She took his arm, and they retraced their steps along the path, again in silence. The labored noise of the orchestra, as it were, returned to meet them. They halted at an intersecting footpath.
“I go back to my slavery—my double bondage,” said Theron, letting his voice sink to a sigh. “But even if I am put on the rack for it, I shall have had one day of glory.”
“I think you may kiss me, in memory of that one day—or of a few minutes in that day,” said Celia.
Their lips brushed each other in a swift, almost perfunctory caress.
Theron went his way at a hurried pace, the sobered tones of her “good-bye” beating upon his brain with every measure of the droning waltz-music.
The memory of the kiss abode with Theron. Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his brain its slave.
Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course. All along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore him sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss to another. Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort of sunlit wonderland. He preached his sermon in the morning, and took his appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening, apparently to everybody's satisfaction: to him it was all a vision.
When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified the clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could have groaned with the burden of his joy. He went out alone into the light, and bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time. In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest and soulful thanksgiving. The impulse to kneel, there in the pure, tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost in his mind. Some formless resignation restrained him from the act itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad luminous face of the satellite. “You are our God,” he murmured. “Hers and mine! You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of the angels on earth. I am speechless with reverence for you both.”
It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of sylvan mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers and water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen before—a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal skies. His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of the fairy that possessed his soul. The place, though he never found it, became real to him. As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave forth light.
With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account of realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds of nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to all these facts.
What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait. He waited for a week—then for another week. The conclusion that the initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind. From this it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things stood out in special prominence. One was that Celia loved him. The other was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting this to be true.
And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of contemplating her as Miss Madden. She had kissed him, and she was very rich. The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes. He tried a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time reined up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a creature of whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all things.
And as to the boy. If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist to it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and foul innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him. What would happen to him if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up in the Discipline. Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a charge, it would be one of immorality. They could prove nothing; there was nothing to prove. At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder. Or if these narrow bigots confused slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to convict him, then it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry, in advance of his condemnation. His relation to the church would be the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer world it would be different. And supposing he did withdraw from the ministry?
Yes; this was the important point. What if he did abandon this mistaken profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious, unthinkable. But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side? For some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question. The thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave him a sinking heart. He tried to imagine himself lecturing, canvassing for books or insurance policies, writing for newspapers—and remained frightened. But suddenly one day it occurred to him that these qualms and forebodings were sheer folly. Was not Celia rich? Would she not with lightning swiftness draw forth that check-book, like the flashing sword of a champion from its scabbard, and run to his relief? Why, of course. It was absurd not to have thought of that before.
He recalled her momentary anger with him, that afternoon in the woods, when he had cried out that discovery would mean ruin to him. He saw clearly enough now that she had been grieved at his want of faith in her protection. In his flurry of fright, he had lost sight of the fact that, if exposure and trouble came to him, she would naturally feel that she had been the cause of his martyrdom. It was plain enough now. If he got into hot water, it would be solely on account of his having been seen with her. He had walked into the woods with her—“the further the better” had been her own words—out of pure kindliness, and the desire to lead her away from the scene of her brother's and her own humiliation. But why amplify arguments? Her own warm heart would tell her, on the instant, how he had been sacrificed for her sake, and would bring her, eager and devoted, to his succor.
That was all right, then. Slowly, from this point, suggestions expanded themselves. The future could be, if he willed it, one long serene triumph of love, and lofty intellectual companionship, and existence softened and enriched at every point by all that wealth could command, and the most exquisite tastes suggest. Should he will it! Ah! the question answered itself. But he could not enter upon this beckoning heaven of a future until he had freed himself. When Celia said to him, “Come!” he must not be in the position to reply, “I should like to, but unfortunately I am tied by the leg.” He should have to leave Octavius, leave the ministry, leave everything. He could not begin too soon to face these contingencies.
