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CHAPTER XVII


"Well, I did what you told me to do," Theron Ware remarked
to Sister Soulsby, when at last they found themselves
alone in the sitting-room after the midday meal.

It had taken not a little strategic skirmishing to
secure the room to themselves for the hospitable Alice,
much touched by the thought of her new friend's departure
that very evening had gladly proposed to let all the work
stand over until night, and devote herself entirely
to Sister Soulsby.  When, finally, Brother Soulsby
conceived and deftly executed the coup of interesting
her in the budding of roses, and then leading her off
into the garden to see with her own eyes how it was done,
Theron had a sense of being left alone with a conspirator.
The notion impelled him to plunge at once into the heart
of their mystery.

"I did what you told me to do," he repeated, looking up
from his low easy-chair to where she sat by the desk;
"and I dare say you won't be surprised when I add that I
have no respect for myself for doing it."

"And yet you would go and do it right over again, eh?"
the woman said, in bright, pert tones, nodding her head,
and smiling at him with roguish, comprehending eyes.
"Yes, that's the way we're built.  We spend our lives doing
that sort of thing."

"I don't know that you would precisely grasp my meaning,"
said the young minister, with a polite effort in his
words to mask the untoward side of the suggestion.
"It is a matter of conscience with me; and I am pained
and shocked at myself."

Sister Soulsby drummed for an absent moment with her thin,
nervous fingers on the desk-top. "I guess maybe you'd
better go and lie down again," she said gently.
"You're a sick man, still, and it's no good your worrying
your head just now with things of this sort.  You'll see
them differently when you're quite yourself again."

"No, no," pleaded Theron.  "Do let us have our talk out!
I'm all right.  My mind is clear as a bell.  Truly, I've
really counted on this talk with you."

"But there's something else to talk about, isn't there,
besides--besides your conscience?" she asked.
Her eyes bent upon him a kindly pressure as she spoke,
which took all possible harshness from her meaning.

Theron answered the glance rather than her words.
"I know that you are my friend," he said simply.

Sister Soulsby straightened herself, and looked down upon
him with a new intentness.  "Well, then," she began,
"let's thrash this thing out right now, and be done with it.
You say it's hurt your conscience to do just one little
hundredth part of what there was to be done here.
Ask yourself what you mean by that.  Mind, I'm not quarrelling,
and I'm not thinking about anything except just your own
state of mind.  You think you soiled your hands by doing
what you did.  That is to say, you wanted ALL the dirty
work done by other people.  That's it, isn't it?"

"The Rev. Mr. Ware sat up, in turn, and looked doubtingly
into his companion's face.

"Oh, we were going to be frank, you know," she added,
with a pleasant play of mingled mirth and honest liking
in her eyes.

"No," he said, picking his words, "my point would
rather be that--that there ought not to have been any
of what you yourself call this--this 'dirty work.'
THAT is my feeling."

"Now we're getting at it," said Sister Soulsby, briskly.
"My dear friend, you might just as well say that potatoes
are unclean and unfit to eat because manure is put
into the ground they grow in.  Just look at the case.
Your church here was running behind every year.
Your people had got into a habit of putting in nickels
instead of dimes, and letting you sweat for the difference.
That's a habit, like tobacco, or biting your fingernails,
or anything else.  Either you were all to come to smash here,
or the people had to be shaken up, stood on their heads,
broken of their habit.  It's my business--mine and Soulsby's--
to do that sort of thing.  We came here and we did it--
did it up brown, too.  We not only raised all the money
the church needs, and to spare, but I took a personal shine
to you, and went out of my way to fix up things for you.
It isn't only the extra hundred dollars, but the whole
tone of the congregation is changed toward you now.
You'll see that they'll be asking to have you back here,
next spring.  And you're solid with your Presiding Elder,
too.  Well, now, tell me straight--is that worth while,
or not?"

"I've told you that I am very grateful," answered the
minister, "and I say it again, and I shall never be tired
of repeating it.  But--but it was the means I had in mind."

"Quite so," rejoined the sister, patiently.  "If you saw
the way a hotel dinner was cooked, you wouldn't be able
to stomach it.  Did you ever see a play?  In a theatre,
I mean.  I supposed not.  But you'll understand when I say
that the performance looks one way from where the audience sit,
and quite a different way when you are behind the scenes.
THERE you see that the trees and houses are cloth,
and the moon is tissue paper, and the flying fairy is a
middle-aged woman strung up on a rope.  That doesn't prove
that the play, out in front, isn't beautiful and affecting,
and all that.  It only shows that everything in this
world is produced by machinery--by organization.
The trouble is that you've been let in on the stage,
behind the scenes, so to speak, and you're so green--
if you'll pardon me--that you want to sit down and cry
because the trees ARE cloth, and the moon IS a lantern.
And I say, don't be such a goose!"

"I see what you mean," Theron said, with an answering smile.
He added, more gravely, "All the same, the Winch business
seems to me--"

"Now the Winch business is my own affair," Sister Soulsby
broke in abruptly.  I take all the responsibility for that.
You need know nothing about it.  You simply voted as you
did on the merits of the case as he presented them--
that's all."

"But--" Theron began, and then paused.  Something had occurred
to him, and he knitted his brows to follow its course
of expansion in his mind.  Suddenly he raised his head.
"Then you arranged with Winch to make those bogus offers--
just to lead others on?" he demanded.

Sister Soulsby's large eyes beamed down upon him in reply,
at first in open merriment, then more soberly, till their
regard was almost pensive.

"Let us talk of something else," she said.  "All that is
past and gone.  It has nothing to do with you, anyway.
I've got some advice to give you about keeping up this
grip you've got on your people."

The young minister had risen to his feet while she spoke.
He put his hands in his pockets, and with rounded shoulders
began slowly pacing the room.  After a turn or two he came
to the desk, and leaned against it.

"I doubt if it's worth while going into that," he said,
in the solemn tone of one who feels that an irrevocable thing
is being uttered.  She waited to hear more, apparently.
"I think I shall go away--give up the ministry," he added.

Sister Soulsby's eyes revealed no such shock of consternation
as he, unconsciously, had looked for.  They remained quite calm;
and when she spoke, they deepened, to fit her speech,
with what he read to be a gaze of affectionate melancholy--
one might say pity.  She shook her head slowly.

"No--don't let any one else hear you say that," she replied.
"My poor young friend, it's no good to even think it.
The real wisdom is to school yourself to move along smoothly,
and not fret, and get the best of what's going.  I've known
others who felt as you do--of course there are times
when every young man of brains and high notions feels
that way--but there's no help for it.  Those who tried
to get out only broke themselves.  Those who stayed in,
and made the best of it--well, one of them will be a bishop
in another ten years."

Theron had started walking again.  "But the moral degradation
of it!" he snapped out at her over his shoulder.
"I'd rather earn the meanest living, at an honest trade,
and be free from it."

"That may all be," responded Sister Soulsby.  "But it isn't
a question of what you'd rather do.  It's what you can do.
How could you earn a living?  What trade or business do you
suppose you could take up now, and get a living out of?
Not one, my man, not one."

Theron stopped and stared at her.  This view of his
capabilities came upon him with the force and effect
of a blow.

"I don't discover, myself," he began stumblingly,
"that I'm so conspicuously inferior to the men I see
about me who do make livings, and very good ones, too."

"Of course you're not," she replied with easy promptness;
"you're greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this
trouble with you.  But you're what you are because you're
where you are.  The moment you try on being somewhere else,
you're done for.  In all this world nobody else comes to
such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest."

The phrase sent Theron's fancy roving.  "I know a
Catholic priest," he said irrelevantly, "who doesn't
believe an atom in--in things."

"Very likely," said Sister Soulsby.  "Most of us do.
But you don't hear him talking about going and earning
his living, I'll bet!  Or if he does, he takes powerful
good care not to go, all the same.  They've got horse-sense,
those priests.  They're artists, too.  They know how to
allow for the machinery behind the scenes."

"But it's all so different," urged the young minister;
"the same things are not expected of them.  Now I sat
the other night and watched those people you got up
around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying,
and the others jumping up and down with excitement,
and Sister Lovejoy--did you see her?--coming out of her pew
and regularly waltzing in the aisle, with her eyes shut,
like a whirling dervish--I positively believe it was
all that made me ill.  I couldn't stand it.  I can't
stand it now.  I won't go back to it!  Nothing shall
make me!"

"Oh-h, yes, you will," she rejoined soothingly.
"There's nothing else to do.  Just put a good face on it,
and make up your mind to get through by treading on as few
corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in,
and you'll be surprised how easy it'll all come to be.
You were speaking of the revival business.  Now that exemplifies
just what I was saying--it's a part of our machinery.
Now a church is like everything else,--it's got to have a boss,
a head, an authority of some sort, that people will listen
to and mind.  The Catholics are different, as you say.
Their church is chuck-full of authority--all the way
from the Pope down to the priest--and accordingly they
do as they're told.  But the Protestants--your Methodists
most of all--they say 'No, we won't have any authority,
we won't obey any boss.'  Very well, what happens?
We who are responsible for running the thing, and raising
the money and so on--we have to put on a spurt every once
in a while, and work up a general state of excitement;
and while it's going, don't you see that THAT is the authority,
the motive power, whatever you like to call it, by which
things are done?  Other denominations don't need it.
We do, and that's why we've got it."

"But the mean dishonesty of it all!"  Theron broke forth.
He moved about again, his bowed face drawn as with
bodily suffering.  "The low-born tricks, the hypocrisies!
I feel as if I could never so much as look at these people
here again without disgust."

"Oh, now that's where you make your mistake,"
Sister Soulsby put in placidly.  "These people
of yours are not a whit worse than other people.
They've got their good streaks and their bad streaks,
just like the rest of us.  Take them by and large,
they're quite on a par with other folks the whole country through."

"I don't believe there's another congregation in the
Conference where--where this sort of thing would have
been needed, or, I might say, tolerated," insisted Theron.

"Perhaps you're right," the other assented; "but that only
shows that your people here are different from the others--
not that they're worse.  You don't seem to realize:
Octavius, so far as the Methodists are concerned,
is twenty or thirty years behind the times.  Now that has
its advantages and its disadvantages.  The church here is
tough and coarse, and full of grit, like a grindstone;
and it does ministers from other more niminy-piminy places
all sorts of good to come here once in a while and rub
themselves up against it.  It scours the rust and mildew off
from their piety, and they go back singing and shouting.
But of course it's had a different effect with you.
You're razor-steel instead of scythe-steel, and the
grinding's been too rough and violent for you.  But you
see what I mean.  These people here really take their
primitive Methodism seriously.  To them the profession
of entire sanctification is truly a genuine thing.  Well,
don't you see, when people just know that they're saved,
it doesn't seem to them to matter so much what they do.
They feel that ordinary rules may well be bent and twisted
in the interest of people so supernaturally good as they are.
That's pure human nature.  It's always been like that."

Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her.
"That thought," he said, in a vague, slow way, "seems to
be springing up in my path, whichever way I turn.
It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this idea
that the dead men have known more than we know, done more
than we do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--"

"Never mind the dead men," interposed Sister Soulsby.
"Just you come and sit down here.  I hate to have you
straddling about the room when I'm trying to talk to you."

Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby
drew up her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder.
Her gaze rested upon his with impressive steadiness.

"And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,"
she began.  "You mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow
of a hint of this nonsense about leaving the ministry.
I could see how you were feeling--I saw the book you were
reading the first time I entered this room--and that made me
like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly
gumption with your Renan.  Well, perhaps I like you all the
better for not having it--for being so delightfully fresh.
At any rate, that made me sail in and straighten your affairs
for you.  And now, for God's sake, keep them straight.
Just put all notions of anything else out of your head.
Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them.
Keep your eye open for what they think you ought to do,
and do it.  Have your own ideas as much as you like,
read what you like, say 'Damn' under your breath as much
as you like, but don't let go of your job.  I've knocked
about too much, and I've seen too many promising young
fellows cut their own throats for pure moonshine,
not to have a right to say that."

Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on
his shoulder, or to the strenuous sincerity of the voice
which thus adjured him.

"Well," he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes,
"if we agree that it IS moonshine."

"See here!" she exclaimed, with renewed animation,
patting his shoulder in a brisk, automatic way, to point
the beginnings of her confidences:  "I'll tell you something.
It's about myself.  I've got a religion of my own,
and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time
to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day,
and that it can't be done a minute before."

The young minister took in the thought, and turned it
about in his mind, and smiled upon it.

"And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,"
Sister Soulsby continued.  She leaned back in her chair,
and crossed her knees so that one well-shaped and
artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron's hand.
Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.

"I began life," she said, "as a girl by running
away from a stupid home with a man that I knew was
married already.  After that, I supported myself for a
good many years--generally, at first, on the stage.
I've been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've
been leading lady in comic opera companies out West.
I've told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel
where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went
on in another.  I've been a professional clairvoyant,
and I've been a professional medium, and I've been within
one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money
that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most
famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a gentleman
who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies
along with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record."

Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.

"And now take Soulsby," she went on.  "Of course I take
it for granted there's a good deal that he has never felt
called upon to mention.  He hasn't what you may call
a talkative temperament.  But there is also a good deal
that I do know.  He's been an actor, too, and to this
day I'd back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite
'Clarence's Dream.'  And he's been a medium, and then he
was a travelling phrenologist, and for a long time he
was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when I
first saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--
and he had HIS little turn with a grand jury too.  In fact,
he was what you may call a regular bad old rooster."

Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--
save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt
to be going on between his eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.

"Well, then," she resumed, "so much for us apart.
Now about us together.  We liked each other from the start.
We compared notes, and we found that we had both soured
on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the road,
and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age.
We had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two.
Soulsby had always hungered and longed to own a garden
and raise flowers, and had never been able to stay long
enough in one place to see so much as a bean-pod ripen.
So we took a little place in a quiet country village
down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything
three deep all over the place, and I bought a roomful
of cheap good books, and we started in.  We took to it
like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that we
couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this
very day; but as luck would have it, during the first
winter there was a revival at the local Methodist church,
and we went every evening--at first just to kill time,
and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement
and general racket of the thing.  After it was all
over each of us found that the other had been mighty
near going up to the rail and joining the mourners.
And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is,
what tremendous improvements there were possible in the
way that amateur revivalist worked up his business.
This stuck in our crops, and we figured on it all through
the winter.--Well, to make a long story short, we finally went
into the thing ourselves."

"Tell me one thing," interposed Theron.  "I'm anxious
to understand it all as we go along.  Were you and he
at any time sincerely converted?--that is, I mean,
genuinely convicted of sin and conscious of--you know
what I mean!"

"Oh, bless you, yes," responded Sister Soulsby.
"Not only once--dozens of times--I may say every time.
We couldn't do good work if we weren't. But that's a matter
of temperament--of emotions."

"Precisely.  That was what I was getting at," explained Theron.

"Well, then, hear what I was getting at," she went on.
"You were talking very loudly here about frauds and
hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes ago.  Now I say
that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
Now take him, for example.  There isn't a better citizen
in all Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor,
or a better or more charitable man.  I've known him to stay
up a whole winter's night in a poor Irishman's stinking
and freezing stable, trying to save his cart-horse for him,
that had been seized with some sort of fit.  The man's
whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse;
and when it died, Soulsby bought him another, and never
told even ME about it.  Now that I call real piety,
if you like."

"So do I," put in Theron, cordially.

"And this question of fraud," pursued his companion,--
"look at it in this light.  You heard us sing.  Well, now,
I was a singer, of course, but Soulsby hardly knew one
note from another.  I taught him to sing, and he went
at it patiently and diligently, like a little man.
And I invented that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd
didn't know, and so couldn't break in on and smother.
I simply took Chopin--he is full of sixths, you know--
and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes and
mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby
just to sing those sixths so as to make the harmony,
and there you are.  He couldn't sing by himself any more than
a crow, but he's got those sixths of his down to a hair.
Now that's machinery, management, organization.  We take
these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living
with George Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off
on the brethren for hymns.  It's a fraud, yes; but it's
a good fraud.  So they are all good frauds.  I say frankly
that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help
Soulsby and me to be good frauds."

"And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,"
commented the young minister.

She had risen, and he got to his feet as well.
He instinctively sought for her hand, and pressed it warmly,
and held it in both his, with an exuberance of gratitude
and liking in his manner.

Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little
shake of the head.  "I'm afraid you'll never make a really
GOOD fraud," she said.  "You haven't got it in you.
Your intentions are all right, but your execution is
hopelessly clumsy.  I came up to your bedroom there twice
while you were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept
your eyes shut, and all the while a blind horse could
have told that you were wide awake."

"I must have thought it was my wife," said Theron.




PART III



CHAPTER XVIII


When the lingering dusk finally settled down upon this
long summer evening, the train bearing the Soulsbys
homeward was already some score of miles on its way,
and the Methodists of Octavius had nearly finished their
weekly prayer-meeting.

After the stirring events of the revival, it was only
to be expected that this routine, home-made affair
should suffer from a reaction.  The attendance was larger
than usual, perhaps, but the proceedings were spiritless
and tame.  Neither the pastor nor his wife was present
at the beginning, and the class-leader upon whom control
devolved made but feeble headway against the spell of
inertia which the hot night-air laid upon the gathering.
Long pauses intervened between the perfunctory
praise-offerings and supplications, and the hymns weariedly
raised from time to time fell again in languor by the wayside.

Alice came in just as people were beginning to hope
that some one would start the Doxology, and bring matters
to a close.  Her appearance apparently suggested this
to the class-leader, for in a few moments the meeting
had been dismissed, and some of the members, on their
way out, were shaking hands with their minister's wife,
and expressing the polite hope that he was better.
The worried look in her face, and the obvious stains
of recent tears upon her cheeks imparted an added point
and fervor to these inquiries, but she replied to all in
tones of studied tranquillity that, although not feeling
well enough to attend prayer-meeting, Brother Ware was
steadily recovering strength, and confidently expected
to be in complete health by Sunday.  They left her,
and could hardly wait to get into the vestibule to ask
one another in whispers what on earth she could have been
crying about.

Meanwhile Brother Ware improved his convalescent state
by pacing slowly up and down under the elms on the side
of the street opposite the Catholic church.  There were
no houses here for a block and more; the sidewalk was
broken in many places, so that passers-by avoided it;
the overhanging boughs shrouded it all in obscurity;
it was preeminently a place to be alone in.

Theron had driven to the depot with his guests an hour before,
and after a period of pleasant waiting on the platform,
had said good-bye to them as the train moved away.
Then he turned to Alice, who had also accompanied them
in the carriage, and was conscious of a certain annoyance
at her having come.  That long familiar talk of the
afternoon had given him the feeling that he was entitled
to bid farewell to Sister Soulsby--to both the Soulsbys--
by himself.

"I am afraid folks will think it strange--neither of us
attending the prayer-meeting," he said, with a suggestion
of reproof in his tone, as they left the station-yard.

"If we get back in time, I'll run in for a minute,"
answered Alice, with docility.

"No--no," he broke in.  "I'm not equal to walking so fast.
You run on ahead, and explain matters, and I will come
along slowly."

"The hack we came in is still there in the yard,"
the wife suggested.  "We could drive home in that.
I don't believe it would cost more than a quarter--
and if you're feeling badly--"

"But I am NOT feeling badly," Theron replied,
with frank impatience.  "Only I feel--I feel
that being alone with my thoughts would be good for me."

"Oh, certainly--by all means!"  Alice had said, and turned
sharply on her heel.

Being alone with these thoughts, Theron strolled aimlessly about,
and did not think at all.  The shadows gathered, and fireflies
began to disclose their tiny gleams among the shrubbery
in the gardens.  A lamp-lighter came along, and passed him,
leaving in his wake a straggling double line of lights,
glowing radiantly against the black-green of the trees.
This recalled to Theron that he had heard that the town
council lit the street lamps by the almanac, and economized
gas when moonshine was due.  The idea struck him as droll,
and he dwelt upon it in various aspects, smiling at some
of its comic possibilities.  Looking up in the middle
of one of these whimsical conceits, the sportive impulse
died suddenly within him.  He realized that it was dark,
and that the massive black bulk reared against the sky
on the other side of the road was the Catholic church.
The other fact, that he had been there walking to and
fro for some time, was borne in upon him more slowly.
He turned, and resumed the pacing up and down with a
still more leisurely step, musing upon the curious way
in which people's minds all unconsciously follow about
where instincts and intuitions lead.

No doubt it was what Sister Soulsby had said about
Catholics which had insensibly guided his purposeless
stroll in this direction.  What a woman that was!
Somehow the purport of her talk--striking, and even
astonishing as he had found it--did not stand out so clearly
in his memory as did the image of the woman herself.
She must have been extremely pretty once.  For that
matter she still was a most attractive-looking woman.
It had been a genuine pleasure to have her in the house--
to see her intelligent responsive face at the table--
to have it in one's power to make drafts at will upon
the fund of sympathy and appreciation, of facile mirth
and ready tenderness in those big eyes of hers.  He liked
that phrase she had used about herself--"a good fellow."
It seemed to fit her to a "t."  And Soulsby was a good
fellow too.  All at once it occurred to him to wonder whether
they were married or not.

