The Ball of Fire
[Illustration: For an instant the brown eyes and the blue ones met]
The Ball of Fire
By
George Randolph Chester
and
Lillian Chester
[Illustration]
Illustrated
Hearst’s International Library Co.
New York 1914
Copyright, 1914, by
THE RED BOOK CORPORATION
Copyright, 1914, by
HEARST’S INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY CO., INC.
_All Rights reserved, including the translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I NO PLACE FOR SENTIMENT 1
II “WHY?” 9
III THE CHANGE IN THE RECTOR’S EYES 22
IV TOO MANY MEN 35
V EDWARD E. ALLISON TAKES A VACATION 47
VI THE IMPULSIVE YOUNG MAN FROM HOME 59
VII THEY HAD ALREADY SPOILED HER! 70
VIII STILL PIECING OUT THE WORLD 80
IX THE MINE FOR THE GOLDEN ALTAR 88
X THE STORM CENTER OF MAGNETIC ATTRACTION 98
XI “GENTLEMEN, THERE IS YOUR EMPIRE!” 111
XII GAIL SOLVES THE PROBLEM OF VEDDER COURT 123
XIII THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 135
XIV THE FREE AND ENTIRELY UNCURBED 150
XV BUT WHY WAS SHE LONESOME? 158
XVI GAIL AT HOME 167
XVII SOMETHING HAPPENS TO GERALD FOSLAND 178
XVIII THE MESSAGE FROM NEW YORK 187
XIX THE RECTOR KNOWS 199
XX THE BREED OF GAIL 212
XXI THE PUBLIC IS AROUSED 221
XXII THE REV. SMITH BOYD PROTESTS 231
XXIII A SERIES OF GAIETIES 240
XXIV THE MAKER OF MAPS 250
XXV A QUESTION OF EUGENICS 262
XXVI AN EMPIRE AND AN EMPRESS 271
XXVII ALLISON’S PRIVATE AND PARTICULAR DEVIL 281
XXVIII LOVE 289
XXIX GAIL FIRST! 299
XXX THE FLUTTER OF A SHEET OF MUSIC 309
XXXI GAIL BREAKS A PROMISE 315
XXXII GERALD FOSLAND MAKES A SPEECH 325
XXXIII CHICKEN, OR STEAK? 334
XXXIV A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE 344
XXXV A VESTRY MEETING 353
XXXVI HAND IN HAND 362
ILLUSTRATIONS
For an instant the brown eyes and the blue ones met _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
At 7:15 Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the
midst of some neat and intricate tabulations 51
She was glad to be alone, to rescue herself from the
whirl of anger and indignation and humiliation which
had swept around her 109
She telephoned that she was going to remain with
Allison; and they enjoyed a two hour chat of many
things 278
The Ball of Fire
CHAPTER I
NO PLACE FOR SENTIMENT
Silence pervaded the dim old aisles of Market Square Church; a silence
which seemed to be palpable; a solemn hush which wavered, like the
ghostly echoes of anthems long forgotten, among the slender columns and
the high arches and the delicate tracery of the groining; the winter
sun, streaming through the clerestory windows, cast, on the floor and on
the vacant benches, patches of ruby and of sapphire, of emerald and of
topaz, these seeming only to accentuate the dimness and the silence.
A thin, wavering, treble note, so delicate that it seemed like a mere
invisible cobweb of a tone, stole out of the organ loft and went pulsing
up amid the dim arches. It grew in volume; it added a diapason; a deep,
soft bass joined it, and then, subdued, but throbbing with the passion
of a lost soul, it swelled into one of the noble preludes of Bach. The
organ rose in a mighty crescendo to a peal which shook the very edifice;
then it stopped with an abruptness which was uncanny, so much so that
the silence which ensued was oppressive. In that silence the vestry door
creaked, it opened wide, and it was as if a vision had suddenly been set
there! Framed in the dark doorway against the background of the
sun-flooded vestry, bathed in the golden light from the transept window,
brown-haired, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, stood a girl who might have been
one of the slender stained-glass virgins come to life, the golden light
flaming the edges of her hair into an oriole. She stood timidly, peering
into the dimness, and on her beautifully curved lips was a half
questioning smile.
“Uncle Jim,” she called, and there was some quality in her low voice
which was strangely attractive; and disturbing.
“By George, Gail, I forgot that you were to come for me!” said Jim
Sargent, rising from amid the group of men in the dim transept. “The
decorators drove us out of the vestry.”
“They drove me out, too,” laughed the vision, stepping from her frame.
