The One Woman Part 11

"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. G.o.d lives, and the age of miracles is not pa.s.sed."

"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 b.u.ms 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sumes everything. Of G.o.d'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 p.r.o.nounces 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sion 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 pet.i.te 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 ma.s.s 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 s.e.xton 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 a.s.sistants, 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 h.e.l.l. 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."