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The One Woman: A Story of Modern Utopia

by Jr. Thomas Dixon · English · Gutenberg #6037 · 446,868 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The One Woman: A Story of Modern Utopia

Author: Jr. Thomas Dixon


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6037]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6037

Credits: This eBook was produced by Charles Aldarondo and Carrie Fellman


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ONE WOMAN: A STORY OF MODERN UTOPIA ***




This eBook was produced by Charles Aldarondo and Carrie Fellman.



THE ONE WOMAN

A STORY OF MODERN UTOPIA

BY

THOMAS DIXON, JR.

ILLUSTRATED BY

B. WEST CLINEDINST






DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

(1834-1902)

TO WHOSE SCOTCH LOVE OF ROMANTIC LITERATURE I OWE THE HERITAGE OF
ETERNAL YOUTH






CONTENTS





I. The Man and the Woman
II. Visions in the Night
III. The Banker and His Fad
IV. The Shorthorn Deacon
V. The Cry of the City
VI. The Puddle and the Tadpole
VII. A Stolen Kiss
VIII. Sweet Danger
IX. The Spider
X. The Black Cat
XI. An Answer to Prayer
XII. Out of the Shadows
XIII. A Broken Heart-String
XIV. The Voice of the Siren
XV. Goest Thou to See a Woman?
XVI. The Parting
XVII. The Thought That Sweeps the Century
XVIII. A Voice from the Past
XIX. The Wedding of the Annunciation
XX. An Old Sweetheart
XXI. Freedom and Fellowship
XXII. A Scarlet Flame in the Sky
XXIII. The New Heaven
XXIV. Courtier and Queen
XXV. The Irony of Fate
XXVI. At Close Quarters
XXVII. Venus Victrix
XXVIII. The Growl of the Animal
XXIX. Bulldog and Mastiff
XXX. The Cloud's Silver Lining
XXXI. A Lace Handkerchief
XXXII. A Lifetime in a Day
XXXIII. The Verdict
XXXIV. The Appeal
XXXV. Between Two Fires
XXXVI. Swift and Beautiful Feet
XXXVII. The Kiss of the Bride






List of Illustrations





"Her tapering fingers rested on his broad foot."

"About her personality there was a haunting charm, the breath of
a soul capable of the highest heroism."

"Little ringlets of hair curling about her face as though scorched
by the warmth of the red blood below."

"Ripped it open, tore it from his arms, and threw it on the floor."

"Her arms stole around his neck."

"A faint cry came from the full lips."

"Driving his great fingers into his throat."

"A cheer suddenly burst from the crowd and echoed through the
court-room."






Leading Characters of the Story





Scene: New York-Time: The Present

RUTH GORDON . . . The One Woman

REV. FRANK GORDON . . A Social Dreamer

KATE RANSOM . . . The Other Woman

MARK OVERMAN . . . .A Banker

MORRIS KING . . Ruth's Old Sweetheart

ARNOLD VAN METER . . A Shorthorn Deacon

BARRINGER . . Assistant District Attorney






CHAPTER I

THE MAN AND THE WOMAN





"Quick--a glass of water!" A man sprang to his feet, beckoning to
an usher.

When he reached the seat, the woman had recovered by a supreme
effort of will and sat erect, her face flushed with anger at her
own weakness.

"Thank you, I am quite well now," she said with dignity.

The man settled back and the usher returned to his place and stood
watching her out of the corners of his eyes, fascinated by her
beauty.

The church was packed that night with more than two thousand people.
The air was hot and foul. The old brick building, jammed in the
middle of a block, faced the street with its big bare gable. The
ushers were so used to people fainting that they kept water and
smelling-salts handy in the anterooms. The Reverend Frank Gordon
no longer paused or noticed these interruptions. He had accepted
the truth that, while God builds the churches, the devil gets the
job to heat, light and ventilate them.

The preacher had not noticed this excitement under the gallery,
but had gone steadily on in an even monotone very unusual to his
fiery temperament.

A half-dozen reporters yawned and drummed on their fingers with their
pencils. The rumour of a brewing church trouble had been published,
but he had not referred to it in the morning, and evidently was
not going to do so to-night.

Toward the close of his sermon he recovered from the stupor with
which he had been struggling and ended with something of his usual
fervour.

He was a man of powerful physique, wide chest and broad shoulders,
a tall athlete, six feet four, of Viking mould, hair blond and
waving, steel-gray eyes, a strong aquiline nose and frank, serious
face.

He had been called from a town in southern Indiana to the Pilgrim
Congregational Church in New York when, on its last legs, it was
about to sell out and move uptown. He had created a sensation, and
in six months the building could not hold the crowds which struggled
to hear him.

His voice was one of great range and its direct personal tone put
him in touch with every hearer. Before they knew it his accents
quivered with emotion that swept the heart. Emotional thinking
was his trait. He could thrill his crowd with a sudden burst of
eloquence, but he loved to use the deep vibrant subtones of his
voice so charged with feeling that he melted the people into tears.
His face, flashing and trembling, smiling and clouding with hidden
fires of passion, held every eye riveted. His gestures were few and
seemed the resistless burst of enormous reserve power--an impression
made stronger by his great hairy blue-veined hands and the way
he stood on his big, broad feet. He spoke in impassioned moments
with the rush of lightning, and yet each word fell clean-cut and
penetrating.

An idealist and dreamer, in love with life, colour, form, music and
beauty, he had the dash and brilliancy, the warmth and enthusiasm
of a born leader of men. The impulsive champion of the people, the
friend of the weak, he had become the patriot prophet of a larger
democracy.

A passion for music, and a fad for precious stones, especially
pearls and opals, which he carried in his pockets and handled with
the tenderness of a lover, were his hobbies. He had in a marked
degree the peculiar power of attracting children and animals, and
all women liked him instinctively from the first.

But to-night he was not himself. After a brief prayer at the close
of the sermon he dismissed the crowd with the announcement of an
after-meeting for those personally interested in religion.

As the people poured out through the open doors the unceasing roar
of the great city's life swept in drowning the soft strains of
the organ--the jar and whir of wheels, the wheeze of brakes, the
tremor of machinery, the rumble of cab, the clatter of hoof-beat,
the cry of child and hackman, the haunting murmur of millions like
the moan of the sea borne on breezes winged with the odours of
saloon and kitchen, stable and sewer--the crash of a storm of brute
forces on the senses, tearing the nerves, crushing the spirit,
bruising the soul, and strangling the memory of a sane life.

Gordon frowned and shivered as he sat waiting for the crowd to go,
and a look of depression swept his face.

These after-meetings for personal appeal were a regular feature
of his ministry. He held them every Sunday evening, no matter how
tired he was or how hopeless the effort might seem. When the doors
were closed about a hundred people had gathered in the centre of
the church near the front.

He rose from his chair behind the altar-rail with an evident effort
to throw off his weariness. He had laid aside his pulpit robe,
a tribute to ritualism that this church had dragooned him into
accepting.

"My friends," he began slowly and softly, with his hands folded
behind him, "first a few words of testimony from any who can witness
to the miracle of the Spirit in our daily life. We are crushed
sometimes with the brutal weight of matter, and yet over all the
Spirit broods and gives light and life. Who can bear witness to
this miracle?"

"I can!" cried a man, who rose trembling with deep feeling.

His high, well-moulded forehead showed the heritage of intellectual
power. His eyes, soft and tender as a woman's, had in their depths
the record of a great sorrow.

Taking his watch out of his pocket, he looked at it a moment, and,
as the tears began to steal down his face, spoke in a tremulous
voice.

"Seven years, four months, three days and six hours ago the Spirit
of God came to my poor lost soul and found it in a dirty saloon on
the East Side. I was dead--dead to shame, dead to honour, dead to
love, dead to the memory of life. I was so low I found scant welcome
in hell's own port, the saloon. They knew me and dreaded to see
me. I had served time in prison, and when I drank I was an ugly
customer for the bravest policeman to meet alone.

"Ragged, dirty, blear-eyed, besotted, I was seated on a whisky
barrel wondering how I could beat the barkeeper out of a drink,
when a sweet-faced boy came up and handed me a card of this church's
services.

"I don't know how it happened, but all of a sudden it came over
me--where I was, and what I was, and what I once had been--a boy
with a face like that, with a Christian father and mother who loved
me as their own life, and then how I had gone down, down in drink
from ditch to ditch and gutter to gutter to the bottomless pit.

"I jumped down off that whisky barrel and washed my face. That
night I found this church, and the Spirit of God, here in one of
these after-meetings, led my soul to the foot of the cross of Jesus
Christ. I looked up into His beautiful face--the fairest among ten
thousand--the one altogether lovable, and I heard Him say, as to
the thief of old, 'This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.'

"From that day, hour and minute I've been a living man, a miracle
of grace and love. I have not touched a drop of liquor since, and
these hands, which had not earned an honest cent for years, have
handled thousands of dollars of other people's money and not one
penny has ever stuck to them. I am the living witness that God's
spirit can raise man from the dead, and Jesus Christ keep him unto
life!"

He sat down, crying.

Gordon lifted his hand and said, "Let us bow our heads a moment in
silent prayer while every heart opens the door to the Spirit."

At the close of the service he passed the man who had spoken and
pressed his hand.

"Ah, Edwards, old boy, you knew I needed that to-night. God bless
you!"

Jerry Edwards smiled and nodded.

"A lady wishes to speak to you in the study, sir," the sexton said
to him.

He looked around for his wife to tell her to wait, but she had
gone.

His study opened immediately into the auditorium at the foot of
the pulpit stairs. As he entered, a young woman of extraordinary
beauty, elegantly and quietly dressed, advanced to meet him and
shook his hand in a friendly, earnest way.

"Doctor, I've waited patiently to-night to see you," she said. "I've
been coming to hear you for six months, and yet I have never told
you how much good you have done me; and I specially wish to tell
you how sorry I am that my stupid weakness to-night interrupted
you. I think I came near fainting. It was so close and hot--and,
pardon me if I say it--I suddenly got the insane idea that you were
about to faint in the pulpit."

"Well, that is strange," interrupted Gordon, looking at her with
deepening interest. "You have the gift of the sympathetic listener.
I noticed no disturbance, but I did come near fainting. I have had
a hard day--one of fierce nerve-strain."

She looked at him curiously.

"Then I don't feel so badly, now that I know my idea was not incipient
insanity," she said, smiling. "I've quite made up my mind to send
back to Kentucky for my forgotten church-letter. I've seen all
fashionable society in New York can offer and I am weary of its
vacuity. I've been disillusioned of a girl's silly dreams, but
there are some beautiful ones in my heart I've held. I can't tell
you how your church and work have thrilled and interested me.
I have never heard such sermons and prayers as yours. You give to
the old faiths new and beautiful meaning. Every word you have spoken
has seemed to me a divine call."

"And you cannot know how cheering such a message is to me to-night,"
he thoughtfully replied, studying her carefully.

"I never could summon courage to come up and speak to you before,
but your sermon this morning swept me off my feet. It was so simple,
so heartfelt, so sincere, and yet so close in its touch of life,
I felt that you had opened your very soul for me to see my own in
its experiences. It will be a turning point in my life."

She spoke with a quiet seriousness, and Gordon felt that he had
never seen a face of such exquisite grace.

With a promise that he would call to see her within the week, she
left.

He stood for a moment gazing at her name, "Miss Kate Ransom," on
the card she gave him, his mind aglow with the consciousness of
her remarkable beauty, the famous Kentucky type, and yet a distinct
variation.

Her figure was full and magnificent in the ripe glory of youth, a
delicate face, the blonde's colour, thick, waving auburn hair that
seemed brown till the light blazed through its deep red tints,
violet-blue eyes, cordial and smiling, at once mysterious, magic,
friendly, gravely candid. Her skin was smooth as a babe's, with the
delicate creamy satin of the blonde flashing the scarlet tints of
every emotion. Her lips were cherry-red, and as she listened they
half parted with a lazy suggestion of tenderness and love; while
the face was one of refined mentality, as unconscious as a child's
of its splendid beauty.

Her gait was proud and careless, telling of perfect health and
stores of untouched vital powers, a movement of the body at once
strong, luxurious, insolently languid, rhythmic and full of dumb
music. It was when she moved that she expressed the consciousness
of power, a gleam of cruelty, a challenge that was to man an added
charm.

"What a woman!" he exclaimed aloud, as he drew on his coat. "The
kind of a woman who enraptures the senses, drugs the brain and
conscience of the man who responds to her call--the woman about
whom men have never been able to compromise, but have always killed
one another!"

His wife opened the door for him in silence.

"Who was that woman, Frank?" she asked at length, her long, dark
lashes blinking rapidly.

"What woman, Ruth?"

"The beauty I saw glide softly into your study."

Gordon smiled as he sank into a chair in the library.

"Miss Kate Ransom, a stranger I never met before."

"You seem a magnet for strange women, and your church their Mecca."

"Yes, and strange men. God knows New York, with its dead and deserted
churches, needs such a Mecca."

"You promised to call, of course?"

"Certainly; it's my business. The Church needs every friend and
every dollar to be had on Manhattan Island."

"And the distinguished young pastor of the Pilgrim Church needs
the smiles of all beautiful women. His wife is a little faded with
worry and care for his children, while crowds hang on his eloquence
and silly women sigh into his handsome face. Ah, Frank, before we
came to New York you had eyes only for me. The city, the crowd and
the flattery of fools have turned your head. You are letting go of
all things you once held. Now the Bible is 'literature.' You are
sighing for the freedom of a 'larger life.' Where will it end? I
wonder if you have weighed marriage in the balances and found it
wanting?"

Gordon rose with a sigh, walked slowly to the window and looked
down on the city lying below. Their little home was perched on the
cliffs of Washington Heights.

The smile had died from his handsome face and his tall figure was
stooped with exhaustion. He raised one hand and brushed back a stray
lock from his forehead, across which a frown had slowly settled.

"By all means keep your hair adjusted," his wife continued
sarcastically. "The women are all in love with that blond hair.
And it is so effective in the pulpit. If you were not six feet four
it might be effeminate, but I assure you it is the secret of your
strength. I trust you will be wiser than Samson."

Gordon smiled.

"You have quit the old faiths," she continued rapidly, "and gone
to preaching Christian Socialism. You have driven the best members
of the church away, and made the press your enemy. That mob which
hails you a god will turn and curse you. You will never build
your marble dream out of such stuff. Both your sermons to-day will
make your trustees more hostile. There was no Bible in them--only
personalities and rank Socialism. I saw that woman in front of me
drinking it all in as the inspired gospel."

Gordon winced and his brow clouded.

"I gave up everything for you--home, talents, friends," she went
on. "Now that I am thirty-one, it is the new face that charms."

"You did give up a very particular friend for me," Gordon remarked
teasingly. "I only learned recently that you were once engaged to
Mr. Morris King, your faithful attorney, and that you threw him
over for an athletic parson with blond hair and a smile, yet I
have never chided you about this little secret. Mr. King is still
a romantic bachelor. He has not been initiated into the joys of a
Sunday sermon at 10 P. M., with his wife in the pulpit. He has much
to live for."

Her lips quivered and her eyes grew dim.

"Come, come, my dear; you know that I love you and that I am
faithful to you. But such words and scenes as these may destroy
the tenderest love at last. Words, even, are deeds."

"How philosophical! Quite like one of the epigrams of your chum,
Mark Overman, of whose cruel tongue you're so fond. I wonder you
don't make Mr. Overman a deacon in the new order of your church."

Gordon sank back into the chair and thoughtfully shaded his brow
with his hand, his face drawn into deep lines of weariness.

When she saw the look of pain in his face her eyes softened.

"What I fear of you, Frank, is not your intention, but your performance.
You mean well, but you never could resist a pretty woman."

"In a sense, no. If I could, I never would have married."

The faintest suggestion of a smile played about her eyes and then
faded.

"I wonder what pretty speeches you said to the stranger to-night?
You have such charming manners with a woman."

He looked at her appealingly and she stared at him without reply.

"For God's sake, Ruth, end this scene. If you only knew how tired
I am to-night--tired in body, in heart and soul. I think the past
week has been the most trying of my whole life. It opened with a
newspaper attack on me inspired by Van Meter. You know how sensitive
I am to such criticism.

"Saturday came without a moment for preparation for the great crowds
I knew would be present to-day after that attack on me. Instead
of work yesterday, a procession of people, hungry and suffering,
were at the door from morning until night. All their burdens they
poured out to me; All their wrongs and grievances against God and
man became mine.

"On Saturday night the trustee meeting was held to discuss our
building project. Van Meter led the opposition with skill. When I
poured out my soul's dream to them of a great temple of marble, a
flaming centre of Christian Democracy instead of the old brick barn
we call a church--a temple that would flash its glory from the sky
above the sordid materialism that is crushing the lives and hearts
of men, telling in marble song of God, of immortality, of faith and
hope and love--they stared at me in contempt until I felt the blood
freeze in my veins. When I drew a picture of its great auditorium
thronged with thousands of eager faces, Van Meter coolly interrupted
me with the remark:

"'We don't want such trash elbowing our old parishioners out of
their pews. We've had too much of it already. With all your mob,
the pew-rents have fallen off.'

"My first impulse was that of Christ when he took a whip in the
temple. I wanted to knock him down. Instead, I rushed out of the
house and left him victorious.

"I waked this morning with the burden of all this week's horror
choking me, waked to the consciousness that in a few hours thousands
of faces would be looking up to me with hungry souls to be fed.
Well, I had nothing to give them except my own heart's blood, and
so to-day I tore my heart open for them to devour it. True, I didn't
preach the Bible except as its truth had passed into my own soul's
experiences. When I preach such sermons I always quit with the sense
of utter helplessness, exhaustion and failure. Could my bitterest
enemy read my heart in that hour he would cry out for pity.

"I never so felt the crushing burden of all that crowd of people
as to-day. I've heard so much of their sorrows and struggles the
past week. I felt that the city was a great beast in some vast
arena of time, that I was alone, naked and unarmed, on the sands,
struggling with it for the life of the people, while my enemies
looked on. As never before, I heard the rush of its half-crazed
millions, its crash and roar, saw its fierce brutality, its lust,
its cruelty, its senseless scramble for pleasure, its indifference
to truth, its millions of to-day but a symbol of the millions
gone before and the trampling millions to come, and I felt I was
a failure. I felt that I was pitching straws against a hurricane,
only to find them blown back into my face. I came down out of that
pulpit with the weariness of a thousand years crushing my tired
body and soul, feeling that I could never speak again, or struggle
against the tide any more--that I was broken, bruised and done for
all time, and I came home feeling so--"

He paused a moment and a sigh caught his voice. His wife's face
had softened and a tear was quivering on her long eyelashes.

"I came home thus worn out to-night hoping for a word of cheer,
yet knowing it would be days before I could recover from the sheer
nerve-agony I had endured. What a reception you have given me! And
for what? A beautiful woman stopped to tell me my message had not
been in vain, that it had made for her a light on life's way, and
that the prayers in which I had tried to realise as my own, the
people's thoughts and hopes and fears had been a revelation to her,
and because I smiled--"

His wife was again staring at him with the glitter of jealousy. He
saw it and ceased to speak.

He suddenly sprang to his feet and walked to the door. Taking down
his hat and light overcoat from the rack, he said, as though to
himself:

"We will spend the night under different roofs."

As he passed toward the door there was a faint cry fiom within
scarcely louder than a whisper, tense with agony and pitiful in
its pleading accents;

"Frank, dear, please come back!"

But when she summoned strength to rush to the door, crying with
terror she had never known before "Frank! Frank!" he had turned
the corner and disappeared.






CHAPTER II

VISIONS IN THE NIGHT





Gordon walked rapidly with the quick stride of the trained athlete.
Walking was a pet exercise.

His mind was now in a whirl of fury. He had never before given
away to passion in a quarrel with his wife. They had been married
twelve years, and, up to the birth of their boy, four years before,
had lived as happily as possible for two people of strong wills.
Discord had slowly grown as his fame increased. His wife was now
jealous of almost every woman who spoke to him.

They had quarreled before, but he had always kept a clear head
and laughed her out of countenance. These quarrels had ended with
tears and kisses and were forgotten until the next.

To-night somehow every thrust found his most sensitive spots. He
wondered why? Dimly conscious of a curious interest in the woman
who had spoken so sweetly to him at the close of his service, he
wondered if his wife divined the fact by some subtle power their
long association had developed and sharpened.

His enthusiasm for the Socialistic ideal was fast becoming an
absorbing passion, and was destined to lead him into strange company.

