In an up-town block, a stone's-throw west of Fifth Avenue, stands the
Church of the Immaculate Conception. It is a newly erected structure of
gray stone, between two rows of expressionless tenements, and, despite
the aggressive finality emphasized in its architecture, wearing a
general air of holding its ground by sheer force of stolidity.
The interior of the church is less suggestive of modernity, and bears,
on the whole, a surface relationship to a mediaeval cathedral. The purple
light filtering through the stained-glass windows is, in its essential
quality, a European importation, and the altar-piece is a passable
reproduction of a painting of Murillo's.
More than fifty years ago the church, then an unpretentious building of
red brick, endowed neither with rood-screen nor waxen candles, had
called to its rectorship the Reverend Clement Speares, a youthful leader
of the ritualistic element in Episcopalianism. Father Speares heard the
call and accepted the charge, and within a dozen years he had succeeded
in trebling the number of his congregation, and in exchanging the
red-brick building for the present Church of the Immaculate Conception,
with its mystic light of mediaevalism.
The congregation, of that class who toil not, neither spin, but before
whose raiment Easter lilies falter, was fashionable, and also wealthy.
The single-hearted zeal which its priest had put into fifty years of
service had failed to wean his flock from a taste for the flesh-pots.
In return for the generosity with which they supported their place of
worship and its appurtenances, they claimed the indefeasible right to
regulate their own attire and to reserve their pews from the
encroachment of aliens. They were willing to erect a mission chapel in
the slums, but they submitted to no trespassing upon the exclusiveness
of their accustomed preserves.
Father Speares, who, had his temporal power been in proportion to his
ecclesiastical influence, would have thrown open the Holy of Holies to
the beggar in the street, and have knelt with equal charity between the
Pharisees and Publicans, resigned himself to the recognition of
spiritual caste, and devoted his days to Fifth Avenue and his evenings
to the Bowery.
To his honor be it said that he made no more valiant stand for the
salvation of the one than of the other. A soul was a soul to him, and
personal cleanliness a matter of taste.
He was a man of resolute convictions and unswerving purpose. If he did
not possess eloquence of speech, he possessed sincerity of mind, which
is quite as rare, and very nearly as effective. He had a benevolent
countenance combined with a sympathetic manner, and the combination
exercised a charm over those of his hearers who attended his church in
the endeavor to narcotize troublesome nerves. Unconsciously, by his
adoption of celibacy from the mother church, he had borrowed from the
elder faith the powerful weapon of romanticism, exciting the imaginative
qualities, while he emphasized the maxim of the right of private
judgment by rejecting the dogma of papal infallibility.
But since the Church of the Immaculate Conception had risen into being
with Father Speares, there was an Ishmaelitish rumor afloat that with
Father Speares it would pass away. Father Speares himself was not
insensible to the danger, and with the fervor of an enthusiast he
labored to perpetuate the ceremonials his soul loved. With the force of
a revelation there was borne upon him the conception that on him and his
successors rested the mission to impel the conservative wing of
Episcopalianism into that assimilation to Roman Catholicism whose
resultant is the Ritualistic movement. Unto this end he had spent more
than fifty years of labor. At the close of the nineteenth century he
stood a picturesque and pathetic figure, combating with a mediaeval
eloquence the advancing spirit of his time, a representative of the lost
age of faith lingering far into the new-found age of rationalism.
When Anthony Algarcife, a young orphan, had been sent to him, he had
taken the child into his confidence.
"I will help you," the boy had said, enthusiastically--"I will help
you." And he rolled up his little shirt-sleeves in the desire to settle
spiritual differences in the good old fashion of physical force.
Father Speares had smiled and patted him upon the shoulder. "Please God,
you shall, my boy!" he had answered, and had made the child a
white-robed acolyte, that he might ignite by youthful hands the fires of
faith.
Anthony had been a disappointment, he had said, but of the bitterness of
the disappointment he had made no mention. Beneath his teaching he had
seen the young mind unfold and expand strenuously, and then, while his
eager eyes were watching, he had seen it shoot from him and beyond his
grasp, trampling his cherished convictions beneath ruthless feet.
