The Girl Who Had No God/Part 1
CHAPTER I.
—1—
Hilary Kingston had been shot.
Old Hilary had been a familiar figure in the village of Woffingham for years. The eccentricity of his gray derby hat, his beetling gray brows, his always fresh gray gloves, his erect, rather heavy old figure, singled him out from the mass of commuters that thronged the city trains. The gray derby was a part of old Hilary. Except on those rare occasions when he attended service at Saint Jude's he was never seen without it.
He lived on the hill above the village, with his daughter—had lived there for ten years. The hall was beautiful, but old Hilary received no visitors, returned no advances. Visitors thought this curious. The villagers, prosperous business men with smart wives, shrugged their shoulders. The man's house was his own. If be found that he could do without the town, the town could get along without him.
There was no mystery about the hall, and little curiosity. Cars going to the country club passed under the brick wall of its Italian garden. Their occupants sometimes caught a glimpse of Elinor Kingston there, reading in a rose arbor, wandering among her peonies and iris in the spring, or cutting sprays of phlox in midsummer.
The men thought her rather lovely; the women, odd, with her blond hair and dark eyes. The assistant rector of Saint Jude's, newly come to the village, met her face to face on one of his long country walks, a month or so before old Hilary's death, and could not forget her.
He led the conversation to her that night at a dinner.
"An exquisite face," he described her, "but sad, almost tragically sad."
"Blond?" The lady on his right was a Mrs. Bryant. In honor of the new assistant rector, who came of fine family and was a distinct acquisition to the village, she wore the Bryant pear-shaped pearl. She spoke rather curtly. "I should not call her exquisite—but you probably met Elinor Kingston. Her sadness is a pose, I believe; she has everything she wants."
The assistant rector was young, but very wise: So he spoke no more of Elinor until the women had left the table. Then he ventured again.
"Don't join the army of those of us who worship from afar," advised the youth who had moved up beside him. "She's the loveliest thing in this part of the country. But, except our sainted rector, no one ever gets to put a foot on the place. It's exclusiveness to the nth power, and then some. There's a lot of talk, of course, or used to be. Old Kingston brings his servants from New York, and except an elderly housekeeper, none of them speak English. They used to say around here that he was a refugee, but that's all rot. He's a stingy old dotard, afraid some handsome youth like myself will captivate the girl. That's all there is to it."
The assistant rector, whose name was Ward, smiled perfunctorily. Instead of the gleaming table, spread with flowers and candles, with the gay colors of cordials and liqueurs, he was seeing a girl standing at the turn of a country road and gazing down into the valley and the distant village with somber eyes....
Faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these is faith. Faith in ourselves. faith in those around us, and that sublimest faith of all which trusts in something beyond. To all men is given such faith at the beginning of life, and some keep it to the end. But here and there is one who has lost it, who cannot turn his eyes up and say "Lord, Lord." Old Hilary bad not kept the faith.
Years ago he had not been evil. He had gone from philosophy into unbelief, that route which all must travel. But, unlike the many, he had not come back.
He had started with socialism, but socialism must be founded on the Christ, and him he scorned. So from socialism he had drifted to anarchy. To rob the rich and give to the poor, at first. Later on, to rob the rich, to incite seditions, to arm the rebellious—oh, it was comprehensive enough, vastly wicked with that most terrible lawlessness of all, that believes itself law.
To pit his wits against the world and win—that had been old Hilary's creed. "For the oppressed" had been at first the slogan of the band he gathered around him. "Against the oppressor" it became later on. Vastly different the two. Most of human charity and kindliness lay crushed down and trampled underfoot during old Hilary's progress from Christ to Antichrist.
The band had been gathered with much care. Respectability, order, decorum—these spelled safety to old Hilary's astute mind. Most of them were younger sons of English landed families, with a sprinkling of other nationalities. Young Huff was an Australian, for instance, the son of a wealthy sheep-owner. Boroday the Russian—implicated in the bomb-throwing that destroyed the minister of war—was a nobleman. Old Hilary had got him out of Siberia during those early days when he righted what, to his crooked mind, were wrongs.
To Pit His Wits Against the World and Win—That Had Been Old Hilary's Creed.
There were twelve In the band at the beginning, and for five years there were no changes. Then came the kidnapping and holding for ransom of Mackintosh the banker in Iowa, and the unexpected calling out of the state militia. The band had hidden Mackintosh in a deserted mine and three of the band went down in the shooting that followed his discovery. In the looting of Tiffany's vaults, which has never been published, a Frenchman named Dupres was killed; and only recently a tire had burst after the holding up of the car of the governor of Delaware, and their car, overturning, had crushed Jerrold, the mechanic of the band and old Hilary's chauffeur. One way and another, there were only five left: Talbot and Lethbridge the Englishmen, Boroday, Huff and old Hilary himself. And old Hilary's hour was almost come.
