GAIL SOLVES THE PROBLEM OF VEDDER COURT
The Reverend Smith Boyd, rector of the richest church in the world,
dropped his last collar button on the floor, and looked distinctly
annoyed. The collar button rolled under his mahogany highboy, and
concealed itself carefully behind one of the legs. The Reverend Smith
Boyd, there being none to see, laid aside his high dignity, and got down
on his knees, though not for any clerical purpose. With his suspenders
hanging down his back, he sprawled his long arms under the highboy in
all directions, while his face grew red; and the little collar button,
snuggled carefully out of sight behind the furthest leg, just shone and
shone. The rector, the ticking of whose dressing-room clock admonished
him that the precious moments were passing never to return again,
twisted his neck, and bent his head sidewise, and inserted it under the
highboy, one ear scraping the rug and the other the bottom of the lowest
drawer. No collar button. He withdrew his neck, and twisted his head in
the opposite direction, and inserted his head again under the highboy,
so that the ear which had scraped the carpet now scraped the bottom of
the drawer, whereat the little collar button shone so brightly that the
rector’s bulging eye caught the glint of it. His hand swung round, at
the end of a long arm, and captured it before it could hide any further,
then the young rector withdrew his throbbing head and started to raise
up, and bumped the back of his head with a crack on the bottom of an
open drawer, near enough to the top to give him a good long sweep for
momentum. This mishap being just one degree beyond the point to which
the Reverend Smith Boyd had been consecrated, he ejaculated as follows:—
No, it is not respectful, nor proper, nor charitable, to set down what
the Reverend Smith Boyd, in that stress, ejaculated; but a beautiful,
grey-haired lady, beautiful with the sweetness of content and the
happiness of gratified pride and the kindliness of humour, who had
paused at the Reverend Smith Boyd’s open door to inquire how soon he
would be down to dinner, hastily covered her mouth with her hand, and
moved away from the door, with moist blue eyes, around which twinkled a
dozen tiny wrinkles born of much smiling.
When the dignified young rector came down to dinner, fully clothed and
apparently in his right mind, his mother, who was the beautiful
grey-haired lady with the twinkling blue eyes, looked across the table
and smiled indulgently at his disguise; for he was not a grown-up, tall,
broad-shouldered man of thirty-two at all. In reality he was a
shock-headed, slightly freckled urchin of nine or ten, by the name of
“Smitty” on the town commons, and “Tod” at home.
“Aren’t you becoming a trifle irritable of late, Tod?” she inquired with
solicitude, willfully suppressing a smile which flashed up in her as she
remembered that ejaculation. It was shocking in a minister, of course,
but she had ever contended that ministers were, and should be, made of
clay; and clay is friable.
“Yes, mother, I believe I am,” confessed the Reverend Smith Boyd,
considering the matter with serious impartiality.
“You are not ill in any way?”
“Not at all,” he hastily assured her.
“Your cold is all gone?”
“Entirely. As a matter of fact, mother,” and he smiled, “I don’t think I
had one.”
“If you hadn’t drank that tea, and taken the mustard foot bath, and
wrapped the flannel around your throat, it might have been a severe
one,” his mother complacently replied. “You haven’t been studying too
much?”
“No,” and the slightest flicker of impatience twitched his brows.
“You’ve no headache?” and the tone was as level as if she had not seen
that flicker.
“No, mother.”
“Do you sleep well?”
The Reverend Smith Boyd took a drink of water. His hand trembled
slightly.
“Excellently.”
Mrs. Boyd surveyed her son with a practised eye.
“I think your appetite’s dropping off a little,” she commented, and then
she was shrewdly silent, though the twinkles of humour came back to her
eyes by and by. “I don’t think you take enough social diversion,” she
finally advised him. “You should go out more. You should ride, walk, but
always in the company of young and agreeable people. Because you are a
rector is no reason for you to spend your spare time in gloomy solitude,
as you have been doing for the past week.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd would have liked to state that he had been very
busy, but he had a conscience, which was a nuisance to him. He had spent
most of his spare time up in his study, with his chin in his hand.
