CHAPTER XIII — A BROKEN HEART-STRING
The press next morning devoted entire pages to the sensation in the Pilgrim Church. Portraits of Gordon, his life and theories, sketches of the extraordinary scene in his pulpit, a full stenographic report of his address which he had carefully corrected at midnight, portraits of his wife and children, pictures of the old church, its reading-rooms, clubhouses and coffee-house, were exploited.
His letter of resignation and the gift of a millon dollars for building a vast Temple of Humanity, that would be a forum of free thought in the heart of the metropolis, were the subject of separate editorials in every paper.
Speculation as to the identity of this mysterious millionaire, who had apparently deserted the army of entrenched wealth to support this daring young revolutionist, filled columns. But it was all the wildest guessing. Many of the greater magnates hastened to deny with emphasis that they were in any way connected with the scheme. Several of them denounced the preacher as a dangerous man whose wild theories threatened social order. Gordon breathed a sigh of relief when he found not a line hinting at Kate Ransom’s part in the drama or linking his name with hers.
After two o’clock, when he finished his last conference with the reporters and his friends, he went to a hotel where he was not known. He spent the rest of the night pacing the floor fighting to a finish the battle between the memory of Ruth and his children and his fierce new passion.
Just before dawn he lay down and fell asleep, dreaming of Kate. The battle between the flesh and the spirit had ended.
He slept until noon, ate a hasty breakfast, called at the Ransom house a moment, and hurried to his home.
His wife had read the morning papers with increasing amazement at the sensation created, and a sense of impending tragedy began to crush her. For hours she had been walking back and forth from her window watching for his approach, until now she dreaded to see him.
At the sound of his footstep she recalled the fact that she was the judge and he the culprit in the scene to be enacted. She had demanded an explanation of the meaning of the meeting with this woman, and she would have it. If his excuse were good she would be generous in her love and beg him to begin once more their old life, even if she threw the last shred of pride to the winds and made herself his veriest slave. And yet her heart misgave her. She felt herself lost and ruined before the battle began, but determined to play her part bravely.
She watched him over the banisters as he stepped into the hall and greeted the children with unusual tenderness.
He took Lucy’s little form up and placed her arms around his neck.
“Now hug me long, and hard, and kiss me sweet,” he whispered.
The child squeezed his neck and, placing her hands on his cheeks, softly kissed his lips and eyes as she had often seen her mother do. He ran his hand gently through her brown curls that seemed a perfect mixture of her mother’s and his own, and Ruth thought his hand trembled as he kissed her again.
“I never saw you quite so beautiful, my baby, as this morning,” he said, as he placed her on the floor.
When he entered the room upstairs Ruth had recovered her composure and stood waiting, her petite figure drawn to its full height, her anxious face unusually thin, her eyes, set in the dark rings of a sleepless night, looking blacker and stormier than ever in the shadows of her disheveled hair.
“Sorry I could not come sooner, Ruth,” he began, with evident embarrassment. “But I did not get to sleep until just before day, and I was so exhausted I slept until noon.”
“Let us waste no words,” said the soft, round voice. “I have waited long; I am waiting still for ycur explanation. Why was that woman in your study alone with you last night at half-past ten o’clock?”
“You wish to know the whole truth?”
“I demand it.”
“Very well,” he replied deliberately. “The immediate reason is a secret of great importance, I must ask you to guard it sacredly.”
“I’ve kept a dark one in my soul. You have had no cause to complain.”
“The morning papers are full of wild speculation as to the millionaire who gave that immense sum to build the Temple. Miss Ransom gave the money.”
“Impossible!” she gasped.
“So I thought at first. A lawyer came in the afternoon and told me of the gift without a hint of its author. In answer to a request on a card asking that I inform her of the results of my appeal, I called at her house—-”
“Before you called at your own or informed your wife,” she interrupted with bitterness.
“Yes; you have ceased to care about rny work. But there was another and more urgent reason why I called,”
“Doubtless!” she cried impatiently.
“When the import of this gift fully dawned on me, the fulfilment of my grandest hopes in the very moment of defeat (for the popular subscription was a failure), I was overwhelmed with gratitude to God. I fell on my knees and thanked Him. And then, Ruth—”
He paused and looked at her wistfully in pity for the little weak figure that would reel beneath the blow of his words.