Very likely Celia had not thought it out as far as this. With her, it was a mere vague “sometime I may.” But the harder masculine sense, Theron felt, existed for the very purpose of correcting and giving point to these loose feminine notions of time and space. It was for him to clear away the obstacles, and map the plans out with definite decision.
One warm afternoon, as he lolled in his easy-chair under the open window of his study, musing upon the ever-shifting phases of this vast, complicated, urgent problem, some chance words from the sidewalk in front came to his ears, and, coming, remained to clarify his thoughts.
Two ladies whose voices were strange to him had stopped—as so many people almost daily stopped—to admire the garden of the parsonage. One of them expressed her pleasure in general terms. Said the other—
“My husband declares those dahlias alone couldn't be matched for thirty dollars, and that some of those gladiolus must have cost three or four dollars apiece. I know we've spent simply oceans of money on our garden, and it doesn't begin to compare with this.”
“It seems like a sinful waste to me,” said her companion.
“No-o,” the other hesitated. “No, I don't think quite that—if you can afford it just as well as not. But it does seem to me that I'd rather live in a little better house, and not spend it ALL on flowers. Just LOOK at that cactus!”
The voices died away. Theron sat up, with a look of arrested thought upon his face, then sprang to his feet and moved hurriedly through the parlor to an open front window. Peering out with caution he saw that the two women receding from view were fashionably dressed and evidently came from homes of means. He stared after them in a blank way until they turned a corner.
He went into the hall then, put on his frock-coat and hat, and stepped out into the garden. He was conscious of having rather avoided it heretofore—not altogether without reasons of his own, lying unexamined somewhere in the recesses of his mind. Now he walked slowly about, and examined the flowers with great attentiveness. The season was advancing, and he saw that many plants had gone out of bloom. But what a magnificent plenitude of blossoms still remained!
Thirty dollars' worth of dahlias—that was what the stranger had said. Theron hardly brought himself to credit the statement; but all the same it was apparent to even his uninformed eye that these huge, imbricated, flowering masses, with their extraordinary half-colors, must be unusual. He remembered that the boy in Gorringe's office had spoken of just one lot of plants costing thirty-one dollars and sixty cents, and there had been two other lots as well. The figures remained surprisingly distinct in his memory. It was no good deceiving himself any longer: of course these were the plants that Gorringe had spent his money upon, here all about him.
As he surveyed them with a sour regard, a cool breeze stirred across the garden. The tall, over-laden flower-spikes of gladioli bent and nodded at him; the hollyhocks and flaming alvias, the clustered blossoms on the standard roses, the delicately painted lilies on their stilt-like stems, fluttered in the wind, and seemed all bowing satirically to him. “Yes, Levi Gorringe paid for us!” He almost heard their mocking declaration.
Out in the back-yard, where a longer day of sunshine dwelt, there were many other flowers, and notably a bed of geraniums which literally made the eye ache. Standing at this rear corner of the house, he caught the droning sound of Alice's voice, humming a hymn to herself as she went about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they had spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even praised his sermon upon the Sabbath-question, which every one else had been in raptures over. For that matter she no longer praised anything he did, and took obvious pains to preserve toward him a distant demeanor. So much the better, he felt himself thinking. If she chose to behave in that offish and unwifely fashion, she could blame no one but herself for its results.
She had seen him, and came now to the window, watering-pot and broom in hand. She put her head out, to breathe a breath of dustless air, and began as if she would smile on him. Then her face chilled and stiffened, as she caught his look.
“Shall you be home for supper?” she asked, in her iciest tone.
He had not thought of going out before. The question, and the manner of it, gave immediate urgency to the idea of going somewhere. “I may or I may not,” he replied. “It is quite impossible for me to say.” He turned on his heel with this, and walked briskly out of the yard and down the street.
