“My conscience is my own. I am responsible to my Lord for words which I speak in His name, not to you.”
“Your conscience belongs to yourself, but your acts belong to all of us. If there is trouble at the Orange funeral to-morrow it will be your fault. The blame will lie at your door.”
“The sword of the Spirit—”
“Oh, you want the sword, do you? You want the sword, eh?” Ingolby’s jaw was set now like a millstone. “Well, you can have it, and have it now. If you had taken what I said in the right way, I would not have done what I’m going to do. I’m going to send you out of Lebanon. You’re a bad and dangerous element here. You must go.”
“Who are you to tell me I must go?”
The fat hands quivered on the table with anger and emotion, but also with fear of something. “You may be a rich man and own railways, but—”
“But I am not rich and I don’t own railways. Lately bad feeling has been growing on the Sagalac, and only a spark was needed to fire the ricks. You struck the spark in your sermon last night. I don’t see the end of it all. One thing is sure—you’re not going to take the funeral service to-morrow.”
The slack red lips of the man of God were gone dry with excitement, the loose body swayed with the struggle to fight it out.
“I’ll take no orders from you,” the husky voice protested. “My conscience alone will guide me. I’ll speak the truth as I feel it, and the people will stand by me.”
“In that case you WILL take orders from me. I’m going to save the town from what hurts it, if I can. I’ve got no legal rights over you, but I have moral rights, and I mean to enforce them. You gabble of conscience and truth, but isn’t it a new passion with you—conscience and truth?”