Relieved of this burden, Gonfallon had returned to Bronx, departing only when the grave had closed and the last rite had been performed, but not, however, before his old parishioners, radiating in the presence of the now famous cleric who once had been their own, had insisted on his delivering one of his spiritual harangues again. Then, the dust of Bronx barely shaken from him, his mother had been taken ill, and he had been forced to journey to the prim Massachusettsian village in which she dwelt, and to linger there until through an unexpected turn in the malady his mother had been declared out of danger and he was suffered to return to his pastorate in town. Meanwhile, he had caught but infrequent glimpses of Claire; indeed, during his absence such a mass of duties had accumulated, so many parochial matters demanded his attention, that until this evening he had had barely a moment which he could call his own.
But now as he sat at his hostess’s right, interrupting the conversation that fluttered about him now with one of those pleasantries which the popular divine can permit himself, now interjecting some apposite sally—sounding as he did so that resonant accent with which his famous phrase, “Religion, not politics, is the nation’s soul,” had been fired point-blank at the President—he looked once again a maker of songs and of laws and every inch a prelate. With Bucholz inoffensive and the bishopric full in sight, he could well afford to be himself. It was good to smile, and his smile was contagious. There was but one thing that jarred.
On the opposite side of the table, at the farther end, between Mrs. Fox and Miss Raritan, Jones was seated, his recent mourning noticeable only in two microscopic studs of onyx, or of sapphire, the which, parenthetically, give the same effect. On the other side of Miss Raritan was Trement Yarde, and next to him was Claire. To Nicholas Manhattan, the gentlest yet the most easily bored of men—and to whomsoever else would listen—Mrs. Fox was relating a few of her triumphs. Her conversation, such of it at least as reached Gonfallon’s ear, was a glittering spangle of noble names. During her sojourn abroad, seemingly with no one of lesser degree than a baronet had she ever exchanged a word. Her speech was striated with foreign idioms, and occasionally she lapsed wholly into French.
But it was not Mrs. Fox that jarred on Gonfallon: it was Claire and Yarde. From the first, through one of those illogical processes which often hold the core of logic itself, Gonfallon had detested the young fellow; everything about him, from the part of his hair to the soles of his St. James Street shoes—everything, even to the trick he had of contemplating his fingertips, was antipathetic in the extreme. Later, when Yarde had become a visitor at the rectory, haunting it as it were with his unwelcome presence, the antipathy had changed to detestation; and now that he was talking to Claire, and talking to her moreover in a voice so modulated that no one save the girl herself could hear him, Gonfallon’s detestation addled into rage. For the moment he pitied the girl, and sorrowed for her that she should have for neighbor a man she loathed. But suddenly his pity was shot with wonder, his anger with surprise. During the early part of the meal Claire had chatted amiably enough to the man seated between Mrs. Manhattan and herself, and Yarde had delivered himself up to the fascinations of Miss Raritan. But now the conversation had changed, and Yarde was devoting himself to Claire.
That the former should address the girl whom he had taken in to dinner was a thing which, however objectionable in the abstract, was in the circumstances perfectly proper. Indeed, Gonfallon told himself that although Claire in that conversation which he had overheard had snubbed the fellow right roundly, still the dinner-table of a third person must and should interrupt the continuity of a quarrel subsisting between a man and a woman whom the hostess has placed side by side. And now, in spite of that snubbing, did Yarde not address Claire, and did Claire not respond, it would be unmannerly of the one and unseemly of the other. Platitudes are easy of utterance, and the weather, however beastly, has never caused a shipwreck yet.
But as Gonfallon watched them it was clear to him that no exchange of commonplaces was taking place. When he had last seen the two together, Claire’s attitude had been that of an insulted princess, in her voice had been a threat; now disdain had vanished; where the menace had been was now a smile. On her part the transformation was greater than any regard for the proprieties demanded; while as for Yarde, in place of the sulk of a whipped spaniel there had come an air of confidence which was insolent to a degree. Through some jugglery which Gonfallon felt himself incompetent to fathom, he seemed to be engaged in filching from him a thing which after—nay, with—the episcopate was more precious than all things else. And at this jugglery, at this open pillage of his own chattels, conventionality compelled him to assist, inhibiting him even from so much as warning the marauder off, and demanding that he should laugh, that he should jest, that his flow of small-talk should not tarry.
“Don’t you agree with me,