“We are delighted that they drove you in here,” quoth the tall, young
Reverend Smith Boyd, who had accomplished the rare art of bowing
gracefully in a Prince Albert.
She smiled her acknowledgment of the compliment, and glanced uncertainly
at the awe-inspiring vestry meeting, then she turned toward the door.
“My niece, Miss Gail Sargent, gentlemen,” announced Jim Sargent, with
entirely justifiable pride, and, beaming until his bald spot seemed to
glow with an added shine, he introduced her to each of the gentlemen
present, with the exception of Smith Boyd, whom she had met that
morning.
“What a pity Saint Paul didn’t see you,” remarked silver-bearded Rufus
Manning, calmly appropriating the vision and ushering her into the pew
between himself and her uncle. “He never would have said it.”
“That women should not sit in council with the men?” she laughed,
looking into the blue eyes of patriarchal Manning. “Are you sure I won’t
be in the way?”
“Not at all,” round-headed old Nicholas Van Ploon immediately assured
her. He had popped his eyes open with a jerk at the entrance of Gail,
and had not since been able to close them to their normal almond shape.
He sat now uncomfortably twisted so that he could face her, and his
cheeks were reddening with the exertion, which had wrinkled his roundly
filled vest. The young rector contemplated her gravely. He was not quite
pleased.
“We’ll be through in a few minutes, Gail,” promised Jim Sargent.
“Allison, you were about to prove something to us, I think,” and he
leaned forward to smile across Gail at Rufus Manning.
“Prove is the right word,” agreed the stockily built man who had
evidently been addressing the vestry. He was acutely conscious of the
presence of Gail, as they all were. “Your rector suggests that this is a
matter of sentiment. You are anxious to have fifty million dollars to
begin the erection of a cathedral; but I came here to talk business, and
that only. Granting you the full normal appreciation of your Vedder
Court property, and the normal increase of your aggregate rentals, you
can not have, at the end of ten years, a penny over forty-two millions.
I am prepared to offer you, in cash, a sum which will, at three and a
half per cent., and in ten years, produce that exact amount. To this I
add two million.”
“How much did you allow for increase in the value of the property?”
asked Nicholas Van Ploon, whose only knowledge for several generations
had been centred on this one question. The original Van Ploon had bought
a vast tract of Manhattan for a dollar an acre, and, by that stroke of
towering genius, had placed the family of Van Ploon, for all eternity,
beyond the necessity of thought.
For answer, Allison passed him the envelope upon which he had been
figuring, checking off an item as he did so. He noticed that Gail’s lips
twitched with suppressed mirth. She turned abruptly to look back at the
striking transept window, and the three vestrymen in the rear pew
immediately sat straighter. Willis Cunningham, who was a bachelor,
hastily smoothed his Vandyke. He was so rich, by inheritance, that money
meant nothing to him.
“Not enough,” grunted Van Ploon, handing back the envelope, and twisting
again in the general direction of Gail.
“Ample,” retorted Allison. “You can’t count anything for the buildings.
While I don’t deny that they yield the richest income of any property in
the city, they are the most decrepit tenements in New York. They’ll fall
down in less than ten years. You have them propped up now.”
Jim Sargent glanced solicitously at Gail, but she did not seem to be
bored; not a particle!
“They are passed by the building inspector annually,” pompously stated
W. T. Chisholm, his mutton chops turning pink from the reddening of the
skin beneath. He had spent a lifetime in resenting indignities before
they reached him.
“Building inspectors change,” insinuated Allison. “Politics is very
uncertain.”
Four indignant vestrymen jerked forward to answer that insult.
“Gentlemen, this is a vestry meeting,” sternly reproved the Reverend
Smith Boyd, advancing a step, and seeming to feel the need of a gavel.
His rich, deep baritone explained why he was rector of the richest
church in the world.
Gail’s eyes were dancing, but otherwise she was demureness itself as she
studied, in turns, the members of the richest vestry in the world. She
estimated that eight of the gentlemen then present were almost close
enough to the anger line to swear. They numbered just eight, and they
were most interesting! And _this_ was a vestry meeting!
“The topic of debate was money, I believe,” suggested Manning, rescuing
his sense of humour from somewhere in his beard. He was the infidel
member. “Suppose we return to it. Is Allison’s offer worth considering?”
“Why?” inquired the nasal voice of clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who
was sarcastic in money matters. The Standard Cereal Company had attained
its colossal dimensions through rebates; and he had invented the device!
“The only reason we’d sell to Allison would be that we could get more
money than by the normal return from our investment.”
