The morning so long awaited came on a second Sunday after Trinity. Cyrus Browett, in whose keeping was the very ark of the money covenant, alighted from his coupe under the porte-cochere of candied Gothic and humbly took seat in his pew like a mere worshipper of God.

As such—a man among men—the young rector looked calmly down upon him, letting him sink into the crowd-entity which always became subject to him.

His rare, vibrant tones—tones that somehow carried the subdued light and warmth of stained glass—rolled out in moving volume:

"The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him."

Then, still as a mere worshipper of God, that Prince of the power of Mammon down in front knelt humbly to say after the young rector above him that he had erred and strayed like a lost sheep, followed too much the devices of his own heart, leaving undone those things he ought to have done, and doing those things which he ought not to have done; that there was no health in him; yet praying that he might, thereafter, lead a godly, righteous and sober life to the glory of God's holy name. Even to Allan there was something affecting in this—a sort of sardonic absurdity in Browett's actually speaking thus.

The kneeling financier was indeed a gracious and lovely spectacle to the young clergyman, and in his next words, above the still-bended congregation, his tones grew warmly moist with an unction that thrilled his hearers as never before. Movingly, indeed, upon the authority that God hath given to his ministers, did he declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins. Wonderful, in truth, had it been if his hearers did not thrill, for the minister himself was thrilled as never before. He, Allan Delcher Linford, was absolving and remitting the sins of a man whose millions were counted by the hundred, a god of money and of power—who yet cringed before him out there like one who feared and worshipped.

Nor did he here make the mistake that many another would have made. Instead of preaching to Cyrus Browett alone—preaching at him—he preached as usual to his congregation. If his glance fell, now and then, upon the face of Browett, he saw it only through the haze of his own fervour—a patch of granite-gray holding two pricking points of light. Not once was Browett permitted to feel himself more than one of a crowd; not once was he permitted to rise above his mere atomship, nor feel that he received more attention than the humblest worshipper in arrears for pew-rent. Yet, though the young rector regarded Browett as but one of many, he knew infallibly the instant that invisible wire was strung between them, and felt, thereafter, every tug of opposition or signal of agreement that flashed from Browett's mind, knowing in the end, without a look, that he had won Browett's approval and even excited his interest.

For the sermon had been strangely, wonderfully suited to Browett's peculiar tastes. Hardly could a sermon have been better planned to win him. The choice of the text itself: "And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise and perverteth the words of the righteous," was perfect art.

The plea was for intellectual honesty, for academic freedom, for fearless independence, which were said to be the crowning glories in the diadem of man's attributes. Fearlessly, then, did the speaker depreciate both the dogmatism of religion and the dogmatism of science. "Much of what we call religion," he said, "is only the superstition of the past; much of what we call science is but the superstition of the present." He pleaded that religion might be an ever-living growth in the human heart, not a dead formulary of dogmatic origin. True, organisation was necessary, but in the realm of spiritual essentials a creed drawn up in the fourth century should not be treated as if it were the final expression of the religious consciousness in secula seculorum. One should, indeed, be prepared for the perpetual restatement of religious truth, fearlessly submitting the most cherished convictions to the light of each succeeding age.

Yet, especially, should it not be forgotten in an age of ultra-physicism, of social and economic heterodoxies, that there must ever be in human society, according to the blessed ordinance of God, princes and subjects, masters and proletariat, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians—yet all united in the bonds of love to help one another attain their moral welfare on earth and their last end in heaven;—all united in the bonds of fraternal good-will, independent yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence.

He closed with these words of Voltaire: "We must love our country whatever injustice we suffer in it, as we must love and serve the Supreme Being, notwithstanding the superstitions and fanaticism which so often dishonour His worship."

The sermon was no marked achievement in coherence, but neither was Browett a coherent personality. It was, however, a swift, vivid sermon—a short and a busy one, with a reason for each of its parts, incoherent though the parts were. For Browett was a cynic doubter of his own faith; at once an admirer of Voltaire and a believer in the Established Order of Things; despising a radical and a conservative equally, but, hating more than either, a clumsy compromiser. He must be preached to as one not yet brought into that flock purchased by God with the blood of His Son; and at the same time, as one who had always been of that flock and was now inalienable from it. In a word, Browett's doubt and his belief had both to be fed from the same spoon, a fact that all young preachers of God's word would not have fathomed.

Thus our young rector proved his power. His future rolled visibly toward him. During the rest of that service there sounded in his ears an undertone from out the golden centre of that future: "Reverend Father in God, we present unto you this godly and well-learned man to be ordained and consecrated Bishop—"

Rewarded, indeed, was he for the trouble he had taken long months before to build that particular sermon to fit Browett, after specifications confided to him by an obliging parishioner—keeping it ready to use at a second's notice, on the first morning that Browett should appear.

How diminished would be that envious railing at Success could we but know the hidden pains by which alone its victories of seeming ease are won!

The young minister could now meet Browett as man to man, having established a prestige.

It had been said by those who would fain have branded him with the stigma of disrepute that Browett's ethics were inferior to those of the prairie wolf; meaning, perhaps, that he might kill more sheep than he could possibly devour.

Browett had views of his own in this matter. As a tentative evolutionist he looked upon his survival as unimpeachable evidence of his fitness,—as the eagle is fitter than the lamb it may fasten upon. Again, as a believer in Revealed Religion, he accepted human society according to the ordinance of God, deeming himself as Master to be but the rightful, divinely-instituted complement of his humblest servant—the two of them necessary poles in the world spiritual.

One of the few fads of Browett being the memorial window, it was also said by enviers that if he would begin to erect a window to every small competitor his Trust had squeezed to death there would be an unprecedented flurry in stained glass. But Browett knew, as an evolutionist, that the eagle has a divine right to the lamb if it can come safely off with it; as a Christian, that one carries out the will of God as indubitably in preserving the established order of prince and subject, of noble and plebeian, as in giving of his abundance to relieve the necessitous—or in endowing universities which should teach the perpetual sacredness of the established order of things in Church and State.

In short, he derived comfort from both poles of his belief—one the God of Moses, a somewhat emotional god, not entirely uncarnal—the other the god of Spencer, an unemotional and unimaginative god of Law.

It followed that he was much taken with a preacher who could answer so appositely to the needs of his soul as did this impressive young man in a chance sermon of unstudied eloquence.

There were social meetings in which Browett dispassionately confirmed these early impressions gained under the spell of a matchless oratory, and in due time there followed an invitation to the young rector of St. Anne's of Edom to preach at the Church of St. Antipas, which was Browett's city church.



CHAPTER V

A BELATED MARTYRDOM

The rectory at Edom was hot with the fever of preparation. The invitation to preach at St. Antipas meant an offer of that parish should the preaching be approved. It was a most desirable parish—Browett's city church being as smart as one of his steam yachts or his private train (for nothing less than a train sufficed him now—though there were those of the green eyes who pretended to remember, with heavy sarcasm, the humbler day when he had but a beggarly private car, coupled to the rear of a common Limited). It was, moreover, a high church, its last rector having been put away for the narrowness of refusing to "enrich the service." This was the church and this the patron above all others that the Reverend Allan Delcher Linford would have chosen, and earnestly did he pray that God in His wisdom impart to him the grace to please Browett and those whom Browett permitted to have a nominal voice in the control of St. Antipas.

Both Aunt Bell and Nancy came to feel the strain of it all. The former promised to "go into the silence" each day and "hold the thought of success," thereby drawing psychic power for him from the Reservoir of the Eternal.

Nancy could only encourage by wifely sympathy, being devoid of those psychic powers that distinguished Aunt Bell. Tenderly she hovered about Allan the morning he began to write the first of the three sermons he was to preach.

As for him, though heavy with the possibilities of the moment, he was yet cool and centred; resigned to what might be, yet hopeful; his manner was determined, yet gentle, almost sweet—the manner of one who has committed all to God and will now put no cup from him, how bitter soever.

"I am so hopeful, dearest, for your sake," his wife said, softly, wishing to reveal her sympathy yet fearful lest she might obtrude it. He was arranging many sheets of notes before him.

"What will the first one be?" she asked. He straightened in his chair.

"I've made up my mind, Nance! It's a wealthy congregation—one of the wealthiest in the city—but I shall preach first from the parable of Dives and Lazarus."

"Isn't that—a little—wouldn't something else do as well—something that wouldn't seem quite so personal?"

He smiled up with fond indulgence. "That's the woman of it—concession for temporal advantage." Then more seriously he added, "I wouldn't be true to myself, Nance, if I went down there in any spirit of truckling to wealth. Public approval is a most desirable luxury, I grant you—wealth and ease are desirable luxuries, and the favour of those in power—but they're only luxuries. And I know in this matter but one real necessity: my own self-approval. If consciously I preached a polite sermon there, my own soul would accuse me and I should be as a leaf in the wind for power. No, Nance—never urge me to be untrue to that divine Christ-self within me! If I cannot be my best self before God, I am nothing. I must preach Christ and Him crucified, whether it be to the wealthy of St. Antipas or only to believing poverty."

Stung with contrition, she was quick to say, "Oh, my dearest, I didn't mean you to be untrue! Only it seemed unnecessary to affront them in your very first sermon."

"I have been divinely guided, Nance. No considerations of expediency can deflect me now. This had to be! I admit that I had my hour of temptation—but that has gone, and thank God my integrity survives it."

