Читать книгу The Ball of Fire - George Randolph Chester - Страница 3

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Silence pervaded the dim old aisles of Market Square Church; a silence which seemed to be palpable; a solemn hush which wavered, like the ghostly echoes of anthems long forgotten, among the slender columns and the high arches and the delicate tracery of the groining; the winter sun, streaming through the clerestory windows, cast, on the floor and on the vacant benches, patches of ruby and of sapphire, of emerald and of topaz, these seeming only to accentuate the dimness and the silence.

A thin, wavering, treble note, so delicate that it seemed like a mere invisible cobweb of a tone, stole out of the organ loft and went pulsing up amid the dim arches. It grew in volume; it added a diapason; a deep, soft bass joined it, and then, subdued, but throbbing with the passion of a lost soul, it swelled into one of the noble preludes of Bach. The organ rose in a mighty crescendo to a peal which shook the very edifice; then it stopped with an abruptness which was uncanny, so much so that the silence which ensued was oppressive. In that silence the vestry door creaked, it opened wide, and it was as if a vision had suddenly been set there! Framed in the dark doorway against the background of the sun-flooded vestry, bathed in the golden light from the transept window, brown-haired, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, stood a girl who might have been one of the slender stained-glass virgins come to life, the golden light flaming the edges of her hair into an oriole. She stood timidly, peering into the dimness, and on her beautifully curved lips was a half questioning smile.

“Uncle Jim,” she called, and there was some quality in her low voice which was strangely attractive; and disturbing.

“By George, Gail, I forgot that you were to come for me!” said Jim Sargent, rising from amid the group of men in the dim transept. “The decorators drove us out of the vestry.”

“They drove me out, too,” laughed the vision, stepping from her frame.

“We are delighted that they drove you in here,” quoth the tall, young Reverend Smith Boyd, who had accomplished the rare art of bowing gracefully in a Prince Albert.

She smiled her acknowledgment of the compliment, and glanced uncertainly at the awe-inspiring vestry meeting, then she turned toward the door.

“My niece, Miss Gail Sargent, gentlemen,” announced Jim Sargent, with entirely justifiable pride, and, beaming until his bald spot seemed to glow with an added shine, he introduced her to each of the gentlemen present, with the exception of Smith Boyd, whom she had met that morning.

“What a pity Saint Paul didn’t see you,” remarked silver-bearded Rufus Manning, calmly appropriating the vision and ushering her into the pew between himself and her uncle. “He never would have said it.”

“That women should not sit in council with the men?” she laughed, looking into the blue eyes of patriarchal Manning. “Are you sure I won’t be in the way?”

“Not at all,” round-headed old Nicholas Van Ploon immediately assured her. He had popped his eyes open with a jerk at the entrance of Gail, and had not since been able to close them to their normal almond shape. He sat now uncomfortably twisted so that he could face her, and his cheeks were reddening with the exertion, which had wrinkled his roundly filled vest. The young rector contemplated her gravely. He was not quite pleased.

“We’ll be through in a few minutes, Gail,” promised Jim Sargent. “Allison, you were about to prove something to us, I think,” and he leaned forward to smile across Gail at Rufus Manning.

“Prove is the right word,” agreed the stockily built man who had evidently been addressing the vestry. He was acutely conscious of the presence of Gail, as they all were. “Your rector suggests that this is a matter of sentiment. You are anxious to have fifty million dollars to begin the erection of a cathedral; but I came here to talk business, and that only. Granting you the full normal appreciation of your Vedder Court property, and the normal increase of your aggregate rentals, you can not have, at the end of ten years, a penny over forty-two millions. I am prepared to offer you, in cash, a sum which will, at three and a half per cent., and in ten years, produce that exact amount. To this I add two million.”

“How much did you allow for increase in the value of the property?” asked Nicholas Van Ploon, whose only knowledge for several generations had been centred on this one question. The original Van Ploon had bought a vast tract of Manhattan for a dollar an acre, and, by that stroke of towering genius, had placed the family of Van Ploon, for all eternity, beyond the necessity of thought.

For answer, Allison passed him the envelope upon which he had been figuring, checking off an item as he did so. He noticed that Gail’s lips twitched with suppressed mirth. She turned abruptly to look back at the striking transept window, and the three vestrymen in the rear pew immediately sat straighter. Willis Cunningham, who was a bachelor, hastily smoothed his Vandyke. He was so rich, by inheritance, that money meant nothing to him.

“Not enough,” grunted Van Ploon, handing back the envelope, and twisting again in the general direction of Gail.

“Ample,” retorted Allison. “You can’t count anything for the buildings. While I don’t deny that they yield the richest income of any property in the city, they are the most decrepit tenements in New York. They’ll fall down in less than ten years. You have them propped up now.”

Jim Sargent glanced solicitously at Gail, but she did not seem to be bored; not a particle!

“They are passed by the building inspector annually,” pompously stated W. T. Chisholm, his mutton chops turning pink from the reddening of the skin beneath. He had spent a lifetime in resenting indignities before they reached him.

“Building inspectors change,” insinuated Allison. “Politics is very uncertain.”

Four indignant vestrymen jerked forward to answer that insult.

“Gentlemen, this is a vestry meeting,” sternly reproved the Reverend Smith Boyd, advancing a step, and seeming to feel the need of a gavel. His rich, deep baritone explained why he was rector of the richest church in the world.