The thinly spun treble note began once more, pulsing its timid way among
the high, dim arches, as if seeking a lodgment where it might fasten its
tiny thread of harmony, and grow into a masterful composition. A little
old lady came slowly down the centre aisle of the nave, in rich but
modest black, struggling, against her infirmities, to walk with a trace
of the erect gracefulness of her bygone youth. Gail, listening raptly to
the delicately increasing throb of the music, followed, in abstraction,
the slow progress of the little old lady, who seemed to carry with her,
for just a moment, a trace of the solemn hush belonging to that
perspective of slender columns which spread their gracefully pointed
arches up into the groined twilight, where the music hovered until it
could gather strength to burst into full song. The little old lady
turned her gaze for an instant to the group in the transept, and
subconsciously gave the folds of her veil a touch; then she slipped into
her pew, down near the altar, and raised her eyes to the exquisite Henri
Dupres crucifix. She knelt, and bowed her forehead on her hands.
“I’ve allowed two million for the profit of Market Square Church in
dealing with me,” stated Allison, again proffering the envelope which no
one made a move to take. “I will not pay a dollar more.”
W. T. Chisholm was suddenly reminded that the vestry had a moral
obligation in the matter under discussion. He was president of the
Majestic Trust Company, and never forgot that fact.
“To what use would you devote the property of Market Square Church?” he
gravely asked.
“The erection of a terminal station for all the municipal transportation
in New York,” answered Allison; “subways, elevateds, surface cars,
traction lines! The proposition should have the hearty co-operation of
every citizen.”
Simple little idea, wasn’t it? Gail had to think successively to
comprehend what a stupendous enterprise this was; and the man talked
about it as modestly as if he were planning to sod a lawn; more so! Why,
back home, if a man dreamed a dream so vast as that, he just talked
about it for the rest of his life; and they put a poet’s wreath on his
tombstone.
“Now you’re talking sentiment,” retorted stubby-moustached Jim Sargent.
“You said, a while ago, that you came here strictly on business. So did
we. This is no place for sentiment.”
Rufus Manning, with the tip of his silvery beard in his fingers, looked
up into the delicate groining of the apse, where it curved gracefully
forward over the head of the famous Henri Dupres crucifix, and he
grinned. Gail Sargent was looking contemplatively from one to the other
of the grave vestrymen.
“You’re right,” conceded Allison curtly. “Suppose you fellows talk it
over by yourselves, and let me know your best offer.”
“Very well,” assented Jim Sargent, with an indifference which did not
seem to be assumed. “We have some other matters to discuss, and we may
as well thrash this thing out right now. We’ll let you know to-morrow.”
Gail looked at her watch and rose energetically.
“I shall be late at Lucile’s, Uncle Jim. I don’t think I can wait for
you.”
“I’m sorry,” regretted Sargent. “I don’t like to have you drive around
alone.”
“I’ll be very happy to take Miss Sargent anywhere she’d like to go,”
offered Allison, almost instantaneously.
“Much obliged, Allison,” accepted Sargent heartily; “that is, if she’ll
go with you.”
“Thank you,” said Gail simply, as she stepped out of the pew.
The gentlemen of the vestry rose as one man. Old Nicholas Van Ploon even
attempted to stand gracefully on one leg, while his vest bulged over the
back of the pew in front of him.
“I think we’ll have to make you a permanent member of the vestry,”
smiled Manning, the patriarch, as he bowed his adieus. “We’ve been
needing a brightening influence for some time.”
Willis Cunningham, the thoughtful one, wedged his Vandyke between the
heads of Standard Cereal Clark and Banker Chisholm.
“We hope to see you often, Miss Sargent,” was his thoughtful remark.
“I mean to attend services,” returned Gail graciously, looking up into
the organ loft, where the organist was making his third attempt at that
baffling run in the Bach prelude.
“You haven’t said how you like our famous old church,” suggested the
Reverend Smith Boyd with pleasant ease, though he felt relieved that she
was going.
The sudden snap in Gail’s eyes fairly scintillated. It was like the
shattering of fine glass in the sunlight.
“It seems to be a remarkably lucrative enterprise,” she smiled up at
him, and was rewarded by a snort from Uncle Jim and a chuckle from
silvery-bearded Rufus Manning. Allison frankly guffawed. The balance of
the sedate vestry was struck dumb by the impertinence.
Gail felt the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed steadily on her, and
turned to meet them. They were cold. She had thought them blue; but now
they were green! She stared back into them for a moment, and a little
red spot came into the delicate tint of her oval cheeks; then she turned
deliberately to the marvellously beautiful big transept window. It had
been designed by the most famous stained-glass artist in the world, and
its subject lent itself to a wealth of colour. It was Christ turning the
money changers out of the temple!