Opposite the boys' school stood the modest square brick house that had served the first bishop of the diocese during laborious years.
Now it was the dean's residence. Facing it, just as you approached the cathedral, the street curved into a half-circle on either side, and in the centre the granite soldier on his shaft looked over the city that would honor him. Harry saw the tall figure of the dean come out of his gate, the long black skirts of his cassock fluttering under the wind of his big steps.
Beside him skipped and ran, to keep step with him, a little man in ill-fitting black, of whose appearance, thus viewed from the rear, one could only observe stooping shoulders and iron-gray hair that curled at the ends.
"He must be the poor missionary who built his church himself,"Mrs. Lossing observed; "he is not much of a preacher, the dean said, but he is a great worker and a good pastor.""So much the better for his people, and the worse for us!"says Harry, cheerfully.
"Why?"
"Naturally. We shall get the poor sermon and they will get the good pastoring!"Then Harry caught sight of a woman's frock and a profile that he knew, and thought no more of the preacher, whoever he might be.
But he was in the chancel in plain view, after the procession of choir-boys had taken their seats. He was an elderly man with thin cheeks and a large nose. He had one of those great, orotund voices that occasionally roll out of little men, and he read the service with a misjudged effort to fill the building.
The building happened to have peculiarly fine acoustic properties;but the unfortunate man roared like him of Bashan.
There was nothing of the customary ecclesiastical dignity and monotony about his articulation; indeed, it grew plain and plainer to Harry that he must have "come over"from some franker and more emotional denomination.
It seemed quite out of keeping with his homely manner and crumpled surplice that this particular reader should intone.
Intone, nevertheless, he did; and as badly as mortal man well could!
It was not so much that his voice or his ear went wrong;he would have had a musical voice of the heavy sort, had he not bellowed; neither did his ear betray him;the trouble seemed to be that he could not decide when to begin;now he began too early, and again, with a startled air, he began too late, as if he had forgotten.
"I hope he will not preach," thought Harry, who was absorbed in a rapt contemplation of his sweetheart's back hair.
He came back from a tender revery (by way of a little detour into the furniture business and the establishment that a man of his income could afford) to the church and the preacher and his own sins, to find the strange clergyman in the pulpit, plainly frightened, and bawling more loudly than ever under the influence of fear.
He preached a sermon of wearisome platitudes; making up for lack of thought by repetition, and shouting himself red in the face to express earnestness. "Fourth-class Methodist effort,"thought the listener in the Lossing pew, stroking his fair mustache, "with Episcopal decorations! That man used to be a Methodist minister, and he was brought into the fold by a high-churchman. Poor fellow, the Methodist church polity has a place for such fellows as he;but he is a stray sheep with us. He doesn't half catch on to the motions; yet I'll warrant he is proud of that sermon, and his wife thinks it one of the great efforts of the century."Here Harry took a short rest from the sermon, to contemplate the amazing moral phenomenon: how robust can be a wife's faith in a commonplace husband!
"Now, this man," reflected Harry, growing interested in his own fancies, "this man never can have LIVED! He doesn't know what it is to suffer, he has only vegetated! Doubtless, in a prosaic way, he loves his wife and children; but can a fellow who talks like him have any delicate sympathies or any romance about him?
He looks honest; I think he is a right good fellow and works like a soldier; but to be so stupid as he is, ought to HURT!"Harry felt a whimsical moving of sympathy towards the preacher.
He wondered why he continually made gestures with the left arm, never with his right.
"It gives a one-sided effect to his eloquence," said he.
But he thought that he understood when an unguarded movement revealed a rent which had been a mended place in the surplice.
"Poor fellow," said Harry. He recalled how, as a boy, he had gone to a fancy-dress ball in Continental smallclothes, so small that he had been strictly cautioned by his mother and sisters not to bow except with the greatest care, lest he rend his magnificence and reveal that it was too tight to allow an inch of underclothing.
The stockings, in particular, had been short, and his sister had providently sewed them on to the knee-breeches, and to guard against accidents still further, had pinned as well as sewed, the pins causing Harry much anguish.
"Poor fellow!" said Harry again, "I wonder is HE pinned somewhere?
I feel like giving him a lift; he is so prosy it isn't likely anyone else will feel moved to help."Thus it came about that when the dean announced that the alms this day would be given to the parish of our friend who had just addressed us;and the plate paused before the Lossing pew, Harry slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket after those two five-dollar notes.
I should explain that Harry being a naturally left-handed boy, who has laboriously taught himself the use of his right hand, it is a family joke that he is like the inhabitants of Nineveh, who could not tell their right hand from their left.
But Harry himself has always maintained that he can tell as well as the next man.
