Then as she drooped in his arms, a mere fragrant, pulsing, glad submission——
"You have always pleased me, Nancy. I know I shall never regret my choice."
And Nancy, scarce hearing, wondered happily on his breast.
CHAPTER IV
The Winning of Browett
A thoughtful Pagan once reported dignity to consist not in possessing honours, but in the consciousness that we deserve them. It is a theory fit to console multitudes. Edom's young rector was not only consoled by it, he was stimulated. To his ardent nature, the consciousness of deserving honour was the first vital step toward gaining it. Those things that he believed himself to deserve he forthwith subjected to the magnetic rays of his desire: Knowing with the inborn certainty of the successful, that they must finally yield to such silent, coercing influence and soon or late gravitate toward him in obedience to the same law that draws the apple to the earth's lap. In this manner had the young man won his prizes for oratory; so had he won his wife; so had he won his first pastorate; so now would he win that prize he was conscious of meriting next—a city parish—a rectorate in the chief seat of his church in America, where was all wealth and power as well as the great among men, to be swayed by his eloquence and brought at last to the Master's feet. And here, again, would his future enlarge to prospects now but mistily surmised—prospects to be moved upon anon with triumphant tread. Infinite aspiration opening ever beyond itself—this was his. Meantime, step by step, with zealous care for the accuracy of each, with eyes always ahead, leaving nothing undone—he was forever fashioning the moulds into which the Spirit should materialise his benefits.
The first step was the winning of Browett—old Cyrus Browett, whose villa, in the fashion of an English manor-house, was a feature of remark even to the Edom summer dwellers—a villa whose wide grounds were so swept, garnished, trimly flowered, hedge-bordered and shrub-upholstered that, to old Edom, they were like stately parlours built foolishly out of doors.
Months had the rector of tiny St. Anne's waited for Browett to come to him, knowing that Browett must come in the end. One less instinctively wise would have made the mistake of going to Browett. Not this one, whose good spirit warned him that his puissance lay rather with groups of men than with individuals. From back of the chancel railing he could sway the crowd and make it all his own; whereas, taking that same crowd singly, and beyond his sacerdotal functions, he might be at the mercy of each man composing it. He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes—unemotional as two algebraic x's—would be a matter fearfully different. Even his white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff, chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was quite invulnerable to his own vanity. A human Browett would have permitted that moustache to mitigate its surroundings with some flowing grace. He was, indeed, no adversary to meet alone in the open field—for one who could make him in a crowd a mere string of many to his harp.
The morning so long awaited came on a second Sunday after Trinity. Cyrus Browett, in whose keeping was the very ark of the money covenant, alighted from his coupé under the porte-cochère of candied Gothic and humbly took seat in his pew like a mere worshipper of God.