Samuel rushed away into the darkness. But he couldn't stay away—he could not bring himself to believe that he was separated from St. Matthew's forever. He turned and came back to the church, and stood gazing at it, choking with his sobs.
Then, as he waited, he saw an automobile draw up in front of the side entrance, and saw Mr. Wygant step out and enter. The sight was like a blow in the face to him. There was the proud rich man, defiant and unpunished, seated in the place of authority; while Samuel, the Seeker, was turned out of the door!
A blaze of rebellion flamed up in him. No, no—they should not cast him off! He would fight them—he would fight to the very end. The church was not their church—it was the church of God! And he had a right to belong to it—and to speak the truth in it, too!
And so, just after the vestry had got settled to the consideration of the architect's sketch for the new Nurse's Home, there came a loud knock upon the door, and Samuel entered, wild-eyed and breathless.
“Gentlemen!” he cried. “I demand a hearing!”
Dr. Vince sprang to his feet in terror. “Samuel Prescott!” he exclaimed.
“I have been ordered out of the church!” proclaimed Samuel. “And I will not submit to it! I have spoken the truth, and I will not permit the evil-doers in St. Matthew's to silence me!”
Mr. Hickman had sprung up. “Boy,” he commanded, “leave this room!”
“I will not leave the room!” shouted Samuel. “I demand a hearing from the vestry of this church. I have a right to a hearing! I have spoken the truth, and nothing but the truth!”
“What is the boy talking about?” demanded another of the vestrymen. This was Mr. Hamerton, a young lawyer, whose pleasant face Samuel had often noticed. And Samuel, seeing curiosity and interest in his look, sprang toward him.
“Don't let them turn me out without a hearing!” he cried.
“Boy!” exclaimed Mr. Hickman, “I command you to leave this room.”
“You corrupted the city council!” shrilled Samuel. “You bribed it to beat the water bill! It's true, and you know it's true, and you don't dare to deny it!”
Mr. Hickman was purple in the face with rage. “It's a preposterous lie!” he roared.
“I have talked with one of the men who got the money!” cried Samuel. “There was two thousand dollars paid to ten of the supervisors.”
“Who is this man?” cried the other furiously.
“I won't tell his name,” said Samuel. “He told me in confidence.”
“Aha!” laughed the other. “I knew as much! It is a vile slander!”
“It is true!” protested Samuel. “Dr. Vince, you know that I am telling the truth. What reason would I have for making it up?”
“I have told you, Samuel,” exclaimed Dr. Vince, “that I would have nothing to do with this matter.”
“I will take any member of this vestry to talk with that man!” declared the boy. “Anybody can find out about these things if he wants to. Why, Mr. Wygant told me himself that he had paid money to Slattery to get franchises!”
And then Mr. Wygant came into the controversy. “WHAT!” he shouted.
“Why, of course you did!” cried Samuel in amazement. “Didn't you tell me this very afternoon?”
“I told you nothing of the sort!” declared the man.
“You told me everybody did it—that there was no way to help doing it. You called it the competition of capital!”
“I submit that this is an outrage!” exclaimed Mr. Hickman. “Leave this room, sir!”
“The poor people in this town are suffering and dying!” cried Samuel. “And they are being robbed and oppressed. And are these things to go on forever?”
“Samuel, this is no place to discuss the question!” broke in Dr. Vince.
“But why not, sir? The guilty men are high in the councils of this church. They hold the church up to disgrace before all the world. And this is the church of Christ, sir!”
“But yours is not the way to go about it, boy!” exclaimed Mr. Hamerton—who was alarmed because Samuel kept looking at him.
“Why not?” cried Samuel. “Did not Christ drive out the money-changers from the temple with whips?”
This was an uncomfortable saying. There was a pause after it, as if everyone were willing to let his neighbor speak first.
“Are we not taught to follow Christ's example, Dr. Vince?” asked the boy.