"Oh, how much bigger you are than I am, dearest!" She looked down at him proudly as she stood close to his side, smoothing the tawny hair. Then she laid one finger along his lips and made the least little kissing noise with her own lips—a trick of affection learned in the early days of their love. After a little she stole from his side, leaving him with head bent in prayerful study—to be herself alone with her new assurance.

It was moments like this that she had come to long for and to feed her love upon. Nor need it be concealed that there had not been one such for many months. The situation had been graver than she was willing to acknowledge to herself. Not only had she not ceased to wonder since the first days of her marriage, but she had begun to smile in her wonder, fancying from time to time that certain plain answers came to it—and not at all realising that a certain kind of smile is love's unforgivable blasphemy; conscious only that the smile left a strange hurt in her heart.

For a little hour she stayed alone with her joy, fondly turning the light of her newly fed faith upon an idol whose clearness of line and purity of tint had become blurred in a dusk of wondering—an idol that had begun, she now realised with a shudder, to bulk almost grotesquely through that deepening gloom of doubt.

Now all was well again. In this new light the dear idol might even at times show a dual personality—one kneeling beside her very earnestly to worship the other with her. Why not, since the other showed itself truly worthy of adoration? With faith made new in her husband—and, therefore, in God—she went to Aunt Bell.

She found that lady in touch with the cosmic forces, over her book, "The Beautiful Within," her particular chapter being headed, "Psychology of Rest: Rhythms and Sub-rhythms of Activity and Repose; their Synchronism with Subliminal Spontaneity." Over this frank revelation of hidden truths Aunt Bell's handsome head was, for the moment, nodding in sub-rhythms of psychic placidity—a state from which Nancy's animated entrance sufficed to arouse her. As the proud wife spoke, she divested herself of the psychic restraint with something very like a carnal yawn behind her book.

"Oh, Aunt Bell! Isn't Allan fine! Of course, in a way, it's too bad—doubtless he'll spoil his chances for the thing I know he's set his heart upon—and he knows it, too—but he's going calmly ahead as if the day for martyrs to the truth hadn't long since gone by. Oh, dear, martyrs are so dowdy and out-of-date—but there he is, a great, noble, beautiful soul, with a sense of integrity and independence that is stunning!"

"What has Allan been saying now?" asked Aunt Bell, curiously unmoved.

"Said? It's what he's doing! The dear, big, stupid thing is going down there to preach the very first Sunday about Dives and Lazarus—the poor beggar in Abraham's bosom and the rich man down below, you remember?" she added, as Aunt Bell seemed still to hover about the centre of psychic repose.

"Well?"

"Well, think of preaching that primitive doctrine to any one in this age—then think of a young minister talking it to a church of rich men and expecting to receive a call from them!"

Aunt Bell surveyed the plump and dimpled whiteness of her small hands with more than her usual studious complacence. "My dear," she said at last, "no one has a greater admiration for Allan than I have—but I've observed that he usually knows what he's about."

"Indeed, he knows what he's about now, Aunt Bell!" There was a swift little warmth in her tones—"but he says he can't do otherwise. He's going deliberately to spoil his chances for a call to St. Antipas by a piece of mere early-Christian quixotism. And you must see how great he is, Aunt Bell. Do you know—there have been times when I've misjudged Allan. I didn't know his simple genuineness. He wants that church, yet he will not, as so many in his place would do, make the least concession to its people."

Aunt Bell now brought a coldly critical scrutiny to bear upon one small foot which she thrust absently out until its profile could be seen.

"Perhaps he will have his reward," she said. "Although it is many years since I broadened into what I may call the higher unbelief, I have never once suspected, my dear, that merit fails of its reward. And above all, I have faith in Allan, in his—well, his psychic nature is so perfectly attuned with the Universal that Allan simply cannot harm himself. Even when he seems deliberately to invite misfortune, fortune comes instead. So cheer up, and above all, practise going into the silence and holding the thought of success for him. I think Allan will attend very acceptably to the mere details."



CHAPTER VI

THE WALLS OF ST. ANTIPAS FALL AT THE THIRD BLAST

On that dreaded morning a few weeks later, when the young minister faced a thronged St. Antipas at eleven o'clock service, his wife looked up at him from Aunt Bell's side in a pew well forward—the pew of Cyrus Browett—looked up at him in trembling, loving wonder. Then a little tender half-smile of perfect faith went dreaming along her just-parted lips. Let the many prototypes of Dives in St. Antipas—she could see the relentless profile of their chief at her right—be offended by his rugged speech: he should find atoning comfort in her new love. Like Luther, he must stand there to say out the soul of him, and she was prostrate before his brave greatness.

When, at last, he came to read the biting verses of the parable, her heart beat as if it would be out to him, her face paled and hardened with the strain of his ordeal.

"And it came to pass that the beggar died and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom; the rich man also died and was buried.

"And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom.

"And he cried and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.'

"But Abraham said, 'Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and thou art tormented.'"

The sermon began. Unflinchingly the preacher pointed out that Dives, apparently, lay in hell for no other reason than that he had been a rich man; no sin was imputed to him; not even unbelief; he had not only transgressed no law, but was doubtless a respectable, God-fearing man of irreproachable morals—sent to hell for his wealth.

And Lazarus appeared to have won heaven merely by reason of his poverty. No virtue, no active good conduct, was accredited to him.

Reading with the eye of common understanding, Jesus taught that the rich merited eternal torment by reason of their riches, and the poor merited eternal life by reason of their poverty, a belief that one might hear declared even to-day. Nor was this view attested solely by this parable. Jesus railed constantly at those in high places, at the rich and at lawyers, and the chief priests and elders and those in authority—declaring that he had been sent, not to them, but to the poor who needed a physician.

But was there not a seeming inconsistency here in the teachings of the Master? If the poor achieved heaven automatically by their mere poverty, why were they still needing a physician? Under that view, why were not the rich those who needed a physician—according to the literal words of Jesus?

Up to the close of this passage the orator's manner had been one of glacial severity—of a sternness apparently checked by rare self-control from breaking into a denunciation of the modern Dives. Then all was changed. His face softened and lighted; the broad shoulders seemed to relax from their uncompromising squareness; he stood more easily upon his feet; he glowed with a certain encouraging companionableness.

Was that, indeed, the teaching of Jesus—as if in New York to-day he might say, "I have come to Third Avenue rather than to Fifth?" Can this crudely literal reading of his words prevail? Does it not carry its own refutation—the extreme absurdity of supposing that Jesus would come to the squalid Jews of the East Side and denounce the better elements that maintain a church like St. Antipas?

The fallacy were easily probed. A modern intelligence can scarcely prefigure heaven or hell as a reward or punishment for mere carnal comfort or discomfort—as many literal-minded persons believe that Jesus taught. The Son of Man was too subtle a philosopher to teach that a rich man is lost by his wealth and a poor man saved by his poverty, though primitive minds took this to be his meaning. Some primitive minds still believe this—witness the frequent attempts to read a literal meaning into certain other words of Jesus: the command, for example, that a man should give up his cloak also, if he be sued for his coat. Little acumen is required to see that no society could protect itself against the depredations of the lawless under such a system of non-resistance; and we may be sure that Jesus had no intention of tearing down the social structure or destroying vested rights. Those who demand a literal construction of the parable of Dives and Lazarus must look for it in the Bowery melodrama, wherein the wealthy only are vicious and poverty alone is virtuous.

We have only to consider the rawness of this conception to perceive that Jesus is not to be taken literally.

Who, then, is the rich man and who the poor—who is the Dives and who the Lazarus of this intensely dramatic parable?

Dives is but the type of the spiritually rich man who has not charity for his spiritually poor brother; of the man rich in faith who will not trouble to counsel the doubting; of the one rich in humility who will yet not seek to save his neighbour from arrogance; of him rich in charity who indifferently views his uncharitable brethren; of the man rich in hope who will not strive to make hopeful the despairing; of the one rich in graces of the Holy Ghost who will not seek to reclaim the unsanctified beggar at his gate.

And who is Lazarus but a type of the aspiring—the soul-hungry, whether he be a millionaire or a poor clerk—the determined seeker whose eye is single and whose whole body is full of light? In this view, surely more creditable to the intellect of our Saviour, mere material wealth ceases to signify; the Dives of spiritual reality may be the actual beggar rich in faith yet indifferent to the soul-hunger of the faithless; while poor Lazarus may be the millionaire, thirsting, hungering, aspiring, day after day, for crumbs of spiritual comfort that the beggar, out of the abundance of his faith, would never miss.