“And then what?” she asked quickly.
Gordon lowered his chin and rested it on his hand, while a dreamy tone came into his voice, softening it to its lowest notes, and a trance-like look overspread his face.
“And then I recalled that I had been deceiving you and myself and another. I faced for the first time honestly the fact that I was madly in love with a woman not my wife—”
Ruth went white, gave an inarticulate groan, staggered and sank into a chair near him, sobbing in agony.
“Oh! Frank, for the sake of Jesus, the friend of the weak, who loved little children, whose name you have so often spoken, have mercy on me! Do not tell me any more. I am only a woman—I cannot bear it!”
“But the truth is best, Ruth. You must hear it,” he went on rapidly. “I asked God to forgive me for the wrong I had done you and her. I said I would tear that love out of my soul if it killed me, and be true to my marriage vow. I went there to tell her this and ask her to put the ocean between us. I found that she loved me even as I loved her, and she promised. As I started to leave the house, never to enter it again, I saw the card of the lawyer on her table, and the truth flashed over me that she had made this sacrifice of her fortune—greater than I had dreamed—for me and my work, and that because of this I was leaving her forever. It was more than I could bear or ask her to bear. I faced anew the facts. Our love has grown cold. We are no longer congenial. Your ways have ceased to be mine. It is wrong to love one woman and live with another. We must separate.”
“No, no, no, no, Frank, dear, my husband, my love, my own. Not this. You do not mean it!” she groaned, as she sank to the floor, buried her face in her arms and stretched out her hand until her tapering fingers rested on his broad foot.
He bent and took her hand as though to lift her.
Suddenly the fever of her hot fingers trembling with overpowering passion, the moisture of her hand, and the tremor of her convulsed body swept his memory with the pain and rapture of his hour with Kate.
Still holding her fingers, he slipped his watch from his pocket with the other hand and glanced quickly at its face to see if it were time for his return to the Ransom house.
“Come, Ruth, this is very painful to me. You must not humiliate yourself so. You have pride and the heritage of noble blood.”
She sprang to her feet and stared at him, with infinite yearning in her eyes, gave a faint cry, half anguish, half despair, and threw herself into his arms, holding him with passionate violence while she smothered his lips and eyes with kisses.
He attempted gently to draw her arms from his neck.
“No, you shall not,” she cried, holding him convulsively. “I will not let you go. You are my husband—my own, my love, the hero of my girl’s dreams, the father of my babies. I have no pride. I will do anything for you if you will only love me.”
“But, Ruth, if I have ceased to love you—”
“Don’t, don’t say it!” she shrieked, placing her hand on his lips. “I will not hear it. You do love me. This woman has lured you with her devil’s beauty, and thrown her spell over your baser nature. Ah, Frank, dear, tell me that you love me! Lie to me as meaner men lie to their women. Such a lie I’ll hold an honour before the awful shame of desertion. You cannot humiliate me so. See, dear, I am at your feet. Have mercy on me. Do not ask me to bear more than I can endure. Am I not the mother of your children?”
Gordon frowned and withdrew her arms from his neck.
“All this is very painful, Ruth. You cannot mean it. You know I have tried to be honest. I hate a lie. I could not tell one if I tried. You cannot love me and ask this infamy. I could never lift up my head again as a leader and teacher of men and know I was a wilful liar.”
The little figure shivered.
“But, Frank, I can’t give you up. It was the touch of your hand, the music of your voice that first awoke my woman’s soul. You are my mate. You cannot know the young mother-wonder, pain and joy that thrilled my heart as I first bent over Lucy’s face, your dear eyes in hers smiling at me. Our very flesh became one in Nature’s miracle of love.”
“And yet our lives have somehow drifted apart, Ruth.”
“But not so far, dear, as this woman has made you believe,” she answered tenderly. “I have been selfish and resentful, but I will make it all up. I will lift up my head and be cheerful—live for you, work for you, think only of you, ask nothing for myself but only your presence and your love.”
“But if I have given it to another—”
Again she put her hand on his lips.
