Books: The One Woman
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Thomas Dixon >> The One Woman
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And deliberately he put on his hat and left the room.
The net result of the meeting was a vote to reduce the pastor's
salary a thousand dollars and add it to the music fund; and Van
Meter hired two detectives to watch the minister.
CHAPTER VII
A STOLEN KISS
For several weeks after Gordon flung down the gauntlet to his Board
of Trustees and began his battle for supremacy, his wife maintained
a strange attitude of silence and reserve.
She had hired a nurse and resumed her study of music. Her contralto
voice, one of great depth and sweetness, he had admired extravagantly
in the days of their courtship, but she had ceased to sing of
late years. He always listened to her lullaby to the children with
fascination. The soft round notes from her delicate throat seemed
full of magic and held him in a spell.
Before he left for his study one morning, she looked up into his
face with yearning in her dark eyes.
"Come into the parlour, Frank; I will sing for you."
She took her seat at the piano, and her white tapering fingers ran
lightly over the keys with deft, sure touch.
"What would you like to hear?" she asked timidly, from beneath her
long lashes, with the old haunting charm in her manner.
"Tennyson's 'Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O Sea!'
No poet ever dreamed that song as you have sung it, Ruth."
Never did he hear her sing with such feeling. Her Voice, low, soft
and caressing with the languid sensuousness of the South, quivered
with tenderness, and then rose with the storm and broke in round,
deep peals of passion until he could hear the roar of the surf and
feel its white spray in his face. Her erect lithe figure, with the
small white hands and wrists flashing over the keys, the petite
anxious face with stormy eyes and raven hair, seemed the incarnate
soul of the storm.
"Glorious, Ruth!" he cried, with boylike wonder.
And then she bent over the piano and burst into tears.
"Why, what ails you, my dear?"
"Oh, Frank, I'm selfish to leave the children to a nurse and study
music."
"Nonsense. Self-sacrifice is rational only as it is the highest form
of self-development. It is your duty to develop yourself. Self is
the source of all knowledge and strength; books are its record;
the world exists only through its eyes."
"I'm afraid of it. I wish to give all to you and the children, not
to myself. I want you all to myself, and you are growing away from
me. I know it, and it is breaking my heart."
He laughed at her fears, kissed her and went to his study.
Since his break with his Board, he had grown daily in power--power
in himself and over his people. Conflict was always to him the
trumpet call to heroic deeds. The knowledge that Van Meter was
now his open enemy and that he was attempting to build a hostile
faction within the church roused his soul to its depths. Thrown
back thus upon himself and his appeal to the greater tribunal of
the people, he preached as never before in his life. His sermons
had the vigour and prophetic fire of the crusader. His crowds
increased until it was necessary to ask for police aid to control
the exits and entrances to the building. Long before the hour
of service, a dense mass of men and women were packed against the
doors.
Van Meter watched this growth of influence with wonder and
disgust. He determined to leave no stone unturned that might put
a stumbling-block in his way. His detectives had failed as yet to
find any clue that might compromise him. Once they rushed to his office
with the information that they had tracked him to a questionable
house. The Deacon called up his son-in-law and asked excitedly for
a reporter to write a thrilling piece of news. The reporter found
that Gordon had called at the house, but in answer to a summons to
see a dying girl.
Van Meter insisted upon the item being printed, but the young city
editor scowled and threw it in the waste basket.
The Deacon at length discovered Ruth's jealousy and located the
woman who was its object. A costly bouquet of flowers was placed
on Gordon's desk in the study every morning, and an enormous one
blossomed every Sunday morning and evening on the little table
beside his chair in the pulpit. The sexton could not tell who paid
the bills. A florist sent them.
The Deacon had been bitterly chagrined at the outcome of his
movement in reducing the salary. At first the people heard it with
amazement, and then, when Gordon informed a reporter of the fight
in progress and it was published, they laughed, and a cheque was
sent him for two thousand dollars to make good the deficit and add
one thousand more.
The day after this advent he had a hard day's work. A procession
of people drained him of every cent of money he could spare and
every ounce of sympathy and shred of nerve force in his body.
