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The Damnation of Theron Ware

by Harold Frederic · English · Gutenberg #133 · 687,874 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Damnation of Theron Ware

Author: Harold Frederic


        
Release date: March 8, 2006 [eBook #133]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/133

Credits: Produced by Meredith Ricker, John Hamm and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE ***
THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE


by Harold Frederic




PART I



CHAPTER I


No such throng had ever before been seen in the building during all its
eight years of existence. People were wedged together most uncomfortably
upon the seats; they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the
galleries; at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries, they
formed broad, dense masses about the doors, through which it would be
hopeless to attempt a passage.

The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles of flaring gas-jets
arranged on the ceiling, fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some
framed in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned with
shining baldness--but all alike under the spell of a dominant emotion
which held features in abstracted suspense and focussed every eye upon a
common objective point.

The excitement of expectancy reigned upon each row of countenances, was
visible in every attitude--nay, seemed a part of the close, overheated
atmosphere itself.

An observer, looking over these compact lines of faces and noting the
uniform concentration of eagerness they exhibited, might have guessed
that they were watching for either the jury's verdict in some peculiarly
absorbing criminal trial, or the announcement of the lucky numbers in
a great lottery. These two expressions seemed to alternate, and even to
mingle vaguely, upon the upturned lineaments of the waiting throng--the
hope of some unnamed stroke of fortune and the dread of some adverse
decree.

But a glance forward at the object of this universal gaze would have
sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice
nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about
to read out the list of ministerial appointments for the coming year.
This list was evidently written in a hand strange to him, and the slow,
near-sighted old gentleman, having at last sufficiently rubbed the
glasses of his spectacles, and then adjusted them over his nose
with annoying deliberation, was now silently rehearsing his task to
himself--the while the clergymen round about ground their teeth and
restlessly shuffled their feet in impatience.

Upon a closer inspection of the assemblage, there were a great many
of these clergymen. A dozen or more dignified, and for the most part
elderly, brethren sat grouped about the Bishop in the pulpit. As many
others, not quite so staid in mien, and indeed with here and there
almost a suggestion of frivolity in their postures, were seated on the
steps leading down from this platform. A score of their fellows sat
facing the audience, on chairs tightly wedged into the space railed off
round the pulpit; and then came five or six rows of pews, stretching
across the whole breadth of the church, and almost solidly filled with
preachers of the Word.

There were very old men among these--bent and decrepit veterans who
had known Lorenzo Dow, and had been ordained by elders who remembered
Francis Asbury and even Whitefield. They sat now in front places,
leaning forward with trembling and misshapen hands behind their hairy
ears, waiting to hear their names read out on the superannuated list, it
might be for the last time.

The sight of these venerable Fathers in Israel was good to the eyes,
conjuring up, as it did, pictures of a time when a plain and homely
people had been served by a fervent and devoted clergy--by preachers
who lacked in learning and polish, no doubt, but who gave their lives
without dream of earthly reward to poverty and to the danger and wearing
toil of itinerant missions through the rude frontier settlements. These
pictures had for their primitive accessories log-huts, rough household
implements, coarse clothes, and patched old saddles which told of weary
years of journeying; but to even the least sympathetic vision there
shone upon them the glorified light of the Cross and Crown. Reverend
survivors of the heroic times, their very presence there--sitting
meekly at the altar-rail to hear again the published record of their
uselessness and of their dependence upon church charity--was in the
nature of a benediction.

The large majority of those surrounding these patriarchs were
middle-aged men, generally of a robust type, with burly shoulders, and
bushing beards framing shaven upper lips, and who looked for the most
part like honest and prosperous farmers attired in their Sunday clothes.
As exceptions to this rule, there were scattered stray specimens of
a more urban class, worthies with neatly trimmed whiskers, white
neckcloths, and even indications of hair-oil--all eloquent of citified
charges; and now and again the eye singled out a striking and scholarly
face, at once strong and simple, and instinctively referred it to the
faculty of one of the several theological seminaries belonging to the
Conference.

The effect of these faces as a whole was toward goodness, candor,
and imperturbable self-complacency rather than learning or mental
astuteness; and curiously enough it wore its pleasantest aspect on
the countenances of the older men. The impress of zeal and moral worth
seemed to diminish by regular gradations as one passed to younger faces;
and among the very beginners, who had been ordained only within the past
day or two, this decline was peculiarly marked. It was almost a relief
to note the relative smallness of their number, so plainly was it to be
seen that they were not the men their forbears had been.

And if those aged, worn-out preachers facing the pulpit had gazed
instead backward over the congregation, it may be that here too their
old eyes would have detected a difference--what at least they would have
deemed a decline.

But nothing was further from the minds of the members of the First M. E.
Church of Tecumseh than the suggestion that they were not an improvement
on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest
and most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma
Conference, and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike
a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste in devotional
architecture unique in the Methodism of that whole section of the State.
They had a right to be proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the
substantial order of the community, with perhaps not so many very rich
men as the Presbyterians had, but on the other hand with far fewer
extremely poor folk than the Baptists were encumbered with. The pews
in the first four rows of their church rented for one hundred dollars
apiece--quite up to the Presbyterian highwater mark--and they now had
almost abolished free pews altogether. The oyster suppers given by their
Ladies' Aid Society in the basement of the church during the winter
had established rank among the fashionable events in Tecumseh's social
calendar.

A comprehensive and satisfied perception of these advantages was
uppermost in the minds of this local audience, as they waited for the
Bishop to begin his reading. They had entertained this Bishop and his
Presiding Elders, and the rank and file of common preachers, in a style
which could not have been remotely approached by any other congregation
in the Conference. Where else, one would like to know, could the
Bishop have been domiciled in a Methodist house where he might have a
sitting-room all to himself, with his bedroom leading out of it? Every
clergyman present had been provided for in a private residence--even
down to the Licensed Exhorters, who were not really ministers at all
when you came to think of it, and who might well thank their stars
that the Conference had assembled among such open-handed people. There
existed a dim feeling that these Licensed Exhorters--an uncouth crew,
with country store-keepers and lumbermen and even a horse-doctor among
their number--had taken rather too much for granted, and were not
exhibiting quite the proper degree of gratitude over their reception.

But a more important issue hung now imminent in the balance--was
Tecumseh to be fairly and honorably rewarded for her hospitality by
being given the pastor of her choice?

All were agreed--at least among those who paid pew-rents--upon the great
importance of a change in the pulpit of the First M. E. Church. A change
in persons must of course take place, for their present pastor had
exhausted the three-year maximum of the itinerant system, but there was
needed much more than that. For a handsome and expensive church building
like this, and with such a modern and go-ahead congregation, it was
simply a vital necessity to secure an attractive and fashionable
preacher. They had held their own against the Presbyterians these past
few years only by the most strenuous efforts, and under the depressing
disadvantage of a minister who preached dreary out-of-date sermons, and
who lacked even the most rudimentary sense of social distinctions. The
Presbyterians had captured the new cashier of the Adams County Bank, who
had always gone to the Methodist Church in the town he came from, but
now was lost solely because of this tiresome old fossil of theirs; and
there were numerous other instances of the same sort, scarcely less
grievous. That this state of things must be altered was clear.

The unusually large local attendance upon the sessions of the Conference
had given some of the more guileless of visiting brethren a high notion
of Tecumseh's piety; and perhaps even the most sophisticated stranger
never quite realized how strictly it was to be explained by the anxiety
to pick out a suitable champion for the fierce Presbyterian competition.
Big gatherings assembled evening after evening to hear the sermons of
those selected to preach, and the church had been almost impossibly
crowded at each of the three Sunday services. Opinions had naturally
differed a good deal during the earlier stages of this scrutiny, but
after last night's sermon there could be but one feeling. The man for
Tecumseh was the Reverend Theron Ware.

The choice was an admirable one, from points of view much more exalted
than those of the local congregation.

You could see Mr. Ware sitting there at the end of the row inside the
altar-rail--the tall, slender young man with the broad white brow,
thoughtful eyes, and features moulded into that regularity of strength
which used to characterize the American Senatorial type in those
far-away days of clean-shaven faces and moderate incomes before the War.
The bright-faced, comely, and vivacious young woman in the second side
pew was his wife--and Tecumseh noted with approbation that she knew
how to dress. There were really no two better or worthier people in the
building than this young couple, who sat waiting along with the rest to
hear their fate. But unhappily they had come to know of the effort being
made to bring them to Tecumseh; and their simple pride in the triumph of
the husband's fine sermon had become swallowed up in a terribly anxious
conflict of hope and fear. Neither of them could maintain a satisfactory
show of composure as the decisive moment approached. The vision of
translation from poverty and obscurity to such a splendid post as
this--truly it was too dazzling for tranquil nerves.

The tedious Bishop had at last begun to call his roll of names, and the
good people of Tecumseh mentally ticked them off, one by one, as the
list expanded. They felt that it was like this Bishop--an unimportant
and commonplace figure in Methodism, not to be mentioned in the same
breath with Simpson and Janes and Kingsley--that he should begin with
the backwoods counties, and thrust all these remote and pitifully rustic
stations ahead of their own metropolitan charge. To these they listened
but listlessly--indifferent alike to the joy and to the dismay which he
was scattering among the divines before him.

The announcements were being doled out with stumbling hesitation. After
each one a little half-rustling movement through the crowded rows of
clergymen passed mute judgment upon the cruel blow this brother had
received, the reward justly given to this other, the favoritism by which
a third had profited. The Presiding Elders, whose work all this was,
stared with gloomy and impersonal abstraction down upon the rows of
blackcoated humanity spread before them. The ministers returned this
fixed and perfunctory gaze with pale, set faces, only feebly masking the
emotions which each new name stirred somewhere among them. The Bishop
droned on laboriously, mispronouncing words and repeating himself as if
he were reading a catalogue of unfamiliar seeds.

“First church of Tecumseh--Brother Abram G. Tisdale!”

There was no doubt about it! These were actually the words that had been
uttered. After all this outlay, all this lavish hospitality, all this
sacrifice of time and patience in sitting through those sermons, to draw
from the grab-bag nothing better than--a Tisdale!

A hum of outraged astonishment--half groan, half wrathful snort bounded
along from pew to pew throughout the body of the church. An echo of it
reached the Bishop, and so confused him that he haltingly repeated the
obnoxious line. Every local eye turned as by intuition to where the
calamitous Tisdale sat, and fastened malignantly upon him.

Could anything be worse? This Brother Tisdale was past fifty--a
spindling, rickety, gaunt old man, with a long horse-like head and
vacantly solemn face, who kept one or the other of his hands continually
fumbling his bony jaw. He had been withdrawn from routine service for a
number of years, doing a little insurance canvassing on his own account,
and also travelling for the Book Concern. Now that he wished to return
to parochial work, the richest prize in the whole list, Tecumseh, was
given to him--to him who had never been asked to preach at a Conference,
and whose archaic nasal singing of “Greenland's Icy Mountains” had made
even the Licensed Exhorters grin! It was too intolerably dreadful to
think of!

An embittered whisper to the effect that Tisdale was the Bishop's cousin
ran round from pew to pew. This did not happen to be true, but indignant
Tecumseh gave it entire credit. The throngs about the doors dwindled as
by magic, and the aisles cleared. Local interest was dead; and even some
of the pewholders rose and made their way out. One of these murmured
audibly to his neighbors as he departed that HIS pew could be had now
for sixty dollars.

So it happened that when, a little later on, the appointment of Theron
Ware to Octavius was read out, none of the people of Tecumseh either
noted or cared. They had been deeply interested in him so long as
it seemed likely that he was to come to them--before their clearly
expressed desire for him had been so monstrously ignored. But now what
became of him was no earthly concern of theirs.

After the Doxology had been sung and the Conference formally declared
ended, the Wares would fain have escaped from the flood of handshakings
and boisterous farewells which spread over the front part of the church.
But the clergymen were unusually insistent upon demonstrations of
cordiality among themselves--the more, perhaps, because it was evident
that the friendliness of their local hosts had suddenly evaporated--and,
of all men in the world, the present incumbent of the Octavius pulpit
now bore down upon them with noisy effusiveness, and defied evasion.

“Brother Ware--we have never been interduced--but let me clasp your
hand! And--Sister Ware, I presume--yours too!”

He was a portly man, who held his head back so that his face seemed all
jowl and mouth and sandy chin-whisker. He smiled broadly upon them with
half-closed eyes, and shook hands again.

“I said to 'em,” he went on with loud pretence of heartiness, “the
minute I heerd your name called out for our dear Octavius, 'I must go
over an' interduce myself.' It will be a heavy cross to part with those
dear people, Brother Ware, but if anything could wean me to the notion,
so to speak, it would be the knowledge that you are to take up my labors
in their midst. Perhaps--ah--perhaps they ARE jest a trifle close in
money matters, but they come out strong on revivals. They'll need a good
deal o' stirrin' up about parsonage expenses, but, oh! such seasons
of grace as we've experienced there together!” He shook his head, and
closed his eyes altogether, as if transported by his memories.

Brother Ware smiled faintly in decorous response, and bowed in silence;
but his wife resented the unctuous beaming of content on the other's
wide countenance, and could not restrain her tongue.

“You seem to bear up tolerably well under this heavy cross, as you call
it,” she said sharply.

“The will o' the Lord, Sister Ware--the will o' the Lord!” he responded,
disposed for the instant to put on his pompous manner with her, and then
deciding to smile again as he moved off. The circumstance that he was to
get an additional three hundred dollars yearly in his new place was not
mentioned between them.

By a mutual impulse the young couple, when they had at last gained the
cool open air, crossed the street to the side where over-hanging trees
shaded the infrequent lamps, and they might be comparatively alone. The
wife had taken her husband's arm, and pressed closely upon it as they
walked. For a time no word passed, but finally he said, in a grave
voice,--

“It is hard upon you, poor girl.”

Then she stopped short, buried her face against his shoulder, and fell
to sobbing.

He strove with gentle, whispered remonstrance to win her from this mood,
and after a few moments she lifted her head and they resumed their walk,
she wiping her eyes as they went.

“I couldn't keep it in a minute longer!” she said, catching her breath
between phrases. “Oh, WHY do they behave so badly to us, Theron?”

He smiled down momentarily upon her as they moved along, and patted her
hand.

“Somebody must have the poor places, Alice,” he said consolingly. “I am
a young man yet, remember. We must take our turn, and be patient. For
'we know that all things work together for good.'”

“And your sermon was so head-and-shoulders above all the others!” she
went on breathlessly. “Everybody said so! And Mrs. Parshall heard it so
DIRECT that you were to be sent here, and I know she told everybody how
much I was lotting on it--I wish we could go right off tonight without
going to her house--I shall be ashamed to look her in the face--and
of course she knows we're poked off to that miserable Octavius.--Why,
Theron, they tell me it's a worse place even than we've got now!”

“Oh, not at all,” he put in reassuringly. “It has grown to be a large
town--oh, quite twice the size of Tyre. It's a great Irish place, I've
heard. Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must
build it up again; and the salary is better--a little.”

But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had
come within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of
resignation these further words,--

“Come--let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
hands of the Lord.”

“Oh, don't, Theron!” she said hastily. “Don't talk to me about the Lord
tonight; I can't bear it!”



CHAPTER II


“Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!”

Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright
flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form,
clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden
patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she
looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a
doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.

“Come out a minute, Theron!” she called again; and in obedience to the
summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open doorway
behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his knees,
and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning undress
expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the door-sill,
crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky, drawing a
long satisfied breath.

“What a beautiful morning!” he exclaimed. “The elms over there are full
of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some walks.”

His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of
her hand.

“Guess what he tells me!” she said. “It wasn't a mistake at all, our
getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned.”

“What's the matter, boy?” asked the young minister, drawling his words
a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. “Don't the cows
give milk on Sunday, then?”

The boy was not going to be chaffed. “Oh, I'll bring you milk fast
enough on Sundays, if you give me the word,” he said with nonchalance.
“Only it won't last long.”

“How do you mean--'won't last long'?”, asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.

The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped his
half-defiant tone.

“The thing of it's this,” he explained. “Every new minister starts in
saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it.”

The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the stoop
beside his wife. “What's that you say?” he interjected. “Don't THEY take
milk on Sundays?”

“Nope!” answered the boy.

The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment,
then broke into a laugh.

“Well, we'll try it, anyway,” said the preacher. “You can go on bringing
it Sundays till--till--”

“Till you cave in an' tell me to stop,” put in the boy. “All right!” and
he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his
pail as he went.

The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the corner
of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife's
face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle forward out of
its place in the straight and gently firm profile.

“It's just what Wendell Phillips said,” she declared. “'The Puritan's
idea of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'”

The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze
wander over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been
spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by
last year's cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and
vegetation. The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open.
Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy
hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still an ancient
chopping-block, round which were scattered old weather-beaten
hardwood knots which had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and
packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and
general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across the
neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the morning sunlight, and
with what matchless charm came the song of the robins, freshly installed
in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above them, in the
fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant with light and
the purification of spring.

Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.

“What matter anyone's ideas of hell,” he said, in soft, grave tones,
“when we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with?
It seems to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at
other times as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.”

The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.

“Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves,” she
said, “to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing,
and, second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man
would cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies. He's
got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if we
gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way.”

“I suppose every little does help,” commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. “I tell you what let's
do!” he exclaimed. “Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long
walk, way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they
float the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give
you almost mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a
sulphur spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees
all about it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--”

“You forget,” put in Mrs. Ware,--“those trustees are coming at eleven.”

“So they are!” assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs,
and, turning, went indoors.

He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
breakfast dishes--perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding
time to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then
he wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
Finally he did take down “Paley's Evidences,” and seated himself in
the big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his eyelids
half closed themselves in sign of revery.

This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they were
going to dislike so much.

The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of “milkers” coming
lowing down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with
their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would
not be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still
worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
farm-bred--these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there
among those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
abundant and free.

It was there too that the crowning blessedness of his youth--nay, should
he not say of all his days?--had come to him. There he had first seen
Alice Hastings,--the bright-eyed, frank-faced, serenely self-reliant
girl, who now, less than four years thereafter, could be heard washing
the dishes out in the parsonage kitchen.

How wonderful she had seemed to him then! How beautiful and
all-beneficent the miracle still appeared! Though herself the daughter
of a farmer, her presence on a visit within the borders of his remote
country charge had seemed to make everything, there a hundred times
more countrified than it had ever been before. She was fresh from the
refinements of a town seminary: she read books; it was known that
she could play upon the piano. Her clothes, her manners, her way of
speaking, the readiness of her thoughts and sprightly tongue--not
least, perhaps, the imposing current understanding as to her father's
wealth--placed her on a glorified pinnacle far away from the girls of
the neighborhood. These honest and good-hearted creatures indeed
called ceaseless attention to her superiority by their deference and
open-mouthed admiration, and treated it as the most natural thing in the
world that their young minister should be visibly “taken” with her.

Theron Ware, in truth, left this first pastorate of his the following
spring, in a transfiguring halo of romance. His new appointment was
to Tyre--a somewhat distant village of traditional local pride and
substance--and he was to be married only a day or so before entering
upon his pastoral duties there. The good people among whom he had begun
his ministry took kindly credit to themselves that he had met his bride
while she was “visiting round” their countryside. In part by jocose
inquiries addressed to the expectant groom, in part by the confidences
of the postmaster at the corners concerning the bulk and frequency of
the correspondence passing between Theron and the now remote Alice--they
had followed the progress of the courtship through the autumn and
winter with friendly zest. When he returned from the Conference, to say
good-bye and confess the happiness that awaited him, they gave him a
“donation”--quite as if he were a married pastor with a home of his
own, instead of a shy young bachelor, who received his guests and their
contributions in the house where he boarded.

He went away with tears of mingled regret and proud joy in his eyes,
thinking a good deal upon their predictions of a distinguished career
before him, feeling infinitely strengthened and upborne by the hearty
fervor of their God-speed, and taking with him nearly two wagon-loads of
vegetables, apples, canned preserves, assorted furniture, glass dishes,
cheeses, pieced bedquilts, honey, feathers, and kitchen utensils.

Of the three years' term in Tyre, it was pleasantest to dwell upon the
beginning.

The young couple--after being married out at Alice's home in an
adjoining county, under the depressing conditions of a hopelessly
bedridden mother, and a father and brothers whose perceptions were
obviously closed to the advantages of a matrimonial connection with
Methodism--came straight to the house which their new congregation
rented as a parsonage. The impulse of reaction from the rather grim
cheerlessness of their wedding lent fresh gayety to their lighthearted,
whimsical start at housekeeping. They had never laughed so much in all
their lives as they did now in these first months--over their weird
ignorance of domestic details; with its mishaps, mistakes, and
entertaining discoveries; over the comical super-abundances and
shortcomings of their “donation” outfit; over the thousand and one
quaint experiences of their novel relation to each other, to the
congregation, and to the world of Tyre at large.

Theron, indeed, might be said never to have laughed before. Up to that
time no friendly student of his character, cataloguing his admirable
qualities, would have thought of including among them a sense of humor,
much less a bent toward levity. Neither his early strenuous battle to
get away from the farm and achieve such education as should serve
to open to him the gates of professional life, nor the later wave of
religious enthusiasm which caught him up as he stood on the border-land
of manhood, and swept him off into a veritable new world of views and
aspirations, had been a likely school of merriment. People had prized
him for his innocent candor and guileless mind, for his good heart, his
pious zeal, his modesty about gifts notably above the average, but it
had occurred to none to suspect in him a latent funny side.

But who could be solemn where Alice was?--Alice in a quandary over the
complications of her cooking stove; Alice boiling her potatoes all day,
and her eggs for half an hour; Alice ordering twenty pounds of steak and
half a pound of sugar, and striving to extract a breakfast beverage from
the unground coffee-bean? Clearly not so tenderly fond and sympathetic a
husband as Theron. He began by laughing because she laughed, and grew by
swift stages to comprehend, then frankly to share, her amusement. From
this it seemed only a step to the development of a humor of his own,
doubling, as it were, their sportive resources. He found himself
discovering a new droll aspect in men and things; his phraseology took
on a dryly playful form, fittingly to present conceits which danced up,
unabashed, quite into the presence of lofty and majestic truths. He
got from this nothing but satisfaction; it obviously involved increased
claims to popularity among his parishioners, and consequently magnified
powers of usefulness, and it made life so much more a joy and a thing to
be thankful for. Often, in the midst of the exchange of merry quip
and whimsical suggestion, bright blossoms on that tree of strength and
knowledge which he felt expanding now with a mighty outward pushing
in all directions, he would lapse into deep gravity, and ponder with a
swelling heart the vast unspeakable marvel of his blessedness, in being
thus enriched and humanized by daily communion with the most worshipful
of womankind.

This happy and good young couple took the affections of Tyre by storm.
The Methodist Church there had at no time held its head very high among
the denominations, and for some years back had been in a deplorably
sinking state, owing first to the secession of the Free Methodists and
then to the incumbency of a pastor who scandalized the community by
marrying a black man to a white woman. But the Wares changed all this.
Within a month the report of Theron's charm and force in the pulpit was
crowding the church building to its utmost capacity--and that, too,
with some of Tyre's best people. Equally winning was the atmosphere of
jollity and juvenile high spirits which pervaded the parsonage under
these new conditions, and which Theron and Alice seemed to diffuse
wherever they went.

Thus swimmingly their first year sped, amid universal acclaim. Mrs. Ware
had a recognized social place, quite outside the restricted limits of
Methodism, and shone in it with an unflagging brilliancy altogether
beyond the traditions of Tyre. Delightful as she was in other people's
houses, she was still more naively fascinating in her own quaint and
somewhat harum-scarum domicile; and the drab, two-storied, tin-roofed
little parsonage might well have rattled its clapboards to see if it
was not in dreamland--so gay was the company, so light were the hearts,
which it sheltered in these new days. As for Theron, the period was one
of incredible fructification and output. He scarcely recognized for his
own the mind which now was reaching out on all sides with the arms of
an octopus, exploring unsuspected mines of thought, bringing in rich
treasures of deduction, assimilating, building, propounding as if by
some force quite independent of him. He could not look without blinking
timidity at the radiance of the path stretched out before him, leading
upward to dazzling heights of greatness.

At the end of this first year the Wares suddenly discovered that they
were eight hundred dollars in debt.

The second year was spent in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel
wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred
dollars in debt meant.

It was not in their elastic and buoyant natures to grasp the full
significance of the thing at once, or easily. Their position in the
social structure, too, was all against clear-sightedness in material
matters. A general, for example, uniformed and in the saddle, advancing
through the streets with his staff in the proud wake of his division's
massed walls of bayonets, cannot be imagined as quailing at the glance
thrown at him by his tailor on the sidewalk. Similarly, a man invested
with sacerdotal authority, who baptizes, marries, and buries, who
delivers judgments from the pulpit which may not be questioned in his
hearing, and who receives from all his fellow-men a special deference of
manner and speech, is in the nature of things prone to see the grocer's
book and the butcher's bill through the little end of the telescope.

The Wares at the outset had thought it right to trade as exclusively as
possible with members of their own church society. This loyalty became
a principal element of martyrdom. Theron had his creditors seated in
serried rows before him, Sunday after Sunday. Alice had her critics
consolidated among those whom it was her chief duty to visit and profess
friendship for. These situations now began, by regular gradations, to
unfold their terrors. At the first intimation of discontent, the Wares
made what seemed to them a sweeping reduction in expenditure. When
they heard that Brother Potter had spoken of them as “poor pay,” they
dismissed their hired girl. A little later, Theron brought himself
to drop a laboriously casual suggestion as to a possible increase of
salary, and saw with sinking spirits the faces of the stewards freeze
with dumb disapprobation. Then Alice paid a visit to her parents, only
to find her brothers doggedly hostile to the notion of her being helped,
and her father so much under their influence that the paltry sum he
dared offer barely covered the expenses of her journey. With another
turn of the screw, they sold the piano she had brought with her from
home, and cut themselves down to the bare necessities of life, neither
receiving company nor going out. They never laughed now, and even smiles
grew rare.

By this time Theron's sermons, preached under that stony glare of
people to whom he owed money, had degenerated to a pitiful level of
commonplace. As a consequence, the attendance became once more
confined to the insufficient membership of the church, and the trustees
complained of grievously diminished receipts. When the Wares, grown
desperate, ventured upon the experiment of trading outside the bounds of
the congregation, the trustees complained again, this time peremptorily.

Thus the second year dragged itself miserably to an end. Nor was
relief possible, because the Presiding Elder knew something of the
circumstances, and felt it his duty to send Theron back for a third
year, to pay his debts, and drain the cup of disciplinary medicine to
its dregs.

The worst has been told. Beginning in utter blackness, this third year,
in the second month, brought a change as welcome as it was unlooked for.
An elderly and important citizen of Tyre, by name Abram Beekman, whom
Theron knew slightly, and had on occasions seen sitting in one of
the back pews near the door, called one morning at the parsonage, and
electrified its inhabitants by expressing a desire to wipe off all their
old scores for them, and give them a fresh start in life. As he put the
suggestion, they could find no excuse for rejecting it. He had watched
them, and heard a good deal about them, and took a fatherly sort of
interest in them. He did not deprecate their regarding the aid he
proffered them in the nature of a loan, but they were to make themselves
perfectly easy about it, and never return it at all unless they could
spare it sometime with entire convenience, and felt that they wanted to
do so. As this amazing windfall finally took shape, it enabled the Wares
to live respectably through the year, and to leave Tyre with something
over one hundred dollars in hand.

It enabled them, too, to revive in a chastened form their old dream of
ultimate success and distinction for Theron. He had demonstrated clearly
enough to himself, during that brief season of unrestrained effulgence,
that he had within him the making of a great pulpit orator. He set
to work now, with resolute purpose, to puzzle out and master all the
principles which underlie this art, and all the tricks that adorn its
superstructure. He studied it, fastened his thoughts upon it, talked
daily with Alice about it. In the pulpit, addressing those people who
had so darkened his life and crushed the first happiness out of his
home, he withheld himself from any oratorical display which could afford
them gratification. He put aside, as well; the thought of attracting
once more the non-Methodists of Tyre, whose early enthusiasm had
spread such pitfalls for his unwary feet. He practised effects now
by piecemeal, with an alert ear, and calculation in every tone. An
ambition, at once embittered and tearfully solicitous, possessed him.

He reflected now, this morning, with a certain incredulous interest,
upon that unworthy epoch in his life history, which seemed so far behind
him, and yet had come to a close only a few weeks ago. The opportunity
had been given him, there at the Tecumseh Conference, to reveal his
quality. He had risen to its full limit of possibilities, and preached
a great sermon in a manner which he at least knew was unapproachable. He
had made his most powerful bid for the prize place, had trebly deserved
success--and had been banished instead to Octavius!

The curious thing was that he did not resent his failure. Alice had
taken it hard, but he himself was conscious of a sense of spiritual
gain. The influence of the Conference, with its songs and seasons of
prayer and high pressure of emotional excitement, was still strong upon
him. It seemed years and years since the religious side of him had been
so stirred into motion. He felt, as he lay back in the chair, and folded
his hands over the book on his knee, that he had indeed come forth
from the fire purified and strengthened. The ministry to souls diseased
beckoned him with a new and urgent significance. He smiled to remember
that Mr. Beekman, speaking in his shrewd and pointed way, had asked him
whether, looking it all over, he didn't think it would be better for
him to study law, with a view to sliding out of the ministry when a good
chance offered. It amazed him now to recall that he had taken this
hint seriously, and even gone to the length of finding out what books
law-students began upon.

Thank God! all that was past and gone now. The Call sounded, resonant
and imperative, in his ears, and there was no impulse of his heart, no
fibre of his being, which did not stir in devout response. He closed his
eyes, to be the more wholly alone with the Spirit, that moved him.

The jangling of a bell in the hallway broke sharply upon his
meditations, and on the instant his wife thrust in her head from the
kitchen.

“You'll have to go to the door, Theron!” she warned him, in a loud,
swift whisper. “I'm not fit to be seen. It is the trustees.”

“All right,” he said, and rose slowly from sprawling recumbency to his
feet. “I'll go.”

“And don't forget,” she added strenuously; “I believe in Levi Gorringe!
I've seen him go past here with his rod and fish-basket twice in eight
days, and that's a good sign. He's got a soft side somewhere. And just
keep a stiff upper lip about the gas, and don't you let them jew you
down a solitary cent on that sidewalk.”

“All right,” said Theron, again, and moved reluctantly toward the hall
door.



CHAPTER III


When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev. Mr. Ware, and had
taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued. The young minister looked
doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with
inquiring interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising
the furniture in their minds.

The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an
old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as
hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone. The
irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like
firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from
half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to
attain to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if
feeling that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought
not to be taken into account. Mr. Pierce's face did not know how to
smile--what was the use of smiles?--but its whole surface radiated
secretiveness. Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a
red robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would
have seen in it vast reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic
cupboards, the guarded mysteries of half a century's international
diplomacy. The amateurs would have been wrong again. There was nothing
behind Mr. Pierce's juiceless countenance more weighty than a general
determination to exact seven per cent for his money, and some specific
notions about capturing certain brickyards which were interfering with
his quarry-sales. But Octavius watched him shamble along its sidewalks
quite as the Vienna of dead and forgotten yesterday might have watched
Metternich.

Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort--a florid, stout, and sandy man,
who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy,
securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm
utensils. This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively
hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he
pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added
a considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language. To
look at him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good
fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom.
But the County Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of
agriculturists who knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and
who held him to be even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of
a mortgage.

The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first
glance what on earth he was doing in that company. Those who had known
him longest had the least notion; but it may be added that no one knew
him well. He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten
years; that is to say, since early manhood. He had an office on the main
street, just under the principal photograph gallery. Doubtless he was
sometimes in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often
in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring
show-cases of the photographer on either side, standing with his hands
in his pockets and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing
in particular. About every other day he went off after breakfast into
the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but
always alone. He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of
his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a
restaurant close by. Though he had little visible practice, he was
understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred
that he “shaved notes.” The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as
a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown
their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church.
He had never, it is true, professed religion, but they had elected him
as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same--partly because he
was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues, held
a mortgage on the church edifice and lot. In person, Mr. Gorringe was a
slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving
hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face. He wore
a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England
parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he
presented a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes
startlingly at variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism.
Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a
drinking man.

The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now; and Loren
Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business
was about to begin. At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe
untied a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee.
Theron felt that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled
brethren an unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands. He tried
to look more resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.

“Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,” said Erastus Winch, beaming
broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted
jollity. “That's it, Brother Gorringe,--take your seat at Brother Ware's
desk. Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start off
writin' out sermons instid of figgers.” The humorist turned to Theron
as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window. “I allus have to
caution him about that,” he remarked with great joviality. “An' do YOU
look out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o'
yours scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o' the Word.”

Theron felt bound to exhibit a grin in acknowledgment of this
pleasantry. The lawyer's change of position had involved some shifting
of the others' chairs, and the young minister found himself directly
confronted by Brother Pierce's hard and colorless old visage. Its little
eyes were watching him, as through a mask, and under their influence
the smile of politeness fled from his lips. The lawyer on his right, the
cheese-buyer to the left, seemed to recede into distance as he for the
moment returned the gaze of the quarryman. He waited now for him to
speak, as if the others were of no importance.

“We are a plain sort o' folks up in these parts,” said Brother Pierce,
after a slight further pause. His voice was as dry and rasping as his
cough, and its intonations were those of authority. “We walk here,” he
went on, eying the minister with a sour regard, “in a meek an' humble
spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't
gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves
Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of
our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here. Your
wife'd better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday.”

