AFTER A YEAR
Night had fallen. The busy racket of wheeled traffic was still, the
pavements were garish with electric light, windows were open, and crowds
jostled to and fro on the cool pavements. But Harry Sanderson, as he
walked slowly back from a long ramble in knickerbockers and norfolk
jacket over the hills, was not thinking of the sights and sounds of the
pleasant evening. He had tramped miles since sundown, and had returned
as he set out, gloomy, unrequited, a follower of a baffled quest. Even
the dog at his heels seemed to partake of his master's mood; he padded
along soberly, forging ahead now and again to look up inquiringly at the
preoccupied face.
Set back from the street in a wide estate of trees and shrubbery, stood
a great white-porched house that gloomed darkly from amid its aspens.
Not a light had twinkled from it for nearly a year. The little city had
wondered at first, then by degrees had grown indifferent. The secret of
that prolonged honeymoon, that dearth and absence, Harry Sanderson and
the bishop alone could have told. For the bishop knew of Hugh's
criminal act; he was named executor of the will that lay in the Korean
chest, and him David Stires had written the truth. His heart had gone
out with pity for Jessica, and understanding. The secret he locked in
his own breast, as did Harry Sanderson, each thinking the other ignorant
of it.
Since that wedding-day no shred of news had come to either. Harry had
wished for none. To think of Jessica was a recurrent pang, and yet the
very combination of the safe in his study he had formed of the letters
of her name! In each memory of her he felt the fresh assault of a new
and tireless foe--the love which he must deny.
Until their meeting his moral existence had been strangely without
struggle. When at a single blow he had cut away, root and branch, from
his old life, he had left behind him its vices and temptations. That
life had been, as he himself had dimly realized at the time, a phase,
not a quality, of his development. It had known no profound emotions.
The first deep feeling of his experience had come with that college
catastrophe which had brought the abrupt change to all his habits of
living. He did not know that the impulse which then drew him to the
Church was the gravitational force of an austere ancestry, itself an
inheritance from a long line of sectarian progenitors--an Archbishop of
Canterbury among them--reaching from Colony times, when King George had
sent the first Sanderson, a virile, sport-loving churchman, to the
tobacco emoluments of the Old Dominion. He did not know that in the
reaction the pendulum of his nature was swinging back along an old
groove in obeisance to the subtle call of blood.
In his new life, problems were already solved for him. He had only to
drift with the current of tradition, whereon was smooth sailing. And so
he had drifted till that evening when "Satan Sanderson," dead and done
and buried, had risen in his grave-clothes to mock him in the person of
Hugh. Each hour since then had sensitized him, had put him through
exercises of self-control. And then, with that kiss of Jessica's, had
come the sudden illumination that had made him curse the work of his
hands--that had shown him what had dawned for him, too late!
Outcast and criminal as he was, castaway, who had stolen a bank's money
and a woman's love, Hugh was still her husband. Hugh's wife--what could
she be to him? And this fevered conflict was shot through with yet
another pang; for the waking smart of compunction which had risen at
Jessica's bitter cry, "You helped to make him what he has become!"
would not down. That cry had shown him, in one clarifying instant, the
follies and delinquencies of his early career reduplicated as through
the facets of a crystal, and in the polarized light of conscience,
Hugh--loafer, gambler and thief--stood as the type and sign of an
enduring accusation.
But if the recollection of that wedding-day and its aftermath stalked
always with him--if that kiss had seemed to cling again and again to his
lips as he sat in the quiet of his study--no one guessed. He seldom
played his violin now, but he had shown no outward sign. As time went
on, he had become no less brilliant, though more inscrutable; no less
popular, save perhaps to the parish heresy-hunter for whom he had never
cared a straw. But beneath the surface a great change had come to Harry
Sanderson.
To-night, as he wended his way past the house in the aspens, through the
clatter and commotion of the evening, there was a kind of glaze over his
whole face--a shell of melancholy.
Judge Conwell drove by in his dog-cart, with the superintendent of the
long, low hospital. The man of briefs looked keenly at the handsome face
on the pavement. "Seems the worse for wear," he remarked sententiously.
The surgeon nodded wisely. "That's the trouble with most of you
professional people," he said; "you think too much!" The judge clucked
to his mare and drove on at a smart trot.
The friendly, critical eye clove to the fact; it discerned the
mental state of which gloom, depression and insomnia were but the
physical reagents. Harry had lately felt disquieting symptoms of
strain--irritable weakness, fitful repose, a sense of vague, mysterious
messages in a strange language never before heard. He had found that the
long walks no longer brought the old reaction--that even the swift rush
of his motor-car, as it bore him through the dusk of an evening, gave
him of late only a momentary relief. To-morrow began his summer
vacation, and he had planned a month's pedestrian outing through the
wide ranch valleys and the further ranges, and this should set him up
again.
