HALLELUJAH JONES TAKES A HAND
Hallelujah Jones had finished his labor for the night. The crowd had
grown restive, and finally melted away, and, his audience gone, he
folded the camp-stool, turned off the gasoline flare, shut down the lid
of his melodeon, and trundled it up the street. A goodly number of
coppers had rattled into his worn hat, and to the workman belonged his
wage. There was a little settlement on the river, a handful of miles
away, and the trudge under the stars would be cool and pleasant. If he
grew tired, there was his blanket strapped atop the melodeon, and the
open night was dry and balmy.
As he pushed up the street he came to a great motor-car standing at the
curb under the maples. There was no one in it, but somewhere in its
interior a muffled whirring throb beat evenly like a double, metallic
heart. He stopped and regarded it inquisitively; a rich man's property,
to be sure!
He looked up--it was at the gate of the chapel. No doubt it belonged to
the fashionable rector who had been pointed out to him on the street the
day before. He remembered the young, handsome face, the stylish
broadcloth. He thought he would have liked to lean over the Reverend
Henry Sanderson's shoulder and lay his finger on a text: _How hardly
shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of Heaven_. Yet it was a
beautiful edifice that wealth had built there for Christ! He saw dimly
the stone angel standing in the porch, and, leaving his melodeon on the
pavement, entered the gate to examine it.
He noticed now a dim flicker that lit one corner of the great
rose-window. Moving softly over the cropped grass, he approached, tilted
one of the hinged panels, and peered in. Two men were there, behind the
altar-railing, seated at the communion table.
Hallelujah Jones started back. There on the table was a bag of coin,
cards and counters. They were playing--he heard the fall of the cards on
the hard wood, saw the gleam of a gold-piece, the smear of melted wax
marring the polished oak. The reddish glow of the candle was reflected
on the players' faces. Well he knew the devil's tools: had he not sung
and exhorted in Black Hill mining camps and prayed in frontier faro
"joints"? They were gambling! At God's holy altar, and on Christ's
table! Who would dare such a profanation?
He craned his neck. Suddenly he gave a smothered cry. The player facing
him he recognized--it was the rector himself! He bent forward, gazing
with a tense and horrified curiosity.
In that hazard within the altar-rail strange forces were contending,
whose meaning he could not fathom. Between the two men who played, not a
word had been spoken save those demanded by the exigencies of the game.
Harry had seemed to act almost automatically, but his mind was working
clearly, his hand was firm and cool as the blossom on his coat; he made
his play with that old steely nonchalance with which, once upon a time,
he had staked--and lost--so often. But in his brain a thousand spindles
were whirring, a maze of refractory images was rushing past him into an
eddying phantasmagoria. A kind of exaltation possessed him. He was
putting his past into the dice-box to redeem a soul in pawn, fighting
the devil with his own fire, gambling for God!
Five times, ten times, the cards had changed hands, and with every deal
he lost. The gold disks had slipped steadily across the table. But Harry
had seemed to be looking beyond the ebb and flow of the jettons and the
pale face opposite him that gloated over its yellow pile. Though that
pile grew larger and larger, Harry's face had never changed. Hugh's was
the shaking hand when he discarded, the convulsed features when he
scanned his draw, the desperate anxiety when for a moment fortune seemed
to waver. He had never in his life had such luck! He swept his winnings
into his pockets with a discordant laugh as he noted that, of the
contents of the opened bag, Harry had but one double-eagle remaining.
Harry paused an instant. He snapped the little gold cross he wore from
its silken tether and set it upright by him on the table.
His hand won, and the next, and the next. Hugh hoarded his gold: he
staked the red wafers--each one a day! He had won almost a thousand
dollars, but the second bag had not yet been opened, and the vampire
intoxication was running molten-hot in his veins. The untouched bag drew
him as the magnet mountain drew the adventurous Sindbad--he could have
snatched it in his eagerness.
But the luck had changed; his red counters diminished, melted; he would
soon have to draw on his real winnings. Cold beads of sweat broke on his
forehead.
Neither had heard the creak of the rose-window as the hinged panel drew
back. Neither saw the face pressed against the aperture. Neither guessed
the wild and terrible thoughts that were raging through the mind of the
solitary watcher as he peered and peered.
This minister! This corrupt, ungodly shepherd! He could be neither
hanged nor put in jail, yet he committed a crime for which hell itself
scarce held adequate penalty and punishment! The street preacher's eyes
dilated, the hand that held the panel trembled, spots of unhealthy white
sprang into his burning cheeks. The flaring candles--the table with its
carven legend, _This Do In Remembrance of Me_--the little gold cross,
set there, it seemed to him, in a satanic derision! It was the evil the
Apostle Paul wrestled against, of "wicked spirits in high places." It
was sacrilege! It was blasphemy! It was the Arch-Fiend laughing, making
a mock of God's own altar with the guilty pleasures of the pit--a very
sacrament of the damned!
Scarce knowing what he did, he closed the panel softly and ran across
the chapel lawn. On the pavement outside he met a man approaching. It
was the bishop, on his way to his contemplated chat with Harry
Sanderson. The excited evangelist did not know the man, but his eye
caught the ministerial dress, the plain, sturdy piety of the face. In
his zeal he saw an instrument to his hand. He grasped the bishop's arm.
"Quick! Quick!" he gasped. "There's devil's work doing in there! Come
and see!" He fairly pulled him inside the gate.