His wife felt this, resented it, and, becoming more and more
conservative, the gulf between them daily widened and deepened.

He cared nothing for her ridicule of his blond locks. He wore them
half in defiance of conventionality and half in whimsical love for
the picture of a beautiful mother from whom he had inherited them.

"What could have possessed her to-night?" he slowly muttered as he
emerged from Central Park and swung into Fifth Avenue. "Am I really
losing my grasp of truth because I am giving up traditional dogmas?
Has God given to her soul the power to look inside my heart and
find its secret thoughts? Why does she keep asking me if I have
lost faith in marriage? Never in word or deed have I hinted at such
a thing."

And yet the memory of that beautiful woman, with a voice like
liquid music, friendly, soothing, reassuring, kept echoing through
his soul.

As the tumult of passion died in the glow of the walk in the open
air he became conscious of the life of the city again. The avenue
was a blaze of light. Its miles of electric torches flashed like
stars in the milky way.

He passed under dozens of awnings before palatial homes in front of
which stood lines of carriages. The old Dutch and English ancestors
of these people were once faithful observers of the Sabbath. Now they
went to church in the mornings as a form of good society and held
their receptions in the evenings. Some of them employed professional
vaudeville artists to enliven their Sunday social bouts.

New York, proud imperial Queen of the Night, seemed just waking
to her real life, a strange new life in human history--a life that
had put darkness to flight, snuffed out the light of moon and star,
laughed at sleep, twin sister of Death, and challenged the soul of
man to live without one refuge of silence or shadow.

And yet the warmth and glow, the splendour and beauty of it all
stirred his imagination and appealed to his love.

At length he stood before the old church that had been the arena of
his struggles and triumphs for the past ten years, and was destined
to be for him the scene of a drama more thrilling than any he had
known or dreamed in the past.

He passed into the auditorium, ascended the pulpit, and sat down
in the armchair where but a few hours before he had held the gaze
of thousands. The electric lights glimmering through the windows
of the gable showed the empty pews in sharp outline.

"I wonder if they know when they go they sometimes leave my soul
as empty and as lonely as those vacant pews? I give, give, give
forever of thought, sympathy and life and never receive, until
sometimes my heart cries to a passing dog for help!

"I'd build here to God a temple whose sheer beauty and glory would
stop every huckster on the street, lift his eyes to heaven and melt
his soul into tears. It must--it shall come to pass!"

He sat there for nearly two hours, dreaming of his plans of uplifting
the city, and through the city as a centre reaching the Nation and
its millions with pen and tongue of fire. Gradually the sense of
isolation from self enveloped him, and the thought of human service
challenged the highest reach of his powers.

He opened the face of his watch and felt the hands, a habit he had
formed of telling the time in the dark. It was one o'clock.

He thought of his wife and their quarrel. He had forgotten it in
larger thoughts, and his heart suddenly went out in pity to her.
He had not meant what he said. He loved her in spite of all harsh
words and bitter scenes. She was the mother of his two lovely
children, a girl of ten and a boy of four. The idea of a night
apart from her, he, and theirs came with a painful shock. He felt
his strength and was ashamed that he had left her so cruelly. He
hurried to the Twenty-third Street elevated station and boarded a
car for his home.

When his wife recovered from the first horror of his leaving, she
was angry. With a nervous laugh she went into the nursery, kissed
the sleeping chil-dren and went to bed. She tossed the first hour,
thinking of the quarrel and many sharp thrusts she might have
given him. Perhaps she would renew the attack when he came in and
attempted to make up. The clock struck eleven and she sprang up,
walked to her window and looked out.

A great new fear began to brood over her soul.

"No, no, he could not have meant it--he is not a brute!" she cried,
as she began to nervously clasp her hands and turn her wedding ring
over and over again on her tapering finger, until it seemed a band
of fire to her fevered nerves.

As she stood by the window in her scarlet silk robe she made a sharp
contrast in person to the woman whose shadow had fallen to-night
across her life. She was a petite brunette of distant Spanish
ancestry, a Spottswood from old Tidewater Virginia. To the tenderest
motherhood she combined a passionate temper with intense jealousy.
The anxious face was crowned with raven hair. Her eyes were dark
and stormy, and so large that in their shining surface the shadows
of the long lashes could be seen.

Her nature, for all its fiery passions, was refined, shy and
tremulous. A dimple in her chin and a small sensitive mouth gave
her an expression at once timid and childlike. Her footstep had
feline grace, delicacy and distinction. She had a figure almost
perfect, erect, lithe, with small hands and feet and tiny wrists.
Her voice was a soft contralto, caress-ing and full of feeling,
with a touch of the languor and delicate sensuousness of the Old
South. About her personality there was a haunting charm, vivid and
spiritual, the breath of a soul capable of the highest heroism if
once aroused.

At twelve o'clock she relighted the gas and went downstairs to
stand at the parlour window to scan more clearly every face that
might pass, and--yes, she would be honest with herself now--to
spring into his arms the moment he entered, smother him with kisses
and beg him to forgive the bitter words she had spoken in anger.

She was sure he would come in a moment. He must have gone on one
of his long walks. She could see the elevated cars on their long
trestle, count the stations, and guess how many minutes it would
take him to climb the hill and rush up the steps. Over and over
she did this, and now it was one o'clock and he had not come.

What if he had been stricken suddenly with mortal illness! His face
had looked so weary and drawn. She began to cry incoherently, and
sank on her knees.

"Lord, forgive me. I am weak and selfish, and I was wicked to-night.
Hear the cry of my heart. Bring him to me quickly, or I shall die!"

As the sobs choked her into silence, she sprang to her feet, both
hands on her lips to keep back a scream of joy, for she had heard
his footstep on the stoop.

The latch clicked, and he was in the hall.

There was a flash of red silk and two white arms were around his
neck, her form convulsed with a joy she could not control or try
to conceal.

He soothed her as a child, and, as he kissed her tenderly, felt
her lips swollen and wet with the salt tears of hours of weeping.

"You will not remember the foolish things I said to-night, dear?"
she pleaded. "There, there, I'll blot them out with kisses--one for
every harsh word, and one more for love's own sake. But you must
promise me, Frank, never to leave me like that again." A sob caught
her voice, and her head drooped.

"You may curse me, strike me, do anything but that. Oh, the loneliness,
the agony and horror of those hours when I realised you were gone
in anger and might not come back to-night--dear, it was too cruel.
Such wild thoughts swept my heart! You do forgive me?"

He stooped and kissed her.

"Why ask it, Ruth?"

"I know I am selfish and fretful and wilful," she said, with a sigh.
"I was only a spoiled child of nineteen when you took me by storm,
body and soul. You remember, on our wedding day, when I looked up
into your handsome face and the sense of responsibility and joy
crushed me for a moment, I cried and begged you, who were so brave
and strong, to teach me if I should fail in the least thing? And
you promised, dear, so sweetly and tenderly. Do you remember?"

"Yes, I remember," he slowly answered.

"And now, somehow, you seem to have drawn away from me as though
the task had wearied you. Come back closer! When I am foolish you
must be wise. You can make of me what you will. You know I am afraid
of this Socialism. It seems to open gulfs between us. You read and
read, while I can only wait and love. You cannot know the silent
agony of that waiting for I know not what tragedy in our lives.
Frank, teach and lead me--I will follow. I love you with a love
that is deathless. If you will be a Socialist, make me one. Show
me there is nothing to fear. I've thought marriage meant only
self-sacrifice for one's beloved. I've tried to give my very life
to you and the children. If I'm making a mistake, show me."

"I will try, Ruth."

She ran her tapering fingers through his hair, smiled and sighed.

"How beautiful you are, my dear! I know it is a sin to love any
man so. One should only love God like this."






CHAPTER III

THE BANKER AND HIS FAD





When Gordon woke next morning from a fitful sleep he was stupid
and blue and had a headache. His wife had not slept at all, but
was cheerful, tender and solicitous.

"Ruth, I can't go down to the ministers' meeting this morning,"
he said wearily. "I must take a day off in the country. I'll lose
both soul and body if I don't take one day's rest in seven. I didn't
tell you last night that I came near fainting in the pulpit during
the evening sermon."

She slipped her hand in his, looking up reproachfully at him out
of her dark eyes.

"Why didn't you tell me that, Frank?"

"I thought you had enough troubles last night. I'll run out on Long
Island and spend the day with Overman. You needn't frown. You are
strangely mistaken in him. I know you hate his brutal frankness,
and he is anything but a Christian, but we are old college chums,
and he's the clearest-headed personal friend I have. I need his
advice about my fight with Van Meter. Overman is a venomous critic
of my Social dreams. I've often wondered at your dislike of him,
when he so thoroughly echoes your feelings."

She was silent a moment, and gravely said: "Take a good day's rest,
then, and come back refreshed. I'll try to like even Mr. Overman,
if he will help you. I'm going to turn over a new leaf this morning."

He laughed, kissed her, and hurried to catch the train for Babylon,
where Overman lived in his great country home.

Mark Overman was a bacholer of forty, noted for the fact that he
had but one eye and was so homely it was a joke. His friends said
he was so ugly it was fascinating, and he was constantly laughing
about it himself. He was a Wall Street banker, several times
a millionaire, famed for his wit, his wide reading, his brutally
cynical views of society, and his ridicule of modern philanthropy
and Socialistic dreams.

He was a man of average height with the heavy-set, bulldog body, face
and neck, broad, powerful hands and big feet. He had an enormous
nose, shaggy eyebrows and a bristling black moustache. But the
one striking peculiarity about him was his missing right eye. The
large heavy eyelid was drooped and closed tightly over the sightless
socket, which seemed to have sunk deep into his head. This cavern
on one side of his face gave to the other eye a strange power.
When he looked at you, it gleamed a fierce steady blaze like the
electric headlight of an engine. How he lost that eye was a secret
he guarded with grim silence, and no one was ever known to ask him
twice.

Though five years older, he was Gordon's classmate at Wabash College.

Overman had always scorned the suggestion of an artificial eye. He
swore he would never stick a piece of glass in his head to deceive
fools. He used to tell Gordon that he was the only one-eyed man in
New York who had the money to buy a glass eye and didn't do it.

"I prefer life's grim little joke to stand as it is," he said, as
he snapped his big jaws together and twisted the muscles of his
mouth into a sneer. He had a habit, when he closed an emphatic
speech, of twisting the muscles of his mouth in that way. When
animated in talk, he was the incarnation of disobedience, defiance,
scorn, success.

Two things he held in special pride--hatred for women and a
passionate love for game-cocks. He allowed no woman on his place
in any capacity, and, by the sounds day and night, he kept at least
a thousand roosters. He would drop the profoundest discussion of
philosophy or economics at the mention of a chicken, and with a
tender smile plunge into an endless eulogy of his pets.

Gordon found him in a chicken yard fitting gaffs on two cocks.

"Caught in the act!" he cried.

"Well, who cares? They've got to fight it out.  It's in 'em. They're
full brothers, too. Hatched the same day. They never scrapped in
their lives till yesterday, when I brought a new pullet and put
her in the neighbouring yard. They both tried to make love to her
through the wire fence at the same time, and they were so busy
crowing and strutting and showing off to this pullet they ran
into each other and began to fight. Now one must die, and I'm just
fixing these little steel points on for them so the function can
be performed decently. I'm a man of fine feelings."

"You're a brute when you let them kill one another with gaffs."

"Nonsense. The fighting instinct is elemental in all animal
life--two-legged and four-legged. Animals fight as inevitably as
they breathe. You can trace the progress of man by the evolution
of his weapons--the stone, the spear, the bow and arrow, the sword,
the gun."

"Well, you're not going to have the fight this morning. Put up
those inventions of the devil and come into the house."

"All right. You're a parson; I'll not allow them to fight. I'll just
chop the head off of one and let you eat him for dinner." Overman
grinned, and pierced Gordon with his gleaming eye.

"It would be more sensible than the exhibition of brutality you
were preparing."

"Not from the rooster's point of view, or mine. I love chickens.
If I tried to eat one it would choke me. But I can see your mouth
watering now, looking at that fat young pullet over there, dreaming
of the dinner hour when you expect to smash her beautiful white
breast between your cannibal jaws. Funny men, preachers!"

Gordon laughed. "After all, you may be right. Our deepest culture
is about skin deep. Scratch any of us with the right tool and you'll
find a savage."

They strolled into the library and sat down. It was the largest and
best-furnished room in the house. Its lofty ceiling was frescoed in
sectional panels by a great artist. Its walls were covered as high
as the arm could reach with loaded bookshelves, and alcove doors
opened every ten feet into rooms stored with special treasures of
subjects on which he was interested. Masterpieces of painting hung
on the walls over the cases, while luxurious chairs and lounges
in heavy leather were scattered about the room among the tables,
desks and filing cabinets. At one end of the room blazed an open
wood fire of cord wood full four feet in length. Beside the chimney
windows opened with entrancing views of the Great South Bay and
the distant beaches of Fire Island. Across the huge oak mantel he
had carved the sentence:

"I AM AN OLD MAN NOW; I'VE HAD LOTS OF TROUBLE, AND MOST OF IT
NEVER HAPPENED."

"Frank, old boy, you look as though you had been pulled through a
small-sized auger hole yesterday. How is the work going?"

"All right. But Van Meter puzzles me. I want your advice about him.
You've come in contact with him in Wall Street and know him. He is
the one man power in my church--the senior deacon and chairman of
the Board of Trustees of the Society. In spite of all my eloquence
and the crowds that throng the building, he has set the whole Board
against me. He is really trying to oust me from the pastorate of
the church. Shall I take the bull by the horns now and throw him and
his Mammon-worshiping satellites out, or try to work such material
into my future plans? Give me your advice as a cool-headed outsider."

Overman was silent a moment.

"Well, Frank, now you've put the question squarely, I'm going
to be candid. I'm alarmed about you. The strain on your nerves is
too great. This maggot of Socialism in your brain is the trouble.
It is the mark of mental and moral breakdown, the fleeing from
self-reliant individual life into the herd for help. You call it
'brotherhood,' the 'solidarity of the race.' Sentimental mush. It's
a stampede back to the animal herd out of which a powerful manhood
has been evolved. This idea is destroying your will, your brain, your
religion, and will finally sap the moral fiber of your character.
It is the greatest sentimentalist."

Gordon grunted.

"It's funny how you have the faculty of putting the opposition in
terms of its last absurdity."

"Grunt if you like; I'm in dead earnest. You want to put on the
brakes. You've struck the down grade. Socialism takes the temper
out of the steel fiber of character. It makes a man flabby. It is
the earmark of racial degeneracy. The man of letters who is poisoned
by it never writes another line worth reading; the preacher who
tampers with it ends a materialist or atheist; the philanthropist
bitten by it, from just a plain fool, develops a madman; while the
home-builder turns free-lover and rake under its teachings."

"You're a beauty to grieve over the loss to the world of home-builders!"
Gordon cried, with scorn.

"Maybe my grief is a little strained--but really, Frank, I hate
women, not because I don't feel the need of their love--"

He drew the muscles of his big mouth together and looked thoughtfully
out of the window with his single piercing eye.

"No; for the first time on that point I'll make an honest, clean
confession to you. I hate women because I'm afraid of them. I
have a face that can stop an eight-day clock if I look at it hard
enough; and yet beneath this hideous mask there's a poor coward's
soul that worships beauty and hungers for love! I don't allow women
in this house because I can't stand the rustle of their drapery.
I don't want one of them to get her claws into me. They can see
through me in a minute. Women have an X-ray in their eyes. They
can look through a brick wall, without going to see what's on
the other side. A man learns a thing is true by a painful process
of reasoning. A woman knows a thing is so--because! She knows it
thoroughly, too, from top to bottom. Whenever a woman looks at me I
can feel her taking an X-ray photograph of the marrow of my bones."

He wheeled suddenly and fixed his eye on Gordon.

"I'll bet you had another quarrel with your wife last night?"

"How do you know?"

"Tell by your hangdog look. You look like an old Shanghai rooster
that a little game-cock has knocked down and trampled on for half
an hour before letting him up."

"We did have some words."

"Exactly; and I can tell you what about. Your wife is growing more
nervous over the tendency of your religion and your thinking. You
can't fool her about it. She knows you are drifting where she can
never follow. She knows instinctively that Socialism is the return
to the animal herd and that the family will be trampled to death
beneath its hoofs."

"Come, Mark, you're crazy. The Brotherhood of Man and the Solidarity
of the Race can have such meaning only to a lunatic."

"Don't you know that the triumph of Socialism will destroy the
monogamic family?" Overman asked sharply.

"Rubbish."

"Strange, how you sentimentalists slop over things. You have allowed
second-hand Socialistic catch words to change your methods of work
and thought and revolutionize your character, and yet you have never
seriously tried to go to the bottom of it. Come into this room a
minute."

They went into an alcove room.

"Here I have more than a thousand volumes of Socialistic literature.
I've read it all with more or less thoroughness. When I look at the
titles of these books I feel as though I've eaten tons of sawdust.
You are preaching this stuff as the gospel, and yet you don't know
what your masters are really trying to do."

"I know that there can be no true home life until the shadow of
want has been lifted," said the preacher emphatically. "The aim of
Socialism is to bring to pass this dream of heaven on earth."

"Just so. But you've never defined what the dream will be like
when it comes. Your masters have. Let me read some choice bits to
you from these big-brained, clear-eyed men who created your movement.
I like these men because they scorn humbug. Defiance, disobedience,
contempt for thing that is, consumes them."

He drew from the shelves a lot of books, threw them on a table,
and took up a volume.

"This from Fourier: 'Monogamy and private property are the main
characteristics of Civilisation. They are the breastworks behind
which the army of the rich crouch and from which they sally to rob
the poor. The individual family is the unit of all faulty societies
divided by opposing interests.'

"And this choice bit from William Morris: 'Marriage under existing
conditions is absurd. The family, about which so much twaddle is
talked, is hateful. A new development of the family will take place,
as the basis not of a predetermined lifelong business arrangement
to be formally held to irrespective of conditions, but on mutual
inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will
of either party.'"

Overman fixed his eye on Gordon for a moment, laid his hand on his
arm and asked:

"Now, honestly, Frank, confess to me you never read one of those
sentences in your life?"

"No, I never did."

"I was sure of it. Listen again; this from Robert Owen: 'In the new
Moral World the irrational names of husband, wife, parent and child
will be heard no more. Children will undoubtedly be the property
of the whole community.'

"But perhaps the idea has been best expressed by Mr. Grant Allen.
Hear his clean-cut statement: 'No man, indeed, is truly civilised
till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of all the women
he loves, to every woman of all the women who love him: "Give me
what you can of your love and yourself; but never strive for my
sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that pants for breath
within you. Give me what you can, while you can, without grudging,
but the moment you feel you love me no more, don't do injustice to
your own prospective children by giving them a father whom you no
longer respect, or admire, or yearn for." When men and women can
both alike say this, the world will be civilised. Until they can
say it truly, the world will be as now, a jarring battle-field of
monopolist instincts.'

"Then this gem from another of the frousy-headed--Karl Pearson:
'In a Socialist form of government the sex relation would vary
according to the feelings and wants of individuals.'

"Observe in all these long-haired philosophers how closely the
idea of private property is linked with the family. That is why the
moment you attack private property in your pulpit your wife knows
instinctively that you are attacking the basis of her life and home.
Private property had its origin in the family. The family is the
source of all monopolistic instincts, and your reign of moonshine
brotherhood can never be brought to pass until you destroy monogamic
marriage."

"But my dream is of an ideal marriage and home life," cried the
preacher.

"Yes, and that is why you make me furious. You don't know the origin
or meaning of this Socialistic dream and yet you are preaching it
every Sunday, inflaming the minds of that crowd. I don't blame your
wife. She sees in her soul the rock on which you must wreck your
ship sooner or later. The herd and the mating pair cannot co-exist
as dominant forces. This is why Socialism never converts a woman
except through some--individual man. Woman's maternal instinct
created monogamic marriage. The only women who become Socialists
directly are the sexless, the defectives and the oversexed, who
can always be depended on to make the herd a lively place for its
fighting male members. What have you to say to this?"

Overman turned his head sideways and pierced Gordon again with his
single eye.

"Well, I confess you've given me something to think about, and I'm
going to the bottom of the subject. You've opened vistas of great
ideas. It's the question of the century, the thought that is sweeping
life before it. While I've been listening to you, more and more
I've seen the need of consecration to the leading and teaching of
the people who are being swept by millions into this movement. But
you haven't told me what to do with Van Meter."

