Читать книгу The Ball of Fire - George Randolph Chester - Страница 6

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“A conscience must be a nuisance to a rector,” sympathised Gail Sargent, as she walked up the hill beside the Reverend Smith Boyd.

The tall, young rector shifted the thin rope of the sled to his other hand.

“Epigrams are usually more clever than true,” he finally responded, with a twinkle in his eyes. It had been in his mind to sharply defend that charge, but he reflected that it was unwise to assume the speech worth serious consideration. Moreover, he had come to this toboggan party for healthful physical exercise!

“Then you’re guilty of an epigram,” retorted Gail, who was annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd without quite knowing why. “You can’t believe all you are compelled, as a minister, to say.”

“That,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd coldly, “is a matter of interpretation.” He commended himself for his patience, as he proceeded to instruct this mistaken young person. She was a lovable girl, in spite of the many things he found in her of which to disapprove. “The eye of the needle through which the camel was supposed not to be able to pass, was, in reality, a narrow city gate called the Needle’s Eye.”

Gail looked at him with that little smile at the corners of her red lips, eyelids down, curved lashes on her cheeks, and beneath the lashes a sparkle brighter than the moonlight on the snow crystals in the adjoining field.

“It seems to me there was something about wealth in that metaphor,” she observed, her round eyes flashing open as she smiled up at him. “If it was so difficult even in those days for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, how can a rich church hope to enter the spirit of the gospel?”

The Reverend Smith Boyd hastily, and almost roughly, drew her aside, as a long, low bob-sled, accompanied by appropriate screams, came streaking down the hill, and passed them. They both turned and followed its progress down the narrowing white road, to where it curved away in a silver line far at the bottom of a hill. Hills and valleys, and fences and trees, and even a distant stream were covered with the fleecy mantle of winter, while high over head in a sky of blue, hung a round, white moon, which flooded the country-side with mellow light, and strewed upon earth’s fresh robe a wealth of countless sparkling gems.

“This is a wonderful sermon,” mused Gail; then she turned to the rector. She softened toward him, as she saw that he, too, had partaken of the awe and majesty of this scene. He stood straight and tall, his splendidly poised head thrown back, and his gaze resting far off where the hills cut against the sky in tree-clad scallops.

“It is an inspiration,” he told her, with a tone in his vibrant voice which she had not heard before; and for that brief instant these two, between whom there had seemed some instinctive antagonism, were nearer in sympathy than either had thought it possible to be. Then the Reverend Smith Boyd happened to remember something. “The morality or immorality of riches depends upon its use,” he sonorously stated, as he stepped out into the road again, dragging his sled behind him, following the noisy, loitering crowd with the number two bob-sled. “Market Square Church, which is the one I suppose you meant in your comparison with the rich man, intends to devote all the means with which a kind Providence has blessed it, to the glory of God.”

“And the gratification of the billionaire vestry,” she added, still annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd, though she did not know why.

He turned to her almost savagely.

“Have you no sense of reverence?” he demanded.

“For the church, or the creed, or the ministry? Not a particle!” she heartily assured him. “The church, as an instrument for good, has practically ceased to exist. Even charity, the greatest of the three principles upon which the church was originally founded, has been taken away from it, because the secular organisations dispense charity better and more sanely, and while the object is still alive.”

Again the Reverend Smith Boyd drew her out of the road, almost ungently, and unnecessarily in advance of need, to permit a thick man to glide leisurely by, on his stomach on a hand sled. He grinned up at them from under a stubby moustache, and waved a hand at them with a vigour which nearly ran him into a ditch; but a sharp scrape of his toe in the snow, made with a stab the expertness of which had come back to him through forty years, brought him into the path again, and he slid majestically onward, with happy forgetfulness of the dignity belonging to the president of the Towando Valley Railroad and a vestryman of Market Square Church.

“That used to be lots of fun,” remembered Gail, looking after her Uncle Jim in envy.

“Market Square Church has dispensed millions in charity,” the rector felt it his duty to inform her, as they started up the hill again.

“If it’s like our church at home it costs ninety cents to deliver a dime,” she retorted, bristling anew with bygone aggravations. “So long as you can deliver baskets of provisions in person, it is all right, but the minute you let the money out of your sight it filters through too many paid hands. I found this out just before I resigned from our charity committee.”

He looked at her in perplexity. She was so young and so pretty, so charming in the ermine which framed her pink face, so gentle of speech and movement, that her visible self and her incisive mind seemed to be two different creatures.

“Why are you so bitter against the church?” and his tone was troubled, not so much about what she had said, but about her.

“I didn’t know I was,” she confessed, concerned about it herself. “All at once I seem to look on it as an old shoe which should be cast aside. It is so elaborate to do so little good in the world. Morality is on the increase, as any page of history will show.”

“I believe that to be true,” he hastily assured her, glad to be able to agree with her upon something.