“But you have not. It is madness. You could not forget our life. Last night I lay alone in silence, with wide-open eyes, dreaming it all over again. This woman I know is more beautiful than I—three years younger; her hair is gold, mine the raven’s. She is fair and full and tall, and I am dark and small; but, Frank, dear, love is more than eyes and hair and lips and form. We have been made one in our flesh and blood and inmost soul. There is no other man than you for me. There is no music save your voice.”
“Yet, if you feel this for me, and I thus wait in love on another, how can I live the lie?”
“Can you forget the sunlit days of our past?” she pleaded wistfully. “When you lay on the sands of the beach in old Virginia and held my hand while I read to you, idly dreaming through that wonderful summer before our first-born came sailing into port from God’s blue sea! You said I was beautiful then. And you were so tender and gracious in your strength. No other woman can ever be to you this first girl-mother.”
Her voice melted into a sob. She tried to go on and bit her swollen lips.
Then she rose quietly, and walked to the window and looked down at the city below, whose roar had drowned the music of her life.
He sat silent, waiting for her to regain her strength. He knew that he had the power of hypnotic suggestion over her in his iron will, and that she was beginning to recognise the inevitable.
She turned and faced him again, the hungry fires in her eyes burning with mystic radiance. A tiny stream of blood ran down from her lip and stood in the dimple of her chin. She drew a delicate lace handkerchief from her bosom and wiped the blood away until it ceased to flow. And then in low accents she said:
“You are going to leave me, my love. I feel the cold chill on my heart. It is God’s will; I bow to it. One look into your dear eyes, one last embrace, one farewell kiss, and you will be gone. A little gift I will make you in this, the saddest, lowliest hour my soul has ever known. This handkerchief, stained with blood from lips you have kissed so tenderly in the past—that bled to-day because I tried to keep back the cries of a broken heart. I ask that you keep this as a token of my love.”
She handed it to him and Gordon placed it in his pocket with a sigh, brushing a tear from his own eyes.
CHAPTER XIV — THE VOICE OF THE SIREN
Gordon left the house with a lingering look at Ruth’s window and turned his face toward Gramercy Park, where another woman was waiting for his footstep.
He had suffered intensely in the scene with his wife. He did not believe it possible that she retained such power over him. He drew a deep breath of relief that it was over. Her pride would come to the rescue; for he knew that with her tenderness she combined strength, and with her delicacy, supreme energy.
The exaltation of his great victory of yesterday welled within him and drowned the sense of pain. It had been the most momentous day of his life. Visions of his Temple with gorgeous dome of gold—rising in the sky from its pile of gleaming marble rose before his fancy. He could hear the peal of the grand organ, the swell of the chorus choir, and the response from five thousand eager faces before him. He was speaking with inspiration as never before. He was leading not a forlorn hope against overwhelming odds, but a triumphant host of free, godlike men and women to certain victory.
He thought of the love that filled the heart of the woman to whom he was hurrying, that she should do this unheard of thing while yet breathing the breath of the capital of Mammon.
And then there stole over him, as oil on slumbering fires, the memory of her kisses, the melting languor of her eyes, the odour of her hair, the fever of her creamy flesh, until his senses reeled as drunk with wine. A smile played about his lips; he quickened his pace, lifted his head high, his nostrils dilated wide; he looked dreamily over the housetops into the sky and saw only the face of a woman.
He was in the grip of superhuman impulses. In the quickened throb of his heart and the rush of his blood was the sweep of subconscious forces of nature playing their role in the cosmic drama of all sentient life, laughing at man’s laws, making and unmaking the history of races and worlds.
He was justifying his desires now in his new-found Social philosophy, which he had studied closely since Overman’s suggestion of its scope.
He knew instinctively that between these elemental impulses and the Moral Law there was war. He would reconcile them by leading a revolution that should decree a new basis for the Moral Law itself. He would make these very subconscious forces the expression of the highest Moral Law. It suddenly flashed over him that this was the key to the paradox of life. He would be the prophet of the new era, and this beautiful woman his comrade in leadership in the Social Revolution it must bring.
His face flushed with the new enthusiasm, and the glorious autumn day about him seemed one with his spirit. The sky was cloudless with fresh breezes sweeping over the seas from the south.