"Yes, I have, The trouble, I tell you, is with you, not Van Meter.
He's a little man, but he's just the size of a deacon in a modern
church in New York. Win him over and work with him. He's your only
hope. Van Meter knows his business as a deacon and trustee. You
are off the track."

"But how can I ever reconcile Van Meter's commercialism with any
living religion?"

Overman frowned and shrugged his shoulders.

"Religion? Man, you haven't religion! Religion is the worship of
a Superior Being, fear of His power, submission to His commands,
inability to discuss theoretically the formulas of faith, the desire
to spread the faith, and the habit of considering as enemies all
who do not accept it. You can't pass examination on any of these
points. Your idea of God is the First Cause. You do not really
worship or fear anything. You submit blindly to nothing. You have
written an interrogation point before every dogma. You have ceased
to be missionary and become humanitarian. As a priest you're a
joke. Van Meter is a better deacon than you are a priest. I don't
blame him. He must put you out, or be put out of business sooner or
later. Your passion for reforming the world, your 'enthusiasm for
humanity,' are things apart from worship and absolutely antagonistic
to it."

"But not antagonistic to the mission of Christ."

"Granted. But the Christianity of Christ is one thing and modern
Christianity another thing. The ancient Church, you must remember,
absorbed Paganism. Van Meter's religion is, I grant you, a pretty
stiff mixture of Paganism and Christianity, but historically he
is in line with the Church and you are out of line with it. I'd do
one of two things--use Van Meter for all he is worth, or get out
of his church and let him alone. It's his. He and his kind built
it. You are an interloper."

"Perhaps so," Gordon mused.

"You know my opinion of your dream of social salvation. I say let
the fit survive and the weak go to the wall. If you could save all
the floating trash that so moves your pity, you would only lower
the standard of humanity. Hell is the furnace made to consume such
worthless rubbish. You are even apologising for hell because you
can't stand the odour of burning flesh. I like the old God of Israel
better than the ghost you moderns have set up. Honestly, Frank,
you have never treated Van Meter decently. He's a small man, but
he is in dead earnest, and he is historically a Christian. I don't
know what the devil you are, and I don't believe you know yourself.
Go to Van Meter, have a plain business talk with him, and see if
you can't come to an understanding."

"That's the only sensible thing you've said to me."

"And the only immoral thing; for if you and Van Meter ever agree
you will both do some tall lying."

"I think I'll take your advice and see him, anyhow."






CHAPTER IV

THE SHORTHORN DEACON





Gordon and Overman came into town on the four o'clock express. They
sat down in opposite seats near the centre of the car.

Neither of them noticed Van Meter, who also lived at Babylon in the
summer, board the train as it pulled out of the station. He was a
pompous little man, short and red-faced, with gray side whiskers
and bald head. His eyes were sharp and beady and shined like
shoe-buttons. Piety and thrift were written all over him. As a
deacon he passed the bread and wine at the Lord's Table on Sunday,
with his black eyes half closed, dreaming of cornering the bread
market of the world on Monday. For him New York was the centre of
the universe, and the Stock Exchange was the centre of New York.
The rest of this earth was provincial, tributary soil. He had gone
abroad, but rarely ventured beyond Philadelphia or Coney Island on
this side. He was the presiding officer of the Stock Exchange and
the President of the Metropolitan Bible and Tract Society. He took
himself very seriously.

As they got out of the car at Long Island City, Gordon said to him:

"Deacon, I wish to have a talk with you tomorrow. Shall I call at
your home or office?"

"Come down to the office at two o'clock; I'll be out at night,"
Van Meter answered briskly.

The next day Gordon walked from the church down Fourth Avenue to
Union Square and down Broadway to the Battery. It was a glorious day
in early spring. The air had in it yet the cool breath of winter,
but the electric thrill of coming life was in the soft breezes
that came from the South, where flowers were already blooming and
birds singing. The hucksters were selling sweet violets and the
cry of the strawberry man echoed along the side streets.

Fourth Avenue was piled with builders' material. The old brick
homes were crumbling and steel-ribbed monsters climbing into the
sky from their sites.

"Progress everywhere but in the churches," muttered Gordon. "The
Church alone seems dead in New York."

Broadway was one vast river of humanity. As far as the eye could
reach the throng engulfed the pavements and overflowed into the
streets between the curbs, mingling with the mass of cars, cabs,
trucks and wagons. On either side towered the interminable miles
of business houses whose nerves and arteries reach to the limits
of the known world, savage and civilised. Behind those fronts sat
the engineers of industry with their hands on the throttles of the
world's machinery, their keen eyes and ears alert to every sound
of danger in the ceaseless roar around them.

Shadowy and far away seemed the Spirit world from those hurrying,
rushing, cursing, struggling men. And yet the earth was quivering
beneath them with the shock of spiritual forces. The age of miracles
was only dawning.

He felt like climbing to the tower of one of those great temples
of trade and shouting to the throng to lift up their heads from
the stones below and beyond the line of towering steel and granite
see the Glory of God. And as he thought how little that crowd would
heed it if he did, he felt himself in the grip of Titanic forces
of Nature sweeping through time and eternity, and that he was but
an atom tossed by their fury.

As he passed the City Hall his eye rested on the towering castles
of the metropolitan newspapers. He could feel in the air the throb
of their presses, the whir of their wheels within wheels telling
the story of a day's life, wet with tears of hope and love, or
poisoned with slander and falsehood, their minarets and domes the
flaming signs in the sky of a new power in history, a menace to
the life of the ancient Church and its priesthood. Was this power
a threat to human liberty, or the highest expression of its hope?
Only the future would reveal. What silent forces crouched behind
those towers with their throbbing cylinders the world could only
guess as yet.

He walked past old Castle Garden where so many weary feet have
landed and found hope.

His heart filled with patriotic pride. Far out in the harbour stood
Liberty Enlightening the World, lifting her torch among the stars,
her face calm and majestic, gazing serenely out to sea.

"Land of faith and hope--my country!" he exclaimed. "Here the
commonest man has risen from the dust and proved himself a king.
Home of the broken-hearted, the tyrant-cursed, the bruised, the
oppressed, within thy magic gates the miracle of life has been
renewed!"

He looked out on the great emerald harbour gleaming in the sunlight,
its sky-line white with clouds and penciled with the pennant-tipped
masts of a thousand ships flying the flags of every nation of the
earth. His soul was flooded again with the sense of the city's
imperial splendour, stretching out her hand to grasp the financial
scepter of the world, already the second city of the earth, a
kingdom mightier than Caesar ruled and richer than Croesus dreamed.

He came back to Wall Street, and, as he turned into the narrow
lane, felt its power shadow his imagination.

"After all," he muttered, "Van Meter is not far wrong in his idea
of the omnipotence of this street."

The Deacon's office was plainly furnished. He was seated at an
old-fashioned mahogany desk, evidently a relic of his Knickerbocker
past. Born in New York sixty years before, he was popularly reckoned
a multimillionaire, though his wealth was overestimated. Compared
to the big-brained, eagle-eyed men who had come from the West and
mastered Wall Street, Van Meter was really a pygmy.

He greeted Gordon politely.

"Delighted to welcome you, Doctor, to my office. This is the first
call you have ever honoured me with downtown."

"I've been to your home often, Deacon."

"But somehow you've always been shy of Wall Street," said Van Meter,
expansively. "I suppose you look on us down here somewhat as the
old-time preacher regarded the saloon-keeper. You should know us
better. This alley is the jugular vein of the nation, and the Stock
Exchange its heart. We have a President and Congress at Washington,
and some very handsome buildings there. It is supposed to be the
capital of the republic. A political myth! Here is the capital. The
money centre is the seat of government. The Southern Confederacy
failed, not for lack of soldiers or generals of military genius,
but because it had no money."

Van Meter's stature grew taller and his eyes larger as Gordon felt
the truth of his words.

"Well, Deacon, I wish to know you better. I'm afraid I've not always
been fair to you as the senior officer of the church and one of
its oldest members."

"I haven't worried over it," he replied quickly.

"I know you in your home life," Gordon continued. "You are a faithful
and tender husband and father. If you were to die to-morrow, your
servants would stand sobbing at the doorway when I entered. You
are one of the kindest men in your individual life."

"Thanks. I hardly thought you would say so much."

"Then you have misjudged me. The only criticism I've ever made
of you has been as a part of our social and economic order. This
is a question, it seems to me, we might differ about and still be
friends. Now, I wish you to tell me honestly, face to face, why
you object to me as the pastor of your church?"

"You wish me to be perfectly frank?" he asked, with his black eyes
twinkling.

"Perfectly so. You couldn't say anything that would anger me. I am
too much in earnest."

"Well, to begin with, you don't preach the simple gospel."

"No; but I do preach the gospel of Christ."

"Your reference to the strike amongst the women shirt-makers in
New York drove one of the richest men out of our church."

"Yes; I saw him jump up and go out during the service. The women
were making shirts for his house at thirty-five cents a dozen,
finding their own thread and using their own machines. I said if I
found one of those shirts in my house I'd put it in the fire with
a pair of tongs, and I would. I'd be afraid to touch a seam lest
I felt the throb of a woman's bruised fingers in it."

The Deacon softly stroked his whiskers.

"It was an unfortunate remark. He contributed $500 a year to the
church. He has gone where the simple gospel of Christ is preached."

"Yes, so simple that he can sleep through it and know that it will
never touch his life," Gordon said with a sneer. "What's the use to
talk about mustard plaster? I say apply it to the place that hurts."

"You preach Evolution. I don't like the idea that man is descended
from a monkey."

"The weight of scholarship sustains the theory."

"Well, my idea is, if it's true, the less said about it the better.
And then you lack dignity out of the pulpit."

"Even so, Deacon, the most dignified man I ever saw was a dead
man--a dead New Yorker. What we need in the church is life."

"But you have departed from the faith of our fathers."

"Perhaps," Gordon said, with a twinkle in his eye, "if you mean
our famous fathers who 'landed first on their knees and then on
the aborigines.'"

Van Meter ignored the remark.

"You said one day that in America we had but two classes, the masses
and the asses. That sentence cost the church a thousand dollars in
pew-rents. I think such assertions blasphemous."

"Well, it's true."

"I don't think so; and if it were, it don't pay to say such things."

"Am I only to preach the truths that pay?"

"We hired you to preach the simple gospel of Christ."

"Pardon me, Deacon; I am not your hired man. I chose this church
as the instrument through which I could best give my message to
the world. I answer to God, not to you. The salary you pay me is
not the wage of a hireling. My support comes from the free offerings
laid on God's altar."

"We call them pew-rents. You are trying to abolish this system,
as old as our life, and allow a mob of strangers to push and crowd
our old members out of their pews."

"I believe the system of renting pews un-Christian and immoral-a
mark of social caste."

"And that's why I think you're a little crazy. Even your best
friends say you're daft on some things."

"So did Christ's."

The Deacon's face clouded and his black eyes flashed.

"From denouncing private pews you have begun to denounce private
property. Our church is becoming a Socialist rendezvous and you
a firebrand." "Deacon, you have allowed your commercial habits to
master your thinking, your religion and your character. In your
home, you are a good man. In Wall Street," he smiled, "pardon me,
you are a highwayman, and you carry the ideals and methods of the
Street into your duties as a churchman."

"Pretty far apart for a pastor and deacon, then, don't you think?"

"You ran the preacher away who preceded me, too," mused Gordon.

The Deacon's eyes danced at this acknowledgment of his power.

"He was a little slow for New York. You are rather swift."

Gordon rose and looked down good-naturedly on the shining bald head
as he took his leave.

"I suppose we will have to fight it out?"

"It looks that way. My kindest regards to Mrs. Gordon."






CHAPTER V

THE CRY OF THE CITY





Kate Ransom entered the church with enthusiasm. Even Van Meter,
learning that she lived on Gramercy Park and was a woman of wealth,
congratulated Gordon on the event.

She organized a working-girls' club and became its presiding genius.
Her beauty and genial ways won every girl with whom she came in
contact. Her club became at once a force in Gordon's work, absolutely
loyal to his slightest wish. She formed a corps of visitors and
asked to be allowed to help in his pastoral work.

"Before we begin," she said, "let me be your assistant for a day.
I wish to see the city as you see it, that I can direct my girls
with intelligence."

On the day fixed, she acted as usher for his callers at the church.

The President of his boys' club was admitted first to tell him
a saloon had been opened next door to their building in spite of
their protest to the Board of Excise.

Gordon frowned.

"It's no use to waste breath on the Board. They know that saloon
is within the forbidden number of feet from our church. But as the
Governor of New York has recently said, 'Give me the vote of the
saloons; I don't mind the churches,' go down to this lawyer and
tell him to insist on an indictment of Crook, the Chairman of the
Board, for the violation of his oath of office."

"It's no use, sir," said Anderson, his assistant. "I've been to
see him. He tells me there were three indictments for penitentiary
offenses pending against Crook when the Mayor promoted him to be
Chairman of the Board. Three courts have pronounced him guilty,
but the new Legislature is going to pass an ex-post facto law to
relieve him of his term in prison."

"Then try him with one more indictment and include the whole Board
of Excise this time. We will let them know we are alive."

Kate ushered in a slatternly little woman, dirty, ugly, cross-eyed
and her face red from weeping. "Please, Doctor, come quick. They've
got Dan. They knocked him in the head, dragged him down the stairs
and flung him in the wagon. He's in jail, and they say they'll have
him in Sing Sing in a week. He ain't done a thing. You're the only
friend we've got in the world."

"On what charge did they arrest him, Mrs. Hogan?"

"Just a lot o' policemen charged on him with billies!"

"But why did they do it?"

"It's the policeman on the beat who's got a grudge agin him. He
swore he'd land him in Sing Sing. And if you can't stop him, he'll
do it."

Gordon wrote a note to a lawyer and handed it to her.

"Go to this lawyer and tell him to take the case."

"Dan's a friend of mine," he explained to Kate. "I've taken him out
of the hospital three times from delirium tremens, and found work
for him a dozen times. But he can't hold his job. Everything seems
against him.

"'It's me face, Doctor,' he tells me in despair. 'When they see
me they won't stand me. Me wife's cross-eyed, or she'd 'a' never
married me. I was tin years prowlin' up an' down the earth seekin'
a woman. But I couldn't catch one. She'd 'a' got away from me if
she could 'a' seed straight.'"

Kate laughed and ushered in a young woman with blond hair and an
ill-fitting dress. She walked as in a dream, and there was a strange
look in her eye.

"I hope you are feeling better to-day, Miss Alice."

She made no reply, but seated herself wearily, while Gordon drew
a cheque for fifty dollars and handed it to her. She placed it
mechanically in her purse.

"I hope you are making progress in your art now that you have a
comfortable studio," he said kindly.

"I want to see him," she replied in a low voice.

"But I can't give you his address, When he came to me, conscience
stricken, and told me that you were wandering about the streets of
New York ill and half starved, and placed this fund at my disposal,
he stipulated that he would pay it only so long as you let him
alone. You promised me last month to stop writing letters to the
general post-office."

"I can't help it. I love him. I don't want this money; I want him."

"But you know he is married."

"He said he'd get a divorce. I love him. I'll be his servant, his
dog--if he will only see me and speak to me. Tell me where to find
him. I believe all men are friends to one another."

Kate, waiting behind the curtain which cut off Gordon's desk, could
hear distinctly.

When the young woman emerged she led her into the adjoining room,
and there was the sound of a kiss at the door as she left.

An aged father and mother came, dressed in their best clothes, and
very timid.

"We have a great sorrow, Doctor," the father began tremulously.
"We are strangers in New York. We hate to trouble you. But we heard
you preach, and you seemed to get so close to our hearts we felt
we had known you all our lives."

He paused and the mother began to brush the tears from her eyes.

"Our boy is a medical student here. We were proud of him--all we
had dreamed and never seen, all we had hoped to be and never been
in life, we expected to see in him. We skimped and saved and gave
him an education. Sometimes we didn't have much to eat at home,
but we didn't care. Did we, Ma?"

The mother shook her head.

"Then we mortgaged the farm and sent him here to study three years
and be a great doctor."

He paused, bent low and covered his face with his hands.

"And now, sir, he's taken to drink, and they tell us at the college
he won't get his diploma! And we thought, after we heard you, maybe
you could see him, get hold of him, and help us save him. He's all
we've got. The rest are dead."

Gordon looked away and his lips quivered.

"You'll help us, Doctor?"

"I'll do the best I can for you, my friends. It's such a sad old
story in this town that one gets hardened to it till we see it in
some fresh revelation of anguish like yours."

He took the name and address and the old man and woman went out,
softly crying.

A widow came to tell him of an assault on her twelve-year-old
daughter.

"And because the brute is a rich man on an avenue," she sobbed,
"they've turned him loose with a fine. I'm poor and ignorant, and
I'm not a member of your church, but all the people are talking
about you in our neighbourhood, and told me you were a friend of
the weak, and I'm here."

He called his assistant in.

"Anderson, do you know anything of this case? How could such a
thing be?"

"I've looked into it. It's just as she tells you. The man was
arraigned before a police magistrate, who had no power to try such
a case. He was allowed to plead under an assumed name-John Stevens,
of Newark, New Jersey, fined and discharged. I informed the city
editor of the Herald of the case; he detailed a reporter, who
wrote it up. He left out the man's real name. Nothing has come of
it. Our courts have become so debased, God only knows what they
will do next. We have a police judge now who is the owner of five
disreputable dives, which he runs every day and Sunday. He sits down
on the bench on Monday and discharges the cases against his saloons.
We've another, who was drunk in the gutter, with two warrants out
for his arrest, when the Boss made him a judge. What can we expect
from such courts?"

He sent her away with the premise to consult the best legal talent.

A little frousle-headed woman, carrying a bag full of documents,
then explained to him that she was the inventor of a process for
preserving dead bodies, meats and eggs by treating them with the
purifying ozone of the air, and wished him to organise a company,
make her president, and act as her secretary.

"It's the greatest invention ever conceived by the human mind,"
she explained, as she spread out scores of letters and testimonials
from men who had tested it, and many who had signed anything to
get rid of her.

"Madam, if your process can only be applied to the city government
of New York you will deserve a monument higher than the Statue of
Liberty. But I'm afraid there's not enough ozone in the atmosphere."

He had to call help to get her out, and then she only went after
she got the loan of five dollars to tide her over the week.

A theological student with an open hatchet face, from the western
plains, on his way to Moody's school at Northfield, asked for money
to get there.

"I had a-plenty," he explained, "but I met a man who asked me to
change a bill for him. He got the change, but I'm looking for him
to get the bill. I don't know, to save my life, how he got away.
I still have his umbrella that he asked me to hold."

Gordon smiled and loaned him the money.

"I don't ask you for any references. You are the real thing, my
boy."

A woman in mourning, whom he recognised immediately from her
published pictures, asked him to champion the cause of her son,
who was under sentence of death.

Gordon readily recalled the case as a famous one. He had followed
it with some care and was sure from the evidence that the young
man was guilty.

For a half hour she poured out her mother's soul to him in piteous
accents.

"My dear madam," he said at last, "I cannot possibly undertake such
work."

"Then who will save him? I've tramped the streets of New York for
six months and appealed to every man of power. Your voice raised in
protest against this shameful and unjust death will turn the tide
of public opinion and save him. You can't refuse me!"

"I must refuse," he answered firmly.

She turned pale, and her mouth twitched nervously. He looked into
her white face with a great pity and a feeling of horror swept
his heart. The pathos and the agony of the tragedy filled him with
strange foreboding. In his imagination he could hear the click of
handcuffs on his own wrists and feel the steel of prison bars on
his own hands as he peered through the grating toward the gate of
Death.

But he was firm in his refusal, and she left with words of bitterness
and reproach.

After a long procession of people, sick, and most of them out of
work, he was surprised to see one of his own deacons approach with
a look of dejection.

"Why, Ludlow, what ails you?"

"Sorry to trouble you, Pastor, but I've lost my place. You see,
I'm more than fifty years old, and though I've worked for my firm
twenty years, they laid me off for a younger man. I'm ruined unless
I can get work. I've four people dependent on me. I've come to ask
you to see the Manager of the new department store and get me a
place. I've been there three times, but I can't get to the Manager."

"I'll do it to-day, Deacon. Let me know when you need anything."

After two hours of this work, he left, with Kate Ransom, for his
round of visits.

She looked at him as he started smilingly from the church.

"And you have gone through with this every day for ten years?"

"Of course."

"While I have been around the corner laughing and dancing with
a lot of idiots. And you seem as cheerful as though you had been
listening to ravishing music!"

"Yes, I must be cheerful."