Silence possessed the room for a few moments, the while Theron,
pale-faced and with brows knit, studied the pattern of the ingrain
carpet. Then he lifted his head, and nodded it in assent. “Yes,”
 he said; “we will do nothing by which our 'brother stumbleth, or is
offended, or is made weak.'”

Brother Pierce's parchment face showed no sign of surprise or pleasure
at this easy submission. “Another thing: We don't want no book-learnin'
or dictionary words in our pulpit,” he went on coldly. “Some folks may
stomach 'em; we won't. Them two sermons o' yours, p'r'aps they'd do down
in some city place; but they're like your wife's bunnit here, they're
too flowery to suit us. What we want to hear is the plain, old-fashioned
Word of God, without any palaver or 'hems and ha's. They tell me
there's some parts where hell's treated as played-out--where our
ministers don't like to talk much about it because people don't want to
hear about it. Such preachers ought to be put out. They ain't Methodists
at all. What we want here, sir, is straight-out, flat-footed hell--the
burnin' lake o' fire an' brim-stone. Pour it into 'em, hot an' strong.
We can't have too much of it. Work in them awful deathbeds of Voltaire
an' Tom Paine, with the Devil right there in the room, reachin' for
'em, an' they yellin' for fright; that's what fills the anxious seat an'
brings in souls hand over fist.”

Theron's tongue dallied for an instant with the temptation to comment
upon these old-wife fables, which were so dear to the rural religious
heart when he and I were boys. But it seemed wiser to only nod again,
and let his mentor go on.

“We ain't had no trouble with the Free Methodists here,” continued
Brother Pierce, “jest because we kept to the old paths, an' seek for
salvation in the good old way. Everybody can shout 'Amen!' as loud
and as long as the Spirit moves him, with us. Some one was sayin' you
thought we ought to have a choir and an organ. No, sirree! No such
tom-foolery for us! You'll only stir up feelin' agin yourself by hintin'
at such things. And then, too, our folks don't take no stock in all that
pack o' nonsense about science, such as tellin' the age of the earth by
crackin' up stones. I've b'en in the quarry line all my life, an' I know
it's all humbug! Why, they say some folks are goin' round now preachin'
that our grandfathers were all monkeys. That comes from departin'
from the ways of our forefathers, an puttin' in organs an' choirs, an'
deckin' our women-folks out with gewgaws, an' apin' the fashions of the
worldly. I shouldn't wonder if them kind did have some monkey blood in
'em. You'll find we're a different sort here.”

The young minister preserved silence for a little, until it became
apparent that the old trustee had had his say out. Even then he raised
his head slowly, and at last made answer in a hesitating and irresolute
way.

“You have been very frank,” he said. “I am obliged to you. A clergyman
coming to a new charge cannot be better served than by having
laid before him a clear statement of the views and--and spiritual
tendencies--of his new flock, quite at the outset. I feel it to be
of especial value in this case, because I am young in years and in my
ministry, and am conscious of a great weakness of the flesh. I can
see how daily contact with a people so attached to the old, simple,
primitive Methodism of Wesley and Asbury may be a source of much
strength to me. I may take it,” he added upon second thought, with an
inquiring glance at Mr. Winch, “that Brother Pierce's description of our
charge, and its tastes and needs, meets with your approval?”

Erastus Winch nodded his head and smiled expansively. “Whatever Brother
Pierce says, goes!” he declared. The lawyer, sitting behind at the desk
by the window, said nothing.

“The place is jest overrun with Irish,” Brother Pierce began again.
“They've got two Catholic churches here now to our one, and they do jest
as they blamed please at the Charter elections. It'd be a good idee to
pitch into Catholics in general whenever you can. You could make a hit
that way. I say the State ought to make 'em pay taxes on their church
property. They've no right to be exempted, because they ain't Christians
at all. They're idolaters, that's what they are! I know 'em! I've had
'em in my quarries for years, an' they ain't got no idee of decency or
fair dealin'. Every time the price of stone went up, every man of 'em
would jine to screw more wages out o' me. Why, they used to keep account
o' the amount o' business I done, an' figger up my profits, an' have
the face to come an' talk to me about 'em, as if that had anything to do
with wages. It's my belief their priests put 'em up to it. People
don't begin to reelize--that church of idolatry 'll be the ruin o' this
country, if it ain't checked in time. Jest you go at 'em hammer 'n'
tongs! I've got Eyetalians in the quarries now. They're sensible
fellows: they know when they're well off--a dollar a day, an' they're
satisfied, an' everything goes smooth.”

“But they're Catholics, the same as the Irish,” suddenly interjected the
lawyer, from his place by the window. Theron pricked up his ears at the
sound of his voice. There was an anti-Pierce note in it, so to speak,
which it did him good to hear. The consciousness of sympathy began on
the instant to inspire him with courage.

“I know some people SAY they are,” Brother Pierce guardedly retorted
“but I've summered an' wintered both kinds, an' I hold to it they're
different. I grant ye, the Eyetalians ARE some given to jabbin' knives
into each other, but they never git up strikes, an' they don't grumble
about wages. Why, look at the way they live--jest some weeds an' yarbs
dug up on the roadside, an' stewed in a kettle with a piece o' fat the
size o' your finger, an' a loaf o' bread, an' they're happy as a king.
There's some sense in THAT; but the Irish, they've got to have meat an'
potatoes an' butter jest as if--as if--”

“As if they'd b'en used to 'em at home,” put in Mr. Winch, to help his
colleague out.

The lawyer ostentatiously drew up his chair to the desk, and began
turning over the leaves of his biggest book. “It's getting on toward
noon, gentlemen,” he said, in an impatient voice.

The business meeting which followed was for a considerable time confined
to hearing extracts from the books and papers read in a swift and formal
fashion by Mr. Gorringe. If this was intended to inform the new pastor
of the exact financial situation in Octavius, it lamentably failed of
its purpose. Theron had little knowledge of figures; and though he
tried hard to listen, and to assume an air of comprehension, he did not
understand much of what he heard. In a general way he gathered that the
church property was put down at $12,000, on which there was a debt of
$4,800. The annual expenses were $2,250, of which the principal items
were $800 for his salary, $170 for the rent of the parsonage, and $319
for interest on the debt. It seemed that last year the receipts had
fallen just under $2,000, and they now confronted the necessity of
making good this deficit during the coming year, as well as increasing
the regular revenues. Without much discussion, it was agreed that they
should endeavor to secure the services of a celebrated “debt-raiser,”
 early in the autumn, and utilize him in the closing days of a revival.

Theron knew this “debt-raiser,” and had seen him at work--a burly,
bustling, vulgar man who took possession of the pulpit as if it were an
auctioneer's block, and pursued the task of exciting liberality in the
bosoms of the congregation by alternating prayer, anecdote, song,
and cheap buffoonery in a manner truly sickening. Would it not be
preferable, he feebly suggested, to raise the money by a festival, or
fair, or some other form of entertainment which the ladies could manage?

Brother Pierce shook his head with contemptuous emphasis. “Our
women-folks ain't that kind,” he said. “They did try to hold a sociable
once, but nobody came, and we didn't raise more 'n three or four
dollars. It ain't their line. They lack the worldly arts. As the
Discipline commands, they avoid the evil of putting on gold and costly
apparel, and taking such diversions as cannot be used in the name of the
Lord Jesus.”

“Well--of course--if you prefer the 'debt-raiser'--” Theron began, and
took the itemized account from Gorringe's knee as an excuse for not
finishing the hateful sentence.

He looked down the foolscap sheet, line by line, with no special sense
of what it signified, until his eye caught upon this little section of
the report, bracketed by itself in the Secretary's neat hand:

     INTEREST CHARGE.

     First mortgage (1873) .. $1,000 ... (E. Winch)    @7.. $ 70
     Second mortgage (1776)..  1,700 ... (L. Gorringe) @6..  102
     Third mortgage (1878)...  2,100 ... (L. Pierce)   @7..  147
     -------                       -----
     $4,800                        $319

It was no news to him that the three mortgages on the church property
were held by the three trustees. But as he looked once more, another
feature of the thing struck him as curious.

“I notice that the rates of interest vary,” he remarked without
thinking, and then wished the words unsaid, for the two trustees in view
moved uneasily on their seats.

“Oh, that's nothing,” exclaimed Erastus Winch, with a boisterous display
of jollity. “It's only Brother Gorringe's pleasant little way of making
a contribution to our funds. You will notice that, at the date of all
these mortgages, the State rate of interest was seven per cent. Since
then it's b'en lowered to six. Well, when that happened, you see,
Brother Gorringe, not being a professin' member, and so not bound by our
rules, he could just as well as not let his interest down a cent. But
Brother Pierce an' me, we talked it over, an' we made up our minds
we were tied hand an' foot by our contract. You know how strong the
Discipline lays it down that we must be bound to the letter of our
agreements. That bein' so, we seen it in the light of duty not to change
what we'd set our hands to. That's how it is, Brother Ware.”

“I understand,” said Theron, with an effort at polite calmness of tone.
“And--is there anything else?”

“There's this,” broke in Brother Pierce: “we're commanded to be
law-abiding people, an' seven per cent WAS the law an' would be now if
them ragamuffins in the Legislation--”

“Surely we needn't go further into that,” interrupted the minister,
conscious of a growing stiffness in his moral spine. “Have we any other
business before us?”

Brother Pierce's little eyes snapped, and the wrinkles in his forehead
deepened angrily. “Business?” he demanded. “Yes, plenty of it. We've
got to reduce expenses. We're nigh onto $300 behind-hand this minute.
Besides your house-rent, you get $800 free an' clear--that is $15.38
every week, an' only you an' your wife to keep out of it. Why, when
I was your age, young man, and after that too, I was glad to get $4 a
week.”

“I don't think my salary is under discussion, Mr. Pierce--”

“BROTHER Pierce!” suggested Winch, in a half-shuckling undertone.

“Brother Pierce, then!” echoed Theron, impatiently. “The Quarterly
Conference and the Estimating Committee deal with that. The trustees
have no more to do with it than the man in the moon.”

“Come, come, Brother Ware,” put in Erastus Winch, “we mustn't have no
hard feelin's. Brotherly love is what we're all lookin' after. Brother
Pierce's meanin' wasn't agin your drawin' your full salary, every cent
of it, only--only there are certain little things connected with the
parsonage here that we feel you ought to bear. F'r instance, there's the
new sidewalk we had to lay in front of the house here only a month ago.
Of course, if the treasury was flush we wouldn't say a word about it.
An' then there's the gas bill here. Seein' as you get your rent for
nothin', it don't seem much to ask that you should see to lightin' the
place yourself.”

“No, I don't think that either is a proper charge upon me,” interposed
Theron. “I decline to pay them.”

“We can have the gas shut off,” remarked Brother Pierce, coldly.

“As soon as you like,” responded the minister, sitting erect and tapping
the carpet nervously with his foot. “Only you must understand that I will
take the whole matter to the Quarterly Conference in July. I already see
a good many other interesting questions about the financial management
of this church which might be appropriately discussed there.”

“Oh, come, Brother Ware!” broke in Trustee Winch, with a somewhat
agitated assumption of good-feeling. “Surely these are matters we ought
to settle amongst ourselves. We never yet asked outsiders to meddle with
our business here. It's our motto, Brother Ware. I say, if you've got a
motto, stand by it.”

“Well, my motto,” said Theron, “is to be behaved decently to by those
with whom I have to deal; and I also propose to stand by it.”

Brother Pierce rose gingerly to his feet, with the hesitation of an old
man not sure about his knees. When he had straightened himself, he put
on his hat, and eyed the minister sternly from beneath its brim.

“The Lord gives us crosses grievous to our natur',” he said, “an' we're
told to bear 'em cheerfully as long as they're on our backs; but there
ain't nothin' said agin our unloadin' 'em in the ditch the minute we git
the chance. I guess you won't last here more 'n a twelvemonth.”

He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a
significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door
without offering to shake hands.

The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the
meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad,
hard palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. “Don't mind his little
ways, Brother Ware,” he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a
grinning backward nod: “he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't
give him free rein; but he's all wool an' a yard wide when it comes to
right-down hard-pan religion. My love to Sister Ware;” and he followed
the senior trustee into the hall.

Mr. Gorringe had been tying up his books and papers. He came now with
the bulky parcel under his arm, and his hat and stick in the other hand.
He could give little but his thumb to Theron to shake. His face wore
a grave expression, and not a line relaxed as, catching the minister's
look, he slowly covered his left eye in a deliberate wink.



“Well?--and how did it go off?” asked Alice, from where she knelt by the
oven door, a few minutes later.

For answer, Theron threw himself wearily into the big old farm
rocking-chair on the other side of the stove, and shook his head with a
lengthened sigh.

“If it wasn't for that man Gorringe of yours,” he said dejectedly, “I
think I should feel like going off--and learning a trade.”



CHAPTER IV


On the following Sunday, young Mrs. Ware sat alone in the preacher's pew
through the morning service, and everybody noted that the roses had
been taken from her bonnet. In the evening she was absent, and after
the doxology and benediction several people, under the pretence of
solicitude for her health, tried to pump her husband as to the reason.
He answered their inquiries civilly enough, but with brevity: she
had stayed at home because she did not feel like coming out--this and
nothing more.

The congregation dispersed under a gossip-laden cloud of consciousness
that there must be something queer about Sister Ware. There was a
tolerably general agreement, however, that the two sermons of the day
had been excellent. Not even Loren Pierce's railing commentary on the
pastor's introduction of an outlandish word like “epitome”--clearly
forbidden by the Discipline's injunction to plain language understood of
the people--availed to sap the satisfaction of the majority.

Theron himself comprehended that he had pleased the bulk of his
auditors; the knowledge left him curiously hot and cold. On the one
hand, there was joy in the apparent prospect that the congregation would
back him up in a stand against the trustees, if worst came to worst.
But, on the other hand, the bonnet episode entered his soul. It had
been a source of bitter humiliation to him to see his wife sitting there
beneath the pulpit, shorn by despotic order of the adornments natural
to her pretty head. But he had even greater pain in contemplating the
effect it had produced on Alice herself. She had said not a word on the
subject, but her every glance and gesture seemed to him eloquent of deep
feeling about it. He made sure that she blamed him for having defended
his own gas and sidewalk rights with successful vigor, but permitted
the sacrifice of her poor little inoffensive roses without a protest. In
this view of the matter, indeed, he blamed himself. Was it too late to
make the error good? He ventured a hint on this Sunday evening, when he
returned to the parsonage and found her reading an old weekly newspaper
by the light of the kitchen lamp, to the effect that he fancied there
would be no great danger in putting those roses back into her bonnet.
Without lifting her eyes from the paper, she answered that she had
no earthly desire to wear roses in her bonnet, and went on with her
reading.

At breakfast the next morning Theron found himself in command of an
unusual fund of humorous good spirits, and was at pains to make the
most of it, passing whimsical comments on subjects which the opening
day suggested, recalling quaint and comical memories of the past, and
striving his best to force Alice into a laugh. Formerly her merry temper
had always ignited at the merest spark of gayety. Now she gave his jokes
only a dutiful half-smile, and uttered scarcely a word in response to
his running fire of talk. When the meal was finished, she went silently
to work to clear away the dishes.

Theron turned over in his mind the project of offering to help her, as
he had done so often in those dear old days when they laughingly began
life together. Something decided this project in the negative for him,
and after lingering moments he put on his hat and went out for a walk.

Not even the most doleful and trying hour of his bitter experience in
Tyre had depressed him like this. Looking back upon these past troubles,
he persuaded himself that he had borne them all with a light and
cheerful heart, simply because Alice had been one with him in every
thought and emotion. How perfect, how ideally complete, their sympathy
had always been! With what absolute unity of mind and soul they had
trod that difficult path together! And now--henceforth--was it to be
different? The mere suggestion of such a thing chilled his veins. He
said aloud to himself as he walked that life would be an intolerable
curse if Alice were to cease sharing it with him in every conceivable
phase.

He had made his way out of town, and tramped along the country hill-road
for a considerable distance, before a merciful light began to lessen the
shadows in the picture of gloom with which his mind tortured itself.
All at once he stopped short, lifted his head, and looked about him. The
broad valley lay warm and tranquil in the May sunshine at his feet. In
the thicket up the side-hill above him a gray squirrel was chattering
shrilly, and the birds sang in a tireless choral confusion. Theron
smiled, and drew a long breath. The gay clamor of the woodland
songsters, the placid radiance of the landscape, were suddenly taken in
and made a part of his new mood. He listened, smiled once more, and then
started in a leisurely way back toward Octavius.

How could he have been so ridiculous as to fancy that Alice--his
Alice--had been changed into someone else? He marvelled now at his own
perverse folly. She was overworked--tired out--that was all. The task of
moving in, of setting the new household to rights, had been too much for
her. She must have a rest. They must get in a hired girl.