"It is all rubbish," Anthony had declared in the first intolerance of
his youth. "The mental world is filled with a lot of decaying theology,
which has been accumulating for centuries. It remains for us to sweep it
away."
"And you would sweep me with it," said Father Speares, a little
bitterly.
"The ground must be cleared," returned Anthony. "You are sitting upon
the rubbish, as a miser in Pompeii might have sat upon his gold while
Vesuvius overflowed. It is wiser to flee and leave hoarded treasure to
be ingulfed. That the rubbish was once sound theology, I grant, but it
has crumbled, and its usefulness of a thousand years ago will not it
save from the ash-heap of outgrown ideas to-day."
Father Speares sighed and set his lips. "The boy is young," he said,
with the yearning self-deception of age. "It will pass, and he will
return the stronger for his wandering."
But the event had not borne out his prophecy. It did not pass, and
Anthony did not return.
"It is my head," he explained, half irritably. "There is a wall of
scepticism surrounding my brain, through which only the toughest facts
may penetrate. I am minus the faculty of credulity."
"Or reverence," Father Speares added, reproachfully. "You regard
spiritual things as a deaf man regards sound or a blind man sight."
Anthony's irritation triumphed.
"Or as a man awake regards a dream," he suggested. "The film of
superstition has cleared from my eyes, and I see. The truth is that I
regard all religions exactly as you regard all except the one which you
inherited. An accident of birth has made you a Christian instead of a
Moslem or a Brahman, that is all."
"And a twist of the mind has made you an atheist."
"As you please--atheist, agnostic, sceptic, what you will. It only means
that you offer me an irrational assumption, and I reject it. It is the
custom of you theologians to fit ugly epithets to your opponents,
whereas the denial of Christianity no more argues atheism than the
denial of Confucianism does. It merely proves that a man refuses to
acknowledge any one of the gods which men have created, and that he
leaves the ultimate essence outside his generalizations. Such a man has
learned the first lesson in knowledge--the lesson of his own ignorance."
"And has missed the greater lesson of the wisdom of God."
Algarcife shrugged his shoulders.
"It is no use," he said; "I can't believe, and I wouldn't if I could."
So he had gone from Father Speares into the world. Virile, strenuous,
and possessed with intellectual passion, he had closed the doors of his
mind upon commonplaces, and with the improvidence from which mental
stamina failed to redeem him had wedded himself to poverty and science.
Five years after leaving Father Speares's roof he returned with Mariana
at his side.
"We have come to be married," he announced.
Father Speares gasped and suggested prudence. "It is unwise," he
remonstrated--"it is utterly unwise."
"I agree with you," admitted Anthony. "It is unwise, and we know it; but
there is nothing else to be done--is there, Mariana?"
Mariana looked into Father Speares's face and smiled.
"Of course you are right," she said, "and we are very foolish, but--but
there really isn't anything else to do."
And Father Speares was silenced. He looked at the license a little
ruefully, read the service, and sent them off with a benediction.
"God knows, I wish you happiness," he assured Mariana when she kissed
him.
Several months later, meeting Algarcife on Broadway, he repeated the
words.
"I am happy," returned Algarcife, emphatically. "Mariana is an angel."
"I am glad to hear it," said Father Speares, and he sighed irrelevantly.
"A good woman is a jewel of rare value."
The term "good woman," applied to Mariana, gave Anthony a sense of
unfitness. Mariana was certainly a jewel, but, somehow, it had never
occurred to him to look upon her as a "good woman."
"She is very charming," he remarked, quietly.
Father Speares was regarding him critically. "You are not looking well,"
he said. "Is it work or worry?"
Algarcife shook his head impatiently. "I--oh, I am all right," he
rejoined. "A little extra work, that's all."
"Your book?"
Algarcife's face contracted, and the harassed expression about his mouth
deepened.
"No, not my book," he answered, hastily. "I've put that aside for a
while. I am trying a hand at bread-winning."
"With satisfactory results, I hope."
Anthony's laugh was slightly constrained.
"Why, certainly! Am I the man to fail?"
"I don't know," commented Father Speares--"I don't know. I never thought
of you in that light, somehow. But if I can help you, remember that you
were once my boy."