When he stepped to the downtown platform his eye wandered up and down Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue and lingered on rivers of women, below.
His own drama, his million-dollar gift, the enormous sensation it had made in the morning press, had not produced a ripple on this swirling tide of flesh. They crowded the windows filled with feathers and hats, elbowed and jostled one another on the pavements, pushed and squeezed and trampled each other’s feet and skirts fighting for standing room around the Monday bargain counters, oblivious of the existence of the spiritual world, church, God, or devil.
Again the ceaseless roar of the city, calm and fierce as the sea, one with its eternity of life, stunned him with its immensity and its indifference. He felt himself once more but an atom lost in the surging tides that beat on these stone pavements, worn by the surge of myriads dead and waiting for the throb of hosts unborn. What did they care? If he were to drop dead that moment, in the morning of his manhood, with the shout of victory on his lips, they would not lift an eye from their gaze on hat or ribbon to watch his funeral cortege trot to the cemetery. A brief obituary and he would be forgotten.
“After all,” he mused, “Nature will have her way about this old world and its destiny. Self-development is the first law of life, not self-effacement.”
His brow clouded for a moment as he recalled Kate’s strange reserve and shrinking at his morning visit. Would she, womanlike, at the last moment contradict herself and withhold the full surrender of life? It was impossible, and yet he felt a vague fear. At any rate, he had burned the bridges behind. His way was clear. He would bring to bear every power he possessed to win her, and in the vanity of his powerful manhood he laughed with the certainty of victory.
When he greeted Kate and bent to kiss her she drew back, blushed and firmly said:
“No; we have had our moments of madness.”
And the man smiled.
“I mean it,” she said, shaking her head.
“You will change your mind. It’s a woman’s way. Those moments of bliss, so intense it was pain, when our souls and bodies met in a kiss, have made a new world for you and me.”
“But we will keep ourselves pure and unspotted,” she answered slowly. “All night I fought this battle alone. Our love is a hopeless tragedy.”
“It shall not be so for you, my shining one.”
“There are others,” she said, nervously clasping her hands, “whose lives are linked with ours. The face of your wife I saw last night will forever haunt me with its pathos. I’ve seen your children once—so like you, and yet so like her.”
“Even so. Life has no meaning now except that you are mine and I am yours.”
“But may you not be mine in a nobler way than the cheap surrender to our senses? We can love and suffer and wait. You love me. It is enough.”
“But, Kate, my dear, there can be no middle course between right and wrong, a lie and the truth.”
She fixed on him an intense look.
“Have you told her?”
“Yes, and we have separated as man and wife. She leaves for Florida for the winter. She has agreed at my request to secure a divorce, and you and I will marry under the new forms of Social freedom. Our union will be a prophecy of the revolution that shall redeem society.”
“You are doing a great wrong,” she protested, her full red lips drawn with pain. “When I think of your wife and children, of her tears and reproaches, I am sick with fear.”
“Perfect love will cast out fear. The world is large. The soul is large. Lift up your head and be yourself. You said to me in this room once you were not afraid.”
“Yes; I had not kissed you then, or felt the bliss and agony of your strong arms about me. Now, I am afraid of you”—her voice sank to a tense whisper—“and I am afraid of myself!”
He seized her hand.
“You will take the risk. You are cast in such a mould,” he said, with ringing assurance. “You are the chosen one, my dauntless comrade in a holy crusade. We will call womanhood from enslavement to form, ceremony and tradition, in which the brute nature of man has bound her, out and up into her larger self, the mate and equal of man.”
She shook her head, and her hair began to fall in waving ringlets about her forehead, temples and neck.
“I am afraid. I cannot permit this sacrifice on your part. You must break with society, your friends, your father, your past, your wife and children. I must brave the sneers of gossip and the tongue of slander. It will destroy your work and end your career.”
“It will give it grander scope. Back of the dead forms of the age, the living heart of a new life is beating. It will burst its bounds as surely as the dead limbs in that park will in spring put on their shimmering satin which Nature is now weaving in her mills beneath the sod. You and I will open the doors of the soul and body to a new and wider life. And, after all, the body is the soul. I know it as I drink the madness of your beauty.”