It was the most natural thing that presently he should be strolling past the Madden house, and letting a covert glance stray over its front and the grounds about it, as he loitered along. Every day since his return from the woods he had given the fates this chance of bringing Celia to meet him, without avail. He had hung about in the vicinity of the Catholic church on several evenings as well, but to no purpose. The organ inside was dumb, and he could detect no signs of Celia's presence on the curtains of the pastorate next door. This day, too, there was no one visible at the home of the Maddens, and he walked on, a little sadly. It was weary work waiting for the signal that never came.
But there were compensations. His mind reverted doggedly to the flowers in his garden, and to Alice's behavior toward him. They insisted upon connecting themselves in his thoughts. Why should Levi Gorringe, a money-lender, and therefore the last man in the world to incur reckless expenditure, go and buy perhaps a hundred dollars, worth of flowers for his wife's garden? It was time—high time—to face this question. And his experiencing religion afterward, just when Alice did, and marching down to the rail to kneel beside her—that was a thing to be thought of, too.
Meditation, it is true, hardly threw fresh light upon the matter. It was incredible, of course, that there should be anything wrong. To even shape a thought of Alice in connection with gallantry would be wholly impossible. Nor could it be said that Gorringe, in his new capacity as a professing church-member, had disclosed any sign of ulterior motives, or of insincerity. Yet there the facts were. While Theron pondered them, their mystery, if they involved a mystery, baffled him altogether. But when he had finished, he found himself all the same convinced that neither Alice nor Gorringe would be free to blame him for anything he might do. He had grounds for complaint against them. If he did not himself know just what these grounds were, it was certain enough that THEY knew. Very well, then, let them take the responsibility for what happened.
It was indeed awkward that at the moment, as Theron chanced to emerge temporarily from his brown-study, his eyes fell full upon the spare, well-knit form of Levi Gorringe himself, standing only a few feet away, in the staircase entrance to his law office. His lean face, browned by the summer's exposure, had a more Arabian aspect than ever. His hands were in his pockets, and he held an unlighted cigar between his teeth. He looked the Rev. Mr. Ware over calmly, and nodded recognition.
Theron had halted instinctively. On the instant he would have given a great deal not to have stopped at all. It was stupid of him to have paused, but it would not do now to go on without words of some sort. He moved over to the door-way, and made a half-hearted pretence of looking at the photographs in one of the show-cases at its side. As Mr. Gorringe did not take his hands from his pockets, there was no occasion for any formal greeting.
“I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,” Theron remarked after a minute's silence, still bending in examination of the photographs.
“They ought to; they charge New York prices,” observed the lawyer, sententiously.
Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his trustee.
“Speaking of the price of things,” he said, with an effort of arrogance in his measured tone, “I have never had an opportunity before of mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for my—for MY garden.”
“Why mention it now?” queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
“Because—” began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated—“because—well, it raises a question of my being under obligation, which I—”
“Oh, no, sir,” said the lawyer; “put that out of your mind. You are no more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy about that. Neither of us owes the other anything.”
“Not even good-will—I take that to be your meaning,” retorted Theron, with some heat.
“The words are yours, sir,” responded Gorringe, coolly. “I do not object to them.”
“As you like,” put in the other. “If it be so, why, then all the more reason why I should, under the circumstances—”
“Under what circumstances?” interposed the lawyer. “Let us be clear about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?”
He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the black mustache.
“The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on.”
“And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general—and you in particular—were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out of date?”
“I understand your sneer well enough,” retorted Theron, “but that can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these plants—or to smuggle them in—but never once deigned to hint to me that you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not have known to this day where they came from.”
Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim amusement about the corner of his mouth. “I should have thought,” he said with dry deliberation, “that possibly this fact might have raised in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be intended for you at all.”
“That is precisely it, sir,” said Theron. There were people passing, and he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he felt, to shout. “That is it—they were not intended for me.”
“Well, then, what are you talking about?” The lawyer's speech had become abrupt almost to incivility.
“I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,” said the minister, with dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion. It occurred to him to add, “Please remember that I am not in the witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional.”
Gorringe studied Theron's face attentively with a cold, searching scrutiny. “You may thank your stars you're not!” he said, with significance.
