第26章

and Mullins would say surely there couldn't be fifty dollars for taxes, because there weren't any taxes, and the Dean would admit that of course it couldn't be for the taxes.In fact, the truth is that the Dean's figures were badly mixed, and the fault lay indubitably with the mathematical professor of two generations back.

It was always Mullins's intention some day to look into the finances of the church, the more so as his father had been with Dean Drone at the little Anglican college with the cricket ground.But he was a busy man.As he explained to the rector himself, the banking business nowadays is getting to be such that a banker can hardly call even his Sunday mornings his own.Certainly Henry Mullins could not.They belonged largely to Smith's Hotel, and during the fishing season they belonged away down the lake, so far away that practically no one, unless it was George Duff of the Commercial Bank, could see them.

But to think that all this trouble had come through the building of the new church.

That was the bitterness of it.

For the twenty-five years that Rural Dean Drone had preached in the little stone church, it had been his one aim, as he often put it in his sermons, to rear a larger Ark in Gideon.His one hope had been to set up a greater Evidence, or, very simply stated, to kindle a Brighter Beacon.

After twenty-five years of waiting, he had been able at last to kindle it.Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church.First of all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for the newer Evidence.It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said, to lay hands on it.Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone of it and build it into a Sunday School, as a lesser testimony.Then, when that provided impracticable, it was suggested that the stone be reverently fashioned into a wall that should stand as a token.And when even that could not be managed, the stone of the little church was laid reverently into a stone pile;afterwards it was devoutly sold to a building contractor, and, like so much else in life, was forgotten.

But the building of the church, no one, I think, will forget.The Dean threw himself into the work.With his coat off and his white shirt-sleeves conspicuous among the gang that were working at the foundations, he set his hand to the shovel, himself guided the road-scraper, urging on the horses; cheering and encouraging the men, till they begged him to desist.He mingled with the stone-masons, advising, helping, and giving counsel, till they pleaded with him to rest.He was among the carpenters, sawing, hammering, enquiring, suggesting, till they besought him to lay off.And he was night and day with the architect's assistants, drawing, planning, revising, till the architect told him to cut it out.

So great was his activity, that I doubt whether the new church would ever have been finished, had not the wardens and the vestry men insisted that Mr.Drone must take a holiday, and sent him on the Mackinaw trip up the lakes,--the only foreign travel of the Dean's life.

So in due time the New Church was built and it towered above the maple trees of Mariposa like a beacon on a hill.It stood so high that from the open steeple of it, where the bells were, you could see all the town lying at its feet, and the farmsteads to the south of it, and the railway like a double pencil line, and Lake Wissanotti spread out like a map.You could see and appreciate things from the height of the new church,--such as the size and the growing wealth of Mariposa,--that you never could have seen from the little stone church at all.

Presently the church was opened and the Dean preached his first sermon in it, and he called it a Greater Testimony, and he said that it was an earnest, or first fruit of endeavour, and that it was a token or pledge, and he named it also a covenant.He said, too, that it was an anchorage and a harbour and a lighthouse as well as being a city set upon a hill; and he ended by declaring it an Ark of Refuge and notified them that the Bible Class would meet in the basement of it on that and every other third Wednesday.

In the opening months of preaching about it the Dean had called the church so often an earnest and a pledge and a guerdon and a tabernacle, that I think he used to forget that it wasn't paid for.

It was only when the agent of the building society and a representative of the Hosanna Pipe and Steam Organ Co.(Limited), used to call for quarterly payments that he was suddenly reminded of the fact.Always after these men came round the Dean used to preach a special sermon on sin, in the course of which he would mention that the ancient Hebrews used to put unjust traders to death,--a thing of which he spoke with Christian serenity.

I don't think that at first anybody troubled much about the debt on the church.Dean Drone's figures showed that it was only a matter of time before it would be extinguished; only a little effort was needed, a little girding up of the loins of the congregation and they could shoulder the whole debt and trample it under their feet.Let them but set their hands to the plough and they could soon guide it into the deep water.Then they might furl their sails and sit every man under his own olive tree.

Meantime, while the congregation was waiting to gird up its loins, the interest on the debt was paid somehow, or, when it wasn't paid, was added to the principal.