“But it is in spite of the church, not because of it,” she immediately added. “You can’t say that there is a tremendous moral influence in a congregation which numbers eight hundred, and sends less than fifty to services. The balance show their devotion to Christianity by a quarterly check.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd felt unfairly hit.

“That is the sorrow of the church,” he sadly confessed; “the lukewarmness of its followers.”

She felt a trace of compunction for him; but why had he gone into the ministry?

“Can you blame them?” she demanded, as much aggrieved as if she had suffered a personal distress. “Not so long ago, the governing body of the church held a convention in which the uppermost thought was this same lukewarmness. It was felt, and acknowledged, that the church was losing its personal hold on its membership, and that something should be done about it; yet that same body progressed no further in this problem than to realise that something should be done about it; and spent hours and hours wrangling over whether banana wine could be used for the sacrament in Uganda, where grapes do not grow, and where every bottle of grape wine carried over the desert represents the life of a man. Of what value is that to religion? How do you suppose Christ would have decided that question?”

The rector flushed as if he had been struck, and he turned to Gail with that cold look in his green eyes.

“That is too deep a subject to discuss here, but if you will permit me, I will take it up with you at the house,” he quietly returned, and there was a dogged compulsion in his tone.

“I shall be highly interested in the defence,” accepted Gail, with an aggravating smile.

There seemed to be but very little to say after that, and they walked silently up the hill together towards the yellow camp fire, fuming inwardly at each other. Near the top of the hill, her ermine scarf came loose at the throat, and, with her numbed hands, she could not locate the little clasp with which it had been held.

“May I help you?” offered the rector, constraining himself to politeness.

“Thank you.” She was extremely sweet about it, and he reached up to perform the courtesy. The rounded column of her neck was white as marble in the moonlight, and, as he sought the clasps, his fingers, drawn from his woollen gloves, touched her warm throat, and they tingled. He started as if he had received an electric shock, and, as he looked into her eyes, a purple mist seemed to spring between them. He mechanically fastened the clasps, though his fingers trembled. “Thank you,” again said Gail, and he did not notice that her voice was unusually low. She went on over to the group gathered around the fire, but the Reverend Smith Boyd stood where she had left him, staring stupidly at the ground. He was in a whirl of bewilderment, amid which there was some unreasoning resentment, but beneath it all there was an inexplicable sadness.

“Just in time for the Palisade Special, Gail,” called Lucile Teasdale.

“I don’t know,” laughed Gail. “I think of going on a private car this trip,” and she sought among the group for distraction from certain oppressive thought. Allison, and Lucile and Ted and Arly, were among the more familiar figures; besides were a cherub-cheeked young lady in a bear skin, to whom Ted Teasdale was pretending to pay assiduous attention; and the thoughtful Willis Cunningham; and Houston Van Ploon, who was a ruddy-faced young fellow with an English moustache, and a perpetual air of having just come from his tailor’s; and a startling Adonis, with pink cheeks and a shining black goatee and a curly moustache, and large, round, black eyes, which were deep, and full of almost anything one might wish to put into them. This astoundingly fascinating gentleman had been proudly introduced as Dick Rodley, by Arlene, early in the evening, with an air which plainly stated that he was a personal discovery for which she gave herself great credit. At present, however, he was warming the slender white hands of Lucile Teasdale. Now he sprang up and came towards Gail.

“The Palisade Special will not start without Miss Sargent,” he declared, bending upon her an ardent gaze, and bestowing upon her a smile which displayed a flash of perfect white teeth.

Gail breathlessly thought him the most dangerously handsome thing she had ever seen, but she missed the foreign accent in him. That would have made him complete.

“I’m sorry that the Palisade Special will be delayed,” she coolly told him, but she tempered the deliberateness of that decision with an upward and sidelong glance, which she was startled to recognise in herself as distinct coquetry. She concluded, however, on reflection, that this was only a just meed which no one could withhold from this resplendent creature.

“You haven’t the heart to refuse,” protested handsome Dick, coming nearer, and again smiling down at her.

“I have a prior claim,” laughed Allison, stepping up and taking her by the arm. “It’s my turn to guide Miss Sargent on the two-passenger sled.”

There was something new about Allison to-night. There was the thrill and the exultation of youth in his voice, and twenty years seemed to have been dropped from his age. There was an intensity about him, too, and also a proprietor-like compulsion, which decided Gail on a certain diversion she had entertained. She was oppressed with men to-night. The world was full of them, and they had closed too nearly around her.

Suddenly she broke away with a laugh, and, taking the two-passenger sled from Smith Boyd, who still stood in preoccupation at the edge of the group, she picked it up and ran with it, and threw herself face forward on it, as she had done when she was a kiddy, and shot down the hill, to the intense disapproval of the Reverend Boyd! Dick Rodley, ever alert in his chosen profession, grabbed a light steel racer from the edge of the bank, and, with a magnificent run, slapped himself on the sled, and darted in pursuit! The rector’s lip curled the barest trace at one corner, but Edward E. Allison, looking down the hill, grinned, and lit a cigar.