Gail’s eyes were dancing, but otherwise she was demureness itself as she studied, in turns, the members of the richest vestry in the world. She estimated that eight of the gentlemen then present were almost close enough to the anger line to swear. They numbered just eight, and they were most interesting! And this was a vestry meeting!

“The topic of debate was money, I believe,” suggested Manning, rescuing his sense of humour from somewhere in his beard. He was the infidel member. “Suppose we return to it. Is Allison’s offer worth considering?”

“Why?” inquired the nasal voice of clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who was sarcastic in money matters. The Standard Cereal Company had attained its colossal dimensions through rebates; and he had invented the device! “The only reason we’d sell to Allison would be that we could get more money than by the normal return from our investment.”

The thinly spun treble note began once more, pulsing its timid way among the high, dim arches, as if seeking a lodgment where it might fasten its tiny thread of harmony, and grow into a masterful composition. A little old lady came slowly down the centre aisle of the nave, in rich but modest black, struggling, against her infirmities, to walk with a trace of the erect gracefulness of her bygone youth. Gail, listening raptly to the delicately increasing throb of the music, followed, in abstraction, the slow progress of the little old lady, who seemed to carry with her, for just a moment, a trace of the solemn hush belonging to that perspective of slender columns which spread their gracefully pointed arches up into the groined twilight, where the music hovered until it could gather strength to burst into full song. The little old lady turned her gaze for an instant to the group in the transept, and subconsciously gave the folds of her veil a touch; then she slipped into her pew, down near the altar, and raised her eyes to the exquisite Henri Dupres crucifix. She knelt, and bowed her forehead on her hands.

“I’ve allowed two million for the profit of Market Square Church in dealing with me,” stated Allison, again proffering the envelope which no one made a move to take. “I will not pay a dollar more.”

W. T. Chisholm was suddenly reminded that the vestry had a moral obligation in the matter under discussion. He was president of the Majestic Trust Company, and never forgot that fact.

“To what use would you devote the property of Market Square Church?” he gravely asked.

“The erection of a terminal station for all the municipal transportation in New York,” answered Allison; “subways, elevateds, surface cars, traction lines! The proposition should have the hearty co-operation of every citizen.”

Simple little idea, wasn’t it? Gail had to think successively to comprehend what a stupendous enterprise this was; and the man talked about it as modestly as if he were planning to sod a lawn; more so! Why, back home, if a man dreamed a dream so vast as that, he just talked about it for the rest of his life; and they put a poet’s wreath on his tombstone.

“Now you’re talking sentiment,” retorted stubby-moustached Jim Sargent. “You said, a while ago, that you came here strictly on business. So did we. This is no place for sentiment.”

Rufus Manning, with the tip of his silvery beard in his fingers, looked up into the delicate groining of the apse, where it curved gracefully forward over the head of the famous Henri Dupres crucifix, and he grinned. Gail Sargent was looking contemplatively from one to the other of the grave vestrymen.

“You’re right,” conceded Allison curtly. “Suppose you fellows talk it over by yourselves, and let me know your best offer.”

“Very well,” assented Jim Sargent, with an indifference which did not seem to be assumed. “We have some other matters to discuss, and we may as well thrash this thing out right now. We’ll let you know to-morrow.”

Gail looked at her watch and rose energetically.

“I shall be late at Lucile’s, Uncle Jim. I don’t think I can wait for you.”

“I’m sorry,” regretted Sargent. “I don’t like to have you drive around alone.”

“I’ll be very happy to take Miss Sargent anywhere she’d like to go,” offered Allison, almost instantaneously.

“Much obliged, Allison,” accepted Sargent heartily; “that is, if she’ll go with you.”

“Thank you,” said Gail simply, as she stepped out of the pew.

The gentlemen of the vestry rose as one man. Old Nicholas Van Ploon even attempted to stand gracefully on one leg, while his vest bulged over the back of the pew in front of him.

“I think we’ll have to make you a permanent member of the vestry,” smiled Manning, the patriarch, as he bowed his adieus. “We’ve been needing a brightening influence for some time.”

Willis Cunningham, the thoughtful one, wedged his Vandyke between the heads of Standard Cereal Clark and Banker Chisholm.

“We hope to see you often, Miss Sargent,” was his thoughtful remark.

“I mean to attend services,” returned Gail graciously, looking up into the organ loft, where the organist was making his third attempt at that baffling run in the Bach prelude.

“You haven’t said how you like our famous old church,” suggested the Reverend Smith Boyd with pleasant ease, though he felt relieved that she was going.

The sudden snap in Gail’s eyes fairly scintillated. It was like the shattering of fine glass in the sunlight.

“It seems to be a remarkably lucrative enterprise,” she smiled up at him, and was rewarded by a snort from Uncle Jim and a chuckle from silvery-bearded Rufus Manning. Allison frankly guffawed. The balance of the sedate vestry was struck dumb by the impertinence.

Gail felt the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed steadily on her, and turned to meet them. They were cold. She had thought them blue; but now they were green! She stared back into them for a moment, and a little red spot came into the delicate tint of her oval cheeks; then she turned deliberately to the marvellously beautiful big transept window. It had been designed by the most famous stained-glass artist in the world, and its subject lent itself to a wealth of colour. It was Christ turning the money changers out of the temple!