Christianity has suffered much from our failure to give the Saviour due credit for subtlety. So far as money—mere wealth—is a soul-factor at all, it must be held to increase rather than to diminish its possessor's chances of salvation, but not in merely providing the refinements of culture and the elegances of modern luxury and good taste, important though these are to the spirit's growth. The true value of wealth to the soul—a value difficult to over-estimate—is that it provides opportunity for, and encourages the cultivation of, that virtue which is "the greatest of all these"; that virtue which "suffereth long and is kind; which vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up"—Charity, in short. While not denying the simple joys of penury, nor forgetting the Saviour's promises to the poor and meek and lowly, it is still easy to understand that charity is less likely to be a vigorous soul-growth in a poor man than in a rich. The poor man may possess it as a germ, a seed; but the rich man is, through superior prowess in the struggle for existence, in a position to cultivate this virtue; and who will say that he has not cultivated it? Certainly no one acquainted with the efforts of our wealthy men to uplift the worthy poor. A certain modern sentimentality demands that poverty be abolished—ignoring those pregnant words of Jesus—"the poor ye have always with you"—forgetting, indeed, that human society is composed of unequal parts, even as the human body; that equality exists among the social members only in this: that all men have their origin in God the Creator, have sinned in Adam, and have been, by the sacrificial blood of God's only begotten Son, born of the Virgin Mary, equally redeemed into eternal life, if they will but accept Christ as their only true Saviour;—forgetting indeed that to abolish poverty would at once prevent all manifestations of human nature's most beauteous trait and virtue—Charity.

Present echoes from the business world indicate that the poor man to-day, with his vicious discontent, his preposterous hopes of trades-unionism, and his impracticable and very un-Christian dreams of an industrial millennium, is the true and veritable Dives, rich in arrogance and poor in that charity of judgment which the millionaire has so abundantly shown himself to possess.

The remedy was for the world to come up higher. Standing upon one of the grand old peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the speaker had once witnessed a scene in the valley below which, for beauty of illustration of the thought in hand, the world could not surpass. He told his hearers what the scene was. And he besought them to come up to the rock of Charity and mingle in the blue serene. Charity—a tear dropped on the world's cold cheek of intolerance to make it burn forever! Or it was the grand motor-power which, like a giant engine, has rolled the car of civilisation out from the maze of antiquity into the light of the present day where it now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, then to speed on to that hoped-for golden era when truth shall rise as a new and blazing star to light the splendid pageantry of earth, bound together in one law of universal brotherhood, independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence. Charity indeed was what Voltaire meant to inculcate when he declared: "Atheism and fanaticism are the two poles of a universe of confusion and horror. The narrow zone of virtue is between these two. March with a firm step in that path; believe in a good God and do good."

The peroration was beautifully simple, thrilling the vast throng with a sudden deeper conviction of the speaker's earnestness: "Charity! Oh, of all the flowers that have swung their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of charity. Other flowers there may be that yield as rich perfume, but they must be crushed before their fragrance becomes perceptible; but this flower at early morn, at burning noon and when the dew of eve is on the flowers, has coursed its way down the garden walk, out through the deep, dark dell, over the burning plain, and up the mountain side—up, ever UP it rises into the beautiful blue—up along the cloudy corridors of the day, up along the misty pathway to the skies till it touches the beautiful shore and mingles with the breath of angels."

Hardly was there a dissenting voice in all St. Antipas that Sabbath upon the proposal that this powerful young preacher be called to its pulpit. The few who warily suggested that he might be too visionary, not sufficiently in touch with the present day, were quieted the following Sabbath by a very different sermon on certain flaws in the fashionable drama.

The one and only possible immorality in this world, contended the speaker, was untruth. A sermon was as immoral as any stage play if the soul of it was not Truth; and a stage play became as moral as a sermon if its soul was truth. The special form of untruth he attacked was what he styled "the drama of the glorified wanton." Warmly and ably did he denounce the pernicious effect of those plays, that take the wanton for a heroine and sentimentalise her into a morbid attractiveness. The stage should show life, and the wanton, being of life, might be portrayed; but let it be with ruthless fidelity. She must not be falsified into a creature of fine sensibilities and lofty emotions—a thing of dangerous plausibility to the innocent.

The last doubter succumbed on the third Sabbath, when he preached from the warning of Jesus that many would come after him, performing in his name wonders that might deceive, were it possible, even the very elect. The sermon likened this generation to the people Paul found in Athens, running curiously after any new god; after Christian Science—which he took the liberty of remarking was neither Christian nor scientific—or mental science, spiritism, theosophy, clairvoyance, all black arts, straying from the fold of truth into outer darkness—forgetting that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed therein might not perish, but have everlasting life." As this was the sole means of salvation that God had provided, the time was, obviously, one fraught with vital interest to every thinking man.

As a sagacious member of the Board of Trustees remarked, it would hardly have been possible to preach three sermons better calculated, each in its way, to win the approval of St. Antipas.

The call came and was accepted after the signs of due and prayerful consideration. But as for Nancy, she had left off certain of her wonderings forever.



CHAPTER VII

THERE ENTERETH THE SERPENT OF INAPPRECIATION

For the young rector of St. Antipas there followed swift, rich, high-coloured days—days in which he might have framed more than one triumphant reply to that poet who questioned why the spirit of mortal should be proud, intimating that it should not be.

Also was the handsome young rector's parish proud of him; proud of his executive ability as shown in the management of its many organised activities, religious and secular; its Brotherhood of St. Bartholomew, its Men's Club, Women's Missionary Association, Guild and Visiting Society, King's Daughters, Sewing School, Poor Fund, and still others; proud of his decorative personality, his impressive oratory and the modern note in his preaching; proud that its ushers must each Sabbath morning turn away many late-comers. Indeed, the whole parish had been born to a new spiritual life since that day when the worship at St. Antipas had been kept simple to bareness by a stubborn and perverse reactionary. In this happier day St. Antipas was known for its advanced ritual, for a service so beautifully enriched that a new spiritual warmth pervaded the entire parish. The doctrine of the Real Presence was not timidly minced, but preached unequivocally, with dignified boldness. Also there was a confessional, and the gracious burning of incense. In short, St. Antipas throve, and the grace of the Holy Ghost palpably took possession of its worshippers. The church was become the smartest church in the diocese, and its communicants were held to have a tone.

And to these communicants their rector of the flawless pulchritude was a gracious spectacle, not only in the performance of his sacerdotal offices, but on the thoroughfares of the city, where his distinction was not less apparent than back of the chancel rail.

A certain popular avenue runs between rows of once splendid mansions now struggling a little awkwardly into trade on their lowest floors, like impoverished but courageous gentlefolk. To these little tragedies, however, the pedestrian throng is obtuse—blind to the pathos of those still haughty upper floors, silent and reserved, behind drawn curtains, while the lower two floors are degraded into shops. In so far as the throng is not busied with itself, its attention is upon the roadway, where is ever passing a festival procession of Success, its floats of Worth Rewarded being the costliest and shiniest of the carriage-maker's craft—eloquent of true dignity and fineness even in the swift silence of their rubber tires. This is a spectacle to be viewed seriously; to be mocked at only by the flippant, though the moving pedestrian mass on the sidewalk is gayer of colour, more sentient—more companionable, more understandably human.

It was in this weaving mass on the walk that the communicants of St. Antipas were often refreshed by the vision of their rector on pleasant afternoons. Here the Reverend Doctor Linford loved to walk in God's sunlight out of sheer simple joy in living—happily undismayed by any possible consciousness that his progress turned all faces to regard him, as inevitably as one would turn the spokes of an endless succession of turnstyles.

Habited with an obviously loving attention to detail, yet with tasteful restraint, a precise and frankly confessed, yet never obtrusive, elegance, bowing with a manner to those of his flock favoured by heaven to meet him, superbly, masculinely handsome, he was far more than a mere justification of the pride St. Antipas felt in him. He was a splendid inspiration to belief in God and man.

Nor was he of the type Pharasaic—the type to profess love for its kind, yet stay scrupulously aloof from the vanquished and court only the victors. Indeed, this was not so.

In the full tide of his progress—it was indeed a progress and never a mere walk—he would stop to address a few words of simple cheer to the aged female mendicant—perhaps to make a joke with her—some pleasantry not unbefitting his station, his mien denoting a tender chivalry which has been agreeably subdued though not impaired by the experience inevitable to a man of the world. When he dropped the coin into the withered palm, he did it with a certain lingering hurriedness, as one frankly unable to repress a human weakness, though nervously striving to have it over quickly and by stealth.

Young Rigby Reeves, generalising, as it later appeared, from inadequate data, swore once that the rector of St. Antipas kept always an eye ahead for the female mendicant in the tattered shawl and the bonnet of inferior modishness; that, if the Avenue was crowded enough to make it seem worth while, he would even cross from one side to the other for the sake of speaking to her publicly.

While the fact so declared may have been a fact, the young man's corollary that the rector of St. Antipas sought this experience for the sake of its mere publicity came from a prejudice which closer acquaintance with Dr. Linford happily dissolved from his mind. As reasonably might he have averred, as did another cynic, that the rector of St. Antipas was actuated by the instincts of a mountebank when he selected his evening papers each day—deliberately and with kind words—from the stock of a newswoman at a certain conspicuous and ever-crowded crossing. As reasonable was the imputation of this other cynic, that in greeting friends upon the thronged avenue, the rector never failed to use some word or phrase that would identify him to those passing, giving the person addressed an unpleasant sense of being placed in a lime-light, yet reducing him to an insignificance just this side the line of obliteration.

