Clergy -- Fiction; Love stories; Mistaken identity -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
What had brought him there? He scarcely could have told. Partly,
perhaps, a painful curiosity, a flagellant longing to press the iron
that had seared him to his soul. So, after a fortnight of drifting, the
dark maelstrom of his thoughts had swept him to its dead center. This
was the spot that held the key to the secret whose shame had sent him
hither by night, like a jailbird revisiting the haunts that can know him
no more. He came at length to a fork in the road; he mechanically took
the right, and it led him soon to a paved road and to more cheerful
thoroughfares.
Once in the streets, a bar to curious glances, he turned up his coat
collar and settled the brim of his felt hat more closely over his eyes.
He halted once before a shadowed door with a barred window set in its
upper panel--the badge of a gambling-house. As he had walked, baffling
hints of pictures, unfilled outlines like a painter's studies had been
flitting before him, as faces flit noiselessly across the opaque ground
of a camera-obscura. Now, down the steps from that barred door, a filmy,
faded, Chesterfieldian figure seemed to be coming toward him with
outstretched hand--one of the ghosts of his world of shadows.
He walked on. He crossed an open square and presently came to the gate
of a Gothic chapel, set well back from the street. Its great
rose-window was alight, for on this evening was to be held a memorial
service for the old man whose money had built the pile, who had died a
fortnight before in a distant sanatorium. A burnished brass plate was
set beside the gate, bearing the legend: "St. James Chapel. Reverend
Henry Sanderson, Rector." The gaze with which the man's eye traced the
words was as mechanical as the movement with which his hand, in his
pocket, closed on the little gold cross; for organ practice was
beginning, and the air, throbbing to it, was peopled with confused
images--but no realization of the past emerged.
He turned at the sound of wheels, and the blur shocked itself apart to
reveal a kindly face that looked at him for an instant framed in the
window of a passing carriage. With the look a specter plucked at the
flesh of the wayfarer with intangible fingers. He shrank closer against
the palings.
Inside the carriage Bishop Ludlow settled back with a sigh. "Only a face
on the pavement," he said to his wife, "but it reminded me somehow of
Harry Sanderson."
"How strange it is!" she said--the bishop had no secrets from his
wife--"never a word or a sign, and everything in his study just as he
left it. What can you do, John? It is four months ago now, and the
parish needs a rector."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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