“Gentlemen,” said he, “I wish to speak to you as the treasury committee, rather than as vestrymen, for it is in the former capacity which you always attend. I am advised that we have been paid for Vedder Court.”
Chisholm, to whom he directed a gaze of inquiry, nodded his head.
“It’s in the Majestic,” he stated. “I have plans for its investment, which I wish to lay before the committee.”
“I shall lay my own before them at the same time,” went on the rector. “I wish, however, to preface these plans by the statement that I have, so far as I am concerned, relinquished all thought of building the new cathedral.”
Nicholas Van Ploon, who had been much troubled of late, brightened, and nodded his round head emphatically.
“The decision does not lay in your hands, Doctor Boyd,” drawled a nasal voice with an unconcealed sneer in it. It was clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who was not disturbed, in so much as the parting of one hair, by all the adverse criticism of him which had filled column upon column of the daily press for the past few days. “The rector has never, in the history of Market Square Church, been given the control of its finances. He has invariably been hired to preach the gospel.”
Sargent, Cunningham, Manning, and even Van Ploon, looked at Clark in surprise. He was not given to open reproof. Chisholm manifested no astonishment. He sat quietly in his chair, his fingers idly drumming on the edge of the table, but his mutton-chop beard was pink from the reddening of the skin beneath.
“The present rector of Market Square Church means to have a voice in its deliberations so long as he is the rector!” announced that young man emphatically, and Jim Sargent looked up at him with a jerk of his head. The Reverend Smith Boyd was pale this afternoon, but there was a something shining through his pallor which made the face alive; and the something was not temper. Rufus Manning, clasping his silvery beard with a firm grip, smiled encouragingly at the tall young orator. “I have said that I have, so far as I am concerned, relinquished the building of the cathedral,” the rector went on. “For this there are two reasons. The first is that its building will bring us further away from the very purpose for which the church was founded; the worship of God with an humble and a contrite heart! I am ready to confess that I found, on rigid self-analysis, my leading motive in urging the building of the new cathedral to have been vanity. I am also ready to confess, on behalf of my congregation and vestry, that their leading motive was vanity!”