Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

“Meaning virtue—or ability?” inquired the chairman, with his friendly smile.

“Both. You see—well, to put it honestly—I’m just a country boy as yet, born in Scotland and brought up in your South. I haven’t had the training——”

“Very good things have come out of the country—and Scotland—and the South,” Mr. John Radway had suggested. “And I believe you are a graduate of—a perfectly satisfactory college and seminary, and have built this church up from desertion to popularity——”

Well, they had had it out on those lines, and others, in the next hour, the committee falling more and more in love with its candidate—if so emotional a phrase may be used of the feelings stirred in the breasts of five middle-aged, steady-going, sensible men—as they watched the young man’s face go from pale to red and back again, and heard him tell them not only what he thought he was not, but what he thought they might not be either—in so frank and winning a way that the more he wasn’t sure he’d better come the surer they were he must!

In the end he came—called and accepted, after the modern methods, wholly on the judgment of the committee, for he had refused absolutely and finally to come and preach a candidating sermon. So when he emerged from the vestry door, on that first May Sunday, he faced for the first time his newly acquired congregation, and the church faced for the first time its minister-elect. Which was wholly as it should be, and the result was a tremendously large audience, on tiptoe with interest and curiosity.

Red was not in the congregation when Black first came in through the vestry door. Instead, as usual, he was racing along the road in a very muddy car, trying to make four calls in the time in which he should really have made two, because his wife had insisted very strenuously that he should do his best to get to church on that particular morning. It seemed that she had learned that the new minister was from the South, and she, being a Southerner, naturally felt an instant sense of loyalty. It was mighty seldom that Red could ever be got to church, not so much because he didn’t want to go—though he didn’t, really, unless the man he was to hear was exceptionally good—as because he couldn’t get around to it, not once in a blue moon—or a Sunday morning sun. And if, by strenuous exertion, he did arrive at church, there was one thing which almost invariably happened—so what was the use? The young usher for Doctor Burns’ aisle always grinned when he saw him come in, because he knew perfectly that within a very short time, he, the usher, would be tiptoeing down the aisle and whispering in the ear below the heavy thatch of close-cropped, fire-red hair. And then Doctor Burns’ attending church for that day would be over.

The chances seemed fair, however, on this particular morning, because Red did not come into church till the preliminary service was well along. He stole in while the congregation was on its feet singing a hymn, so his entrance was not conspicuous; but Black saw him, just the same. Black had already seen every man in the congregation, though he had noted individually but few of the women. He saw this big figure, stalwart yet well set up; he saw the red head—he could hardly help that—it would be a landmark in any audience. He saw also the brilliant hazel eyes, the strong yet finely cut face. To put it in a word, as Redfield Pepper Burns came into the crowded church, his personality reached out ahead of him and struck the man in the pulpit a heavy blow over the heart. Too strong a phrase? Not a bit of it. If the thing has never happened to you, then you’re not a witness, and your testimony doesn’t count. But plenty of witnesses can be found.

Robert Black looked down the aisle, and instantly coveted this man for a friend. “I’ve got to have you,” he said within himself, while the people went on singing the last stanza of a great hymn. “I’ve got to have you for a friend. I don’t know who else may be in this parish but as long as you’re here there’ll be something worth the very best I can do. I wonder if you’ll be easy to get. I—doubt it.”

Now this was rather strange, for the family with whom he was staying while the manse was being put in order for the new minister had spoken warmly of Doctor Burns as the man whom they always employed, plainly showing their affection for him, and adding that half the town adored the red-headed person in question. When that red head came into church late, looking as professional as such a man can’t possibly help looking, it was easy enough for Black to guess that this was Doctor Burns.

Across the space, then, they faced each other, these two, whose lives were to react so powerfully, each upon the other—and only one of them guessed it. To tell the truth, Red was more than a little weary that Sunday morning; he was not just then electrically sensitive, like the other man, to every impression—he was not that sort of man, anyhow. He had been up half the night, and his hair-trigger temper—which had inspired the nickname he had carried from boyhood—had gone off in a loud explosion within less than an hour before he appeared in the church. He was still inwardly seething slightly at the recollection, though outwardly he had returned to calm. Altogether, he was not precisely in a state of mind to gaze with favour upon the new man in the pulpit, who struck him at once as disappointingly young. He had been told by somebody that Robert McPherson Black was thirty-five, but his first swift glance convinced him that Robert had not been strictly truthful about his age—or else had encouraged an impression that anybody with half an eye could see was a wrong one. He was quite evidently a boy—a mere boy. Burns liked boys—but not in the pulpit, attempting to take charge of his life and tell him what to do.