“You are quite right, mother,” he sombrely confessed, and swallowed two
spoonfuls of his soup. It was excellent soup, but, after taking a bite
of a wafer, he laid his spoon on the edge of the plate.
“I think I’ll drive you out of the house, Tod,” Mrs. Boyd decided, in
the same tones she had used to employ when she had sent him to bed. “I
think I’ll send you over to Sargent’s to-night, to sing with Gail.”
The rector of the richest church in the world flushed a trifle, and
looked at the barley in the bottom of his soup. His mother regarded him
quietly, and the twinkles went out of her eyes. She had been bound to
get at the bottom of his irritability, and now she had arrived at it.
“I would prefer not to go,” he told her stiffly, and the eyes which he
lifted to her were coldly green.
“Why?”
Again that slight twitch of impatience in his brows, then he suppressed
a sigh. The catechism was on the way, and he might just as well answer
up promptly.
“I do not approve of Miss Sargent.”
For just one second the rector’s mother felt an impulse to shake Tod
Boyd. Gail Sargent was a young lady of whom any young man might
approve—and what was the matter with Tod? She was beginning to be
humiliated by the fact that, at thirty-two, he had not lost his head and
made a fool of himself, to the point of tight shoes and poetry, over a
girl.
“Why?” and the voice of Mrs. Boyd was not cold as she had meant it to
be. She had suddenly felt some tug of sympathy for Tod.
“Well, for one thing, she has a most disagreeable lack of reverence,” he
stated.
“Reverence?” and Mrs. Boyd knitted her brows. “I don’t believe you quite
understand her. She has the most beautifully simple religious faith that
I have ever seen, Tod.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd watched his soup disappearing, as if it were
some curious moving object to which his attention had just been called.
“Miss Sargent claims to have a new religion,” he observed. “She has said
most unkind things about the Church as an institution, and about Market
Square Church in particular. She says that it is a strictly commercial
institution, and that its motive in desiring to build the new cathedral
is vanity.”
He omitted to mention Gail’s further charge that his own motive in
desiring the new cathedral was personal ambition. Candour did not compel
that admission. It did not become him to act from piqued personal pride.
Mrs. Boyd studied him as he gazed sombrely at his fish, and the twinkles
once more returned to her eyes, as she made up her mind to cure Tod’s
irritability.
“I am ashamed of you,” she told her son. “This girl is scarcely twenty.
If I remember rightly, and I’m sure that I do, you came to me, at about
twenty, and confessed to a logical disbelief in the theory of creation,
which included, of course, a disbelief in the Creator. You were an
infidel, an atheist. You were going to relinquish your studies, and give
up all thought of the Church.”
The deep red of the Reverend Smith Boyd’s face testified to the truth of
this cruel charge, and he pushed back his fish permanently.
“I most humbly confess,” he stated, and indeed he had writhed in spirit
many times over that remembrance. “However, mother, I have since
discovered that to be a transitional stage through which every
theological student passes.”
“Yet you won’t allow it to a girl,” charged Mrs. Boyd, with the severity
which she could much better have expressed with a laugh. “When you
discover that this young lady, who seems to be in every way delightful,
is so misled as to criticise the motives of Market Square Church, you
withdraw into your dignity, with the privilege of a layman, and announce
that ‘you do not approve of her.’ What she needs, Tod, is religious
instruction.”
She had carefully ironed out the tiny little wrinkles around her blue
eyes by the time her son looked up from the profound cogitation into
which this reproof had thrown him.
“Mother, I have been wrong,” he admitted, and he seemed ever so much
brighter for the confession. He drew his fish towards him and ate it.
Later the Reverend Smith Boyd presented himself at James Sargent’s
house, with a new light shining in his breast; and he had blue eyes. He
had come to show Gail the way and the light. If she had doubts, and lack
of faith, and flippant irreverence, it was his duty to be patient with
her, for this was the fault of youth. He had been youthful himself.
