"I'll do my best not to disappoint you."

He shook hands with her, declining to go in, and, as she sprang swiftly and gracefully up the steps, his eyes lingered a moment on the rhythm of her movement and the glory of her splendid figure in sheer rapture for its perfect beauty.

As he turned homeward, he thrust his hand, yet warm with the touch of her bare arm, into his pocket, drew out two pearls, looked tenderly at them and felt their smooth, rounded forms. A longing for such companionship in work with his wife swept his soul.

CHAPTER VI

THE PUDDLE AND THE TADPOLE

When Gordon started home from his round of visits with Kate the wind had hauled to the north and it began to spit drops of snow.

The cars were still crowded, the aisles full and the platforms jammed, though it was seven o'clock. He b.u.t.toned his coat about his neck and paced the station, waiting for a train in which he could find a seat.

"Bad omen for my trustee meeting to-night," he muttered. "This air feels like Van Meter's breath."

He allowed four trains to pa.s.s, and at last boarded one worse crowded than the first. With a sigh for the end of chivalry, he pushed his way through the dense ma.s.s packed at the doors, wedging his big form roughly among the women, to the centre of the car, and mechanically seized a strap. He was so used to this leather-strap habit that he held on with one hand and, while reading, unfolded and folded his paper with the other.

He climbed the hill to his home in the face of a howling snow-storm.

Ruth looked at him intently.

"I am sorry I couldn't get home earlier," he said, "I've had a hard day."

"But such pleasant help that you didn't mind it, I'm sure. I heard Miss Ransom was a.s.sisting you. I went to the church and found you had gone out with her. I hear she is becoming indispensable in your work."

"Come, Ruth, let's not have another silly quarrel."

"No; it's a waste of breath," she replied bitterly.

He slipped quietly out of the house after supper and hurried back to his study to collect his thoughts for the battle he knew he must wage with Van Meter. This one man had ruled the church with his rod of gold for twenty years. He had established a mission station on the East Side and gathered into it the undesirable people. He was the watchdog of the Prudential Committee guarding the door to membership.

This trustee meeting had for him a double interest. A panic in Wall Street had all but ruined Van Meter. He had attempted to corner the bread market. The wheat crop had been ruined by a hard winter, and the little black eyes, watching, believed the coup could be made.

The attempt was in concerted action through his a.s.sociate houses in Chicago and St. Louis, and he had plunged as never before. The corner had failed. It was reported that he had made an a.s.signment.

This had proved a mistake. His long-established credit and his high personal standing in Wall Street had rallied money to his support and he had pulled out with the loss of three-fourths of his fortune.

Gordon wondered what the effect of this blow would be on his character and att.i.tude toward the church's work. He was specially anxious to know the effect of the reverse on the imagination of the other members of the Board, who merely revolved in worshipful admiration around his millions.

He asked Van Meter to come to his study for a personal interview before the meeting. The Deacon was cool and polite, and his little eyes were shining with a distant l.u.s.ter.

"I was sorry, Deacon, to learn of your personal misfortunes."

Van Meter wet his dry lips with his tongue, looked Gordon squarely in the face and snapped:

"Were you the clergyman who made the statement concerning that corner reported yesterday in an evening paper?"

Gordon flushed, turned uneasily in his chair, and boldly replied:

"Yes, I was, and I repeat it to you. On every such attempt to coin money out of hunger and despair, I pray G.o.d's everlasting curse to fall. I am glad your corner failed. The world is larger than New York, and New York is larger than the Stock Exchange. Am I clear?"

"Quite so. With your permission I will return to the trustee meeting."

"Very well. I wish to make a statement to the Board when you are ready."

Gordon frowned, sat down and made some notes of the points he wished to urge.

He had often wondered at the impotence of the average preacher in New York. But as he felt the forces of materialism closing about him, and their steel grip on his heart, he began to know why New York is the preacher's graveyard. He had won his great audience.

His voice had not been drowned in the roar of the breakers of this ocean of flesh, but he had met bitter disillusioning. As he looked into the faces of his Board of Trustees, dominated by that little bald-headed man, he felt the cruel force of Overman's sneer at the modern church as the home of the mean and the crippled and the sick. The appeal to the ideal seemed to stick in his throat.

He had thrilled at the struggle with the big city's rushing millions.

Their stupendous indifference dared him to conquer or die, and he had conquered. He had seen these indifferent millions swallow cabinets, presidents, princes and kings, and rush on their way without a thought whether they lived or died. He had made himself heard. But this power that worshiped a dollar and called it G.o.d, that controlled the finances of the church and sought to control its pastor and strangle his soul--this was the force slowly choking him to death unless he could conquer it.

The average preacher, when he landed in New York and faced the roar of its advancing ocean of materialism, fluttered hopelessly about for a year or two like a frightened sand-fiddler in the edge of the surf of a cyclone, was engulfed, and disappeared.

To conquer this sea and lift his voice in power above its thunder, and then be strangled in a little yellow puddle full of tadpoles, was more than his soul could endure.

"I'll not submit to it," he growled, with clenched fist.

When he entered the meeting, the dozen men were hanging on Van Meter's lips as on the inspired word of Moses.

"I was just telling the Board," he suavely explained, "that Mr.

Wellford, on whom we must depend for such a building enterprise involving millions, has declared his hostility to the scheme. He is out of sympathy with the sensational methods of the Pilgrim Church."

"I'll inform the Board," said Gordon, as he advanced toward Van Meter and thrust his hands in his pockets, "that it's not true. I have seen Mr. Wellford, by his invitation, this week at his home.

I laid our great plan before him. I found him a big man, a man who thinks big thoughts, and does big things. He told me frankly he was heartily in favour of it and would do his part the moment we were ready and other men of wealth would join in the movement. He simply declares that we must act first."

Van Meter pursed his lips and tried to lift his nose into a sneer.

"May I ask, Doctor, if it is your intention to demand a vote to-night on this building scheme?"

"It is."

"Then I suggest that we vote first and hear your speech afterward.

Some of us may wish to go before you're done."

Gordon turned red with rage and started to sit down, but, wheeling, he again faced the chairman and glared at him.

"Pardon my business methods, Doctor," he went on, "but your visions are rather tiresome. We are old New Yorkers. We know what you are going to tell us of the dark problem of the city's corruption, the poverty of the poor, and so on. Every now and then we see such sacred fires burning in the heart of a country parson called to town. Yet, in spite of the splendour of these little fizzling pinwheels that light the cruelty and darkness of metropolitan life for a moment, New York has managed somehow to jog along."

Gordon's anger melted into a laugh as he watched the Deacon's face grow purple with fury as he fairly hissed the last sentence of his speech. He was not an impressive man in an attempted flight of eloquence, and the preacher's laughter quite unhorsed him.