“I do not fear the world so much, I shrink from striking a woman a mortal blow. I know what it is to love now,” she insisted sadly.
“Ruth and I have grown out of each other’s life. Besides, you do not know her. Beneath her little form are caged powers you have not guessed,” he replied, with a curious smile. “I groan and bellow in pain until you can hear me a mile. It is my way. She can take her place on the cold slab of a surgeon’s table, feel the crash of steel through nerve and muscle and artery without a groan. I might rave, commit suicide or murder in a tempest of passion, but mark my word, she will lift her lithe figure erect and, with soft, even footstep, go her way.”
He said this with a ring of tender pride, as though she were his child about whom he was boasting.
“I believe you love her still,” Kate said, flushing with a look of surprise.
“You know her love could not live in the fires with which my eyes are consuming you,” he said with intensity.
She lowered her gaze and glanced uneasily about as though afraid of him.
“Must the strength of manhood be forever throttled by the impulses and mistakes of youth? Great changes in society are impending. You have felt it. The whole world is trembling at their coming. Changes in the forms of marriage must come that shall give scope for our highest development. I ask you to enter with me into this new world as a comrade pioneer and priestess. We will enter into a marriage so free, so spontaneous no chains shall gall it; and yet in the breadth of its freedom so sweet, so strong, so harmonious it will be a sublime revelation to the world.”
“And you think me fit for such priesthood?” she asked. “There are hidden fires beneath this form you deem so fair. I have never known restraint except in the willing slavery of your love. You do not know me—I warn you. I did not know myself until I felt the mad rush of blood from my heart in your arms yesterday. I am afraid of this woman I met for the first time in the wild joy of your kiss.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” he laughed, springing to his feet and striding toward her.
She trembled at his approach, but did not protest except with a helpless look in her violet eyes.
He stood for a moment towering over her, his feet braced apart, his big hands fiercely locked, his wide chest heaving with the exultant joy of the mastery of her life, his steel-gray eyes sparkling with the insolence of strength.
“We were born for one another,” he said, in low, burning tones. “It was for me you were waiting. Lo! I am here, and you are mine. In you I have seen the ideal that haunts every full-grown man’s soul, of comradeship in every work, sympathy with every hope, the glory of a perfect body, and perfect faith with perfect freedom.”
“And you see all this in me?” she asked earnestly.
“Yes. You are my affinity, nerve answering nerve, thought echoing thought. In our union I see a love so strong, of such utter surrender, of such devotion of intellect, such mystic enthusiasm and physical joy, its waves must break in ecstasy on our souls forever.”
She arose with a sigh, looked appealingly at him, and her lips mechanically said:
“It is wrong.”
But the man saw the flash of unutterable love in her eyes and the tender smile about her full lips; and laughing aloud, he took her deliberately in his arms.
He kissed a tear from her lashes. A tremor shook her splendid form, she closed her eyes, breathing deeply, slipped her arms around his neck and sighed:
“My darling!”
CHAPTER XV — GOEST THOU TO SEE A WOMAN?
Again Gordon was seated in Overman’s library and his single eye was asking some uncomfortable questions.
“I sent for you, Frank, because I discovered by accident, in the office of a newspaper of which I am a stockholder, that some curious things are going on between you and a young woman of your congregation. I put two and two together, and I’ve guessed the secret of your Temple. There’s more behind all this than religious enthusiasm. That gift was not laid on God’s altar, but on the altar of one of his little images here below. Out with it. You can’t fool me.”
“Well, your guess is correct. She gave the money. I love her and she loves me. Ruth will go South for the winter, and we have separated. A divorce will be obtained in due time, and I will marry Miss Ransom under the new forms of Social Freedom, and you will be my best man.”
“Not on your life,” Overman slowly growled, bringing his enormous jaws together and twisting the muscles of his mouth upward as though he smelled something.
“Can’t stand the rustle of a woman’s dress?”
“Oh, I might survive. You know they say the only really happy people at a wedding are the old bachelors.”
“Then why not?”
“I draw the line at the progressive harem idea.”
“And a bachelor?” Gordon sneered.