Gail’s eyelids dropped and the corners of her lips twitched when the
Reverend Smith Boyd’s name was brought up to her, but she did her hair
in another way, high on her head instead of low on her neck, and then
she went down, bewildering in her simple little dark blue velvet cut
round at the neck.
“I am so glad your cold is better,” she greeted him, smiling as
pleasantly as if their last meeting had been a most joyous occasion.
“I don’t think I had a cold,” laughed the young rector, also as happily
mannered as if their last meeting had been a cheerful one. “I sneezed
twice, I believe, and mother immediately gave me a course of doctoring
which no cold could resist.”
“I was afraid that your voice was out,” remarked Gail, in a tone
suggestive of the fact that that would be a tragedy indeed; and she
began hauling forth music. “You haven’t been over for so long.”
The Reverend Smith Boyd coloured. At times the way of spiritual
instruction was quite difficult. Nevertheless, he had a duty to perform.
Mechanically he had taken his place at the piano, standing straight and
tall, and his blue eyes softened as they automatically fell on the piece
of music she had opened. Of course it was their favourite, the one in
which their voices had soared in the most perfect unison. Gail glanced
up at him as she brushed a purely imaginary fleck of dust from the keys.
For an instant the brown eyes and the blue ones met. He was a
tremendously nice fellow, after all. But what was worrying him?
“Before we sing I should like to take up graver matters,” he began,
feeling at a tremendous disadvantage in the presence of the music. To
obviate this, he drew up a chair, and sat facing her. “I have called
this evening in the capacity of your temporary rector.”
Gail’s eyelids had a tendency to flicker down, but she restrained them.
She was adorable when she looked prim that way. Her lips were like a
rosebud. The Reverend Smith Boyd himself thought of the simile, and cast
it behind him.
“You are most kind,” she told him, suppressing the imps and demons which
struggled to pop into her eyes.
“I have been greatly disturbed by the length to which your unbelief has
apparently gone,” the young rector went on, and having plunged into this
opening he began to breathe more freely. This was familiar ground. “I am
willing to admit, to one of your intelligence, that there are certain
articles of the creed, and certain tenets of the Church, which humanity
has outgrown, as a child outgrows its fear of the dark.”
Gail rested a palm on the edge of the bench behind her, and leaned back
facing him, supported on one beautifully modelled arm. Her face had set
seriously now.
“However,” went on the rector, “it is the habit and the privilege of
youth to run to extremes. Sweeping doubt takes the place of reasonable
criticism, and the much which is good is condemned alike with the little
which has grown useless.”
He paused to give Gail a chance for reply, but that straight-eyed young
lady had nothing to say, at this juncture.
“I do not expect to be able to remove the spiritual errors, which I am
compelled to judge that you have accumulated, by any other means than
patient logic,” he resumed. “May I discuss these matters with you?” His
voice was grave and serious, and full of earnest sincerity, and the
musical quality alone of it made patient logical discussion seem
attractive.
“If you like,” she assented, smiling at him with wileful and wilful
deception. The wicked thought had occurred to her that it might be her
own duty to broaden his spiritual understanding.
“Thank you,” he accepted gravely. “If you will give me an hour or so
each week, I shall be very happy.”
“I am nearly always at home on Tuesday and Friday evenings,” suggested
Gail. “Scarcely any one calls before eight thirty, and we have dinner
quite early on those evenings.” She began to be sincerely interested in
the project. She had never given herself time to quite exactly define
her own attitude towards theology as distinct from religion, and she
felt that she should do it, if for no other reason than to avoid making
impulsive over-statements. The Reverend Smith Boyd would help her to
look squarely into her own mind and her own soul, for he had a very
active intelligence, and was, moreover, the most humanly forceful cleric
she had ever met. Besides, they could always finish by singing.
“I shall make arrangements to be over as early as you will permit,”
declared the rector, warmly aglow with the idea. “We shall begin with
the very beginnings of things, and, step by step, develop, I hope, a
logical justification of the vast spiritual revolution which has
conquered the world.”
“I should like nothing better,” mused Gail, and since the Reverend Smith
Boyd rose, and stood behind her and filled his lungs, she turned to the
piano and struck a preliminary chord, which she trailed off into a
tinkling little run, by way of friendly greeting to the piano.