"You say, 'Ah, Doctor!' and shake hands, you know," said this hypercritical observer, "and, ten to one, he says something about St. Antipas directly, you know, or—'Tell him to call on Dr. Linford at the rectory adjoining St. Antipas—I'm always there at eleven,' or 'Yes, quite true, the bishop said to me, "My dear Linford, we depend on you in this matter,"' or telling how Mrs. General Somebody-Something, you know—I never could remember names—took him down dreadfully by calling him the most dangerously fascinating man in New York. And there you are, you know! It never fails, on my word! And all the time people are passing and turning to stare and listen, you know, so that it's quite rowdy—saying 'Yes—that's Linford—there he is,' quite as if they were on one of those coaches seeing New York; and you feel, by Jove, I give you my word, like the solemn ass who goes up on the stage to help the fellow do his tricks, you know, when he calls for 'some kind gentleman from the audience.'"

It may be told that this other person was of a cynicism hopelessly indurated. Not so with Rigby Reeves, even after Reeves alleged the other discoveries that the rector of St. Antipas had "a walk that would be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; and again, that one might read in his eyes a keenly sensuous enjoyment in the tones of his own voice; that he coloured these with a certain unction corresponding to the flourishes with which people of a certain obliquity of mind love to ornament their chirography; still again that he, Reeves, was "ready to lay a bet that the fellow would continue to pose even at the foot of the Great White Throne."

Happily this young man was won out of his carping attitude by closer acquaintance with the rector of St. Antipas, and learned to regard those things as no more than the inseparable antennae of a nature unusually endowed with human warmth and richness—mere meaningless projections from a personality simple, rugged, genuine, never subtle, and entirely likable. He came to feel that, while the rector himself was unaffectedly impressed by that profusion of gifts with which it had pleased heaven to distinguish him, he was yet constantly annoyed and embarrassed by the fact that he was thus made so salient a man. Young Reeves found him an appreciative person, moreover, one who betrayed a sensible interest in a fellow's own achievements, finding many reasons to be impressed by a few little things in the way of athletics, travel, and sport that had never seemed at all to impress the many—not even the members of one's own family. Rigby Reeves, indeed, became an ardent partisan of Dr. Linford, attending services religiously with his mother and sisters—and nearly making a row in the club cafe one afternoon when the other and more obdurate cynic declared, with a fine assumption of the judicial, that Linford was "the best actor in New York—on the stage or off!"

It was concerning this habit of the daily stroll that Aunt Bell and her niece also disagreed one afternoon. They were in the little dark-wooded, red-walled library of the rectory, Aunt Bell with her book of devotion, Nancy at her desk, writing.

From her low chair near the window, Aunt Bell had just beheld the Doctor's erect head, its hat of flawless gloss, and his beautifully squared shoulders, progress at a moderate speed across her narrow field of vision. In so stiffly a level line had they passed that a profane thought seized her unawares: the fancy that the rector of St. Antipas had been pulled by the window on rollers. But this was at once atoned for. She observed that Allan was one of the few men who walk always like those born to rule. Then she spoke:

"Nancy, why do you never walk with Allan in the afternoon? Nothing would please him better—the boy is positively proud to have you."

"Oh, I had to finish this letter to Clara," Nancy answered abstractedly, as if still intent upon her writing, debating a word with narrowed eyes and pen-tip at her teeth.

But Aunt Bell was neither to be misunderstood nor insufficiently answered.

"Not this afternoon, especially—any afternoon. I can't remember when you've walked with him. So many times I've heard you refuse—and I dare say it doesn't please him, you know."

"Oh, he has often told me so."

"Well?"

"Aunt Bell—I—Oh, you've walked on the street with Allan!"

"To be sure I have!"

"Well!"

"Well—of course—that is true in a way—Allan does attract attention the moment he reaches the pavement—and of course every one stares at one—but it isn't the poor fellow's fault. At least, if the boy were at all conscious of it he might in very little ways here and there prevent the very tiniest bit of it—but, my dear, your husband is a man of most striking appearance—especially in the clerical garb—even on that avenue over there where striking persons abound—and it's not to be helped. And I can't wonder he's not pleased with you when it gives him such pleasure to have a modish and handsome young woman at his side. I met him the other day walking down from Forty-second Street with that stunning-looking Mrs. Wyeth, and he looked as happy and bubbling as a schoolboy."

"Oh—Aunt Bell—but of course, if you don't see, I couldn't possibly tell you." She turned suddenly to her letter, as if to dismiss the hopeless task.

Now Aunt Bell, being entirely human, would not keep silence under an intimation that her powers of discernment were less than phenomenal. The tone of her reply, therefore, hinted of much.

"My child—I may see and gather and understand much more than I give any sign of."

It was a wretchedly empty boast. Doubtless it had never been true of Aunt Bell at any time in her life, but she was nettled now: one must present frowning fortifications at a point where one is attacked, even if they be only of pasteboard. Then, too, a random claim to possess hidden fruits of observation is often productive. Much reticence goes down before it.

Nancy turned to her again with a kind of relief in her face.

"Oh, Aunt Bell, I was sure of it—I couldn't tell you, but I was sure you must see!" Her pen was thrown aside and she drooped in her chair, her hands listless in her lap.

Aunt Bell looked sympathetically voluble but wisely refrained from speech.

"I wonder," continued the girl, "if you knew at the time, the time when my eyes seemed to open—when I was deceived by his pretension into thinking—you remember that first sermon, Aunt Bell—how independent and noble I thought it was going to be. Oh, Aunt Bell—what a slump in my faith that day! I think its foundations all went, and then naturally the rest of it just seemed to topple. Did you realise it all the time?"

So it was religious doubt—a loss of faith—heterodoxy? Having listened until she gathered this much, Aunt Bell broke in—"My dear, you must let me guide you in this. You know what I've been through. Study the higher criticism, reverently, if you will—even broaden into the higher unbelief. Times have changed since my youth; one may broaden into almost anything now and still be orthodox, especially in our church. But beware of the literal mind, the material view of things. Remember that the essentials of Christianity are spiritually historic even if they aren't materially historic—facts in the human consciousness if not in the world of matter. You need not pretend to understand how God can be one in essence and three in person—I grant you that is only a reversion to polytheism and is so regarded by the best Biblical scholars—but never surrender your belief in the atoning blood of the Son whom He sent a ransom for many—at least as a spiritual fact. I myself have dismissed the Trinity as one of those mysteries to be adoringly believed on earth and comprehended only in heaven—but that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son—Child, do you think I could look forward without fear to facing God, if I did not believe that the blood of his only begotten Son had washed from my soul that guilt of the sin I committed in Adam? Cling to these simple essentials, and otherwise broaden even into the higher unbelief, if you like—"

"But, Aunt Bell, it isn't that! I never trouble about those things—though you have divined truly that I have doubted them lately—but the doubts don't distress me. Actually, Aunt Bell, for a woman to lose faith in her God seems a small matter beside losing faith in her husband. You can doubt and reason and speculate and argue about the first—it's fashionable—people rather respect unbelievers nowadays—but Oh, Aunt Bell, how the other hurts!"

"But, my child—my preposterous child! How can you have lost faith in that husband of yours? What nonsense! Do you mean you have taken seriously those harmless jesting little sallies of his about the snares and pitfalls of a clergyman's life, or his tales of how this or that silly woman has allowed him to detect in her that pure reverence which most women do feel for a clergyman, whether he's handsome or not? Take Mrs. Wyeth, for example—"

"Oh, Aunt Bell—no, no—how can you think—"

"I admit Allan is the least bit—er—redundant of those anecdotes—perhaps just the least bit insistent about the snares and pitfalls that beset an attractive man in his position. But really, my dear—I know men—and you need never feel a twinge of jealousy. For one thing, Allan would be held in bounds by fear of the world, even if his love for you were inadequate to hold him."

"It's no use trying to make you understand, Aunt Bell—you can't!"

Whereupon Aunt Bell neglected her former device of pretending that she did, indeed, understand, and bluntly asked:

"Well, what is it, child?"

"Nothing, nothing, nothing, Aunt Bell—it's only what he is."

"What he is? A handsome, agreeable, healthy, good-tempered, loyal, upright, irreproachable—"

"Aunt Bell, he's killing me. I seem to want to laugh when I tell you, because it's so funny that he should have the power to—but I tell you he's killing out all the good in me—a little bit every day. I can't even want to be good. Oh, how stupid to think you could see—that any one could see! Sometimes I do forget and laugh all at once. It's as grotesque and unreal as an imaginary monster I used to be afraid of—then I'm sick, for I remember we are bound together by the laws of God and man. Of course, you can't see, Aunt Bell—the fire hasn't eaten through yet—but I tell you it's burning inside day and night."

She laughed a little, as if to reassure her puzzled listener.

"A fire eating away inside, Aunt Bell—burning out my goodness—if the firemen would only come with engines and axes and hooks and things, and water—I'd submit to being torn apart as meekly as any old house—it hurts so!"



CHAPTER VIII

THE APPLE OF DOUBT IS NIBBLED

The rector of St. Antipas came from preaching his Easter sermon. He was elated. Of the sermons delivered in New York that morning, he suspected that his would be found not the least ingenious. Telling excerpts would doubtless appear in the next day's papers, and at least one paper would reprint his favourite likeness over the caption, "Dr. Allan Delcher Linford, the Handsome and Up-to-Date Rector of St. Antipas." Under this would be head-lines: "The Resurrection Proved; a Literal Fact in History not less than a Spiritual Fact in the Human Consciousness. An Unbroken Chain of Living Witnesses."