But really that was no affair of his, he reflected.
A citizen of the intellectual world should be above
soiling his thoughts with mean curiosities of that sort,
and he drove the impertinent query down again under the
surface of his mind.  He refused to tolerate, as well,
sundry vagrant imaginings which rose to cluster about and
literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby
had so frankly outlined.  He would think upon nothing
but her as he knew her,--the kindly, quick-witted, capable
and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break
in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his.
The only genuine happiness in life must consist in having
bright, smart, attractive women like that always about.

The lights were visible now in the upper rooms of Father Forbes'
pastorate across the way.  Theron paused for a second to
consider whether he wanted to go over and call on the priest.
He decided that mentally he was too fagged and flat for such
an undertaking.  He needed another sort of companionship--
some restful, soothing human contact, which should exact
nothing from him in return, but just take charge of him,
with soft, wise words and pleasant plays of fancy,
and jokes and--and--something of the general effect created
by Sister Soulsby's eyes.  The thought expanded itself,
and he saw that he had never realized before--nay,
never dreamt before--what a mighty part the comradeship
of talented, sweet-natured and beautiful women must
play in the development of genius, the achievement
of lofty aims, out in the great world of great men.
To know such women--ah, that would never fall to his hapless lot.

The priest's lamps blinked at him through the trees.
He remembered that priests were supposed to be even further
removed from the possibilities of such contact than he
was himself.  His memory reverted to that horribly ugly old
woman whom Father Forbes had spoken of as his housekeeper.
Life under the same roof with such a hag must be even
worse than--worse than--

The young minister did not finish the comparison, even in the
privacy of his inner soul.  He stood instead staring over
at the pastorate, in a kind of stupor of arrested thought.
The figure of a woman passed in view at the nearest window--
a tall figure with pale summer clothes of some sort,
and a broad summer hat--a flitting effect of diaphanous
shadow between him and the light which streamed from
the casement.

Theron felt a little shiver run over him, as if the delicate
coolness of the changing night-air had got into his blood.
The window was open, and his strained hearing thought
it caught the sound of faint laughter.  He continued
to gaze at the place where the vision had appeared,
the while a novel and strange perception unfolded itself
upon his mind.

He had come there in the hope of encountering Celia Madden.

Now that he looked this fact in the face, there was nothing
remarkable about it.  In truth, it was simplicity itself.
He was still a sick man, weak in body and dejected in spirits.
The thought of how unhappy and unstrung he was came to him
now with an insistent pathos that brought tears to his eyes.
He was only obeying the universal law of nature--the law
which prompts the pallid spindling sprout of the potato
in the cellar to strive feebly toward the light.

From where he stood in the darkness he stretched
out his hands in the direction of that open window.
The gesture was his confession to the overhanging boughs,
to the soft night-breeze, to the stars above--and it
bore back to him something of the confessional's vague
and wistful solace.  He seemed already to have drawn
down into his soul a taste of the refreshment it craved.
He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted again upon
his eyelids, but this time not all in grief.  With his
tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter
of buoyant prescience, of exquisite expectancy.

Fate walked abroad this summer night.  The street door
of the pastorate opened, and in the flood of illumination
which spread suddenly forth over the steps and sidewalk,
Theron saw again the tall form, with the indefinitely
light-hued flowing garments and the wide straw hat.
He heard a tuneful woman's voice call out "Good-night, Maggie,"
and caught no response save the abrupt closing of the door,
which turned everything black again with a bang.
He listened acutely for another instant, and then with long,
noiseless strides made his way down his deserted side
of the street.  He moderated his pace as he turned
to cross the road at the corner, and then, still masked
by the trees, halted altogether, in a momentary tumult
of apprehension.  No--yes--it was all right.  The girl
sauntered out from the total darkness into the dim starlight
of the open corner.

"Why, bless me, is that you, Miss Madden?"

Celia seemed to discern readily enough, through the
accents of surprise, the identity of the tall, slim man
who addressed her from the shadows.

"Good-evening, Mr. Ware," she said, with prompt affability.
"I'm so glad to find you out again.  We heard you were ill."

"I have been very ill," responded Theron, as they
shook hands and walked on together.  He added, with a
quaver in his voice, "I am still far from strong.
I really ought not to be out at all.  But--but the
longing for--for--well, I COULDN'T stay in any longer.
Even if it kills me, I shall be glad I came out tonight."

"Oh, we won't talk of killing," said Celia.  "I don't
believe in illnesses myself"

"But you believe in collapses of the nerves," put in Theron,
with gentle sadness, "in moral and spiritual and mental
breakdowns.  I remember how I was touched by the way you
told me YOU suffered from them.  I had to take what you said
then for granted.  I had had no experience of it myself.
But now I know what it is."  He drew a long, pathetic sigh.
"Oh, DON'T I know what it is!" he repeated gloomily.

"Come, my friend, cheer up," Celia purred at him,
in soothing tones.  He felt that there was a deliciously
feminine and sisterly intuition in her speech,
and in the helpful, nurse-like way in which she drew
his arm through hers.  He leaned upon this support,
and was glad of it in every fibre of his being.

"Do you remember?  You promised--that last time I saw you--
to play for me," he reminded her.  They were passing
the little covered postern door at the side and rear of
the church as he spoke, and he made a half halt to point
the coincidence.

"Oh, there's no one to blow the organ," she said,
divining his suggestion.  "And I haven't the key--
and, besides, the organ is too heavy and severe
for an invalid.  It would overwhelm you tonight."

"Not as you would know how to play it for me,"
urged Theron, pensively.  "I feel as if good music to-night
would make me well again.  I am really very ill and weak--
and unhappy!"

The girl seemed moved by the despairing note in his voice.
She invited him by a sympathetic gesture to lean even more
directly on her arm.

"Come home with me, and I'll play Chopin to you," she said,
in compassionate friendliness.  "He is the real medicine
for bruised and wounded nerves.  You shall have as much
of him as you like."

The idea thus unexpectedly thrown forth spread itself
like some vast and inexpressibly alluring vista before
Theron's imagination.  The spice of adventure in it
fascinated his mind as well, but for a shrinking moment
the flesh was weak.

"I'm afraid your people would--would think it strange,"
he faltered--and began also to recall that he had some
people of his own who would be even more amazed.

"Nonsense," said Celia, in fine, bold confidence, and with
a reassuring pressure on his arm.  "I allow none of my
people to question what I do.  They never dream of such
a preposterous thing.  Besides, you will see none of them.
Mrs. Madden is at the seaside, and my father and brother
have their own part of the house.  I shan't listen for
a minute to your not coming.  Come, I'm your doctor.
I'm to make you well again."

There was further conversation, and Theron more or less
knew that he was bearing a part in it, but his whole
mind seemed concentrated, in a sort of delicious terror,
upon the wonderful experience to which every footstep
brought him nearer.  His magnetized fancy pictured a great
spacious parlor, such as a mansion like the Maddens'
would of course contain, and there would be a grand piano,
and lace curtains, and paintings in gold frames,
and a chandelier, and velvet easy-chairs, and he would sit
in one of these, surrounded by all the luxury of the rich,
while Celia played to him.  There would be servants about,
he presumed, and very likely they would recognize him,
and of course they would talk about it to Tom, Dick and
Harry afterward.  But he said to himself defiantly that he
didn't care.

He withdrew his arm from hers as they came upon the
well-lighted main street.  He passed no one who seemed
to know him.  Presently they came to the Madden place,
and Celia, without waiting for the gravelled walk,
struck obliquely across the lawn.  Theron, who had been
lagging behind with a certain circumspection, stepped
briskly to her side now.  Their progress over the soft,
close-cropped turf in the dark together, with the scent
of lilies and perfumed shrubs heavy on the night air,
and the majestic bulk of the big silent house rising
among the trees before them, gave him a thrilling sense
of the glory of individual freedom.

"I feel a new man already," he declared, as they swung
along on the grass.  He breathed a long sigh of content,
and drew nearer, so that their shoulders touched now
and again as they walked.  In a minute more they were
standing on the doorstep, and Theron heard the significant
jingle of a bunch of keys which his companion was groping
for in her elusive pocket.  He was conscious of trembling
a little at the sound.

It seemed that, unlike other people, the Maddens did
not have their parlor on the ground-floor, opening off
the front hall.  Theron stood in the complete darkness
of this hall, till Celia had lit one of several candles
which were in their hand-sticks on a sort of sideboard
next the hat-rack. She beckoned him with a gesture
of her head, and he followed her up a broad staircase,
magnificent in its structural appointments of inlaid woods,
and carpeted with what to his feet felt like down.
The tiny light which his guide bore before her half revealed,
as they passed in their ascent, tall lengths of tapestry,
and the dull glint of armor and brazen discs in shadowed
niches on the nearer wall.  Over the stair-rail lay an open
space of such stately dimensions, bounded by terminal lines
of decoration so distant in the faint candle-flicker,
that the young country minister could think of no word
but "palatial" to fit it all.

At the head of the flight, Celia led the way along a wide
corridor to where it ended.  Here, stretched from side to side,
and suspended from broad hoops of a copper-like metal,
was a thick curtain, of a uniform color which Theron at
first thought was green, and then decided must be blue.
She pushed its heavy folds aside, and unlocked another door.
He passed under the curtain behind her, and closed
the door.

The room into which he had made his way was not at all
after the fashion of any parlor he had ever seen.  In the
obscure light it was difficult to tell what it resembled.
He made out what he took to be a painter's easel,
standing forth independently in the centre of things.
There were rows of books on rude, low shelves.
Against one of the two windows was a big, flat writing-table--
or was it a drawing-table?--littered with papers.
Under the other window was a carpenter's bench, with a large
mound of something at one end covered with a white cloth.
On a table behind the easel rose a tall mechanical contrivance,
the chief feature of which was a thick upright spiral screw.
The floor was of bare wood stained brown.  The walls of this
queer room had photographs and pictures, taken apparently
from illustrated papers, pinned up at random for their
only ornament.

Celia had lighted three or four other candles on the mantel.
She caught the dumfounded expression with which her
guest was surveying his surroundings, and gave a merry
little laugh.

"This is my workshop," she explained.  "I keep this
for the things I do badly--things I fool with.  If I want
to paint, or model in clay, or bind books, or write,
or draw, or turn on the lathe, or do some carpentering,
here's where I do it.  All the things that make a mess
which has to be cleaned up--they are kept out here--
because this is as far as the servants are allowed
to come."

She unlocked still another door as she spoke--a door
which was also concealed behind a curtain.

"Now," she said, holding up the candle so that its reddish
flare rounded with warmth the creamy fulness of her chin
and throat, and glowed upon her hair in a flame of orange
light--"now I will show you what is my very own."



CHAPTER XIX


Theron Ware looked about him with frankly undisguised astonishment.

The room in which he found himself was so dark at first
that it yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed
altogether beyond his comprehension.  His gaze helplessly
followed Celia and her candle about as she busied herself
in the work of illumination.  When she had finished,
and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in
the apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque
alternating rectangles of blue and yellow glass.  They must
be set in some sort of lanterns around against the wall,
he thought, but the shape of these he could hardly make out.

Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light,
and he began to see other things.  These queer lamps
were placed, apparently, so as to shed a special radiance
upon some statues which stood in the corners of the chamber,
and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls.
Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost
its aggressive whiteness under the tinted lights,
were mostly of naked men and women; the pictures, four or
five in number, were all variations of a single theme--
the Virgin Mary and the Child.

A less untutored vision than his would have caught
more swiftly the scheme of color and line in which
these works of art bore their share.  The walls of
the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns,
terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were
all painted in pale amber and straw and primrose hues,
irregularly wavering here and there toward suggestions
of white.  Between these pilasters were broader panels of
stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue.
These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled
in what he could see of the shadowed ceiling far above.
They were repeated in the draperies and huge cushions
and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran about
three sides of the room.  Even the floor, where it
revealed itself among the scattered rugs, was laid in a
mosaic pattern of matched woods, which, like the rugs,
gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain yellows.

The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline
at one end by the door through which they had entered,
and at the other by a broad, square opening,
hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff.
Between the two apertures rose against the wall what
Theron took at first glance to be an altar.  There were
pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either side,
each masked with a little silken hood; below, in the centre,
a shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive,
carved casket, and in the beautiful intricacies of this,
and the receding canopy of delicate ornamentation
which depended above it, the dominant color was white,
deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations,
to the tints which ruled the rest of the room.

Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra,
and opened the top of the casket.  Theron saw with
surprise that she had uncovered the keyboard of a piano.
He viewed with much greater amazement her next proceeding--
which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and,
bending over one of the candles with it for an instant,
turn to him with a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.

"Make yourself comfortable anywhere," she said, with a
gesture which comprehended all the divans and pillows
in the place.  "Will you smoke?"

"I have never tried since I was a little boy," said Theron,
"but I think I could.  If you don't mind, I should like
to see."

Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron
experimented cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco,
and looked at Celia with what he felt to be the confident
quiet of a man of the world.  She had thrown aside
her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the
heavy strands of hair coiled at the back of her head.
His glance instinctively rested upon this wonderful hair
of hers.  There was no mistaking the sudden fascination
its disorder had for his eye.

She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily
between thumb and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled
comprehendingly down on her guest.

"I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair
of mine when I was a child," she said.  "I daresay
all children have a taste for persecuting red-heads;
but it's a specialty with Irish children.  They get hold
somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend,
that red hair was brought into Ireland by the Danes.
It's been a term of reproach with us since Brian Boru's time
to call a child a Dane.  I used to be pursued and baited
with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my
ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity,
so that I might hide my hair under one of their big
beastly white linen caps.  I've got rather away from that
ideal since, I'm afraid," she added, with a droll downward
curl of her lip.

"Your hair is very beautiful," said Theron, in the calm
tone of a connoisseur.

"I like it myself," Celia admitted, and blew a little
smoke-ring toward him.  "I've made this whole room
to match it.  The colors, I mean," she explained,
in deference to his uplifted brows.  "Between us, we make
up what Whistler would call a symphony.  That reminds me--
I was going to play for you.  Let me finish the cigarette first."

Theron felt grateful for her reticence about the fact
that he had laid his own aside.  "I have never seen
a room at all like this," he remarked.  You are right;
it does fit you perfectly."

She nodded her sense of his appreciation.  "It is what
I like," she said.  "It expresses ME.  I will not have
anything about me--or anybody either--that I don't like.
I suppose if an old Greek could see it, it would make
him sick, but it represents what I mean by being a Greek.
It is as near as an Irishman can get to it."

"I remember your puzzling me by saying that you were
a Greek."

Celia laughed, and tossed the cigarette-end away.
"I'd puzzle you more, I'm afraid, if I tried to explain
to you what I really meant by it.  I divide people
up into two classes, you know--Greeks and Jews.
Once you get hold of that principle, all other divisions
and classifications, such as by race or language
or nationality, seem pure foolishness.  It is the only
true division there is.  It is just as true among negroes
or wild Indians who never heard of Greece or Jerusalem,
as it is among white folks.  That is the beauty of it.
It works everywhere, always."

"Try it on me," urged Theron, with a twinkling eye.
"Which am I?"

"Both," said the girl, with a merry nod of the head.
"But now I'll play.  I told you you were to hear Chopin.
I prescribe him for you.  He is the Greekiest of the Greeks.
THERE was a nation where all the people were artists,
where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the
Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo.
Chopin might have written his music for them."

"I am interested in Shopang," put in Theron, suddenly recalling
Sister Soulsby's confidences as to the source of her tunes.
"He lived with--what's his name--George something.
We were speaking about him only this afternoon."

Celia looked down into her visitor's face at first
inquiringly, then with a latent grin about her lips.
"Yes--George something," she said, in a tone which mystified him.

The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward,
in a ferment of awakened consciousness that he had
never heard the piano played before.  After a little,
he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled himself
again in a recumbent posture.  It was beyond his strength
to follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast
with what his ears took in.  He sighed and lay back,
and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking charm
of it all.

It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air
about him--a simple, plaintive strain wandering at will
over a surface of steady rhythmic movement underneath,
always creeping upward through mysteries of sweetness,
always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones. With
only a moment's pause, there came the Seventh Waltz--
a rich, bold confusion which yet was not confused.
Theron's ears dwelt with eager delight upon the chasing
medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his
thoughts free.

From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize,
one by one, the statues in the corners.  No doubt they
were beautiful--for this was a department in which he
was all humility--and one of them, the figure of a
broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman,
bending slightly forward and with both arms broken off,
was decently robed from the hips downward.  The others were
not robed at all.  Theron stared at them with the erratic,
rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he
possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female
emancipation meant in these later days.  Roving along
the wall, his glance rested again upon the largest of the
Virgin pictures--a full-length figure in sweeping draperies,
its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration,
its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth
in bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs.
The incongruity between the unashamed statues and this
serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for
the instant.  Then his mind went to the piano.

Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into
a passage of what might be church music, an exquisitely
modulated and gently solemn chant, through which a soft,
lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the listener
to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed
and soothed to repose.

He looked from the Madonna to Celia.  Beyond the carelessly
drooping braids and coils of hair which blazed between
the candles, he could see the outline of her brow
and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full,
modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf
is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall.
The sight convicted him in the court of his own soul
as a prurient and mean-minded rustic.  In the presence
of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such
thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than
did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now,
gravely accumulating their spell upon him.

"It is all singing!" the player called out to him over
her shoulder, in a minute of rest.  "That is what Chopin does--
he sings!"

She began, with an effect of thinking of something else,
the Sixth Nocturne, and Theron at first thought she was not
playing anything in particular, so deliberately, haltingly,
did the chain of charm unwind itself into sequence.
Then it came closer to him than the others had done.
The dreamy, wistful, meditative beauty of it all at once
oppressed and inspired him.  He saw Celia's shoulders sway
under the impulse of the RUBATO license--the privilege
to invest each measure with the stress of the whole,
to loiter, to weep, to run and laugh at will--and the
music she made spoke to him as with a human voice.
There was the wooing sense of roses and moonlight,
of perfumes, white skins, alluring languorous eyes,
and then--

"You know this part, of course," he heard her say.

On the instant they had stepped from the dark, scented,
starlit garden, where the nightingale sang, into a great cathedral.
A sombre and lofty anthem arose, and filled the place
with the splendor of such dignified pomp of harmony and
such suggestions of measureless choral power and authority
that Theron sat abruptly up, then was drawn resistlessly
to his feet.  He stood motionless in the strange room,
feeling most of all that one should kneel to hear such music.

"This you'll know too--the funeral march from the Second
Sonata," she was saying, before he realized that the end
of the other had come.  He sank upon the divan again,
bending forward and clasping his hands tight around his knees.
His heart beat furiously as he listened to the weird,
mediaeval processional, with its wild, clashing chords
held down in the bondage of an orderly sadness.
There was a propelling motion in the thing--a sense of being
borne bodily along--which affected him like dizziness.
He breathed hard through the robust portions of stern,
vigorous noise, and rocked himself to and fro when, as rosy
morn breaks upon a storm-swept night, the drums are silenced
for the sweet, comforting strain of solitary melody.
The clanging minor harmonies into which the march relapses
came to their abrupt end.  Theron rose once more,
and moved with a hesitating step to the piano.

"I want to rest a little," he said, with his hand
on her shoulder.

"Whew! so do I," exclaimed Celia, letting her hands fall
with an exaggerated gesture of weariness.  "The sonatas take
it out of one!  They are hideously difficult, you know.
They are rarely played."

"I didn't know," remarked Theron.  She seemed not to mind
his hand upon her shoulder, and he kept it there.
"I didn't know anything about music at all.  What I do know
now is that--that this evening is an event in my life."

She looked up at him and smiled.  He read unsuspected
tendernesses and tolerances of friendship in the depths
of her eyes, which emboldened him to stir the fingers
of that audacious hand in a lingering, caressing trill
upon her shoulder.  The movement was of the faintest,
but having ventured it, he drew his hand abruptly away.

"You are getting on," she said to him.  There was an
enigmatic twinkle in the smile with which she continued
to regard him.  "We are Hellenizing you at a great rate."

A sudden thought seemed to strike her.  She shifted
her eyes toward vacancy with a swift, abstracted glance,
reflected for a moment, then let a sparkling half-wink
and the dimpling beginnings of an almost roguish smile
mark her assent to the conceit, whatever it might be.

"I will be with you in a moment," he heard her say;
and while the words were still in his ears she had risen
and passed out of sight through the broad, open doorway
to the right.  The looped curtains fell together behind her.
Presently a mellow light spread over their delicately
translucent surface--a creamy, undulating radiance which
gave the effect of moving about among the myriad folds
of the silk.

Theron gazed at these curtains for a little, then straightened
his shoulders with a gesture of decision, and, turning on his heel,
went over and examined the statues in the further corners minutely.

"If you would like some more, I will play you the Berceuse now."