Once this decision about a servant fixed itself in the young minister's
mind, it drove out the last vestage of discomfort. He strode along now
in great content, revolving idly a dozen different plans for gilding and
beautifying this new life of leisure into which his sanguine thoughts
projected Alice. One of these particularly pleased him, and waxed in
definiteness as he turned it over and over. He would get another piano
for her, in place of that which had been sacrificed in Tyre. That
beneficient modern invention, the instalment plan, made this quite
feasible--so easy, in fact, that it almost seemed as if he should find
his wife playing on the new instrument when he got home. He would stop
in at the music store and see about it that very day.

Of course, now that these important resolutions had been taken, it would
be a good thing if he could do something to bring in some extra money.
This was by no means a new notion. He had mused over the possibility in
a formless way ever since that memorable discovery of indebtedness in
Tyre, and had long ago recognized the hopelessness of endeavor in every
channel save that of literature. Latterly his fancy had been stimulated
by reading an account of the profits which Canon Farrar had derived from
his “Life of Christ.” If such a book could command such a bewildering
multitude of readers, Theron felt there ought to be a chance for him.
So clear did constant rumination render this assumption that the young
pastor in time had come to regard this prospective book of his as a
substantial asset, which could be realized without trouble whenever he
got around to it.

He had not, it is true, gone to the length of seriously considering what
should be the subject of his book. That had not seemed to him to matter
much, so long as it was scriptural. Familiarity with the process of
extracting a fixed amount of spiritual and intellectual meat from any
casual text, week after week, had given him an idea that any one of
many subjects would do, when the time came for him to make a choice.
He realized now that the time for a selection had arrived, and almost
simultaneously found himself with a ready-made decision in his mind. The
book should be about Abraham!

Theron Ware was extremely interested in the mechanism of his own brain,
and followed its workings with a lively curiosity. Nothing could be more
remarkable, he thought, than to thus discover that, on the instant of
his formulating a desire to know what he should write upon, lo, and
behold! there his mind, quite on its own initiative, had the answer
waiting for him! When he had gone a little further, and the powerful
range of possibilities in the son's revolt against the idolatry of his
father, the image-maker, in the exodus from the unholy city of Ur, and
in the influence of the new nomadic life upon the little deistic family
group, had begun to unfold itself before him, he felt that the hand of
Providence was plainly discernible in the matter. The book was to be
blessed from its very inception.

Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk and his mind
all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work, and impatience to
be at it, he came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the
whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard
them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession,
and began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left
unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he
saw.

In the centre of the group were four working-men, bearing between them
an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across
them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another
blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath
its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at
such an angle as to hide everything beyond to those in front. The tall
young minister, stepping aside and standing tip-toe, could see sloping
downward behind this hedge of beard a pinched and chalk-like face, with
wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving
ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.

Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter--a
motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers
explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the
wagon-shops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his
employer's house, and, being unused to such work, had fallen from the
top and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's
house, but he had insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy,
and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and
Martin's. After a pause the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee
Irishman, volunteered the further information that his big brother had
run to bring “Father Forbess,” on the chance that he might be in time to
administer “extry munction.”

The way of the silent little procession led through back streets--where
women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons
full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by--and came
to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half
dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and debris of the town's most
bedraggled outskirts.

A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger
of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering
children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of
the neighborhood, some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning
in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the
keen of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter
stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet
brow, and looked--one could have sworn impassively--into his staring
eyes. Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door,
and led the way herself.

Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself, a minute later, inside a
dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by
the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon
the open door of the only other apartment--the bed-chamber. Through
this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing
awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old
Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed
limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings,
they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry
and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and
the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious
duties. They admitted freely that, by the light of his example, their
own husbands and sons left much to be desired, and from this wandered
easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But all the while
their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron made out, after
he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell, that many of them
were telling their beads even while they kept the muttered conversation
alive. None of them paid any attention to him, or seemed to regard his
presence there as unusual.

Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of
a different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a
fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of
red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the
throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of
this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring
attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a
quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a
lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and
big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little
inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her
arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.

“I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some
assistance,” he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that
at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this
Romish house was due. “I hope they won't feel that I have intruded.”

She nodded her head as if she quite understood. “They'll take the will
for the deed,” she whispered back. “Father Forbes will be here in a
minute. Do you know is it too late?”

Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk
of a newcomer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way
in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his
identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way
as this priest of a strange church advanced across the room--a
broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely,
strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread.
He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To
this and to him the women courtesied and bowed their heads as he passed.

“Come with me,” whispered the tall girl with the parasol to Theron; and
he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the
priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the
arm.

“Just to tell you that I am here,” she said. The priest nodded with
a grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the
workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut
behind them.

“He is making his confession,” explained the young lady. “Stay here for
a minute.”

She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and
tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the
crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered
with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of
water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness
before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were
kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads
on their rosaries.

The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with
an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his
shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.

One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two
candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The
young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into
the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs.
MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed
now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing with the others
to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers;
kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence
with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced
crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips,
hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece
of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to
forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by
the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the
ASPERGES ME, DOMINE, and MISEREATUR VESTRI OMNIPOTENS DEUS, with its
soft Continental vowels and liquid R's. It seemed to him that he had
never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with
the red hair declaimed the CONFITEOR, vigorously and with a resonant
distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more
sonorous; and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the
other's prayers, the last moment came.

Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bedsides; no
other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been
the girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great
names--BEATUM MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, SANCTOS
APOSTOLOS PETRUM ET PAULUM--invoked with such proud confidence in this
squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.

He came out with the others at last--the candles and the folded hands
over the crucifix left behind--and walked as one in a dream. Even by
the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at
the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had
begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.



CHAPTER V


While Mr. Ware stood thus on the doorstep, through a minute of
formless musing, the priest and the girl came out, and, somewhat to his
confusion, made him one of their party. He felt himself flushing under
the idea that they would think he had waited for them--was thrusting
himself upon them. The notion prompted him to bow frigidly in response
to Father Forbes' pleasant “I am glad to meet you, sir,” and his
outstretched hand.

“I dropped in by the--the merest accident,” Theron said. “I met them
bringing the poor man home, and--and quite without thinking, I obeyed
the impulse to follow them in, and didn't realize--”

He stopped short, annoyed by the reflection that this was his second
apology. The girl smiled placidly at him, the while she put up her
parasol.

“It did me good to see you there,” she said, quite as if she had known
him all her life. “And so it did the rest of us.”

Father Forbes permitted himself a soft little chuckle, approving rather
than mirthful, and patted her on the shoulder with the air of being
fifty years her senior instead of fifteen. To the minister's relief, he
changed the subject as the three started together toward the road.

“Then, again, no doctor was sent for!” he exclaimed, as if resuming a
familiar subject with the girl. Then he turned to Theron. “I dare-say
you have no such trouble; but with our poorer people it is very
vexing. They will not call in a physician, but hurry off first for the
clergyman. I don't know that it is altogether to avoid doctor's bills,
but it amounts to that in effect. Of course in this case it made no
difference; but I have had to make it a rule not to go out at night
unless they bring me a physician's card with his assurance that it is a
genuine affair. Why, only last winter, I was routed up after midnight,
and brought off in the mud and pelting rain up one of the new streets
on the hillside there, simply because a factory girl who was laced too
tight had fainted at a dance. I slipped and fell into a puddle in the
darkness, ruined a new overcoat, and got drenched to the skin; and when
I arrived the girl had recovered and was dancing away again, thirteen
to the dozen. It was then that I made the rule. I hope, Mr. Ware, that
Octavius is producing a pleasant impression upon you so far?”

“I scarcely know yet,” answered Theron. The genial talk of the priest,
with its whimsical anecdote, had in truth passed over his head. His
mind still had room for nothing but that novel death-bed scene, with
the winged captain of the angelic host, the Baptist, the glorified
Fisherman and the Preacher, all being summoned down in the pomp of
liturgical Latin to help MacEvoy to die. “If you don't mind my saying
so,” he added hesitatingly, “what I have just seen in there DID make a
very powerful impression upon me.”

“It is a very ancient ceremony,” said the priest; “probably Persian,
like the baptismal form, although, for that matter, we can never dig
deep enough for the roots of these things. They all turn up Turanian if
we probe far enough. Our ways separate here, I'm afraid. I am delighted
to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Ware. Pray look in upon me, if you
can as well as not. We are near neighbors, you know.”

Father Forbes had shaken hands, and moved off up another street some
distance, before the voice of the girl recalled Theron to himself.

“Of course you knew HIM by name,” she was saying, “and he knew you
by sight, and had talked of you; but MY poor inferior sex has to be
introduced. I am Celia Madden. My father has the wagon-shops, and I--I
play the organ at the church.”

“I--I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Theron, conscious
as he spoke that he had slavishly echoed the formula of the priest. He
could think of nothing better to add than, “Unfortunately, we have no
organ in our church.”

The girl laughed, as they resumed their walk down the street. “I'm
afraid I couldn't undertake two,” she said, and laughed again. Then she
spoke more seriously. “That ceremony must have interested you a good
deal, never having seen it before. I saw that it was all new to you, and
so I made bold to take you under my wing, so to speak.”

“You were very kind,” said the young minister. “It was really a great
experience for me. May--may I ask, is it a part of your functions, in
the church, I mean, to attend these last rites?”

“Mercy, no!” replied the girl, spinning the parasol on her shoulder and
smiling at the thought. “No; it was only because MacEvoy was one of our
workmen, and really came by his death through father sending him up to
trim a tree. Ann MacEvoy will never forgive us that, the longest day she
lives. Did you notice her? She wouldn't speak to me. After you came out,
I tried to tell her that we would look out for her and the children; but
all she would say to me was: 'An' fwat would a wheelwright, an' him the
father of a family, be doin' up a tree?'”

They had come now upon the main street of the village, with its
flagstone sidewalk overhung by a lofty canopy of elm-boughs. Here, for
the space of a block, was concentrated such fashionable elegance of
mansions and ornamental lawns as Octavius had to offer; and it was
presented with the irregularity so characteristic of our restless
civilization. Two or three of the houses survived untouched from the
earlier days--prim, decorous structures, each with its gabled centre
and lower wings, each with its row of fluted columns supporting the
classical roof of a piazza across its whole front, each vying with the
others in the whiteness of those wooden walls enveloping its bright
green blinds. One had to look over picket fences to see these houses,
and in doing so caught the notion that they thus railed themselves
off in pride at being able to remember before the railroad came to the
village, or the wagon-works were thought of.

Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so
that one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed
sward to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways. Some of the
residences, thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of
wood painted in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked
the native yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be
accounted tiles. Others--a prouder, less pretentious sort--were of brick
or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real
slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes
overhead.

Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking
of these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: “Here I am, once
more. Good-morning, Mr. Ware.”

Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he
felt in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house
in Octavius. He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the
abode of the owner of the wagon factories; but it had not occurred to
him before to associate this girl with that village magnate. It was
stupid of him, of course, because she had herself mentioned her father.
He looked at her again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook
the gloved hand she gave him, and lifted his soft hat. The strong noon
sunlight, forcing its way down between the elms, and beating upon her
parasol of lace-edged, creamy silk, made a halo about her hair and face
at once brilliant and tender. He had not seen before how beautiful she
was. She nodded in recognition of his salute, and moved up the lawn
walk, spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.

Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
time to think about a good many things before he reached home.

First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure
among the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron
had scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race
before. He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish
families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards,
but he had never come in contact with any of them, or given to their
existence even a passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went,
the Irish had been to him only a name.

But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general
subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment.
He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of
the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption
were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--qualities
accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful
influence of a false and idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to
say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.
His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political,
and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible
together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course
that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of
his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he
entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One
might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence
of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction.
Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had
ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely. He understood very
little about politics, it is true. If he had been driven into a corner,
and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity
in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned
the War--the last shots of which were fired while he was still in
petticoats. Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that
the Irish were on the other side.

He had never before had occasion to formulate, even in his own thoughts,
this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It
rose now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch
of sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic
monument. He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something
he had heard of all his life, but never seen before--an abhorrent
spectacle, truly! The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself
were ignorance, squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire
before its base, and burrowing into this base were a myriad of narrow
doors, each bearing the hateful sign of a saloon, and giving forth
from its recesses of night the sounds of screams and curses. Above were
sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's
cartoons, and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom--on the one
side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck, and on the other
gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a
spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic
masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.

Theron stared this phantasm hard in the face, and recognized it for a
very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought
about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if
the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he
smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father
Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's
bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he
heard only the proud, confident clanging of the girl's recital,--BEATUM
MICHAELEM ARCHANGELUM, BEATUM JOANNEM BAPTISTAM, PETRUM ET
PAULUM--EM!--AM!--UM!--like strokes on a great resonant alarm-bell,
attuned for the hearing of heaven. He caught himself on the very verge
of feeling that heaven must have heard.

Then he smiled again, and laid the matter aside, with a parting
admission that it had been undoubtedly picturesque and impressive, and
that it had been a valuable experience to him to see it. At least the
Irish, with all their faults, must have a poetic strain, or they would
not have clung so tenaciously to those curious and ancient forms. He
recalled having heard somewhere, or read, it might be, that they were
a people much given to songs and music. And the young lady, that very
handsome and friendly Miss Madden, had told him that she was a musician!
He had a new pleasure in turning this over in his mind. Of all the
closed doors which his choice of a career had left along his pathway, no
other had for him such a magical fascination as that on which was graven
the lute of Orpheus. He knew not even the alphabet of music, and his
conceptions of its possibilities ran but little beyond the best of the
hymn-singing he had heard at Conferences, yet none the less the longing
for it raised on occasion such mutiny in his soul that more than once he
had specifically prayed against it as a temptation.

Dangerous though some of its tendencies might be, there was no
gainsaying the fact that a love for music was in the main an uplifting
influence--an attribute of cultivation. The world was the sweeter and
more gentle for it. And this brought him to musing upon the odd chance
that the two people of Octavius who had given him the first notion of
polish and intellectual culture in the town should be Irish. The Romish
priest must have been vastly surprised at his intrusion, yet had been
at the greatest pains to act as if it were quite the usual thing to have
Methodist ministers assist at Extreme Unction. And the young woman--how
gracefully, with what delicacy, had she comprehended his position and
robbed it of all its possible embarrassments! It occurred to him that
they must have passed, there in front of her home, the very tree from
which the luckless wheelwright had fallen some hours before; and the
fact that she had forborne to point it out to him took form in his mind
as an added proof of her refinement of nature.

The midday dinner was a little more than ready when Theron reached home,
and let himself in by the front door. On Mondays, owing to the moisture
and “clutter” of the weekly washing in the kitchen, the table was laid
in the sitting-room, and as he entered from the hall the partner of
his joys bustled in by the other door, bearing the steaming platter of
corned beef, dumplings, cabbages, and carrots, with arms bared to the
elbows, and a red face. It gave him great comfort, however, to note that
there were no signs of the morning's displeasure remaining on this face;
and he immediately remembered again those interrupted projects of his
about the piano and the hired girl.

“Well! I'd just about begun to reckon that I was a widow,” said Alice,
putting down her fragrant burden. There was such an obvious suggestion
of propitiation in her tone that Theron went around and kissed her. He
thought of saying something about keeping out of the way because it was
“Blue Monday,” but held it back lest it should sound like a reproach.

“Well, what kind of a washerwoman does THIS one turn out to be?” he
asked, after they were seated, and he had invoked a blessing and was
cutting vigorously into the meat.

“Oh, so-so,” replied Alice; “she seems to be particular, but she's
mortal slow. If I hadn't stood right over her, we shouldn't have had the
clothes out till goodness knows when. And of course she's Irish!”

“Well, what of THAT?” asked the minister, with a fine unconcern.

Alice looked up from her plate, with knife and fork suspended in air.
“Why, you know we were talking only the other day of what a pity it was
that none of our own people went out washing,” she said. “That Welsh
woman we heard of couldn't come, after all; and they say, too, that she
presumes dreadfully upon the acquaintance, being a church member, you
know. So we simply had to fall back on the Irish. And even if they do
go and tell their priest everything they see and hear, why, there's one
comfort, they can tell about US and welcome. Of course I see to it she
doesn't snoop around in here.”

Theron smiled. “That's all nonsense about their telling such things to
their priests,” he said with easy confidence.

“Why, you told me so yourself,” replied Alice, briskly. “And I've always
understood so, too; they're bound to tell EVERYTHING in confession.
That's what gives the Catholic Church such a tremendous hold. You've
spoken of it often.”

“It must have been by way of a figure of speech,” remarked Theron,
not with entire directness. “Women are great hands to separate one's
observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite
unintended. They are also great hands,” he added genially, “or at least
one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings in the world. I
believe these are the best even you ever made.”

Alice was not unmindful of the compliment, but her thoughts were on
other things. “I shouldn't like that woman's priest, for example,” she
said, “to know that we had no piano.”