"How do you endure it? Yet it fascinates me, this life--in touch
with drama more thrilling than poets dream. It seems to me I'm just
beginning to live. I am very grateful to you."

He looked into her face, smiling.

"The gratitude is on my side. You are going to be more popular than
the pastor."

"I'm sure you will not be jealous."

"Hardly, as long as I hear the extravagant things you are telling
your girls about loyalty to the leader."

She blushed and turned her violet eyes frankly on him.

"I believe in loyalty."

He answered with a look of gratitude.

"We must go first to that store for Ludlow. He's the best deacon
in the church, a staunch friend, a loyal, tireless worker."

Gordon waited patiently at the store a half hour and succeeded in
reaching the Manager. As they left, he said to Kate:

"Did you see that crowd of two hundred men waiting at his door?"

"Yes; what were they doing there?"

"Waiting their turn to see the Manager. They will come back
to-morrow, and next day and next day, just like that. I felt mean
to sneak in ahead of them by a private door because my card could
open it. The Manager gave me a note to the head of the department
Ludlow wishes to enter and asked him to suspend the rule against
men fifty years of age and give my man a trial. In return for this
favour he coolly asked me to deliver a lecture before his employees
that will cost me a week's work. I had to do it. The head of the
department who read the note told me to send Ludlow to see him,
but he scowled at me as though he would like to tear my eyes out.
He will put him on and discharge him in a month for some frivolous
offense."

They boarded a Broadway car and got off at City Hall Park.

"Where are you going down here?" she asked.

"To a building that collapsed yesterday and killed thirty working
people. That house was condemned fifteen years ago by the Inspector.
But its owner was a friend of the Boss, and it stood till it fell
and killed those people."

The street was blocked by the fire department playing their streams
on the smouldering ruins, while gangs of men worked cleaning away
the rubbish and searching for dead bodies.

A crowd of relatives and friends were pressing close to the ropes.
Many of them had stood there all night, crazed with grief, wringing
their hands, hoping and praying they might find some token of love
left of those dear to them, and yet hoping against hope that they
might find nothing and that their beloved would appear, saved by
some miracle.

Gordon had promised a mother whose daughter was missing to help
her in the search. She did not know where her own child worked.
She only knew it was downtown near the City Hall. A building had
fallen in, and she had not come home.

Just as they approached the ruins a body was found and brought to
the enclosure for identification. The mother recognized her daughter
by an earring. She flung herself across the black-charred trunk
with a shriek that rang clear and soul-piercing above the roar and
thunder of the city's life at high tide. Above the rumble of car,
the rattle of wagon, the jar of machinery, the tramp and murmur of
millions the awful cry pierced the sky.

Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and pressed her red lips together,
shivering. "O dear! O dear! what a cry! I can't go any closer. I'll
wait for you out at the edge of the crowd."

He pushed into the throng, lifted the woman, spoke a few words of
tenderness to her, and told her he would call at her home later.

As he was about to leave, a tall, delicate man working among the
ruins reeled and sank in a faint. When he revived, he quit his job
and went home without a word.

"What was the matter with that man?" Gordon asked the foreman of
the wrecking company.

"Starved, to tell you the truth. He came here yesterday and begged
for a job. He looked so pale and sick I couldn't refuse him. He
fainted the first hour and went home. He came back this morning and
begged me to try him again. I did, but you see he is too weak. He
told me his family was starving."

He joined Kate and they crossed the City Hall Square and walked
down Centre Street to the Tombs prison.

She was pale and quiet, glancing at him now and then.

"I've an engagement at the Tombs," he told her, "with a lady to
whom I used to make innocent love in our youth in a college town.
I got a note from her yesterday, written in the clear, beautiful
hand I recognised from the memory of little perfumed things she used
to send me. You don't know what a queer sick feeling came over me
when I recognised from the street number that she was in prison.
I haven't seen her in fifteen years. She was the village belle and
made what was supposed to be a brilliant marriage."

They entered the grim old prison, that looked like an Egyptian
temple, with its huge slanting walls of granite squatting low on
Centre Street like a big pot-bellied spider, watching with one eye
the brilliant insects of wealth on Broadway and with the other the
gray vermin swarming under the Bridge and along the river.

Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and drew closer as they passed
down its gloomy corridor to the warden's office.

She tried to smile, but by the twitching at the corners of her
full lips he could see she was nearer to crying. Again, as her body
touched his, he felt the warmth and glow of her beauty, her blue
eyes, cordial and grave, her waving auburn hair with its glowing
fires, her step luxurious and rhythmic, and. now as her hand
trembled, instead of the gleam of cruelty and conscious power, the
timid appeal to the strength of the man.

She looked at him and lowered her eyes, and then flashed them up
straight into his face with a smile.

"I'm not afraid!" she said impulsively.

"Of course not."

His steel-gray eyes looked into hers, and they both laughed.

Gordon asked the warden's permission to see the woman whose letter
had brought him and also the young man who had returned from Sing
Sing for a new trial.

"What is the charge against the woman?" he asked.

"Shoplifting, sir. She's been here before and begged off. But they
are going to send her up this time. I'll allow her to see you in
the reception room."

She came in, with a poor attempt at dignity, and then collapsed
into whining but hopeful lying. She was dressed in an old sunburnt
frock. Her hair was tousled, her shoes untied, and a corset-string
was hanging outside her skirt. Her front teeth were out, and the
red blotches on her face told the story of drink and drugs.

"Doctor, it's all a mistake. I swear to you I am innocent. You
don't know how it humiliates me for you to see me like this--you,
who knew me in the old days at home, when I was rich and petted
and loved. And now I haven't a friend in the world. My husband left
me. If you will tell them to let me off, they will do it for your
sake. I swear to you I will leave New York, go back to my old home
and try to begin life over again." She buried her face in her hands.

"What shall I do?" he whispered to Kate. "She is lying. She will
never leave New York."

"Promise her--promise her; I'll try to do something for her."

They passed inside, along Murderers' Row, and stopped before the
cell in which stood the man waiting his new trial. He poured out
his story again, and as Gordon looked sadly through the bars at his
face the certainty of his guilt gave the lie to every fair word.

As his glib tongue rattled on, Gordon's mind was farther and farther
away. He was thinking of that grim sentence from the old Bible,
"Sin when it is full grown bringeth forth death." And again this
problem of sin, the wilful and persistent violation of known law,
threw its shadow for a moment over his dream of social brotherhood.
The voice of the man angered him. He frowned, bade him good-by and
left.

And as he passed out, he felt, in spite of the charm of Kate's
companionship, the shadow of that veiled mother by his side, and
heard the bitter cries of her broken heart, until the sin and shame
of the man seemed his own. The pity and pathos of it all haunted
and filled him with vague forebodings.--"Now for something more
cheerful," he said, as they passed out of the Tombs and boarded an
uptown car.

"A derrick at work in that wreck yesterday fell on a working-man.
He has a wife and four children. We must see how he is getting on."

They got off on the Bowery, turned down a cross street toward the
East River, threading their way through the masses of people jamming
the sidewalks, and dodging missiles from dirty children screaming
and romping at play.

"Mercy!" exclaimed Kate, "I thought Broadway and Fifth Avenue and
the shopping districts crowded--but this is beyond belief! I didn't
know there were so many people in the world."

"And what you see, just a drop in the ocean of humanity. There are
miles and miles of these tenements in New York--square mile after
square mile, packed from cellar to attic. We have a million and a
half crowded behind these grim walls on this island alone."

"Surely not all so ugly and wretched as these?"

"Many worse. But don't let the outside deceive you. Back of
these nightmares of scorched mud, festooned with shabby clothes,
are thousands of brave loving men and women, living their lives
cheerfully, not asking us for pity. Even in this squalor grow
beautiful, innocent girls like flowers in a muck-heap. When I see
these children growing up thus into fair men and women with such
sur-roundings, I know that every babe is born a child of God, not
of the devil."

They climbed a dark stairway and knocked at the back door of a
double-decker tenement.

A stout woman opened it, and they entered the tiny kitchen, so
small that the table had to be pushed against the wall to pass it
and the family of six could not all eat at one time because the
table could not be pulled out into the room.

"How is John this afternoon, Mrs. McDonald?"

"We don't know, sir. The doctor's in there now. If he dies, God
knows what we will do; and if he lives, a cripple, it'll be worse."

The doctor called them into the front room and whispered to Gordon:

"He's got to die, and I'm going to tell him. I'm glad you are here."

He took the man by the hand.

"Well, John, I'm sorry to say so to you, but you must know it. You
can't live beyond the day."

The man drew himself upon his elbow, looked at the doctor in a
dazed sort of way and then at his wife holding his crying baby in
her arms, the other little ones clinging to her dress, and gasped:

"Did you say die? Here--now--to-day--die? And if I do, I leave my
helpless ones to starve."

He paused, fingering the covering nervously, shut his jaws firmly
and looked at the doctor.

"Almighty God! I can't die!" he growled through his teeth. "I will
not die!"

"No, no, you sha'n't die, John. We'll help you to live!" his wife
cried.

"Very well; if you keep on feeling that way you may live," said
the doctor cheerfully. "We will hope for the best."

Kate's eyelids drooped as she stood watching this scene as in a
dream. She took the woman by the hand as she left:

"I do hope he will live for your sake. I believe he will."

When they reached the street, the doctor said to her:

"Glad to welcome you, Miss Ransom, from the little world into the
great one."

"Thank you. I begin to feel I have not been in the world at all
before. Will he live, do you think?"

"If he holds that iron will with the grip he has on it now he'll
pull through--and be a hopeless invalid for life. He will join
the great army of industrial cripples--a havoc that makes war seem
harmless. The wrecking corporation have already sent their lawyer
and settled his case for eighty-five dollars cash: not enough to
bury him. He thought it better than nothing."

The doctor hurried on to another patient.

It had grown quite dark. Gordon took Kate by the arm after the
modern fashion, and they threaded their way through the crowds
made denser by the return of the working people. She had removed
her right glove in the house and did not replace it immediately.
His big hand clasped her rounded, beautiful arm, and a thrill of
emotion swept him at the consciousness of her nearness, her sympathy,
her open admiration and sweet companionship in his work.

Again, as she walked with the quick, sinuous and graceful swing of
her body, he was impressed with her perfect health and vital power.
She had recovered her balance now, and when she spoke it was with
contagious enthusiasm.

"I can never thank you enough for opening the door of a real world
to me, Doctor," she declared, looking up at him soberly.

"And you have no idea what inspiration you have given the church--just
at a time I need it, too," he answered warmly.

"I've been wondering what I did here for nine years, unconscious
of this wonderful drama of love and shame, joy and sorrow about
me. But what did he mean by an army of cripples greater than the
havoc of war?"

"Victims of machinery. It's incredible to those who do not come
in contact with it. The railroads alone kill and wound thirty-five
thousand working-men every year: this is a small percentage of
the grand total. More men are killed and wounded by machinery in
America than were killed and wounded any year in the great Civil War,
the bloodiest and most fatal struggle in history. We pay billions
in pensions to our soldiers, but nothing is done about this. The
social order that permits such atrocity must go down before the
rising consciousness of human brotherhood. The employers ask, 'Am
I my brother's keeper?' and forget that they are echoing the shriek
of the first murderer over his victim's body."

"And I never thought of it before. How strange that so many people
are in the world and never a part of it."

"You can begin to see the outlines of the problems before us. It
will be years before you can realise the height and depth of need
that calls here to-day for deeds more heroic than knights of old
ever dreamed."

Again she looked at him with frank admiration.

"But the most wonderful thing I have seen to-day has been a man,"
she boldly said. "Your faith, your optimism, your dreams in the face
of the awful facts of life, and with it a tenderness of sympathy
I never thought in you, have been a revelation to me. I feel more
and more ashamed of the years I have wasted."

She said this very tenderly, while Gordon unconsciously tightened
the grip of his big hand on her arm, and then went on as though
she had not spoken.

"What a call to an earnest life! New York City furnishes two-thirds
of the convicts of the state. We have one murder and ten suicides
every week. More than eighty thousand men and women are arrested
here every year. Fifty thousand pass through that basilisk's den we
saw to-day. We have a hundred thousand child workers out of whose
tender flesh we are coining gold. Three hundred thousand of our
women are hewers of wood and drawers of water, robbed of their divine
right of love and motherhood. There are twenty thousand children
and fifty thousand men and women homeless in our streets. I have
seen more than five hundred of them fighting for the chance of
sleeping on the bare planks of a dirty police lodging-house."

He felt her nerves quiver with sympathy and surprise.

"I never dreamed such things took place in New York."

"Yes, and those homeless children are the saddest tragedy. We haven't
orphanages for them. When a house burns down that has a coal shute
or an opening in it where a child can crawl, the firemen thrust
their hooks in and pull out a bundle of charred rags and flesh--one
of these homeless waifs. No father or mother that ever bent over
a cradle, looked into a baby's face and felt its warm breath can
realise that horror and not go mad. We don't realise it. We ignore
it. We have four hundred churches. We open them a few hours every
week. We have nine thousand saloons opened all day, most of the
night, and Sunday too. We haven't orphanages, but we have these
nine thousand factories where orphans are made. When our country
friends come to see us we take them to see the saloons! Our shame
is our glory. You have to-day seen some of the fruits."

"And yet you have faith?"

"Yes; I have eyes that see the invisible. In all this crash of brute
forces I see beauty in ugliness, innocence in filth. Here one is
put to the test. Here the great powers of Nature have gathered for
their last assault and have challenged man's soul to answer for
its life. Dark spiritual forces shriek their battle-cries over the
din of matter. The swiftness of progress, crushing and enriching,
the mad greed for gold, the worship of success--a success that sneers
at duty, honour, love and patriotism--the filth and frivolity of our
upper strata, the growth of hate and envy below, the restlessness
of the masses, the waning of faith, the growth of despair, the
triumph of brute force, the reign of the liar and huckster--all
these are more real and threatening here, as beasts and reptiles
increase in size as we near the tropics. We are nearing the tropics
of civilisation. We must not forget that the flowers will be richer,
wilder, more beautiful, and life capable of higher things."

They had reached her door, and he released her arm, soft, round
and warm, with a sense of loss and regret.

"Yet with all its shadows and sorrows," he cried with enthusiasm,
"I love this imperial city. It is the centre of our national
life--its very beating heart. If we can make it clean, its bright
blood will go back to the farthest village and country seat with
life. I shall live to see its black tenements swept away, and homes
for the people, clean, white and beautiful, rise in their places.
I have a vision of its streets swept and garnished, of green parks
full of happy children, of working-men coming to their homes with
songs at night as men once sang because their work was glad. I
haven't much to depend on just now in the church. But God lives.
I have a growing group of loyal young dreamers, and you have come
as an omen of greater things."

She smiled.

"I'll do my best not to disappoint you."

He shook hands with her, declining to go in, and, as she sprang
swiftly and gracefully up the steps, his eyes lingered a moment on
the rhythm of her movement and the glory of her splendid figure in
sheer rapture for its perfect beauty.

As he turned homeward, he thrust his hand, yet warm with the touch
of her bare arm, into his pocket, drew out two pearls, looked
tenderly at them and felt their smooth, rounded forms. A longing
for such companionship in work with his wife swept his soul.






CHAPTER VI

THE PUDDLE AND THE TADPOLE





When Gordon started home from his round of visits with Kate the
wind had hauled to the north and it began to spit drops of snow.
The cars were still crowded, the aisles full and the platforms
jammed, though it was seven o'clock. He buttoned his coat about his
neck and paced the station, waiting for a train in which he could
find a seat.

"Bad omen for my trustee meeting to-night," he muttered. "This air
feels like Van Meter's breath."

He allowed four trains to pass, and at last boarded one worse crowded
than the first. With a sigh for the end of chivalry, he pushed his
way through the dense mass packed at the doors, wedging his big form
roughly among the women, to the centre of the car, and mechanically
seized a strap. He was so used to this leather-strap habit that he
held on with one hand and, while reading, unfolded and folded his
paper with the other.

He climbed the hill to his home in the face of a howling snow-storm.

Ruth looked at him intently.

"I am sorry I couldn't get home earlier," he said, "I've had a hard
day."

"But such pleasant help that you didn't mind it, I'm sure. I heard
Miss Ransom was assisting you. I went to the church and found you
had gone out with her. I hear she is becoming indispensable in your
work."

"Come, Ruth, let's not have another silly quarrel."

"No; it's a waste of breath," she replied bitterly.

He slipped quietly out of the house after supper and hurried back
to his study to collect his thoughts for the battle he knew he must
wage with Van Meter. This one man had ruled the church with his
rod of gold for twenty years. He had established a mission station
on the East Side and gathered into it the undesirable people. He
was the watchdog of the Prudential Committee guarding the door to
membership.

This trustee meeting had for him a double interest. A panic in Wall
Street had all but ruined Van Meter. He had attempted to corner
the bread market. The wheat crop had been ruined by a hard winter,
and the little black eyes, watching, believed the coup could be
made.

The attempt was in concerted action through his associate houses
in Chicago and St. Louis, and he had plunged as never before. The
corner had failed. It was reported that he had made an assignment.
This had proved a mistake. His long-established credit and his high
personal standing in Wall Street had rallied money to his support
and he had pulled out with the loss of three-fourths of his fortune.

Gordon wondered what the effect of this blow would be on his
character and attitude toward the church's work. He was specially
anxious to know the effect of the reverse on the imagination of
the other members of the Board, who merely revolved in worshipful
admiration around his millions.

He asked Van Meter to come to his study for a personal interview
before the meeting. The Deacon was cool and polite, and his little
eyes were shining with a distant luster.

"I was sorry, Deacon, to learn of your personal misfortunes."

Van Meter wet his dry lips with his tongue, looked Gordon squarely
in the face and snapped:

"Were you the clergyman who made the statement concerning that
corner reported yesterday in an evening paper?"

Gordon flushed, turned uneasily in his chair, and boldly replied:

"Yes, I was, and I repeat it to you. On every such attempt to coin
money out of hunger and despair, I pray God's everlasting curse to
fall. I am glad your corner failed. The world is larger than New
York, and New York is larger than the Stock Exchange. Am I clear?"

"Quite so. With your permission I will return to the trustee
meeting."

"Very well. I wish to make a statement to the Board when you are
ready."

Gordon frowned, sat down and made some notes of the points he wished
to urge.

He had often wondered at the impotence of the average preacher in
New York. But as he felt the forces of materialism closing about
him, and their steel grip on his heart, he began to know why New
York is the preacher's graveyard. He had won his great audience.
His voice had not been drowned in the roar of the breakers of this
ocean of flesh, but he had met bitter disillusioning. As he looked
into the faces of his Board of Trustees, dominated by that little
bald-headed man, he felt the cruel force of Overman's sneer at
the modern church as the home of the mean and the crippled and the
sick. The appeal to the ideal seemed to stick in his throat.

He had thrilled at the struggle with the big city's rushing millions.
Their stupendous indifference dared him to conquer or die, and
he had conquered. He had seen these indifferent millions swallow
cabinets, presidents, princes and kings, and rush on their way
without a thought whether they lived or died. He had made himself
heard. But this power that worshiped a dollar and called it God,
that controlled the finances of the church and sought to control
its pastor and strangle his soul--this was the force slowly choking
him to death unless he could conquer it.

The average preacher, when he landed in New York and faced the roar
of its advancing ocean of materialism, fluttered hopelessly about
for a year or two like a frightened sand-fiddler in the edge of
the surf of a cyclone, was engulfed, and disappeared.

To conquer this sea and lift his voice in power above its thunder,
and then be strangled in a little yellow puddle full of tadpoles,
was more than his soul could endure.

"I'll not submit to it," he growled, with clenched fist.

When he entered the meeting, the dozen men were hanging on Van
Meter's lips as on the inspired word of Moses.

"I was just telling the Board," he suavely explained, "that Mr.
Wellford, on whom we must depend for such a building enterprise
involving millions, has declared his hostility to the scheme. He is
out of sympathy with the sensational methods of the Pilgrim Church."

"I'll inform the Board," said Gordon, as he advanced toward Van
Meter and thrust his hands in his pockets, "that it's not true. I
have seen Mr. Wellford, by his invitation, this week at his home.
I laid our great plan before him. I found him a big man, a man who
thinks big thoughts, and does big things. He told me frankly he was
heartily in favour of it and would do his part the moment we were
ready and other men of wealth would join in the movement. He simply
declares that we must act first."

Van Meter pursed his lips and tried to lift his nose into a sneer.

"May I ask, Doctor, if it is your intention to demand a vote to-night
on this building scheme?"

"It is."

