It was towards the close of a political contest that he first donned the rector’s gown. On that occasion the President happened to be in the middle aisle. Gonfallon, however, with an apposite text for foreword, took up the question at once. For three-quarters of an hour he held the most indifferent congregation in New York with the topic for which they cared the least. And at the close, with a gesture that swept the church, “Not politics,” he cried, “but religion is the nation’s soul.” It was in this wise that the congregation was won.
Incidentally he did not neglect Bucholz, nor yet Bucholz’ daughter. The girl was shyly willing; as for Gonfallon, he was wholly in love. The dream of celibacy faded, as dreams ever do. He asked, and with sweet reluctance it was given. His mother, who had migrated with him from Bronx, departed to the Massachusettsian homestead; and after the brief honeymoon he settled down to his pastorate charge.
Meanwhile, Bucholz’ younger daughter, Claire, had been sent abroad in search of masters of foreign arts and tongues; and abroad for four years she remained—in fact, until Bucholz, caught in a mousetrap which that arch-hunter Jerolomon had set for him, saw the amassments of his own booty, twenty million at least, evaporate in a night. Six weeks later Claire landed in New York.
And now, the morning of her arrival, as Gonfallon lounged back through the past, the episodes of his career paraded unsummoned before him. He saw himself on the singing sands of the Beverly coast, he saw the elms of the village street, he heard the unprompted prayers of his youth and the sound of his own voice vibrating for the first time through the aisles of Gethsemane. Faces long forgotten returned to him and smiled. Incidents that were trivial ousted others that were grave—the trick the countess had of polishing the handle of her crutch, the vividness of certain dreams, one in particular that had haunted him, sporadically, for years—the idea that he had ascended the pulpit in pajamas and was unable to hide—the tennis-match in which Ruth had played, and which, a sunstroke and a check of perspiration aiding, had resulted in the neuralgia which kept her to her room.
At the thought of her he drew a breath that resembled a sigh. For Ruth, in her enforced seclusion, seemed to have resigned herself to invalidism and the matter-of-fact. The breeziness which had won him to her had gone, gone too the impromptu of her speech, the savors that had so allured. Three years of marriage, and in place of the sensitive, high-strung girl there was a languid woman who each day at stated intervals consumed a furtive pill. His love for her, that love which he had accounted measureless, and which in the earliest transports of the unexpected had thrown him at her feet, impelling him in the belief there was none that could fill his life as she, and prompting him in the utterance, Non hodie solum, sed in aeternum te adorabo—that love which in the possibilities of its expansion had seemed a contingent of the infinite had narrowed into an unsuggestive bond. Where is the Vandal that invented marriage? Gonfallon put to himself no such query. Unquestionably he was happy in his household; but to the happiest of households there comes a moment of regret.
II
Claire transplanted took root at once. It was only now and then, in a bow not from the neck but from the waist, in an intonation, in a haphazard phrase, that you divined the foreign-bred girl. A month had not spent itself before she was in possession of a list. Each day was marked by scrawls from people she had met no one knew how or when. In the evening and in the late afternoons the sitting-room of the rectory, a room which Gonfallon in the earliest awkwardness of prosperity had fitted in that lovable Latin fashion which excludes everything but the necessary and inhibits every adornment introduced for ornament’s sake—the bare tableless sitting-room, with its infrequent chairs and pedestalled lamps, was peopled with guests astonished enough to find themselves in so sedate a home. Mrs. Manhattan, on the wing from Newport to New Jersey, had happened in twice, a signal mark of favor from one as socially occupied as she. And with her, or without her, yet inevitably in her train, were other ladies of lesser note—Miss Nevers, for instance, a young woman who had preferences for everybody and attractions for none; Miss Pickett, whom Claire had encountered in that vague region which is known as Abroad; Mrs. Usselex, a parishioner of Gonfallon’s, the bride of a year, more familiarly known as Eden; the Pondirs, mère et fille, recruiting, as usual, for their musicales; Miss Raritan, with whom scandal had been busy and who ignored that scandal as only the virtuous may; the Duchesse de la Dèche, born a Wainwaring, very fetching in her widow’s weeds, now courted, it was rumored, by Mr. Incoul. And with these ladies there was a contingent of men—Dugald Maule, a young lawyer who dreamed of the bench, famous for the art with which he abandoned a sweetheart and preserved her good will; Harry Tandem, a youth of such lively taste in dress that the previous winter on asking Nicholas Manhattan to suggest a costume that he might wear to the Amsterdams’ fancy-ball he had been answered, “Go as you are, Harry; you are fancy enough as it is;” George Rerick, a young man so vacuous of expression that he had been nicknamed It; Trement Yarde, Claire’s fellow-passenger on the voyage over, a scion of the house of Yarde and Company, bankers; and, last and least, Alphabet Jones the novelist.
The sudden infatuation of these people for his sister-in-law was a phenomenon which
