased to speak to men and began to talk with God.
“People of the Church of the Love of Christ! Approach God, for He is close at heart.... Thou great God! Holy, Almighty, Merciful! Make us know how to deal with sin, in our own souls, and in the lives of others. For the sake of Thy Son whose Name we dare to bear. Amen.”
As the words of this outcry, this breath of the spirit, rose and ceased, the silence in the room was something so profound that a girl’s sigh was heard far back by the door.
The hush was stung by a long, low, sibilant sound; a single hiss insulted that sacred stillness. Then a man purple to the brows, rose and went out. It was old Trawl, whose saloon had been a landmark in Angel Alley for fifty years.
The stranger, who had been more moved than it seemed he cared to show by what he had heard and seen, passed slowly with the crowd down the long stairs, and reached the outer air. As the salt wind struck in his face, a hand was laid upon his shoulder. The young minister, looking pale and tired, but enviably calm, drew the visitor’s hand through his arm.
“I saw you, Fenton,” he said quietly, “when you first came in. You’ll come straight to my lodgings with me.... Won’t you?” he added wistfully, fancying that Fenton hesitated. “You can’t know how much it will mean to me. I haven’t seen anybody—why, I haven’t seen a fellow since I came to Windover.”