"Then I suggest that we vote first and hear your speech afterward.
Some of us may wish to go before you're done."

Gordon turned red with rage and started to sit down, but, wheeling,
he again faced the chairman and glared at him.

"Pardon my business methods, Doctor," he went on, "but your visions
are rather tiresome. We are old New Yorkers. We know what you are
going to tell us of the dark problem of the city's corruption, the
poverty of the poor, and so on. Every now and then we see such sacred
fires burning in the heart of a country parson called to town. Yet,
in spite of the splendour of these little fizzling pinwheels that
light the cruelty and darkness of metropolitan life for a moment,
New York has managed somehow to jog along."

Gordon's anger melted into a laugh as he watched the Deacon's face
grow purple with fury as he fairly hissed the last sentence of
his speech. He was not an impressive man in an attempted flight of
eloquence, and the preacher's laughter quite unhorsed him.

"Gentlemen," Gordon said with quiet dignity, "I came here to-night
to make an appeal. But, I'm no longer in the mood. I see in your
faces the folly of it. I make an announcement to you. The Temple
will be built, with or without you. I prefer your cooperation. I
can do it with your united opposition. God lives, and the age of
miracles is not passed."

"In behalf of the Board, I accept your challenge and await the
miracle," retorted Van Meter. "You can pray till you're blue in
the face and you will never get money enough to buy a lot on Fifth
Avenue big enough to bury yourself, to say nothing of rearing a
Solomon's Temple on it."

"We shall see," the young giant replied.

"This Board is tired of the circus business," Van Meter went on
angrily. "You have transformed the church already into a menagerie.
We don't want any more of your Soup-House Sarahs, Hallelujah Johns
nor decorative bums testifying here to the power of miracles,
while we wonder whether our overcoats will be on the rack when we
recover from the spell of their eloquence. It's a big world, there's
room for us all, but there's not room for any more new wrinkles in
this church."

"Yes, it is a big world, Deacon, but there are some small potatoes
in it. There's hope for a fool, he may be turned from his folly,
but God Almighty can't put a gallon into a pint cup."

"We'll see who the small potato is before the day is done," Van
Meter snorted.

Gordon continued, meditatively, without noticing the interruption:

"Of all the little things on this earth a little New Yorker is the
smallest. I've met ignorance in the South, sullen pigheadedness
in New England; I've measured the boundless cheek of the West, my
native heath; but for self-satisfied stupidity, for littleness in
the world of morals, I have seen nothing on earth, or under it,
quite so small as a well-to-do New Yorker. He has little brains,
or culture, and only the rudiments of common sense, but, being from
New York, he assumes everything. Of God's big world, outside Wall
Street, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, Central Park and Coney Island, he
knows nothing; for he neither reads nor travels; and yet pronounces
instant judgment on world movements of human thought and society."

And deliberately he put on his hat and left the room.

The net result of the meeting was a vote to reduce the pastor's
salary a thousand dollars and add it to the music fund; and Van
Meter hired two detectives to watch the minister.






CHAPTER VII

A STOLEN KISS





For several weeks after Gordon flung down the gauntlet to his Board
of Trustees and began his battle for supremacy, his wife maintained
a strange attitude of silence and reserve.

She had hired a nurse and resumed her study of music. Her contralto
voice, one of great depth and sweetness, he had admired extravagantly
in the days of their courtship, but she had ceased to sing of
late years. He always listened to her lullaby to the children with
fascination. The soft round notes from her delicate throat seemed
full of magic and held him in a spell.

Before he left for his study one morning, she looked up into his
face with yearning in her dark eyes.

"Come into the parlour, Frank; I will sing for you."

She took her seat at the piano, and her white tapering fingers ran
lightly over the keys with deft, sure touch.

"What would you like to hear?" she asked timidly, from beneath her
long lashes, with the old haunting charm in her manner.

"Tennyson's 'Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!'
No poet ever dreamed that song as you have sung it, Ruth."

Never did he hear her sing with such feeling. Her Voice, low, soft
and caressing with the languid sensuousness of the South, quivered
with tenderness, and then rose with the storm and broke in round,
deep peals of passion until he could hear the roar of the surf and
feel its white spray in his face. Her erect lithe figure, with the
small white hands and wrists flashing over the keys, the petite
anxious face with stormy eyes and raven hair, seemed the incarnate
soul of the storm.

"Glorious, Ruth!" he cried, with boylike wonder.

And then she bent over the piano and burst into tears.

"Why, what ails you, my dear?"

"Oh, Frank, I'm selfish to leave the children to a nurse and study
music."

"Nonsense. Self-sacrifice is rational only as it is the highest form
of self-development. It is your duty to develop yourself. Self is
the source of all knowledge and strength; books are its record;
the world exists only through its eyes."

"I'm afraid of it. I wish to give all to you and the children, not
to myself. I want you all to myself, and you are growing away from
me. I know it, and it is breaking my heart."

He laughed at her fears, kissed her and went to his study.

Since his break with his Board, he had grown daily in power--power
in himself and over his people. Conflict was always to him the
trumpet call to heroic deeds. The knowledge that Van Meter was
now his open enemy and that he was attempting to build a hostile
faction within the church roused his soul to its depths. Thrown
back thus upon himself and his appeal to the greater tribunal of
the people, he preached as never before in his life. His sermons
had the vigour and prophetic fire of the crusader. His crowds
increased until it was necessary to ask for police aid to control
the exits and entrances to the building. Long before the hour
of service, a dense mass of men and women were packed against the
doors.

Van Meter watched this growth of influence with wonder and
disgust. He determined to leave no stone unturned that might put
a stumbling-block in his way. His detectives had failed as yet to
find any clue that might compromise him. Once they rushed to his office
with the information that they had tracked him to a questionable
house. The Deacon called up his son-in-law and asked excitedly for
a reporter to write a thrilling piece of news. The reporter found
that Gordon had called at the house, but in answer to a summons to
see a dying girl.

Van Meter insisted upon the item being printed, but the young city
editor scowled and threw it in the waste basket.

The Deacon at length discovered Ruth's jealousy and located the
woman who was its object. A costly bouquet of flowers was placed
on Gordon's desk in the study every morning, and an enormous one
blossomed every Sunday morning and evening on the little table
beside his chair in the pulpit. The sexton could not tell who paid
the bills. A florist sent them.

The Deacon had been bitterly chagrined at the outcome of his
movement in reducing the salary. At first the people heard it with
amazement, and then, when Gordon informed a reporter of the fight
in progress and it was published, they laughed, and a cheque was
sent him for two thousand dollars to make good the deficit and add
one thousand more.

The day after this advent he had a hard day's work. A procession
of people drained him of every cent of money he could spare and
every ounce of sympathy and shred of nerve force in his body.

He had tried the year before to establish a free employment bureau
to relieve him of this strain. But the bureau added to his work. He
had to close it. It had required the employment of five assistants,
and even these could make little impression on the list of applicants
who crowded the rooms and blocked the pavements from morning until
night.

When the sick and hungry and out-of-works had been disposed of
after a fashion, the miscellaneous crowd filed in.

An old college mate came in shivering in a dirty suit. He fumbled
at his hat nervously until he caught Gordon's eye and saw him smile.

"Well, by the great hornspoon, Ned, you look like you've fallen
into a well!"

"Worse'n that, Frank; I slipped clean into hell. I got with some
fellows, went on a drunk, stayed a month and lost my place. I want
you to loan me money to get to Baltimore, buy a decent suit of
clothes, and I'll get another position. Yes, and I'll lift my head
up and be a man."

Gordon sent out to the bank and got the money for him.

Another seedy one softly explained to him that he was a fellow
countryman from Indiana. Gordon gave him a quarter.

A sobbing woman closely veiled he recognised as a bride he had
married in the church after prayer meeting two weeks before.

"Doctor," she said in a whisper, "I've called to beg you please not
to allow any one to know of my marriage. My husband turned out to
be a burglar. He stole ten thousand dollars from an old lady who
is one of our boarders, and skipped. He married me to get the run
of the house. He tried to marry her first, though she was seventy-five
years old, got in her room last night, stole the money, and now
he's gone. I'm heartbroken!"

"What! because he's gone?"

"No; because I was a fool. I know he has a dozen wives. He was so
handsome."

"Madam, I'm not very sorry for you. I tried to prevent you marrying
him that night. I begged you to go back to Jersey City to your own
church."

"You will keep it secret, Doctor?" she begged.

"I'll not publish it. But the certificate is on file in the Hall
of Records. Any one can see it who wishes. It is beyond my control."

An old woman with bedraggled skirt, reddened eyes and a fat, motherly
face timidly approached. She had been overlooked.

"Doctor, you're my last chance. I come up to New York to see my
son-in-law, as grand a rascal as ever lived. He owes me a thousand
dollars and won't pay it. We lost our crop down in Old Virginia.
So I scraped up the money and got here to squeeze what he owed out
of that rascal. Now he's turned me out into the street and moved
where I can't find him. I'm starvin' to death. I ain't got a cent
to go home; an' what's worse'n all, I got a letter this mornin'
tellin' me my idiot boy's down sick an' cryin' for me. I'm the only
one can do anything for him. He can't understand nobody else."

Her voice broke and she bit her lips to keep back the tears.

"I've begged all day. Everybody laughs at me. I heard you preach
one Sunday. I knowed you wouldn't laugh at me. I want you to loan
me twenty dollars to get home quick. I'll start the minute I can
get to the train, an' I'll pay you back if I have to sell my feather
beds. Now, will you do it?"

"Well, a more improbable story was never told a New Yorker, but
something whispers to me you're telling the truth."

"You'll do it?"

"Yes."

She drew a deep breath, and cried with streaming eyes:

"Oh, Lord, have mercy on my poor soul, that I doubted You, and
thought You had forsaken me!"

Gordon handed her the cheque.

"I'm going to kiss you!" she fairly screamed.

Before he could lift his hand or protest, she threw her arms around
his neck and kissed him.

As he took her hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away
from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and
Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she
saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked
into the tear-stained motherly old face she burst into hysterical
laughter.

Gordon rose and escorted the woman to the door with courtesy.

"You will find the bank at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third
Street--the Garfield National. Write me how your son is when you
reach home, and send me the money when you are able."

"I will. God bless you, sir," she answered with fervour.

When he returned to his study, Ruth was still hysterical, and he
sat down without a word and began to write.

"Frank, I'm sorry to have been so rude," she said at length.

"Is that all?"

"No; I'm sorry I humiliated myself by spying on you."

She sat twisting her handkerchief, glancing at him timidly.

"And you can't understand how deeply you have wounded me by such an
act, Ruth. I hope you have heard all that passed here this morning."

"It's strange how I always seem to be in the wrong. Frank, I am
very sorry. You must forgive me. And I have another confession.
I've been receiving anonymous letters about you for the past three
weeks. I was too weak and cowardly to show them to you. It was one
of these letters which caused me to come here this morning. And
now I've wounded you, and alienated your heart from me more than
ever. I feel I shall die."

She began to sob.

"Come, Ruth, you must conquer this insanity. Naturally you are
bright, witty, cheerful and altogether charming. Jealousy reduces
you to a lump of stupidity."

"You do forgive me?"

"Yes; and don't, for heaven's sake, do such a thing again. Ask me
what you wish to know. I am not a liar; I will tell you the truth."

"But I don't want to hear it if it's cruel," she protested.

"The truth is best, gentle or cruel."

She kissed him impulsively and left.

He sat for an hour, tired, sore and brooding over this scene with
his wife. He caught the perfume of the flowers on his desk, and in
the tints of the roses saw the warm blushes of the woman who had
sent them. Her voice was friendly and caressing and her speech,
words of sweetest flattery--flattery that cleared the stupor from
his brain and gave life and new faith in himself and his work;
flattery that had in it a mysterious personal flavour that piqued
his curiosity and fed his vanity. How clearly he recalled her--the
superb figure, with rounded bust and arms full and magnificent, in
the ripe glory of youth, her waving auburn hair so thick and long
it could envelop half her body. Often he had watched the light
blaze through its red tints while he talked to her of his dreams,
her lips half parted with lazy tenderness and ready with gentle
words. He recalled the rhythmic music of her walk, strong and
insolent in its luxury of health. And he was grateful for the cheer
she had brought into his life.






CHAPTER VIII

SWEET DANGER





Kate Ransom had attempted no close analysis of her absorbing
interest in Gordon's work. The change in her life from weariness
to thrilling interest had been its own justification. Wealth had
robbed her of the mystery and charm of accident. The future was
fixed; there could be no unknown. The men she had met in society
were mere fops, or expert butlers who wrote books on etiquette.
Life was a problem for them of what the tailors could do.

She had been isolated from humanity. Now she felt the red blood
tingling to her finger tips. Her days were full of sweet surprises
or sudden revelations of drama and tragedy, and her woman's soul
responded with eager interest.

She had never loved. Such a woman could not love a tailor's dummy.
Her nature was warm, rich and passionate, and she was consumed with
longing for the moment of bliss when her whole being would so burn
with sacrificial fire for her beloved that she could walk with him
naked in winter snows, unconscious of cold.

Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She
knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her
beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert.
She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as
divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.

Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood,
brooded in tenderness over her new work--the tortures of half-starved
mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of
the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the
cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness
of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she
was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of
her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and
say, "I understand you; come with me." His eloquence and emotional
thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His
face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of
smouldering passion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power
was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very
pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand
in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew
not whence nor why.

Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were
drawing him with resistless magnetism.

As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering
in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and
take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over
Kate's determination to stay, but there was no help for it.

July broke the record of forty years for heat. Scores were
prostrated daily and dead horses blocked traffic at almost every
hour. A drought threatened the water-supply, and night brought no
relief to the millions who sweltered in the tenements.

The babies began to die by thousands--more than two thousand a
week on Manhattan. Island alone. The city's wagons raked the little
black coffins up and dumped them into the Potters' Field, one on top
of the other, like so many dead flies. Down every tenement-walled
street the white ribbons fluttered their tragic story from cellar
to attic. At night tired mothers walked the pavements, hot and
radiating heat, till the sun rose again, carrying their sick babies,
or crowded the housetops, fanning them as they lay on their pallets,
pale and still, fighting with Death the grim, silent battle.

Kate Ransom finally gave her entire time to these children. She
fitted up a hotel in the mountains of Pennsylvania and kept it full.
She chartered a steamer and took a thousand of them for a day up
the Hudson as an experiment, and asked Gordon to go with them. They
would have music, and a dinner spread under the trees of the park
which stretched back from the water's edge into the towering hills.

He met them at the ferry slip from which the steamer sailed. Kate
was already there, and the throng filled every inch of the floor
space. She was moving about among them, while they gazed at her
in admiration no words in their vocabulary could express. Her face
was flushed with excitement, and her violet eyes, wide open, were
sparkling with pleasure.

The man's eyes lingered on the scene, feeling that, for all her
magnificently human body, no angel ever made a fairer vision.

He was struck with the silence of these children. As he looked
closer it was only too plain they were not children. They were only
little wizen-faced men and women, who had never learned to laugh or
smile or play; little pinched faces with weak eyes that had never
seen God's green fields; little dirty ears that had been bruised
with a thousand beastly noises, but had never heard the murmur
of beautiful waters in the depths of a forest. His heart went out
to them in a great yearning pity as he recalled his own enchanted
childhood.

His voice was soft with tears as he greeted Kate.

"A more pathetic sight than this crowd of silent children old earth
never saw. But the shining figure in the centre lights the shadows
with a touch of divine beauty."

"It does break one's heart to see such children, doesn't it?" she
answered, looking at them tenderly and ignoring his pointed tribute
to her beauty.

"Are we all ready?" Gordon cried.

"If you are. Is Mrs. Gordon not coming?"

"No; I couldn't persuade her. She took our chicks to the seashore."

As the boat moved swiftly up the great river in the fresh morning
air and the breeze blowing down its channel strengthened, they sat
together on the after deck and watched the dead souls of the little
ones stir with life under the kiss of the wind and the caress of
the music.

In the park they spread out in the whispering stillness of the
woods. Nature breathed the sweet breath of her life into their
hearts again and they began to twist their queer little faces and
try to laugh. They called to one another and listened with mute
wonder at the echo among the rock-ribbed hills. Gordon watched
curiously in their faces the flash of the inherited memory of forest
habits, choked and stunted and dormant in all city folks, and yet
alive as long as the human heart beats. Within two hours they had
grown noisy with play after a timid, clumsy fashion.

"Give them a week and they would learn to laugh!" Kate exclaimed.

But the man was now more interested in watching the woman than
the children, as he saw her satin skin flush with pleasure and the
creamy lace on her full bosom rise and fall.

They sat down on a rock beside a brook.

"What an inspiration to see this old yet ever new miracle of
regeneration unfold under the magic touch of a woman's hand!"

"You mean a man's hand," she replied. "This would never have
interested me except that you led me to see it."

"Then we've helped one another. I'm beginning to feel you are
indispensable. I wonder if you, too, will leave us after awhile as
so many pass on."

"No; this has become my very life," she soberly answered, looking
down at the ground and then into his face with frank, open-eyed
pleasure.

He was silent for several minutes and then softly laughed.

"What is it?" she cried.

"You could never guess."

She lifted her superb arms, showing bare to the elbow, and felt of
the mass of auburn hair. "That load of red hay about to fall?"

"Don't be sacrilegious. No."

"Harness broken anywhere?" She felt of her belt, and ran her hands
down the lines of her beautiful figure, eyeing him laughingly.

"I'll tell you," he said, sinking his voice to its lowest note
of expressive feeling, while a whimsical smile played round the
corners of his eyes. "Sitting here in the woods by your side on
this glorious summer day, your eyes looked so blue in the creamy
satin of your face, I suddenly thought I smelled the violets with
which God mixed their colours."

"You think of such silly things," she said with mock severity.

"There's nothing silly about it. Beauty is an attribute of the
divine. I worship it for its own sweet sake wherever I find it, in
pearl or opal, dewdrop or flower, the stars, or a woman's face or
form or eyes."

She lowered her head.

"Do you know the old legend of the opal?" he asked.

He took some stones from his pocket and held in the light an opal
of rare luster.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she cried.

"And its story is as beautiful as its face. Listen: A sunbeam
lingered under a leaf in the forest at sunset, loath to leave
so fair a spot, until the moon suddenly rose. Enraptured with the
shimmering beauty of a moonbeam, he stood entranced and trembling
and could not go. In ecstasy they met, embraced and kissed. The
sun sank and left him in her arms. The opal is the child of their
love. In its fair face is forever mingled the silver of the rising
moon and the golden glory of the sunset."

"I believe you made that up," she laughed.

"I wish I were poet enough."

"I had no idea you dreamed of such romantic nonsense."

"Yes, I dream many things. I had a funny dream about you the other
night."

"Tell me what it was," she begged.

"I dare not."

"I thought you would dare anything."

"No; you see, dreams are such intimate, unconventional mysteries.
Dreams have no regard for law or custom The soul and the body seem
equally free and without sin or shame. I have a curious feeling
of awe about sleep and dreams. It's the surest evidence I have of
immortality and the reality of a spiritual life. It is to me the
prophecy of the ideal world, too, in which we will dare to live
some day what we really are, without pretence or hypocrisy--live
that deep secret inner life we try sometimes to hide from the eye
of God."

"And you will not even give me a hint of this dream?"

"No. It was very foolish, but very charming and beautiful. It was
in part a picture from that dream which made me laugh awhile ago
about your eyes."

"I think it mean in you to tell me that much and no more."

"I would tell you if I dared. I may dare some day."

She was afraid to ask him after that, and yet something within
cried for joy.

They rose, gathered the children for dinner, ands after three hours
in the woods, returned to the city as the twilight softly fell over
its ragged steel and granite sky-line.

"You must take tea with us to-night," she said, as they stepped
from the boat.

His wife would not return for supper and he consented.

It was not the first time he had spent an hour at the table of
the Ransom household. Mrs. Ransom deemed herself honoured by his
visits, and his chats with the invalid father about books were
bright spots in his life.

Kate had sent the stringed band from the boat to the house and
stationed them in the conservatory opening into the dining-room.
The tender strains of the music, the splash of a fountain mingled
with the songs of birds in their cages, the gleam of silver and
diamond flash of cut glass, gave Gordon's senses a soothing contrast
to the wild beauty of the woods. His nature responded to art and
luxury as quickly as to the sensuous voice of Nature in the glory
of her summer's splendour.

There was something in this glittering beauty, cold and cruel,
that appealed to him. He always felt at home in such surroundings.
Beneath his idealism and love of humanity there was still hidden
somewhere the nerve of an Epicurean.

