This minister! This corrupt, ungodly shepherd! He could be neither hanged nor put in jail, yet he committed a crime for which hell itself scarce held adequate penalty and punishment! The street preacher's eyes dilated, the hand that held the panel trembled, spots of unhealthy white sprang into his burning cheeks. The flaring candles—the table with its carven legend, This Do In Remembrance of Me—the little gold cross, set there, it seemed to him, in a satanic derision! It was the evil the Apostle Paul wrestled against, of "wicked spirits in high places." It was sacrilege! It was blasphemy! It was the Arch-Fiend laughing, making a mock of God's own altar with the guilty pleasures of the pit—a very sacrament of the damned!
Scarce knowing what he did, he closed the panel softly and ran across the chapel lawn. On the pavement outside he met a man approaching. It was the bishop, on his way to his contemplated chat with Harry Sanderson. The excited evangelist did not know the man, but his eye caught the ministerial dress, the plain, sturdy piety of the face. In his zeal he saw an instrument to his hand. He grasped the bishop's arm.
"Quick! Quick!" he gasped. "There's devil's work doing in there! Come and see!" He fairly pulled him inside the gate.
The puzzled bishop saw the intense excitement of the other's demeanor. He saw the faint glow in the corner of the rose-window. Were there thieves after the altar-plate?
He shook off the eager hand that was drawing him toward the window. "Not there—come this way!" he said, and hurried toward the porch. He tried the chapel door—it was fast. He had a key to this in his pocket. He inserted it with caution, opened the door noiselessly and went in, the street preacher at his heels.
What the bishop saw was photographed instantaneously on his mind in fiery, indelible colors. It ate into his soul like hot iron into quivering flesh, searing itself upon his memory. It was destined to haunt his sleep for many months afterward, a phantom of regret and shame. He was, in his way, a man of the world, travelled, sophisticated, acquainted with sin in unexpected forms and places. But this sight, in all its coarse suggestion of license, in its harrowing implication of hidden vice and hypocrisy, was damning and appalling. The evangelist of the pave had been horrified, shocked to word and action; the bishop was frozen, inarticulate, impaled. For any evil in Hugh Stires he was prepared—since the forgery. But Hugh's companion now was the man whom he himself had ordained and anointed, by the laying on of hands, with the chrism of his holy ministry.
It was sin, then, that had set the look he had marvelled at in Harry Sanderson's face—sin, flaunting, mocking and terrible! He whom the church had ordained to shepherd its little ones, to comfort its afflicted, to give in marriage and to bless, to hold before the world the white and stainless banner—a renegade, polluting the sanctuary! A priest apostate, surprised in a hideous revel, gambling, as the Roman soldiers gambled for the seamless garment, at the foot of the cross! An irrepressible exclamation burst from his lips.
With the sound both men at the table started to their feet. Hugh, with a single glance behind him, uttering a wild laugh, leaped the railing, dashed through the study, and vanished into the night; Harry, as though suddenly turned to stone, stood staring at the accusatory figure, with the eager form of the evangelist behind it. It was as if the horror on the stern, set face of the bishop mirrored itself instantaneously upon his countenance, his imagination opening in a shocked, awed way to the concentrated light of feeling, so that he stood bewildered in the paralysis of a like dismay.
To the bishop it seemed the attitude of guilt detected.