During the last months of winter Gonfallon was a frequent guest at the house on the hill. The countess was too infirm to attend services with any satisfaction to herself, but she was devout, and the visits of the pastor were grateful to her. She was appreciative, and, despite her encroaching deafness, pleasant and intelligent of speech. She had a smile of singular indulgence, and, though her beauty was that of a city raised from the ground, still, you divined among the vestiges the seductions of earlier charm. By repute she had been indeed a belle; and as for her manner, time had coped with it in vain: she was still the high-bred woman who had shown the pinchbeck maréchales and marchionesses of the Tuileries how to walk, and who, when the Emperor on learning that her baptismal name was Helen had exclaimed, “Ah that I were Paris!” had answered, “Sire, you are France.”
Of connections she had many, yet of relations but one, a nephew, Mr. A. B. Fenwick Chisolm-Jones by name, familiarly known as Alphabet, a young gentleman of literary promise which thus far he had failed to fulfil. To the aunt in the sultriness of the summer months the nephew came, and with him anyone else who could be lured that way. But in the winter the great house was almost uninhabited; and so it came about that in the soundless dusks the one man in the village who could speak English correctly was made welcome there and at home.
The countess, as has been intimated, was devout. In the old cosmogony she had the amplest faith. To her, heaven was just beyond the stars, and hell beneath the ferrule of her crutch. To the truth of any miracle she would have testified on oath. Had anyone so much as hinted before her that the precepts of the synoptic gospels were due to Socrates and the Socratics, she would have routed the blasphemer with the sign of the cross. It was rumored that in youth she had been less orthodox. But with age religion held her like a vice; it was her ultimate refuge; and as Gonfallon penetrated its abysses he fell to wondering whether his own creed might not be as futile as was hers. Yet to argue with her would have been profitable as the chiding of a river. As a consequence, he held his peace, perplexed at times, but endeavoring in the saddle, in long stretches over bleak, unfrequented roads, to starve his thoughts into submission and sponge his mind of doubt.
Meanwhile, the tenor of his discourses remained unchanged. Long since he had discovered that to move his congregation he needed not spirituality of metaphor, but powder and shot; and yet, through that obstinacy which inhibits the poet from writing to the crowd, he continued to preach, not to his listeners, but to the lintels above. And to them his lessons bore no trace of the dogmatic. Now and then would come a warning, but the detached and terrible maledictions in which the provincial divine delights were never voiced by him. It was to souls he did not see he spoke, and in his speech were exhortations to virtue and pictures of the perfect peace of conscience at rest. His weapons were parables; the groundwork of his instruction was built on compassion. Did he plead, it was for patience, for abnegation of self; did he exhort, it was to charity, to forgiveness of sin.
Christopher Gonfallon did not preach to the lintels wholly in vain. One green afternoon in June, while he was engaged with the litany, a little man, rather stout, rather pompous, yet shrewd of eye, an individual unknown to the villagers, entered the church and dropped into the first convenient pew, the which, thereupon, apparently interested him no further. During the services he remained apathetic; during the sermon that followed he did not once take his eyes from the preacher. And when, to the accompaniment of the usual “Let your light so shine,” the warden handed him, tentative fashion, the plate, that gentleman was bewildered at the receipt, not of the fraction of a dollar which he had expected, but of the most majestic contribution which he had as yet borne to the rail.
In a village a bit of gossip seems rather to permeate the air than to circulate from mouth to mouth: it reaches the sojourner whether he will it or not. Before teatime that evening everyone in Bronx knew that the little man was Bucholz the monopolist, a visitor, with his daughters, at the house on the hill, piloted there, it was rumored, by the countess’s nephew, Alphabet Jones.
To the house on the hill that evening Christopher Gonfallon was bidden. In summer it was the custom of the countess not to sup, but to dine; and when the doors of the semi-baronial hall were thrown open and a servant announced that her ladyship was served, Gonfallon discovered that it was his privilege to lead to the repast one of the two daughters of the monopolist alluded to. She was, he presently observed, a very fetching young woman. Her skin was eburnean in its clarity, her eyes of iserine, and in her features something there was that suggested a pastel of a politer age, an Eve on a fan. Across the table her sister sat, an undeveloped slip of a girl, at whom Gonfallon glanced but
