Meanwhile Senator Cheney’s purse was always open to any demand the church made; he believed in churches as benevolent if not soul-saving institutions, and cheerfully aided their charitable work.
The rector of St Blank’s, the fashionable edifice where the ladies of the Cheney household obtained spiritual manna in New York, died when Alice was sixteen years old. He was a good old man, and a sincere Episcopalian, and whatever originality of thought or expression he may have lacked, his strict observance of the High Church code of ethics maintained the tone of his church and rendered him an object of reverence to his congregation. His successor was Reverend Arthur Emerson Stuart, a young man barely thirty years of age, heir to a comfortable fortune, gifted with strong intellectual powers and dowered with physical attractions.
It was not a case of natural selection which caused Arthur Stuart to adopt the church as a profession. It was the result of his middle name. Mrs Stuart had been an Emerson—in some remote way her family claimed relationship with Ralph Waldo. Her father and grandfather and several uncles had been clergymen. She married a broker, who left her a rich widow with one child, a son. From the hour this son was born his mother designed him for the clergy, and brought him up with the idea firmly while gently fixed in his mind.
Whatever seed a mother plants in a young child’s mind, carefully watches over, prunes and waters, and exposes to sun and shade, is quite certain to grow, if the soil is not wholly stony ground.
Arthur Stuart adored his mother, and stifling some commercial instincts inherited from the parental side, he turned his attention to the ministry and entered upon his chosen work when only twenty-five years of age. Eloquent, dramatic in speech, handsome, and magnetic in person, independent in fortune, and of excellent lineage on the mother’s side, it was not surprising that he was called to take charge of the spiritual welfare of fashionable St Blank’s Church on the death of the old pastor; or that, having taken the charge, he became immensely popular, especially with the ladies of his congregation. And from the first Sabbath day when they looked up from their expensive pew into the handsome face of their new rector, there was but one man in the world for Mabel Cheney and her daughter Alice, and that was the Reverend Arthur Emerson Stuart.