“But if he comes and stands outside our house every night and
listens--as of course he will,” said Theron, with mock gravity, “it is
only a question of time when he must reach that conclusion for himself.
Our only chance, however, is that there are some sixteen hundred other
houses for him to watch, so that he may not get around to us for quite a
spell. Why, seriously, Alice, what on earth do you suppose Father Forbes
knows or cares about our poor little affairs, or those of any other
Protestant household in this whole village? He has his work to do, just
as I have mine--only his is ten times as exacting in everything except
sermons--and you may be sure he is only too glad when it is over each
day, without bothering about things that are none of his business.”

“All the same I'm afraid of them,” said Alice, as if argument were
exhausted.



CHAPTER VI


On the following morning young Mr. Ware anticipated events by inscribing
in his diary for the day, immediately after breakfast, these remarks:
“Arranged about piano. Began work upon book.”

The date indeed deserved to be distinguished from its fellows. Theron
was so conscious of its importance that he not only prophesied in the
little morocco-bound diary which Alice had given him for Christmas, but
returned after he had got out upon the front steps of the parsonage to
have his hat brushed afresh by her.

“Wonders will never cease,” she said jocosely. “With you getting
particular about your clothes, there isn't anything in this wide world
that can't happen now!”

“One doesn't go out to bring home a piano every day,” he made answer.
“Besides, I want to make such an impression upon the man that he will
deal gently with that first cash payment down. Do you know,” he added,
watching her turn the felt brim under the wisp-broom's strokes, “I'm
thinking some of getting me a regular silk stove-pipe hat.”

“Why don't you, then?” she rejoined, but without any ring of glad
acquiescence in her tone. He fancied that her face lengthened a little,
and he instantly ascribed it to recollections of the way in which the
roses had been bullied out of her own headgear.

“You are quite sure, now, pet,” he made haste to change the subject,
“that the hired girl can wait just as well as not until fall?”

“Oh, MY, yes!” Alice replied, putting the hat on his head, and smoothing
back his hair behind his ears. “She'd only be in the way now. You see,
with hot weather coming on, there won't be much cooking. We'll take all
our meals out here, and that saves so much work that really what remains
is hardly more than taking care of a bird-cage. And, besides, not having
her will almost half pay for the piano.”

“But when cold weather comes, you're sure you'll consent?” he urged.

“Like a shot!” she assured him, and, after a happy little caress, he
started out again on his momentous mission.

“Thurston's” was a place concerning which opinions differed in Octavius.
That it typified progress, and helped more than any other feature of the
village to bring it up to date, no one indeed disputed. One might move
about a great deal, in truth, and hear no other view expressed. But then
again one might stumble into conversation with one small storekeeper
after another, and learn that they united in resenting the existence of
“Thurston's,” as rival farmers might join to curse a protracted drought.
Each had his special flaming grievance. The little dry-goods dealers
asked mournfully how they could be expected to compete with an
establishment which could buy bankrupt stocks at a hundred different
points, and make a profit if only one-third of the articles were sold
for more than they would cost from the jobber? The little boot and
shoe dealers, clothiers, hatters, and furriers, the small merchants in
carpets, crockery, and furniture, the venders of hardware and household
utensils, of leathern goods and picture-frames, of wall-paper, musical
instruments, and even toys--all had the same pathetically unanswerable
question to propound. But mostly they put it to themselves, because the
others were at “Thurston's.”

The Rev. Theron Ware had entertained rather strong views on this
subject, and that only a week or two ago. One of his first acquaintances
in Octavius had been the owner of the principal book-store in the
place--a gentle and bald old man who produced the complete impression of
a bibliophile upon what the slightest investigation showed to be only a
meagre acquaintance with publishers' circulars. But at least he had the
air of loving his business, and the young minister had enjoyed a long
talk with, or rather, at him. Out of this talk had come the information
that the store was losing money. Not even the stationery department now
showed a profit worth mentioning. When Octavius had contained only five
thousand inhabitants, it boasted four book-stores, two of them good
ones. Now, with a population more than doubled, only these latter two
survived, and they must soon go to the wall. The reason? It was in a
nutshell. A book which sold at retail for one dollar and a half cost the
bookseller ninety cents. If it was at all a popular book, “Thurston's”
 advertised it at eighty-nine cents--and in any case at a profit of only
two or three cents. Of course it was done to widen the establishment's
patronage--to bring people into the store. Equally of course, it was
destroying the book business and debauching the reading tastes of the
community. Without the profits from the light and ephemeral popular
literature of the season, the book-store proper could not keep up its
stock of more solid works, and indeed could not long keep open at all.
On the other hand, “Thurston's” dealt with nothing save the demand of
the moment, and offered only the books which were the talk of the week.
Thus, in plain words, the book trade was going to the dogs, and it was
the same with pretty nearly every other trade.

Theron was indignant at this, and on his return home told Alice that
he desired her to make no purchases whatever at “Thurston's.” He
even resolved to preach a sermon on the subject of the modern idea of
admiring the great for crushing the small, and sketched out some notes
for it which he thought solved the problem of flaying the local abuse
without mentioning it by name. They had lain on his desk now for ten
days or more, and on only the previous Friday he had speculated upon
using them that coming Sunday.

On this bright and cheerful Tuesday morning he walked with a blithe step
unhesitatingly down the main street to “Thurston's,” and entered without
any show of repugnance the door next to the window wherein, flanked
by dangling banjos and key-bugles built in pyramids, was displayed the
sign, “Pianos on the Instalment Plan.”

He was recognized by some responsible persons, and treated with
distinguished deference. They were charmed with the intelligence that he
desired a piano, and fascinated by his wish to pay for it only a little
at a time. They had special terms for clergymen, and made him feel as
if these were being extended to him on a silver charger by kneeling
admirers.

It was so easy to buy things here that he was a trifle disturbed to find
his flowing course interrupted by his own entire ignorance as to what
kind of piano he wanted. He looked at all they had in stock, and heard
them played upon. They differed greatly in price, and, so he fancied,
almost as much in tone. It discouraged him to note, however, that
several of those he thought the finest in tone were among the very
cheapest in the lot. Pondering this, and staring in hopeless puzzlement
from one to another of the big black shiny monsters, he suddenly thought
of something.

“I would rather not decide for myself,” he said, “I know so little about
it. If you don't mind, I will have a friend of mine, a skilled musician,
step in and make a selection. I have so much confidence in--in her
judgment.” He added hurriedly, “It will involve only a day or two's
delay.”

The next moment he was sorry he had spoken. What would they think when
they saw the organist of the Catholic church come to pick out a piano
for the Methodist parsonage? And how could he decorously prefer the
request to her to undertake this task? He might not meet her again for
ages, and to his provincial notions writing would have seemed out of the
question. And would it not be disagreeable to have her know that he was
buying a piano by part payments? Poor Alice's dread of the washerwoman's
gossip occurred to him, at this, and he smiled in spite of himself. Then
all at once the difficulty vanished. Of course it would come all right
somehow. Everything did.

He was on firmer ground, buying the materials for the new book, over
on the stationery side. His original intention had been to bestow this
patronage upon the old bookseller, but these suavely smart people in
“Thurston's” had had the effect of putting him on his honor when
they asked, “Would there be anything else?” and he had followed them
unresistingly.

He indulged to the full his whim that everything entering into the
construction of “Abraham” should be spick-and-span. He watched with his
own eyes a whole ream of broad glazed white paper being sliced down by
the cutter into single sheets, and thrilled with a novel ecstasy as he
laid his hand upon the spotless bulk, so wooingly did it invite him to
begin. He tried a score of pens before the right one came to hand.
When a box of these had been laid aside, with ink and pen-holders and a
little bronze inkstand, he made a sign that the outfit was complete.
Or no--there must be some blotting-paper. He had always used those
blotting-pads given away by insurance companies--his congregations never
failed to contain one or more agents, who had these to bestow by the
armful--but the book deserved a virgin blotter.

Theron stood by while all these things were being tied up together in a
parcel. The suggestion that they should be sent almost hurt him. Oh,
no, he would carry them home himself. So strongly did they appeal to his
sanguine imagination that he could not forbear hinting to the man who
had shown him the pianos and was now accompanying him to the door that
this package under his arm represented potentially the price of the
piano he was going to have. He did it in a roundabout way, with one of
his droll, hesitating smiles. The man did not understand at all, and
Theron had not the temerity to repeat the remark. He strode home with
the precious bundle as fast as he could.

“I thought it best, after all, not to commit myself to a selection,” he
explained about the piano at dinner-time. “In such a matter as this,
the opinion of an expert is everything. I am going to have one of the
principal musicians of the town go and try them all, and tell me which
we ought to have.”

“And while he's about it,” said Alice, “you might ask him to make a
little list of some of the new music. I've got way behind the times,
being without a piano so long. Tell him not any VERY difficult pieces,
you know.”

“Yes, I know,” put in Theron, almost hastily, and began talking of other
things. His conversation was of the most rambling and desultory sort,
because all the while the two lobes of his brain, as it were, kept up a
dispute as to whether Alice ought to have been told that this “principal
musician” was of her own sex. It would certainly have been better, at
the outset, he decided; but to mention it now would be to invest the
fact with undue importance. Yes, that was quite clear; only the clearer
it became, from one point of view, the shadier it waxed from the other.
The problem really disturbed the young minister's mind throughout
the meal, and his abstraction became so marked at last that his wife
commented upon it.

“A penny for your thoughts!” she said, with cheerful briskness. This
ancient formula of the farm-land had always rather jarred on Theron. It
presented itself now to his mind as a peculiarly aggravating banality.

“I am going to begin my book this afternoon,” he remarked impressively.
“There is a great deal to think about.”

It turned out that there was even more to think about than he had
imagined. After hours of solitary musing at his desk, or of pacing up
and down before his open book-shelves, Theron found the first shadows of
a May-day twilight beginning to fall upon that beautiful pile of white
paper, still unstained by ink. He saw the book he wanted to write before
him, in his mental vision, much more distinctly than ever, but the idea
of beginning it impetuously, and hurling it off hot and glowing week by
week, had faded away like a dream.

This long afternoon, spent face to face with a project born of his own
brain but yesterday, yet already so much bigger than himself, was really
a most fruitful time for the young clergyman. The lessons which cut
most deeply into our consciousness are those we learn from our children.
Theron, in this first day's contact with the offspring of his fancy,
found revealed to him an unsuspected and staggering truth. It was that
he was an extremely ignorant and rudely untrained young man, whose
pretensions to intellectual authority among any educated people would be
laughed at with deserved contempt.

Strangely enough, after he had weathered the first shock, this discovery
did not dismay Theron Ware. The very completeness of the conviction it
carried with it, saturated his mind with a feeling as if the fact had
really been known to him all along. And there came, too, after a little,
an almost pleasurable sense of the importance of the revelation. He had
been merely drifting in fatuous and conceited blindness. Now all at once
his eyes were open; he knew what he had to do. Ignorance was a thing to
be remedied, and he would forthwith bend all his energies to cultivating
his mind till it should blossom like a garden. In this mood, Theron
mentally measured himself against the more conspicuous of his colleagues
in the Conference. They also were ignorant, clownishly ignorant: the
difference was that they were doomed by native incapacity to go on all
their lives without ever finding it out. It was obvious to him that his
case was better. There was bright promise in the very fact that he had
discovered his shortcomings.

He had begun the afternoon by taking down from their places the various
works in his meagre library which bore more or less relation to the task
in hand. The threescore books which constituted his printed possessions
were almost wholly from the press of the Book Concern; the few
exceptions were volumes which, though published elsewhere, had come to
him through that giant circulating agency of the General Conference,
and wore the stamp of its approval. Perhaps it was the sight of these
half-filled shelves which started this day's great revolution in
Theron's opinions of himself. He had never thought much before about
owning books. He had been too poor to buy many, and the conditions of
canvassing about among one's parishioners which the thrifty Book Concern
imposes upon those who would have without buying, had always repelled
him. Now, suddenly, as he moved along the two shelves, he felt ashamed
at their beggarly showing.

“The Land and the Book,” in three portly volumes, was the most
pretentious of the aids which he finally culled from his collection.
Beside it he laid out “Bible Lands,” “Rivers and Lakes of Scripture,”
 “Bible Manners and Customs,” the “Genesis and Exodus” volume of Whedon's
Commentary, some old numbers of the “Methodist Quarterly Review,” and a
copy of “Josephus” which had belonged to his grandmother, and had
seen him through many a weary Sunday afternoon in boyhood. He glanced
casually through these, one by one, as he took them down, and began to
fear that they were not going to be of so much use as he had thought.
Then, seating himself, he read carefully through the thirteen chapters
of Genesis which chronicle the story of the founder of Israel.

Of course he had known this story from his earliest years. In almost
every chapter he came now upon a phrase or an incident which had served
him as the basis for a sermon. He had preached about Hagar in the
wilderness, about Lot's wife, about the visit of the angels, about the
intended sacrifice of Isaac, about a dozen other things suggested by the
ancient narrative. Somehow this time it all seemed different to him.
The people he read about were altered to his vision. Heretofore a poetic
light had shone about them, where indeed they had not glowed in a halo
of sanctification. Now, by some chance, this light was gone, and he saw
them instead as untutored and unwashed barbarians, filled with animal
lusts and ferocities, struggling by violence and foul chicanery to
secure a foothold in a country which did not belong to them--all rude
tramps and robbers of the uncivilized plain.

The apparent fact that Abram was a Chaldean struck him with peculiar
force. How was it, he wondered, that this had never occurred to him
before? Examining himself, he found that he had supposed vaguely that
there had been Jews from the beginning, or at least, say, from the
flood. But, no, Abram was introduced simply as a citizen of the Chaldean
town of Ur, and there was no hint of any difference in race between him
and his neighbors. It was specially mentioned that his brother, Lot's
father, died in Ur, the city of his nativity. Evidently the family
belonged there, and were Chaldeans like the rest.

I do not cite this as at all a striking discovery, but it did have a
curious effect upon Theron Ware. Up to that very afternoon, his notion
of the kind of book he wanted to write had been founded upon a popular
book called “Ruth the Moabitess,” written by a clergyman he knew very
well, the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin. This model performance troubled itself
not at all with difficult points, but went swimmingly along through
scented summer seas of pretty rhetoric, teaching nothing, it is true,
but pleasing a good deal and selling like hot cakes. Now, all at once
Theron felt that he hated that sort of book. HIS work should be of a
vastly different order. He might fairly assume, he thought, that if the
fact that Abram was a Chaldean was new to him, it would fall upon the
world in general as a novelty. Very well, then, there was his chance.
He would write a learned book, showing who the Chaldeans were, and how
their manners and beliefs differed from, and influenced--

It was at this psychological instant that the wave of self-condemnation
suddenly burst upon and submerged the young clergyman. It passed again,
leaving him staring fixedly at the pile of books he had taken down from
the shelves, and gasping a little, as if for breath. Then the humorous
side of the thing, perversely enough, appealed to him, and he grinned
feebly to himself at the joke of his having imagined that he could write
learnedly about the Chaldeans, or anything else. But, no, it shouldn't
remain a joke! His long mobile face grew serious under the new resolve.
He would learn what there was to be learned about the Chaldeans. He rose
and walked up and down the room, gathering fresh strength of purpose
as this inviting field of research spread out its vistas before him.
Perhaps--yes, he would incidentally explore the mysteries of the
Moabitic past as well, and thus put the Rev. E. Ray Mifflin to confusion
on his own subject. That would in itself be a useful thing, because
Mifflin wore kid gloves at the Conference, and affected an intolerable
superiority of dress and demeanor, and there would be general
satisfaction among the plainer and worthier brethren at seeing him taken
down a peg.

Now for the first time there rose distinctly in Theron's mind that
casual allusion which Father Forbes had made to the Turanians. He
recalled, too, his momentary feeling of mortification at not knowing who
the Turanians were, at the time. Possibly, if he had probed this matter
more deeply, now as he walked and pondered in the little living-room,
he might have traced the whole of the afternoon's mental experiences to
that chance remark of the Romish priest. But this speculation did not
detain him. He mused instead upon the splendid library Father Forbes
must have.

“Well, how does the book come on? Have you got to 'my Lady Keturah'
yet?'”

It was Alice who spoke, opening the door from the kitchen, and putting
in her head with a pretence of great and solemn caution, but with a
correcting twinkle in her eyes.

“I haven't got to anybody yet,” answered Theron, absently. “These big
things must be approached slowly.”

“Come out to supper, then, while the beans are hot,” said Alice.

The young minister sat through this other meal, again in deep
abstraction. His wife pursued her little pleasantry about Keturah,
the second wife, urging him with mock gravity to scold her roundly for
daring to usurp Sarah's place, but Theron scarcely heard her, and said
next to nothing. He ate sparingly, and fidgeted in his seat, waiting
with obvious impatience for the finish of the meal. At last he rose
abruptly.

“I've got a call to make--something with reference to the book,” he
said. “I'll run out now, I think, before it gets dark.”