He even worded scraps of the article on his way from the church to his study:

"An unusually rich Easter service was held at fashionable St. Antipas yesterday morning. The sermon by its able and handsome young rector, the Reverend Dr. Linford, was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man. The Resurrection he declares to be a fact as well attested as the Brooklyn Bridge is to thousands who have never seen it—yet who are convinced of its existence upon the testimony of those who have. Thus one who has never seen this bridge may be as certain of its existence as a man who crosses it twice a day. In the same way, a witness to the risen Christ tells the glorious truth to his son, a lad of fifteen, who at eighty tells it to his grandson. 'Do you realise,' said the magnetic young preacher, 'that the assurance of the Resurrection comes to you this morning by word of mouth through a scant three thousand witnesses—a living chain of less than three thousand links by which we may trace our steps back to the presence of the first witness—so that, in effect, we have the Resurrection on the word of a man who beheld the living Saviour this very morning? Nay; further, in effect we ourselves stand trembling before that stone rolled away from the empty but forever hallowed tomb. As certainly as thousands know that a structure called the Brooklyn Bridge exists, so upon testimony of the same validity do we know that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed on him might not perish but have everlasting life." God has not expected us to trust blindly: he has presented tangible and compelling evidence of his glorious scheme of salvation.' The speaker, who is always imbued with the magnetism of a striking personality, was more than usually effective on this occasion, and visibly moved the throng of fashionable worshippers that—"

"Allan, you outdid yourself!" Aunt Bell had come in and, in the mirror over the dining-room mantel, was bestowing glances of unaffected but strictly impartial admiration upon the bonnet of lilac blossoms that rested above the lustrous puffs of her plenteous gray hair.

The young man looked up from his meditative pacing of the room.

"Aunt Bell, I think I may say that I pleased myself this morning—and you know that's not easy for me."

"It's too bad Nance wasn't there!"

"Nancy is not pleasing me," began her husband, in gentle tones.

"I didn't feel equal to it, Allan," his wife called from the library.

"Oh, you're there! My dear, you give up too easily to little indispositions that another woman would make nothing of. I've repeated that to you so often that, really, your further ignoring it appears dangerously like perverseness—"

"Is she crying?" he asked Aunt Bell, as they both listened.

"Laughing!" replied that lady.

"My dear, may I ask if you are laughing at me?"

"Dear, no!—only at something I happened to think of." She came into the dining-room, a morning paper in her hand. "Besides, in to-morrow's paper I shall read all about what the handsome rector of St. Antipas said, in his handsome voice, to his handsome hearers—"

He had frowned at first, but now smiled indulgently, as they sat down to luncheon. "You will have your joke about my appearance, Nance! That reminds me—that poor romantic little Mrs. Eversley—sister of Mrs. Wyeth, you know—said to me after service this morning, 'Oh, Dr. Linford, if I could only believe in Christian dogma as I believe in you as a man!' You know, she's such a painfully emotional, impulsive creature, and then Colonel Godwin who stood by had to have his joke: 'The symbol will serve you for worship, Madam!' he says; 'I'm sure no woman's soul would ever be lost if all clergymen were as good to look upon as our friend here!' Those things always make me feel so awkward—they are said so bluntly—but what could I do?"

"Mr. Browett's sister and her son were out with him this morning," began Aunt Bell, charitably entering another channel of conversation from the intuition that her niece was wincing. But, as not infrequently happened, the seeming outlet merely gave again into the main channel.

"And there's Browett," continued the Doctor. "Now I am said to have great influence over women—women trust me, believe me—I may even say look up to me—but I pledge you my word I am conscious of wielding an immensely greater influence over men. There seems to be in my ego the power to prevail. Take Browett—most men are afraid of him—not physical fear, but their inner selves, their egos, go down before him. Yet from the moment I first saw that man I dominated him. It's all in having an ego that means mastery, Aunt Bell. Browett has it himself, but I have a greater one. Every time Browett's eyes meet mine he knows in his soul that I'm his master—his ego prostrates itself before mine—and yet that man"—he concluded in a tone of distinguishable awe—"is worth all the way from two to three hundred millions!"

"Mrs. Eversley is an unlucky little woman, from what I hear," began Aunt Bell, once more with altruistic aims.

"That reminds me," said the Doctor, recalling himself from a downward look at the grovelling Browett, "she made me promise to be in at four o'clock. Really I couldn't evade her—it was either four o'clock to-day or the first possible day. What could I do? Aunt Bell, I won't pretend that this being looked up to and sought out is always disagreeable. Contrary to the Pharisee, I say 'Thank God I am as other men are!' I have my human moments, but mostly it bores me, and especially these half-religious, half-sentimental confidences of emotional women who imagine their lives are tragedies. Now this woman believes her marriage is unhappy—"

"Indeed, it is!" Aunt Bell broke in—this time effectually, for she proceeded to relate of one Morris Upton Eversley a catalogue of inelegancies that, if authoritative, left him, considered as a husband, undesirable, not to say impracticable. His demerits, indeed, served to bring the meal to a blithe and chatty close.

Aunt Bell's practice each day after luncheon was, in her own terminology, to "go into the silence and concentrate upon the thought of the All-Good." She was recalled from the psychic state on this afternoon, though happily not before a good half-hour, by Nancy's knock at her door.

She came in, cheerful, a small sheaf of papers in her hand. Aunt Bell, finding herself restored and amiable, sat up to listen.

Nancy threw herself on the couch, with the air of a woman about to chat confidentially from the softness of many gay pillows, dropping into the attitude of tranquil relaxation that may yet bristle with eager mental quills.

"The drollest thing, Aunt Bell! This morning instead of hearing Allan, I went up to that trunk-room and rummaged through the chest that has all those old papers and things of Grandfather Delcher's. And would you believe it? For an hour or more there, I was reading bits of his old sermons."

"But he was a Presbyterian!" In her tone and inflection Aunt Bell ably conveyed an exposition of the old gentleman's impossibility—lucidly allotting him to spiritual fellowship with the head-hunters of Borneo.

"I know it, but, Aunt Bell, those old sermons really did me good; all full of fire they were, too, but you felt a man back of them—a good man, a real man. You liked him, and it didn't matter that his terminology was at times a little eccentric. Grandfather's theology fitted the last days of his life about as crinoline and hoop-skirts would fit over there on the avenue to-day—but he always made me feel religious. It seemed sweet and good to be a Christian when he talked. With all his antiquated beliefs he never made me doubt as—as I doubt to-day. But it was another thing I wanted to show you—something I found—some old compositions of Bernal's that his grandfather must have kept. Here's one about birds—'jingle-birds, squeak-birds and clatter-birds.' No?—you wouldn't care for that?—well—listen to this."

She read the youthful Bernal's effort to rehabilitate the much-blemished reputation of Judas—a paper that had been curiously preserved by the old man.

"Poor Judas, indeed!" The novelty was not lost upon Aunt Bell, expert that she was in all obliquities from accepted tradition.

"The funny boy! Very ingenious, I'm sure. I dare say no one ever before said a good word for Judas since the day of his death, and this lad would canonise him out of hand. Think of it—St. Judas!"

Nancy lay back among the cushions, talking idly, inconsequently.

"You see, there was at least one man created, Aunt Bell, who could by no chance be saved—one man who had to betray the Son of Man—one man to be forever left out of the Christian scheme of salvation, even if every other in the world were saved. There had to be one man to disbelieve, to betray and to lie in hell for it, or the whole plan would have been frustrated. There was a theme for Dante, Aunt Bell—not the one soul in hell, but the other souls in heaven slowly awakening to the suffering of that one soul—to the knowledge that he was suffering in order that they might be saved. Do you think they would find heaven to be real heaven if they knew he was burning? And don't you think a poet could make some interesting talk between this solitary soul predestined to hell, and the God who planned the scheme?"

Aunt Bell looked bored and uttered a swift, low phrase that might have been "Fiddlesticks!"

"My dear, no one believes in hell nowadays."

"Does any one believe in anything?"

"Belief in the essentials of Christianity was never more apparent."

It was a treasured phrase from the morning's sermon.

"What are the essentials?"

"Belief that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son—you know as well as I, child—belief in the atoning blood of the Christ."

"Wouldn't it be awful, Aunt Bell, if you didn't believe in it, and had to be in hell because the serpent persuaded Eve and Eve persuaded Adam to eat the apple—that's the essential foundation of Christianity, isn't it?"

"Why, certainly—you must believe in original sin—"

"I see—here's a note in Bernal's hand, on one of these old papers—evidently written much later than the other: 'The old gentleman says Christmas is losing its deeper significance. What is it? That the Babe of Bethlehem was begotten by his Father to be a sacrifice to its Father—that its blood might atone for the sin of his first pair—and so save from eternal torment the offspring of that pair. God will no longer be appeased by the blood of lambs; nothing but the blood of his son will now atone for the sin of his own creatures. It seems to me the sooner Christmas loses this deeper significance the better. Poor old loving human nature gives it a much more beautiful significance.'"

"My dear," began Aunt Bell, "before I broadened into what I have called the higher unbelief, I should have considered that that young man had a positive genius for blasphemy; now that I have again come into the shadow of the cross, it seems to me that he merely lacks imagination."

"Poor Bernal! Yet he made me believe, though he seemed to believe in nothing himself. He makes me believe now. He calls to me, Aunt Bell—or is it myself calling to him that I hear?