Her voice came to him with a delicious shock.
He wheeled round and beheld her standing at the piano,
with one hand resting, palm upward, on the keys.  She was
facing him.  Her tall form was robed now in some shapeless,
clinging drapery, lustrous and creamy and exquisitely soft,
like the curtains.  The wonderful hair hung free and luxuriant
about her neck and shoulders, and glowed with an intensity
of fiery color which made all the other hues of the room
pale and vague.  A fillet of faint, sky-like blue drew
a gracious span through the flame of red above her temples,
and from this there rose the gleam of jewels.  Her head
inclined gently, gravely, toward him--with the posture
of that armless woman in marble he had been studying--
and her brown eyes, regarding him from the shadows,
emitted light.

"It is a lullaby--the only one he wrote," she said, as Theron,
pale-faced and with tightened lips, approached her.
"No--you mustn't stand there," she added, sinking into
the seat before the instrument; "go back and sit where
you were."

The most perfect of lullabies, with its swaying
abandonment to cooing rhythm, ever and again rising
in ripples to the point of insisting on something,
one knows not what, and then rocking, melting away
once more, passed, so to speak, over Theron's head.
He leaned back upon the cushions, and watched the white,
rounded forearm which the falling folds of this strange,
statue-like drapery made bare.

There was more that appealed to his mood in the Third Ballade.
It seemed to him that there were words going along with it--
incoherent and impulsive yet very earnest words,
appealing to him in strenuous argument and persuasion.
Each time he almost knew what they said, and strained after
their meaning with a passionate desire, and then there
would come a kind of cuckoo call, and everything would
swing dancing off again into a mockery of inconsequence.

Upon the silence there fell the pure, liquid, mellifluous
melody of a soft-throated woman singing to her lover.

"It is like Heine--simply a love-poem," said the girl,
over her shoulder.

Theron followed now with all his senses, as she carried
the Ninth Nocturne onward.  The stormy passage, which she
banged finely forth, was in truth a lover's quarrel;
and then the mild, placid flow of sweet harmonies into
which the furore sank, dying languorously away upon
a silence all alive with tender memories of sound--
was that not also a part of love?

They sat motionless through a minute--the man on the divan,
the girl at the piano--and Theron listened for what he
felt must be the audible thumping of his heart.

Then, throwing back her head, with upturned face, Celia began
what she had withheld for the last--the Sixteenth Mazurka.
This strange foreign thing she played with her eyes closed,
her head tilted obliquely so that Theron could see the
rose-tinted, beautiful countenance, framed as if asleep
in the billowing luxuriance of unloosed auburn hair.
He fancied her beholding visions as she wrought the music--
visions full of barbaric color and romantic forms.
As his mind swam along with the gliding, tricksy phantom
of a tune, it seemed as if he too could see these visions--
as if he gazed at them through her eyes.

It could not be helped.  He lifted himself noiselessly to
his feet, and stole with caution toward her.  He would hear
the rest of this weird, voluptuous fantasy standing thus,
so close behind her that he could look down upon her full,
uplifted lace--so close that, if she moved, that glowing
nimbus of hair would touch him.

There had been some curious and awkward pauses in this
last piece, which Theron, by some side cerebration,
had put down to her not watching what her fingers did.
There came another of these pauses now--an odd,
unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything.
He stared intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face
during the hush, and caught his breath as he waited.
There fell at last a few faltering ascending notes,
making a half-finished strain, and then again there
was silence.

Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze
into the face above hers.  Its pale lips were parted
in suspense, and the color had faded from its cheeks.

"That is the end," she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body,
stood swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken
melody seemed panting in the air about her for completion.

Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly
against eyes and brow for an instant.  Then, throwing them
aside with an expansive downward sweep of the arms,
and holding them clenched, he returned Celia's glance.
It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes before.

"It CAN'T be the end!" he heard himself saying,
in a low voice charged with deep significance.  He held
her gaze in the grasp of his with implacable tenacity.
There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic
floor seemed to stir under his feet.  He clung defiantly
to the one idea of not releasing her eyes.

"How COULD it be the end?" he demanded, lifting an uncertain
hand to his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there
as if to control the tumultuous fluttering of his heart.
"Things don't end that way!"

A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and
shook him, while the brave words were on his lips.
He blinked and tottered under it, as it passed, and then
backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a little,
and patting his hand on his heart.  There was fright
written all over his whitened face.

"We--we forgot that I am a sick man," he said feebly,
answering Celia's look of surprised inquiry with a forced,
wan smile.  "I was afraid my heart had gone wrong."

She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing
reassurance in her air.  Then, piling up the pillows
and cushions behind him for support, for all the world
like a big sister again, she stepped into the inner room,
and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass.
She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish,
aromatic liquid, and gave it him to drink.

"This Benedictine is all I happen to have," she said.
"Swallow it down.  It will do you good."

Theron obeyed her.  It brought tears to his eyes; but,
upon reflection, it was grateful and warming.  He did feel
better almost immediately.  A great wave of comfort seemed
to enfold him as he settled himself back on the divan.
For that one flashing instant he had thought that he
was dying.  He drew a long grateful breath of relief,
and smiled his content.

Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away.
She sat with her head against the wall, and one foot curled
under her, and almost faced him.

"I dare say we forced the pace a little," she remarked,
after a pause, looking down at the floor, with the puckers
of a ruminating amusement playing in the corners of her mouth.
"It doesn't do for a man to get to be a Greek all of a sudden.
He must work along up to it gradually."

He remembered the music.  "Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,"
he murmured ecstatically, "what a revelation your playing
has been to me!  I had never imagined anything like it.
I shall think of it to my dying day."

He began to remember as well the spirit that was in the air
when the music ended.  The details of what he had felt
and said rose vaguely in his mind.  Pondering them,
his eye roved past Celia's white-robed figure to the broad,
open doorway beyond.  The curtains behind which she
had disappeared were again parted and fastened back.
A dim light was burning within, out of sight, and its faint
illumination disclosed a room filled with white marbles,
white silks, white draperies of varying sorts, which shaped
themselves, as he looked, into the canopy and trappings
of an extravagantly over-sized and sumptuous bed.
He looked away again.

"I wish you would tell me what you really mean by that Greek
idea of yours," he said with the abruptness of confusion.

Celia did not display much enthusiasm in the tone
of her answer.  "Oh," she said almost indifferently,
"lots of things.  Absolute freedom from moral bugbears,
for one thing.  The recognition that beauty is the only
thing in life that is worth while.  The courage to kick
out of one's life everything that isn't worth while;
and so on."

"But," said Theron, watching the mingled delicacy and power
of the bared arm and the shapely grace of the hand which she
had lifted to her face, "I am going to get you to teach it
ALL to me."  The memories began crowding in upon him now,
and the baffling note upon which the mazurka had stopped
short chimed like a tuning-fork in his ears.  "I want to
be a Greek myself, if you're one.  I want to get as close
to you--to your ideal, that is, as I can.  You open up
to me a whole world that I had not even dreamed existed.
We swore our friendship long ago, you know:  and now,
after tonight--you and the music have decided me.
I am going to put the things out of MY life that are
not worthwhile.  Only you must help me; you must tell me
how to begin."

He looked up as he spoke, to enforce the almost tender
entreaty of his words.  The spectacle of a yawn,
only fractionally concealed behind those talented fingers,
chilled his soft speech, and sent a flush over his face.
He rose on the instant.

Celia was nothing abashed at his discovery.  She laughed
gayly in confession of her fault, and held her hand out to
let him help her disentangle her foot from her draperies,
and get off the divan.  It seemed to be her meaning that he
should continue holding her hand after she was also standing.

"You forgive me, don't you?" she urged smilingly.
"Chopin always first excites me, then sends me to sleep.
You see how YOU sleep tonight!"

The brown, velvety eyes rested upon him, from under their
heavy lids, with a languorous kindliness.  Her warm,
large palm clasped his in frank liking.

"I don't want to sleep at all," Mr. Ware was impelled to say.
"I want to lie awake and think about--about everything
all over again."

She smiled drowsily.  "And you're sure you feel strong
enough to walk home?"

"Yes," he replied, with a lingering dilatory note,
which deepened upon reflection into a sigh.  "Oh, yes."

He followed her and her candle down the magnificent
stairway again.  She blew the light out in the hall,
and, opening the front door, stood with him for a silent
moment on the threshold.  Then they shook hands once more,
and with a whispered good-night, parted.

Celia, returning to the blue and yellow room, lighted a cigarette
and helped herself to some Benedictine in the glass which
Theron had used.  She looked meditatively at this little glass
for a moment, turning it about in her fingers with a smile.
The smile warmed itself suddenly into a joyous laugh.
She tossed the glass aside, and, holding out her flowing
skirts with both hands, executed a swinging pirouette
in front of the gravely beautiful statue of the armless woman.



CHAPTER XX


It was apparent to the Rev. Theron Ware, from the very
first moment of waking next morning, that both he and
the world had changed over night.  The metamorphosis,
in the harsh toils of which he had been laboring blindly
so long, was accomplished.  He stood forth, so to speak,
in a new skin, and looked about him, with perceptions
of quite an altered kind, upon what seemed in every way
a fresh existence.  He lacked even the impulse to turn
round and inspect the cocoon from which he had emerged.
Let the past bury the past.  He had no vestige of interest
in it.

The change was not premature.  He found himself not in
the least confused by it, or frightened.  Before he had
finished shaving, he knew himself to be easily and comfortably
at home in his new state, and master of all its requirements.

It seemed as if Alice, too, recognized that he had become
another man, when he went down and took his chair at the
breakfast table.  They had exchanged no words since their
parting in the depot-yard the previous evening--an event
now faded off into remote vagueness in Theron's mind.
He smiled brilliantly in answer to the furtive,
half-sullen, half-curious glance she stole at him,
as she brought the dishes in.

"Ah! potatoes warmed up in cream!" he said, with hearty
pleasure in his tone.  "What a mind-reader you are,
to be sure!"

"I'm glad you're feeling so much better," she said briefly,
taking her seat.

"Better?" he returned.  "I'm a new being!"

She ventured to look him over more freely, upon this assurance.
He perceived and catalogued, one by one, the emotions
which the small brain was expressing through those shallow
blue eyes of hers.  She was turning over this, that,
and the other hostile thought and childish grievance--
most of all she was dallying with the idea of asking him
where he had been till after midnight.  He smiled affably
in the face of this scattering fire of peevish glances,
and did not dream of resenting any phase of them all.

"I am going down to Thurston's this morning, and order
that piano sent up today," he announced presently,
in a casual way.

"Why, Theron, can we afford it?" the wife asked,
regarding him with surprise.

"Oh, easily enough," he replied light-heartedly. "You
know they've increased my salary."

She shook her head.  "No, I didn't. How should I?
You don't realize it," she went on, dolefully, "but you're
getting so you don't tell me the least thing about your
affairs nowadays."

Theron laughed aloud.  "You ought to be grateful--
such melancholy affairs as mine have been till now,"
he declared--"that is, if it weren't absurd to think
such a thing."  Then, more soberly, he explained:
"No, my girl, it is you who don't realize.  I am carrying
big projects in my mind--big, ambitious thoughts and
plans upon which great things depend.  They no doubt
make me seem preoccupied and absent-minded; but it
is a wife's part to understand, and make allowances,
and not intrude trifles which may throw everything out
of gear.  Don't think I'm scolding, my girl.  I only
speak to reassure you and--and help you to comprehend.
Of course I know that you wouldn't willingly embarrass my--
my career."

"Of course not," responded Alice, dubiously; "but--but--
"

"But what?  Theron felt compelled by civility to say,
though on the instant he reproached himself for the weakness
of it.

"Well--I hardly know how to say it," she faltered, "but it
was nicer in the old days, before you bothered your head
about big projects, and your career, as you call it,
and were just a good, earnest, simple young servant
of the Lord.  Oh, Theron!" she broke forth suddenly,
with tearful zeal, "I get sometimes lately almost scared
lest you should turn out to be a--a BACKSLIDER!"

The husband sat upright, and hardened his countenance.
But yesterday the word would have had in it all sorts
of inherited terrors for him.  This morning's dawn
of a new existence revealed it as merely an empty and
stupid epithet.

"These are things not to be said," he admonished her,
after a moment's pause, and speaking with carefully
measured austerity.  "Least of all are they to be said
to a clergyman--by his wife."

It was on the tip of Alice's tongue to retort, "Better by
his wife than by outsiders!" but she bit her lips,
and kept the gibe back.  A rebuke of this form and gravity
was a novelty in their relations.  The fear that it had
been merited troubled, even while it did not convince,
her mind, and the puzzled apprehension was to be read
plainly enough on her face.

Theron, noting it, saw a good deal more behind.  Really,
it was amazing how much wiser he had grown all at once.
He had been married for years, and it was only this morning
that he suddenly discovered how a wife ought to be handled.
He continued to look sternly away into space for a little.
Then his brows relaxed slowly and under the visible
influence of melting considerations.  He nodded his head,
turned toward her abruptly, and broke the silence with
labored amiability.

"Come, come--the day began so pleasantly--it was so good
to feel well again--let us talk about the piano instead.
That is," he added, with an obvious overture to playfulness,
"if the thought of having a piano is not too distasteful
to you."

Alice yielded almost effusively to his altered mood.
They went together into the sitting-room, to measure
and decide between the two available spaces which were at
their disposal, and he insisted with resolute magnanimity
on her settling this question entirely by herself.
When at last he mentioned the fact that it was Friday,
and he would look over some sermon memoranda before
he went out, Alice retired to the kitchen in openly
cheerful spirits.

Theron spread some old manuscript sermons before him
on his desk, and took down his scribbling-book as well.
But there his application flagged, and he surrendered
himself instead, chin on hand, to staring out at
the rhododendron in the yard.  He recalled how he had
seen Soulsby patiently studying this identical bush.
The notion of Soulsby, not knowing at all how to sing,
yet diligently learning those sixths, brought a smile
to his mind; and then he seemed to hear Celia calling out
over her shoulder, "That's what Chopin does--he sings!"
The spirit of that wonderful music came back to him,
enfolded him in its wings.  It seemed to raise itself up--
a palpable barrier between him and all that he had known
and felt and done before.  That was his new birth--
that marvellous night with the piano.  The conceit pleased him--
not the less because there flashed along with it the thought
that it was a poet that had been born.  Yes; the former
country lout, the narrow zealot, the untutored slave
groping about in the dark after silly superstitions,
cringing at the scowl of mean Pierces and Winches,
was dead.  There was an end of him, and good riddance.
In his place there had been born a Poet--he spelled the word
out now unabashed--a child of light, a lover of beauty and
sweet sounds, a recognizable brother to Renan and Chopin--
and Celia!

Out of the soothing, tenderly grateful revery, a practical
suggestion suddenly took shape.  He acted upon it
without a moment's delay, getting out his letter-pad,
and writing hurriedly--

"Dear Miss Madden,--Life will be more tolerable to me
if before nightfall I can know that there is a piano
under my roof.  Even if it remains dumb, it will be some
comfort to have it here and look at it, and imagine
how a great master might make it speak.

"Would it be too much to beg you to look in at Thurston's,
say at eleven this forenoon, and give me the inestimable
benefit of your judgment in selecting an instrument?

"Do not trouble to answer this, for I am leaving home now,
but shall call at Thurston's at eleven, and wait.

"Thanking you in anticipation,

"I am--"

Here Theron's fluency came to a sharp halt.  There were adverbs
enough and to spare on the point of his pen, but the right
one was not easy to come at.  "Gratefully," "faithfully,"
"sincerely," "truly"--each in turn struck a false note.
He felt himself not quite any of these things.
At last he decided to write just the simple word "yours,"
and then wavered between satisfaction at his boldness,
dread lest he had been over-bold, and, worst of the lot,
fear that she would not notice it one way or the other--
all the while he sealed and addressed the letter, put it
carefully in an inner pocket, and got his hat.

There was a moment's hesitation as to notifying the kitchen
of his departure.  The interests of domestic discipline seemed
to point the other way.  He walked softly through the hall,
and let himself out by the front door without a sound.

Down by the canal bridge he picked out an idle boy to his mind--
a lad whose aspect appeared to promise intelligence
as a messenger, combined with large impartiality in
sectarian matters.  He was to have ten cents on his return;
and he might report himself to his patron at the bookstore yonder.

Theron was grateful to the old bookseller for remaining
at his desk in the rear.  There was a tacit compliment
in the suggestion that he was not a mere customer,
demanding instant attention.  Besides, there was no keeping
"Thurston's" out of conversations in this place.

Loitering along the shelves, the young minister's eye
suddenly found itself arrested by a name on a cover.
There were a dozen narrow volumes in uniform binding,
huddled together under a cardboard label of "Eminent
Women Series."  Oddly enough, one of these bore the title
"George Sand."  Theron saw there must be some mistake,
as he took the book down, and opened it.  His glance
hit by accident upon the name of Chopin.  Then he read
attentively until almost the stroke of eleven.

"We have to make ourselves acquainted with all sorts
of queer phases of life," he explained in self-defence
to the old bookseller, then counting out the money for
the book from his lean purse.  He smiled as he added,
"There seems something almost wrong about taking advantage
of the clergyman's discount for a life of George Sand."

"I don't know," answered the other, pleasantly.  "Guess she
wasn't so much different from the rest of 'em--except
that she didn't mind appearances.  We know about her.
We don't know about the others."

"I must hurry," said Theron, turning on his heel.
The haste with which he strode out of the store,
crossed the street, and made his way toward Thurston's,
did not prevent his thinking much upon the astonishing
things he had encountered in this book.  Their relation
to Celia forced itself more and more upon his mind.
He could recall the twinkle in her eye, the sub-mockery
in her tone, as she commented with that half-contemptuous
"Yes--George something!" upon his blundering ignorance.
His mortification at having thus exposed his dull
rusticity was swallowed up in conjectures as to just
what her tolerant familiarity with such things involved.
He had never before met a young unmarried woman who would
have confessed to him any such knowledge.  But then,
of course, he had never known a girl who resembled Celia
in any other way.  He recognized vaguely that he must
provide himself with an entire new set of standards by which
to measure and comprehend her.  But it was for the moment
more interesting to wonder what her standards were.
Did she object to George Sand's behavior?  Or did she
sympathize with that sort of thing?  Did those statues,
and the loose-flowing diaphonous toga and unbound hair,
the cigarettes, the fiery liqueur, the deliberately
sensuous music--was he to believe that they signified--?

"Good-morning, Mr. Ware.  You have managed by a miracle
to hit on one of my punctual days," said Celia.

She was standing on the doorstep, at the entrance to the
musical department of Thurston's. He had not noticed
before the fact that the sun was shining.  The full glare
of its strong light, enveloping her figure as she stood,
and drawing the dazzled eye for relief to the bower
of softened color, close beneath her parasol of creamy
silk and lace, was what struck him now first of all.
It was as if Celia had brought the sun with her.

Theron shook hands with her, and found joy in the perception,
that his own hand trembled.  He put boldly into words
the thought that came to him.

"It was generous of you," he said, "to wait for me out here,
where all might delight in the sight of you, instead of
squandering the privilege on a handful of clerks inside."

Miss Madden beamed upon him, and nodded approval.

"Alcibiades never turned a prettier compliment,"
she remarked.  They went in together at this, and Theron
made a note of the name.

During the ensuing half-hour, the young minister followed
about even more humbly than the clerks in Celia's
commanding wake.  There were a good many pianos in the big
show-room overhead, and Theron found himself almost awed
by their size and brilliancy of polish, and the thought
of the tremendous sum of money they represented altogether.
Not so with the organist.  She ordered them rolled around
this way or that, as if they had been so many checkers on
a draught-board. She threw back their covers with the scant
ceremony of a dispensary dentist opening paupers' mouths.
She exploited their several capacities with masterful hands,
not deigning to seat herself, but just slightly
bending forward, and sweeping her fingers up and down
their keyboards--able, domineering fingers which pounded,
tinkled, meditated, assented, condemned, all in a flash, and
amid what affected the layman's ears as a hopelessly discordant hubbub.

Theron moved about in the group, nursing her parasol
in his arms, and watching her.  The exaggerated deference
which the clerks and salesmen showed to her as the rich
Miss Madden, seemed to him to be mixed with a certain
assertion of the claims of good-fellowship on the score
of her being a musician.  There undoubtedly was a sense
of freemasonry between them.  They alluded continually
in technical terms to matters of which he knew nothing,
and were amused at remarks of hers which to him carried
no meaning whatever.  It was evident that the young
men liked her, and that their liking pleased her.
It thrilled him to think that she knew he liked her,
too, and to recall what abundant proofs she had given
that here, also, she had pleasure in the fact.  He clung
insistently to the memory of these evidences.  They helped
him to resist a disagreeable tendency to feel himself
an intruder, an outsider, among these pianoforte experts.

When it was all over, Celia waved the others aside,
and talked with Theron.  "I suppose you want me to tell you
the truth," she said.  "There's nothing here really good.
It is always much better to buy of the makers direct."

"Do they sell on the instalment plan?" he asked.
There was a wistful effect in his voice which caught
her attention.