He put on his hat, and strode out of the house as if his errand was of
the utmost urgency. Once upon the street, however, his pace slackened.
There was still a good deal of daylight outside, and he loitered
aimlessly about, walking with bowed head and hands clasped behind him,
until dusk fell. Then he squared his shoulders, and started straight as
the crow flies toward the residence of Father Forbes.



CHAPTER VII


The new Catholic church was the largest and most imposing public
building in Octavius. Even in its unfinished condition, with a bald
roofing of weather-beaten boards marking on the stunted tower the place
where a spire was to begin later on, it dwarfed every other edifice of
the sort in the town, just as it put them all to shame in the matter of
the throngs it drew, rain or shine, to its services.

These facts had not heretofore been a source of satisfaction to the Rev.
Theron Ware. He had even alluded to the subject in terms which gave his
wife the impression that he actively deplored the strength and size of
the Catholic denomination in this new home of theirs, and was troubled
in his mind about Rome generally. But this evening he walked along
the extended side of the big structure, which occupied nearly half the
block, and then, turning the corner, passed in review its wide-doored,
looming front, without any hostile emotions whatever. In the gathering
dusk it seemed more massive than ever before, but he found himself only
passively considering the odd statement he had heard that all Catholic
Church property was deeded absolutely in the name of the Bishop of the
diocese.

Only a narrow passage-way separated the church from the pastorate--a
fine new brick residence standing flush upon the street. Theron mounted
the steps, and looked about for a bell-pull. Search revealed instead a
little ivory button set in a ring of metal work. He picked at this for
a time with his finger-nail, before he made out the injunction, printed
across it, to push. Of course! how stupid of him! This was one of those
electric bells he had heard so much of, but which had not as yet made
their way to the class of homes he knew. For custodians of a mediaeval
superstition and fanaticism, the Catholic clergy seemed very much up to
date. This bell made him feel rather more a countryman than ever.

The door was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who stood in black relief
against the radiance of the hall-way while Theron, choosing his words
with some diffidence, asked if the Rev. Mr. Forbes was in.

“He is” came the hush-voiced answer. “He's at dinner, though.”

It took the young minister a second or two to bring into association in
his mind this evening hour and this midday meal. Then he began to say
that he would call again--it was nothing special--but the woman suddenly
cut him short by throwing the door wide open.

“It's Mr. Ware, is it not?” she asked, in a greatly altered tone. “Sure,
he'd not have you go away. Come inside--do, sir!--I'll tell him.”

Theron, with a dumb show of reluctance, crossed the threshold. He noted
now that the woman, who had bustled down the hall on her errand, was
gray-haired and incredibly ugly, with a dark sour face, glowering black
eyes, and a twisted mouth. Then he saw that he was not alone in the
hall-way. Three men and two women, all poorly clad and obviously working
people, were seated in meek silence on a bench beyond the hat-rack. They
glanced up at him for an instant, then resumed their patient study of
the linoleum pattern on the floor at their feet.

“And will you kindly step in, sir?” the elderly Gorgon had returned to
ask. She led Mr. Ware along the hall-way to a door near the end, and
opened it for him to pass before her.

He entered a room in which for the moment he could see nothing but a
central glare of dazzling light beating down from a great shaded
lamp upon a circular patch of white table linen. Inside this ring of
illumination points of fire sparkled from silver and porcelain, and two
bars of burning crimson tracked across the cloth in reflection from tall
glasses filled with wine. The rest of the room was vague darkness; but
the gloom seemed saturated with novel aromatic odors, the appetizing
scent of which bore clear relation to what Theron's blinking eyes rested
upon.

He was able now to discern two figures at the table, outside the glowing
circle of the lamp. They had both risen, and one came toward him with
cordial celerity, holding out a white plump hand in greeting. He took
this proffered hand rather limply, not wholly sure in the half-light
that this really was Father Forbes, and began once more that everlasting
apology to which he seemed doomed in the presence of the priest. It was
broken abruptly off by the other's protesting laughter.

“My dear Mr. Ware, I beg of you,” the priest urged, chuckling with
hospitable mirth, “don't, don't apologize! I give you my word, nothing
in the world could have pleased us better than your joining us here
tonight. It was quite dramatic, your coming in as you did. We were
speaking of you at that very moment. Oh, I forgot--let me make you
acquainted with my friend--my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar. Let
me take your hat; pray draw up a chair. Maggie will have a place laid
for you in a minute.”

“Oh, I assure you--I couldn't think of it--I've just eaten
my--my--dinner,” expostulated Theron. He murmured more inarticulate
remonstrances a moment later, when the grim old domestic appeared with
plates, serviette, and tableware for his use, but she went on spreading
them before him as if she heard nothing. Thus committed against a decent
show of resistance, the young minister did eat a little here and there
of what was set before him, and was human enough to regret frankly
that he could not eat more. It seemed to him very remarkable cookery,
transfiguring so simple a thing as a steak, for example, quite out of
recognition, and investing the humble potato with a charm he had never
dreamed of. He wondered from time to time if it would be polite to ask
how the potatoes were cooked, so that he might tell Alice.

The conversation at the table was not continuous, or even enlivened.
After the lapses into silence became marked, Theron began to suspect
that his refusal to drink wine had annoyed them--the more so as he had
drenched a large section of table-cloth in his efforts to manipulate a
siphon instead. He was greatly relieved, therefore, when Father Forbes
explained in an incidental way that Dr. Ledsmar and he customarily ate
their meals almost without a word.

“It's a philosophic fad of his,” the priest went on smilingly, “and I
have fallen in with it for the sake of a quiet life; so that when we do
have company--that is to say, once in a blue moon--we display no manners
to speak of.”

“I had always supposed--that is, I've always heard--that it was more
healthful to talk at meals,” said Theron. “Of course--what I mean--I
took it for granted all physicians thought so.”

Dr. Ledsmar laughed. “That depends so much upon the quality of the
meals!” he remarked, holding his glass up to the light.

He seemed a man of middle age and an equable disposition. Theron,
stealing stray glances at him around the lampshade, saw most distinctly
of all a broad, impressive dome of skull, which, though obviously the
result of baldness, gave the effect of quite belonging to the face.
There were gold-rimmed spectacles, through which shone now and again the
vivid sparkle of sharp, alert eyes, and there was a nose of some sort
not easy to classify, at once long and thick. The rest was thin hair and
short round beard, mouse-colored where the light caught them, but losing
their outlines in the shadows of the background. Theron had not heard of
him among the physicians of Octavius. He wondered if he might not be a
doctor of something else than medicine, and decided upon venturing the
question.

“Oh, yes, it is medicine,” replied Ledsmar. “I am a doctor three or four
times over, so far as parchments can make one. In some other respects,
though, I should think I am probably less of a doctor than anybody else
now living. I haven't practised--that is, regularly--for many years, and
I take no interest whatever in keeping abreast of what the profession
regards as its progress. I know nothing beyond what was being taught in
the sixties, and that I am glad to say I have mostly forgotten.”

“Dear me!” said Theron. “I had always supposed that Science was the most
engrossing of pursuits--that once a man took it up he never left it.”

“But that would imply a connection between Science and Medicine!”
 commented the doctor. “My dear sir, they are not even on speaking
terms.”

“Shall we go upstairs?” put in the priest, rising from his chair. “It
will be more comfortable to have our coffee there--unless indeed, Mr.
Ware, tobacco is unpleasant to you?”

“Oh, my, no!” the young minister exclaimed, eager to free himself from
the suggestion of being a kill-joy. “I don't smoke myself; but I am very
fond of the odor, I assure you.”

Father Forbes led the way out. It could be seen now that he wore a long
house-gown of black silk, skilfully moulded to his erect, shapely, and
rounded form. Though he carried this with the natural grace of a proud
and beautiful belle, there was no hint of the feminine in his bearing,
or in the contour of his pale, firm-set, handsome face. As he moved
through the hall-way, the five people whom Theron had seen waiting rose
from their bench, and two of the women began in humble murmurs, “If you
please, Father,” and “Good-evening to your Riverence;” but the priest
merely nodded and passed on up the staircase, followed by his guests.
The people sat down on their bench again.

A few minutes later, reclining at his ease in a huge low chair, and
feeling himself unaccountably at home in the most luxuriously appointed
and delightful little room he had ever seen, the Rev. Theron Ware sipped
his unaccustomed coffee and embarked upon an explanation of his errand.
Somehow the very profusion of scholarly symbols about him--the great
dark rows of encased and crowded book-shelves rising to the ceiling,
the classical engravings upon the wall, the revolving book-case, the
reading-stand, the mass of littered magazines, reviews, and papers at
either end of the costly and elaborate writing-desk--seemed to make
it the easier for him to explain without reproach that he needed
information about Abram. He told them quite in detail the story of his
book.

The two others sat watching him through a faint haze of scented smoke,
with polite encouragement on their faces. Father Forbes took the added
trouble to nod understandingly at the various points of the narrative,
and when it was finished gave one of his little approving chuckles.

“This skirts very closely upon sorcery,” he said smilingly. “Do
you know, there is perhaps not another man in the country who knows
Assyriology so thoroughly as our friend here, Dr. Ledsmar.”

“That's putting it too strong,” remarked the Doctor. “I only follow at
a distance--a year or two behind. But I daresay I can help you. You are
quite welcome to anything I have: my books cover the ground pretty well
up to last year. Delitzsch is very interesting; but Baudissin's 'Studien
zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte' would come closer to what you need.
There are several other important Germans--Schrader, Bunsen, Duncker,
Hommel, and so on.”

“Unluckily I--I don't read German readily,” Theron explained with
diffidence.

“That's a pity,” said the doctor, “because they do the best work--not
only in this field, but in most others. And they do so much that the
mass defies translation. Well, the best thing outside of German of
course is Sayce. I daresay you know him, though.”

The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head mournfully. “I don't seem to know any
one,” he murmured.

The others exchanged glances.

“But if I may ask, Mr. Ware,” pursued the doctor, regarding their guest
with interest through his spectacles, “why do you specially hit upon
Abraham? He is full of difficulties--enough, just now, at any rate, to
warn off the bravest scholar. Why not take something easier?”

Theron had recovered something of his confidence. “Oh, no,” he said,
“that is just what attracts me to Abraham. I like the complexities and
contradictions in his character. Take for instance all that strange
and picturesque episode of Hagar: see the splendid contrast between the
craft and commercial guile of his dealings in Egypt and with Abimelech,
and the simple, straightforward godliness of his later years. No, all
those difficulties only attract me. Do you happen to know--of course
you would know--do those German books, or the others, give anywhere any
additional details of the man himself and his sayings and doings--little
things which help, you know, to round out one's conception of the
individual?”

Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young
minister's head. It was Father Forbes who replied.

“I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,”
 he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go
so well with his gown. “Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out
of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym--it
means 'exalted father.' Practically all the names in the Genesis
chronologies are what we call eponymous. Abram is not a person at all:
he is a tribe, a sept, a clan. In the same way, Shem is not intended for
a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race. Heber is
simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the
Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.”

“But this is something very new, this theory, isn't it?” queried Theron.

The priest smiled and shook his head. “Bless you, no! My dear sir, there
is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian
theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why
Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In
his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical names,
'GENTES NON HOMINES;' that is, 'peoples, not persons.' It was as obvious
to him--as much a commonplace of knowledge--as it was to Ezekiel eight
hundred years before him.”

“It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,”
 commented Theron; “I mean, that everybody shouldn't know it.”

Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle. “Ah, there we get upon
contentious ground,” he remarked. “Why should 'everybody' be supposed
to know anything at all? What business is it of 'everybody's' to know
things? The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it
to be flat, as it is now. So the truth remains always the truth, even
though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to
examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is
as many different varieties of something else. But of course that whole
question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man's-Land for us.
We were speaking of eponyms.”

“Yes,” said Theron; “it is very interesting.”

“There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn't been worked out
much,” continued the priest. “Probably the Germans will get at that too,
sometime. They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.
I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the
Hittites. Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends
and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in
their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders
called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively
modern--about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish
myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an
ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe
to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of
Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which
the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed the
invention of the alphabet. The Irish have a holy salmon of knowledge,
just like the Chaldean man-fish. The Druids' tree-worship is identical
with that of the Chaldeans--those pagan groves, you know, which the Jews
were always being punished for building. You see, there is nothing new.
Everything is built on the ruins of something else. Just as the material
earth is made up of countless billions of dead men's bones, so the
mental world is all alive with the ghosts of dead men's thoughts and
beliefs, the wraiths of dead races' faiths and imaginings.”

Father Forbes paused, then added with a twinkle in his eye: “That
peroration is from an old sermon of mine, in the days when I used to
preach. I remember rather liking it, at the time.”

“But you still preach?” asked the Rev. Mr. Ware, with lifted brows.

“No! no more! I only talk now and again,” answered the priest, with what
seemed a suggestion of curtness. He made haste to take the conversation
back again. “The names of these dead-and-gone things are singularly
pertinacious, though. They survive indefinitely. Take the modern name
Marmaduke, for example. It strikes one as peculiarly modern, up-to-date,
doesn't it? Well, it is the oldest name on earth--thousands of years
older than Adam. It is the ancient Chaldean Meridug, or Merodach. He was
the young god who interceded continually between the angry, omnipotent
Ea, his father, and the humble and unhappy Damkina, or Earth, who was
his mother. This is interesting from another point of view, because
this Merodach or Marmaduke is, so far as we can see now, the original
prototype of our 'divine intermediary' idea. I daresay, though, that if
we could go back still other scores of centuries, we should find whole
receding series of types of this Christ-myth of ours.”

Theron Ware sat upright at the fall of these words, and flung a
swift, startled look about the room--the instinctive glance of a man
unexpectedly confronted with peril, and casting desperately about for
means of defence and escape. For the instant his mind was aflame with
this vivid impression--that he was among sinister enemies, at the mercy
of criminals. He half rose under the impelling stress of this feeling,
with the sweat standing on his brow, and his jaw dropped in a scared and
bewildered stare.

Then, quite as suddenly, the sense of shock was gone; and it was as if
nothing at all had happened. He drew a long breath, took another sip of
his coffee, and found himself all at once reflecting almost pleasurably
upon the charm of contact with really educated people. He leaned back in
the big chair again, and smiled to show these men of the world how much
at his ease he was. It required an effort, he discovered, but he made it
bravely, and hoped he was succeeding.

“It hasn't been in my power to at all lay hold of what the world keeps
on learning nowadays about its babyhood,” he said. “All I have done is
to try to preserve an open mind, and to maintain my faith that the more
we know, the nearer we shall approach the Throne.”

Dr. Ledsmar abruptly scuffled his feet on the floor, and took out his
watch. “I'm afraid--” he began.

“No, no! There's plenty of time,” remarked the priest, with his soft
half-smile and purring tones. “You finish your cigar here with Mr. Ware,
and excuse me while I run down and get rid of the people in the hall.”

Father Forbes tossed his cigar-end into the fender. Then he took from
the mantel a strange three-cornered black-velvet cap, with a dangling
silk tassel at the side, put it on his head, and went out.

Theron, being left alone with the doctor, hardly knew what to do or say.
He took up a paper from the floor beside him, but realized that it would
be impolite to go farther, and laid it on his knee. Some trace of that
earlier momentary feeling that he was in hostile hands came back, and
worried him. He lifted himself upright in the chair, and then became
conscious that what really disturbed him was the fact that Dr. Ledsmar
had turned in his seat, crossed his legs, and was contemplating him with
a gravely concentrated scrutiny through his spectacles.

This uncomfortable gaze kept itself up a long way beyond the point of
good manners; but the doctor seemed not to mind that at all.



CHAPTER VIII


When Dr. Ledsmar finally spoke, it was in a kindlier tone than the
young minister had looked for. “I had half a notion of going to hear
you preach the other evening,” he said; “but at the last minute I backed
out. I daresay I shall pluck up the courage, sooner or later, and really
go. It must be fully twenty years since I last heard a sermon, and I had
supposed that that would suffice for the rest of my life. But they
tell me that you are worth while; and, for some reason or other, I find
myself curious on the subject.”

Involved and dubious though the compliment might be, Theron felt himself
flushing with satisfaction. He nodded his acknowledgment, and changed
the topic.

“I was surprised to hear Father Forbes say that he did not preach,” he
remarked.

“Why should he?” asked the doctor, indifferently. “I suppose he hasn't
more than fifteen parishioners in a thousand who would understand him
if he did, and of these probably twelve would join in a complaint to his
Bishop about the heterodox tone of his sermon. There is no point in his
going to all that pains, merely to incur that risk. Nobody wants him to
preach, and he has reached an age where personal vanity no longer tempts
him to do so. What IS wanted of him is that he should be the paternal,
ceremonial, authoritative head and centre of his flock, adviser,
monitor, overseer, elder brother, friend, patron, seigneur--whatever you
like--everything except a bore. They draw the line at that. You see how
diametrically opposed this Catholic point of view is to the Protestant.”

“The difference does seem extremely curious to me,” said Theron. “Now,
those people in the hall--”

“Go on,” put in the doctor, as the other faltered hesitatingly. “I know
what you were going to say. It struck you as odd that he should let them
wait on the bench there, while he came up here to smoke.”