Anthony held out his hand quickly, his voice trembling.
"You are generous--generous as you have always been, but--I am all
right."
They parted, Algarcife turning into a cross street. He walked slowly,
and the harassed lines did not fade from his mouth. He seemed to have
grown older within the last few months, and the fight he was making had
bowed his shoulders and sown the seeds of future furrows upon his face.
At the corner he bought a box of sardines and a pound of crackers for
Mariana, who liked a late supper. Then he crossed to The Gotham and
ascended the stairs.
He found Mariana in a dressing-sack of pink flannel, sitting upon the
bed, and engaged in manufacturing an opera-bonnet out of a bit of black
gauze and a few pink rose-buds. She was trying it on as he entered, and,
catching sight of him, did not remove it as she raised her hand
warningly. "Tell me if it is becoming before you kiss me," she
commanded, pressing her thimble against her lips.
Anthony drew back and surveyed her.
"Of course it is," he replied; "but what is it, anyway?"
Mariana laughed and leaned towards him.
"A bonnet, of course; not a coal-scuttle or a lamp-shade."
Then she took it from her head and held it before her, turning it
critically from side to side.
"Don't you think it might have a few violets against the hair, just
above the left temple? I am sure I could take some out of my last
summer's hat."
She left the bed and stood upon a chair, to place the bonnet in a box
upon the top of the wardrobe. "As a scientific problem it should
interest you," she observed. "I created it out of nothing."
Anthony caught her as she descended from the chair.
"As a possible adornment for your head it interests me still more," he
replied.
"Because you haven't been married long enough to discover what an empty
little head it is?"
"Because it is the dearest head in the world, and the wisest. But what a
thriftless house-keeper, not to have set the table!" A door had been cut
into his study, and he glanced through. "Do you think you are still
below Mason and Dixon's line, where time is not recognized?"
"I forgot it," said Mariana; "but there isn't any bread, so you must go
after it. Oh, you didn't get sardines again, did you? I said potted
ham--and it is really a very small chicken they sent us."
"Well, no matter. It might have been a chop. By the way, I met Mr.
Speares--"
"Father Speares," corrected Mariana.
"Mr. or Father, he's a nice old chap, isn't he?"
"He's a saint," said Mariana. Then she grew serious. "If you could have
gone into the Church--honestly, I mean--how pleased he would have been,
dearest."
"Yes; but I couldn't, you know, and if I had I could not have married
you. He is High Church, you see. Celibacy is his pet institution."
Mariana colored. "Then I am glad you didn't." She flung herself upon
him; then, drawing back, added, wistfully, "But you wouldn't have been
poor."
"Do you find it so hard?"
"I hate it--for you. You work so hard. And I can't help you."
"My beloved!"
"I mind it most for you. But, of course, I feel badly when the
washer-woman comes and there isn't any money--and I should like to have
some gloves--"
"You shall have them, my darling. Why didn't you tell me?"
Mariana leaned upon his breast and swept her loosened hair across his
arm. "It doesn't matter very much," she answered. "If I were starving
and you kissed me I should forget it." And she added, with
characteristic inconsequence: "Only I haven't been out for several days
because I didn't have any."
"You shall have them to-morrow. Is there anything else, dearest?"
"Nothing!" laughed Mariana.
She went to the mirror and began coiling her hair. From the glass her
eyes met Anthony's, and she threw him a smiling glance.
"I have been reading one of your books," she said, pointing with the
brush; "there it is."
Anthony lifted the volume from the bureau and grew serious. "Mill?" he
observed. "It is a good start. Every woman should know political
economy. I am glad it interests you."
"I haven't gone beyond the first page yet," returned Mariana, putting up
both hands to fluff her aureole, and pausing to run her fingers over her
eyebrows in the attempt to narrow them. "There was something in the
first page about 'a web of muslin,' and, somehow, it suggested to me the
idea of making that bonnet. Odd, wasn't it? And I am so glad I read it,
for I am sure I should never have thought of the bonnet otherwise--and
it is becoming."
"But you like Mill?"
"Oh yes," said Mariana; "I find him very suggestive."