Months had the rector of tiny St. Anne's waited for Browett to come to
him, knowing that Browett must come in the end. One less instinctively
wise would have made the mistake of going to Browett. Not this one,
whose good spirit warned him that his puissance lay rather with groups
of men than with individuals. From back of the chancel railing he could
sway the crowd and make it all his own; whereas, taking that same crowd
singly, and beyond his sacerdotal functions, he might be at the mercy of
each man composing it. He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of
his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the
plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite
hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes--unemotional
as two algebraic x's--would be a matter fearfully different. Even his
white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff,
chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was
quite invulnerable to his own vanity. A human Browett would have
permitted that moustache to mitigate its surroundings with some flowing
grace. He was, indeed, no adversary to meet alone in the open field--for
one who could make him in a crowd a mere string of many to his harp.
The morning so long awaited came on a second Sunday after Trinity. Cyrus
Browett, in whose keeping was the very ark of the money covenant,
alighted from his coupe under the _porte-cochere_ of candied Gothic and
humbly took seat in his pew like a mere worshipper of God.
As such--a man among men--the young rector looked calmly down upon him,
letting him sink into the crowd-entity which always became subject to
him.
His rare, vibrant tones--tones that somehow carried the subdued light
and warmth of stained glass--rolled out in moving volume:
"The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before
him."
Then, still as a mere worshipper of God, that Prince of the power of
Mammon down in front knelt humbly to say after the young rector above
him that he had erred and strayed like a lost sheep, followed too much
the devices of his own heart, leaving undone those things he ought to
have done, and doing those things which he ought not to have done; that
there was no health in him; yet praying that he might, thereafter, lead
a godly, righteous and sober life to the glory of God's holy name. Even
to Allan there was something affecting in this--a sort of sardonic
absurdity in Browett's actually speaking thus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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