A STOLEN KISS
For several weeks after Gordon flung down the gauntlet to his Board
of Trustees and began his battle for supremacy, his wife maintained
a strange attitude of silence and reserve.
She had hired a nurse and resumed her study of music. Her contralto
voice, one of great depth and sweetness, he had admired extravagantly
in the days of their courtship, but she had ceased to sing of
late years. He always listened to her lullaby to the children with
fascination. The soft round notes from her delicate throat seemed
full of magic and held him in a spell.
Before he left for his study one morning, she looked up into his
face with yearning in her dark eyes.
"Come into the parlour, Frank; I will sing for you."
She took her seat at the piano, and her white tapering fingers ran
lightly over the keys with deft, sure touch.
"What would you like to hear?" she asked timidly, from beneath her
long lashes, with the old haunting charm in her manner.
"Tennyson's 'Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!'
No poet ever dreamed that song as you have sung it, Ruth."
Never did he hear her sing with such feeling. Her Voice, low, soft
and caressing with the languid sensuousness of the South, quivered
with tenderness, and then rose with the storm and broke in round,
deep peals of passion until he could hear the roar of the surf and
feel its white spray in his face. Her erect lithe figure, with the
small white hands and wrists flashing over the keys, the petite
anxious face with stormy eyes and raven hair, seemed the incarnate
soul of the storm.
"Glorious, Ruth!" he cried, with boylike wonder.
And then she bent over the piano and burst into tears.
"Why, what ails you, my dear?"
"Oh, Frank, I'm selfish to leave the children to a nurse and study
music."
"Nonsense. Self-sacrifice is rational only as it is the highest form
of self-development. It is your duty to develop yourself. Self is
the source of all knowledge and strength; books are its record;
the world exists only through its eyes."
"I'm afraid of it. I wish to give all to you and the children, not
to myself. I want you all to myself, and you are growing away from
me. I know it, and it is breaking my heart."
He laughed at her fears, kissed her and went to his study.
Since his break with his Board, he had grown daily in power--power
in himself and over his people. Conflict was always to him the
trumpet call to heroic deeds. The knowledge that Van Meter was
now his open enemy and that he was attempting to build a hostile
faction within the church roused his soul to its depths. Thrown
back thus upon himself and his appeal to the greater tribunal of
the people, he preached as never before in his life. His sermons
had the vigour and prophetic fire of the crusader. His crowds
increased until it was necessary to ask for police aid to control
the exits and entrances to the building. Long before the hour
of service, a dense mass of men and women were packed against the
doors.
Van Meter watched this growth of influence with wonder and
disgust. He determined to leave no stone unturned that might put
a stumbling-block in his way. His detectives had failed as yet to
find any clue that might compromise him. Once they rushed to his office
with the information that they had tracked him to a questionable
house. The Deacon called up his son-in-law and asked excitedly for
a reporter to write a thrilling piece of news. The reporter found
that Gordon had called at the house, but in answer to a summons to
see a dying girl.
Van Meter insisted upon the item being printed, but the young city
editor scowled and threw it in the waste basket.
The Deacon at length discovered Ruth's jealousy and located the
woman who was its object. A costly bouquet of flowers was placed
on Gordon's desk in the study every morning, and an enormous one
blossomed every Sunday morning and evening on the little table
beside his chair in the pulpit. The sexton could not tell who paid
the bills. A florist sent them.
The Deacon had been bitterly chagrined at the outcome of his
movement in reducing the salary. At first the people heard it with
amazement, and then, when Gordon informed a reporter of the fight
in progress and it was published, they laughed, and a cheque was
sent him for two thousand dollars to make good the deficit and add
one thousand more.
The day after this advent he had a hard day's work. A procession
of people drained him of every cent of money he could spare and
every ounce of sympathy and shred of nerve force in his body.
He had tried the year before to establish a free employment bureau
to relieve him of this strain. But the bureau added to his work. He
had to close it. It had required the employment of five assistants,
and even these could make little impression on the list of applicants
who crowded the rooms and blocked the pavements from morning until
night.
When the sick and hungry and out-of-works had been disposed of
after a fashion, the miscellaneous crowd filed in.
An old college mate came in shivering in a dirty suit. He fumbled
at his hat nervously until he caught Gordon's eye and saw him smile.
"Well, by the great hornspoon, Ned, you look like you've fallen
into a well!"
"Worse'n that, Frank; I slipped clean into hell. I got with some
fellows, went on a drunk, stayed a month and lost my place. I want
you to loan me money to get to Baltimore, buy a decent suit of
clothes, and I'll get another position. Yes, and I'll lift my head
up and be a man."
Gordon sent out to the bank and got the money for him.
Another seedy one softly explained to him that he was a fellow
countryman from Indiana. Gordon gave him a quarter.