“Hardly in that sense, Samuel,” said the terrified doctor. “Christ was God. And we can hardly be expected—”
“Ah, that is a subterfuge!” broke in Samuel, passionately. “You say that Christ was God, and so you excuse yourself from doing what He tells you to! But I don't believe that He was God in any such sense as that. He was a man, like you and me! He was a poor man, who suffered and starved! And the rich men of His time despised Him and spit upon Him and crucified Him!”
Here a new member of the vestry entered the arena. This was the venerable Mr. Curtis, who looked like a statue of the Olympian Jove. “Boy,” he said sternly, “you object to being put out of the church—and yet you confess to being an infidel.”
“I may be an infidel, Mr. Curtis,” replied the other, quickly; “but I never paid two hundred dollars to Slattery so that the police would let me block the sidewalks of the town.”
And Mr. Curtis subsided and took no further part in the discussion.
“The church cast out Jesus!” went on Samuel, taking advantage of the confusion. “And it was the rich and powerful in the church who did it. And he used about them language far more violent than I have ever used. 'Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites!' he said. 'Woe unto you also, you lawyers!—Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?' And if He were here tonight He would be on my side—and the rich evil-doers who sit on this board would cast Him out again! You have cast Him out already! You have shut your ears to the cry of the oppressed—you make mockery of justice and truth! You are crucifying Him again every day!”
“This is outrageous!” cried Mr. Hickman. “It is blasphemy!”
“It must stop instantly,” put in Mr. Wygant. And Samuel knew that when Mr. Wygant spoke, he meant to be obeyed.
“Then there is no one here who will hear me?” he exclaimed. “Mr. Hamerton, won't you help me?”
“What do you want us to do?” demanded Mr. Hamerton.
“I want the vestry to investigate these charges. I want you to find out whether it is true that members of St. Matthew's have been corrupting the government of Lockmanville. And if it is true, I want you to drive such men from the church! They have no place in the church, sir! Men who spend their whole time in trying to get the people's money from them! Men who openly declare, as Mr. Wygant did to me, that it is necessary to bribe lawmakers in order to make money! Such men degrade the church and drag it from its mission. They are the enemies the church exists to fight—”
“Are we here to listen to a sermon from this boy?” shouted Mr. Hickman furiously.
“Samuel, leave this room!” commanded Dr. Vince.
“Then there is no one here who will help me?”
“I told you you could accomplish nothing by such behavior. Leave the room!”
“Very well, then,” cried the boy wildly, “I will go. But I tell you I will not give up without a fight. I will expose you and denounce you to the world! The people shall know you for what you are—cowards and hypocrites, faithless to your trust! Plunderers of the public! Corrupters of the state!”
“Get out of here, you young villain!” shouted Hickman, advancing with a menace.
And the boy, blazing with fury, pointed his finger straight into his face. “You, Henry Hickman!” he cried. “You are the worst of them all! You, the great lawyer—the eminent statesman! I have been among the lowest—I have been with saloon keepers and criminals—with publicans and harlots and thieves—but never yet have I met a man as merciless and as hard as you! You a Christian—you might be the Roman soldier who spat in Jesus' face!”
And with that last thunderbolt Samuel turned and went out, slamming the door with a terrific bang in the great lawyer's face.
For at least a couple of hours Samuel paced the streets of Lockmanville, to let his rage and grief subside. And then he went home, and to his astonishment found that Sophie Stedman had been waiting up for him all this while.
She listened breathlessly to the story of his evening's adventures. Then she said, “I have been trying to do something, too.”
“What have you done?” he asked.
“I went to see little Ethel,” she replied.
“Ethel Vince!” he gasped.
“Yes,” said she. “She is your friend, you know; and I went to ask her not to let her father turn you off.”
“And what came of it?”
“She cried,” said Sophie. “She was terribly unhappy. She said that she knew that you were a good boy; and that she would never rest until her father had taken you back.”
“You don't mean it!” cried Samuel in amazement.
“Yes, Samuel; but then her mother came.”
“Oh! And what then?”
“She scolded me! She was very angry with me. She said I had no right to fill the child's mind with falsehoods about her uncle. And she wouldn't listen to me—she turned me out of the house.”
Sophie in a low voice. “We are going to have to do it all by ourselves.”
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