When Kate appeared, dressed for tea, simply but richly, with her
splendid neck and shoulders bare and little ringlets of hair curling
about her face as though scorched by the warmth of the red blood
below, he felt the picture complete.

She chatted with him before entering the dining-room.

Her manner was always flattering and frankly gracious, but to-night
there was an added note of warmth and familiar comradeship. Never
had he seen her so charming and so resistless. Always intensely
conscious of her sex, she seemed to have the power to-night of
communicating to the man before her that consciousness so intimately,
so directly and yet so delicately that he was led captive.

With scarcely a spoken word their relationship leaped the space of
years. The quiver of her eyelid, the dilation of a nostril, little
inarticulate exclamations, the turn of her head, the rising and
falling of her bosom, the flash of her violet eyes, the subtle
perfume of her hair or the graceful movement of her magnificent
form spoke the language of life deep and rhythmic which no words
have ever expressed.

He went home, on fire with the dream of an ideal life and work with
such a woman of supreme beauty.






CHAPTER IX

THE SPIDER





The passing of a year added immensely to the fame of the pastor
of the Pilgrim Church. His sermons now reached twenty millions of
people through the daily press every Monday morning. It had become
necessary to issue tickets of admission to the members and admit
them by a small door that was cut beside the large ones.

Van Meter had ceased to be of sufficient importance for serious
notice. The growth of Gordon's influence within the year had been
so rapid, he found he had set out to fight a flea with artillery.

The old man felt his eclipse with bitterness. He had quit talking
much, but writhed in silent fury at the sight of this tall athlete
with his conquering gray eyes and smooth, serious face. Yet he was
a regular attendant. The preacher's eloquence, the vibrant tones
of his voice, full of passion, or trembling with prophetic zeal,
and the whole drama of a living militant church with this daring
revolutionist at its head, risen from the grave of the old, fascinated
him in spite of his hatred.

In the local development of the church Kate Ransom had become,
next to the pastor, the most important factor. She had shown strong
administrative talent, had organized kindergartens, night-schools
for teaching domestic science to girls, established a reading-room,
and opened a coffee house on the corner near the church, fitting
it up with the magnificence of a saloon, with free lunch counter,
music and singing. It was crowded with working-men and women every
night.

Her work had brought her in daily contact with Gordon, and their
comradeship had become so constant and so sweet that neither of
them dared face the problem of its meaning.

To the woman the man had become little less than her God. Their
daily life, its hopes, its poetry, its dreams of social and civic
salvation, were enough in themselves: she did not analyse or
question.

For the man, this fair woman, beautiful in face and form beyond the
flight of his fancy, and loyal in the worship of his strength, as
the soul of the strong man ever desires of his ideal woman, she had
become a daily inspiration. And yet he had not acknowledged this
even in a whisper of his soul.

In the meanwhile, his wife's interest in music had ceased, and she
was rarely seen at the church on Sundays or at its weekday functions.
She had withdrawn from its life and had settled into a state of
somber resentment.

She would frequently sit through a meal eating little, speaking in
monosyllables, her black eyes staring, wide open, and yet seeing
nothing, looking past the things that bound her, back into the
sunlit years of girlhood, or forward into the future whose shadow's
chill she felt already on her soul. Often he found her at night
seated by the window in the dark alone, looking down on the city
below.

She had ceased to ask him of his work or plans and he no longer
troubled her with their discussion. Their lives were separated by
an ever-widening gulf.

Stimulated by a sermon he had preached in August of the previous
summer, when the death-rate was at its highest, a wave of reform
had swept over New York. In his sermon he had arraigned the city
government in terms so trenchant and terrible the people had rallied
as to a trumpet call to battle.

A resistless movement for the overthrow of a corrupt administration
took the city by storm. Day and night with voice and pen, with all
the fire and passion of his magnetic personality, he had led these
assaults.

Complete success crowned the movement. The reform Mayor was elected
by a large majority.

Ten months had passed and the net results were discouraging. Police
scandals ran riot as of yore; gambling, drinking and the social
evil flourished as before; and the press, that had valiantly and
almost unanimously championed Reform, now exhausted upon it the
vocabulary of abuse.

Gordon was disgusted and sickened and felt that one of his fairest
dreams had been shattered forever.

The reaction from this reform programme had thrown him more than
ever back upon his ideas of a Socialistic revolution which should
destroy Commercialism itself, and he had become its enthusiastic
champion.

Kate Ransom had followed his change of views with keenest sympathy.
She had read every book after him and had responded to his every
mood.

"No; we're on the wrong tack, with our half-way measures and our
fitful charities," he said to her.

"We must go deeper. We must make the Fatherhood of God and the
Brotherhood of Man our daily life, not merely a poetic theory.

"We have hundreds of beautiful-souled men and women giving their
lives in sacrifice for the city's poor and fallen. They seem to
make little impression on its ocean of misery. We are bailing out
the sea with teaspoons."

"I feel you are right, as you always are," she responded, unconscious
of the contradiction.

"The Brotherhood of Man and the Solidarity of the Race we must
make vital realities. Greed, commercialism, competition and the
monopolistic instincts are the cause of all this crime and misery
and confusion. Love, not force, must rule the world."

"And you are the prophet to lead humanity into this Kingdom of
Love," she said, her eyes enfolding him with their soft blue light.

"I fear I'm too great a coward for such a task. The man who does
it must break with the past, become accursed for the truth's sake,
defy social law and convention, breast the storm of the world's
hate, die despised, and wait for a nobler generation to place his
name on the roll of the world's heroes."

"It is your work," she cried with elation.

"It's a lonely way for the soul to travel."

"You will have one loyal follower the blackest hour of the darkest
night that comes."

A curious smile played around her full lips, and he looked away,
afraid to say anything.

"Yes, I know that," he softly answered. "And I'm more afraid for
that very reason."

"I'm not afraid." Her voice rang clear and thrilling.

"I wonder if you know the meaning of such words; or if you are
thinking of one thing and I of another?" he slowly asked.

"I dare to think many things I've never dared to say," she replied.

"A break must come sooner or later," he went on. "No man of my
temperament and brain can live under the conditions here, feel the
grip of this cruelty on the throat of humanity, read and think,
and endure it."

"It seems to me a social revolution must come quickly."

"I wondered if you had felt that?" Gordon asked, as he leaned back
in his chair and locked his powerful hands behind his head. "This
presentiment of overwhelming change haunts me day and night and
makes many things seem childish and futile.

"Ill and feverish from overwork one day last week, I stood by my
window, looking down on the city, dreaming and listening to its
cries for help, watching the sweep of the elevated trains coming
and going, and I was overwhelmed with the immensity of its complex
life. Our hurrying cars carry within the corporate limits daily
more passengers than all the railroads of the western hemisphere.
I thought of the rivers of human flesh that flow unceasingly through
its streets and flood its market places. And these millions are
but one wave of the ocean forever breaking on the shores of time,
its tides everlasting, insistent, resistless, never pausing, behind
them the pressure of the heaped centuries, and over them the lowering
clouds of fresh storms soon to burst and add their tons."

He paused and closed his eyes as though to shut out the roar, while
she listened with half-parted lips.

"And as I looked out the window I had a startling experience. I
saw a huge dragon-like beast begin to crawl slowly down from the
hills and stretch his big claws over the housetops of the city below.
I was not asleep or in a trance, but wide awake, only a little
feverish. With increasing horror I watched this monster stretch his
enormous body, covered with scales, and short hair growing between
the scales, on and on, until he covered the city and gathered its
thousands of houses within his huge paws. His eyes were enormous
and blood-red, his breath hot.

"I moved back, gasping with surprise and horror, to find it was
only a spider crawling down his slender thread on the window close
to my eye. It was a fevered delusion, but it haunted me for days,
and haunts me still.

"I am growing in the conviction that the very foundations of morals
are shifting, and that Religion, Society and Civilisation must
readjust themselves or humanity sink into unspeakable degradation.

"Belief in the old religious authority is gone. Our church is thronged
because of a peculiar personal power with which I am endowed. I
could wield that power without a church, society, creed or Bible.
Esthetic forces now draw people to non-ritualistic churches that
once came for prayer and preaching. The preacher must secularise
his sermon or talk to vacant pews. Historic Christianity has been
destroyed by Criticism. A thousand wild Isms nourish in the twilight
of this eclipse of Faith, while Materialism and the Pursuit of
Pleasure strangle out spiritual hopes."

"And you are the seer called to lead out of this chaos," the woman
whispered. "I know this from my own life. But for you I would be
listening to idiotic platitudes, cultivating sham, my very soul
'crucified between a whimper and a smile.' I owe it to you that I
am a woman--not a cross between an angel and an idiot."

The passion with which she said this, bending her beautiful face,
flushed with emotion, so close to his that he caught the perfume
of her mass of waving hair, went to the man's head like wine.

"Why not spring our building scheme on the people at once, without
authority from the Board of Trustees, and make it the rallying cry
of the new Humanity?" he cried eagerly.

"I believe it will succeed," she answered, her heart glowing with
the consciousness of the intimacy of that little word "our" he had
used.

She got pad and pencil, and Gordon dictated to her a plan for
engaging every force of the church and its congregation and various
societies in the project.

He fixed the Sunday on which to make the effort of his life
in his appeal to the people of his congregation and the world for
the million-dollar fund needed. It was eleven o'clock before they
finished the discussion of the scheme, and aglow with enthusiasm
he left for his home.

As he sat down in the car and lived over again his happiness of the
past hours in this woman's companionship the paradox of his return
in a few minutes to the arms of his wife struck him squarely in
the face for the first time.

He could not plead a mistake in his first love. His romance was
genuine. He had loved with all the fire of his youth. The passion
which drew him to Ruth was mutual and resistless. Yet its ardour
had cooled. He could not say it was his fault, not altogether hers.
It seemed as inevitable in its decline as its onrush was resistless.
Yet at the thought of this new woman he felt his heart beat with
quicker stroke. He was older and stronger than the youth of the
past, and the woman more mature in the ripened glory of beauty.

Yet he began to recall with infinite tenderness the love life with
Ruth. Its memories were very real and very sweet. And the faces of
his children haunted him with strange power. The idea of a divorce
from Ruth and the loss of these children cut him with sharp pain.

Had he outgrown his first love? Could he continue to live with one
woman if he loved another? Was not this the one unpardonable sin
and shame? And yet to break that bond and form the other if he could
meant the end of associations in which the fibers of his very life
were wrought.

But was not this one of the burning problems of the new humanity,
this freedom of the soul and body, this new birth into the liberty
and love of a great Brotherhood? Was not sham and hypocrisy now
the law of life, and was not Society perishing because of it?

Thus wrestling with the tragic dilemma he felt closing about him,
he went past his station to the end of the line and had to take
the down train back. It was past midnight when he reached his home.






CHAPTER X

THE BLACK CAT





When Van Meter heard of the scheme to appeal directly to the people
to build the temple in defiance of the Board of Trustees, who were
the legal managers of the church's property, he was thunderstruck.

When the Sunday arrived he came half an hour earlier than usual
to watch every incident of the day with his little black eyes open
their widest.

It was a crisp November morning. Recent rains had washed the streets
clean, the wind was blowing fresh, the sky was cloudless and the
sun lit in cool gleaming splendour every avenue and park of the
great city.

The people had returned from their country places and the hotels
were thronged with merchants and visitors from the four quarters
of the earth.

An enormous crowd squeezed into every inch of space the police
would allow to be filled in the church, and hundreds were turned
away, unable to gain admission.

Gordon had spent the entire day and night before in an agony of
preparation, and he had not left his study until two o'clock Sunday
morning. He took his seat in the pulpit trembling with anxiety. The
organ burst into the strains of the Doxology and the crowd rose.
He stood with folded hands looking over the sea of faces, and his
heart began to ache with an agony of suspense and fear of failure.

The singing ceased, and every head bent as he lifted his big hand,
with its blue veins standing out like a net of steel wires, and
pronounced a brief invocation.

When he read the hymn, the people felt in his voice the shock of a
storm of pent-up emotion. He read it slowly, beautifully, and with
exquisite tenderness.

While they sang he sat with his elbow on the little table on which
stood a vase of roses, his face resting thoughtfully on his left
hand, studying the people, his soul on fire with the sense of their
infinite needs.

Crouching low in his seat under the left gallery, he saw a man who
had confessed a great wrong and was searching for peace.

At a post on the right, in a seat where he had been accustomed
to see a working-girl for the past two years, a stranger sat. The
girl was found dead in her room the week before. She had lost her
place because she wore shabby clothes, and she wore shabby clothes
because she had been sending her earnings to her home in Connecticut,
supporting an aged father, mother and a worthless brother.

The rich, the poor, the old, the young, the outcast, the publican
and sinner, the strange woman and the sweet face of innocent girlhood
were there looking up at him for guidance and help.

But outnumbering all were massed rows of clean-faced young men whom
his enthusiasm had drawn resistlessly. His heart went out to them
in yearning sympathy, fighting their battles in the morning of life
with the powers and princes of the spirit world for the mastery of
the soul.

He felt the sledge-hammer blow of their united heart-beat strike
his brain with the pain of a bludgeon.

The agony of fear was now upon him. He saw Van Meter sitting in
the central tier of seats watching him sharply out of his little
half-closed eyes, the incarnate sign of the mortal enmity of
organised wealth, and he must appeal for money.

His great crowd had infinite needs, but much money they did not
have. He thought with hope of the twenty millions of people who
read his sermons on Monday morning, and of a dozen big-hearted men
of wealth he knew in the city, and he was cheered.

He had prepared a most powerful sermon on the text, "The common
people heard Him gladly." He felt they could not resist his appeal.
And yet in spite of himself his gaze would wander back to Van Meter,
drawn by his black eyes as by the charm of an adder.

The Deacon was wondering, as he watched him, what could possibly be
the outcome of this daring insanity. He had been fooled so often by
the power of this athletic dreamer, he feared to predict the end,
though he felt certain what it would be.

The services were unusually impressive. Special music had been
prepared by the choir and rendered magnificently. Gordon read
the hymns and Scripture with a feeling so intense the people were
thrilled. His prayer had been simple and heartfelt, and had melted
scores of people to tears.

He rose and faced the crowd with the keenest sense of solemnity.
The hour was propitious; he could feel the hearts of the people
beat responsive to his slightest tone, word or gesture.

As he swept rapidly through his introduction and into his theme
he knew he was holding these thousands of breathless listeners in
the hollow of his hand. He could feel their heartstrings quiver
as he touched them with tenderness or struck them with some mighty
thought.

His soul was singing with triumph, when suddenly a ripple of laughter
ran along the front tier of the gallery, and a hundred heads were
turned upward to see what the disturbance meant.

Had a bolt of lightning struck his spinal column he could not have
been more shocked.

He repeated mechanically the last sentence in a dazed sort of
way, and a louder ripple of laughter ran the entire length of both
galleries and echoed through the main floor.

He stopped, fumbled at his notes, and turned red. The people
before him were smiling and craning their necks to see more plainly
something on the wide platform of the pulpit.

He suddenly got the insane idea that a fiend had thrust his head
in the door behind him and was mocking and grinning.

He turned and looked, and there sat an impudent little black cat
with big yellow eyes.

She had been sitting on her haunches blinking at him when he raised
his voice or gestured, and the crowd has never yet gathered on
this earth in the temple of Baal or Jehovah that can resist a cat
accompaniment to the functions of a priest.

When Gordon looked the little cat full in the face, she liked him
at once, and in the softest, friendliest treble said:

"Meow!"

And the crowd burst into incontrollable laughter.

At first the full import of the situation did not reach his mind,
he was so stunned with surprise. He stood looking at the cat in
helpless stupor, and blushing red. And then the sickening certainty
crushed him that the day was lost; that it was beyond the power
of human genius, or the reach of the spirit of God, to remove that
cat and regain control of his audience.

He turned sick with anger and humiliation, and his big bear-like
hands clasped his sheet of notes and slowly crushed them.

He continued to look at the cat and she cocked her head to one side,
opened her yellow eyes wider and, slowly, in grieved accents said:

"M-e-o-w!"

Which unmistakably meant, "I'm very sorry you don't like me as well
as I do you."

Again the crowd laughed.

Gordon stepped backward and bent slowly over the cat. She did not
look very bright, but she was too shrewd for that movement.

The crowd watched breathlessly. He grasped at her.

She sprang quickly to one side, bowed her back, bushed her tail,
and scampered across the platform crying:

"Pist! pist!" and ran up the column that supported the end of the
gallery.

The preacher's empty hand struck the bare floor, and the crowd was
convulsed.

A young man sitting in the gallery near the column caught the cat
as she climbed over the rail, ran to a window and was about to
throw her down to the pavement twenty feet below.

Gordon lifted his hand and cried:

"Don't do that, young man--don't hurt her; bring her here."

It had, suddenly occurred to the preacher as he watched Van Meter
bending low in his pew overcome with laughter, that he had stooped
to this contemptible trick to defeat him and make the solemnest
hour of life ridiculous. He knew the Deacon had come to the church
earlier than usual. He was sure he had done it.

A curious smile began to play about his lips, and a cold glitter
came into his steel-gray eyes.

He took the cat in his arms and stroked her gently. She purred
and rubbed her face against his and moved her feet up and down,
sheathing and unsheathing her claws in his robe with evident delight.

The crowd grew still. Instinctively they knew that something big
was happening in the soul of the man they were watching.

"This little cat, my friends," he said, "is an innocent actor
in a tragedy this morning, but she is the agent of one who is not
innocent."

He fixed his gaze on Van Meter, who stirred with uneasy amazement.

"They say that cats sometimes incarnate the souls of dead men. This
one is the soul of a living man, my good friend, Deacon Arnold Van
Meter, who had her brought here this morning."

The Deacon turned red, drew his head down as though he would pull
it within his shoulders, and shrank from the gaze of the crowd.

Gordon handed the cat back to the young man, whispered something
to him, and he disappeared.

Then, walking up to the pulpit, he snatched off its crimson cloth
and threw it behind him. He ran his big muscular hands into the
throat of his robe, ripped it open, tore it from his arms, crushed
it into a shapeless mass and threw it on the floor.

He snatched up the golden lectern pulpit, hurled it back into the
comer, and moved the little table with its vase of roses into its
place. He did this quickly, without a word or an exclamation to
break the awful stillness with which the crowd watched him.

They knew that a tremendous drama was being enacted before them.
So intense was the excitement the people on the back tiers of the
galleries sprang impulsively to their feet and stood on the pews.

Van Meter's eyes danced with wild amazement as he straightened
himself up, sure Gordon had gone mad. But when he advanced to the
edge of the platform, looking a foot taller in his long black Prince
Albert coat, folded his giant arms across his breast, the nostrils
of his great aquiline nose dilated, his lips quivering, and looked
straight into Van Meter's face, the Deacon saw there was dangerous
method in his madness.

His eyes blazing with pent-up passion, he began in deliberate tones
an extempore address.

In a moment the air was charged with the thrill of his powerful
personality wrought to the highest tension of emotional power.

[Illustration: "Ripped it open, tore it from his arms, and threw
it on the floor."]

"My friends," he began, "there are moments in our experience when
we live a lifetime--moments when the hair of our heads turns gray,
a soul dies within a laving body, or a dead one rises, shakes off
its grave clothes, and lifts its head in the sunlight.

"From this hour I am a free man. I will live what I am, and speak
what I feel to be the truth. The truth shall be its own justification.
I will wear no robes, mumble no ceremonies, call no man Rabbi, and
permit no man to call me Rabbi. I proclaim the universal priesthood
of believers.

"While I am your pastor the Kitchen Mission in which we have gathered
the poor on the East Side will be closed at the hour of service,
and all God's children shall enter this house because it is their
Father's!"

Van Meter shrank back in his pew as a ripple of applause ran round
the galleries.

"If men ask a sign to-day whether the Church of the living God
exists in New York, what is our answer?

"Look about you. New York is the centre of the commerce, society,
art, literature and politics of the Western World. Her port, in
which fly the flags of every nation, is the gateway of two worlds.
The feet of four millions daily press her pavements. Her walls frame
the furnace in which are being tried by fire the faiths, hopes and
dreams of the centuries past and to come. In mere volume of population
she is the equal of three great Atlantic states: Virginia, North
and South Carolina. One man alone of her millions of citizens
possesses wealth greater than the valuation of all the property
of the State of North Carolina, the cradle of American democracy,
containing fifty thousand square miles and supporting a population
of a million six hundred thousand.

"In the roar of this modern Babylon beats the fevered heart of
modern civilisation. He who wins that heart holds the key to the
century. Imperial Rome, mistress of the world, was a pygmy compared
to this.