“Ted Teasdale, come right over here,” ordered Lucile.

“Can’t,” carelessly returned Ted. “I’m having a serious flirtation with Miss Kenneth.”

“You have to stop, and flirt with me,” Lucile insisted, and going over, she slipped a hand within his sleeve, and passed the other arm affectionately around Marion Kenneth. “Gail stole the ornament.”

“Serves you right,” charged Arly Fosland. “You stole him from me. Come on, Houston, bring out the Palisade Special.”

Houston Van Ploon, who was a brother to all ladies, obediently dragged forward the number two bob-sled, and set its nose at the brow of the hill, and the merry mob piled on.

“Coming Allison?” called Cunningham. “There’s room for you both, Doctor.”

“I don’t think I’ll ride this trip, thanks,” returned Allison, and, as the rector also declined with pleasant thanks, Allison gave the voyagers a hearty push, and walked back to the camp fire.

“I received the ultimatum of your vestry to-day, Doctor Boyd,” observed Allison when they were alone. “Still that eventual fifty million.”

“Well, yes,” returned the rector briskly, and he backed up comfortably to the blaze. He was a different man now. “We discussed your proposition thoroughly, and decided that, in ten years, the property is worth fifty million to you, for the purpose you have in mind. Consequently why take less.”

Allison surveyed him shrewdly for a moment.

“That’s the argument of a bandit,” he remarked. “Why accept all that the prisoner has when his friends can raise a little more?”

“I don’t see the use of metaphor,” retorted the rector, who dealt professionally in it. “Business is business.”

Allison grunted, and flicked his ashes into the fire.

“By George, you’re right,” he agreed. “I’ve been trying to handle you like a church, but now I’m going after you like the business organisation you are.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd reddened. The charge that Market Square Church was a remarkably lucrative enterprise was becoming too general for comfort.

“The vestry has given you their decision,” he returned, standing stiff and straight, with his hands clasped behind him. “You may pay for the Vedder Court tenement property a cash sum which, in ten years, will accrue to fifty million dollars, or you may let it alone,” and his tone was as forcefully crisp as Allison’s, though he could not hide the musical timbre of it.

“I won’t pay that price, and I won’t let the property alone,” Allison snapped back. “The city needs it.”

For a moment the two men looked each other levelly in the eyes. There seemed to have sprang up some new enmity between them. A thick man with a stubby moustache came puffing up to the fire, and sat down on his sled with a thump.

“Splendid exercise,” he gasped, holding his sides. “I think about a week of it would either reduce me to a living skeleton, or kill me.”

“Your vestry’s an ass,” Allison took pleasure in informing him.

“Same to you and many of them,” puffed Jim Sargent. “What’s the trouble with you? Trying to take a business advantage of a church.”

“I’d have a better chance with a Jew,” was Allison’s contemptuous reply.

“Oh, see here, Allison!” remonstrated Jim Sargent seriously. He even rose to his feet to make it more emphatic. “You mustn’t treat Market Square Church with so much indignity.”

“Why not? Market Square Church puts itself in a position to be considered in the light of any other grasping organisation.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd, finding in himself the growth of a most uncloth-like anger, decided to walk away rather than suffer the aggravation which must ensue in this conversation. Consequently, he started down the hill, dragging Jim Sargent’s sled behind him for company. There were no further insults to the church, however.

“Jim, what are the relations of the Towando Valley to the L. and C.?” asked Allison, offering Sargent a cigar.

“Largely paternal,” and the president of the Towando Valley grinned. “We feed it when it’s good, and spank it when it cries.”

“Hold control of the stock?”

“No, only its transportation,” returned Sargent complacently.

“Stock is a good deal scattered, I suppose.”

“Small holdings entirely, and none of the holders proud,” replied Sargent. “It starts no place and comes right back, and the share-holders won’t pay postage to send in their annual proxies.”

“Then the stock doesn’t seem to be worth buying,” observed Allison, with vast apparent indifference.

“Only to piece out a collection,” chuckled Sargent. “I didn’t know you were interested in railroads.”

“I wasn’t a week ago,” and Allison looked out across the starry sky to the tree-scalloped hills. “With the completion of the consolidation of New York’s transportation system, and the building of a big central station, I thought I was through. It seemed a big achievement to gather all these lines to a common centre, like holding them in my hand; to converge four millions of people at one point, to handle them without confusion, and to re-distribute them along the same lines, looked like a life’s work; but now I’m beginning to become ambitious.”

“Oh, I see,” grinned Jim Sargent. “You want to do something you can really call a job. If I remember rightly, you started with an equipment of four horse cars and two miles of rusted rail. What do you want to conquer next?”

Allison glanced down the hill, then back out across the starlit sky. Some new fervor had possessed him to-night which made him a poet, and loosened the tongue which, previous to this, could almost calculate its utterances in percentage.

“The world,” he said.