What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting away.
“I do not see,” he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to take on an injured and plaintive inflection—“I do not see why you should adopt this tone toward me—Brother Gorringe.”
The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
“If I have unconsciously offended you in any way,” Theron went on, “I beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between a pastor and a probationer who—”
“No,” Gorringe broke in; “quarrel isn't the word for it. There isn't any quarrel, Mr. Ware.” He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Working-men with dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, “It wouldn't be worth any grown man's while to quarrel with so poor a creature as you are.”
Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
“I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,” he remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough the blank vacancy of his mind. The suggestion that anybody deemed him a “poor creature” grew more astounding, incomprehensible, as it swelled in his brain.
“No, I suppose not,” snapped Gorringe. “You're not the sort to stand up to men; your form is to go round the corner and take it out of somebody weaker than yourself—a defenceless woman, for instance.”
“Oh—ho!” said Theron. The exclamation had uttered itself. The sound of it seemed to clarify his muddled thoughts; and as they ranged themselves in order, he began to understand. “Oh—ho!” he said again, and nodded his head in token of comprehension.
The lawyer, chewing his cigar with increased activity, glared at him. “What do you mean?” he demanded peremptorily.
“Mean?” said the minister. “Oh, nothing that I feel called upon to explain to you.”
It was passing strange, but his self-possession had all at once returned to him. As it became more apparent that the lawyer was losing his temper, Theron found the courage to turn up the corners of his lips in show of a bitter little smile of confidence. He looked into the other's dusky face, and flaunted this smile at it in contemptuous defiance. “It is not a subject that I can discuss with propriety—at this stage,” he added.
“Damn you! Are you talking about those flowers?”
“Oh, I am not talking about anything in particular,” returned Theron, “not even the curious choice of language which my latest probationer seems to prefer.”
“Go and strike my name off the list!” said Gorringe, with rising passion. “I was a fool to ever have it there. To think of being a probationer of yours—my God!”
“That will be a pity—from one point of view,” remarked Theron, still with the ironical smile on his lips. “You seemed to enter upon the new life with such deliberation and fixity of purpose, too! I can imagine the regrets your withdrawal will cause, in certain quarters. I only hope that it will not discourage those who accompanied you to the altar, and shared your enthusiasm at the time.” He had spoken throughout with studied slowness and an insolent nicety of utterance.
“You had better go away!” broke forth Gorringe. “If you don't, I shall forget myself.”
“For the first time?” asked Theron. Then, warned by the flash in the lawyer's eye, he turned on his heel and sauntered, with a painstaking assumption of a mind quite at ease, up the street.
Gorringe's own face twitched and his veins tingled as he looked after him. He spat the shapeless cigar out of his mouth into the gutter, and, drawing forth another from his pocket, clenched it between his teeth, his gaze following the tall form of the Methodist minister till it was merged in the crowd.
“Well, I'm damned!” he said aloud to himself.
The photographer had come down to take in his showcases for the night. He looked up from his task at the exclamation, and grinned inquiringly.
“I've just been talking to a man,” said the lawyer, “who's so much meaner than any other man I ever heard of that it takes my breath away. He's got a wife that's as pure and good as gold, and he knows it, and she worships the ground he walks on, and he knows that too. And yet the scoundrel is around trying to sniff out some shadow of a pretext for misusing her worse than he's already done. Yes, sir; he'd be actually tickled to death if he could nose up some hint of a scandal about her—something that he could pretend to believe, and work for his own advantage to levy blackmail, or get rid of her, or whatever suited his book. I didn't think there was such an out-and-out cur on this whole footstool. I almost wish, by God, I'd thrown him into the canal!”
“Yes, you lawyers must run against some pretty snide specimens,” remarked the photographer, lifting one of the cases from its sockets.