"And what are we doing?

"Our Protestant churches have thirty-five thousand men and one
hundred thousand women enrolled out of two millions on Manhattan
Island. Our invested capital is one hundred million dollars, our
annual gifts four millions, and we fail to hold one-half the children
born in our own homes.

"As a remedy for this the Trustees proposed to me to sell out and
move uptown to vacant lots! They say the people have gone. They
have come--come in such numbers and with such problems, churches
have fled before the avalanche of humanity.

"Within a stone's throw of this church are districts in which ten
men and women sleep in one room twelve feet square. New York is
the most crowded city in the world. London has seven people to a
house; we have sixteen. In two houses were found the other day one
hundred and thirty-six children. Death stalks through these crowded
alleys with scythe ever swinging.

"Shall we, too, desert?

"I hear the tread of coming thousands from these shadows who will
laugh at your flag, who know not the name of your President, or
your God, whose heavy hands upon your doors will summon you before
the tribunal of the knife, the torch, the bomb to make good your
right to live.

"When your population shall number ten millions, and the gulf between
the rich and poor shall have become impassable, some gigantic corner
shall have doubled the price of bread, starvation spread her black
wings, and idle thousands sullen and desperate begin to look with
darkening brows on your unprotected wealth, then will come the test
of modern society.

"This growth of the city is as resistless and inevitable as the
movement of time. Why people continue to turn their backs upon the
open fields and crowd into this great foul, rattling, crawling,
smoking, stinking, ghastly heap of fermenting brickwork, oozing
poison at every pore, is beyond my ken, but they come. They come
each year in hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, crowding
the crowded trades, crowding closer the crowded dens in which human
beings whelp and stable as beasts. They leave friends and neighbours
who love them, leave earth for hell, and still they come. The
tenement, huge monster of modern greed, engulfs them, and the word
home is stricken from their tongue.

"They tell us that yesterday a man in a fit of insanity murdered
his wife and two daughters. Insanity? Love has its hours when
death becomes beautiful. Poets sing of old Virginius who slew his
daughter to save her from dishonour. May it not be better to die
a man than live a beast?

"There are conditions about us where suicide is a luxury and the
death of a child a joy. They are gathered to the Potters' Field,
but they rest. We pile them one on top of the other in big black
trenches, but the dawn does not call them to beastly toil. Their
little forms moulder, but they no longer cry for bread and their
pinched faces no longer try to smile. They are safe in Death's
land-locked harbour.

"Last year the deaths on this island numbered forty thousand. Ten
thousand--one in four--were buried from hospitals, jails, almshouses,
asylums and workhouses. I have been assailed by a deacon of this
church because I no longer preach hell. Why preach hell to people
who expect to better their condition in the next world whether they
go up or down?

"I am here henceforth to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,
the healing of the bruised, the release of the captive, and to
preach the Gospel to the poor.

"Let snobs and apes hear me. Democracy is the goal of the race,
the destiny of the world. American Democracy is but a hundred years
old, yet not one crowned head is left on the western hemisphere.
Crowns, thrones, scepters, titles, privileges belong to the past;
they are doomed. The people already rule the world. Emperors, kings
and presidents exist, not by the grace of God, but by the consent
of the people, to whom they give account of their stewardship.
Empires are the dungheaps out of which democracies grow.

"The historian writes of the common people. Once of kings
and princes were their stories. The eyes of the world are on the
masses. Science toils to make Nature their servant. Art portrays
their life. Literature, once a clown at the feet of Fortune's
fools, now writes of the people. Wealth lays its tribute at their
feet. The millionaire, who dies to-day grasping his millions as his
own, is hissed while he lives, openly cursed while he lies cold in
death, and forgotten in contempt.

"Outside the history of the common people there is nothing worth
recording. They are mankind. As a half-million miles make no
difference in the vast distance to the sun in figuring an eclipse,
so the classes may be disregarded.

"Jesus Christ was the carpenter's son. His home was humble, His
birth lowly. He was born poor, lived and died poor. The foxes had
holes, the birds of the air nests, but He had not where to lay His
head. Our robes and altar cloths, our tin and tinsel, were not His.

"When John Wesley raised his voice for the people the Church of
England had the opportunity to become the Church of the Anglo-Saxon
race, that is now conquering the world. They called him a liar,
a hypocrite, a Jesuit, a devil, cast him out, and the opportunity
passed forever.

"I see a man before me who hates this big crowd and yet expects to
go to heaven. Heaven is the home of millions--'a great multitude
which no man could number,' says the seer. Hell is the home of
swell society."

The words leaped from Gordon's lips a rushing torrent and swept the
crowd. Growing each moment more and more conscious of his strength,
he attained the heights of eloquence. Intoxicated with the reflex
action from the sea of eager listeners, he outdid himself with each
succeeding climax of feeling. Never had his voice been so deep,
so full, so clear, so penetrating, so thrilling, and never had he
been so conscious of its control. Not once did it break. Its loudest
trumpet note echoed with sure roundness.

When he turned his eyes from Van Meter after his first assault they
rested on the face of Kate Ransom, her magnificent figure tense,
rigid, her cheeks scarlet, her blue eyes flashing with tears of
excitement. She was stirred to her soul's depths, and no figure in
all the throbbing crowd gave to the speaker such inspiring response.
Her face flashed back as from a mirror every throb of thought and
stroke of his heart.

Van Meter gazed on him hypnotised by the violence of his onrush.
When Gordon would suddenly lift his enormous blue-veined hand
high over his head in an impassioned gesture the Deacon cowered
unconsciously beneath his towering figure.

Pausing a moment, while the crowd held its' breath, watching every
movement and every twitch of a muscle of his face, he pointed his
long finger at the Deacon and continued:

"And, as if to mock intelligence, Tradition raises the feeble cry
of reminiscent senility, 'Back to the old paths!'

"Protestantism is the rebellion of reason against the shackles of
authority. Our conscience fettered by tradition stultifies its own
life. We must go forward or die.

"Theology is a science, religion a life. The one is a fact, the
other an analysis after the fact. The stage-coach yielded to the
limited, the sailing craft to the ocean greyhound, but we are told
that the only age that ever knew the truth, or had the right to
express it, was the age which burned witches, executed dumb animals
as criminals, whipped church bells for heresy, held chemistry a black
art and electricity a manifestation of the devil or the Shekina of
God.

"The men to whom I speak have seen New York grow from a town of
three hundred thousand on the lower end of Manhattan Island to be
the imperial metropolis of the New World with four millions within
her golden gates.

"Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain
of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our
buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with
their flag-staffs in the clouds.

"Our nation has been baptised in blood and a new Constitution
established.

"The German Empire has been created, and a new map of the world
made.

"Steam and electricity have been applied to travel and speech,
and the earth transformed into a whispering gallery. The cylinder
press has proclaimed universal education, and the dynamo crowned
the brow of humanity with a coronet of light.

"But our churches in New York have merely moved uptown! Their methods
are the methods of their fathers--a solecism, stupid, irrational,
immoral.

"The superstition that seeks to limit the horizon of the soul to
the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe
of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt,
rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress and of
life.

"Your Traditionalists crucified the Christ. They declared him to
be the friend of publicans and harlots.

"Since then they have covered the Church with the infamy of cruelty
and blood, flame, sword, thumb-screw, rack and torch. The blackest
pages in the story of the martyrdom of man have been written by
their hands. They sent Alva into the Netherlands to sweep it with
fire. They revoked the edict of Nantes until the soil of France was
drunk with the blood of her children. They led the trembling sons
and daughters of faith, barefoot and blindfolded, over burning
plowshares, stretched them on wheel and rack, tore them limb from
limb, sparing not for the groan of age, the lisp of childhood, or
the piteous cry of expectant motherhood.

"The Bible they made a bludgeon with which to brain heretics, forged
its word into chains, and with its leaves kindled martyr fires.

"They have arraigned the reason, the heart and the knowledge of the
race against Jesus Christ and His religion. They stretched Galileo
on the rack for inventing a telescope which gave new beauty to
the psalm, 'The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament
showeth His handiwork.'

"They are driving manhood from the modern Church. Your New York
congregations average four women to one man. Of forty-three Governors
of our states, only seventeen are members of any church; yet all
profess allegiance to the religion of Jesus. The men have formed
secret societies outside the Church.

"The Church triumphant will be a social power. Man to-day is more
than an individual. The individual has played his role in the growth
of the centuries. This is the age of federation, organisation,
society, humanity. Man can no longer live to himself or die to
himself.

"I proclaim again the universal priesthood of believers. I call
for those mighty forces among the unordained which thrilled the
Waldenses, the Franciscans, the Puritan and early Methodists and
sent them on their glorious careers. I preach a holy crusade for
man as man, in the name of God, whose image he bears. I ask you
to join with me as man, not as priest, and build here a 'Temple of
Humanity' that shall be for a sign of hope and faith and freedom."

As he closed, a spontaneous burst of applause shook the building,
and instead of the usual prayer which ended his sermons he lifted
both his big hands high above his head and the audience rose.

"Let us sing the national hymn, 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee, Sweet
Land of Liberty,'" he cried, his voice still throbbing with emotion.
"And while we sing the ushers will pass the subscription cards that
you may join with us in our enterprise."

He dismissed the crowd with the Benediction, and the whole mass
lingered, discussing with flushed faces the extraordinary scene
they had witnessed and speculating on its outcome. It was evident
his action and speech had produced a moral earthquake in the church.

The older and more conservative members slipped out one by one and
went home dazed.

The younger and more sensitive crowded about Gordon in hundreds,
wrung his hand and pledged their support. For half an hour he could
not move, so dense was this struggling mass around him.

He did not see Kate among them. He knew the scene had cut too deeply
into her life for such poor expression. The ushers at last handed
him a bundle of subscription cards and he hurried to his study to
read their verdict.






CHAPTER XI

AN ANSWER TO PRAYER





When Gordon reached his study and locked the door, he turned the
bundle of cards over nervously, afraid to look at them.

He untied the package, read the first, and ran rapidly through the
pile. The total subscriptions reached only twenty thousand dollars.
He had asked for a million.

A sickening sense of failure crushed him. How weak and puerile
the eloquence of words or the beat of the human heart against that
mysterious force gleaming at him through Van Meter's black eyes!

He sat brooding over the power wielded by a dozen men whose names
were linked with the Deacon's in Wall Street. This group of men had
personal fortunes of more than eight hundred millions and controlled
as much more. He believed that they dictated the policy of railroads,
banks, trade, the State, the Nation, and that no king or emperor
of the world wielded such despotism over men as these uncrowned
monarchs of money. He felt as though he had collided with the stars
in their courses and been crushed to dust.

An Answer to Prayer 129

In the middle of the pile of cards he found one signed by Kate
Ransom. She had written across the printed form in her smooth,
flowing hand:

"Please call after the service and let me know the result. I will
send you my subscription to-morrow."

He knew that she would make a liberal gift, but her fortune could
not be more than a million, perhaps not half so large. Her generosity
could not save the day even if she gave half of all she possessed,
a supposition of course preposterous.

He could not summon courage to go in the bitterness of his defeat.
He scrawled a note and sent it by the sexton.

"Feeling too blue to call. Failure complete and pitiful. The
subscriptions reach only twenty thousand dollars. GORDON."

There was but one forlorn hope left. He had written personal letters
to several millionaires he knew in town. They might respond.

He sat in his study in the afternoon, dull, stupid and sick, feeling
an iron band around his brain. He could not think. Ho gave up the
work on his evening sermon and determined to repeat an old one.

As he sat in an aching stupor the sexton announced a gentleman who
insisted on seeing him on important business.

"I told him you would see no one at this hour, but he says he must
see you."

"Show him in," Gordon said, with a frown.

The man entered, gazed at the preacher with curious interest, and
stood with his silk hat in hand, smiling.

"This is Doctor Gordon?"

"Leave off the doctor and you have it right."

"I am the bearer of good news. A client of mine has instructed me
to call and say that the sum of one million dollars will be placed
to your credit in the Garfield National Bank within two years, and
that you will be its sole trustee for the building of your projected
Temple. One-third of it will be available within three months. I
am sorry, I am forbidden to disclose the name."

Gordon sprang to his feet, pale as death, overwhelmed with awe. To
have the answer of his prayers, the agonising of his soul for years,
answered in the hour of utter defeat thrilled him with a sense
of solemnity he had never felt. The man was not a man. He was the
messenger swift and beautiful from the courts of heaven, for whose
coming his eyes had long strained and his ears listened. Not a
doubt of its truth shadowed his mind. He knew it was true. It was
the fulfilment of life. It had been ordained from eternity. He had
seen it always. Now he saw with his eyes. A paean of exaltation
welled within him.

With dimmed eyes he grasped the lawyer's hand and fairly crushed
it in his iron grip.

"My friend, your face will always be beautiful to me, and your name
a song of joy. You have come to lift me from the gulf of despair
and renew my faith."

"With all my heart I congratulate you," he warmly responded.

He left his card, and Gordon locked his door, walked back to his
desk and fell on his knees. In transports of childlike gratitude he
poured out his soul. All the old faith in prayer was in him again,
the breath he breathed. He talked to God as to a loving father,
promising in broken accents to cleanse his heart of every selfish
thought and consecrate anew every energy to his work.

And then he caught the perfume of flowers, and saw the face of a
woman, and she was not the wife of his youth or the mother of his
children.

"God forgive me for the drifting of the past," he cried. "I will
tear this madness out of my heart and love only Thee. I will be true
to the vows taken at Thy altar. I have been wayward and sinned in
Thy sight in heart and thought. Wash me in Thy love and I shall be
clean, and though my sins be as scarlet they shall be like wool."

He rose from his knees determined to go immediately to Kate Ransom,
tell her the news, make a clean breast of his love for her, beg her
to put the ocean between them, and for all time end their dangerous
relationship.

She greeted him with reserve, and seemed embarrassed.

With impetuous rush he told her the tidings.

"I've been lifted from the depths of Sheol to the highest heaven.
Every hope and dream of my struggle is a living reality. An unknown
millionaire has given the whole sum needed--a million dollars--and
our Temple will rise in grandeur!"

She smiled timidly, and said: "I knew it would be so. You were
glorious this morning."

He felt her embarrassment and wondered if she could have divined
his grim purpose of separation.

"You do not seem so glad as I thought you would be," he said, with
something of reproach in his voice.

"Some joys are too intense for speech. The scene this morning and
your burning message went too deep for words."

"I understand," he said softly.

"I wonder if you do?" she asked, dropping her eyes.

"Yes, and I have come to the hardest task of my life, one of the
bitterest and one of the sweetest," he said, with deliberation.

She glanced at him quickly and began to tremble.

"Not another hour must pass without a confession to you."

He moved across the room and sat down as if by an effort to put
distance between them.

"What is it?" she asked, colouring.

He was silent a moment and then said with low, deliberate tenderness:

"I love you."

She sobbed, and he looked steadily out of the window.

"I dare not sit by your side when I tell you this," he continued
passionately. "I have felt it growing in spite of reason or will.
I know it's tragedy and sealed my lips with bolts of steel. I have
been too weak to keep away from you, strong enough to keep silent.
But God has sent his messenger to-day to recall me to duty. There
is truth in the old faith. He has heard and answered the prayer
of my heart. Somewhere in this Mammon-cursed city there is one
beautiful disinterested soul that gives and asks nothing. I have
seen, as in a flash of lightning, my danger. I must tear this
passion out of my life, though it kill me. I must be true to my
vows. I must live without scandal or shame. And you," he paused and
his voice sank to a tense whisper--"my beautiful darling, glorious
love of my manhood--you must help me!"

He buried his face in his great hands, convulsed with emotion.

"I will, my dearest," she tenderly answered.

"If I had failed to-day," he went on tremblingly, "perhaps in
reckless fury I might have forgotten duty, dashed the cup of this
martyrdom from my lips, and drowned conscience in the sweetness of
your kiss. But God sent success, not failure. And I must be worthy.
I have sinned a thousand times as I have gloated over your beauty,
heard the music of your voice, touched your soft hand and looked
into your soul through those dear blue eyes. It must end. One hour
thus face to face we will speak, and never again by word or deed
recall that we are aught to one another. I have not asked if you
love me. How well I know the tragic truth! But you will tell me
once, that my ears may never forget the words on your lips."

"I love you, I love you, I-love-you!" she sobbed in anguish.

"We must never be together alone again," he sighed.

"No."

"We must not see each other any more."

"It is best," she said, with despair.

"I dare not touch your hand--good-by!" he cried, staggering to his
feet.

"Good-by, Frank, my hero, my love--my God!"

He took one step toward the door, but his feet carried him to her
side.

He trembled, hesitated, and then slowly drew her to his heart.
Her arms stole around his neck and her head drooped on his breast,
the perfume of her hair was in his nostrils, and their lips met in
burning kisses.

"God forgive us! It was more than mortal flesh could bear to go
without one moment of love's sweet life!" he cried. "And now we
must part."

He took her hands in his and gently kissed them, while she looked
away seeing only his face, for it had long since filled the world.

He turned abruptly into the hall, and, moving to the door with
swift step, he saw lying on the silver tray the card of the lawyer
he had met an hour ago. In a moment it flashed over him that Kate
was the unknown messenger. He had not dreamed her fortune of such
magnitude.

He seized the card and rushed back into the room.

"Is that your lawyer's name?" he gasped.

She smiled and nodded her head in assent.

"And I never dreamed it possible!"

He looked at her as though in a trance.

"Yes, I will confess now. You have confessed to me. My fortune
came direct from my grandmother, who willed me her farm on which
the oil was discovered. My father's fortune is worth perhaps five
hundred thousand dollars. Mine was worth about two million dollars.
I have given one to you. I may give you the other if you ask it.
One was all you asked."

Again he took her to his heart.

"I have misread the message. Such love is in itself divine, and
its own defense. You are mine by the higher law of life. I will not
give you up--you are mine, mine! I will defy the world. I loved my
child-wife. I was honest then. I will be honest now. I loved as a
boy loves. Now I am a man, with a man's fierce passions, and you
are the answer--strength calling to strength, deep answering unto
deep! Your eyes, my darling, flash the beauty of every flower that
blooms and every star of the sky; in your hair is the rose's breath
and the golden glory of the sun! I will not live with one woman
and love another."

And the twilight deepened into night while they held each other's
hands and smiled into each other's faces.






CHAPTER XII

OUT OF THE SHADOWS





When Gordon announced at the evening service that a million dollars
had been subscribed to the new "Temple of Man," and that he had
been constituted its sole trustee, the crowd burst into a storm of
applause.

In vain he raised his big muscular hand over the tumult.

Troops of young men and women with flushed faces, some laughing,
some crying, sprang from their seats, rushed to the platform and
seized his hand.

The strains of the national hymn suddenly burst from the crowd,
and they rose en masse singing it with triumphant peal. As its last
note died away a woman's voice started "Nearer, My God, to Thee,"
the people caught it instantly and its mighty chorus rolled
heavenward. The singing had in it the spontaneous rhythm of hearts
transported by resistless feeling. For half an hour they stood
and sang the old familiar hymns whose sentences were wet with the
tears and winged with the hopes and mysteries of their lives.

Instead of a sermon, Gordon read his resignation as pastor of the
Pilgrim Church.

And then, folding his hands behind him, in trumpet tones he cried:

"Next Sunday morning will be the last service I will ever conduct
in this church; the Sunday morning following, at eleven o'clock,
the first services of the 'Church of the Son of Man' will be held
in the old Grand Opera House. It will seat four thousand people.
All who wish to join this independent society are cordially invited
to be present and bring your friends. The work of building the
'Temple of Man' will begin at once. Within six months we hope to
lay its corner-stone."

The meeting was closed at once with the Doxology and Benediction.

The reporters crowded around him for fuller details. He refused
to give any further information. They interviewed every officer of
the church and congregation from whom any news might be secured,
and it was nine o'clock before the excitement had subsided and the
crowd left.

The organist and quartet choir lingered to rehearse their music
for the following Sunday.

Gordon retired to his study, where he had asked Kate to meet him
for an important conference.

The church opened on the cross street and stretched its barn shape
through the entire block. The study was beside the pulpit platform,
a little beyond the centre of the building. Behind it was the
Sunday-school and reading-room, opening on the rear.

Kate had the keys to the reading-room, which was under her direction,
and Gordon asked her to come to his study from the rear entrance
through the Sunday-school room that she might avoid the suspicion
of the reporters. For the same reason he did not wish to be seen
at her house. He had left the door of his study unlocked for her,
and she entered before the crowd had left the church.