"And blasphemy—even the word is ridiculous, Aunt Bell. I was at the day-nursery yesterday when all those babies were brought in to their dinner. They are strictly forbidden to coo or to make any noise, and they really behaved finely for two-and three-year-olds—though I did see one outlaw reach over before the signal was given and lovingly pat the big fat cookie beside its plate—thinking its insubordination would be overlooked—but, Aunt Bell, do you suppose one of those fifty-two babies could blaspheme you?"

"Don't be silly!"

"But can you imagine one of them capable of any disrespect to you that would merit—say, burning or something severe like that?"

"Of course not!"

"Well, don't you really believe that God is farther beyond you or me or the foolish boy that wrote this, than we are beyond those babies—with a greater, bigger point of view, a fuller love? Imagine the God that made everything—the worlds and birds and flowers and butterflies and babies and mountains—imagine him feeling insulted because one of his wretched little John Smiths or Bernal Linfords babbles little human words about him, or even worries his poor little human heart with doubts of His existence!"

"My child, yours is but a finite mind, unable to limit or define the Infinite. What is it, anyway—is it Christian Science taking hold of you, or that chap who preaches that they have the Messiah re-incarnated and now living in Syria—Babbists, aren't they—or is it theosophy—or are you simply dissatisfied with Allan?" A sudden shrewd glance from Aunt Bell's baby-blue eyes went with this last.

Nancy laughed, then grew serious. "I think the last is it, Aunt Bell. A woman seems to doubt God and everything else after she begins to doubt the husband she has loved. Really, I find myself questioning everything—every moral standard."

"Nance, you are an ungrateful woman to speak like that of Allan!"

"I never should have done it, dear, if you hadn't made me believe you knew. I should have thought it out all by myself, and then acted, if I found I could with any conscience."

"Eh? Mercy! You couldn't. The idea! And there's Allan, now. Come!"

The Doctor was on the threshold. "So here you are! Well, I've just sent Mrs. Eversley away in tears."

He dropped into an arm-chair with a little half-humorous moan of fatigue.

"It's a relief, sometimes, to know you can relax and let your whole weight absolutely down on to the broad earth!" he declared.

"Mrs. Eversley?" suggested Aunt Bell.

"Well, the short of it is, she told me her woes and begged me to give my sanction to her securing a divorce!"

Nancy sat up from her pillows. "Oh—and you did?"

"Nancy!" It was low, but clear, quick-spoken, stern, and hurt. "You forget yourself. At least you forget my view and the view of my Church. Even were I out of the Church, I should still regard marriage as a sacrament—indissoluble except by death. The very words—'Whom God hath joined'"—he became almost oratorical in his warmth—"Surely you would not expect me to use my influence in this parish to undermine the sanctity of the home—to attack our emblem of Christ's union with His Church!"

With reproach in his eyes—a reproach that in some way seemed to be bland and mellow, yet with a hurt droop to his handsome head, he went from the room. Nancy looked after him, longingly, wonderingly.

"The maddening thing is, Aunt Bell, that sometimes he actually has the power to make me believe in him. But, oh, doesn't Christ's union with his Church have some ghastly symbols!"



CHAPTER IX

SINFUL PERVERSENESS OF THE NATURAL WOMAN

Two months later a certain tension in the rectory of St. Antipas was temporarily relieved. Like the spring of a watch wound too tightly, it snapped one day at Nancy's declaration that she would go to Edom for a time—would go, moreover, without a reason—without so much as a woman's easy "because." This circumstance, while it froze in the bud every available objection to her course, quelled none of the displeasure that was felt at her woman's perversity.

Her decision was announced one morning after a sleepless night, and after she had behaved unaccountably for three days.

"You are not pleasing Allan," was Aunt Bell's masterly way of putting the situation. Nancy laughed from out of the puzzling reserve into which she had lately settled.

"So he tells me, Aunt Bell. He utters it with the air of telling me something necessarily to my discredit—yet I wonder whose fault it really is."

"Well, of all things!" Aunt Bell made no effort to conceal her amazement.

"It isn't necessarily mine, you know." Before the mirror she brought the veil nicely about the edge of her hat, with the strained and solemn absorption of a woman in this shriving of her reflection so that it may go out in peace.

"My failure to please Allan, you know, may as easily be due to his defects as to mine. I said so, but he only answered, 'Really, you're not pleasing me.' And, as he often says of his own predicaments—'What could I do?' But I'm glad he persists in it."

"Why, if you resent it so?"

"Because, Aunt Bell, I must be quite—quite certain that Allan is funny. It would be dreadful to make a mistake. If only I could be certain—positive—convinced—sure—that Allan is the funniest thing in all the world—"

"It never occurred to me that Allan is funny." Aunt Bell paused for an instant's retrospect. "Now, he doesn't joke much."

"One doesn't have to joke to be a joke, Aunt Bell."

"But what if he were funny? Why is that so important?"

"Oh, it's important because of the other thing that you know you know when you know that."

"Mercy! Child, you should have a cup of cocoa or something before you start off—really—"

The last long hatpin seemingly pierced the head of Nancy and she turned from the glass to fumble on her gloves.

"Aunt Bell, if Allan tells me once more in that hurt, gentle tone that I don't please him, I believe I shall be the freest of free women—ready to live."

She paused to look vacantly into the wall. "Sometimes, you know, I seem to wake up with a clear mind—but the day clouds it. We shouldn't believe so many falsities, Aunt Bell, if they didn't pinch our brains into it at a tender age. I should know Allan through and through at a glance to-day, if I met him for the first time; but he kneaded my poor girl's brain this way and that, till I'd have been done for, Aunt Bell, if some one else hadn't kneaded and patted it into other ways, so that little memories come back and stay with me—little bits of sweetness and genuineness—of realness, Aunt Bell."

"Nance, you are morbid—and I think you're wrong to go up there to be alone with your sick fancies—why are you going, Nance?"

"Aunt Bell, can I really trust you not to betray me? Will you promise to keep the secret if I actually tell you?"

Aunt Bell looked at once important and trustworthy, yet of an incorruptible propriety.

"I'm sure, my dear, you would not ask me to keep secret anything that your husband would be—"

"Dear, no! You can keep mum with a spotless conscience."

"Of course; I was sure of that!"

"What a fraud you are, Aunt Bell—you weren't sure at all—but I shall disappoint you. Now my reason—" She came close and spoke low—"My reason for going to Edom, whatever it is, is so utterly silly that I haven't even dared to tell myself—so, you see—my real reason for going is simply to find out what my reason really is. I'm dying to know. There! Now never say I didn't trust you."

In the first shock of this fall from her anticipations Aunt Bell neglected to remember that All is Good. Yet she was presently far enough mollified to accompany her niece to the station.

Returning from thence after she had watched Nancy through the gate to the 3:05 Edom local, Aunt Bell lingered at the open study door of the rector of St. Antipas. He looked up cordially.

"You know, Allan, it may do the child good, after all, to be alone a little while."

"Nancy—has—not—pleased—me!" The words were clean-cut, with an illuminating pause after each, so that Aunt Bell might by no chance mistake their import, yet the tone was low and not without a quality of winning sweetness—the tone of the injured good.

"I've seen that, Allan. Nance undoubtedly has a vein of selfishness. Instead of striving to please her husband, she—well, she has practically intimated to me that a wife has the right to please herself. Of course, she didn't say it brutally in just those words, but—"

"It's the modern spirit, Aunt Bell—the spirit of unbelief. It has made what we call the 'new woman'—that noxious flower on the stalk of scientific materialism."

He turned and wrote this phrase rapidly on a pad at his elbow, while Aunt Bell waited expectantly for more.

"There's a sermon that writes itself, Aunt Bell. 'Woman's deterioration under Modern Infidelity to God.' As truly as you live, this thing called the 'new woman' has grown up side by side with the thing called the higher criticism. And it's natural. Take away God's word as revealed in the Scriptures and you make woman a law unto herself. Man's state is then wretched enough, but contemplate woman's! Having put aside Christ's authority, she naturally puts aside man's, hence we have the creature who mannishly desires the suffrage and attends club meetings and argues, and has views—views, Aunt Bell, on the questions of the day—the woman who, as you have just succinctly said of your niece, 'believes she has a right to please herself!' There is the keynote of the modern divorce evil, Aunt Bell—she has a right to please herself. Believing no longer in God, she no longer feels bound by His commandment: 'Wives be subject to your husbands!' Why, Aunt Bell, if you can imagine Christianity shorn of all its other glories, it would still be the greatest religion the world has ever known, because it holds woman sternly in her sphere and maintains the sanctity of the home. Now, I know nothing of the real state of Nancy's faith, but the fact that she believes she has a right to please herself is enough to convince me. I would stake my right arm this moment, upon just this evidence, that Nancy has become an unbeliever. When I let her know as plainly as English words can express it that she is not pleasing me, she looks either sullen or flippant—thus showing distinctly a loss of religious faith."

"You ought to make a stunning sermon of that, Allan. I think society needs it."

