“Ha! His brat! But, you still love that fallen priest?”
“Yes,” was the whispered answer.
He rose and opened a drawer in his desk. Taking out a paper-bound book, he held it out to the girl. “Look here,” he sneered. “Here’s a little piece of work which your brilliant lover did some time ago. ‘Confessions of a Roman Catholic Priest.’ Do you know the penalty your clerical paramour paid for that, eh? Then I’ll tell you,” bending over close to her ear, “his life!”
Carmen rose unsteadily. The color had fled from her cheeks. She staggered a few steps toward the door, then stopped. “God––is––is––everywhere!” she murmured. It was the refuge of her childhood days.
Then she reeled, and fell heavily to the floor.
CHAPTER 15
If additional proof of the awful cost of hating one’s fellow-men were required, the strike which burst upon the industrial world that winter must furnish it in sickening excess. But other facts, too, were rendered glaringly patent by that same desperate clash which made Avon a shambles and transformed its fair name into a by-word, to be spoken only in hushed whispers when one’s thought dwells for a moment upon the madness of the carnal mind that has once tasted blood. The man-cleft chasm between labor and capital, that still unbridged void which separates master and servant, and which a money-drunk class insolently calls God-made, grows wider with each roar of musketry aimed by a frenzied militia at helpless men and women; grows deeper with each splitting crack of the dynamite that is laid to tear asunder the conscienceless wielder of the goad; and must one day fall gaping in a cavernous embouchure that will engulf a nation.
Hitt saw it, and shuddered; Haynerd, too. Ames may have dimly marked the typhoon on the horizon, but, like everything that manifested opposition to this superhuman will, it only set his teeth the firmer and thickened the callous about his cold heart. Carmen saw it, too. And she knew––and the world must some day know––that but one tie has ever been designed adequate to bridge this yawning cañon of human hatred. That tie is love. Aye, well she knew that the world laughed, and called it chimera; called it idealism, and emotional weakness. And 201 well she knew that the most pitiable weakness the world has ever seen was the class privilege which nailed the bearer of the creed of love upon the cross, and to-day manifests in the frantic grasping of a nation’s resources, and the ruthless murder of those who ask that they, too, may have a share in that abundance which is the common birthright of all. Do the political bully, the grafter, the tout, know the meaning of love? No; but they can be taught. Oh, not by the hypocritical millionaire pietists who prate their glib platitudes to their Sunday Bible classes, and return to their luxurious homes to order the slaughter of starving women and babes! They, like their poor victims, are deep under the spell of that mesmerism which tells them that evil is good. Nor by the Church, with its lamentable weakness of knowledge and works. Only by those who have learned something of the Christ-principle, and are striving daily to demonstrate its omnipotence in part, can the world be taught a saving knowledge of the love that solves every problem and creates a new heaven and a newer, better concept of the earth and its fullness.