Theron spent half an hour in aimless strolling about the streets. From earliest boyhood his mind had always worked most clearly when he walked alone. Every mental process which had left a mark upon his memory and his career—the daydreams of future academic greatness and fame which had fashioned themselves in his brain as a farm lad; the meditations, raptures, and high resolves of his student period at the seminary; the more notable sermons and powerful discourse by which he had revealed the genius that was in him to astonished and delighted assemblages—all were associated in his retrospective thoughts with solitary rambles.
He had a very direct and vivid consciousness now that it was good to be on his legs, and alone. He had never in his life been more sensible of the charm of his own companionship. The encounter with Gorringe seemed to have cleared all the clouds out of his brain, and restored lightness to his heart. After such an object lesson, the impossibility of his continuing to sacrifice himself to a notion of duty to these low-minded and coarse-natured villagers was beyond all argument. There could no longer be any doubt about his moral right to turn his back upon them, to wash his hands of the miserable combination of hypocrisy and hysterics which they called their spiritual life.
And the question of Gorringe and Alice, that too stood precisely where he wanted it. Even in his own thoughts, he preferred to pursue it no further. Between them somewhere an offence of concealment, it might be of conspiracy, had been committed against him. It was no business of his to say more, or to think more. He rested his case simply on the fact, which could not be denied, and which he was not in the least interested to have explained, one way or the other. The recollection of Gorringe's obvious disturbance of mind was especially pleasant to him. He himself had been magnanimous almost to the point of weakness. He had gone out of his way to call the man “brother,” and to give him an opportunity of behaving like a gentleman; but his kindly forbearance had been wasted. Gorringe was not the man to understand generous feelings, much less rise to their level. He had merely shown that he would be vicious if he knew how. It was more important and satisfactory to recall that he had also shown a complete comprehension of the injured husband's grievance. The fact that he had recognized it was enough—was, in fact, everything.
In the background of his thoughts Theron had carried along a notion of going and dining with Father Forbes when the time for the evening meal should arrive. The idea in itself attracted him, as a fitting capstone to his resolve not to go home to supper. It gave just the right kind of character to his domestic revolt. But when at last he stood on the doorstep of the pastorate, waiting for an answer to the tinkle of the electric bell he had heard ring inside, his mind contained only the single thought that now he should hear something about Celia. Perhaps he might even find her there; but he put that suggestion aside as slightly unpleasant.
The hag-faced housekeeper led him, as before, into the dining-room. It was still daylight, and he saw on the glance that the priest was alone at the table, with a book beside him to read from as he ate.
Father Forbes rose and came forward, greeting his visitor with profuse urbanity and smiles. If there was a perfunctory note in the invitation to sit down and share the meal, Theron did not catch it. He frankly displayed his pleasure as he laid aside his hat, and took the chair opposite his host.
“It is really only a few months since I was here, in this room, before,” he remarked, as the priest closed his book and tossed it to one side, and the housekeeper came in to lay another place. “Yet it might have been years, many long years, so tremendous is the difference that the lapse of time has wrought in me.”
“I am afraid we have nothing to tempt you very much, Mr. Ware,” remarked Father Forbes, with a gesture of his plump white hand which embraced the dishes in the centre of the table. “May I send you a bit of this boiled mutton? I have very homely tastes when I am by myself.”
“I was saying,” Theron observed, after some moments had passed in silence, “that I date such a tremendous revolution in my thoughts, my beliefs, my whole mind and character, from my first meeting with you, my first coming here. I don't know how to describe to you the enormous change that has come over me; and I owe it all to you.”
“I can only hope, then, that it is entirely of a satisfactory nature,” said the priest, politely smiling.
“Oh, it is so splendidly satisfactory!” said Theron, with fervor. “I look back at myself now with wonder and pity. It seems incredible that, such a little while ago, I should have been such an ignorant and unimaginative clod of earth, content with such petty ambitions and actually proud of my limitations.”
“And you have larger ambitions now?” asked the other. “Pray let me help you to some potatoes. I am afraid that ambitions only get in our way and trip us up. We clergymen are like street-car horses. The more steadily we jog along between the rails, the better it is for us.”