She looked away--out through the window on the street below--
for a moment.  Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded
him with a comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance,
recalling for all the world the way Sister Soulsby had
looked at him at odd times.

"Oh, you want it at once--I see," she remarked softly.
"Well, this Adelberger is the best value for the money."

Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay
that it pointed toward the largest instrument in the room--
a veritable leviathan among pianos.  The price of this
had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the fact
that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found
the courage to shake his head.

"It would be too large--much too large--for the room,"
he explained.  "And, besides, it is more than I like to pay--
or CAN pay, for that matter."  It was pitiful to be
explaining such details, but there was no help for it.

They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at
least of fair quality.  "Now leave all the bargaining
to me," she adjured him.  "These prices that they talk
about in the piano trade are all in the air.  There are
tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them.
All you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house--
you wanted it today, you said?"

"Yes--in memory of yesterday," he murmured.

She herself gave the directions, and Thurston's people,
now all salesmen again, bowed grateful acquiescence.
Then she sailed regally across the room and down the stairs,
drawing Theron in her train.  The hirelings made salaams
to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose
anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates
of payment.

"I am ever so much obliged to you," he said fervently,
in the comparative solitude of the lower floor.  She had
paused to look at something in the book-department.

"Of course I was entirely at your service; don't mention it,"
she replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way
for her parasol.

He held up instead the volume he had purchased.  "Guess what
that is!  You never would guess in this wide world!"
His manner was surcharged with a sense of the surreptitious.

"Well, then, there's no good trying, IS there?"
commented Celia, her glance roving again toward the shelves.

"It is a life of George Sand," whispered Theron.
"I've been reading it this morning--all the Chopin part--
while I was waiting for you."

To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased
contraction of her brows as he made this revelation.
For the instant, a dreadful fear of having offended her
seized upon and sickened him.  But then her face cleared,
as by magic.  She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle
in laughter at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most
winning mockery of admonition.

"Naughty! naughty!" she murmured back, with a roguishly
solemn wink.

He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed
her the parasol.  The situation had suddenly grown
too confused for words, or even sequent thoughts.
Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there
scudded the singular reflection that he should never hear
her play on that new piano of his.  Even as it flashed
by out of sight, he recognized it for one of the griefs
of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed
nothing but a revolt against the idea of having a piano
at all.  He would countermand the order.  He would--
but she was speaking again.

They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as
placidly conventional as if the talk had never strayed
from the subject of pianos.  Theron with an effort
pulled himself together, and laid hold of her words.

"I suppose you will be going the other way," she was saying.
"I shall have to be at the church all day.  We have just
got a new Mass over from Vienna, and I'm head over heels
in work at it.  I can have Father Forbes to myself today,
too.  That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism,
and can't come out of his cave, thank Heaven!"

And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit,
busy sidewalk, and Theron, standing on the doorstep,
ruefully rubbed his chin.  She had said he was going
the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her
words good, though each step he took seemed all in despite
of his personal inclinations.  Some of the passers-by
bowed to him, and one or two paused as if to shake hands
and exchange greetings.  He nodded responses mechanically,
but did not stop.  It was as if he feared to interrupt
the process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling
them forward, lest they should wheel and scuttle off
in the opposite direction.



CHAPTER XXI


Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of
store-fronts along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion
of picket-fences enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon
Theron's attention the fact that he was nearing home.
It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal.
He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any
desire just now to sit about in that library living-room
of his.  Why should he go home at all?  There was no
reason whatever--save that Alice would be expecting him.
Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason.
Wives, with their limited grasp of the realities of life,
were always expecting their husbands to do things
which it turned out not to be feasible for them to do.
The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his
life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary
to disappoint or upset her little plans for his comings
and goings.  It was in the very nature of things that it
should be so.

Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps,
then halted irresolutely, and after a minute's hesitation,
entered the small temperance restaurant before which,
as by intuition, he had paused.  The elderly woman who
placed on the tiny table before him the tea and rolls
he ordered, was entirely unknown to him, he felt sure,
yet none the less she smiled at him, and spoke almost
familiarly--"I suppose Mrs. Ware is at the seaside,
and you are keeping bachelor's hall?"

"Not quite that," he responded stiffly, and hurried
through the meagre and distasteful repast, to avoid
any further conversation.

There was an idea underlying her remark, however, which
recurred to him when he had paid his ten cents and got
out on the street again.  There was something interesting
in the thought of Alice at the seaside.  Neither of them
had ever laid eyes on salt water, but Theron took for granted
the most extravagant landsman's conception of its curative
and invigorating powers.  It was apparent to him that he
was going to pay much greater attention to Alice's happiness
and well-being in the future than he had latterly done.
He had bought her, this very day, a superb new piano.
He was going to simply insist on her having a hired girl.
And this seaside notion--why, that was best of all.

His fancy built up pleasant visions of her feasting her
delighted eyes upon the marvel of a great ocean storm,
or roaming along a beach strewn with wonderful marine shells,
exhibiting an innocent joy in their beauty.  The fresh
sea-breeze blew through her hair, as he saw her in mind's eye,
and brought the hardy flush of health back upon her rather
pallid cheeks.  He was prepared already hardly to know her,
so robust and revivified would she have become, by the
time he went down to the depot to meet her on her return.

For his imagination stopped short of seeing himself
at the seaside.  It sketched instead pictures of whole
weeks of solitary academic calm, alone with his books
and his thoughts.  The facts that he had no books,
and that nobody dreamed of interfering with his thoughts,
subordinated themselves humbly to his mood.  The prospect,
as he mused fondly upon it, expanded to embrace the
priest's and the doctor's libraries; the thoughts which
he longed to be alone with involved close communion
with their thoughts.  It could not but prove a season
of immense mental stimulation and ethical broadening.
It would have its lofty poetic and artistic side as well;
the languorous melodies of Chopin stole over his revery,
as he dwelt upon these things, and soft azure and golden
lights modelled forth the exquisite outlines of tall
marble forms.

He opened the gate leading to Dr. Ledsmar's house.  His walk
had brought him quite out of the town, and up, by a broad
main highway which yet took on all sorts of sylvan charms,
to a commanding site on the hillside.  Below, in the valley,
lay Octavius, at one end half-hidden in factory smoke,
at the other, where narrow bands of water gleamed
upon the surface of a broad plain piled symmetrically
with lumber, presenting an oddly incongruous suggestion
of forest odors and the simplicity of the wilderness.
In the middle distance, on gradually rising ground,
stretched a wide belt of dense, artificial foliage,
peeping through which tiled turrets and ornamented
chimneys marked the polite residences of those who,
though they neither stoked the furnace fires to the west,
nor sawed the lumber on the east, lived in purple and fine
linen from the profits of this toil.  Nearer at hand,
pastures with grazing cows on the one side of the road,
and the nigh, weather-stained board fence of the race-course
on the other, completed the jumble of primitive rusticity
and urban complications characterizing the whole picture.

Dr. Ledsmar's house, toward which Theron's impulses had been
secretly leading him ever since Celia's parting remark
about the rheumatism, was of that spacious and satisfying
order of old-fashioned houses which men of leisure and
means built for themselves while the early traditions
of a sparse and contented homogeneous population were
still strong in the Republic.  There was a hospitable look
about its wide veranda, its broad, low bulk, and its big,
double front door, which did not fit at all with the sketch
of a man-hating recluse that the doctor had drawn of himself.

Theron had prepared his mind for the effect of being
admitted by a Chinaman, and was taken somewhat aback
when the door was opened by the doctor himself.
His reception was pleasant enough, almost cordial,
but the sense of awkwardness followed him into his host's
inner room and rested heavily upon his opening speech.

"I heard, quite by accident, that you were ill," he said,
laying aside his hat.

"It's nothing at all," replied Ledsmar.  "Merely a stiff
shoulder that I wear from time to time in memory of my father.
It ought to be quite gone by nightfall.  It was good of you
to come, all the same.  Sit down if you can find a chair.
As usual, we are littered up to our eyes here.  That's it--
throw those things on the floor."

Mr. Ware carefully deposited an armful of pamphlets on the
rug at his feet, and sat down.  Litter was indeed the word
for what he saw about him.  Bookcases, chairs, tables,
the corners of the floor, were all buried deep under
disorderly strata of papers, diagrams, and opened books.
One could hardly walk about without treading on them.
The dust which danced up into the bar of sunshine streaming in
from the window, as the doctor stepped across to another chair,
gave Theron new ideas about the value of Chinese servants.

"I must thank you, first of all, doctor," he began,
"for your kindness in coming when I was ill.  'I was sick,
and ye visited me.'"

"You mustn't think of it that way," said Ledsmar; "your friend
came for me, and of course I went; and gladly too.
There was nothing that I could do, or that anybody
could do.  Very interesting man, that friend of yours.
And his wife, too--both quite out of the common.
I don't know when I've seen two such really genuine people.
I should like to have known more of them.  Are they
still here?"

"They went yesterday," Theron replied.  His earlier shyness
had worn off, and he felt comfortably at his ease.
"I don't know," he went on, "that the word 'genuine'
is just what would have occurred to me to describe
the Soulsbys.  The, are very interesting people, as you say--
MOST interesting--and there was a time, l dare say,
when I should have believed in their sincerity.  But of
course I saw them and their performance from the inside--
like one on the stage of a theatre, you know, instead of
in the audience, and--well, I understand things better
than I used to."

The doctor looked over his spectacles at him with a
suggestion of inquiry in his glance, and Theron continued:
"I had several long talks with her; she told me very
frankly the whole story of her life--and and it was
decidedly queer, I can assure you!  I may say to you--
you will understand what I mean--that since my talk
with you, and the books you lent me, I see many
things differently.  Indeed, when I think upon it sometimes
my old state of mind seems quite incredible to me.
I can use no word for my new state short of illumination."

Dr. Ledsmar continued to regard his guest with that calm,
interrogatory scrutiny of his.  He did not seem disposed
to take up the great issue of illumination.  "I suppose,"
he said after a little, "no woman can come in contact
with a priest for any length of time WITHOUT telling him
the 'story of her life,' as you call it.  They all do it.
The thing amounts to a law."

The young minister's veins responded with a pleasurable
thrill to the use of the word "priest" in obvious allusion
to himself.  "Perhaps in fairness I ought to explain,"
he said, "that in her case it was only done in the course
of a long talk about myself.  I might say that it
was by way of kindly warning to me.  She saw how I
had become unsettled in many--many of my former views--
and she was nervous lest this should lead me to--to--"

"To throw up the priesthood," the doctor interposed upon
his hesitation.  "Yes, I know the tribe.  Why, my dear sir,
your entire profession would have perished from the memory
of mankind, if it hadn't been for women.  It is a very
curious subject.  Lots of thinkers have dipped into it,
but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light
and exploited the whole thing.  Our boys, for instance,
traverse in their younger years all the stages of the
childhood of the race.  They have terrifying dreams
of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have
never so much as heard in their waking hours; they pass
through the lust for digging caves, building fires,
sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows--
all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones,
marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year
which they instinctively know, just as they were played
in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much earlier.
But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him--
so completely that the grown man feels himself more
a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking
and doing precisely the things he thought and did a few
years before, than he would among Kurds or Esquimaux.
But the woman is totally different.  She is infinitely
more precocious as a girl.  At an age when her slow brother
is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period,
she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage,
or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own.
Having got there, she stays there; she dies there.
The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare.
He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain
in the dark ages, where she belongs.  If he happens to be
a fool, which is customary, he stops and hangs around in
her vicinity."

Theron smiled.  "We priests," he said, and paused again
to enjoy the words--"I suppose I oughtn't to inquire
too closely just where we belong in the procession."

"We are considering the question impersonally,"
said the doctor.  "First of all, what you regard as
religion is especially calculated to attract women.
They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow
of their bones, as they were ten thousand years ago.
Even the cleverest of them are secretly afraid of omens,
and respect auguries.  Think of the broadest women
you know.  One of them will throw salt over her shoulder
if she spills it.  Another drinks money from her cup
by skimming the bubbles in a spoon.  Another forecasts
her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds. They
make the constituency to which an institution based
on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally,
would naturally appeal.  Secondly, there is the personality
of the priest."

"Yes," assented Ware.  There rose up before him,
on the instant, the graceful, portly figure and strong,
comely face of Father Forbes.

"Women are not a metaphysical people.  They do not
easily follow abstractions.  They want their dogmas
and religious sentiments embodied in a man, just as they
do their romantic fancies.  Of course you Protestants,
with your married clergy, see less of the effects of this
than celibates do, but even with you there is a great deal
in it.  Why, the very institution of celibacy itself
was forced upon the early Christian Church by the scandal
of rich Roman ladies loading bishops and handsome priests
with fabulous gifts until the passion for currying favor
with women of wealth, and marrying them or wheedling
their fortunes from them, debauched the whole priesthood.
You should read your Jerome."

"I will--certainly," said the listener, resolving to
remember the name and refer it to the old bookseller.

"Well, whatever laws one sect or another makes, the woman's
attitude toward the priest survives.  She desires to see
him surrounded by flower-pots and candles, to have him
smelling of musk.  She would like to curl his hair,
and weave garlands in it.  Although she is not learned
enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively
feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan
sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped
the priesthood in Greek and Roman days.  Ugh!  It makes
one sick!"

Dr. Ledsmar rose, as he spoke, and dismissed the topic with
a dry little laugh.  "Come, let me show you round a bit,"
he said.  "My shoulder is easier walking than sitting."

"Have you never written a book yourself?" asked Theron,
getting to his feet.

"I have a thing on serpent-worship," the scientist
replied--"written years ago."

"I can't tell you how I should enjoy reading it,"
urged the other.

The doctor laughed again.  "You'll have to learn German,
then, I 'm afraid.  It is still in circulation in Germany,
I believe, on its merits as a serious book.  I haven't
a copy of the edition in English.  THAT was all exhausted
by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity,
like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.'  Come this way, and I
will show you my laboratory."

They moved out of the room, and through a passage,
Ledsmar talking as he led the way.  "I took up that subject,
when I was at college, by a curious chance.  I kept a young
monkey in my rooms, which had been born in captivity.
I brought home from a beer hall--it was in Germany--
some pretzels one night, and tossed one toward the monkey.
He jumped toward it, then screamed and ran back shuddering
with fright.  I couldn't understand it at first.  Then I
saw that the curled pretzel, lying there on the floor,
was very like a little coiled-up snake.  The monkey had
never seen a snake, but it was in his blood to be afraid
of one.  That incident changed my whole life for me.
Up to that evening, I had intended to be a lawyer."

Theron did not feel sure that he had understood the point
of the anecdote.  He looked now, without much interest,
at some dark little tanks containing thick water, a row of small
glass cases with adders and other lesser reptiles inside,
and a general collection of boxes, jars, and similar
receptacles connected with the doctor's pursuits.
Further on was a smaller chamber, with a big empty furnace,
and shelves bearing bottles and apparatus like a drugstore.

It was pleasanter in the conservatory--a low,
spacious structure with broad pathways between the plants,
and an awning over the sunny side of the roof.  The plants
were mostly orchids, he learned.  He had read of them,
but never seen any before.  No doubt they were curious;
but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss
made about them.  The heat grew oppressive inside,
and he was glad to emerge into the garden.  He paused
under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off
his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief.
Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural and delightfully
free from pretence in the big, overgrown field of flowers
and shrubs.

Theron recalled with some surprise Celia's indictment
of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul.
"You must be extremely fond of flowers," he remarked.

Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder.  "They have their points,"
he said briefly.  "These are all dioecious here.  Over beyond
are monoecious species.  My work is to test the probabilities
for or against Darwin's theory that hermaphroditism
in plants is a late by-product of these earlier forms."

"And is his theory right?" asked Mr. Ware, with a polite
show of interest.

"We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,"
replied Ledsmar.  He looked up into his guest's face
with a quizzical half-smile. "That is a very brief period
for observation when such a complicated question as sex
is involved," he added.  "We have been studying the female
of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years,
and we haven't arrived at the most elementary rules
governing her actions."

They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more
forward of which were beginning to show bloom.  "Here another
task will begin next month," the doctor observed.
"These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums,
or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose.
Humble-bees bore holes through their base, to save
the labor of climbing in and out of the flowers,
and we don't quite know yet why some hive-bees discover
and utilize these holes at once, while others never do.
It may be merely the old-fogy conservatism of the individual,
or there may be a law in it."

These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom
to bother his head about.  Theron looked, as he was bidden,
at the rows of hives shining in the hot sun on a bench
along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a casual,
"My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she
never got around to it.  They say it pays very well, though."

"The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the
nectar of the EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet
to our taste, and wasps are greedy for it, WOULD pay,"
commented the doctor.  "Not like a blue rhododendron,
in mere money, but in recognition.  Lots of men have
achieved a half-column in the 'Encyclopedia Britannica'
on a smaller basis than that."

They stood now at the end of the garden, before a small,
dilapidated summer-house. On the bench inside, facing him,
Theron saw a strange recumbent figure stretched at
full length, apparently sound asleep, or it might be dead.
Looking closer, with a startled surprise, he made out
the shaven skull and outlandish garb of a Chinaman.
He turned toward his guide in the expectation of a scene.

The doctor had already taken out a note-book and pencil,
and was drawing his watch from his pocket.  He stepped into
the summer-house, and, lifting the Oriental's limp arm,
took account of his pulse.  Then, with head bowed low,
side-wise, he listened for the heart-action. Finally,
he somewhat brusquely pushed back one of the Chinaman's eyelids,
and made a minute inspection of what the operation disclosed.
Returning to the light, he inscribed some notes in
his book, put it back in his pocket, and came out.
In answer to Theron's marvelling stare, he pointed toward
a pipe of odd construction lying on the floor beneath
the sleeper.

"This is one of my regular afternoon duties," he explained,
again with the whimsical half-smile. "I am increasing his
dose monthly by regular stages, and the results promise
to be rather remarkable.  Heretofore, observations have been
made mostly on diseased or morbidly deteriorated subjects.
This fellow of mine is strong as an ox, perfectly nourished,
and watched over intelligently.  He can assimilate opium
enough to kill you and me and every other vertebrate
creature on the premises, without turning a hair, and he
hasn't got even fairly under way yet."

The thing was unpleasant, and the young minister turned away.
They walked together up the path toward the house.
His mind was full now of the hostile things which Celia
had said about the doctor.  He had vaguely sympathized
with her then, upon no special knowledge of his own.
Now he felt that his sentiments were vehemently in accord
with hers.  The doctor WAS a beast.

And yet--as they moved slowly along through the garden
the thought took sudden shape in his mind--it would be
only justice for him to get also the doctor's opinion
of Celia.  Even while they offended and repelled him,
he could not close his eyes to the fact that the doctor's
experiments and occupations were those of a patient
and exact man of science--a philosopher.  And what he
had said about women--there was certainly a great deal
of acumen and shrewd observation in that.  If he would
only say what he really thought about Celia, and about
her relations with the priest!  Yes, Theron recognized
now there was nothing else that he so much needed light
upon as those puzzling ties between Celia and Father Forbes.

He paused, with a simulated curiosity, about one of
the flower-beds. "Speaking of women and religion"--
he began, in as casual a tone as he could command--
"I notice curiously enough in my own case, that as I develop
in what you may call the--the other direction, my wife,
who formerly was not especially devote, is being strongly
attracted by the most unthinking and hysterical side of--
of our church system."

The doctor looked at him, nodded, and stooped to nip
some buds from a stalk in the bed.

"And another case," Theron went on--"of course it was all
so new and strange to me--but the position which Miss
Madden seems to occupy about the Catholic Church here--
I suppose you had her in mind when you spoke."

Ledsmar stood up.  "My mind has better things to busy
itself with than mad asses of that description,"
he replied.  "She is not worth talking about--a mere
bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness.
If she were even a type, she might be worth considering;
but she is simply an abnormal sport, with a little brain
addled by notions that she is like Hypatia, and a large
impudence rendered intolerable by the fact that she
has money.  Her father is a decent man.  He ought to have
her whipped."

Mr. Ware drew himself erect, as he listened to these
outrageous words.  It would be unmanly, he felt, to allow
such comments upon an absent friend to pass unrebuked.
Yet there was the courtesy due to a host to be considered.
His mind, fluttering between these two extremes,
alighted abruptly upon a compromise.  He would speak
so as to show his disapproval, yet not so as to prevent
his finding out what he wanted to know.  The desire
to hear Ledsmar talk about Celia and the priest seemed
now to have possessed him for a long time, to have
dictated his unpremeditated visit out here, to have been
growing in intensity all the while he pretended to be
interested in orchids and bees and the drugged Chinaman.
It tugged passionately at his self-control as he spoke.

"I cannot in the least assent to your characterization
of the lady," he began with rhetorical dignity.

"Bless me!" interposed the doctor, with deceptive
cheerfulness, "that is not required of you at all.
It is a strictly personal opinion, offered merely
as a contribution to the general sum of hypotheses."