Within a few moments from the time she unlocked the door of the
reading-room, Van Meter's detectives informed him that she was in
the pastor's study and that he had left the rear door open for her
to secretly enter.

The Deacon despatched one of his men with an anonymous note to
Ruth informing her that Gordon was in his study alone by secret
appointment with Kate Ransom, and giving to her duplicate keys to
every door in the church building.

The detective did not see Ruth, but the maid said she was at home,
and he handed her the package.

Gordon had telephoned to her briefly the facts of the excitement
of the morning, and told her he was so exhausted that he would not
return for dinner, but would take his meals at a hotel and come
home after the evening service.

When Ruth received the note and keys she was brooding over his absence
and peering in the depths of the widening gulf which separated them
in such a crisis of his life.

The note threw her into the wildest excitement.  All the old fiery
temper and jealousy which she had kept smouldering in restraint
now burst its bounds.

Flushed and trembling she rushed from the house and soon reached
the church.

She opened the door gently, and with soft feline step was about to
enter the Sunday-school room to reach his study, when through the
glass sliding partition she heard the voice of Van Meter talking
in the dark to a detective and a reporter.

She listened intently.

"I wish you had a flashlight camera," he was saying. "His wife
will be here in a few minutes and the scene in that room would be
worth ten thousand dollars. I have a good photograph of the woman
you can use. You can get his anywhere."

"It will be a great scoop on the other fellows who will write up
the Temple without the Priestess!" the reporter whispered.

"I'd give a thousand dollars to see his face in the morning when he
picks up your paper and reads its headlines," chuckled the Deacon.
"His eloquence, his bullfrog voice, his curling locks, his splendid
eyes, will all be needed, and will all of them be inadequate to
the occasion."

"It will be tough on that beautiful woman, the scandal--by George,
it's a pity," the reporter sighed.

"But it will be a great day for the little black-eyed spitfire wife
of his he's been neglecting for the past year. Her revenge will be
sweet. I've been sorry enough for her."

"I wonder if she will promptly sue for a divorce?"

"Yes; you can write that down without an interview," the Deacon
replied.

Ruth had come raging in anger against her husband. But the cold words
of these men, whispering in the dark their joy over his downfall,
stopped the beat of her heart.

She could see the big cruel headlines in the morning paper, holding
her beloved up to shame in the hour of his triumph. Surely this
would be what he deserved. But she loved him--yes, good or bad,
she loved him. He was the hero of her girl's soul, the father of
her beautiful children, and in spite of all his coldness and neglect
he was her heart's desire.

And the feeling came crushing down upon her that perhaps she
had failed somehow to do her whole duty. She had been wilful and
fretful and had not kept in touch and sympathy with his work. She
had demanded a perfect love and loyalty, and in agony she asked
herself if she had given as much as she had demanded. Had she not
thought too much of her own rights and wrongs and too little of
his hopes and burdens? And perhaps because of this he was to be
crushed at a blow, and his enemies laugh at his calamity and give
to her their maudlin pity.

She could hear the sweet strains of the organ in the church and
the soprano singing the Gloria.

She held her hand on her heart for a moment, as though it were
breaking, and suddenly her soul was born anew.

Out of the shadows of self and self-seeking she lifted up her head
into the sunlight of a perfect love, a love that suffereth long
and is kind, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not
its own, believeth all things, endureth all things--love that never
faileth.

"Lord, have mercy on me, and help me--I must save him!" she cried
in agony.

Rapidly retracing her steps, she passed back into the street and
around the block to the front of the church.

To her joy she encountered no one. The Deacon was so sure of his
triumph he had withdrawn his detectives from the street and had
them massed as witnesses in the Sunday-school room. He was sure
they would emerge by that way, for it was Gordon's usual way of
exit, and the choir was still singing in the church.

With feverish haste she applied the key to the spring lock of the
door for the members' entrance and passed noiselessly down the
aisle in the shadows under the gallery, unobserved by the choir.
Only the lights about the organ were burning.

When she reached the door of the study she paused.

What if she found him with his arms about her and his lips on hers?
Could she control herself? Would she not spring on the woman, with
all the tiger of her hot Southern blood from centuries of proud
ancestry tingling in her tapering fingers, and tear those blue
eyes from her head? She must be sure. No; it was over now. She had
conquered self. She would save him.

Slipping the key softly into the lock, she entered and stood a
moment, her stormy eyes burning a deep, steady fire.

They were studying a map of the city with eager interest in the
location of the Temple and did not see or hear her.

As she saw them thus, a sense of gratitude soothed her excitement
and gave perfect control of her voice.

"Frank," she said quietly.

"Ruth!" he exclaimed in amazement, striding toward her, while Kate
blushed and, with dilated eyes, stared at her, dumb with fear of
a scene of violence.

"Yes," she continued in even, rapid tones, "I have come, in love,
not anger, to save you both from shame and disgrace. That room
behind you is full of detectives and reporters. They are waiting
for the choir to leave to find you here alone. They sent for me
to give a fitting climax to the scene. They have your photograph
already, Miss Ransom, and the reporter is preparing his article on
the hidden Priestess of the new Temple."

"Oh, I thank you!" Kate cried, trembling.

"Keep your thanks. I do this from no regard for you. Frankly, I
hate you--hate and envy yoi your terrible beauty that has robbed
me of that which I hold dearer than life."

"But I do not hate you, Mrs. Gordon. I have for you only the
kindliest feelings," Kate protested.

"I prefer your hatred. But we have no time for talk."

Ruth quickly removed her hat and cloak and handed them to Kate.

"Exchange with me and pass quickly out of the church by the little
front door. Keep under the shadows of the gallery and the choir
cannot see you."

In a moment it was done, and Gordon faced his wife alone.

"My dear, that was a beautiful deed you have just done."

"Don't say 'my dear' to me again until we have come to an understanding
of this meeting," his wife said, closing her lips firmly.

"As you will," he gravely answered.

"When we are at home to-night alone I will hear your explanation."

"What you have told me is of such importance I cannot go home
to-night. I must see friends who will reach that newspaper in time
to know what Van Meter can have printed. It may keep me the whole
night."

"Very well; it will not be the first night I have spent alone,"
she answered bitterly.

"I will go with you to the elevated station, and will be home
certainly early in the morning."

They stepped from the study, and Gordon turned the electric switch,
filling the room with a blaze of light.

Van Meter and his men blinked in amazement at the sight of the
preacher and his wife quietly walking toward them.

"You contemptible old sneak!" he hissed. "How dare you crawl into
this room to spy on me?"

"I thought I had good reasons for being here," he spluttered,
nervously clearing his throat.

"Well, you thought a lie as your father, the devil, did before
you."

"Apparently a mistake somewhere," stammered the Deacon, looking
sheepishly at Mrs. Gordon. "And I'd like to explain to you, sir,
that I didn't bring that cat."

"Well, cat or no cat, I give you a parting warning. We will not
meet again in this church, and if I ever catch you sneaking around
me I'll take a whip and thrash you as I would a cur, you little
ferret-eyed imp of hell!"

The Deacon cowered beneath the furious giant figure and beckoned
to the detectives.

Gordon and his wife passed by them and out into the night.






CHAPTER XIII

A BROKEN HEART-STRING





The press next morning devoted entire pages to the sensation in
the Pilgrim Church. Portraits of Gordon, his life and theories,
sketches of the extraordinary scene in his pulpit, a full stenographic
report of his address which he had carefully corrected at midnight,
portraits of his wife and children, pictures of the old church,
its reading-rooms, clubhouses and coffee-house, were exploited.

His letter of resignation and the gift of a millon dollars for
building a vast Temple of Humanity, that would be a forum of free
thought in the heart of the metropolis, were the subject of separate
editorials in every paper.

Speculation as to the identity of this mysterious millionaire, who
had apparently deserted the army of entrenched wealth to support
this daring young revolutionist, filled columns. But it was all
the wildest guessing. Many of the greater magnates hastened to deny
with emphasis that they were in any way connected with the scheme.
Several of them denounced the preacher as a dangerous man whose
wild theories threatened social order.  Gordon breathed a sigh of
relief when he found not  a line hinting at Kate Ransom's part in
the drama or linking his name with hers.

After two o'clock, when he finished his last conference with the
reporters and his friends, he went to a hotel where he was not
known. He spent the rest of the night pacing the floor fighting
to a finish the battle between the memory of Ruth and his children
and his fierce new passion.

Just before dawn he lay down and fell asleep, dreaming of Kate.
The battle between the flesh and the spirit had ended.

He slept until noon, ate a hasty breakfast, called at the Ransom
house a moment, and hurried to his home.

His wife had read the morning papers with increasing amazement at
the sensation created, and a sense of impending tragedy began to
crush her. For hours she had been walking back and forth from her
window watching for his approach, until now she dreaded to see him.

At the sound of his footstep she recalled the fact that she was
the judge and he the culprit in the scene to be enacted. She had
demanded an explanation of the meaning of the meeting with this
woman, and she would have it. If his excuse were good she would
be generous in her love and beg him to begin once more their old
life, even if she threw the last shred of pride to the winds and
made herself his veriest slave. And yet her heart misgave her. She
felt herself lost and ruined before the battle began, but determined
to play her part bravely.

She watched him over the banisters as he stepped into the hall and
greeted the children with unusual tenderness.

He took Lucy's little form up and placed her arms around his neck.

"Now hug me long, and hard, and kiss me sweet," he whispered.

The child squeezed his neck and, placing her hands on his cheeks,
softly kissed his lips and eyes as she had often seen her mother
do. He ran his hand gently through her brown curls that seemed a
perfect mixture of her mother's and his own, and Ruth thought his
hand trembled as he kissed her again.

"I never saw you quite so beautiful, my baby, as this morning," he
said, as he placed her on the floor.

When he entered the room upstairs Ruth had recovered her composure
and stood waiting, her petite figure drawn to its full height, her
anxious face unusually thin, her eyes, set in the dark rings of
a sleepless night, looking blacker and stormier than ever in the
shadows of her disheveled hair.

"Sorry I could not come sooner, Ruth," he began, with evident
embarrassment. "But I did not get to sleep until just before day,
and I was so exhausted I slept until noon."

"Let us waste no words," said the soft, round voice. "I have waited
long; I am waiting still for ycur explanation. Why was that woman
in your study alone with you last night at half-past ten o'clock?"

"You wish to know the whole truth?"

"I demand it."

"Very well," he replied deliberately. "The immediate reason is a
secret of great importance, I must ask you to guard it sacredly."

"I've kept a dark one in my soul. You have had no cause to complain."

"The morning papers are full of wild speculation as to the millionaire
who gave that immense sum to build the Temple. Miss Ransom gave
the money."

"Impossible!" she gasped.

"So I thought at first. A lawyer came in the afternoon and told me
of the gift without a hint of its author. In answer to a request
on a card asking that I inform her of the results of my appeal, I
called at her house---"

"Before you called at your own or informed your wife," she interrupted
with bitterness.

"Yes; you have ceased to care about rny work. But there was another
and more urgent reason why I called,"

"Doubtless!" she cried impatiently.

"When the import of this gift fully dawned on me, the fulfilment
of my grandest hopes in the very moment of defeat (for the popular
subscription was a failure), I was overwhelmed with gratitude to
God. I fell on my knees and thanked Him. And then, Ruth--"

He paused and looked at her wistfully in pity for the little weak
figure that would reel beneath the blow of his words.

"And then what?" she asked quickly.

Gordon lowered his chin and rested it on his hand, while a dreamy
tone came into his voice, softening it to its lowest notes, and a
trance-like look overspread his face.

"And then I recalled that I had been deceiving you and myself and
another. I faced for the first time honestly the fact that I was
madly in love with a woman not my wife--"

Ruth went white, gave an inarticulate groan, staggered and sank
into a chair near him, sobbing in agony.

"Oh! Frank, for the sake of Jesus, the friend of the weak, who
loved little children, whose name you have so often spoken, have
mercy on me! Do not tell me any more. I am only a woman--I cannot
bear it!"

"But the truth is best, Ruth. You must hear it," he went on rapidly.
"I asked God to forgive me for the wrong I had done you and her.
I said I would tear that love out of my soul if it killed me, and
be true to my marriage vow. I went there to tell her this and ask
her to put the ocean between us. I found that she loved me even
as I loved her, and she promised. As I started to leave the house,
never to enter it again, I saw the card of the lawyer on her table,
and the truth flashed over me that she had made this sacrifice of
her fortune--greater than I had dreamed--for me and my work, and
that because of this I was leaving her forever. It was more than
I could bear or ask her to bear. I faced anew the facts. Our love
has grown cold. We are no longer congenial. Your ways have ceased
to be mine. It is wrong to love one woman and live with another.
We must separate."

"No, no, no, no, Frank, dear, my husband, my love, my own. Not
this. You do not mean it!" she groaned, as she sank to the floor,
buried her face in her arms and stretched out her hand until her
tapering fingers rested on his broad foot.

He bent and took her hand as though to lift her.

Suddenly the fever of her hot fingers trembling with overpowering
passion, the moisture of her hand, and the tremor of her convulsed
body swept his memory with the pain and rapture of his hour with
Kate.

Still holding her fingers, he slipped his watch from his pocket
with the other hand and glanced quickly at its face to see if it
were time for his return to the Ransom house.

"Come, Ruth, this is very painful to me. You must not humiliate
yourself so. You have pride and the heritage of noble blood."

She sprang to her feet and stared at him, with infinite yearning in
her eyes, gave a faint cry, half anguish, half despair, and threw
herself into his arms, holding him with passionate violence while
she smothered his lips and eyes with kisses.

He attempted gently to draw her arms from his neck.

"No, you shall not," she cried, holding him convulsively. "I will
not let you go. You are my husband--my own, my love, the hero of
my girl's dreams, the father of my babies. I have no pride. I will
do anything for you if you will only love me."

"But, Ruth, if I have ceased to love you--"

"Don't, don't say it!" she shrieked, placing her hand on his lips.
"I will not hear it. You do love me. This woman has lured you with
her devil's beauty, and thrown her spell over your baser nature.
Ah, Frank, dear, tell me that you love me! Lie to me as meaner
men lie to their women. Such a lie I'll hold an honour before the
awful shame of desertion. You cannot humiliate me so. See, dear, I
am at your feet. Have mercy on me. Do not ask me to bear more than
I can endure. Am I not the mother of your children?"

Gordon frowned and withdrew her arms from his neck.

"All this is very painful, Ruth. You cannot mean it. You know I
have tried to be honest. I hate a lie. I could not tell one if I
tried. You cannot love me and ask this infamy. I could never lift
up my head again as a leader and teacher of men and know I was a
wilful liar."

The little figure shivered.

"But, Frank, I can't give you up. It was the touch of your hand,
the music of your voice that first awoke my woman's soul. You are
my mate. You cannot know the young mother-wonder, pain and joy
that thrilled my heart as I first bent over Lucy's face, your dear
eyes in hers smiling at me. Our very flesh became one in Nature's
miracle of love."

"And yet our lives have somehow drifted apart, Ruth."

"But not so far, dear, as this woman has made you believe," she
answered tenderly. "I have been selfish and resentful, but I will
make it all up. I will lift up my head and be cheerful--live for
you, work for you, think only of you, ask nothing for myself but
only your presence and your love."

"But if I have given it to another--"

Again she put her hand on his lips.

"But you have not. It is madness. You could not forget our life.
Last night I lay alone in silence, with wide-open eyes, dreaming it
all over again. This woman I know is more beautiful than I--three
years younger; her hair is gold, mine the raven's. She is fair and
full and tall, and I am dark and small; but, Frank, dear, love is
more than eyes and hair and lips and form. We have been made one
in our flesh and blood and inmost soul. There is no other man than
you for me. There is no music save your voice."

"Yet, if you feel this for me, and I thus wait in love on another,
how can I live the lie?"

"Can you forget the sunlit days of our past?" she pleaded wistfully.
"When you lay on the sands of the beach in old Virginia and held
my hand while I read to you, idly dreaming through that wonderful
summer before our first-born came sailing into port from God's
blue sea! You said I was beautiful then. And you were so tender and
gracious in your strength. No other woman can ever be to you this
first girl-mother."

Her voice melted into a sob. She tried to go on and bit her swollen
lips.

Then she rose quietly, and walked to the window and looked down at
the city below, whose roar had drowned the music of her life.

He sat silent, waiting for her to regain her strength. He knew
that he had the power of hypnotic suggestion over her in his iron
will, and that she was beginning to recognise the inevitable.

She turned and faced him again, the hungry fires in her eyes
burning with mystic radiance. A tiny stream of blood ran down from
her lip and stood in the dimple of her chin. She drew a delicate
lace handkerchief from her bosom and wiped the blood away until it
ceased to flow. And then in low accents she said:

"You are going to leave me, my love. I feel the cold chill on my
heart. It is God's will; I bow to it. One look into your dear eyes,
one last embrace, one farewell kiss, and you will be gone. A little
gift I will make you in this, the saddest, lowliest hour my soul
has ever known. This handkerchief, stained with blood from lips
you have kissed so tenderly in the past--that bled to-day because
I tried to keep back the cries of a broken heart. I ask that you
keep this as a token of my love."

She handed it to him and Gordon placed it in his pocket with a
sigh, brushing a tear from his own eyes.






CHAPTER XIV

THE VOICE OF THE SIREN





Gordon left the house with a lingering look at Ruth's window
and turned his face toward Gramercy Park, where another woman was
waiting for his footstep.

He had suffered intensely in the scene with his wife. He did not
believe it possible that she retained such power over him. He drew
a deep breath of relief that it was over. Her pride would come
to the rescue; for he knew that with her tenderness she combined
strength, and with her delicacy, supreme energy.

The exaltation of his great victory of yesterday welled within him
and drowned the sense of pain. It had been the most momentous day
of his life. Visions of his Temple with gorgeous dome of gold--rising
in the sky from its pile of gleaming marble rose before his fancy.
He could hear the peal of the grand organ, the swell of the chorus
choir, and the response from five thousand eager faces before him.
He was speaking with inspiration as never before. He was leading
not a forlorn hope against overwhelming odds, but a triumphant host
of free, godlike men and women to certain victory.

He thought of the love that filled the heart of the woman to whom
he was hurrying, that she should do this unheard of thing while
yet breathing the breath of the capital of Mammon.

And then there stole over him, as oil on slumbering fires, the
memory of her kisses, the melting languor of her eyes, the odour
of her hair, the fever of her creamy flesh, until his senses reeled
as drunk with wine. A smile played about his lips; he quickened his
pace, lifted his head high, his nostrils dilated wide; he looked
dreamily over the housetops into the sky and saw only the face of
a woman.

He was in the grip of superhuman impulses. In the quickened throb
of his heart and the rush of his blood was the sweep of subconscious
forces of nature playing their role in the cosmic drama of all
sentient life, laughing at man's laws, making and unmaking the
history of races and worlds.

He was justifying his desires now in his new-found Social philosophy,
which he had studied closely since Overman's suggestion of its
scope.

He knew instinctively that between these elemental impulses and
the Moral Law there was war. He would reconcile them by leading a
revolution that should decree a new basis for the Moral Law itself.
He would make these very subconscious forces the expression of the
highest Moral Law. It suddenly flashed over him that this was the
key to the paradox of life. He would be the prophet of the new era,
and this beautiful woman his comrade in leadership in the Social
Revolution it must bring.

His face flushed with the new enthusiasm, and the glorious autumn
day about him seemed one with his spirit. The sky was cloudless
with fresh breezes sweeping over the seas from the south.

When he stepped to the downtown platform his eye wandered up and
down Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue and lingered on rivers
of women, below.

His own drama, his million-dollar gift, the enormous sensation it
had made in the morning press, had not produced a ripple on this
swirling tide of flesh. They crowded the windows filled with feathers
and hats, elbowed and jostled one another on the pavements, pushed
and squeezed and trampled each other's feet and skirts fighting
for standing room around the Monday bargain counters, oblivious of
the existence of the spiritual world, church, God, or devil.

Again the ceaseless roar of the city, calm and fierce as the sea,
one with its eternity of life, stunned him with its immensity and
its indifference. He felt himself once more but an atom lost in
the surging tides that beat on these stone pavements, worn by the
surge of myriads dead and waiting for the throb of hosts unborn.
What did they care? If he were to drop dead that moment, in the
morning of his manhood, with the shout of victory on his lips, they
would not lift an eye from their gaze on hat or ribbon to watch
his funeral cortege trot to the cemetery. A brief obituary and he
would be forgotten.

"After 

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