He had tried the year before to establish a free employment bureau
to relieve him of this strain. But the bureau added to his work. He
had to close it. It had required the employment of five assistants,
and even these could make little impression on the list of applicants
who crowded the rooms and blocked the pavements from morning until
night.
When the sick and hungry and out-of-works had been disposed of
after a fashion, the miscellaneous crowd filed in.
An old college mate came in shivering in a dirty suit. He fumbled
at his hat nervously until he caught Gordon's eye and saw him smile.
"Well, by the great hornspoon, Ned, you look like you've fallen
into a well!"
"Worse'n that, Frank; I slipped clean into hell. I got with some
fellows, went on a drunk, stayed a month and lost my place. I want
you to loan me money to get to Baltimore, buy a decent suit of
clothes, and I'll get another position. Yes, and I'll lift my head
up and be a man."
Gordon sent out to the bank and got the money for him.
Another seedy one softly explained to him that he was a fellow
countryman from Indiana. Gordon gave him a quarter.
A sobbing woman closely veiled he recognised as a bride he had
married in the church after prayer meeting two weeks before.
"Doctor," she said in a whisper, "I've called to beg you please not
to allow any one to know of my marriage. My husband turned out to
be a burglar. He stole ten thousand dollars from an old lady who
is one of our boarders, and skipped. He married me to get the run
of the house. He tried to marry her first, though she was seventy-five
years old, got in her room last night, stole the money, and now
he's gone. I'm heartbroken!"
"What! because he's gone?"
"No; because I was a fool. I know he has a dozen wives. He was so
handsome."
"Madam, I'm not very sorry for you. I tried to prevent you marrying
him that night. I begged you to go back to Jersey City to your own
church."
"You will keep it secret, Doctor?" she begged.
"I'll not publish it. But the certificate is on file in the Hall
of Records. Any one can see it who wishes. It is beyond my control."
An old woman with bedraggled skirt, reddened eyes and a fat, motherly
face timidly approached. She had been overlooked.
"Doctor, you're my last chance. I come up to New York to see my
son-in-law, as grand a rascal as ever lived. He owes me a thousand
dollars and won't pay it. We lost our crop down in Old Virginia.
So I scraped up the money and got here to squeeze what he owed out
of that rascal. Now he's turned me out into the street and moved
where I can't find him. I'm starvin' to death. I ain't got a cent
to go home; an' what's worse'n all, I got a letter this mornin'
tellin' me my idiot boy's down sick an' cryin' for me. I'm the only
one can do anything for him. He can't understand nobody else."
Her voice broke and she bit her lips to keep back the tears.
"I've begged all day. Everybody laughs at me. I heard you preach
one Sunday. I knowed you wouldn't laugh at me. I want you to loan
me twenty dollars to get home quick. I'll start the minute I can
get to the train, an' I'll pay you back if I have to sell my feather
beds. Now, will you do it?"
"Well, a more improbable story was never told a New Yorker, but
something whispers to me you're telling the truth."
"You'll do it?"
"Yes."
She drew a deep breath, and cried with streaming eyes:
"Oh, Lord, have mercy on my poor soul, that I doubted You, and
thought You had forsaken me!"
Gordon handed her the cheque.
"I'm going to kiss you!" she fairly screamed.
Before he could lift his hand or protest, she threw her arms around
his neck and kissed him.
As he took her hands down from his shoulders and drew his face away
from the mouldy-smelling old shawl, he looked toward the door, and
Ruth stood in the entrance. Her eyes blazed with wrath, but as she
saw the faded and bedraggled dress and moth-eaten shawl and looked
into the tear-stained motherly old face she burst into hysterical
laughter.
Gordon rose and escorted the woman to the door with courtesy.
"You will find the bank at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third
Street--the Garfield National. Write me how your son is when you
reach home, and send me the money when you are able."
"I will. God bless you, sir," she answered with fervour.
When he returned to his study, Ruth was still hysterical, and he
sat down without a word and began to write.
"Frank, I'm sorry to have been so rude," she said at length.
"Is that all?"
"No; I'm sorry I humiliated myself by spying on you."
She sat twisting her handkerchief, glancing at him timidly.