“Oh, I don't intend to remain in the ministry,” declared Theron. The statement seemed to him a little bald, now that he had made it; and as his companion lifted his brows in surprise, he added stumblingly: “That is, as I feel now, it seems to me impossible that I should remain much longer. With you, of course, it is different. You have a thousand things to interest and pleasantly occupy you in your work and its ceremonies, so that mere belief or non-belief in the dogma hardly matters. But in our church dogma is everything. If you take that away, or cease to have its support, the rest is intolerable, hideous.”
Father Forbes cut another slice of mutton for himself. “It is a pretty serious business to make such a change at your time of life. I take it for granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit yourself.” He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
“Oh, yes,”, Theron made answer; “I shall do nothing rash. But I have a good many plans for the future.”
Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of silence fell upon the table.
“I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,” Theron ventured, at last. “I have not seen any of you since then.”
The priest shook his head and sighed. “No,” he said. “It is a bad business. I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past fortnight. That young man who was rude to you—of course it was mere drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part—has got himself into a serious scrape, I'm afraid. It is being kept quite within the family, and we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly upset his father and his sister. But that, after all, is not so hard to bear as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens. You remember Michael, the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself. He has been seized with quick consumption. He will hardly last till snow flies.”
“Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!” Theron spoke with tremulous earnestness. It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to him.
“It is very hard upon them all,” the priest went on. “Michael is as sweet and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of. He is the apple of his father's eye. They were inseparable, those two. Do you know the father, Mr. Madden?”
Theron shook his head. “I think I have seen him,” he said. “A small man, with gray whiskers.”
“A peasant,” said Father Forbes, “but with a heart of gold. Poor man! he has had little enough out of his riches. Ah, the West Coast people, what tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live in. The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost. Whole families go. I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children in the cemetery. If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year, there would have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth. These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens, you know.”
“I didn't know,” said Theron. “It is very strange—and very sad.” His startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
“The sister—Miss Madden—seems extremely strong,” he remarked tentatively.
“Celia may escape the general doom,” said the priest. His guest noted that he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and that his gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its tone. “THAT would be too dreadful to think of,” he added.
Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the thought.
“She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,” the priest proceeded, “and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little nervous about her. I have been urging her to go away and get a change of air and scene, if only for a few days. She does not sleep well, and that is always a bad thing.”
“I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless spells,” said Theron. “She said that then she banged on her piano at all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman. A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?”
Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips. “What, our Celia?” he said. “Interesting! Why, Mr. Ware, there is no one like her in the world. She is as unique as—what shall I say?—as the Irish are among races. Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she—she might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly rather under-witted than otherwise. She always impresses me as a sort of atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best. There in Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines. They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism. Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it. Their religion is full of it; their blood is full of it; our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else. The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her. They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan. These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood. When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them all.”
Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration. “I love to hear you talk,” he said simply.
An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind. Those were the very words that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days. How curious it was! He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially impressive masculine personality. It was indeed strange that this soft-voiced, portly creature in a gown, with his white, fat hands and his feline suavity of manner, should produce such a commanding and unique effect of virility. No doubt this was a part of the great sex mystery which historically surrounded the figure of the celibate priest as with an atmosphere. Women had always been prostrating themselves before it. Theron, watching his companion's full, pallid face in the lamp-light, tried to fancy himself in the priest's place, looking down upon these worshipping female forms. He wondered what the celibate's attitude really was. The enigma fascinated him.
Father Forbes, after his rhetorical outburst, had been eating. He pushed aside his cheese-plate. “I grow enthusiastic on the subject of my race sometimes,” he remarked, with the suggestion of an apology. “But I make up for it other times—most of the time—by scolding them. If it were not such a noble thing to be an Irishman, it would be ridiculous.”