Overman nodded. “Many things may be forgiven sinners, but a bishop must be the husband of one wife.”
“I’m not a bishop. I’m a man. I ask no quarter of my enemies.”
“You have but one enemy. You can see him in the mirror any time.”
“It’s funny to hear you preach!”
The banker bent forward.
“Frank, you’re joking. You don’t mean to tell me that your Socialist poppy plant has borne its opium fruit so soon? That you are going to desert that charming little woman, shy, timid and tremulous, with her great soulful eyes, the bride of your youth, the mother of your babes, and take up with another woman, just as any ordinary cur has done now and then for the past four thousand years?”
Gordon winced.
“No. I am going to form a union with this beautiful woman which shall be a prophecy and a propaganda of the freedom of the race, when comrade life shall forget the ancient fears, each shall be free to find and love his own, love be loosed from tragedy, doubt or moan, each life be its own, original and masterful, each man a god, arrayed and beautiful!”
Overman laughed softly.
“So fine as that? You’re great on the frills. You have dressed it up nicely. But when two of your man-gods, arrayed and beautiful, get their eyes, set on the same woman-god, still more beautiful, arrayed or unarrayed, you’ll hear the rattle of the police wagon in the streets of Heaven, with the ambulance close behind.”
The banker grinned and fixed his eye on his friend with a quizzical look.
“Don’t be a monkey,” Gordon scowled.
“Why not? You propose to go back to forest life.”
“I propose to make human society a vast brotherhood,” the preacher cried, with a wave of his arm.
“Well, don’t forget that Cain killed his brother Abel for less than a woman’s smile.”
“Society is lost unless some great upheaval shall clear the rubbish and we build new foundations on truth and fellowship and freedom.”
Overman put his hand on Gordon’s knee.
“Frank, I’m a godless, crusty bachelor, but I read history. Destroy the integrity of the family and the salt of the earth is lost. The whole thing will rot.”
“But I propose to purify and glorify the home its life by building it on love.”
“Your dream’s a fake and its world peopled with fools.”
“Love must conquer all,” the dreamer insisted.
“And to do it, Frank, it must begin at home. You are blinded by a woman’s beauty.”
“No; I love her with the one master passion of manhood. Such love is itself the highest expression of life.”
“Confound you,” snapped Overman, “love as many women as you please, but don’t desert your wife and children. It’s too vulgar. I’m ashamed of you.”
“I will not live a lie,” Gordon said, with emphasis.
“Strange madness. I urge you to tell a tiny little polite lie and save your wife and children. You’re too good to lie, so you kill your wife, proclaim an insane crusade of lust, and call it a religion!”
“We can’t control the beat of our hearts,” was the dreamy reply.
“No, you can’t; but you can control the stroke of your big, blue-veined fist! You have struck the mother of your children with your brute claws. It’s a mean, low thing to do, call it by as many high names as you please. Love as many women as you like, but for decency’s sake—can’t you honour your wife with a polite lie?”
“It’s not in me to lie, or to love but one woman.”
The banker’s massive shoulders went up and his bushy brows lifted.
“You’ll end with a dozen, and it’s such a stupid old story. You think the performance an original drama in which you are playing a star role. It’s as old as the brute beneath the skin of your big hairy hand. Alexander could conquer the world, but he died in drunken revelry with a worthless woman. Caesar and Mark Antony forgot the Roman Empire for the smile of Cleopatra. Frederick the Great became a puppet in the hands of a ballet dancer. She spoke and he obeyed. Conde, in the meridian of his splendid manhood, the pride and glory of France, sacrificed his family, his fortune and his friends for an adventuress, who murdered him. Charles Stewart Parnell, the uncrowned king of Ireland, forgot his people and stumbled into death and oblivion over the form of a woman. The hills and valleys of the centuries are white with the bones of these fools.”
“There was never a case just like mine.”
“So every fool thought.”
“But you have not seen this woman. You do not know her,” Gordon protested, hotly.
“No; and I don’t want to know her. ‘Goest thou to see a woman? Take thy whip!’ Women, savages and children are inferior and immature forms of evolution. But they are going to prove more than a match for you, my boy.”