"And you can't understand how deeply you have wounded me by such an
act, Ruth. I hope you have heard all that passed here this morning."
"It's strange how I always seem to be in the wrong. Frank, I am
very sorry. You must forgive me. And I have another confession.
I've been receiving anonymous letters about you for the past three
weeks. I was too weak and cowardly to show them to you. It was one
of these letters which caused me to come here this morning. And
now I've wounded you, and alienated your heart from me more than
ever. I feel I shall die."
She began to sob.
"Come, Ruth, you must conquer this insanity. Naturally you are
bright, witty, cheerful and altogether charming. Jealousy reduces
you to a lump of stupidity."
"You do forgive me?"
"Yes; and don't, for heaven's sake, do such a thing again. Ask me
what you wish to know. I am not a liar; I will tell you the truth."
"But I don't want to hear it if it's cruel," she protested.
"The truth is best, gentle or cruel."
She kissed him impulsively and left.
He sat for an hour, tired, sore and brooding over this scene with
his wife. He caught the perfume of the flowers on his desk, and in
the tints of the roses saw the warm blushes of the woman who had
sent them. Her voice was friendly and caressing and her speech,
words of sweetest flattery--flattery that cleared the stupor from
his brain and gave life and new faith in himself and his work;
flattery that had in it a mysterious personal flavour that piqued
his curiosity and fed his vanity. How clearly he recalled her--the
superb figure, with rounded bust and arms full and magnificent, in
the ripe glory of youth, her waving auburn hair so thick and long
it could envelop half her body. Often he had watched the light
blaze through its red tints while he talked to her of his dreams,
her lips half parted with lazy tenderness and ready with gentle
words. He recalled the rhythmic music of her walk, strong and
insolent in its luxury of health. And he was grateful for the cheer
she had brought into his life.
CHAPTER VIII
SWEET DANGER
Kate Ransom had attempted no close analysis of her absorbing
interest in Gordon's work. The change in her life from weariness
to thrilling interest had been its own justification. Wealth had
robbed her of the mystery and charm of accident. The future was
fixed; there could be no unknown. The men she had met in society
were mere fops, or expert butlers who wrote books on etiquette.
Life was a problem for them of what the tailors could do.
She had been isolated from humanity. Now she felt the red blood
tingling to her finger tips. Her days were full of sweet surprises
or sudden revelations of drama and tragedy, and her woman's soul
responded with eager interest.
She had never loved. Such a woman could not love a tailor's dummy.
Her nature was warm, rich and passionate, and she was consumed with
longing for the moment of bliss when her whole being would so burn
with sacrificial fire for her beloved that she could walk with him
naked in winter snows, unconscious of cold.
Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She
knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her
beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert.
She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as
divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.
Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood,
brooded in tenderness over her new work--the tortures of half-starved
mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of
the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the
cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness
of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she
was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of
her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and
say, "I understand you; come with me." His eloquence and emotional
thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His
face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of
smouldering passion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power
was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very
pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand
in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew
not whence nor why.
Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were
drawing him with resistless magnetism.
As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering
in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and
take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over
Kate's determination to stay, but there was no help for it.
July broke the record of forty years for heat. Scores were
prostrated daily and dead horses blocked traffic at almost every
hour. A drought threatened the water-supply, and night brought no
relief to the millions who sweltered in the tenements.
The babies began to die by thousands--more than two thousand a
week on Manhattan. Island alone. The city's wagons raked the little
black coffins up and dumped them into the Potters' Field, one on top
of the other, like so many dead flies. Down every tenement-walled
street the white ribbons fluttered their tragic story from cellar
to attic. At night tired mothers walked the pavements, hot and
radiating heat, till the sun rose again, carrying their sick babies,
or crowded the housetops, fanning them as they lay on their pallets,
pale and still, fighting with Death the grim, silent battle.
Kate Ransom finally gave her entire time to these children. She
fitted up a hotel in the mountains of Pennsylvania and kept it full.
She chartered a steamer and took a thousand of them for a day up
the Hudson as an experiment, and asked Gordon to go with them. They
would have music, and a dinner spread under the trees of the park
which stretched back from the water's edge into the towering hills.