“Ah,” said Theron, deprecatingly, “who would not be enthusiastic in talking of Miss Madden? What you said about her was perfect. As you spoke, I was thinking how proud and thankful we ought to be for the privilege of knowing her—we who do know her well—although of course your friendship with her is vastly more intimate than mine—than mine could ever hope to be.”
The priest offered no comment, and Theron went on: “I hardly know how to describe the remarkable impression she makes upon me. I can't imagine to myself any other young woman so brilliant or broad in her views, or so courageous. Of course, her being so rich makes it easier for her to do just what she wants to do, but her bravery is astonishing all the same. We had a long and very sympathetic talk in the woods, that day of the picnic, after we left you. I don't know whether she spoke to you about it?”
Father Forbes made a movement of the head and eyes which seemed to negative the suggestion.
“Her talk,” continued Theron, “gave me quite new ideas of the range and capacity of the female mind. I wonder that everybody in Octavius isn't full of praise and admiration for her talents and exceptional character. In such a small town as this, you would think she would be the centre of attention—the pride of the place.”
“I think she has as much praise as is good for her,” remarked the priest, quietly.
“And here's a thing that puzzles me,” pursued Mr. Ware. “I was immensely surprised to find that Dr. Ledsmar doesn't even think she is smart—or at least he professes the utmost intellectual contempt for her, and says he dislikes her into the bargain. But of course she dislikes him, too, so that's only natural. But I can't understand his denying her great ability.”
The priest smiled in a dubious way. “Don't borrow unnecessary alarm about that, Mr. Ware,” he said, with studied smoothness of modulated tones. “These two good friends of mine have much enjoyment out of the idea that they are fighting for the mastery over my poor unstable character. It has grown to be a habit with them, and a hobby as well, and they pursue it with tireless zest. There are not many intellectual diversions open to us here, and they make the most of this one. It amuses them, and it is not without its charms for me, in my capacity as an interested observer. It is a part of the game that they should pretend to themselves that they detest each other. In reality I fancy that they like each other very much. At any rate, there is nothing to be disturbed about.”
His mellifluous tones had somehow the effect of suggesting to Theron that he was an outsider and would better mind his own business. Ah, if this purring pussy-cat of a priest only knew how little of an outsider he really was! The thought gave him an easy self-control.
“Of course,” he said, “our warm mutual friendship makes the observation of these little individual vagaries merely a part of a delightful whole. I should not dream of discussing Miss Madden's confidences to me, or the doctor's either, outside our own little group.”
Father Forbes reached behind him and took from a chair his black three-cornered cap with the tassel. “Unfortunately I have a sick call waiting me,” he said, gathering up his gown and slowly rising.
“Yes, I saw the man sitting in the hall,” remarked Theron, getting to his feet.
“I would ask you to go upstairs and wait,” the priest went on, “but my return, unhappily, is quite uncertain. Another evening I may be more fortunate. I am leaving town tomorrow for some days, but when I get back—”
The polite sentence did not complete itself. Father Forbes had come out into the hall, giving a cool nod to the working-man, who rose from the bench as they passed, and shook hands with his guest on the doorstep.
When the door had closed upon Mr. Ware, the priest turned to the man. “You have come about those frames,” he said. “If you will come upstairs, I will show you the prints, and you can give me a notion of what can be done with them. I rather fancy the idea of a triptych in carved old English, if you can manage it.”
After the workman had gone away, Father Forbes put on slippers and an old loose soutane, lighted a cigar, and, pushing an easy-chair over to the reading lamp, sat down with a book. Then something occurred to him, and he touched the house-bell at his elbow.
“Maggie,” he said gently, when the housekeeper appeared at the door, “I will have the coffee and FINE CHAMPAGNE up here, if it is no trouble. And—oh, Maggie—I was compelled this evening to turn the blameless visit of the framemaker into a venial sin, and that involves a needless wear and tear of conscience. I think that—hereafter—you understand?—I am not invariably at home when the Rev. Mr. Ware does me the honor to call.”