"Religion, I think, should be everybody"s," he answered quietly.
She made no reply. And he entered, as into another world, the circular arbour in which the pergola ended, so complete in contrast was its atmosphere to that of the house. The mansion he had long since grown to recognize as an expression of the personality of its owner, but this cla.s.sic bower was as remote from it as though it were in Greece. He was sensitive to beauty, yet the beauty of the place had a perplexing quality, which he felt in the perfect curves of the marble bench, in the marble basin br.i.m.m.i.n.g to the tip with clear water,--the surface of which, flecked with pink petals, mirrored the azure sky through the leafy network of the roof. In one green recess a slender Mercury hastily adjusted his sandal.
Was this, her art, the true expression of her baffling personality? As she had leaned back in the corner of the automobile she had given him the impression of a languor almost Oriental, but this had been startlingly dispelled at the lunch-table by the revelation of an animation and a vitality which had magically transformed her. But now, as under the spell of a new encompa.s.sment of her own weaving, she seemed to revert to her former self, sinking, relaxed, into a wicker lounge beside the basin, one long and shapely hand in the water, the other idle in her lap. Her eyes, he remarked, were the contradiction in her face.
Had they been larger, and almond-shaped, the illusion might have been complete. They were neither opaque nor smouldering,--but Western eyes, amber-coloured, with delicately stencilled rays and long lashes. And as they gazed up at him now they seemed to reflect, without disclosing the flitting thoughts behind them. He felt antagonism and attraction in almost equal degree--the situation transcended his experience.
"You don"t intend to change this?" he asked, with an expressive sweep of his hand.
"No," she said, "I"ve always liked it. Tell me what you feel about it."
He hesitated.
"You resent it," she declared.
"Why do you say that?" he demanded quickly.
"I feel it," she answered calmly, but with a smile.
""Resent" would scarcely be the proper word," he contended, returning her smile, yet hesitating again.
"You think it pagan," she told him.
"Perhaps I do," he answered simply, as though impressed by her felicitous discovery of the adjective.
Alison laughed.
"It"s pagan because I"m pagan, I suppose."
"It"s very beautiful--you have managed to get an extraordinary atmosphere," he continued, bent on doing himself an exact justice. "But I should say, if you pressed me, that it represents to me the deification of beauty to the exclusion of all else. You have made beauty the Alpha and Omega."
"There is nothing else for me," she said.
The coffee-tray arrived and was deposited on a wicker table beside her.
She raised herself on an elbow, filled his cup and handed it to him.
"And yet," he persisted, "from the manner in which you spoke at the table--"
"Oh, don"t imagine I haven"t thought? But thinking isn"t--believing."
"No," he admitted, with a touch of sadness, "you are right. There were certain comments you made on the Christian religion--"
She interrupted him again.
"As to the political side of it, which is Socialism, so far as I can see. If there is any other side, I have never been able to discover it. It seems to me that if Christians were logical, they should be Socialists. The brotherhood of man, cooperation--all that is Socialism, isn"t it? It"s opposed to the principle of the survival of the fittest, which so many of these so-called Christians practise. I used to think, when I came back from Paris, that I was a Socialist, and I went to a lot of their meetings in New York, and to lectures. But after a while I saw there was something in Socialism that didn"t appeal to me, something smothering,--a forced cooperation that did not leave one free. I wanted to be free, I"ve been striving all my life to be free," she exclaimed pa.s.sionately, and was silent an instant, inspecting him. "Perhaps I owe you an apology for speaking as I did before a clergyman--especially before an honest one."
He pa.s.sed over the qualification with a characteristic smile.
"Oh, if we are going to shut our ears to criticism we"d better give up being clergymen," he answered. "I"m afraid there is a great deal of truth in what you said."
"That"s generous of you!" she exclaimed, and thrilled him with the tribute. Nor was the tribute wholly in the words: there had come spontaneously into her voice an exquisite, modulated note that haunted him long after it had died away....
"I had to say what I thought," she continued earnestly; "I stood it as long as I could. Perhaps you didn"t realize it, but my father was striking at me when he referred to your sermon, and spiritual control--and in other things he said when you were talking about the settlement-house. He reserves for himself the right to do as he pleases, but insists that those who surround him shall adopt the subserviency which he thinks proper for the rest of the world. If he were a Christian himself, I shouldn"t mind it so much."
Hodder was silent. The thought struck him with the force of a great wind.
"He"s a Pharisee," Alison went on, following the train of her thought.
