"Oh, I can wash them!" she laughed; "and it is worth a few smuts. I shall tell Mr. Ryder to canvass for you," she added.
Ardly shouted, "Good heavens! He is one of the best fighters the Republicans have!"
Mariana smiled inscrutably.
"But that was before I had a candidate," she answered.
They followed her to the sidewalk and tucked her carriage furs about her while the footman looked on.
"And you are coming to see me soon?" she insisted – "very soon?"
"We swear it!" they protested.
"And you will tell me all the news of the elections?"
"On our manly faith."
"That I will trust. Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!"
The carriage started, when suddenly she lowered the window and looked out, the plume in her hat waving black against the wind.
"I forgot to tell you," she said; "my name is Gore – Mrs. Cecil Gore."
With the light of audacity in his face, Nevins laid his hand upon the window.
"And where is the Honorable Cecil?" he asked.
A flash of irritation darkened Mariana's eyes. She laughed with a ring of recklessness.
"The Lord forbid that I should know!" she replied.
She motioned to the coachman, and the carriage rolled rapidly away. Nevins stood looking after it until it turned the corner. When the last wheel vanished, he spoke slowly:
"Well, I'll be blessed!" he said.
Ardly stooped and picked up a violet that lay upon the curbing.
"And so will I," he responded.
"Have a whiskey?"
"All right."
They entered the building and mounted the stairs in silence.
CHAPTER VI
The Reverend Anthony Algarcife had inspired his congregation with an almost romantic fervor.
When he had first appeared before them as assistant to Father Speares in his Bowery Mission, and a little later as server in the celebrations, they regarded him as a thoughtful-eyed young priest, whose appearance fitted into the general scheme of color in the chancel. When he read the lessons they noticed the richness of his voice, and when at last he came to the altar-step to deliver his first sermon they thrilled into the knowledge of his power.
But he turned from their adulations almost impatiently to throw himself into the mission in the slums. His eloquence had passed from the rich to the poor, and beyond an occasional sermon he became only a harmonious figure in the setting of the church. For the honors they meted out to him he had no glance, for their favors he had only indifference. He seemed as insensible to praise as to censure, and to the calls of ambition his ears were closed. He lived in the fevered haste of a man who has but one end remaining – to have life over.
But his indifference redounded to his honor. Because he shunned popularity, it fell upon him; because he put aside personal gains, he found them in the reverence of his people. His apathy was construed into humility, his compassion into loving-kindness, his endeavors to stifle memory into the fires of faith. At the end of six years his determination to remain a cipher in religion had made him the leader of his church, and the means which he had taken to annihilate self had drawn on him the wondering eyes of his world. Almost unconsciously he bowed his head to receive the yoke.
When, at the death of Father Speares, he was called to the charge, he accepted it without a struggle and without emotion. He saw in it but an opening to heavier labor and an opportunity to hasten the progress of his slow suicide.
So he took the work from the failing hands and devoted to it the fulness of his own frenzied vigor. The ritual which his predecessor loved became sacred to him, and the most trivial ceremonials grew mighty with memory of the dead. Each candle upon the altar, each silken thread in the embroidered vestments he wore, was a tribute to a sincerity which was not his.
He lent a sudden fervor to the decoration of the church and to the training of his choristers, passionately reviving lost and languishing rites of religion, and silencing the faint protests of his more conservative parishioners by an arrogant appeal to the "Ornaments Rubric" of the Prayer-book. In defiance of the possible opposition of the bishop, he transposed the "Gloria" to its old place in the Catholic Mass, hurling, like an avenging thunderbolt, at a priestly objector to the good old rule of St. Vincent, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus."
"My dear father," his senior warden had once said to him, "I doubt if most priests put as much work into their whole lives as you do into one celebration."
"I know," replied Father Algarcife slowly. "If I have left anything undone it has been from oversight, not fear of labor."
The warden smiled.
"Your life is a proof of your industry as well as your faith," he responded. "Only a man who loves his religion better than his life would risk himself daily. It is your great hold upon your people. They believe in you."
"Yes, yes," said the other.
"But I have wanted to warn you," continued the warden. "It cannot last. Give yourself rest."
Father Algarcife shook his head.
"I rest only when I am working," he answered, and he added, a little wistfully, "The parish bears witness that I have done my best by the charge."
The warden, touched by the wistfulness, lowered his eyes. "That you have done any man's best," he returned.
"Thank you," said Father Algarcife. Then he passed into the sacristy to listen to the confession of a parishioner.
It was a tedious complaint, and he followed it abstractedly – winding through the sick imaginings of a nervous woman and administering well-worn advice in his rich voice, which lent a charm to the truisms. When it was over, he advised physical exercise, and, closing the door, seated himself to await the next comer.
It was Miss Vernish, and as she entered, with her impatient limp, the bitterness of her mouth relaxed. She was supervising the embroidering of the vestments to be worn at Easter, and in a spirit of devotion she had sacrificed her diamonds to their ornamentation. Her eyes grew bright as she talked, and a religious warmth softened her manner.
"It has made me so happy," she said, "to feel that I can give something beautiful to the service. It is the sincerest pleasure I have known for years."
She left, and her place was taken by a young divinity student who had been drawn from law to theology by the eloquence of Father Algarcife. He had come to obtain the priest's advice upon a matter of principle, and departed with a quickening of his religious tendencies.
Then came several women, entering with a great deal of rustling and no evident object in view. Then a vestryman to talk over a point in business; then the wife of a well-known politician, to ask if she should consent to her husband's accepting a foreign appointment; then a man who wished to be confirmed in his church; and, after all, Mrs. Ryder, large and warm and white, to say that since the last communion she had felt herself stronger to contend with disappointment.
When it was over and he came out into the evening light, he drew himself together with a quick movement, as if he had knelt in a strained position for hours. Vaguely he wondered how his nerves had sustained it, and he smiled half bitterly as he admitted that eight years ago he would have succumbed.
"It is because my nerves are dead," he said; "as dead as my emotions."
He knew that since the pressure of feeling had been lifted the things which would have overwhelmed him in the past had lost the power to thrill his supine sensations, that from a mere jangled structure of nerve wires he had become a physical being – a creature who ate and drank and slept, but did not feel.