"But," Theron went on, feeling his way, "of course,
I gathered that evening that you had prejudices in the matter;
but these are rather apart from the point I had in view.
We were speaking, you will remember, of the traditional
attitude of women toward priests--wanting to curl their
hair and put flowers in it, you know, and that suggested
to me some individual illustrations, and it occurred
to me to wonder just what were the relations between Miss
Madden and--and Father Forbes.  She said this morning,
for instance--I happened to meet her, quite by accident--
that she was going to the church to practise a new piece,
and that she could have Father Forbes to herself all day.
Now that would be quite an impossible remark in our--that is,
in any Protestant circles--and purely as a matter of comparison,
I was curious to ask you just how much there was in it.
I ask you, because going there so much you have had exceptional
opportunities for--"

A sharp exclamation from his companion interrupted
the clergyman's hesitating monologue.  It began like a
high-pitched, violent word, but dwindled suddenly into a groan
of pain.  The doctor's face, too, which had on the flash
of Theron's turning seemed given over to unmixed anger,
took on an expression of bodily suffering instead.

"My shoulder has grown all at once excessively painful,"
he said hastily.  "I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me,
Mr. Ware."

Carrying the afflicted side with ostentatious caution,
he led the way without ado round the house to the front
gate on the road.  He had put his left hand under his coat
to press it against his aching shoulder, and his right hung
palpably helpless.  This rendered it impossible for him
to shake hands with his guest in parting.

"You're sure there's nothing I can do," said Theron,
lingering on the outer side of the gate.  "I used to rub
my father's shoulders and back; I'd gladly--"

"Oh, not for worlds!" groaned the doctor.  His anguish
was so impressive that Theron, as he walked down the road,
quite missed the fact that there had been no invitation
to come again.

Dr. Ledsmar stood for a minute or two, his gaze meditatively
following the retreating figure.  Then he went in, opening the
front door with his right hand, and carrying himself once more
as if there were no such thing as rheumatism in the world.
He wandered on through the hall into the laboratory,
and stopped in front of the row of little tanks full of water.

Some deliberation was involved in whatever his purpose might be,
for he looked from one tank to another with a pondering,
dilatory gaze.  At last he plunged his hand into the opaque
fluid and drew forth a long, slim, yellowish-green lizard,
with a coiling, sinuous tail and a pointed, evil head.
The reptile squirmed and doubled itself backward around
his wrist, darting out and in with dizzy swiftness its tiny
forked tongue.

The doctor held the thing up to the light, and, scrutinizing it
through his spectacles, nodded his head in sedate approval.
A grim smile curled in his beard.

"Yes, you are the type," he murmured to it, with evident
enjoyment in the conceit.  "Your name isn't Johnny any more.
It's the Rev. Theron Ware."



CHAPTER XXII


The annual camp-meeting of the combined Methodist
districts of Octavius and Thessaly was held this year in
the second half of September, a little later than usual.
Of the nine days devoted to this curious survival of
primitive Wesleyanism, the fifth fell upon a Saturday.
On the noon of that day the Rev. Theron Ware escaped
for some hours from the burden of work and incessant
observation which he shared with twenty other preachers,
and walked alone in the woods.

The scene upon which he turned his back was one worth
looking at.  A spacious, irregularly defined clearing
in the forest lay level as a tennis-court, under the soft
haze of autumn sunlight.  In the centre was a large,
roughly constructed frame building, untouched by paint,
but stained and weather-beaten with time.  Behind it were some
lines of horse-sheds, and still further on in that direction,
where the trees began, the eye caught fragmentary
glimpses of low roofs and the fronts of tiny cottages,
withdrawn from full view among the saplings and underbrush.
At the other side of the clearing, fully fourscore tents
were pitched, some gray and mended, others dazzlingly
white in their newness.  The more remote of these tents
fell into an orderly arrangement of semi-circular form,
facing that part of the engirdling woods where the trees
were largest, and their canopy of overhanging foliage
was lifted highest from the ground.  Inside this half-ring
of tents were many rounded rows of benches, which followed
in narrowing lines the idea of an amphitheatre cut in two.
In the centre, just under the edge of the roof of boughs,
rose a wooden pagoda, in form not unlike an open-air stand
for musicians.  In front of this, and leading from it
on the level of its floor, there projected a platform,
railed round with aggressively rustic woodwork.
The nearest benches came close about this platform.

At the hour when Theron started away, there were few enough
signs of life about this encampment.  The four or five
hundred people who were in constant residence were eating
their dinners in the big boarding-house, or the cottages
or the tents.  It was not the time of day for strangers.
Even when services were in progress by daylight,
the regular attendants did not make much of a show,
huddled in a gray-black mass at the front of the auditorium,
by comparison with the great green and blue expanses
of nature about them.

The real spectacle was in the evening when, as the
shadows gathered, big clusters of kerosene torches,
hung on the trees facing the audience were lighted.
The falling darkness magnified the glow of the lights,
and the size and importance of what they illumined.
The preacher, bending forward over the rails of the platform,
and fastening his eyes upon the abashed faces of those
on the "anxious seat" beneath him, borrowed an effect
of druidical mystery from the wall of blackness about him,
from the flickering reflections on the branches far above,
from the cool night air which stirred across the clearing.
The change was in the blood of those who saw and heard
him, too.  The decorum and half-heartedness of their
devotions by day deepened under the glare of the torches
into a fervent enthusiasm, even before the services began.
And if there was in the rustic pulpit a man whose prayers
or exhortations could stir their pulses, they sang and
groaned and bellowed out their praises with an almost
barbarous license, such as befitted the wilderness.

But in the evening not all were worshippers.  For a dozen
miles round on the country-side, young farm-workers and
their girls regarded the camp-meeting as perhaps the chief
event of the year--no more to be missed than the country
fair or the circus, and offering, from many points of view,
more opportunities for genuine enjoyment than either.
Their behavior when they came was pretty bad--not the less
so because all the rules established by the Presiding
Elders for the regulation of strangers took it for granted
that they would act as viciously as they knew how.
These sight-seers sometimes ventured to occupy the back benches
where the light was dim.  More often they stood outside,
in the circular space between the tents and the benches,
and mingled cat-calls, drovers' yelps, and all sorts
of mocking cries and noises with the "Amens" of the
earnest congregation.  Their rough horse-play on the
fringe of the sanctified gathering was grievous enough;
everybody knew that much worse things went on further
out in the surrounding darkness.  Indeed, popular report
gave to these external phases of the camp-meeting an even
more evil fame than attached to the later moonlight
husking-bees, or the least reputable of the midwinter
dances at Dave Randall's low halfway house.

Cynics said that the Methodists found consolation
for this scandal in the large income they derived from
their unruly visitors' gate-money. This was unfair.
No doubt the money played its part, but there was something
else far more important.  The pious dwellers in the camp,
intent upon reviving in their poor modern way the character
and environment of the heroic early days, felt the need
of just this hostile and scoffing mob about them to bring
out the spirit they sought.  Theirs was pre-eminently
a fighting religion, which languished in peaceful
fair weather, but flamed high in the storm.  The throng
of loafers and light-minded worldlings of both sexes,
with their jeering interruptions and lewd levity of conduct,
brought upon the scene a kind of visible personal devil,
with whom the chosen could do battle face to face.
The daylight services became more and more perfunctory,
as the sojourn in the woods ran its course, and interest
concentrated itself upon the night meetings, for the reason
that THEN came the fierce wrestle with a Beelzebub of flesh
and blood.  And it was not so one-sided a contest, either!

No evening passed without its victories for the pulpit.
Careless or mischievous young people who were pushed into
the foremost ranks of the mockers, and stood grinning
and grimacing under the lights, would of a sudden feel
a spell clamped upon them.  They would hear a strange,
quavering note in the preacher's voice, catch the sense
of a piercing, soul-commanding gleam in his eye--
not at all to be resisted.  These occult forces would
take control of them, drag them forward as in a dream
to the benches under the pulpit, and abase them there like
worms in the dust.  And then the preacher would descend,
and the elders advance, and the torch-fires would sway
and dip before the wind of the mighty roar that went up
in triumph from the brethren.

These combats with Satan at close quarters, if they
made the week-day evenings exciting, reacted with an
effect of crushing dulness upon the Sunday services.
The rule was to admit no strangers to the grounds from
Saturday night to Monday morning.  Every year attempts
were made to rescind or modify this rule, and this season
at least three-fourths of the laymen in attendance had
signed a petition in favor of opening the gates.  The two
Presiding Elders, supported by a dozen of the older preachers,
resisted the change, and they had the backing of the more
bigoted section of the congregation from Octavius.
The controversy reached a point where Theron's Presiding
Elder threatened to quit the grounds, and the leaders
of the open-Sunday movement spoke freely of the ridiculous
figure which its cranks and fanatics made poor Methodism
cut in the eyes of modern go-ahead American civilization.
Then Theron Ware saw his opportunity, and preached
an impromptu sermon upon the sanctity of the Sabbath,
which ended all discussion.  Sometimes its arguments seemed
to be on one side, sometimes on the other, but always
they were clothed with so serene a beauty of imagery,
and moved in such a lofty and rarefied atmosphere
of spiritual exaltation, that it was impossible to link
them to so sordid a thing as this question of gate-money.
When he had finished, nobody wanted the gates opened.
The two factions found that the difference between them had
melted out of existence.  They sat entranced by the charm
of the sermon; then, glancing around at the empty benches,
glaringly numerous in the afternoon sunlight, they whispered
regrets that ten thousand people had not been there
to hear that marvellous discourse.  Theron's conquest was
of exceptional dimensions.  The majority, whose project
he had defeated, were strangers who appreciated and
admired his effort most.  The little minority of his
own flock, though less susceptible to the influence
of graceful diction and delicately balanced rhetoric,
were proud of the distinction he had reflected upon them,
and delighted with him for having won their fight.
The Presiding Elders wrung his hand with a significant grip.
The extremists of his own charge beamed friendship upon
him for the first time.  He was the veritable hero of the week.

The prestige of this achievement made it the easier
for Theron to get away by himself next day, and walk in
the woods.  A man of such power had a right to solitude.
Those who noted his departure from the camp remembered
with pleasure that he was to preach again on the morrow.
He was going to commune with God in the depths of the forest,
that the Message next day might be clearer and more
luminous still.

Theron strolled for a little, with an air of aimlessness,
until he was well outside the more or less frequented
neighborhood of the camp.  Then he looked at the sun
and the lay of the land with that informing scrutiny
of which the farm-bred boy never loses the trick, turned,
and strode at a rattling pace down the hillside.
He knew nothing personally of this piece of woodland--
a spur of the great Adirondack wilderness thrust southward
into the region of homesteads and dairies and hop-fields--
but he had prepared himself by a study of the map, and he
knew where he wanted to go.  Very Soon he hit upon the path
he had counted upon finding, and at this he quickened
his gait.

Three months of the new life had wrought changes
in Theron.  He bore himself more erectly, for one thing;
his shoulders were thrown back, and seemed thicker.
The alteration was even more obvious in his face.
The effect of lank, wistful, sallow juvenility had vanished.
It was the countenance of a mature, well-fed, and confident man,
firmer and more rounded in its outlines, and with a glow
of health on its whole surface.  Under the chin were
the suggestions of fulness which bespeak an easy mind.
His clothes were new; the frock-coat fitted him, and the thin,
dark-colored autumn overcoat, with its silk lining exposed
at the breast, gave a masculine bulk and shape to his figure.
He wore a shining tall hat, and, in haste though he was,
took pains not to knock it against low-hanging branches.

All had gone well--more than well--with him.  The second
Quarterly Conference had passed without a ripple.
Both the attendance and the collections at his church were
larger than ever before, and the tone of the congregation
toward him was altered distinctly for the better.
As for himself, he viewed with astonished delight the progress
he had made in his own estimation.  He had taken Sister
Soulsby's advice, and the results were already wonderful.
He had put aside, once and for all, the thousand foolish
trifles and childish perplexities which formerly had racked
his brain, and worried him out of sleep and strength.
He borrowed all sorts of books boldly now from the Octavius
public library, and could swim with a calm mastery
and enjoyment upon the deep waters into which Draper
and Lecky and Laing and the rest had hurled him.
He dallied pleasurably, a little languorously, with a dozen
aspects of the case against revealed religion, ranging from
the mild heterodoxy of Andover's qualms to the rude
Ingersoll's rollicking negation of God himself, as a woman
of coquetry might play with as many would-be lovers.
They amused him; they were all before him to choose;
and he was free to postpone indefinitely the act
of selection.  There was a sense of the luxurious in this
position which softened bodily as well as mental fibres.
He ceased to grow indignant at things below or outside
his standards, and he bought a small book which treated
of the care of the hand and finger nails.

Alice had accepted with deference his explanation that
shapely hands played so important a part in pulpit oratory.
For that matter, she now accepted whatever he said or did
with admirable docility.  It was months since he could
remember her venturing upon a critical attitude toward him.

She had not wished to leave home, for the seaside or any
other resort, during the summer, but had worked outside
in her garden more than usual.  This was inexpensive, and it
seemed to do her as much good as a holiday could have done.
Her new devotional zeal was now quite an odd thing;
it had not slackened at all from the revival pitch.
At the outset she had tried several times to talk with her
husband upon this subject.  He had discouraged conversation
about her soul and its welfare, at first obliquely, then,
under compulsion, with some directness.  His thoughts
were absorbed, he said, by the contemplation of vast,
abstract schemes of creation and the government of the universe,
and it only diverted and embarrassed his mind to try
to fasten it upon the details of personal salvation.
Thereafter the topic was not broached between them.

She bestowed a good deal of attention, too, upon her piano.
The knack of a girlish nimbleness of touch had returned
to her after a few weeks, and she made music which Theron
supposed was very good--for her.  It pleased him,
at all events, when he sat and listened to it; but he had
a far greater pleasure, as he listened, in dwelling upon
the memories of the yellow and blue room which the sounds
always brought up.  Although three months had passed,
Thurston's had never asked for the first payment on the piano,
or even sent in a bill.  This impressed him as being
peculiarly graceful behavior on his part, and he recognized
its delicacy by not going near Thurston's at all.

An hour's sharp walk, occasionally broken by short
cuts across open pastures, but for the most part on
forest paths, brought Theron to the brow of a small knoll,
free from underbrush, and covered sparsely with
beech-trees. The ground was soft with moss and the
powdered remains of last year's foliage; the leaves above
him were showing the first yellow stains of autumn.
A sweet smell of ripening nuts was thick upon the air,
and busy rustlings and chirpings through the stillness told
how the chipmunks and squirrels were attending to their harvest.

Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland.
He had halted, and was searching through the little
vistas offered between the stout gray trunks of the
beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort.
Yes! there were certainly voices to be heard, down in
the hollow.  And now, beyond all possibility of mistake,
there came up to him the low, rhythmic throb of music.
It was the merest faint murmur of music, made up almost
wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough.
He moved down the slope, swiftly at first, then with
increasing caution.  The sounds grew louder as he advanced,
until he could hear the harmony of the other strings
in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles,
and distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet
moving as one.

He reached a place from which, himself unobserved,
he could overlook much of what he had come to see.

The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine,
as flat and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn.
Its open expanse was big enough to accommodate several
distinct crowds, and here the crowds were--one massed about
an enclosure in which young men were playing at football,
another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve at
the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging
at a point where the shade of overhanging woods began,
focussed upon a centre of interest which Theron could
not make out.  Closer at hand, where a shallow stream
rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys,
with legs bared to the thighs, were paddling about,
under the charge of two men clad in long black gowns.
There were others of these frocked monitors scattered
here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven,
monkish figures, who none the less wore modern hats,
and superintended with knowledge the games of the period.
Theron remembered that these were the Christian Brothers,
the semi-monastic teachers of the Catholic school.

And this was the picnic of the Catholics of Octavius.
He gazed in mingled amazement and exhilaration upon
the spectacle.  There seemed to be literally thousands
of people on the open fields before him, and apparently
there were still other thousands in the fringes of the woods
round about.  The noises which arose from this multitude--
the shouts of the lads in the water, the playful
squeals of the girls in the swings, the fused uproar
of the more distant crowds, and above all the diligent,
ordered strains of the dance-music proceeding from
some invisible distance in the greenwood--charmed his
ears with their suggestion of universal merriment.
He drew a long breath--half pleasure, half wistful regret--
as he remembered that other gathering in the forest
which he had left behind.

At any rate, it should be well behind him today, whatever the
morrow might bring!  Evidently he was on the wrong side
of the circle for the headquarters of the festivities.
He turned and walked to the right through the beeches,
making a detour, under cover, of the crowds at play.
At last he rounded the long oval of the clearing,
and found himself at the very edge of that largest throng
of all, which had been too far away for comprehension
at the beginning.  There was no mystery now.  A rough,
narrow shed, fully fifty feet in length, imposed itself
in an arbitrary line across the face of this crowd,
dividing it into two compact halves.  Inside this shed,
protected all round by a waist-high barrier of boards,
on top of which ran a flat, table-like covering, were twenty
men in their shirt-sleeves, toiling ceaselessly to keep
abreast of the crowd's thirst for beer.  The actions
of these bartenders greatly impressed Theron.  They moved
like so many machines, using one hand, apparently, to take
money and give change, and with the other incessantly
sweeping off rows of empty glasses, and tossing forward
in their place fresh, foaming glasses five at a time.
Hundreds of arms and hands were continually stretched out,
on both sides of the shed, toward this streaming bar,
and through the babel of eager cries rose without pause the
racket of mallets tapping new kegs.

Theron had never seen any considerable number of his
fellow-citizens engaged in drinking lager beer before.
His surprise at the facility of those behind the bar
began to yield, upon observation, to a profound amazement
at the thirst of those before it.  The same people
seemed to be always in front, emptying the glasses
faster than the busy men inside could replenish them,
and clamoring tirelessly for more.  Newcomers had to
force their way to the bar by violent efforts, and once
there they stayed until pushed bodily aside.  There were
actually women to be seen here and there in the throng,
elbowing and shoving like the rest for a place at the front.
Some of the more gallant young men fought their way outward,
from time to time, carrying for safety above their heads
glasses of beer which they gave to young and pretty girls
standing on the fringe of the crowd, among the trees.

Everywhere a remarkable good-humor prevailed.
Once a sharp fight broke out, just at the end of the bar
nearest Theron, and one young man was knocked down.
A rush of the onlookers confused everything before the
minister's eyes for a minute, and then he saw the aggrieved
combatant up on his legs again, consenting under the kindly
pressure of the crowd to shake hands with his antagonist,
and join him in more beer.  The incident caught his fancy.
There was something very pleasingly human, he thought,
in this primitive readiness to resort to fisticuffs,
and this frank and genial reconciliation.

Perhaps there was something contagious in this wholesale
display of thirst, for the Rev. Mr. Ware became conscious
of a notion that he should like to try a glass of beer.
He recalled having heard that lager was really a most
harmless beverage.  Of course it was out of the question
that he should show himself at the bar.  Perhaps some one
would bring him out a glass, as if he were a pretty girl.
He looked about for a possible messenger.  Turning, he found
himself face to face with two smiling people, into whose
eyes he stared for an instant in dumfounded blankness.
Then his countenance flashed with joy, and he held out both
hands in greeting.  It was Father Forbes and Celia.

"We stole down upon you unawares," said the priest,
in his cheeriest manner.  He wore a brown straw hat,
and loose clothes hardly at all clerical in form,
and had Miss Madden's arm drawn lightly within his own.
"We could barely believe our eyes--that it could be you
whom we saw, here among the sinners!"

"I am in love with your sinners," responded Theron,
as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look
fully into her eyes.  "I've had five days of the saints,
over in another part of the woods, and they've bored the
head off me."



CHAPTER XXIII


At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering
near them went down through the throng to the bar,
and returned with three glasses of beer.  It pleased
the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it
for granted that he would do as the others did.  He knocked
his glass against theirs in compliance with a custom strange
to him, but which they seemed to understand very well.
The beer itself was not so agreeable to the taste as he
had expected, but it was cold and refreshing.

When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three
stood for a moment in silence, meditatively watching
the curious scene spread below them.  Beyond the bar,
Theron could catch now through the trees regularly
recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion.
These were nearest him, and clearest to the vision
as well, at the instant when they reached their highest
forward point.  The seats were filled with girls,
some of them quite grown young women, and their curving
upward sweep through the air was disclosing at its climax
a remarkable profusion of white skirts and black stockings.
The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme, and he
turned his eyes away.  They met Celia's; and there was
something latent in their brown depths which prompted him,
after a brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look
again at the swings.

"That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous,
with those white stockings of hers," remarked Celia;
"some friend ought to tell her to dye them."

"Or pad them," suggested Father Forbes, with a gay
little chuckle.  "I daresay the question of swings and ladies'
stockings hardly arises with you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?"

Theron laughed aloud at the conceit.  "I should say not!"
he replied.

"I'm just dying to see a camp-meeting!" said Celia.
"You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them."

"Don't go, I beg of you!" urged Theron, with doleful emphasis.
"Don't let's even talk about them.  I should like to feel
this afternoon as if there was no such thing within
a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting. Do you know,
all this interests me enormously.  It is a revelation to me
to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people,
just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings.
I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn't
a single person who will mention the subject of his soul
to any other person all day long."