Old Hilary lived well, as he might. His foreign servants were artists. He liked good food, good wines, good books. He even had a few pictures—from the leading galleries of Europe. He hung them In the house at Woffingham, with a cynical smile.
"Safest place in the world," he said to old Henriette, who protested. "The village has never even heard of them!"
And so in this atmosphere with which he surrounded himself, of fine living and wrong thinking, of atheism raised almost to religion, of no law and no Christ, old Hilary had brought up his daughter. He had been proud of her in his way; absolutely selfish, too. She had had no other companion. He taught her his unbelief, pointing out the churchgoers, as they drove together on Sunday mornings, as slaves to a myth. Also, he taught her to hate a lie, and to give alms. Early in her life their drives together had been punctured with questions.
"But if my mother is dead, where is she?" asked Elinor on one of them.
Old Hilary had eyed her from under eyebrows that were already gray.
"She lives in the memories of those that knew and loved her."
"But I never knew her. Then for me she doesn't live! But Mademoiselle—" she checked herself. Suspicion had been dawning in old Hilary's eyes.
"Death is the end," he said tersely, and quoted Darwin and Haeckel to her. But at the end of the drive he interviewed Mademoiselle, and sent her flying to her chamber, where from under the carpet beneath her bureau, she got her rosary and wept over it.
Elinor was twenty the year her father died, a slender girl, fond of flowers. rather a dreamer. Well educated, too. Old Hilary had seen to that; she knew Muluto. Haeckel, Bakunin; spoke French and Spanish—Hilary had spent much time In Central America helping the insurgents; It was he who financed the insurrection in northern Mexico—and wrote fluently the form of shorthand that her father had devised as a means of communication between the leader of the band. A keen-eyed, wistful-mouthed slip of a girl, shut off in the great house on the hill above Woffingham; living her life of big theories and small duties, calloused to robbery and violent deeds, and viewing wistfully from her windows the little children in the road below.
CHAPTER II.
Once a year the association closed its books. During all of the June before old Hilary's sudden death, Elinor had been busy arranging figures, collecting data in the cryptic shorthand she knew. Then, on the first of July, Hilary gave his annual dinner.
The band, from twelve, was down to five. Boroday, the Russian, glancing around the table, shrugged his shoulders. It was the chance of the game they played, and percentages would he larger. Nevertheless there was a weight of depression over them all.
Elinor was at her father's right, simply dressed. The dinners were always a trial to her. She was palpitatingly anxious that the papers before old Hilary be in order and accurate. They were her work. The deeper significance of the meeting she was not so much ignorant of as profoundly indifferent to. If her father did a thing, it took on order, became a law.
There were present Talbot and Lethbridge, the Englishmen; Boroday, whose rescue from Siberia had made him old Hilary's henchman; and young Huff. Huff was the mechanician. He had been trained in the Bleriot works; airplanes to wireless, automobiles to automatic pistols, he knew them—all makes, all grades. If old Hilary was the brains, Huff was the hands of the band.
He sat beside Elinor, and watched her with worshiping eyes. Perhaps it was as well that old Hilary was intent on his food and on the business in hand.
The routine of the annual dinner seldom varied. Five of them then, that last dinner around the table. In evening clothes, well set up, spare, three of them young, all temperate, honorable about women—as polished, as harmless in appearance, as death-dealing as the gleaming projectile of a twelve-inch gun!
First old Hilary went over the books. It might have been the board meeting of some respectable bank. He stood at his end of the table, and the light from the chandelier fell full on him.
"I have to report, gentlemen," he would say, "a fairly successful year." This is where it differed from a bank. The association had had no bad years. "While our expenses have been heavy, returns have been correspondingly so." And so on, careful lines of figures, outlays and returns, to the end. For old Hilary was secretary and treasurer as well as president.
This time, when he had reached the end of what was to he his last report, he paused and cleared his throat.
"Unfortunately, that is not all, gentlemen. 'Nothing can we call our own but death.' And it is my sad duty to report, this last year, the loss of three of our number. A calamitous year, gentlemen."
He might have been a trustee, lamenting the loss of valued supporters to a hospital!
Afterward, in the library, with Elinor embroidering by the fire, they cashed in. They dealt only in cash. Securities were dangerous. Once or twice Boroday had successfully negotiated with a fence in Paris, but always under old Hilary's protest.