Theron smiled faintly. “I WAS thinking that my--my parishioners wouldn't
have taken it so quietly. But of course--it is all so different!”

“As chalk from cheese!” said Dr. Ledsmar, lighting a fresh cigar. “I
daresay every one you saw there had come either to take the pledge, or
see to it that one of the others took it. That is the chief industry
in the hall, so far as I have observed. Now discipline is an important
element in the machinery here. Coming to take the pledge implies that
you have been drunk and are now ashamed. Both states have their values,
but they are opposed. Sitting on that bench tends to develop penitence
to the prejudice of alcoholism. But at no stage would it ever occur to
the occupant of the bench that he was the best judge of how long he was
to sit there, or that his priest should interrupt his dinner or general
personal routine, in order to administer that pledge. Now, I daresay you
have no people at all coming to 'swear off.'”

The Rev. Mr. Ware shook his head. “No; if a man with us got as bad as
all that, he wouldn't come near the church at all. He'd simply drop out,
and there would be an end to it.”

“Quite so,” interjected the doctor. “That is the voluntary system. But
these fellows can't drop out. There's no bottom to the Catholic Church.
Everything that's in, stays in. If you don't mind my saying so--of
course I view you all impartially from the outside--but it seems logical
to me that a church should exist for those who need its help, and not
for those who by their own profession are so good already that it is
they who help the church. Now, you turn a man out of your church who
behaves badly: that must be on the theory that his remaining in would
injure the church, and that in turn involves the idea that it is the
excellent character of the parishioners which imparts virtue to the
church. The Catholics' conception, you see, is quite the converse. Such
virtue as they keep in stock is on tap, so to speak, here in the church
itself, and the parishioners come and get some for themselves according
to their need for it. Some come every day, some only once a year, some
perhaps never between their baptism and their funeral. But they all
have a right here, the professional burglar every whit as much as the
speckless saint. The only stipulation is that they oughtn't to come
under false pretences: the burglar is in honor bound not to pass himself
off to his priest as the saint. But that is merely a moral obligation,
established in the burglar's own interest. It does him no good to come
unless he feels that he is playing the rules of the game, and one of
these is confession. If he cheats there, he knows that he is cheating
nobody but himself, and might much better have stopped away altogether.”

Theron nodded his head comprehendingly. He had a great many views about
the Romanish rite of confession which did not at all square with this
statement of the case, but this did not seem a specially fit time for
bringing them forth. There was indeed a sense of languid repletion in
his mind, as if it had been overfed and wanted to lie down for awhile.
He contented himself with nodding again, and murmuring reflectively,
“Yes, it is all strangely different.”

His tone was an invitation to silence; and the doctor turned his
attention to the cigar, studying its ash for a minute with an air
of deep meditation, and then solemnly blowing out a slow series of
smoke-rings. Theron watched him with an indolent, placid eye, wondering
lazily if it was, after all, so very pleasant to smoke.

There fell upon this silence--with a softness so delicate that it came
almost like a progression in the hush--the sound of sweet music. For a
little, strain and source were alike indefinite--an impalpable setting
to harmony of the mellowed light, the perfumed opalescence of the air,
the luxury and charm of the room. Then it rose as by a sweeping curve of
beauty, into a firm, calm, severe melody, delicious to the ear, but as
cold in the mind's vision as moonlit sculpture. It went on upward with
stately collectedness of power, till the atmosphere seemed all alive
with the trembling consciousness of the presence of lofty souls, sternly
pure and pitilessly great.

Theron found himself moved as he had never been before. He almost
resented the discovery, when it was presented to him by the prosaic,
mechanical side of his brain, that he was listening to organ-music, and
that it came through the open window from the church close by. He would
fain have reclined in his chair and closed his eyes, and saturated
himself with the uttermost fulness of the sensation. Yet, in absurd
despite of himself, he rose and moved over to the window.

Only a narrow alley separated the pastorate from the church; Mr. Ware
could have touched with a walking-stick the opposite wall. Indirectly
facing him was the arched and mullioned top of a great window. A dim
light from within shone through the more translucent portions of the
glass below, throwing out faint little bars of party-colored radiance
upon the blackness of the deep passage-way. He could vaguely trace by
these the outlines of some sort of picture on the window. There were
human figures in it, and--yes--up here in the centre, nearest him, was a
woman's head. There was a halo about it, engirdling rich, flowing waves
of reddish hair, the lights in which glowed like flame. The face itself
was barely distinguishable, but its half-suggested form raised a curious
sense of resemblance to some other face. He looked at it closely,
blankly, the noble music throbbing through his brain meanwhile.

“It's that Madden girl!” he suddenly heard a voice say by his side. Dr.
Ledsmar had followed him to the window, and was close at his shoulder.

Theron's thoughts were upon the puzzling shadowed lineaments on the
stained glass. He saw now in a flash the resemblance which had baffled
him. “It IS like her, of course,” he said.

“Yes, unfortunately, it IS just like her,” replied the doctor, with a
hostile note in his voice. “Whenever I am dining here, she always goes
in and kicks up that racket. She knows I hate it.”

“Oh, you mean that it is she who is playing,” remarked Theron. “I
thought you referred to--at least--I was thinking of--”

His sentence died off in inconsequence. He had a feeling that he did not
want to talk with the doctor about the stained-glass likeness. The music
had sunk away now into fragmentary and unconnected passages, broken here
and there by abrupt stops. Dr. Ledsmar stretched an arm out past him and
shut the window. “Let's hear as little of the row as we can,” he said,
and the two went back to their chairs.

“Pardon me for the question,” the Rev. Mr. Ware said, after a pause
which began to affect him as constrained, “but something you said about
dining--you don't live here, then? In the house, I mean?”

The doctor laughed--a characteristically abrupt, dry little laugh, which
struck Theron at once as bearing a sort of black-sheep relationship
to the priest's habitual chuckle. “That must have been puzzling you no
end,” he said--“that notion that the pastorate kept a devil's advocate
on the premises. No, Mr. Ware, I don't live here. I inhabit a house
of my own--you may have seen it--an old-fashioned place up beyond the
race-course, with a sort of tower at the back, and a big garden. But I
dine here three or four times a week. It is an old arrangement of ours.
Vincent and I have been friends for many years now. We are quite alone
in the world, we two--much to our mutual satisfaction. You must come
up and see me some time; come up and have a look over the books we were
speaking of.”

“I am much obliged,” said Theron, without enthusiasm. The thought of the
doctor by himself did not attract him greatly.

The reservation in his tone seemed to interest the doctor. “I suppose
you are the first man I have asked in a dozen years,” he remarked,
frankly willing that the young minister should appreciate the favor
extended him. “It must be fully that since anybody but Vincent Forbes
has been under my roof; that is, of my own species, I mean.”

“You live there quite alone,” commented Theron.

“Quite--with my dogs and cats and lizards--and my Chinaman. I mustn't
forget him.” The doctor noted the inquiry in the other's lifted brows,
and smilingly explained. “He is my solitary servant. Possibly he
might not appeal to you much; but I can assure you he used to interest
Octavius a great deal when I first brought him here, ten years ago or
so. He afforded occupation for all the idle boys in the village for a
twelve-month at least. They used to lie in wait for him all day long,
with stones or horse-chestnuts or snowballs, according to the season.
The Irishmen from the wagon-works nearly killed him once or twice, but
he patiently lived it all down. The Chinaman has the patience to live
everything down--the Caucasian races included. He will see us all to
bed, will that gentleman with the pigtail!”

The music over in the church had lifted itself again into form and
sequence, and defied the closed window. If anything, it was louder than
before, and the sonorous roar of the bass-pedals seemed to be shaking
the very walls. It was something with a big-lunged, exultant, triumphing
swing in it--something which ought to have been sung on the battlefield
at the close of day by the whole jubilant army of victors. It was
impossible to pretend not to be listening to it; but the doctor
submitted with an obvious scowl, and bit off the tip of his third cigar
with an annoyed air.

“You don't seem to care much for music,” suggested Mr. Ware, when a lull
came.

Dr. Ledsmar looked up, lighted match in hand. “Say musicians!” he
growled. “Has it ever occurred to you,” he went on, between puffs at the
flame, “that the only animals who make the noises we call music are of
the bird family--a debased offshoot of the reptilian creation--the
very lowest types of the vertebrata now in existence? I insist upon
the parallel among humans. I have in my time, sir, had considerable
opportunities for studying close at hand the various orders of mammalia
who devote themselves to what they describe as the arts. It may sound
a harsh judgement, but I am convinced that musicians stand on the very
bottom rung of the ladder in the sub-cellar of human intelligence, even
lower than painters and actors.”

This seemed such unqualified nonsense to the Rev. Mr. Ware that he
offered no comment whatever upon it. He tried instead to divert his
thoughts to the stormy strains which rolled in through the vibrating
brickwork, and to picture to himself the large, capable figure of Miss
Madden seated in the half-light at the organ-board, swaying to and fro
in a splendid ecstasy of power as she evoked at will this superb and
ordered uproar. But the doctor broke insistently in upon his musings.

“All art, so-called, is decay,” he said, raising his voice. “When a race
begins to brood on the beautiful--so-called--it is a sign of rot, of
getting ready to fall from the tree. Take the Jews--those marvellous old
fellows--who were never more than a handful, yet have imposed the rule
of their ideas and their gods upon us for fifteen hundred years. Why?
They were forbidden by their most fundamental law to make sculptures or
pictures. That was at a time when the Egyptians, when the Assyrians, and
other Semites, were running to artistic riot. Every great museum in
the world now has whole floors devoted to statues from the Nile, and
marvellous carvings from the palaces of Sargon and Assurbanipal. You
can get the artistic remains of the Jews during that whole period into
a child's wheelbarrow. They had the sense and strength to penalize art;
they alone survived. They saw the Egyptians go, the Assyrians go, the
Greeks go, the late Romans go, the Moors in Spain go--all the artistic
peoples perish. They remained triumphing over all. Now at last their
long-belated apogee is here; their decline is at hand. I am told that in
this present generation in Europe the Jews are producing a great lot of
young painters and sculptors and actors, just as for a century they have
been producing famous composers and musicians. That means the end of the
Jews!”

“What! have you only got as far as that?” came the welcome interruption
of a cheery voice. Father Forbes had entered the room, and stood looking
down with a whimsical twinkle in his eye from one to the other of his
guests.

“You must have been taken over the ground at a very slow pace, Mr.
Ware,” he continued, chuckling softly, “to have arrived merely at the
collapse of the New Jerusalem. I fancied I had given him time enough to
bring you straight up to the end of all of us, with that Chinaman of
his gently slapping our graves with his pigtail. That's where the doctor
always winds up, if he's allowed to run his course.”

“It has all been very interesting, extremely so, I assure you,” faltered
Theron. It had become suddenly apparent to him that he desired nothing
so much as to make his escape--that he had indeed only been waiting for
the host's return to do so.

He rose at this, and explained that he must be going. No special effort
being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father
Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very
gracious cordiality into his adieux.

The night was warm and black. Theron stood still in it the moment the
pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it
was as if he had closed his eyes. His dominant sensation was of a deep
relief and rest after some undue fatigue. It crossed his mind that
drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned against things on
their way home. He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and
half-nausea following a mental intoxication. The conceit pleased him,
and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps.
It must be growing late, he thought. Alice would be wondering as she
waited.

There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he
noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of
the music proceeding from the organ within the church--a vaguely
processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy
effect. It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint
rhythm of sound as he sauntered along. He discovered, as he neared
the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the
flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy. He smiled again at this.
There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood,
now that he examined it. He set it down as a reaction from that doctor's
extravagant and incendiary talk. One thing was certain--he would never
be caught up at that house beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and
its Chinaman. Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided
not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative, but as he felt now,
the chances were all against it.

Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side
of the huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the
edifice, a small door--the entrance to a porch coming out to the
sidewalk--which stood wide open. A thin, pale, vertical line of light
showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.

Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by
distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal
relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed
the window. It was as if it was being played for him alone.

He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to
the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold
him. There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now.
He fancied that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something
adapted to marriage ceremonies--rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration
of beauty and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only
heightened by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of
a fond, timid little sob.

Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of
impression this music was making upon him. Then, all at once, he wheeled
and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and
hearing it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.

He had never been inside a Catholic church before.



CHAPTER IX


Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.
There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.

The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame
every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the
Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility
which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment. Everybody knew some version
of the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the
incongruity between him and his splendid habitation. Some had it that he
slept in the shed. Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in
the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because
the second Mrs. Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come
in and bear him company. But no matter how comic the exaggeration,
these legends were invariably amiable. It lay in no man's mouth to speak
harshly of Jeremiah Madden.

He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he
was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the
green stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so
older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started
in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the
poor-law officers were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back
next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused
her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.
“While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation,” they had
explained to her. The girl died without profiting by this official
apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. Now,
after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he
remembered best about Ireland.

He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that
vast flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade,
and really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm
and sequent progression--steady employment as a journeyman first; then
marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
late years stupendous--all following naturally, easily, one thing out of
another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again,
that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to himself at
the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it all but
empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he had
known--none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the
gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he. He
could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it would
have been like sneering over their poor graves.

Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man of a reddened,
weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows.
The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's
recollections of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular
teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened
the whole countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard,
passing from ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as
simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his
steadfast devotion to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain
rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least
to the public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite
alone. His family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.

There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs.
Madden's offspring--Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife,
who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This
minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street.
Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence
of the majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated
ground. If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through
the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used
only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean
forgotten. The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive,
neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully
half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--there were two
naming the very parish adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was
of the remoter 'fifties. They had all been stricken down, here in this
strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own
soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them. Musing upon
the clumsy sculpture, with its “R.I.P.,” or “Pray for the Soul of,” half
to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem
to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.
What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the
passing of the planets overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears
in the new cemetery, where his ten children were. He never left this
weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.

One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as
his fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and
individual, for his own use. To the men about him in the offices and
the shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable
cheeriness of demeanor. He had been always fortunate in the selection of
lieutenants and chief helpers. Two of these had grown now into partners,
and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah
himself. They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or
petulant word of his--much less any unworthy deed. Once they had seen
him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to
nothing. A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of
some apprentices; and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender
implacably from his employ. It was years now since any one who knew him
had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing. Jokes of the sort
which women might hear he was very fond of though he had not much humor
of his own. Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most
perfunctory pretence now and again of reading the newspapers.

The elder son Michael was very like his father--diligent, unassuming,
kindly, and simple--a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who
toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in
the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master.
If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a
partner, he gave no hint of sharing it. He attended to his religious
duties with great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter
of course. This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees
who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries under his notice,
certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works. To some
few whom he knew specially well, Michael would confess that if he
had had the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest. He
displayed no inclination to marry.

The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the
product of a wholly different race. The contrast between Michael's sandy
skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face,
with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown
eyes, and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their
temperamental separation. This second lad had been away for years at
school,--indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage
to keep him long. He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the
Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt. St. Mary's and the
severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits.
The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become
Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful,
bold, and showy boy who had gone away in his teens. He was still rather
small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly
tailored, that the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise.
He never dreamed of going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good
deal--in fact, most of the time--to the Nedahma Club. His mother spoke
often to her friends about her fears for his health. He never spoke to
his friends about his mother at all.

The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family
pride. She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid.
Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally
because she was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable
reputation for piety. It was at a time when the expansion of his
business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting the removal to
Octavius. He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social
respectability were increasing; it was certain that the embarrassments
of a motherless family were. Miss Foley had shown a good deal of
attention to his little children. She was not ill-looking; she bore
herself with modesty; she was the priest's sister--the niece once
removed of a vicar-general. And so it came about.

Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from
the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious
and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as
a spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife.
Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered,
she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah
Madden to drink or flight. He may have had his temptations, but they
made no mark on the even record of his life. He only worked the harder,
concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of
home-life would have claimed instead. The end of twenty years found him
a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had
his wage to earn. In the great house which had been built to please, or
rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible. The
popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less
true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco
himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man,
and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively
sucked his clay pipe. One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up
in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest
mechanics to the music she played for them.

Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than
a daughter and sister. They could not think there had ever been anything
like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word
of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.

She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously
talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There
had been a little Celia--a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl,
always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or
hope to the rest of the family. Then there was a long gap, during which
the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received
from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality
to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if
she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill. Then all at
once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again,
but who really seemed never to have been there before--a tall, handsome,
confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to
know everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint
pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the
gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.

The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the
step-mother. Mrs. Madden had looked forward with a certain grim
tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the “red-head.”
 She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the
girl went away. She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house
was nearly finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and
spent far more money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the
whole section. The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to
date--having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to
Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood. It was in
all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and
“soft-sawdherers”--wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men
who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of
going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention
of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her
invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her
step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen
and hated “red-head,” moping defiantly in corners, or courting by
her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the
step-mother's mind to get at her.