"I should think the assumption was a safe one," said the
priest, smilingly, "unless," he added on afterthought,
"it be by way of a genial profanity.  There used to be
some old Clare men who said 'Hell to my soul!' when they
missed at quoits, but I haven't heard it for a long time.
I daresay they're all dead."

"I shall never forget that death-bed--where I saw you first,"
remarked Theron, musingly.  "I date from that experience
a whole new life.  I have been greatly struck lately,
in reading our 'Northern Christian Advocate' to see
in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over
and over again it is recorded that they got religion
in their youth through being frightened by some illness
of their own, or some epidemic about them.  The cholera
year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist.
Even to this day our most successful revivalists,
those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go,
do it more by frightful pictures of hell-fire surrounding
the sinner's death-bed than anything else.  You could
hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you
were there."

"There isn't so much difference as you think,"
said Father Forbes, dispassionately.  "Your people keep
examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up
the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet.
Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism.
But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike.
As I remember saying to you once before, there is really
nothing new under the sun.  Even the saying isn't new.
Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes
in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over
many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered
very much.  Where religions are concerned, the human race
are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark,
telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They
have always been like that."

"What nonsense!" cried Celia.  "I have no patience with
such gloomy rubbish.  The Greeks had a religion full
of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they
weren't frightened of death at all.  They made the image
of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down.
Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practised
the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life.
Our own early Church was full of these broad and beautiful
Greek ideas.  You know that yourself!  And it was only
when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils
brought in the abominable meannesses and cruelties
of the Jewish Old Testament, and stamped out the sane
and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that Christians
became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring
themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones."

"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her
shoulder gently, "we will have no Greek debate today.
Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings,
and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks.  Look at
those fellows down there, trampling over one another
to get more beer.  What have they to do with Athens,
or Athens with them?  I take it, Mr. Ware," he went on,
with a grave face but a twinkling eye, "that what we are
observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great
ethical and theological revolution, which in time will modify
and control the destiny of the entire American people.
You see those young Irishmen there, struggling like pigs at
a trough to get their fill of German beer.  That signifies
a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching
in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.
The Kelt has come to grief heretofore--or at least been
forced to play second fiddle to other races--because he
lacked the right sort of a drink.  He has in his blood an
excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities.
It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself,
to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and
more sluggish temperaments.  When you add whiskey to that,
or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call
'porther,' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst.
These young men down there are changing all that.
They have discovered lager.  Already many of them
can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage.
The lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will
be a new type of humanity--the Kelt at his best.
He will dominate America.  He will be THE American.
And his church--with the Italian element thrown clean out
of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown--
will be the Church of America."

"Let us have some more lager at once," put in Celia.
"This revolution can't be hurried forward too rapidly."

Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest's discourse
was in jest, how much in earnest.  "It seems to me,"
he said, "that as things are going, it doesn't look much
as if the America of the future will trouble itself about
any kind of a church.  The march of science must very soon
produce a universal scepticism.  It is in the nature of
human progress.  What all intelligent men recognize today,
the masses must surely come to see in time."

Father Forbes laughed outright this time.  "My dear
Mr. Ware," he said, as they touched glasses again,
and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them,
"of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless
and empty as this idea that humanity progresses.
The savage's natural impression is that the world he
sees about him was made for him, and that the rest
of the universe is subordinated to him and his world,
and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy
themselves exclusively with him and his affairs.
That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it
is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it
is the foundation of human nature.  That foundation is just
as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age.
It will always remain, and upon it will always be built
some kind of a religious superstructure.  'Intelligent men,'
as you call them, really have very little influence,
even when they all pull one way.  The people as a whole
soon get tired of them.  They give too much trouble.
The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection
and inertia.  The middle-aged man has found out that the
chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him,
to shut up and do as others do.  Even when he thinks he
has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he
will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples'
superstitions alone.  That is always the ultimate view of
the crowd."

"But I don't see," observed Theron, "granting that all
this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come
out on top.  I could understand it of Unitarianism,
or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody
seems to have to believe particularly in anything except
the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very
rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible.
There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic;
there is no room for compromise."

"The Church is always compromising," explained the priest,
"only it does it so slowly that no one man lives long
enough to quite catch it at the trick.  No; the great
secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn't debate
with sceptics.  No matter what points you make against it,
it is never betrayed into answering back.  It simply says
these things are sacred mysteries, which you are quite
free to accept and be saved, or reject and be damned.
There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude
like that.  When people have grown tired of their absurd
and fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which,
humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense, they will
come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof,
in that restful house where things are taken for granted.
There the manners are charming, the service excellent,
the decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye,
and the music"--he made a little mock bow here to Celia--"the
music at least is divine.  There you have nothing to do but
be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances.
You are no more expected to express doubts about the
Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom
you take down to dinner how old she is.  Now that is, as I
have said, an intelligent and rational church for people
to have.  As the Irish civilize themselves--you observe
them diligently engaged in the process down below there--
and the social roughness of their church becomes softened
and ameliorated, Americans will inevitably be attracted
toward it.  In the end, it will embrace them all, and be
modified by them, and in turn influence their development,
till you will have a new nation and a new national church,
each representative of the other."

"And all this is to be done by lager beer!"
Theron ventured to comment, jokingly.  He was conscious
of a novel perspiration around the bridge of his nose,
which was obviously another effect of the drink.

The priest passed the pleasantry by.  "No," he said seriously;
"what you must see is that there must always be a church.
If one did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
It is needed, first and foremost, as a police force.
It is needed, secondly, so to speak, as a fire insurance.
It provides the most even temperature and pure atmosphere
for the growth of young children.  It furnishes the best
obtainable social machinery for marrying off one's daughters,
getting to know the right people, patching up quarrels,
and so on.  The priesthood earn their salaries as
the agents for these valuable social arrangements.
Their theology is thrown in as a sort of intellectual
diversion, like the ritual of a benevolent organization.
There are some who get excited about this part of it,
just as one hears of Free-Masons who believe that the sun
rises and sets to exemplify their ceremonies.  Others take
their duties more quietly, and, understanding just
what it all amounts to, make the best of it, like you
and me."

Theron assented to the philosophy and the compliment
by a grave bow.  "Yes, that is the idea--to make the best
of it," he said, and fastened his regard boldly this
time upon the swings.

"We were both ordained by our bishops," continued the priest,
"at an age when those worthy old gentlemen would not have
trusted our combined wisdom to buy a horse for them."

"And I was married," broke in Theron, with an eagerness
almost vehement, "when I had only just been ordained!
At the worst, YOU had only the Church fastened upon your back,
before you were old enough to know what you wanted.
It is easy enough to make the best of THAT, but it is
different with me."

A marked silence followed this outburst.  The Rev. Mr. Ware
had never spoken of his marriage to either of these
friends before; and something in their manner seemed
to suggest that they did not find the subject inviting,
now that it had been broached.  He himself was filled
with a desire to say more about it.  He had never clearly
realized before what a genuine grievance it was.
The moisture at the top of his nose merged itself into
tears in the corners of his eyes, as the cruel enormity
of the sacrifice he had made in his youth rose before him.
His whole life had been fettered and darkened by it.
He turned his gaze from the swings toward Celia, to claim
the sympathy he knew she would feel for him.

But Celia was otherwise engaged.  A young man had
come up to her--a tall and extremely thin young man,
soberly dressed, and with a long, gaunt, hollow-eyed face,
the skin of which seemed at once florid and pale.
He had sandy hair and the rough hands of a workman;
but he was speaking to Miss Madden in the confidential
tones of an equal.

"I can do nothing at all with him," this newcomer said
to her.  "He'll not be said by me.  Perhaps he'd listen
to you!"

"It's likely I'll go down there!" said Celia.
"He may do what he likes for all me!  Take my advice,
Michael, and just go your way, and leave him to himself.
There was a time when I would have taken out my eyes
for him, but it was love wasted and thrown away.
After the warnings he's had, if he WILL bring trouble
on himself, let's make it no affair of ours."

Theron had found himself exchanging glances of inquiry
with this young man.  "Mr. Ware," said Celia, here, "let me
introduce you to my brother Michael--my full brother."

Mr. Ware remembered him now, and began, in response to the
other's formal bow, to say something about their having
met in the dark, inside the church.  But Celia held up
her hand.  "I'm afraid, Mr. Ware," she said hurriedly,
"that you are in for a glimpse of the family skeleton.
I will apologize for the infliction in advance."

Wonderingly, Theron followed her look, and saw another
young man who had come up the path from the crowd below,
and was close upon them.  The minister recognized in him
a figure which had seemed to be the centre of almost every
group about the bar that he had studied in detail.  He was
a small, dapper, elegantly attired youth, with dark hair,
and the handsome, regularly carved face of an actor.
He advanced with a smiling countenance and unsteady step--
his silk hat thrust back upon his head, his frock-coat and
vest unbuttoned, and his neckwear disarranged--and saluted
the company with amiability.

"I saw you up here, Father Forbes," he said, with a
thickened and erratic utterance.  "Whyn't you come
down and join us?  I'm setting 'em up for everybody.
You got to take care of the boys, you know.  I'll blow
in the last cent I've got in the world for the boys,
every time, and they know it.  They're solider for me
than they ever were for anybody.  That's how it is.
If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you.
I'm going to the Assembly for this district, and they ain't
nobody can stop me.  The boys are just red hot for me.
Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address a few
words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a candidate,
and say I'm bound to win, hands down.  That'll make you solid
with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together.
Come on down!"

The priest affably disengaged his arm from the clutch
which the speaker had laid upon it, and shook his head
in gentle deprecation.  "No, no; you must excuse me,
Theodore," he said.  "We mustn't meddle in politics, you know."

"Politics be damned!" urged Theodore, grabbing the priest's
other arm, and tugging at it stoutly to pull him down
the path.  "I say, boys" he shouted to those below,
"here's Father Forbes, and he's going to come down
and address the meeting.  Come on, Father!  Come down,
and have a drink with the boys!"

It was Celia who sharply pulled his hand away from the
priest's arm this time.  "Go away with you!" she snapped
in low, angry tones at the intruder.  "You should be
ashamed of yourself!  If you can't keep sober yourself,
you can at least keep your hands off the priest.  I should
think you'd have more decency, when you're in such a state
as this, than to come where I am.  If you've no respect
for yourself, you might have that much respect for me!
And before strangers, too!

"Oh, I mustn't come where YOU are, eh?" remarked the peccant
Theodore, straightening himself with an elaborate effort.
"You've bought these woods, have you?  I've got a hundred
friends here, all the same, for every one you'll ever
have in your life, Red-head, and don't you forget it."

"Go and spend your money with them, then, and don't come
insulting decent people," said Celia.

"Before strangers, too!" the young man called out,
with beery sarcasm.  "Oh, we'll take care of the
strangers all right."  He had not seemed to be aware of
Theron's presence, much less his identity, before; but he
turned to him now with a knowing grin.  "I'm running
for the Assembly, Mr. Ware," he said, speaking loudly
and with deliberate effort to avoid the drunken elisions
and comminglings to which his speech tended, "and I want
you to fix up the Methodists solid for me.  I'm going
to drive over to the camp-meeting tonight, me and some
of the boys in a barouche, and I'll put a twenty-dollar
bill on their plate.  Here it is now, if you want to see it."

As the young man began fumbling in a vest-pocket, Theron
gathered his wits together.

"You'd better not go this evening," he said, as convincingly
as he knew how; "because the gates will be closed very early,
and the Saturday-evening services are of a particularly
special nature, quite reserved for those living on the grounds."

"Rats!" said Theodore, raising his head, and abandoning
the search for the bill.  "Why don't you speak out
like a man, and say you think I'm too drunk?"

"I don't think that is a question which need arise
between us, Mr. Madden," murmured Theron, confusedly.

"Oh, don't you make any mistake!  A hell of a lot of
questions arise between us, Mr. Ware," cried Theodore,
with a sudden accession of vigor in tone and mien.
"And one of 'em is--go away from me, Michael!--one of 'em is,
I say, why don't you leave our girls alone?  They've got
their own priests to make fools of themselves over,
without any sneak of a Protestant parson coming meddling
round them.  You're a married man into the bargain;
and you've got in your house this minute a piano that my
sister bought and paid for.  Oh, I've seen the entry
in Thurston's books!  You have the cheek to talk to me
about being drunk--why--"

These remarks were never concluded, for Father Forbes
here clapped a hand abruptly over the offending mouth,
and flung his free arm in a tight grip around the young
man's waist.  "Come with me, Michael!" he said, and the two
men led the reluctant and resisting Theodore at a sharp
pace off into the woods.

Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among
the undergrowth.  "It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him,"
he heard her say, as if between clenched teeth.

The girl's big brown eyes, when Theron looked into them again,
were still fixed upon the screen of foliage, and dilated
like those of a Medusa mask.  The blood had gone away,
and left the fair face and neck as white, it seemed to him,
as marble.  Even her lips, fiercely bitten together,
appeared colorless.  The picture of consuming and powerless
rage which she presented, and the shuddering tremor
which ran over her form, as visible as the quivering track
of a gust of wind across a pond, awed and frightened him.

Tenderness toward her helpless state came too, and uppermost.
He drew her arm into his, and turned their backs upon
the picnic scene.

"Let us walk a little up the path into the woods," he said,
"and get away from all this."

"The further away the better," she answered bitterly,
and he felt the shiver run through her again as she spoke.

The methodical waltz-music from that unseen dancing
platform rose again above all other sounds.  They moved
up the woodland path, their steps insensibly falling
into the rhythm of its strains, and vanished from sight
among the trees.



CHAPTER XXIV


Theron and Celia walked in silence for some minutes,
until the noises of the throng they had left behind were lost.
The path they followed had grown indefinite among the
grass and creepers of the forest carpet; now it seemed
to end altogether in a little copse of young birches,
the delicately graceful stems of which were clustered
about a parent stump, long since decayed and overgrown
with lichens and layers of thick moss.

As the two paused, the girl suddenly sank upon her knees,
then threw herself face forward upon the soft green bark
which had formed itself above the roots of the ancient
mother-tree. Her companion looked down in pained amazement
at what he saw.  Her body shook with the violence of
recurring sobs, or rather gasps of wrath and grief Her hands,
with stiffened, claw-like fingers, dug into the moss
and tangle of tiny vines, and tore them by the roots.
The half-stifled sounds of weeping that arose from where her
face grovelled in the leaves were terrible to his ears.
He knew not what to say or do, but gazed in resourceless
suspense at the strange figure she made.  It seemed a
cruelly long time that she lay there, almost at his feet,
struggling fiercely with the fury that was in her.

All at once the paroxysms passed away, the sounds of wild
weeping ceased.  Celia sat up, and with her handkerchief
wiped the tears and leafy fragments from her face.
She rearranged her hat and the braids of her hair with swift,
instinctive touches, brushed the woodland debris from
her front, and sprang to her feet.

"I'm all right now," she said briskly.  There was palpable
effort in her light tone, and in the stormy sort of smile
which she forced upon her blotched and perturbed countenance,
but they were only too welcome to Theron's anxious mood.

"Thank God!" he blurted out, all radiant with relief.
"I feared you were going to have a fit--or something."

Celia laughed, a little artificially at first, then with a
genuine surrender to the comic side of his visible fright.
The mirth came back into the brown depths of her eyes again,
and her face cleared itself of tear-stains and the marks
of agitation.  "I AM a nice quiet party for a Methodist
minister to go walking in the woods with, am I not?"
she cried, shaking her skirts and smiling at him.

"I am not a Methodist minister--please!" answered Theron--"at
least not today--and here--with you!  I am just a man--
nothing more--a man who has escaped from lifelong imprisonment,
and feels for the first time what it is to be free!"

"Ah, my friend," Celia said, shaking her head slowly,
"I'm afraid you deceive yourself.  You are not by any
means free.  You are only looking out of the window
of your prison, as you call it.  The doors are locked,
just the same."

"I will smash them!" he declared, with confidence.
"Or for that matter, I HAVE smashed them--battered them
to pieces.  You don't realize what progress I have made,
what changes there have been in me since that night,
you remember that wonderful night!  I am quite another being,
I assure you!  And really it dates from way beyond that--
why, from the very first evening, when I came to you in
the church.  The window in Father Forbes' room was open,
and I stood by it listening to the music next door,
and I could just faintly see on the dark window across
the alley-way a stained-glass picture of a woman.
I suppose it was the Virgin Mary.  She had hair like yours,
and your face, too; and that is why I went into the church
and found you.  Yes, that is why."

Celia regarded him with gravity.  "You will get yourself
into great trouble, my friend," she said.

"That's where you're wrong," put in Theron.  "Not that I'd
mind any trouble in this wide world, so long as you called
me 'my friend,' but I'm not going to get into any at all.
I know a trick worth two of that.  I've learned to be a showman.
I can preach now far better than I used to, and I can get
through my work in half the time, and keep on the right
side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness.
I was too green before.  I took the thing seriously,
and I let every mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic
worry me, and keep me on pins and needles.  I don't
do that any more.  I've taken a new measure of life.
I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going
to have my share of it.  Why should I deliberately deny
myself all possible happiness for the rest of my days,
simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in
my teens?  Other men are not eternally punished like that,
for what they did as boys, and I won't submit to it either.
I will be as free to enjoy myself as--as Father Forbes."

Celia smiled softly, and shook her head again.  "Poor man,
to call HIM free!" she said:  "why, he is bound hand and foot.
You don't in the least realize how he is hedged about,
the work he has to do, the thousand suspicious eyes
that watch his every movement, eager to bring the Bishop
down upon him.  And then think of his sacrifice--
the great sacrifice of all--to never know what love means,
to forswear his manhood, to live a forlorn, celibate life--
you have no idea how sadly that appeals to a woman."

"Let us sit down here for a little," said Theron;
"we seem at the end of the path."  She seated herself
on the root-based mound, and he reclined at her side,
with an arm carelessly extended behind her on the moss.

"I can see what you mean," he went on, after a pause.
"But to me, do you know, there is an enormous fascination
in celibacy.  You forget that I know the reverse of the medal.
I know how the mind can be cramped, the nerves harassed,
the ambitions spoiled and rotted, the whole existence
darkened and belittled, by--by the other thing.  I have
never talked to you before about my marriage."

"I don't think we'd better talk about it now," observed Celia.
"There must be many more amusing topics."

He missed the spirit of her remark.  "You are right,"
he said slowly.  "It is too sad a thing to talk about.
But there! it is my load, and I bear it, and there's nothing
more to be said."

Theron drew a heavy sigh, and let his fingers toy
abstractedly with a ribbon on the outer edge of Celia's
penumbra of apparel.

"No," she said.  "We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk.
When I get into a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way
through it and tear things, but it doesn't last long,
and I come out of it feeling all the better.  I don't know
that I've ever seen your wife.  I suppose she hasn't got
red hair?"

"I think it's a kind of light brown," answered Theron,
with an effect of exerting his memory.

"It seems that you only take notice of hair
in stained-glass windows," was Celia's comment.

"Oh-h!" he murmured reproachfully, "as if--as if--
but I won't say what I was going to."

"That's not fair!" she said.  The little touch of whimsical
mockery which she gave to the serious declaration was
delicious to him.  "You have me at such a disadvantage!
Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my head,
exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my
very heart in candor, and you meditate, you turn things
over cautiously in your mind, like a second Machiavelli.
I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle and mysterious in
your reserves."

Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had
in her delicate chaff.  "No, it is you who are secretive,"
he said.  "You never told me about--about the piano."

The word was out!  A minute before it had seemed incredible
to him that he should ever have the courage to utter it--
but here it was.  He laid firm hold upon the ribbon,
which it appeared hung from her waist, and drew himself
a trifle nearer to her.  "I could never have consented
to take it, I'm afraid," he went on in a low voice,
if I had known.  And even as it is, I fear it won't
be possible."

"What are you afraid of?" asked Celia.  "Why shouldn't you
take it?  People in your profession never do get anything
unless it's given to them, do they?  I've always understood
it was like that.  I've often read of donation parties--
that's what they're called, isn't it?--where everybody
is supposed to bring some gift to the minister.
Very well, then, I've simply had a donation party of my own,
that's all.  Unless you mean that my being a Catholic
makes a difference.  I had supposed you were quite free
from that kind of prejudice."

"So I am!  Believe me, I am!" urged Theron.  "When I'm
with you, it seems impossible to realize that there are
people so narrow and contracted in their natures as to take
account of such things.  It is another atmosphere that I
breathe near you.  How could you imagine that such a thought--
about our difference of creed--would enter my head?
In fact," he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, "there
isn't any such difference.  Whatever your religion is,
it's mine too.  You remember--you adopted me as a Greek."