A sobbing woman closely veiled he recognised as a bride he had
married in the church after prayer meeting two weeks before.
"Doctor," she said in a whisper, "I've called to beg you please not
to allow any one to know of my marriage. My husband turned out to
be a burglar. He stole ten thousand dollars from an old lady who
is one of our boarders, and skipped. He married me to get the run
of the house. He tried to marry her first, though she was seventy-five
years old, got in her room last night, stole the money, and now
he's gone. I'm heartbroken!"
"What! because he's gone?"
"No; because I was a fool. I know he has a dozen wives. He was so
handsome."
"Madam, I'm not very sorry for you. I tried to prevent you marrying
him that night. I begged you to go back to Jersey City to your own
church."
"You will keep it secret, Doctor?" she begged.
"I'll not publish it. But the certificate is on file in the Hall
of Records. Any one can see it who wishes. It is beyond my control."
An old woman with bedraggled skirt, reddened eyes and a fat, motherly
face timidly approached. She had been overlooked.
"Doctor, you're my last chance. I come up to New York to see my
son-in-law, as grand a rascal as ever lived. He owes me a thousand
dollars and won't pay it. We lost our crop down in Old Virginia.
So I scraped up the money and got here to squeeze what he owed out
of that rascal. Now he's turned me out into the street and moved
where I can't find him. I'm starvin' to death. I ain't got a cent
to go home; an' what's worse'n all, I got a letter this mornin'
tellin' me my idiot boy's down sick an' cryin' for me. I'm the only
one can do anything for him. He can't understand nobody else."
Her voice broke and she bit her lips to keep back the tears.
"I've begged all day. Everybody laughs at me. I heard you preach
one Sunday. I knowed you wouldn't laugh at me. I want you to loan
me twenty dollars to get home quick. I'll start the minute I can
get to the train, an' I'll pay you back if I have to sell my feather
beds. Now, will you do it?"
"Well, a more improbable story was never told a New Yorker, but
something whispers to me you're telling the truth."
"You'll do it?"
"Yes."
She drew a deep breath, and cried with streaming eyes:
"Oh, Lord, have mercy on my poor soul, that I doubted You, and
thought You had forsaken me!"
Gordon handed her the cheque.
"I'm going to kiss you!" she fairly screamed.
Before he could lift his hand or protest, she threw her arms around
his neck and kissed him.
As he took her hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away
from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and
Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she
saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked
into the tear-stained motherly old face she burst into hysterical
laughter.
Gordon rose and escorted the woman to the door with courtesy.
"You will find the bank at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third
Street--the Garfield National. Write me how your son is when you
reach home, and send me the money when you are able."
"I will. God bless you, sir," she answered with fervour.
When he returned to his study, Ruth was still hysterical, and he
sat down without a word and began to write.
"Frank, I'm sorry to have been so rude," she said at length.
"Is that all?"
"No; I'm sorry I humiliated myself by spying on you."
She sat twisting her handkerchief, glancing at him timidly.
"And you can't understand how deeply you have wounded me by such an
act, Ruth. I hope you have heard all that passed here this morning."
"It's strange how I always seem to be in the wrong. Frank, I am
very sorry. You must forgive me. And I have another confession.
I've been receiving anonymous letters about you for the past three
weeks. I was too weak and cowardly to show them to you. It was one
of these letters which caused me to come here this morning. And
now I've wounded you, and alienated your heart from me more than
ever. I feel I shall die."
She began to sob.
"Come, Ruth, you must conquer this insanity. Naturally you are
bright, witty, cheerful and altogether charming. Jealousy reduces
you to a lump of stupidity."
"You do forgive me?"
"Yes; and don't, for heaven's sake, do such a thing again. Ask me
what you wish to know. I am not a liar; I will tell you the truth."
"But I don't want to hear it if it's cruel," she protested.
"The truth is best, gentle or cruel."
She kissed him impulsively and left.
He sat for an hour, tired, sore and brooding over this scene with
his wife. He caught the perfume of the flowers on his desk, and in
the tints of the roses saw the warm blushes of the woman who had
sent them. Her voice was friendly and caressing and her speech,
words of sweetest flattery--flattery that cleared the stupor from
his brain and gave life and new faith in himself and his work;
flattery that had in it a mysterious personal flavour that piqued
his curiosity and fed his vanity. How clearly he recalled her--the
superb figure, with rounded bust and arms full and magnificent, in
the ripe glory of youth, her waving auburn hair so thick and long
it could envelop half her body. Often he had watched the light
blaze through its red tints while he talked to her of his dreams,
her lips half parted with lazy tenderness and ready with gentle
words. He recalled the rhythmic music of her walk, strong and
insolent in its luxury of health. And he was grateful for the cheer
she had brought into his life.