“We shall begin with the creation,” pursued the rector, dwelling, with
pleasure, on the idea of a thorough progress through the mazes of
religious growth. There were certain vague points which he wanted to
clear up for himself.
“And wind up with Vedder Court.” She had not meant to say that. It just
popped into her mind, and popped off the end of her tongue.
“Even that will be taken up in its due logical sequence,” and the
Reverend Smith Boyd prided himself on having already displayed the
patience which he had come expressly to exercise.
Gail was immediately aware that he was exercising patience. He had
reproved her, nevertheless, and quite coldly, for having violated the
tacit agreement to take up the different phases of their weighty topic
only “in their due logic sequence.” The rector, in this emergency, would
have found no answer which would stand the test, but Gail had the
immense advantage of femininity.
“It altogether depends at which end we start our sequence,” she sweetly
reminded him. “My own impression is that we should begin at Vedder Court
and work back to the creation. Vedder Court needs immediate attention.”
That was quite sufficient. When Allison called, twenty minutes later,
they were at it hammer and tongs. There was a bright red spot in each of
Gail’s cheeks, and the Reverend Smith Boyd’s cold eyes were distinctly
green! Allison had been duly announced, but the combatants merely
glanced at him, and finished the few remarks upon which they were, at
the moment, engaged. He had been studying the tableau with the interest
of a connoisseur, and he had devoted his more earnest attention to the
Reverend Smith Boyd.
“So glad to see you,” said Gail conventionally, rising and offering him
her hand. If there was that strange thrill in his clasp, she was not
aware of it.
“I only ran in to see if you’d like to take a private car trip in the
new subway before it is opened,” offered Allison, turning to shake hands
with the Reverend Smith Boyd. “Will you join us, Doctor?”
For some reason a new sort of jangle had come into the room, and it
affected the three of them. Allison was the only one who did not notice
that he had taken Gail’s acceptance for granted.
“You might tell us when,” she observed, transferring the flame of her
eyes from the rector to Allison. “I may have conflicting engagements.”
“No, you won’t,” Allison cheerfully informed her; “because it will be at
any hour you set.”
“Oh,” was the weak response, and, recognising that she was fairly
beaten, her white teeth flashed at him in a smile of humour. “Suppose we
say ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”
“I am free at that hour,” stated Doctor Boyd, in answer to a glance of
inquiry from Allison. He felt it his duty to keep in touch with public
improvements. Also, beneath his duty lay a keen pleasure in the task.
“You’ll be very much interested, I think,” and Allison glowed with the
ever-present pride of achievement, then he suddenly grinned. “The new
subway stops at the edge of Vedder Court, waiting.”
There was another little pause of embarrassment, in which Gail and the
Reverend Smith Boyd were very careful not to glance at each other.
Unfortunately, however, the Reverend Smith Boyd was luckless enough to
automatically, and without conscious mental process, fold the sheet of
music which had long since been placed on the piano.
“Why stop at the edge of Vedder Court?” inquired Gail, with a nervous
little jerk, much as if the words had been jolted out of her by the
awkward slam of the music rack, which had succeeded the removal of the
song. “Why not go straight on through, and demolish Vedder Court? It is
a scandal and a disgrace to civilisation, and to the city, as well as to
its present proprietors! Vedder Court should be annihilated, torn down,
burned up, swept from the face of the earth! The board of health should
condemn it as unsanitary, the building commission should condemn it as
unsafe, the department of public morals should condemn it as
unwholesome!”
The Reverend Smith Boyd had been engaged in a strong wrestle within
himself, but the spirit finally conquered the flesh, and he held his
tongue. He remembered that Gail was young, and youth was prone to
extravagant impulse. His spirit of forbearance came so strongly to his
aid that he was even able to acknowledge how beautiful she was when she
was stiffened.
Allison had been viewing her with mingled admiration and respect.
“By George, that’s a great idea,” he thoughtfully commented. “Gail, I
think I’ll tear down Vedder Court for you!”