"Did I?" she rejoined.  "Well, if that's the case,
it leaves you without a leg to stand on.  I challenge you
to find any instance where a Greek made any difficulties
about accepting a piano from a friend.  But seriously--
while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject:
I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had
no such intention, when I picked the instrument out.
It was later, when I was talking to Thurston's people
about the price, that the whim seized me.  Now it
is the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims.
Whatever occurs to me as a possibly pleasant thing to do,
straight like a hash, I go and do it.  It is the only
way that a person with means, with plenty of money,
can preserve any freshness of character.  If they stop
to think what it would be prudent to do, they get crusted
over immediately.  That is the curse of rich people--
they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every
impulse toward unusual actions.  They get to feel that it
is more necessary for them to be cautious and conventional
than it is for others.  I would rather work at a wash-tub
than occupy that attitude toward my bank account.  I fight
against any sign of it that I detect rising in my mind.
The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify it.
That is my theory of life.  That accounts for the piano;
and I don't see that you've anything to say about it at
all."

It seemed very convincing, this theory of life.
Somehow, the thought of Miss Madden's riches had never
before assumed prominence in Theron's mind.  Of course
her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred to him
that the daughter's emancipation might run to the length
of a personal fortune.  He knew so little of rich people and their ways!

He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened
humility and awe in his glance.  The glamour of a separate
banking-account shone upon her.  Where the soft woodland
light played in among the strands of her disordered hair,
he saw the veritable gleam of gold.  A mysterious new
suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of
her face, was exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments.
He maintained a timorous hold upon the ribbon, wondering at
his hardihood in touching it, or being near her at all.

What surprises me," he heard himself saying, "is that
you are contented to stay in Octavius.  I should think
that you would travel--go abroad--see the beautiful
things of the world, surround yourself with the luxuries
of big cities--and that sort of thing."

Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her
with a pensive gaze.  "Sometime--no doubt I will sometime,"
she said abstractedly.

"One reads so much nowadays," he went on, "of American
heiresses going to Europe and marrying dukes and noblemen.
I suppose you will do that too.  Princes would fight one
another for you."

The least touch of a smile softened for an instant
the impassivity of her countenance.  Then she stared
harder than ever at the vague, leafy distance.  "That is
the old-fashioned idea," she said, in a musing tone,
"that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios,
or statues, or race-horses. You don't understand,
my friend, that I have a different view.  I am myself,
and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man.
The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain
the slightest property rights in me is as preposterous,
as ridiculous, as--what shall I say?--as the notion
of your being taken out with a chain on your neck and
sold by auction as a slave, down on the canal bridge.
I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any
other thought were possible to me."

"That is not the generally accepted view, I should think,"
faltered Theron.

"No more is it the accepted view that young married
Methodist ministers should sit out alone in the
woods with red-headed Irish girls.  No, my friend,
let us find what the generally accepted views are,
and as fast as we find them set our heels on them.
There is no other way to live like real human beings.
What on earth is it to me that other women crawl about on
all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle
a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table?
I am not related to them.  I have nothing to do with them.
They cannot make any rules for me.  If pride and dignity
and independence are dead in them, why, so much the worse
for them!  It is no affair of mine.  Certainly it is no
reason why I should get down and grovel also.  No; I at
least stand erect on my legs."

Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes
and parted lips, at his companion.  Instinctively his brain
dragged forth to the surface those epithets which the doctor
had hurled in bitter contempt at her--"mad ass, a mere
bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness."
The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and
sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at
her side; to breathe the same air, and behold the calm
loveliness of her profile; to touch the ribbon of her dress--
and all the while to hold these poisoned darts of abuse
levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous.
He could have killed the doctor at that moment.
With an effort, he drove the foul things from his mind--
scattered them back into the darkness.  He felt that he
had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan
that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle.
Or was the groan imaginary?

Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking
upon vacancy.  Theron's eyes searched her face in vain
for any sign of consciousness that she had astounded and
bewildered him.  She did not seem to be thinking of him
at all.  The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance
suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote
abstractions and noble ideals.  Contemplating her,
he suddenly perceived that what she had been saying
was great, wonderful, magnificent.  An involuntary thrill
ran through his veins at recollection of her words.
His fancy likened it to the sensation he used to feel
as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader bawled forth
that opening clause:  "When, in the course of human events,
it becomes necessary," etc.  It was nothing less than
another Declaration of Independence he had been listening to.

He sank again recumbent at her side, and stretched the
arm behind her, nearer than before.  "Apparently, then,
you will never marry."  His voice trembled a little.

"Most certainly not!" said Celia.

"You spoke so feelingly a little while ago," he ventured along,
with hesitation, "about how sadly the notion of a priest's
sacrificing himself--never knowing what love meant--
appealed to a woman.  I should think that the idea
of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder still."

"I don't remember that we mentioned THAT," she replied.
"How do you mean--sacrificing herself?"

Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress
in his hand, and boldly patted and caressed them.
"You, so beautiful and so free, with such fine talents
and abilities," he murmured; "you, who could have the whole
world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know
what love means?  Do you call that no sacrifice?  To me it
is the most terrible that my imagination can conceive."

Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which
Theron's ears traced elements of tenderness.  "You must
regulate that imagination of yours," she said playfully.
"It conceives the thing that is not.  Pray, when"--and here,
turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of
arch mock-seriousness--"pray, when did I describe myself
in these terms?  When did I say that I should never know
what love meant?"

For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm,
and closed his eyes, and held his face against the draperies
encircling her.  "I cannot think!" he groaned.

The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed
and rocked in the tempest of emotion, was the strange
reminiscence of early childhood in it all.  It was
like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent,
unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.
The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous,
unashamed tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite
joy which spread, wave-like, over him, at once reposeful
and yearning, was full of infantile purity and sweetness.
He had not comprehended at all before what wellsprings
of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
his nature contained.

"We were speaking of our respective religions,"
he heard Celia say, as imperturbably as if there
had been no digression worth mentioning.

"Yes," he assented, and moved his head so that he
looked up at her back hair, and the leaves high above,
mottled against the sky.  The wish to lie there, where now
he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin
as well, was very strong upon him.  "Yes?" he repeated.

"I cannot talk to you like that," she said; and he sat
up again shamefacedly.

"Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago,"
he faltered, to relieve the situation.  The dreadful
thought that she might be annoyed began to oppress him.

"Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too.
That entitles you at least to be told what the religion is.
Now, I am a Catholic."

Theron, much mystified, nodded his head.  Could it
be possible--was there coming a deliberate suggestion
that he should become a convert?  "Yes--I know," he murmured.

"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense
that its symbolism is pleasant to me.  You remember what
Schopenhauer said--you cannot have the water by itself:
you must also have the jug that it is in.  Very well;
the Catholic religion is my jug.  I put into it the things
I like.  They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago.
The Jews threw them out; we will put them back again.
We will restore art and poetry and the love of beauty,
and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.  The Greeks
had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it
hadn't been for those brutes they call the Fathers.
They loved ugliness and dirt and the thought of hell-fire.
They hated women.  In all the earlier stages of the Church,
women were very prominent in it.  Jesus himself
appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him,
and talk with them and listen to them.  That was
the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed
into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace
which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul
and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish.
But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began
the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes
one almost forgive him.  To please the Egyptians, he secured
the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin.
It is that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive,
and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world.
It was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without
sex in it."

"I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,"
said Theron, feeling more himself again.  "I wondered
if they quite went with the statues."

The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.

"They get along together better than you suppose,"
she answered.  "Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary.
One of them, standing on the moon, is of Isis with the infant
Horus in her arms.  Another might as well be Mahamie,
bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias
with her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding
her babe Plato--all these were similar cases, you know.
Almost every religion had its Immaculate Conception.
What does it all come to, except to show us that man
turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea?
That is the deepest of all our instincts--love of woman,
who is at once daughter and wife and mother.  It is that that
makes the world go round."

Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind,
and shone forth in a confident yet wistful smile on his face.

"lt is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,"
he said, in steady, low tone.  "Then you would realize
the tremendous truth of what you have been saying.
It is only your intellect that has reached out and grasped
the idea.  If you were in my place, you would discover
that your heart was bursting with it as well."

Celia turned and looked at him.

"I myself," he went on, "would not have known, half an hour ago,
what you meant by the worship of the maternal idea.
I am much older than you.  I am a strong, mature man.
But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes--because the
charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment
overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me.
It was absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good,
pure-minded, fond little child, and you were the mother
that I idolized."

Celia had not taken her eyes from his face.  "I find myself
liking you better at this moment," she said, with gravity,
"than I have ever liked you before."

Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet.
"Come!" she cried, her voice and manner all vivacity
once more, "we have been here long enough."

Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up,
it became apparent to them both that perhaps they had been
there too long.

A boy with a gun under his arm, and two gray squirrels
tied by the tails slung across his shoulder, stood at
the entrance to the glade, some dozen paces away,
regarding them with undisguised interest.  Upon the discovery
that he was in turn observed, he resumed his interrupted
progress through the woods, whistling softly as he went,
and vanished among the trees.

"Heavens above!" groaned Theron, shudderingly.

"Know him?" he went on, in answer to the glance of inquiry on
his companion's face.  "I should think I did!  He spades my--
my wife's garden for her.  He used to bring our milk.
He works in the law office of one of my trustees--
the one who isn't friendly to me, but is very friendly
indeed with my--with Mrs. Ware.  Oh, what shall I do?
It may easily mean my ruin!"

Celia looked at him attentively.  The color had gone out of
his face, and with it the effect of earnestness and mental
elevation which, a minute before, had caught her fancy.
"Somehow, I fear that I do not like you quite so much
just now, my friend," she remarked.

"In God's name, don't say that!" urged Theron.
He raised his voice in agitated entreaty.  "You don't
know what these people are--how they would leap at the
barest hint of a scandal about me.  In my position I
am a thousand times more defenceless than any woman.
Just a single whisper, and I am done for!"

"Let me point out to you, Mr. Ware," said Celia, slowly,
"that to be seen sitting and talking with me, whatever doubts
it may raise as to a gentleman's intellectual condition,
need not necessarily blast his social reputation beyond
all hope whatever."

Theron stared at her, as if he had not grasped her meaning.
Then he winced visibly under it, and put out his hands
to implore her.  "Forgive me!  Forgive me!" he pleaded.
"I was beside myself for the moment with the fright
of the thing.  Oh, say you do forgive me, Celia!"
He made haste to support this daring use of her name.
"I have been so happy today--so deeply, so vastly happy--
like the little child I spoke of--and that is so new in my
lonely life--that--the suddenness of the thing--it just for
the instant unstrung me.  Don't be too hard on me for it!
And I had hoped, too--I had had such genuine heartfelt
pleasure in the thought--that, an hour or two ago, when you
were unhappy, perhaps it had been some sort of consolation
to you that I was with you."

Celia was looking away.  When he took her hand she did not
withdraw it, but turned and nodded in musing general assent
to what he had said.  "Yes, we have both been unstrung,
as you call it, today," she said, decidedly out of pitch.
"Let each forgive the other, and say no more about it."

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.




PART IV



CHAPTER XXV


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.



CHAPTER XXVI


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, and 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."



CHAPTER XXVII


That night brought the first frost of the season
worth counting.  In the morning, when Theron came downstairs,
his casual glance through the window caught a desolate
picture of blackened dahlia stalks and shrivelled blooms.
The gayety and color of the garden were gone,
and in their place was shabby and dishevelled ruin.
He flung the sash up and leaned out.  The nipping autumn
air was good to breathe.  He looked about him, surveying
the havoc the frost had wrought among the flowers, and smiled.

At breakfast he smiled again--a mirthless and
calculated smile.  "I see that Brother Gorringe's
flowers have come to grief over night," he remarked.

Alice looked at him before she spoke, and saw on his
face a confirmation of the hostile hint in his voice.
She nodded in a constrained way, and said nothing.

"Or rather, I should say, "Theron went on, with deliberate
words, "the late Brother Gorringe's flowers."

"How do you mean--LATE" asked his wife, swiftly.

"Oh, calm yourself!" replied the husband.  He is not dead.
He has only intimated to me his desire to sever his connection.
I may add that he did so in a highly offensive manner."

"I am very sorry," said Alice, in a low tone, and with
her eyes on her plate.

"I took it for granted you would be grieved at his backsliding,"
remarked Theron, making his phrases as pointed as he could.
"He was such a promising probationer, and you took
such a keen interest in his spiritual awakening.
But the frost has nipped his zeal--along with the hundred
or more dollars' worth of flowers by which he testified
his faith.  I find something interesting in their having
been blasted simultaneously."

Alice dropped all pretence of interest in her breakfast.
With a flushed face and lips tightly compressed,
she made a movement as if to rise from her chair.
Then, changing her mind, she sat bolt upright and faced
her husband.

"I think we had better have this out right now," she said,
in a voice which Theron hardly recognized.  "You have
been hinting round the subject long enough--too long.
There are some things nobody is obliged to put up with,
and this is one of them.  You will oblige me by saying out
in so many words what it is you are driving at."

The outburst astounded Theron.  He laid down his knife
and fork, and gazed at his wife in frank surprise.
She had so accustomed him, of late, to a demeanor almost
abject in its depressed docility that he had quite
forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit
and courage enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own.
The flash in her eyes and the lines of resolution
about her mouth and chin for a moment daunted him.
Then he observed by a flutter of the frill at her wrist
that she was trembling.

"I am sure I have nothing to 'say out in so many words,'
as you put it," he replied, forcing his voice into cool,
impassive tones.  "I merely commented upon a coincidence,
that was all.  If, for any reason under the sun, the subject
chances to be unpleasant to you, I have no earthly desire
to pursue it."

"But I insist upon having it pursued!" returned Alice.
"I've had just all I can stand of your insinuations
and innuendoes, and it's high time we had some plain talk.
Ever since the revival, you have been dropping sly,
underhand hints about Mr. Gorringe and--and me.  Now I ask
you what you mean by it."

Yes, there was a shake in her voice, and he could see
how her bosom heaved in a tremor of nervousness.
It was easy for him to be very calm.

"It is you who introduce these astonishing suggestions,
not I," he replied coldly.  "It is you who couple
your name with his--somewhat to my surprise, I admit--
but let me suggest that we drop the subject.  You are
excited just now, and you might say things that you
would prefer to leave unsaid.  It would surely be better
for all concerned to say no more about it."

Alice, staring across the table at him with knitted brows,
emitted a sharp little snort of indignation.
"Well, I never!  Theron, I wouldn't have thought it of you!"

"There are so many things you wouldn't have thought,
on such a variety of subjects," he observed, with a
show of resuming his breakfast.  "But why continue?
We are only angering each other."

"Never mind that," she replied, with more control
over her speech.  "I guess things have come to a pass
where a little anger won't do any harm.  I have a right
to insist on knowing what you mean by your insinuations."

Theron sighed.  "Why will you keep harping on the thing?"
he asked wearily.  "I have displayed no curiosity.
I don't ask for any explanations.  I think I mentioned
that the man had behaved insultingly to me--but that
doesn't matter.  I don't bring it up as a grievance.
I am very well able to take care of myself I have no
wish to recur to the incident in any way.  So far as I
am concerned, the topic is dismissed."

"Listen to me!" broke in Alice, with eager gravity.
She hesitated, as he looked up with a nod of attention,
and reflected as well as she was able among her thoughts
for a minute or two.  "This is what I want to say
to you.  Ever since we came to this hateful Octavius,
you and I have been drifting apart--or no, that doesn't
express it--simply rushing away from each other.
It only began last spring, and now the space between us
is so wide that we are worse than complete strangers.
For strangers at least don't hate each other, and I've had
a good many occasions lately to see that you positively do
hate me--"

"What grotesque absurdity" interposed Theron, impatiently.

"No, it isn't absurdity; it's gospel truth," retorted Alice.
"And--don't interrupt me--there have been times, too,
when I have had to ask myself if I wasn't getting almost
to hate you in return.  I tell you this frankly."

"Yes, you are undoubtedly frank," commented the husband,
toying with his teaspoon.  "A hypercritical person
might consider, almost too frank."

Alice scanned his face closely while he spoke, and held her
breath as if in expectant suspense.  Her countenance clouded
once more.  "You don't realize, Theron," she said gravely;
"your voice when you speak to me, your look, your manner,
they have all changed.  You are like another man--
some man who never loved me, and doesn't even know me,
much less like me.  I want to know what the end of it
is to be.  Up to the time of your sickness last summer,
until after the Soulsbys went away, I didn't let myself
get downright discouraged.  It seemed too monstrous for
belief that you should go away out of my life like that.
It didn't seem possible that God could allow such a thing.
It came to me that I had been lax in my Christian life,
especially in my position as a minister's wife,
and that this was my punishment.  I went to the altar,
to intercede with Him, and to try to loose my burden
at His feet.  But nothing has come of it.  I got no help
from you."

"Really, Alice," broke in Theron, "I explained over and
over again to you how preoccupied I was--with the book--
and affairs generally."

"I got no assistance from Heaven either," she went on,
declining the diversion he offered.  "I don't want to
talk impiously, but if there is a God, he has forgotten me,
his poor heart-broken hand-maiden."

"You are talking impiously, Alice," observed her husband.
"And you are doing me cruel injustice, into the bargain."

"I only wish I were!" she replied; "I only wish to God
I were!"

"Well, then, accept my complete assurance that you ARE--
that your whole conception of me, and of what you are pleased
to describe as my change toward you, is an entire and
utter mistake.  Of course, the married state is no more exempt
from the universal law of growth, development, alteration,
than any other human institution.  On its spiritual side,
of course, viewed either as a sacrament, or as--"

"Don't let us go into that," interposed Alice, abruptly.
"In fact, there is no good in talking any more at all.
It is as if we didn't speak the same language.
You don't understand what I say; it makes no impression
upon your mind."

"Quite to the contrary," he assured her; "I have been
deeply interested and concerned in all you have said.
I think you are laboring under a great delusion,
and I have tried my best to convince you of it;
but I have never heard you speak more intelligibly or,
I might say, effectively."

A little gleam of softness stole over Alice's face.
"If you only gave me a little more credit for intelligence,"
she said, "you would find that I am not such a blockhead
as you think I am."

"Come, come!" he said, with a smiling show of impatience.
"You really mustn't impute things to me wholesale,
like that."

She was glad to answer the smile in kind.  "No; but truly,"
she pleaded, "you don't realize it, but you have grown
into a way of treating me as if I had absolutely no mind
at all."

"You have a very admirable mind," he responded,
and took up his teaspoon again.  She reached for his cup,
and poured out hot coffee for him.  An almost cheerful
spirit had suddenly descended upon the breakfast table.

"And now let me say the thing I have been aching to say
for months," she began in less burdened voice.

He lifted his brows.  "Haven't things been discussed
pretty fully already?" he asked.

The doubtful, harassed expression clouded upon her face
at his words, and she paused.  "No," she said resolutely,
after an instant's reflection; "it is my duty to
discuss this, too.  It is a misunderstanding all round.
You remember that I told you Mr. Gorringe had given me
some plants, which he got from some garden or other?"

"If you really wish to go on with the subject--yes I
have a recollection of that particular falsehood of his."

"He did it with the kindest and friendliest motives in
the world!" protested Alice.  "He saw how down-in-the-mouth
and moping I was here, among these strangers--
and I really was getting quite peaked and run-down--
and he said I stayed indoors too much and it would do me
all sorts of good to work in the garden, and he would
send me some plants.  The next I knew, here they were,
with a book about mixing soils and planting, and so on.
When I saw him next, and thanked him, I suppose I showed
some apprehension about his having laid out money on them,
and he, just to ease my mind, invented the story about his
getting them for nothing.  When I found out the truth--
I got it out of that boy, Harvey Semple--he admitted it
quite frankly--said he was wrong to deceive me."

"This was in the fine first fervor of his term of probation,
I suppose," put in Theron.  He made no effort to dissemble
the sneer in his voice.

"Well," answered Alice, with a touch of acerbity,
"I have told you now, and it is off my mind.  There never
would have been the slightest concealment about it,
if you hadn't begun by keeping me at arm's length,
and making it next door to impossible to speak to you
at all, and if--"

"And if he hadn't lied."  Theron, as he finished her
sentence for her, rose from the table.  Dallying for a
brief moment by his chair, there seemed the magnetic
premonition in the air of some further and kindlier word.
Then he turned and walked sedately into the next room,
and closed the door behind him.  The talk was finished;
and Alice, left alone, passed the knuckle of her thumb
over one swimming eye and then the other, and bit her lips
and swallowed down the sob that rose in her throat.



CHAPTER XXVIII


It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard,
bestowing no glance upon the withered and tarnished
show of the garden, and started with a definite step
down the street.  The tendency to ruminative loitering,
which those who saw him abroad always associated
with his tall, spare figure, was not suggested today.
He moved forward like a man with a purpose.

All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room,
with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard.
It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts.
That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a
disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it.
It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe's
motives in lying had been.  As for Alice, he hardened
his heart against her.  Just now it was her mood to try
and make up to him.  But it had been something different
yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow?
He really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting
emotional vagaries, now lurching in this direction,
now in that.  She had had her chance to maintain a hold
upon his interest and imagination, and had let it slip.
These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh
happenings in the great tragedy of Nature.  They could not
be helped, and there was nothing more to be said.