"It does, Aunt Bell, it does! And we are going from bad to worse. I foresee the time in this very age of ours when no woman will continue to be wife to a man except by the dictates of her own lawless and corrupt nature—when a wife will make so-called love her only rule—when she will brazenly disregard the law of God and the word of his only begotten crucified Son, unless she can continue to feel what she calls 'love and respect' for the husband who chose her. We prize liberty, Aunt Bell, but liberty with woman has become license since she lost faith in the word of God that holds her subject to man. We should be thankful that the mother Church still stands firm on that rock—the rock of woman's subjection to man. Our own Church has quibbled, Aunt Bell, but look at the fine consistency of the Church of Rome. As truly as you live, the Catholic Church will one day hold the only women who subject themselves to their husbands in all things because of God's command—regardless of their anarchistic desire to 'please themselves.' There is the only Christian Church left that knows woman is a creature to be ruled with an iron hand—and has the courage to send them to hell for 'pleasing themselves.'"

He glowed in meditation a moment, then, in a burst of confidence, continued:

"This is not to be repeated, Aunt Bell, but I have more than once questioned if I should always allow the Anglo-Catholic Church to modify my true Catholicism. I have talked freely with Father Riley of St. Clements at our weekly ministers' meetings—there's a bright chap for you—and really, Aunt Bell, as to mere universality, the Church of Rome has about the only claim worth considering. Mind you, this is not to be repeated, but I am often so much troubled that I have to fall back on my simple childish faith in the love of the Father earned of him for me by the Son's death on the cross. But what if I err in making my faith too simple? Even now I am almost persuaded that a priest ordained into the Episcopal Church cannot consecrate the elements of the Eucharist in a sacrificial sense. Doubts like these are tragedies to an honest man, Aunt Bell—they try his soul—they bring him each day to the foot of that cross whereon the Son of God suffers his agony in order to ransom our souls from God's wrath with us—and there are times, Aunt Bell, when I find myself gazing longingly, like a little tired child, at the open arms of the mother Church—on whose loving bosom of authority a man may lay all his doubts and be never again troubled in his mind."

Aunt Bell sighed cheerfully.

"After all," she said briskly, "isn't Christianity the most fascinating of all beliefs, if one comes into it from the higher unbelief? Isn't it fine, Allan—doesn't the very thought excite you—that not only the souls of thousands now living, but thousands yet unborn, will be affected through all eternity for good or bad, by the clearness with which you, here at this moment, perceive and reason out these spiritual values—and the honesty with which you act upon your conclusions. How truly God has made us responsible for the souls of one another!"

The rector of St. Antipas shrugged modestly at this bald wording of his responsibility; then he sighed and bent his head as one honestly conscious of the situation's gravity.



CHAPTER X

THE REASON OF A WOMAN WHO HAD NO REASON

It was not a jest—Nancy's telling Aunt Bell that her reason for going to Edom was too foolish to give even to herself. At least such reticence to self is often sincerely and plausibly asserted by the very inner woman. Yet no sooner had her train started than her secret within a secret began to tell itself: at first in whispers, then low like a voice overheard through leafy trees; then loud and louder until all the noise of the train did no more than confuse the words so that only she could hear them.

When the exciting time of this listening had gone and she stepped from the train into the lazy spring silence of the village, her own heart spelled the thing in quick, loud, hammering beats—a thing which, now that she faced it, was so wildly impossible that her cheeks burned at the first second of actual realisation of its enormity; and her knees weakened in a deathly tremble, quite as if they might bend embarrassingly in either direction.

Then in the outer spaces of her mind there grew, to save her, a sense of her crass fatuity. She was quickly in a carriage, eager to avoid any acquaintance, glad the driver was no village familiar who might amiably seek to regale her with gossip. They went swiftly up the western road through its greening elms to where Clytie kept the big house—her own home while she lived, and the home of the family when they chose to go there.

At last, the silent, cool house with its secretive green shutters rose above her; the wheels made their little crisping over the fine metal of the driveway. She hastily paid the man and was at the side door that opened into the sitting-room. As she put her hand to the knob she was conscious of Clytie passing the window to open the door.

Then they were face to face over the threshold—Clytemnestra, of a matronly circumference, yet with a certain prim consciousness of herself, which despite the gray hair and the excellent maturity of her face, was unmistakably maidenish—Clytie of the eyes always wise to another's needs and beaming with that fine wisdom.

She started back from the doorway by way of being playfully dramatic—her hands on her hips, her head to one side at an astounded angle. Yet little more than a second did she let herself simulate this welcoming incredulity—this stupefaction of cordiality. There must be quick speech—especially as to Nancy's face—which seemed strangely unfamiliar, set, suppressed, breathless, unaccountably young—and there had to be the splendid announcement of another matter.

"Why, child, is it you or your ghost?"

Nancy could only nod her head.

"My suz! what ails the child?"

Here the other managed a shake of the head and a made smile.

"And of all things!—you'll never, never, never guess!—"

"There—there!—yes, yes—yes! I know—know all about it—knew it—knew it last night—"

She had put out a hand toward Clytie and now reached the other from her side, easing herself to the doorpost against which she leaned and laughed, weakly, vacantly.

"Some one told you—on the way up?"

"Yes—I knew it, I tell you—that's what makes it so funny and foolish—why I came, you know—" She had now gained a little in coherence, and with it came a final doubt. She steadied herself in the doorway to ask—"When did Bernal come?"

And Clytie, somewhat relieved, became voluble.

"Night before last on the six-fifteen, and me getting home late from the Epworth meeting—fire out—not a stick of kindling-wood in—only two cakes in the buttery, neither of them a layer—not a frying-size chicken on the place—thank goodness he didn't have the appetite he used to—though in another way it's just downright heartbreaking to see a person you care for not be a ready eater—but I had some of the plum jell he used to like, and the good half of an apple-John which I at once het up—and I sent Mehitty Lykins down for some chops—"

"Where is he?"

There had seemed to be a choking in the question. Clytie regarded her curiously.

"He was lying down up in the study a while ago—kicking one foot up in the air against the wall, with his head nearly off the sofy onto the floor, just like he used to—there—that's his step—"

"I can't see him now! Here—let me go into your room till I freshen and rest a bit—quick—"

Once more the indecisive knees seemed about to bend either way under their burden. With an effort of will she drew the amazed Clytie toward the open door of the latter's bedroom, then closed it quickly, and stood facing her in the dusk of the curtained room.

"Clytie—I'm weak—it's so strange—actually weak—I shake so—Oh, Clytie—I've got to cry!"

There was a mutual opening of arms and a head on Clytie's shoulder, wet eyes close in a corner that had once been the good woman's neck—and stifling sobs that seemed one moment to contract her body rigidly from head to foot—the next to leave it limp and falling. From the nursing shoulder she was helped to the bed, though she could not yet relax her arms from that desperate grip of Clytie's neck. Long she held her so, even after the fit of weeping passed, clasping her with arms in which there was almost a savage intensity—arms that locked themselves more fiercely at any little stirring of the prisoned one.

At last, when she had lain quiet a long time, the grasp was suddenly loosened and Clytie was privileged to ease her aching neck and cramped shoulders. Then, even as she looked down, she heard from Nancy the measured soft breathing of sleep. She drew a curtain to shut out one last ray of light, and went softly from the room.

Two hours later, as Clytemnestra attained ultimate perfection in the arrangement of four glass dishes of preserves and three varieties of cake upon her table—for she still kept to the sinfully complex fare of the good old simple days—Nancy came out. Clytie stood erect to peer anxiously over the lamp at her.

"I'm all right—you were a dear to let me sleep. See how fresh I am."

"You do look pearter, child—but you look different from when you came. My suz! you looked so excited and kind of young when I opened that door, it give me a start for a minute—I thought I'd woke out of a dream and you was a Miss in short skirts again. But now—let me see you closer." She came around the table, then continued: "Well, you look fresh and sweet and some rested, and you look old and reasonable again—I mean as old as you had ought to look. I never did know you to act that way before, child. My neck ain't got the crick out of it yet."

"Poor old Clytie—but you see yesterday all day I felt queer—very queer, and wrought up, and last night I couldn't rest, and I lay awake and excited all night—and something seemed to give way when I saw you in the door. Of course it was nervousness, and I shall be all right now—"

She looked up and saw Bernal staring at her—standing in the doorway of the big room, his face shading into the dusk back of him. She went to him with both hands out and he kissed her.

"Is it Nance?"

"I don't know—but it's really Bernal."

"Clytie says you knew I had come."

"Clytie must have misunderstood. No one even intimated such a thing. I came up to-day—I had to come—because—if I had known you were here, wouldn't I have brought Allan?"

"Of course I was going to let you know, and come down in a few days—there was some business to do here. Dear old Allan! I'm aching to get a stranglehold on him!"

"Yes—he'll be so glad—there's so much to say!"

"I didn't know whom I should find here."

"We've had Clytie look after both houses—sometimes we've rented mine—and almost every summer we've come here."

"You know I didn't dream I was rich until I got here. The lawyer says they've advertised, but I've been away from everything most of the time—not looking out for advertisements. I can't understand the old gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a thoroughly decent chap."

"Oh, hardly a reprobate!"

"Worse, Nance—an ass—think of my talking to that dear old soul as I did—taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith. I shudder when I remember it. And yet I honestly thought he might be made to see things my way."

Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of their last parting—that singular moment when they blindly groped for each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all time since—and increasingly during the later years—secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled—those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other—faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty.

Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind. Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp—the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.

They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot.

Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.

As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman—listening, waiting, judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.

Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together—with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.

Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered her way to womanhood. Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her dreaming girlhood must be to the present. Should she enter it, she knew the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled rooms.

And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy. Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal's devising had frightened them for the last time—when in a sudden flash of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding. One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child's faith in the Gratcher. He had replied that, as an institution, the Gratcher was imperishable—that it was brute humanity's instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child's Gratcher was not the man's, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity: that the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter him when he hears God's call to live.

She had not been able to understand, nor did she now. She was looking out to the two trees where once her hammock had swung—to the rustic chair, now falling apart from age, from which Bernal had faced her that last evening. Then with a start she was back in the present. Nancy of the old days must be shut fat in the old house. There she might wander and wonder endlessly among the echoes and the half-seen faces, but never could she come forth; over the threshold there could pass only the wife of Allan Linford.

Quick upon this realisation came a sharp fear of the man beside her—a fear born of his hand's hold upon hers when they had met. She shrank under the memory of it, with a sudden instinct of the hunted. Then from her new covert of reserve she dared to peer cautiously at him, seeking to know how great was her peril—to learn what measure of defense would best insure her safety—recognising fearfully the traitor in her own heart.

Their first idle talk had died, and she noted with new alarm that they had been silent for many minutes. This could not safely be—this insidious, barrier-destroying silence. She seemed to hear his heart beating high from his own sense of peril. But would he help her? Would he not rather side with that wretched traitor within her, crying out for the old days—would he not still be the proud fool who would suffer no man's law but his own? She shivered at the thought of his nearness—of his momentous silence—of his treacherous ally.

She stirred in her chair to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen and dining-room. Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction. For a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer terror. Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving fearful point to them now? Would the old eager hand come again upon hers with a boy's pleading and a man's power? And what of her own secret guilt? She had cherished the memory of him and across space had responded to him through that imperious need of her heart. Swiftly in this significant moment she for the first time saw herself with critical eyes—saw that in her fancied security she had unwittingly enthroned the hidden traitor. More and more poignant grew her apprehension as she felt his eyes upon her and divined that he was about to speak. With a little steadying of the lips, with eyes that widened at him in the dim light, she waited for the sound of his voice—waited as one waits for something "terrible and dear"—the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or pass—to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against elemental forces.

"Would you mind if I smoked, Nance?"

She stared stupidly. So tense had been her strain that the words were mere meaningless blows that left her quivering. He thought she had not heard.

"Would you mind my pipe—and this very mild mixture?"

She blessed him for the respite.

"Smoke, of course!" she managed to say.

She watched him closely, still alert, as he stuffed the tobacco into his pipe-bowl from a rubber pouch. Then he struck the match and in that moment she suffered another shock. The little flame danced out of the darkness, and wavering, upward shadows played over a face of utter quietness. The relaxed shoulders drooped sideways in the chair, the body placidly sprawled, one crossed leg gently waving. The shaded eye surveyed some large and tranquil thought—and in that eye the soul sat remote, aloof from her as any star.

She sank back in her chair with a long, stealthy breath of relief—a relief as cold as stone. She had not felt before that there was a chill in the wide sweetness of the night. Now it wrapped her round and slowly, with a soft brutality, penetrated to her heart.

The silence grew too long. With a shrugging effort she surmounted herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in the gloom. A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her. Her intellect awoke to inquiries. She began to question him of his days away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.

"You know, Nance, I was a prodigal—only when I awoke I had no father to go to. Poor grandad! What a brutal cub I was! That has always stuck in my mind. I was telling you about that cold wet night in Denver. I had found a lodging in the police station. There were others as forlorn—and Nance—did you ever realise the buoyancy of the human mind? It's sublime. We rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us. You would have thought that none of them could fear bad luck—worse luck—none of them could have been more dismally situated. But, do you know? most of those fellows became nervous—as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been pampered princes in a time of revolution. I was one of the two that volunteered to restore confidence by bringing in another man.

"We found an undersized, insignificant-looking chap toddling aimlessly along the street a few blocks away from the station. We grappled with him and hustled him back to the crowd. He slept with us on the floor, and no one paid any further attention to him, except to remark that he talked to himself a good bit. He and I awoke earliest next morning. I asked him if he was hungry and he said he was. So I bought two fair breakfasts with the money I'd saved for one good one, and we started out of town. This chap said he was going that way, and I had made up my mind to find a certain friend of mine—a chap named Hoover. The second day out I discovered that this queer man was the one who'd been turning Denver upside down for ten days, healing the halt and the blind. He was running away because he liked a quieter life."

He stopped, laughing softly, as if in remembrance—until she prompted him.

"Yes, he said, 'Father' had commanded him to go into the wilderness to fast. He was always talking familiarly with 'Father,' as we walked. So I stayed by him longer than I meant to—he seemed so helpless—and I happened at that time to be looking for the true God."

"Did you find him, Bernal?"

"Oh, yes!"

"In this strange man?"

"In myself. It's the same old secret, Nance, that people have been discovering for ages—but it is a secret only until after you learn it for yourself. The only true revelation from God is here in man—in the human heart. I had to be years alone to find it out, Nance—I'd had so much of that Bible mythology stuffed into me—but I mustn't bore you with it."

"Oh, but I must know, Bernal—you don't dream how greatly I need at this moment to believe something—more than you ever did!"

"It's simple, Nance. It's the only revelation in which the God of yesterday gives willing place to the better God of to-day—only here does the God of to-day say, 'Thou shalt have no other God before me but the God of to-morrow who will be more Godlike than I. Only in this way can we keep our God growing always a little beyond us—so that to-morrow we shall not find ourselves surpassing him as the first man you would meet out there on the street surpasses the Christian God even in the common virtues. That was the fourth dimension of religion that I wanted, Nance—faith in a God that a fearless man could worship."

He lighted his pipe again, and as the match blazed up she saw the absent look still in his eyes. By it she realised how far away from her he was—realised it with a little sharp sense of desolation. He smoked a while before speaking.

"Out there in the mountains, Nance, I thought about these things a long time—the years went before I knew it. At first I stayed with this healing chap, only after a while he started back to teach again and they found him dead. He believed he had a mission to save the world, and that he would live until he accomplished it. But there he was, dead for want of a little food. Then I stayed a long time alone—until I began to feel that I, too, had something for the world. It began to burn in my bones. I thought of him, dead and the world not caring that he hadn't saved it—not even knowing it was lost. But I kept thinking—a man can be so much more than himself when he is alone—and it seemed to me that I saw at least two things the world needed to know—two things that would teach men to stop being cowards and leaners."

Her sympathy was quick and ardent.

"Oh, Bernal," she said warmly, "you made me believe when you believed nothing—and now, when I need it above all other times, you make me believe again! And you've come back with a message! How glorious!"

He smiled musingly.

"I started with one, Nance—one that had grown in me all those years till it filled my life and made me put away everything. I didn't accept it at first. It found me rebellious—wanting to live on the earth. Then there came a need to justify myself—to show that I was not the mere vicious unbeliever poor grandad thought me. And so I fought to give myself up—and I won. I found the peace of the lone places."

His voice grew dreamy—ceased, as if that peace were indeed too utter for words. Then with an effort he resumed:

"But after a while the world began to rumble in my ears. A man can't cut himself off from it forever. God has well seen to that! As the message cleared in my mind, there grew a need to give it out. This seemed easy off there. The little puzzles that the world makes so much of solved themselves for me. I saw them to be puzzles of the world's own creating—all artificial—all built up—fashioned clumsily enough from man's brute fear of the half-God, half-devil he has always made in his own image.

"But now that I'm here, Nance, I find myself already a little bewildered. The solution of the puzzles is as simple as ever, but the puzzles themselves are more complex as I come closer to them—so complex that my simple answer will seem only a vague absurdity."

He paused and she felt his eyes upon her—felt that he had turned from his abstractions to look at her more personally.

"Even since meeting you, Nance," he went on with an odd, inward note in his voice, "I've been wondering if Hoover could by some chance have been right. When I left, Hoover said I was a fool—a certain common variety of fool."

"Oh, I'm sure you're not—at least, not the common kind. I dare say that a man must be a certain kind of fool to think he can put the world forward by leaps and bounds. I think he must be a fool to assume that the world wants truth when it wants only to be assured that it has already found the truth for itself. The man who tells it what it already believes is never called a fool—and perhaps he isn't. Indeed, I've come to think he is less than a fool—that he's a mere polite echo. But oh, Bernal, hold to your truth! Be the simple fool and worry the wise in the cages they have built around themselves."

She was leaning eagerly forward, forgetful of all save that her starved need was feasting royally.

"Don't give up; don't parrot the commoner fool's conceits back to him for the sake of his solemn approval. Let those of his kind give him what he wants, while you meet those who must have more. I'm one of them, Bernal. At this moment I honestly don't know whether I'm a bad woman or a good one. And I'm frightened—I'm so defenseless! Some little soulless circumstance may make me decisively good or bad—and I don't want to be bad! But give me what I want—I must have that, regardless of what it makes me."

He was silent for a time, then at last spoke:

"I used to think you were a rebel, Nance. Your eyes betrayed it, and the corners of your mouth went up the least little bit, as if they'd go further up before they went down—as if you'd laugh away many solemn respectabilities. But that's not bad. There are more things to laugh at than are dreamed of. That's Hoover's entire creed, by the way."