He met them at the ferry slip from which the steamer sailed. Kate
was already there, and the throng filled every inch of the floor
space. She was moving about among them, while they gazed at her
in admiration no words in their vocabulary could express. Her face
was flushed with excitement, and her violet eyes, wide open, were
sparkling with pleasure.
The man's eyes lingered on the scene, feeling that, for all her
magnificently human body, no angel ever made a fairer vision.
He was struck with the silence of these children. As he looked
closer it was only too plain they were not children. They were only
little wizen-faced men and women, who had never learned to laugh or
smile or play; little pinched faces with weak eyes that had never
seen God's green fields; little dirty ears that had been bruised
with a thousand beastly noises, but had never heard the murmur
of beautiful waters in the depths of a forest. His heart went out
to them in a great yearning pity as he recalled his own enchanted
childhood.
His voice was soft with tears as he greeted Kate.
"A more pathetic sight than this crowd of silent children old earth
never saw. But the shining figure in the centre lights the shadows
with a touch of divine beauty."
"It does break one's heart to see such children, doesn't it?" she
answered, looking at them tenderly and ignoring his pointed tribute
to her beauty.
"Are we all ready?" Gordon cried.
"If you are. Is Mrs. Gordon not coming?"
"No; I couldn't persuade her. She took our chicks to the seashore."
As the boat moved swiftly up the great river in the fresh morning
air and the breeze blowing down its channel strengthened, they sat
together on the after deck and watched the dead souls of the little
ones stir with life under the kiss of the wind and the caress of
the music.
In the park they spread out in the whispering stillness of the
woods. Nature breathed the sweet breath of her life into their
hearts again and they began to twist their queer little faces and
try to laugh. They called to one another and listened with mute
wonder at the echo among the rock-ribbed hills. Gordon watched
curiously in their faces the flash of the inherited memory of forest
habits, choked and stunted and dormant in all city folks, and yet
alive as long as the human heart beats. Within two hours they had
grown noisy with play after a timid, clumsy fashion.
"Give them a week and they would learn to laugh!" Kate exclaimed.
But the man was now more interested in watching the woman than
the children, as he saw her satin skin flush with pleasure and the
creamy lace on her full bosom rise and fall.
They sat down on a rock beside a brook.
"What an inspiration to see this old yet ever new miracle of
regeneration unfold under the magic touch of a woman's hand!"
"You mean a man's hand," she replied. "This would never have
interested me except that you led me to see it."
"Then we've helped one another. I'm beginning to feel you are
indispensable. I wonder if you, too, will leave us after awhile as
so many pass on."
"No; this has become my very life," she soberly answered, looking
down at the ground and then into his face with frank, open-eyed
pleasure.
He was silent for several minutes and then softly laughed.
"What is it?" she cried.
"You could never guess."
She lifted her superb arms, showing bare to the elbow, and felt of
the mass of auburn hair. "That load of red hay about to fall?"
"Don't be sacrilegious. No."
"Harness broken anywhere?" She felt of her belt, and ran her hands
down the lines of her beautiful figure, eyeing him laughingly.
"I'll tell you," he said, sinking his voice to its lowest note
of expressive feeling, while a whimsical smile played round the
corners of his eyes. "Sitting here in the woods by your side on
this glorious summer day, your eyes looked so blue in the creamy
satin of your face, I suddenly thought I smelled the violets with
which God mixed their colours."
"You think of such silly things," she said with mock severity.
"There's nothing silly about it. Beauty is an attribute of the
divine. I worship it for its own sweet sake wherever I find it, in
pearl or opal, dewdrop or flower, the stars, or a woman's face or
form or eyes."
She lowered her head.
"Do you know the old legend of the opal?" he asked.
He took some stones from his pocket and held in the light an opal
of rare luster.
"Isn't it beautiful?" she cried.
"And its story is as beautiful as its face. Listen: A sunbeam
lingered under a leaf in the forest at sunset, loath to leave
so fair a spot, until the moon suddenly rose. Enraptured with the
shimmering beauty of a moonbeam, he stood entranced and trembling
and could not go. In ecstasy they met, embraced and kissed. The
sun sank and left him in her arms. The opal is the child of their
love. In its fair face is forever mingled the silver of the rising
moon and the golden glory of the sunset."
