"We've been doing the dim, religious act here," he said, after introducing Saxton. "The lightning out there has been fine."
"You feel that you can't trust me in the dark," said the bishop; "or perhaps that I won't appreciate the 'dim religious,' as you call it. Turn down the gas and save my feelings."
Saxton was well acquainted with Warrick's zeal in church matters and was not surprised to find a church dignitary in his friend's rooms. He had never met the Bishop of Clarkson before, and he was a little awestruck at the heroic size of this man who had just given him so masculine a grasp of the hand and so keen a scrutiny.
The bishop extended his vast bulk in Raridan's easiest chair, and accepted a cigar from the box which Warry passed to him.
"You've come just in time to save us from fierce contentions," said Raridan, all amiability once more, while the bishop lighted his cigar. He was very bald, and his head shone so radiantly that Saxton felt that he could still see it in the dark after Warrick had turned down the lights. There was an atmosphere about the man of great physical strength, and his deep-set eyes under their shaggy brows were quick and penetrating. Here was a man famous in his church for the energy and sacrifice which he had brought to the work of a missionary in one of the great Western dioceses. He had been bereft, in his young manhood, of his wife and children, and had thereafter offered himself for the roughest work of his church. He was sixty years old and for twenty years had been a bishop, first in a vast region of the farther Northwest, where the diocesan limits were hardly known, and where he had traveled ponyback and muleback until called to be the Bishop of Clarkson. He was famous as a preacher, and when he appeared from time to time in the pulpits of Eastern churches, he swayed men mightily by the vigor and simplicity of his eloquence. He had, in his younger days, been reckoned a scholar, but the study of humanity at close hand had superseded long ago his interest in books and learning. He had a deep, melodious voice and there was charm and magnetism in him, as many people of many sorts and conditions knew.
"What's the subject, gentlemen?" he asked, smoking contentedly. "I'm sure something very serious must be before the house."
"Mr. Raridan has been abusing the commercialism of his neighbors," said Saxton.
"Saxton's a new-comer, Bishop, and doesn't understand the situation here as you and I do. You know that I'm the only native that dares to hold honest opinions. The rest all follow the crowd."
"Reformers always have a hard time of it," said the bishop. "If you're going to make over your fellowmen, you'll have to get hardened to their indifference. But what's the matter with things to-night; and what are you gentlemen doing in town, anyway? Aren't there places to go where it's cool and where there are pretty girls to enchant you?"
Raridan attacked the bishop about some question of ritual that was agitating the English Church. It was worse than Greek to Saxton, but Raridan seemed fully informed about it, and turned up the lights to read a paragraph from an English church paper which was, he protested, rankly heretical. The bishop smoked his cigar calmly until Raridan had finished.