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

CHAPTER VII

THERE ENTERETH THE SERPENT OF INAPPRECIATION

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

Also was the handsome young rector's parish proud of him; proud of his executive ability as shown in the management of its many organised activities, religious and secular; its Brotherhood of St. Bartholomew, its Men's Club, Women's Missionary a.s.sociation, Guild and Visiting Society, King's Daughters, Sewing School, Poor Fund, and still others; proud of his decorative personality, his impressive oratory and the modern note in his preaching; proud that its ushers must each Sabbath morning turn away many late-comers. Indeed, the whole parish had been born to a new spiritual life since that day when the worship at St.

Antipas had been kept simple to bareness by a stubborn and perverse reactionary. In this happier day St. Antipas was known for its advanced ritual, for a service so beautifully enriched that a new spiritual warmth pervaded the entire parish. The doctrine of the Real Presence was not timidly minced, but preached unequivocally, with dignified boldness.

Also there was a confessional, and the gracious burning of incense. In short, St. Antipas throve, and the grace of the Holy Ghost palpably took possession of its worshippers. The church was become the smartest church in the diocese, and its communicants were held to have a tone.

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

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

It was in this weaving ma.s.s on the walk that the communicants of St.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You say, 'Ah, Doctor!' and shake hands, you know," said this hypercritical observer, "and, ten to one, he says something about St.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, he has often told me so."

"Well?"

"Aunt Bell--I--Oh, _you've_ walked on the street with Allan!"

"To be sure I have!"

"Well!"

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

I met him the other day walking down from Forty-second Street with that stunning-looking Mrs. Wyeth, and he looked as happy and bubbling as a schoolboy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aunt Bell looked sympathetically voluble but wisely refrained from speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's no use trying to make you understand, Aunt Bell--you _can't!_"

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

"Well, what is it, child?"

"Nothing, nothing, nothing, Aunt Bell--it's only what he _is_."

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