she had been reading, and her fingers trembled with the intensity of her self-repression. The paper rustled nervously as she held it out.
“See what?” said Herod. “Oh, that! Yes, I saw that down at the club. What do you read it for if you don’t like it?”
“And do you mean to say you aren’t going to do anything to this cursed Baptist? What are the laws good for, anyhow?”
Herod grinned. “They’re good for nothing when an election’s only six months off.”
The woman tried to speak; she could not. “It’s a damned shame,” she cried out, at last, still in the same hoarse voice.
Salome turned her head. “Oh, mamma,” she said, “how awfully vulgar.”
The mother glared at the daughter. She looked as though she were about to speak, but she only said, “Pshaw!”
There was a minute or two of silence. Herod stood with his hands in his pockets. “Was Corry King here, do you know?” he said, at last.
Herodias shook her head. Then Herod turned away and walked across the room towards the library. Just as he was about to quit the room, Herodias spoke again. “Did you get that box for the opera to-night?”
He stopped at the door and turned. “Yes, I did,” he said.
“Did you leave orders for the carriage?”
“Yes; I ordered it for eight o’clock, sharp.” Then he went on out of the room.
III
THE PRIESTS AND THE LEVITES
MR. THEODORE CAIAPHAS was rector of the Church of the Advent. It was said of that church that when the congregation were all at the sanctuary and seated in their places the building contained a representation of capital equivalent to a billion dollars of wealth.
It is hardly necessary to describe the Church of the Advent, for nearly everybody knows of it; even those who do not live in the metropolis have seen pictures of it. It occupied, with the rectory, half a square of ground in one of the most valuable parts of the city. It was estimated that if the land on which it stood were covered all over with ten-dollar bills, an approximate value of the real estate would just about be represented. The church itself was an architectural triumph, within and without. It was built of white marble, carved elaborately and exquisitely; the four large windows cost it cannot be told how many thousands of dollars, and the interior decorations were all that art could make them. The church was connected with the rectory by a glazed cloister of exquisite proportions, and the rectory itself, retired well back from the street behind parti-colored beds of flowering plants, was in perfect keeping with the church. The great plate-glass windows looked out across the little lawn upon the busy street where the thunder of life was forever passing and repassing.
One time the Church of the Advent was in the upper part of the town; then the flood of business had risen to it, and finally overwhelmed it and its surroundings. At the time of this story the church looked down upon a tumult of passing life and the bells clashed out their chimes almost unheard in the roar that rose up from the stony streets below. At first the ceaseless, roaring thunder had been very disturbing to Dr. Caiaphas, but he became used to it so that he never noticed it, except to miss it in the stifled, leaden silence of the country during his vacation. The rectory was a very pleasant home, and almost any bright day one could see children playing on the lawn in front of the house (for Dr. Caiaphas had quite a large family), and occasionally the rector himself might have been seen pacing up and down the gravelled driveway–especially on a Saturday afternoon, when he was in the throes of composing his addresses for the morrow.
Dr. Caiaphas was a very notable man. He was a liberal and advanced reformer, not only in religious matters, but in political and social matters as well. Not only had he written a number of pamphlets attacking those lingering superstitions that had so long operated as a clog to check the church in its advance abreast of the progress of civilization, but he had, besides, written hundreds of open letters and papers and several magazine articles upon the social problems of the age–the labor question, the question of social vice, the pauper question, and other similar topics. His passion for attacking and reforming abuses led him even into politics. It was largely through his instrumentality that the committee had been appointed to investigate into the affairs of the police department, and great things had been looked for as the outcome.
When it is taken into consideration that besides all these wide outside works, his was one of the largest parishes in the metropolis, it may be seen that Dr. Caiaphas was an extremely busy man and an extremely useful man.
The income of Dr. Caiaphas as rector of the Church of the Advent was forty thousand dollars per annum; added to this was a beautiful home, rent free.
There was a time when the excess of wealth had been a very sharp thorn in the side of the doctor’s conscience, but at the time of this story he had been rector of the Church of the Advent for nearly twenty years, and he had become reconciled to the burden of good-fortune that the Divine Wisdom had seen fit to lay upon him to bear. He lived soft and warm; he was fond of works of art and of beautiful things, and he was a great collector of rare and handsome books–of which he had a magnificent library. He raised his family with all the surroundings of luxury due to his and their position in the world; both of his sons had attended college and were then abroad–the younger finishing his education at a foreign university; the elder being an attaché to the embassy at the court of another foreign power.
It was a matter of conscience with Dr. Caiaphas thus to spend his money lavishly upon his children and himself, and he poured out his wealth without stint. He used to say, “I will not hoard what has been given me to-day for the sake of a possible to-morrow. I will trust to my Heavenly Father to supply my needs as they arise.”
When Dr. Caiaphas had first been asked to assume the rectorship of the Church of the Advent, he had accepted, not without reluctance. At that time he had very high and very exalted ideas as to his mission in life, and it seemed to him that, should he accept this magnificent call, he would, in a certain sense, be in danger of sacrificing his high birthright in the kingdom of heaven for a mess–however rich–of very worldly pottage. So at first he had been inclined to refuse; then, in thinking the matter over, it occurred to him that maybe Providence had laid this chance in his path that he might take it up and so exercise his usefulness in the wider field of metropolitan life.
He sometimes wondered with misgivings whether his conscience had not tallied almost too patly with his inclination in the matter. Indeed, he would have been more than human had he not appreciated what a thing it was to be rector of the Church of the Advent. It is probable that if he had been asked to leave his church in the country, and its salary of five thousand dollars a year, and to take up an obscure church in the metropolis, say, at a salary of twenty-five hundred a year, he would not have done so, even though, in accepting it, he might have widened his field of usefulness ever so much. But, to change at once from the old Church of the Messiah to the foremost church of his denomination in the country–he would have been, indeed, more than human if he had not appreciated the significance of such an advance in his life.
In his former work Dr. Caiaphas had seen much of poverty in a provincial town, and it was with him as it was with other people in the smaller cities and communities–he did not know what it meant to be poor in a great city such as the metropolis. To be poor in a small city is altogether a different thing from the dreadful poverty of the great congested communities where rents are expensive and living dear. A man may be poor in a provincial town and yet have a comfortable home. Oftentimes his home becomes squalid and barren–it becomes bare and naked and stripped of comforts as he sinks lower and lower into the quag of poverty; but he still has room in which to move about and to live, and he still has the