The puzzled bishop saw the intense excitement of the other's demeanor.
He saw the faint glow in the corner of the rose-window. Were there
thieves after the altar-plate?
He shook off the eager hand that was drawing him toward the window. "Not
there--come this way!" he said, and hurried toward the porch. He tried
the chapel door--it was fast. He had a key to this in his pocket. He
inserted it with caution, opened the door noiselessly and went in, the
street preacher at his heels.
What the bishop saw was photographed instantaneously on his mind in
fiery, indelible colors. It ate into his soul like hot iron into
quivering flesh, searing itself upon his memory. It was destined to
haunt his sleep for many months afterward, a phantom of regret and
shame. He was, in his way, a man of the world, travelled, sophisticated,
acquainted with sin in unexpected forms and places. But this sight, in
all its coarse suggestion of license, in its harrowing implication of
hidden vice and hypocrisy, was damning and appalling. The evangelist of
the pave had been horrified, shocked to word and action; the bishop was
frozen, inarticulate, impaled. For any evil in Hugh Stires he was
prepared--since the forgery. But Hugh's companion now was the man whom
he himself had ordained and anointed, by the laying on of hands, with
the chrism of his holy ministry.
It was sin, then, that had set the look he had marvelled at in Harry
Sanderson's face--sin, flaunting, mocking and terrible! He whom the
church had ordained to shepherd its little ones, to comfort its
afflicted, to give in marriage and to bless, to hold before the world
the white and stainless banner--a renegade, polluting the sanctuary! A
priest apostate, surprised in a hideous revel, gambling, as the Roman
soldiers gambled for the seamless garment, at the foot of the cross! An
irrepressible exclamation burst from his lips.
With the sound both men at the table started to their feet. Hugh, with a
single glance behind him, uttering a wild laugh, leaped the railing,
dashed through the study, and vanished into the night; Harry, as though
suddenly turned to stone, stood staring at the accusatory figure, with
the eager form of the evangelist behind it. It was as if the horror on
the stern, set face of the bishop mirrored itself instantaneously upon
his countenance, his imagination opening in a shocked, awed way to the
concentrated light of feeling, so that he stood bewildered in the
paralysis of a like dismay.
To the bishop it seemed the attitude of guilt detected.
What was Harry Sanderson thinking, as, under that speechless regard, he
mechanically gathered the scattered cards and lifted the little cross
and the unopened bag of double-eagles from the table? Where was the odd
excitement, the strange exaltation that had possessed him? The spindles
in his brain had stilled, and an algid calm had succeeded, as abrupt as
the quiet, deadly assurance with which his mind now saw the pit into
which his own feet had led him. The paradoxical impulse that had bred
this sinister topsyturvydom had fallen away. The same judicial Harry
Sanderson who had said to Jessica, "I was my brother's keeper,"
arraigned and judged himself, and pronounced the sentence on the
bishop's face conclusive, irrefutable, without the power of explanation
or appeal.
He blew out the candle, replaced it carefully in its altar bracket, made
shift to wipe the wax from the table, and slowly, half blindly, and
without a word, went into the study.
The bishop came forward, drew the key from the inside of the study door,
closed it and locked it from the chapel side. Harry did not turn, but he
was acutely conscious of every sound. He heard the door shut sharply,
the harsh grate of the key in the lock, and the sound came to him like
the last sentence--the realization of a soul on whom the gate of the
good closes for ever.
In the dark silence of the chapel Hallelujah Jones smote his thin hands
together approvingly, as he followed the bishop to the outer door. There
the older man laid his hand on his shoulder.
"_Let him that thinketh he standeth_," he said, "_take heed lest he
fall_! Let not this knowledge be spread abroad that it make the
unrighteous to blaspheme. When you pray for your own soul to-night, pray
for the soul of that man from whom God's face is turned away!"
Something in the churchless evangelist bowed to the voice of
ecclesiastical authority. He went without a word.
In the study Harry Sanderson stood for a moment with the cards and the
bag of double-eagles in his hand. In his soft shirt and disordered hair,
with his preternaturally bright eyes, the white blossom on his lapel,
and the brilliant light upon his face, he might have been that
satin-sleeved colonial ancestor of his, in dissolute maturity, coming
from an unclerical bout at Loo, two hundred years ago.
Finally he put the cards and the canvas bag methodically into the safe
and closed it. Then he knelt by his desk and said, clearly and aloud--to
that cold inner symbol of consciousness in his soul:
"O God, I do not know if Thou art, as has been said, a seer of the good
that is in the bad, and of the bad that is in the good, and a lover of
them both. But I know that I am in a final extremity. I can no longer do
my labor consistently before the world and before Thee. If I am
delivered, it must be by some way of Thine own that I can not conceive,
for I can not help myself. Amen."
He rose to his feet, mechanically put on a coat that was lying on a
chair--Hugh's coat, but he did not notice this--and bareheaded passed
out to the street. The motor-car stood there. He took his place in the
forward seat, and threw on the power.
Barking joyously, Rummy, the brown spaniel, tore out of the gate, but
his master did not stop. The little creature pursued the moving car,
made a frantic leap to gain his seat, but missed, and the huge armored
wheel struck and hurled him to the gutter.
Harry did not hear the sharp yelp of pain; his hand was on the lever,
pushing it over, over, to its last notch, and the great mechanism,
responding with a leap, sped away, faster and faster, through the night.