“I don’t want to intrude, Miss Falconer, but you know the committee of clergy are awaiting you in the parlor.”
“Oh, dear,” sighed Sharon. “Are they as terrible as usual here? Can’t you go up and get the kneeling and praying done while I finish my scrambled eggs? Have you told them they’ve got to double the amount of the pledges before this week is over or the souls in Lincoln can go right on being damned?” Cecil was indicating Elmer with an alarmed jerk of his head. “Oh, don’t worry about Elmer. He’s one of us—going to speak for us Friday—used to be a terribly famous preacher, but he’s found a wider field in business—Reverend Aylston, Reverend Gantry. Now run along, Cecil, and keep ’em pious and busy. Any nice-looking young preachers in the committee, or are they all old stiffs?”
Aylston answered with a tight-lipped glare, and flowed away.
“Dear Cecil, he is so useful to me—he’s actually made me take to reading poetry and everything. If he just wouldn’t be polite at breakfast-time! I wouldn’t mind facing the wild beasts of Ephesus, but I can’t stand starch with my eggs. Now I must go up and join him.”
“You’ll have lunch with me?”
“I will not! My dear young man, this endeth my being silly for this week. From this moment on I’ll be one of the anointed, and if you want me to like you—— God help you if you come around looking pussy-catty while I’m manhandling these stiff-necked brethren in Christ! I’ll see you Friday—I’ll have dinner with you, here, before the meeting. And I can depend on you? Good!”
IV
Cecil Aylston was a good deal of a mystic, a good deal of a ritualist, a bit of a rogue, something of a scholar, frequently a drunkard, more frequently an ascetic, always a gentleman, and always an adventurer. He was thirty-two now. At Winchester and New College, he had been known for sprinting, snobbishness, and Greek versification. He had taken orders, served as a curate in a peculiarly muddy and ancient and unlighted church in the East End, and become fanatically Anglo-Catholic. While he was considering taking the three vows and entering a Church of England monastery, his vicar kicked him out, and no one was ever quite certain whether it was because of his “Romish tendencies” or the navvy’s daughter whom he had got with child.
He was ordered down to a bleak, square, stone church in Cornwall, but he resigned and joined the Plymouth Brethren, among whom, in resounding galvanized-iron chapels in the Black Country, he had renown for denunciation of all the pleasant sins. He came to Liverpool for a series of meetings; he wandered by the Huskisson docks, saw a liner ready for sea, bought a steerage ticket, took the passport which he had ready for a promised flight to Rio with the wife of an evangelical merchant in coals and, without a word to the brethren or the ardent lady of the coals, sailed sulkily off to America.
In New York he sold neckties in a department store, he preached in a mission, he tutored the daughter of a great wholesale fish-dealer, and wrote nimble and thoroughly irritating book-reviews. He left town two hours ahead of the fish-dealer’s eldest son, and turned up in Waco, Texas, teaching in a business college, in Winona, Minnesota, preaching in a Nazarene Chapel, in Carmel, California, writing poetry and real estate brochures, and in Miles City, Montana, as the summer supply in a Congregational pulpit. He was so quiet, so studious, here that the widow of a rancher picked him up and married him. She died. He lost the entire fortune in two days at Tia Juana. He became extra pious after that and was converted from time to time by Billy Sunday, Gipsy Smith, Biederwolf, and several other embarrassed evangelists, who did not expect a convert so early in the campaign and had made no plans to utilize him.