The One Woman | Page 4

cordial and smiling, at once mysterious, magic, friendly, gravely candid. Her skin was smooth as a babe's, with the delicate creamy satin of the blonde flashing the scarlet tints of every emotion. Her lips were cherry-red, and as she listened they half parted with a lazy suggestion of tenderness and love; while the face was one of refined mentality, as unconscious as a child's of its splendid beauty.
Her gait was proud and careless, telling of perfect health and stores of untouched vital powers, a movement of the body at once strong, luxurious, insolently languid, rhythmic and full of dumb music. It was when she moved that she expressed the consciousness of power, a gleam of cruelty, a challenge that was to man an added charm.
"What a woman!" he exclaimed aloud, as he drew on his coat. "The kind of a woman who enraptures the senses, drugs the brain and conscience of the man who responds to her call--the woman about whom men have never been able to compromise, but have always killed one another!"
His wife opened the door for him in silence.
"Who was that woman, Frank?" she asked at length, her long, dark lashes blinking rapidly.
"What woman, Ruth?"
"The beauty I saw glide softly into your study."
Gordon smiled as he sank into a chair in the library.
"Miss Kate Ransom, a stranger I never met before."
"You seem a magnet for strange women, and your church their Mecca."
"Yes, and strange men. God knows New York, with its dead and deserted churches, needs such a Mecca."
"You promised to call, of course?"
"Certainly; it's my business. The Church needs every friend and every dollar to be had on Manhattan Island."
"And the distinguished young pastor of the Pilgrim Church needs the smiles of all beautiful women. His wife is a little faded with worry and care for his children, while crowds hang on his eloquence and silly women sigh into his handsome face. Ah, Frank, before we came to New York you had eyes only for me. The city, the crowd and the flattery of fools have turned your head. You are letting go of all things you once held. Now the Bible is 'literature.' You are sighing for the freedom of a 'larger life.' Where will it end? I wonder if you have weighed marriage in the balances and found it wanting?"
Gordon rose with a sigh, walked slowly to the window and looked down on the city lying below. Their little home was perched on the cliffs of Washington Heights.
The smile had died from his handsome face and his tall figure was stooped with exhaustion. He raised one hand and brushed back a stray lock from his forehead, across which a frown had slowly settled.
"By all means keep your hair adjusted," his wife continued sarcastically. "The women are all in love with that blond hair. And it is so effective in the pulpit. If you were not six feet four it might be effeminate, but I assure you it is the secret of your strength. I trust you will be wiser than Samson."
Gordon smiled.
"You have quit the old faiths," she continued rapidly, "and gone to preaching Christian Socialism. You have driven the best members of the church away, and made the press your enemy. That mob which hails you a god will turn and curse you. You will never build your marble dream out of such stuff. Both your sermons to-day will make your trustees more hostile. There was no Bible in them--only personalities and rank Socialism. I saw that woman in front of me drinking it all in as the inspired gospel."
Gordon winced and his brow clouded.
"I gave up everything for you--home, talents, friends," she went on. "Now that I am thirty-one, it is the new face that charms."
"You did give up a very particular friend for me," Gordon remarked teasingly. "I only learned recently that you were once engaged to Mr. Morris King, your faithful attorney, and that you threw him over for an athletic parson with blond hair and a smile, yet I have never chided you about this little secret. Mr. King is still a romantic bachelor. He has not been initiated into the joys of a Sunday sermon at 10 P. M., with his wife in the pulpit. He has much to live for."
Her lips quivered and her eyes grew dim.
"Come, come, my dear; you know that I love you and that I am faithful to you. But such words and scenes as these may destroy the tenderest love at last. Words, even, are deeds."
"How philosophical! Quite like one of the epigrams of your chum, Mark Overman, of whose cruel tongue you're so fond. I wonder you don't make Mr. Overman a deacon in the new order of your church."
Gordon sank back into the chair and thoughtfully shaded his brow with