“Yes; I’ve heard you talk such rubbish before,” Gordon replied, dreamily. “Mark, I’m sorry for the poverty of your life. The man who has not loved is not a man. He is a monstrosity out of touch of sympathy with the race. You cannot understand me when I tell you that our love is so pure, so wonderful, so perfect, it is its own defense.”
“Indeed! Which love? For Ruth or Kate? Frank, I marvel at the childlike simplicity of your folly and your mental antics to justify it. It’s enough to make that cat laugh that broke up your sermon.”
“We are going to bear in our union and life the flaming standard of a revolution that will yet redeem society.”
“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 assurance.
“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 Saturday 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 God!” 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.
Again she was softly praying: “Dear Lord, whatever shall come to her, poverty or riches, joy or pain, honour or shame, sunshine or shadow, save her from this. My feet will climb this Calvary, and my lips drink its gall, but may the cup pass from her!”
After a few hours of fitful sleep, she rose and looked out her window on another radiant November morning. So clear was the sky she could see the flag-staffs of the great downtown buildings and back of them in the distant bay the pennant masts of ships at anchor. The trees in Central Park seemed to glow with the splendour of the dying autumn’s sun. The glory of the day mocked her sorrow.
“What does Nature care?” she sighed. “And yet who knows, it may be a token! I must bravely play my part and leave the rest with God.”
Watching at the window she saw Gordon coming, his broad feet measuring a giant’s stride, his wide shoulders and magnificent head high with unconscious strength.
She wondered if he would stop in the parlour as a visitor or come to her room as was his custom, and a sharp pain cut her with the thought of their changed relationship.
He stopped in the hall, asked the maid to send the children down at once, and stepped into the parlour.
He felt a strange embarrassment in his own home. This house he had bought for Ruth soon after their arrival in New York. It had just been built in the wide-open space of the cliffs on Washington Heights. The Pilgrim Church’s members were long since scattered over every quarter of the city, and, by arranging his study in the church, he was able to have his home so far removed from the noise of the downtown district. He had thus fulfilled Ruth’s passionate desire for a home of her own within their moderate means. He recalled now with tender melancholy how happy they had been decorating this little nest, and how far from his wildest dream had been such an ending of it all.
But he had come with important news, and he hoped her pain would be softened by its announcement.
The children entered with shouts of delight. First one would hug him, and then the other, and then both would try at the same time.
Lucy put her hands on his smooth ruddy cheeks and kissed his lips and eyes with the quaintest imitation of her mother’s trick of gesture.
“Where have you been, Papa? We thought you were never coming? Mama said you were gone for a trip and would come to-day, but”—her voice sank—“she’s been crying, and crying, and we don’t know what’s the matter. I’m so glad you’ve come.”
“Well, you and brother run upstairs to play and tell her Papa wishes to see her.”
The children left and Ruth came down at once.
As she entered the room, he was struck by the change in her face and manner. She seemed transfigured by a strange, spiritual elation. She was gracious, natural and friendly. The anxiety had passed from her face, and the storm in her dark eyes seemed stilled by a steady radiance from the soul.
“I’m glad to see you looking better, Ruth,” he said, with feeling.
“Yes, I have a new standard now of measuring life, its pain and its joy. The soul can only pass once through such a moment as that I lived, prostrate on the floor at your feet last Monday. I have looked Death in the face. I am no longer afraid.”
“I am very, very sorry to give you such pain. I did not think you cared so deeply,” he said, gently.
“Yes, I know I have seemed indifferent and resentful for the past year. I thought you would come back to your old self by and by. In my poor proud soul I thought I was punishing you. How little, dear, I dreamed of this! The thought of really losing you never once entered my heart. It was unthinkable. I do not believe it yet. Such love as ours, such tenderness and devotion as you gave to me once, the delirium of love’s joy that found itself in my motherhood and wrought itself in the forms of our babies—no, Frank, it cannot die, unless God dies! And I shall not lose you at last, unless God forgets me, and He will not.”
Her face, even through her tears, was illumined by an assurance so strong, so prophetic, the man was startled.
“I need not tell you, Ruth, that I desire your happiness. And, strange as it may seem to you, Miss Ransom regards you with tenderness.”