"I remember the first time I discovered that--it was when I was reading the New Testament carefully, in the hope of finding something in Christianity I might take hold of. And I was impressed particularly by the scorn with which Christ treated the Pharisees. My father, too, if he had lived in those days, would have thought Christ a seditious person, an impractical, fanatical idealist, and would have tried to trip him up with literal questions concerning the law. His real and primary interest--is in a social system that benefits himself and his kind, and because this is so, he, and men like him, would have it appear that Christianity is on the side of what they term law and order. I do not say that they are hypocritical, that they reason this out. They are elemental; and they feel intuitively that Christianity contains a vital spark which, if allowed to fly, would start a conflagration beyond their control. The theologians have helped them to cover the spark with ashes, and naturally they won"t allow the ashes to be touched, if they can help it."
She lay very still.
The rector had listened to her, at first with amazement, then with more complicated sensations as she thus dispa.s.sionately discussed the foremost member of his congregation and the first layman of the diocese, who was incidentally her own father. In her masterly a.n.a.lysis of Eldon Parr, she had brought Hodder face to face with the naked truth, and compelled him to recognize it. How could he attempt to refute it, with honesty?
He remembered Mr. Parr"s criticism of Alison. There had been hardness in that, though it were the cry of a lacerated paternal affection. In that, too, a lack of comprehension, an impotent anger at a visitation not understood, a punishment apparently unmerited. Hodder had pitied him then--he still pitied him. In the daughter"s voice was no trace of resentment. No one, seemingly, could be farther removed from him (the rector of St. John"s) in her opinions and views of life, than Allison Parr; and yet he felt in her an undercurrent, deep and strong, which moved him strangely, strongly, irresistibly; he recognized a pa.s.sionate desire for the truth, and the courage to face it at any cost, and a capacity for tenderness, revealed in flashes.
"I have hurt you," she exclaimed. "I am sorry."
He collected himself.
"It is not you who have hurt me," he replied. "Reflections on the contradictions and imperfections of life are always painful. And since I have been here, I have seen a great deal of your father."
"You are fond of him!"
He hesitated. It was not an ordinary conversation they were dealing with realities, and he had a sense that vital issues were at stake. He had, in that moment, to make a revaluation of his sentiments for the financier--to weigh the effect of her indictment.
"Yes," he answered slowly, "I am fond of him. He has shown me a side of himself, perhaps, that other men have not seen,--and he is very lonely."
"You pity him." He started at her word. "I guessed that from an expression that crossed your face when we were at the table. But surely you must have observed the incongruity of his relationship with your Church! Surely, in preaching as you did this morning against materialism, individualism, absorption in the pursuit of wealth, you must have had my father in mind as the supreme example! And yet he listened to you as serenely as though he had never practised any of these things!
"Clergymen wonder why Christianity doesn"t make more progress to-day; well, what strikes the impartial observer who thinks about the subject at all, as one reason, is the paralyzing inconsistency of an alliance between those who preach the brotherhood of man and those who are opposed to it. I"ve often wondered what clergymen would say about it, if they were frank--only I never see any clergymen."
He was strongly agitated. He did not stop--strangely enough--to reflect how far they had gone, to demand by what right she brought him to the bar, challenged the consistency of his life. For she had struck, with a ruthless precision, at the very core of his trouble, revealed it for what it was.
"Yes," he said, "I can see how we may be accused of inconsistency, and with much justice."
His refusal to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt at extenuation could have done. Perhaps, in that moment, her quick instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental suffering he strove to conceal. Contrition shone in her eyes.
"I ought not to have said that," she exclaimed gently. "It is so easy for outsiders to criticize those who are sincere--and I am sure you are.
We cannot know all the perplexities. But when we look at the Church, we are puzzled by that--which I have mentioned--and by other things."
"What other things?" he demanded.
She hesitated in her turn.
"I suppose you think it odd, my having gone to church, feeling as I do,"
she said. "But St. John"s is now the only place vividly a.s.sociated with my mother. She was never at home here, in this house. I always go at least once when I am out here. And I listened to your sermon intently."
"Yes."
"I wanted to tell you this: you interested me as I had not been interested since I was twenty, when I made a desperate attempt to become a Christian--and failed. Do you know how you struck me? It was as a man who actually had a great truth which he was desperately trying to impart, and could not. I have not been in a church more than a dozen times in the last eight years, but you impressed me as a man who felt something--whatever it is."