“Might he? Perhaps. Mine are so much stronger than they were when I started in, that they race me and drag me like winged horses in a chariot of fire.”
His eyes took on their dazzling look; like fine flash-lights they shot forth a brilliance as burning as it was brief; then their calm and color returned to them. Helen watched the transfiguration touch and pass his face with a sense of something so like reverence that it made her uncomfortable. Like many girls trained as she had been, she had small regard for the priestly office, and none for the priestly assumptions. The recognition of a spiritual superiority which she felt to be so far above her that in the nature of things she could not understand it, gave her strong nature a jar: something within her, hitherto fixed and untroubled, shook before it.
Bayard, without apparent consciousness of the young lady’s thoughts, or indeed of her presence for that moment, went on dreamily:—
“I was a theorizer, a dreamer, a theologic apprentice, a year ago. I knew no more of real life than—that silver sea-gull making for the lighthouse tower. I took notes about sin in the lecture-room. Now I study misery and shame in Angel Alley. The gap between them is as wide as the stride of that angel in Revelation—do you remember him?—who stood with one foot upon the land and one upon the sea. All I mind is, that I have so much more to learn than I need have had—everything, in fact. If I had been taught, if I had been trained—if it had not all come with that kind of shock which benumbs a man’s brain at first, and uses up his vitality so much faster than he can afford to spare it—but I have no convictions that I ought to be talking like this!”
“Go on,” said Helen softly.
“Oh, to what end?” asked Bayard wearily. “That ecclesiastical system which brought me where I am can’t be helped by one man’s rebellion. It’s going to take a generation of us. But there is enough that I can help. It is the can-be’s, not the can’t-be’s, that are the business of men like me.”
“I saw you with that drunken man; he had his arms about you,” said Helen with charming irrelevance. Her untroubled brows still held that little knot, half of perplexity, half of annoyance. It became her, for she looked the more of a woman for it.
“Job Slip? Oh, in Boston that day; yes. I got him home to his wife all right that night. He was sober after that for—for quite a while. I wish you had seen that woman!” he said earnestly. “Mari is the most miserable—and the most grateful—person that I know. I never knew what a woman could suffer till I got acquainted with that family. They have a dear little boy. His father used to beat him over the head with a shovel. Joey comes over to see me sometimes, and goes to sleep on my lounge. We’re great chums.”
“You do like it,” said Helen slowly. She had raised her brown eyes while he was speaking, and watched his face with a veiled look. “Yes; there’s no doubt about it. You do.”