The dark eyes flashed a gleam of lightning from their depths.
“Thanks. I can live without her maudlin pity.”
“You misjudge her,” he cried, raising his hand.
“Perhaps; but I’ll ask you, Frank, not to dishonour me, or this little home you were once good enough to give to me, by mentioning that woman’s name within its doors again.”
The sensitive mouth closed with an emphasis he could not mistake.
“But I am the bearer from her to-day of a token of her regard. She has determined to turn over to you as quickly as possible a half-million dollars of her remaining fortune.”
Ruth sprang to her feet, her face scarlet, her breast heaving, her lithe figure erect and trembling.
“And you dare bring this message to me? This offer to sell my husband and my love!”
“Come, come, Ruth, a woman has no need to sacrifice a great fortune in New York for a husband. They are cheaper than that.”
“They do seem cheap,” she answered, bitterly.
“You should have common sense. The spirit of sacrifice in this great gift to you and the children is too deep and honest to be met with a sneer. It is my desire and hers that you shall be forever beyond want.”
Ruth’s face softened and a tender smile lit it once more.
“Frank, my darling, you cannot think me so base? You know there is not a drop of mean blood in me. Can gold pay for my heart’s desire? The price for my beloved? Pile the earth with diamonds to the stars, I’d hold it trash for the touch of your hand!”
The man moved nervously.
“You must have some sense, Ruth. Surely, I’m not worth all this if I leave you so. You must take this money.”
She moved closer to him and held up her delicate hands, with the sunlight gleaming through the red blood of her tapering fingers.
“You see these hands? They have only known the gentle tasks of love. Well, I’ll scrub, sew and wash the clothes of working-men before one dollar of her gold shall stain them!”
“You cannot be so foolish,” he protested, impatiently. “Besides, she has given me this money to give to you.”
“Ah, my love,” she went on, as though she had not heard his last words, “if you were frankly evil as other men, I might bear this shame with better grace. Others before me, as good as I, have borne its burden. But when I think that you are making your sin a religion, and that you are going to preach with the zeal of a prophet this gospel of the brute and call it freedom, how can I bear it?”
They were both silent for a moment.
“Let us change this disgusting subject, Frank,” she said at length. “I wish you to leave with something kindlier to remember in my face than this shadow. You see, I have taken your pictures all down and locked them up. I have placed your clothes, all I could spare, in your trunk—for even these little things to me are heart treasures now. I could not let you take the slippers I have made for you with my own hands, or your dressing-gowns. That woman shall never touch them. The marriage certificate, with the little poem written to me on the birth of Lucy, I’ve packed up, too, with your pictures. I’ve put them away, because, just now, it would break my heart to look at them after this parting with you. When I come back from the South I will be stronger, and I will bring them out again. Your ring is mine until God’s hand shall take it. I’ll teach our babies always to love you.”
Her voice broke, and he looked away.
“I will tell them that you have gone on a long journey into a strange country, and that you will come back again because you love them.”
He stirred uneasily in his chair, crossed his legs and frowned.
“And I wish you to leave me to-day with the certainty—you can read it in my eyes, if you doubt my lips—that I will love you to the end, though you kill me. You can go on no journey so long, in no world so strange, that I shall not follow. My soul will envelop you. For better, for worse, through evil report and good report, I am yours.”
Again a convulsive sob shook her, and she was silent.
Gordon felt an almost resistless impulse to take her in his arms and kiss and soothe her.
Through her tears she smiled at him.
“How beautiful you are, my dear! You will not forget that I love you? The spring, the summer, the autumn, the winter will only bring to me messages from our past. The way will be lonely, but the memory of the touch of your hand, our hours of perfect peace and trustfulness, the sweetness of your kisses on my lips, the living pictures of your face in our children, I will cherish.”
He stooped to kiss her as he left, but she drew back trembling.
“No, Frank, not while your lips are warm with the touch of another and your flesh on fire with desire for her. It will be sweet to remember that you wished it—for I know, what you do not, that deep down in your soul of souls you love me. I will abide God’s time.”
He left her with a smile playing around her sensitive mouth and lighting the shadows of her great dark eyes.