The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away.
The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born
of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by
the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her
room robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.

Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become
almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds
of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but
somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays
in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under
her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the
sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.
Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her,
obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no
longer to look at her and her equipage at all. Worst of all, something
of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now
and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her
for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.
And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.

Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need
for her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words
any of her desires, for that matter. All existing arrangements in the
Madden household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her,
whichever way she walked. A whole quarter of the unfinished house set
itself apart for her. Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved
across to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it
knew not what statue--simply because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed
it so.

When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness
that the only one who really belonged there was Celia. She alone could
behave like one perfectly at home. It seemed entirely natural to the
others that she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her
portion of the house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and
keep such hours as pleased her instant whim. If she awakened them at
midnight by her piano, or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon,
they felt that it must be all right, since Celia did it. She had one
room furnished with only divans and huge, soft cushions, its walls
covered with large copies of statuary not too strictly clothed, which
she would suffer no one, not even the servants, to enter. Michael
fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped entrance to this sacred
chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but he would not have
spoken of it, even had he been sure. Old Jeremiah, whose established
habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household, covered
over round sums to Celia's separate banking account, upon the mere
playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of
questioning her.

That the step-mother had joy, or indeed anything but gall and wormwood,
out of all this is not to be pretended. There lingered along in the
recollection of the family some vague memories of her having tried to
assert an authority over Celia's comings and goings at the outset, but
they grouped themselves as only parts of the general disorder of moving
and settling, which a fort-night or so quite righted. Mrs. Madden
still permitted herself a certain license of hostile comment when her
step-daughter was not present, and listened with gratification to what
the women of her acquaintance ventured upon saying in the same spirit;
but actual interference or remonstrance she never offered nowadays.
The two rarely met, for that matter, and exchanged only the baldest and
curtest forms of speech.

Celia Madden interested all Octavius deeply. This she must have done
in any case, if only because she was the only daughter of its richest
citizen. But the bold, luxuriant quality of her beauty, the original
and piquant freedom of her manners, the stories told in gossip about
her lawlessness at home, her intellectual attainments, and artistic
vagaries--these were even more exciting. The unlikelihood of her
marrying any one--at least any Octavian--was felt to add a certain
romantic zest to the image she made on the local perceptions. There was
no visible young Irishman at all approaching the social and financial
standard of the Maddens; it was taken for granted that a mixed marriage
was quite out of the question in this case. She seemed to have more
business about the church than even the priest. She was always playing
the organ, or drilling the choir, or decorating the altars with flowers,
or looking over the robes of the acolytes for rents and stains, or going
in or out of the pastorate. Clearly this was not the sort of girl to
take a Protestant husband.

The gossip of the town concerning her was, however, exclusively
Protestant. The Irish spoke of her, even among themselves, but seldom.
There was no occasion for them to pretend to like her: they did not know
her, except in the most distant and formal fashion. Even the members of
the choir, of both sexes, had the sense of being held away from her
at haughty arm's length. No single parishioner dreamed of calling her
friend. But when they referred to her, it was always with a cautious and
respectful reticence. For one thing, she was the daughter of their chief
man, the man they most esteemed and loved. For another, reservations
they may have had in their souls about her touched close upon a
delicately sore spot. It could not escape their notice that their
Protestant neighbors were watching her with vigilant curiosity, and with
a certain tendency to wink when her name came into conversation along
with that of Father Forbes. It had never yet got beyond a tendency--the
barest fluttering suggestion of a tempted eyelid--but the whole Irish
population of the place felt themselves to be waiting, with clenched
fists but sinking hearts, for the wink itself.

The Rev. Theron Ware had not caught even the faintest hint of these
overtures to suspicion.

When he had entered the huge, dark, cool vault of the church, he could
see nothing at first but a faint light up over the gallery, far at the
other end. Then, little by little, his surroundings shaped themselves
out of the gloom. To his right was a rail and some broad steps rising
toward a softly confused mass of little gray vertical bars and the pale
twinkle of tiny spots of gilded reflection, which he made out in the
dusk to be the candles and trappings of the altar. Overhead the great
arches faded away from foundations of dimly discernible capitals
into utter blackness. There was a strange medicinal odor--as of cubeb
cigarettes--in the air.

After a little pause, he tiptoed noiselessly up the side aisle toward
the end of the church--toward the light above the gallery. This radiance
from a single gas-jet expanded as he advanced, and spread itself upward
over a burnished row of monster metal pipes, which went towering into
the darkness like giants. They were roaring at him now--a sonorous,
deafening, angry bellow, which made everything about him vibrate. The
gallery balustrade hid the keyboard and the organist from view. There
were only these jostling brazen tubes, as big round as trees and as
tall, trembling with their own furious thunder. It was for all the world
as if he had wandered into some vast tragical, enchanted cave, and was
being drawn against his will--like fascinated bird and python--toward
fate at the savage hands of these swollen and enraged genii.

He stumbled in the obscure light over a kneeling-bench, making a
considerable racket. On the instant the noise from the organ ceased, and
he saw the black figure of a woman rise above the gallery-rail and look
down.

“Who is it?” the indubitable voice of Miss Madden demanded sharply.

Theron had a sudden sheepish notion of turning and running. With the
best grace he could summon, he called out an explanation instead.

“Wait a minute. I'm through now. I'm coming down,” she returned. He
thought there was a note of amusement in her tone.

She came to him a moment later, accompanied by a thin, tall man, whom
Theron could barely see in the dark, now that the organ-light too was
gone. This man lighted a match or two to enable them to make their way
out.

When they were on the sidewalk, Celia spoke: “Walk on ahead, Michael!”
 she said. “I have some matters to speak of with Mr. Ware.”



CHAPTER X


“Well, what did you think of Dr. Ledsmar?”

The girl's abrupt question came as a relief to Theron. They were walking
along in a darkness so nearly complete that he could see next to nothing
of his companion. For some reason, this seemed to suggest a sort of
impropriety. He had listened to the footsteps of the man ahead--whom
he guessed to be a servant--and pictured him as intent upon getting up
early next morning to tell everybody that the Methodist minister had
stolen into the Catholic church at night to walk home with Miss Madden.
That was going to be very awkward--yes, worse than awkward! It might
mean ruin itself. She had mentioned aloud that she had matters to talk
over with him: that of course implied confidences, and the man might
put heaven only knew what construction on that. It was notorious that
servants did ascribe the very worst motives to those they worked for.
The bare thought of the delight an Irish servant would have in also
dragging a Protestant clergyman into the thing was sickening. And what
could she want to talk to him about, anyway? The minute of silence
stretched itself out upon his nerves into an interminable period of
anxious unhappiness. Her mention of the doctor at last somehow, seemed
to lighten the situation.

“Oh, I thought he was very smart.” he made haste to answer. “Wouldn't
it be better--to--keep close to your man? He--may--think we've gone some
other way.”

“It wouldn't matter if he did,” remarked Celia. She appeared to
comprehend his nervousness and take pity on it, for she added, “It is
my brother Michael, as good a soul as ever lived. He is quite used to my
ways.”

The Rev. Mr. Ware drew a long comforting breath. “Oh, I see! He went
with you to--bring you home.”

“To blow the organ,” said the girl in the dark, correctingly. “But about
that doctor; did you like him?”

“Well,” Theron began, “'like' is rather a strong word for so short
an acquaintance. He talked very well; that is, fluently. But he is so
different from any other man I have come into contact with that--”

“What I wanted you to say was that you hated him,” put in Celia, firmly.

“I don't make a practice of saying that of anybody,” returned Theron, so
much at his ease again that he put an effect of gentle, smiling reproof
into the words. “And why specially should I make an exception for him?”

“Because he's a beast!”

Theron fancied that he understood. “I noticed that he seemed not to have
much of an ear for music,” he commented, with a little laugh. “He shut
down the window when you began to play. His doing so annoyed me, because
I--I wanted very much to hear it all. I never heard such music before.
I--I came into the church to hear more of it; but then you stopped!”

“I will play for you some other time,” Celia said, answering the
reproach in his tone. “But tonight I wanted to talk with you instead.”

She kept silent, in spite of this, so long now that Theron was on the
point of jestingly asking when the talk was to begin. Then she put a
question abruptly--

“It is a conventional way of putting it, but are you fond of poetry, Mr.
Ware?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” replied Theron, much mystified. “I can't
say that I am any great judge; but I like the things that I like--and--”

“Meredith,” interposed Celia, “makes one of his women, Emilia in
England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in
cages, always going to one end and back again. Does it impress you that
way?”

“I don't know that it does,” said he, dubiously. It seemed, however,
to be her whim to talk literature, and he went on: “I've hardly read
Meredith at all. I once borrowed his 'Lucile,' but somehow I never got
interested in it. I heard a recitation of his once, though--a piece
about a dead wife, and the husband and another man quarrelling as to
whose portrait was in the locket on her neck, and of their going up to
settle the dispute, and finding that it was the likeness of a third man,
a young priest--and though it was very striking, it didn't give me a
thirst to know his other poems. I fancied I shouldn't like them. But
I daresay I was wrong. As I get older, I find that I take less narrow
views of literature--that is, of course, of light literature--and
that--that--”

Celia mercifully stopped him. “The reason I asked you was--” she began,
and then herself paused. “Or no,--never mind that--tell me something
else. Are you fond of pictures, statuary, the beautiful things of the
world? Do great works of art, the big achievements of the big artists,
appeal to you, stir you up?”

“Alas! that is something I can only guess at myself,” answered Theron,
humbly. “I have always lived in little places. I suppose, from your
point of view, I have never seen a good painting in my life. I can only
say this, though--that it has always weighed on my mind as a great and
sore deprivation, this being shut out from knowing what others mean when
they talk and write about art. Perhaps that may help you to get at what
you are after. If I ever went to New York, I feel that one of the first
things I should do would be to see all the picture galleries; is that
what you meant? And--would you mind telling me--why you--?”

“Why I asked you?” Celia supplied his halting question. “No, I DON'T
mind. I have a reason for wanting to know--to satisfy myself whether I
had guessed rightly or not--about the kind of man you are. I mean in the
matter of temperament and bent of mind and tastes.”

The girl seemed to be speaking seriously, and without intent to offend.
Theron did not find any comment ready, but walked along by her side,
wondering much what it was all about.

“I daresay you think me 'too familiar on short acquaintance,'” she
continued, after a little.

“My dear Miss Madden!” he protested perfunctorily.

“No; it is a matter of a good deal of importance,” she went on. “I can
see that you are going to be thrown into friendship, close contact, with
Father Forbes. He likes you, and you can't help liking him. There is
nobody else in this raw, overgrown, empty-headed place for you and him
TO like, nobody except that man, that Dr. Ledsmar. And if you like HIM,
I shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already. I am counting on
you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more. It would be
different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like
a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense. Of course, if you had been THAT
kind, we should never have got to know you at all. But when I saw you in
MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US--I mean a
MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy. I am talking very frankly to you,
you see. I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless,
bloodless science.”

“I feel myself very heartily on your side,” replied Theron. She had set
their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main
street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk. All his earlier
reservations had fled. It was almost as if she were a parishioner of
his own. “I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude
toward--toward revelation--was deeply repugnant to me. It doesn't make
it any the less hateful to call it science. I am afraid, though,” he
went on hesitatingly, “that there are difficulties in the way of my
helping, as you call it. You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist
minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference
out of the question.”

“No; that doesn't matter a button,” said Celia, lightly. “None of us
think of that at all.”

“There is the other embarrassment, then,” pursued Theron, diffidently,
“that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar--in all these
matters--than I am. How could I possibly hope to influence him by my
poor arguments? I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks
in--on these subjects, I mean.”

“Of course you don't!” interposed the girl, with a confidence which the
other, for all his meekness, rather winced under. “That wasn't what
I meant at all. We don't want arguments from our friends: we want
sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds. The right person's silence
is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from
anybody else. It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know;
it is your heart, and what you feel. You are full of poetry, of ideals,
of generous, unselfish impulses. You see the human, the warm-blooded
side of things. THAT is what is really valuable. THAT is how you can
help!”

“You overestimate me sadly,” protested Theron, though with considerable
tolerance for her error in his tone. “But you ought to tell me something
about this Dr. Ledsmar. He spoke of being an old friend of the pr--of
Father Forbes.”

“Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years. They
were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long
ago. Then they separated, I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they
parted. The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the
place he lives in. Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes
here--that was about three years ago,--and the two men after a while
renewed their old relations. They dine together; that is the doctor's
stronghold. He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I
believe. He studies it as you would study a language. He has taught
old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all
the Delmonicos. And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about
afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the
sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe
in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product
of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. It makes me sick!”

“I can readily see,” said Theron, with sympathy, “how such a cold,
material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an
essentially religious temperament like yours.”

Miss Madden looked up at him. They had turned into the main street, and
there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a
grin on her beautiful face.

“But I'm not religious at all, you know,” he heard her say. “I'm as
Pagan as--anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on;
I rather like them than otherwise. I can make them serve very well for
my own system; for I am myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.”

“Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,” the Rev. Mr.
Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by
the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing. Precisely where the
folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture
of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words.
She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step.
They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house.
Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized
them both.

“What I meant was,” the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again,
and speaking with patient slowness, “that I find myself much more in
sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful
and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is
taught nowadays. Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I
do in Peter. But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no
business to bother you with it. And for that matter, I oughtn't to have
troubled you with any of our--”

“I assure you, Miss Madden!” the young minister began, with fervor.

“No,” she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone; “let it all be
as if I hadn't spoken. Don't mind anything I have said. If it is to be,
it will be. You can't say more than that, can you?”

She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an
impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow
impelled to share. Things seemed all at once to have become very sad
indeed.

“It is one of my unhappy nights,” she explained, in gloomy confidence.
“I get them every once in a while--as if some vicious planet or other
was crossing in front of my good star--and then I'm a caution to snakes.
I shut myself up--that's the only thing to do--and have it out with
myself I didn't know but the organ-music would calm me down, but it
hasn't. I shan't sleep a wink tonight, but just rage around from one
room to another, piling all the cushions from the divans on to the
floor, and then kicking them away again. Do YOU ever have fits like
that?”

Theron was able to reply with a good conscience in the negative. It
occurred to him to add, with jocose intent: “I am curious to know,
do these fits, as you call them, occupy a prominent part in Grecian
philosophy as a general rule?”

Celia gave a little snort, which might have signified amusement, but did
not speak until they were upon her own sidewalk. “There is my brother,
waiting at the gate,” she said then, briefly.

“Well, then, I will bid you good-night here, I think,” Theron remarked,
coming to a halt, and offering his hand. “It must be getting very
late, and my--that is--I have to be up particularly early tomorrow. So
good-night; I hope you will be feeling ever so much better in spirits in
the morning.”

“Oh, that doesn't matter,” replied the girl, listlessly. “It's a very
paltry little affair, this life of ours, at the best of it. Luckily it's
soon done with--like a bad dream.”

“Tut! Tut! I won't have you talk like that!” interrupted Theron, with a
swift and smart assumption of authority. “Such talk isn't sensible, and
it isn't good. I have no patience with it!”

“Well, try and have a little patience with ME, anyway, just for
tonight,” said Celia, taking the reproof with gentlest humility, rather
to her censor's surprise. “I really am unhappy tonight, Mr. Ware, very
unhappy. It seems as if all at once the world had swelled out in size
a thousandfold, and that poor me had dwindled down to the merest wee
little red-headed atom--the most helpless and forlorn and lonesome of
atoms at that.” She seemed to force a sorrowful smile on her face as she
added: “But all the same it has done me good to be with you--I am sure
it has--and I daresay that by tomorrow I shall be quite out of the
blues. Good-night, Mr. Ware. Forgive my making such an exhibition of
myself I WAS going to be such a fine early Greek, you know, and I have
turned out only a late Milesian--quite of the decadence. I shall do
better next time. And good-night again, and ever so many thanks.”

She was walking briskly away toward the gate now, where the shadowy
Michael still patiently stood. Theron strode off in the opposite
direction, taking long, deliberate steps, and bowing his head in
thought. He had his hands behind his back, as was his wont, and the
sense of their recent contact with her firm, ungloved hands was,
curiously enough, the thing which pushed itself uppermost in his mind.
There had been a frank, almost manly vigor in her grasp; he said
to himself that of course that came from her playing so much on the
keyboard; the exercise naturally would give her large, robust hands.

Suddenly he remembered about the piano; he had quite forgotten to
solicit her aid in selecting it. He turned, upon the impulse, to go
back. She had not entered the gate as yet, but stood, shiningly visible
under the street lamp, on the sidewalk, and she was looking in his
direction. He turned again like a shot, and started homeward.

The front door of the parsonage was unlocked, and he made his way on
tiptoe through the unlighted hall to the living-room. The stuffy air
here was almost suffocating with the evil smell of a kerosene
lamp turned down too low. Alice sat asleep in her old farmhouse
rocking-chair, with 

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