A WOMAN WITH A WANT
Five years walked along, and great events took place. The earthquake seized the San Francisco Bay district and shook it as a dog shakes a rat. Fire swept the great city on the peninsula almost out of existence; it made rich men poor, and hard hearts soft—for a few days at least—and by shifting populations and business centers, affected the east side of the Bay almost as much as the west, so that in all that water-circling population there was no business and no society, no man or woman or child even, that was thereafter quite as it or he or she had been.
In this seething ferment of change nothing altered more than the circumstances of John Hampstead. He had buried himself and found himself. He had sought relief in a self-abandoning plunge into obscurity, yet never had a minister so humble gained such burning prominence. The town hung on him. Men who never went to church at all leaned upon him and upon the things they read about him from day to day.
He had gone upon a thousand missions of mercy; he had fought for his lambs like a lion; he had faced calumny; he had dared personal assault. He had triumphed in all his conflicts and stood out before this sprawling, half metropolitan, half-suburban community of half a million people as a man whom it trusted—too much almost.
Under his ministry in these five years, the wretched little chapel had grown into the great All People's Church. To attend All People's was a fad; to belong to it almost a fashion. The newspapers daily made its pastor into a hero, and the moral element in the population looked upon him as its most fearless champion and aggressive leader.
But into this situation and into All People's one morning a woman came walking, with power to shake it more violently than an earthquake could have done.
The choir was just disposing of the anthem. The Reverend John Hampstead sat, but not at ease, in his high pulpit chair, which, somehow, this morning reminded him of the throne chair of Denmark upon its stage in that barn of a theater which at this very instant was only five years—and five miles—distant; the chair from which he used to arise suddenly to receive the rapier thrust of his nephew, Hamlet. This morning a vague uneasiness filled him, as if he were about to receive a real rapier thrust.
The minister's sermon outline was in his hand, but his eye roamed the congregation. It took note of who was there and who was absent; it took note of who came in; but suddenly the eye ceased to rove and started forward in its socket.
Deacon Morris was escorting a lady down the right-center aisle. To distinction of dress and bearing the newcomer added a striking type of beauty. Her figure was tall, combining rounded curves and willowy grace. In the regularity of its smooth chiseling, her profile was purely Greek. The eyes were dark and lustrous, the cheeks had a soft bloom upon them, the lips were ripely red; and if art had helped to achieve these contrasts with a skin that was satiny smooth and of ivory creaminess, it was an art contributory and not an art subversive.
"More beautiful than ever!" murmured the minister with the emphasis of deep conviction.