"I believe you made that up," she laughed.
"I wish I were poet enough."
"I had no idea you dreamed of such romantic nonsense."
"Yes, I dream many things. I had a funny dream about you the other
night."
"Tell me what it was," she begged.
"I dare not."
"I thought you would dare anything."
"No; you see, dreams are such intimate, unconventional mysteries.
Dreams have no regard for law or custom The soul and the body seem
equally free and without sin or shame. I have a curious feeling
of awe about sleep and dreams. It's the surest evidence I have of
immortality and the reality of a spiritual life. It is to me the
prophecy of the ideal world, too, in which we will dare to live
some day what we really are, without pretence or hypocrisy--live
that deep secret inner life we try sometimes to hide from the eye
of God."
"And you will not even give me a hint of this dream?"
"No. It was very foolish, but very charming and beautiful. It was
in part a picture from that dream which made me laugh awhile ago
about your eyes."
"I think it mean in you to tell me that much and no more."
"I would tell you if I dared. I may dare some day."
She was afraid to ask him after that, and yet something within
cried for joy.
They rose, gathered the children for dinner, ands after three hours
in the woods, returned to the city as the twilight softly fell over
its ragged steel and granite sky-line.
"You must take tea with us to-night," she said, as they stepped
from the boat.
His wife would not return for supper and he consented.
It was not the first time he had spent an hour at the table of
the Ransom household. Mrs. Ransom deemed herself honoured by his
visits, and his chats with the invalid father about books were
bright spots in his life.
Kate had sent the stringed band from the boat to the house and
stationed them in the conservatory opening into the dining-room.
The tender strains of the music, the splash of a fountain mingled
with the songs of birds in their cages, the gleam of silver and
diamond flash of cut glass, gave Gordon's senses a soothing contrast
to the wild beauty of the woods. His nature responded to art and
luxury as quickly as to the sensuous voice of Nature in the glory
of her summer's splendour.
There was something in this glittering beauty, cold and cruel,
that appealed to him. He always felt at home in such surroundings.
Beneath his idealism and love of humanity there was still hidden
somewhere the nerve of an Epicurean.
When Kate appeared, dressed for tea, simply but richly, with her
splendid neck and shoulders bare and little ringlets of hair curling
about her face as though scorched by the warmth of the red blood
below, he felt the picture complete.
She chatted with him before entering the dining-room.
Her manner was always flattering and frankly gracious, but to-night
there was an added note of warmth and familiar comradeship. Never
had he seen her so charming and so resistless. Always intensely
conscious of her sex, she seemed to have the power to-night of
communicating to the man before her that consciousness so intimately,
so directly and yet so delicately that he was led captive.
With scarcely a spoken word their relationship leaped the space of
years. The quiver of her eyelid, the dilation of a nostril, little
inarticulate exclamations, the turn of her head, the rising and
falling of her bosom, the flash of her violet eyes, the subtle
perfume of her hair or the graceful movement of her magnificent
form spoke the language of life deep and rhythmic which no words
have ever expressed.
He went home, on fire with the dream of an ideal life and work with
such a woman of supreme beauty.
CHAPTER IX
THE SPIDER
The passing of a year added immensely to the fame of the pastor
of the Pilgrim Church. His sermons now reached twenty millions of
people through the daily press every Monday morning. It had become
necessary to issue tickets of admission to the members and admit
them by a small door that was cut beside the large ones.
Van Meter had ceased to be of sufficient importance for serious
notice. The growth of Gordon's influence within the year had been
so rapid, he found he had set out to fight a flea with artillery.
The old man felt his eclipse with bitterness. He had quit talking
much, but writhed in silent fury at the sight of this tall athlete
with his conquering gray eyes and smooth, serious face. Yet he was
a regular attendant. The preacher's eloquence, the vibrant tones
of his voice, full of passion, or trembling with prophetic zeal,
and the whole drama of a living militant church with this daring
revolutionist at its head, risen from the grave of the old, fascinated
him in spite of his hatred.
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