Now, however, as he walked along, he was bitterly absorbed in thoughts
other than his own needs. He passed more than one acquaintance with a
stare of non-recognition. One of these was the bishop, who turned an
instant to look after him. The bishop had seen that look frequently of
late, and had wondered if it betokened physical illness or mental
unquiet. More than once he had remembered with a sigh the old whisper of
Harry Sanderson's early wildness. But he knew youth and its lapses, and
he liked and respected him. Only two days before, on the second
anniversary of Harry's ordination, he had given him for his silken
watch-guard a little gold cross engraved with his name, and containing
the date. The bishop had seen his gift sparkling against Harry's
waistcoat as he passed. He walked on with a puzzled frown.
The bishop was pursy and prosy, conventional and somewhat stereotyped in
ideas, but he was full of the milk of human kindness. Now he promised
himself that when the hour's errand on which he was hastening was done,
he would stop at the study and if he found Harry in, would have a quiet
chat with him. Perhaps he could put his finger on the trouble.
At a crossing, the sight of a knot of people on the opposite side of the
street awoke Harry from his abstraction. They had gathered around a
peripatetic street preacher, who was holding forth in a shrill voice.
Beside him, on a short pole, hung a dripping gasoline flare, and the
hissing flame lit his bare head, his thin features, his long hair, and
his bony hands moving in vehement gestures. A small melodeon on four
wheels stood beside him, and on its front was painted in glaring white
letters:
"HALLELUJAH JONES."
"_Suffer me that I may speak; and after
that I have spoken, mock on._"
Job, xxi, 3
From over the way Harry gazed at the tall, stooping figure, pitilessly
betrayed by the thin alpaca coat, at the ascetic face burned a brick-red
from exposure to wind and sun, at the flashing eyes, the impassioned
earnestness. He paused at the curb and listened curiously, for
Hallelujah Jones with his evangelism mingled a spice of the rancor of
the socialist. In his thinking, the rich and the wicked were mingled
inextricably in the great chastisement. He was preaching now from his
favorite text: _Woe to them that are at ease in Zion_.
Harry smiled grimly. He had always been "at ease in Zion." He wore
sumptuous clothes--the ruby in his ring would bring what this plodding
exhorter would call a fortune. At this moment, Hede, his dapper Finn
chauffeur, was polishing the motor-car for him to take his cool evening
spin. That very afternoon he had put into the little safe in the chapel
study two thousand dollars in gold, which he had drawn, a part for his
charities and quarterly payments and a part to take with him for the
exigencies of his trip. The street evangelist over there, preaching
paradise and perdition to the grinning yokels, often needed a square
meal, and was lucky if he always knew where he would sleep. Yet did the
Reverend Henry Sanderson, after all, get more out of life than
Hallelujah Jones?
The thread of his thought broke. The bareheaded figure had ended his
harangue. The eternal fires were banked for a time, while, seated on a
camp-stool at his crazy melodeon, he proceeded to transport his audience
to the heavenly meads of the New Jerusalem. He began a "gospel song"
that everybody knew:
"I saw a wayworn traveller,
The sun was bending low.
He overtopped the mountain
And reached the vale below.
He saw the Golden City,
His everlasting home,
And shouted as he journeyed,
'Deliverance will come!
"'Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
The voice was weather-cracked, and the canvas bellows of the instrument
coughed and wheezed, but the music was infectious, and half from
overflowing spirits, and half from the mere swing of the melody, the
crowd chanted the refrain:
"'Palms of Victory;
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
Two, three verses of the old-fashioned hymn he sang, and after each
verse more of the bystanders--some in real earnestness, some in impious
hilarity--shouted in the chorus:
"'Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"
Harry walked on in a brown study, the refrain ringing through his brain.
There came to him the memory of Hugh's old sneer as he looked at his
book-shelves--whereon Nietzsche and Pascal sat cheek by jowl with
_Theron Ware_ and _Robert Elsmere_--"I wonder how much of all that you
really believe!" How much _did_ he really believe? "I used to read
Thomas a Kempis then," he said to himself, "and Jonathan Edwards; now I
read Renan and the _Origins of Christian Mythology_!"
At the chapel-gate lounged his chauffeur, awaiting orders.
"Bring the car round, Hede," said Harry, "and I shan't need you after
that to-night. I'll drive her myself. You can meet me at the garage."
Hede, the dapper, good-looking Scandinavian, touched his glossy straw
hat respectfully. It was a piece of luck that his master had not planned
a motor trip instead of a tour afoot. For a month, after to-night, his
time was his own. His quarter's wages were in his pocket, and he slapped
the wad with satisfaction as he sauntered off to the bowling-alley.
The study was pitch-dark, and Rummy halted on the threshold with a low,
ominous growl as Harry fumbled for the electric switch. As he found and
pressed it and the place flooded with light, he saw a figure there--the
figure of a man who had been sitting alone--beside the empty hearth, who
rose, shrinking back from the sudden brilliancy.
It was Hugh Stires.