"I admire your ingenuity. Just a plain rooster-fighting sinner like me would never have thought of making his sin a holy religion. You haven"t studied theology for nothing. I"ll bet you could argue the devil or the Archangel Michael to a standstill on any proposition you"d set your heart on."
The preacher smiled.
"I never saw my course with greater clearness."
"Yes; but a nail in the pilot-house will draw the needle and drive the mightiest ocean greyhound on the rocks with the captain at the wheel dead sure of his course."
"Mark, it"s utterly useless to talk. You and I are miles apart at our starting-point and we get farther with every step. You look at it from the vulgar point of view of the world. What I am doing is a great act of the soul, a breaking of bonds and chains. You see only the body. I am going to lead a crusade that shall so purify and exalt the body that it shall become one with the soul. The freedom of man can only be attained in unfettered fellowship, and this beautiful woman will be with me a comrade priestess to teach the world this sublime truth."
"And will you be the only priest with her in the Temple of Humanity?"
asked the banker, quizzically.
Gordon laughed with insolent a.s.surance.
"In her eyes, yes."
"But other men have eyes."
"Their gaze will not disturb the serenity of our love, because it will be built on oneness of ideal, hope, faith, taste and work."
"And yet dark hair loves the blond, and blue eyes hunger for the brown. It"s an old trick Nature has played before, Frank."
"Well, we are going to show you a miracle, and you are coming with us by and by and be a deacon in this Church of the Son of Man."
Overman drew his straight bushy brow down over his one eye until it looked like the gleam of a lighthouse through the woods, turned his head sideways, peered at his friend and growled:
"Well, you are a fool!"
"I have faith that will remove mountains."
"You"ll need it. I"ve been waiting for a church in New York broad enough to invite the devil to join. I"ll come when it"s ready."
"Good. We"ll give you a welcome."
Overman grunted, and gazed into the fire with his single eye, frowning and twisting the muscles of his mouth into a sneer.
CHAPTER XVI
THE PARTING
The night before the day Gordon had fixed for their final parting Ruth slept but little. The task of gathering his things scattered about the house was harder than she had hoped.
Over each little trinket that spoke its message of the tender intimacy of married life she had lingered and cried. She wished to keep everything.
At last she placed the clothes in his trunk, his collars, cuffs, cravats and such odds and ends as he would need at once, and the rest she packed away carefully in bureau drawers and locked them up.
His slippers and dressing-gowns she knew he would want, but she made up her mind she would keep them. The slippers were an old-fashioned pattern with quaint Spanish embroidery worked around the edges. She had made the first pair before they were married, with her girl"s heart fluttering with new-found happiness. She had allowed him no other kind since their marriage. This bit of sentiment she had guarded even in the darkest days of the past year"s estrangement.
She had worked each pair with her own hand.
His dressing-gowns, in which he often studied at home in her room late on Sat.u.r.day nights, she had always made for him, changing their designs from time to time as her fancy had led her.
Around these two articles of his wardrobe her very heart-strings seemed woven.
She placed them in his trunk once, telling herself through her tears:
"He may think of me when he sees them."
Then the lightning flashed across the clouds in her eyes.
"She might touch them! Let her make them for him after her own devil"s fancy!"
She took them out, kissed them and packed them away. His picture she took down carefully from the walls, his photographs from her mantel and bureau and dresser. The life-sized one she locked in a closet and packed the others with his belongings she meant to keep.
On a wedding certificate, set in a quaint old gold frame, she looked long and tenderly. She took it down from its place over her bureau, where it had hung for years, and brushed the dust from the back. On its broad white margins he had written a poem to her on the birth of their first baby. He had sent her yards of rhymes during their courtship, but this was a poem. Every line was wet with his tears, and every thought throbbed with the sweetest music of his soul wrought to its highest tension of feeling.
She read it over and over again and cried as though her heart would break as a thousand tender memories came stealing back from their early married life.
"Oh, dear G.o.d!" she sobbed. "How could he have felt that--and he did feel it--and now desert me!"
She sat for an hour with this framed emblem of her happiness and her sorrow in her hands, dreaming of their past.
She was a girl again in old Hampton, Virginia, her heart all a-quiver over a ball at the Hygeia, where she was to meet a guest, a distinguished young preacher resting for the summer just from his divinity course. He had seen her in the crowd at the hotel and begged a friend to introduce him. She was going to meet him in the parlours, dressed in the splendour of her ballroom dress that night, and conquer this handsome young giant. And from the moment they met, she was the conquered, and he the conqueror.
The incense of their honeymoon in a village of southern Indiana during his first pastorate, when the wonder of love made storm days bright with splendour and clothed in beauty the meanest clod of earth, stole over her soul--each memory added to her pain, and yet they were sweet. She hugged them to her heart.
"They are all mine at least!" she sighed. "And I am glad I have lived them."
At two o"clock she went into the nursery and looked at the sleeping children. She bent over the cradle of the boy. He was dreaming, and a smile was playing about the corners of his lips.
He was so like Gordon, with his little mouth twitching in dreamy laughter, she fell on her knees, and buried her face in her delicate tapering hands, crying:
"How can I bear it!"
She placed her arms on the rail of the cradle and gazed at him tenderly.
"Lord, keep him clean and pure, and whatever he may do in life, may he never break a woman"s heart!" she softly prayed.
Into her first-born"s face she looked long and in silence. How like her, and how like him, and how marvelous the miracle of this union of flesh and blood and spirit in a living soul! Lucy was growing more like her every day. She could see and hear herself in her ways and voice, until she would laugh aloud sometimes at the memory of her own childhood. And yet to see her very self growing into the startling image of her lover who was deserting her cut anew with stinging power.