He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest
had said the previous evening.  He passed in review all
the glowing tributes Father Forbes had paid to Celia.
They warmed his senses as he recalled them, but they also,
in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness.
There had been a personal fervor about them which was
something more than priestly.  He remembered how the
priest had turned pale and faltered when the question
whether Celia would escape the general doom of her family
came up.  It was not a merely pastoral agitation that,
he felt sure.

A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions,
crowded upward together in his thoughts.  It became apparent
to him now that from the outset he had been conscious
of something queer--yes, from that very first day when he
saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their glance
of recognition inside the house of death.  He realized now,
upon reflection, that the tone of other people, his own
parishioners and his casual acquaintances in Octavius alike,
had always had a certain note of reservation in it when
it touched upon Miss Madden.  Her running in and out
of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted
her on the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike
the priest's ugly old housekeeper bore her, the astonishing
freedom of their talk with each other--these dark
memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister conjecture.

He could bear the uncertainty no longer.  Was it indeed
not entirely his own fault that it had existed thus long?
No man with the spirit of a mouse would have shilly-shallied
in this preposterous fashion, week after week, with the fever
of a beautiful woman's kiss in his blood, and the woman
herself living only round the corner.  The whole world
had been as good as offered to him--a bewildering world
of wealth and beauty and spiritual exaltation and love--
and he, like a weak fool, had waited for it to be brought
to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced upon
his acceptance!  "That is my failing," he reflected;
"these miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed
my manly side.  The meanest of Thurston's clerks would
have shown a more adventurous spirit and a bolder nerve.
If I do not act at once, with courage and resolution,
everything will be lost.  Already she must think me
unworthy of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow."
Then he remembered that she was now always at home.
"Not another hour of foolish indecision!" he whispered
to himself.  "I will put my destiny to the test.  I will see
her today!

A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the
door-bell of the Madden mansion.  She was palpably Irish,
and looked at him with a saddened preoccupation in her
gray eyes, holding the door only a little ajar.

Theron had got out one of his cards.  "I wish to make
inquiry about young Mr. Madden--Mr. Michael Madden,"
he said, holding the card forth tentatively.  "I have only
just heard of his illness, and it has been a great grief
to me."

"He is no better," answered the woman, briefly.

"I am the Rev. Mr. Ware," he went on, "and you may say that,
if he is well enough, I should be glad to see him."

The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered
expression, then shook her head.  "I don't think he would
be wishing to see YOU," she replied.  It was evident
from her tone that she suspected the visitor's intentions.

Theron smiled in spite of himself.  "I have not come
as a clergyman," he explained, "but as a friend of
the family.  If you will tell Miss Madden that I am here,
it will do just as well.  Yes, we won't bother him.
If you will kindly hand my card to his sister."

When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt
like throwing his hat in the air, there where he stood.
The woman's churlish sectarian prejudices had played
ideally into his hands.  In no other imaginable
way could he have asked for Celia so naturally.
He wondered a little that a servant at such a grand house
as this should leave callers standing on the doorstep.
Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady
of his dream when he came into her presence.

"Will you please to walk this way?"  The woman had returned.
She closed the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way,
not up the sumptuous staircase, as Theron had expected,
but along through the broad hall, past several large doors,
to a small curtained archway at the end.  She pushed
aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort
of conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine
falling through ground-glass. The air was moist and close,
and heavy with the smell of verdure and wet earth.
A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at their base,
reared itself directly in front of him.  The floor was of mosaic,
and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there
were chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation.
It was, indeed, only half a greenhouse, for the lower part
of it was in rosewood panels, with floral paintings on them,
like a room.

Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered,
to his great surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped
up with pillows in a huge easy-chair. The sick man was
looking at him with big, gravely intent eyes.  His face did
not show as much change as Theron had in fancy pictured.
It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day
of the picnic.  The hands spread out on the chair-arms
were very white and thin, though, and the gaze in the blue
eyes had a spectral quality which disturbed him.

Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward,
took it limply in his for an instant.  Then he laid it
down again.  The touch of people about to die had always
been repugnant to him.  He could feel on his own warm
palm the very damp of the grave.

"I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your--
your ill-health," he said, somewhat hesitatingly.  He seated
himself on a bench beneath the palms, facing the invalid,
but still holding his hat.  "I hope very sincerely that you
will soon be all right again."

"My sister is lying down in her room," answered Michael.
He had not once taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze
from the other's face.  The voice in which he uttered this
uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold and impassive.
It fell upon Theron's ears with a suggestion of hidden meaning.
He looked uneasily into Michael's eyes, and then away again.
They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there
was no shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended
things with an unnatural prescience.

"I hope she is feeling better," Theron found himself saying.
"Father Forbes mentioned that she was a little under
the weather.  I dined with him last night."

"I am glad that you came," said Michael, after a little pause.
His earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his
tongue with speech of their own.  "I do be thinking a
great deal about you.  I have matters to speak of to you,
now that you are here."

Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention.
He tried the experiment of looking away from Michael,
but his glance went back again irresistibly, and fastened
itself upon the sick man's gaze, and clung there.

"I am next door to a dead man," he went on, paying no heed
to the other's deprecatory gesture.  "It is not years
or months with me, but weeks.  Then I go away to stand up
for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful will,
I shall see God.  So I say my good-byes now, and so you
will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say.
You are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius,
and it is not a change for the good."

Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put
inquiry into his glance.

"I don't know if Protestants will be saved, in God's
good time, or not," continued Michael.  "I find there
are different opinions among the clergy about that,
and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic,
to be sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt.
But I am sure about one thing.  Those Protestants,
and others too, mind you, who profess and preach good deeds,
and themselves do bad deeds--they will never be saved.
They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire."

"I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,"
said Theron, with surface suavity.

"Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path.
Take the warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!"

The impulse to smile tugged at Theron's facial muscles.
This was really too droll.  He looked up at the ceiling,
the while he forced his countenance into a polite composure,
then turned again to Michael, with some conciliatory
commonplace ready for utterance.  But he said nothing,
and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching
inspection bent upon him by the young man's hollow eyes.
What did Michael suspect?  What did he know?  What was he
hinting at, in this strange talk of his?

"I saw you often on the street when first you came here,"
continued Michael.  "I knew the man who was here before you--
that is, by sight--and he was not a good man.  But your face,
when you came, pleased me.  I liked to look at you.
I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many decent,
kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors
of mine--and, for that matter, others all over the country
must lose their souls because they were Protestants.
At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took the joy
out of me.  Sometimes I usen't to sleep a whole night long,
for thinking that some lad I had been playing with,
perhaps in his own house, that very day, would be taken
when he died, and his mother too, when she died, and thrown
into the flames of hell for all eternity.  It made me
so unhappy that finally I wouldn't go to any Protestant
boy's house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me
cake and apples--and me thinking all the while that they
were bound to be damned, no matter how good they were
to me."

The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he
nodded approbation with a tender smile in his eyes,
forgetting for the moment that a personal application
of the monologue had been hinted at.

"But then later, as I grew up," the sick man went on,
"I learned that it was not altogether certain.  Some of
the authorities, I found, maintained that it was doubtful,
and some said openly that there must be salvation possible
for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth
through no fault of their own.  Then I had hope one day,
and no hope the next, and as I did my work I thought
it over, and in the evenings my father and I talked
it over, and we settled nothing of it at all.  Of course,
how could we?"

"Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?"
it occurred suddenly to Theron to interpose.  He was
conscious of some daring in doing so, and he fancied
that Michael's drawn face clouded a little at his words.

"My sister is no theologian," he answered briefly.
"Women have no call to meddle with such matters.
But I was saying--it was in the middle of these doubtings
of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed
you on the streets, and once in the evening--I made
no secret of it to my people--I sat in the back of your
church and heard you preach.  As I say, I liked you.
It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the man
underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than
anything else.  I said to myself:  "Here is a young man,
only about my own age, and he has education and talents,
and he does not seek to make money for himself,
or a great name, but he is content to live humbly on
the salary of a book-keeper, and devote all his time to
prayer and the meditation of his religion, and preaching,
and visiting the sick and the poor, and comforting them.
His very face is a pleasure and a help for those in suffering
and trouble to look at.  The very sight of it makes one
believe in pure thoughts and merciful deeds.  I will not
credit it that God intends damning such a man as that,
or any like him!"

Theron bowed, with a slow, hesitating gravity of manner,
and deep, not wholly complacent, attention on his face.
Evidently all this was by way of preparation for
something unpleasant.

"That was only last spring," said Michael.  His tired
voice sank for a sentence or two into a meditative
half-whisper. "And it was MY last spring of all.  I shall
not be growing weak any more, or drawing hard breaths,
when the first warm weather comes.  It will be one season
to me hereafter, always the same."  He lifted his voice
with perceptible effort.  "I am talking too much.
The rest I can say in a word.  Only half a year has
gone by, and you have another face on you entirely.
I had noticed the small changes before, one by one.  I saw
the great change, all of a sudden, the day of the picnic.
I see it a hundred times more now, as you sit there.
If it seemed to me like the face of a saint before,
it is more like the face of a bar-keeper now!"

This was quite too much.  Theron rose, flushed to the temples,
and scowled down at the helpless man in the chair.
He swallowed the sharp words which came uppermost,
and bit and moistened his lips as he forced himself to
remember that this was a dying man, and Celia's brother,
to whom she was devoted, and whom he himself felt he
wanted to be very fond of.  He got the shadow of a smile
on to his countenance.

"I fear you HAVE tired yourself unduly," he said,
in as non-contentious a tone as he could manage.
He even contrived a little deprecatory laugh.  I am
afraid your real quarrel is with the air of Octavius.
It agrees with me so wonderfully--I am getting as fat
as a seal.  But I do hope I am not paying for it by such
a wholesale deterioration inside.  If my own opinion could
be of any value, I should assure you that I feel myself
an infinitely better and broader and stronger man than I
was when I came here."

Michael shook his head dogmatically.  "That is the greatest
pity of all," he said, with renewed earnestness.  "You are
entirely deceived about yourself.  You do not at all realize
how you have altered your direction, or where you are going.
It was a great misfortune for you, sir, that you did not keep
among your own people.  That poor half-brother of mine,
though the drink was in him when he said that same to you,
never spoke a truer word.  Keep among your own people,
Mr. Ware!  When you go among others--you know what I mean--
you have no proper understanding of what their sayings
and doings really mean.  You do not realize that they are
held up by the power of the true Church, as a little child
learning to walk is held up with a belt by its nurse.
They can say and do things, and no harm at all come to them,
which would mean destruction to you, because they have help,
and you are walking alone.  And so be said by me, Mr. Ware!
Go back to the way you were brought up in, and leave
alone the people whose ways are different from yours.
You are a married man, and you are the preacher of
a religion, such as it is.  There can be nothing better
for you than to go and strive to be a good husband,
and to set a good example to the people of your Church,
who look up to you--and mix yourself up no more with outside
people and outside notions that only do you mischief.
And that is what I wanted to say to you."

Theron took up his hat.  "I take in all kindness what you
have felt it your duty to say to me, Mr. Madden," he said.
"I am not sure that I have altogether followed you, but I
am very sure you mean it well."

"I mean well by you," replied Michael, wearily moving
his head on the pillow, and speaking in an undertone
of languor and pain, "and I mean well by others, that are
nearer to me, and that I have a right to care more about.
When a man lies by the site of his open grave, he does
not be meaning ill to any human soul."

"Yes--thanks--quite so!" faltered Theron.  He dallied
for an instant with the temptation to seek some further
explanation, but the sight of Michael's half-closed
eyes and worn-out expression decided him against it.
It did not seem to be expected, either, that he should
shake hands, and with a few perfunctory words of hope
for the invalid's recovery, which fell with a jarring note
of falsehood upon his own ears, he turned and left the room.
As he did so, Michael touched a bell on the table beside him.

Theron drew a long breath in the hall, as the curtain
fell behind him.  It was an immense relief to escape
from the oppressive humidity and heat of the flower-room,
and from that ridiculous bore of a Michael as well.

The middle-aged, grave-faced servant, warned by the bell,
stood waiting to conduct him to the door.

"I am sorry to have missed Miss Madden," he said to her.
"She must be quite worn out.  Perhaps later in the day--"

"She will not be seeing anybody today," returned the woman.
"She is going to New York this evening, and she is taking
some rest against the journey."

"Will she be away long?" he asked mechanically.
The servant's answer, "I have no idea," hardly penetrated
his consciousness at all.

He moved down the steps, and along the gravel to the street,
in a maze of mental confusion.  When he reached the sidewalk,
under the familiar elms, he paused, and made a definite
effort to pull his thoughts together, and take stock
of what had happened, of what was going to happen;
but the thing baffled him.  It was as if some drug had
stupefied his faculties.

He began to walk, and gradually saw that what he was
thinking about was the fact of Celia's departure for New
York that evening.  He stared at this fact, at first in
its nakedness, then clothed with reassuring suggestions
that this was no doubt a trip she very often made.
There was a blind sense of comfort in this idea, and he
rested himself upon it.  Yes, of course, she travelled
a great deal.  New York must be as familiar to her
as Octavius was to him.  Her going there now was quite
a matter of course--the most natural thing in the world.

Then there burst suddenly uppermost in his mind the
other fact--that Father Forbes was also going to New
York that evening.  The two things spindled upward,
side by side, yet separately, in his mental vision;
then they twisted and twined themselves together.
He followed their convolutions miserably, walking as if
his eyes were shut.

In slow fashion matters defined and arranged themselves
before him.  The process of tracing their sequence was
all torture, but there was no possibility, no notion,
of shirking any detail of the pain.  The priest had spoken
of his efforts to persuade Celia to go away for a few days,
for rest and change of air and scene.  He must have known
only too well that she was going, but of that he had been
careful to drop no hint.  The possibility of accident
was too slight to be worth considering.  People on such
intimate terms as Celia and the priest--people with such
facilities for seeing each other whenever they desired--
did not find themselves on the same train of cars,
with the same long journey in view, by mere chance.

Theron walked until dusk began to close in upon the
autumn day.  It grew colder, as he turned his face homeward.
He wondered if it would freeze again over-night, and then
remembered the shrivelled flowers in his wife's garden.
For a moment they shaped themselves in a picture before his
mind's eye; he saw their blackened foliage, their sicklied,
drooping stalks, and wilted blooms, and as he looked,
they restored themselves to the vigor and grace and richness
of color of summer-time, as vividly as if they had been
painted on a canvas.  Or no, the picture he stared at
was not on canvas, but on the glossy, varnished panel
of a luxurious sleeping-car. He shook his head angrily and
blinked his eyes again and again, to prevent their seeing,
seated together in the open window above this panel,
the two people he knew were there, gloved and habited
for the night's journey, waiting for the train to start.



"Very much to my surprise," he found himself saying to Alice,
watching her nervously as she laid the supper-table, "I
find I must go to Albany tonight.  That is, it isn't
absolutely necessary, for that matter, but I think it
may easily turn out to be greatly to my advantage to go.
Something has arisen--I can't speak about it as yet--
but the sooner I see the Bishop about it the better.
Things like that occur in a man's life, where boldly
striking out a line of action, and following it up without
an instant's delay, may make all the difference in the world
to him.  Tomorrow it might be too late; and, besides, I can
be home the sooner again."

Alice's face showed surprise, but no trace of suspicion.
She spoke with studied amiability during the meal,
and deferred with such unexpected tact to his implied
desire not to be questioned as to the mysterious motives
of the journey, that his mood instinctively softened and
warmed toward her, as they finished supper.

He smiled a little.  "I do hope I shan't have to go
on tomorrow to New York; but these Bishops of ours are
such gad-abouts one never knows where to catch them.
As like as not Sanderson may be down in New York,
on Book-Concern business or something; and if he is,
I shall have to chase him up.  But, after all, perhaps the
trip will do me good--the change of air and scene,
you know."

"I'm sure I hope so," said Alice, honestly enough.
"If you do go on to New York, I suppose you'll go by the
river-boat. Everybody talks so much of that beautiful
sail down the Hudson."

"That's an idea!" exclaimed Theron, welcoming it
with enthusiasm.  "It hadn't occurred to me.  If I
do have to go, and it is as lovely as they make out,
the next time I promise I won't go without you, my girl.
I HAVE been rather out of sorts lately," he continued.
"When I come back, I daresay I shall be feeling better,
more like my old self.  Then I'm going to try, Alice, to be
nicer to you than I have been of late.  I'm afraid there
was only too much truth in what you said this morning."

"Never mind what I said this morning--or any other time,"
broke in Alice, softly.  "Don't ever remember it again,
Theron, if only--only--"

He rose as she spoke, moved round the table to where
she sat, and, bending over her, stopped the faltering
sentence with a kiss.  When was it, he wondered,
that he had last kissed her?  It seemed years, ages, ago.

An hour later, with hat and overcoat on, and his valise
in his hand, he stood on the doorstep of the parsonage,
and kissed her once more before he turned and descended
into the darkness.  He felt like whistling as his feet
sounded firmly on the plank sidewalk beyond the gate.
It seemed as if he had never been in such capital good
spirits before in his life.



CHAPTER XXIX


The train was at a standstill somewhere, and the dull,
ashen beginnings of daylight had made a first feeble start
toward effacing the lamps in the car-roof, when the new day
opened for Theron.  A man who had just come in stopped
at the seat upon which he had been stretched through
the night, and, tapping him brusquely on the knee, said,
"I'm afraid I must trouble you, sir."  After a moment
of sleep-burdened confusion, he sat up, and the man
took the other half of the seat and opened a newspaper,
still damp from the press.  It was morning, then.

Theron rubbed a clear space upon the clouded window
with his thumb, and looked out.  There was nothing to
be seen but a broad stretch of tracks, and beyond this
the shadowed outlines of wagons and machinery in a yard,
with a background of factory buildings.

The atmosphere in the car was vile beyond belief.
He thought of opening the window, but feared that the
peremptory-looking man with the paper, who had wakened him
and made him sit up, might object.  They were the only people
in the car who were sitting up.  Backwards and forwards,
on either side of the narrow aisle, the dim light disclosed
recumbent forms, curled uncomfortably into corners,
or sprawling at difficult angles which involved the least
interference with one another.  Here and there an upturned
face gave a livid patch of surface for the mingled play
of the gray dawn and the yellow lamp-light. A ceaseless
noise of snoring was in the air.

He got up and walked to the tank of ice-water at the end
of the aisle, and took a drink from the most inaccessible
portion of the common tin-cup's rim.  The happy idea of going
out on the platform struck him, and he acted upon it.
The morning air was deliciously cool and fresh by contrast,
and he filled his lungs with it again and again.
Standing here, he could discern beyond the buildings to the
right the faint purplish outlines of great rounded hills.
Some workmen, one of them bearing a torch, were crouching
along under the side of the train, pounding upon
the resonant wheels with small hammers.  He recalled
having heard the same sound in the watches of the night,
during a prolonged halt.  Some one had said it was Albany.
He smiled in spite of himself at the thought that Bishop
Sanderson would never know about the visit he had missed.

Swinging himself to the ground, he bent sidewise and looked
forward down the long train.  There were five, six,
perhaps more, sleeping-cars on in front.  Which one of them,
he wondered--and then there came the sharp "All aboard!"
from the other side, and he bundled up the steps again,
and entered the car as the train slowly resumed its progress.

He was wide-awake now, and quite at his ease.  He took
his seat, and diverted himself by winking gravely at
a little child facing him on the next seat but one.
There were four other children in the family party,
encamped about the tired and still sleeping mother whose back
was turned to Theron.  He recalled now having noticed this
poor woman last night, in the first stage of his journey--
how she fed her brood from one of the numerous baskets
piled under their feet, and brought water in a tin dish
of her own from the tank to use in washing their faces
with a rag, and loosened their clothes to dispose
them for the night's sleep.  The face of the woman,
her manner and slatternly aspect, and the general effect
of her belongings, bespoke squalid ignorance and poverty.
Watching her, Theron had felt curiously interested
in the performance.  In one sense, it was scarcely more
human than the spectacle of a cat licking her kittens,
or a cow giving suck to her calf.  Yet, in another,
was there anything more human?

The child who had wakened before the rest regarded him
with placidity, declining to be amused by his winkings,
but exhibiting no other emotion.  She had been playing by
herself with a couple of buttons tied on a string, and after
giving a civil amount of attention to Theron's grimaces,
she turned again to the superior attractions of this toy.
Her self-possession, her capacity for self-entertainment,
the care she took not to arouse the others, all impressed
him very much.  He felt in his pocket for a small coin,
and, reaching forward, offered it to her.  She took
it calmly, bestowed a tranquil gaze upon him for a moment,
and went back to the buttons.  Her indifference produced
an unpleasant sensation upon him somehow, and he rubbed
the steaming window clear again, and stared out of it.

The wide river lay before him, flanked by a precipitous wall
of cliffs which he knew instantly must be the Palisades.
There was an advertisement painted on them which he
tried in vain to read.  He was surprised to find they
interested him so slightly.  He had heard all his life
of the Hudson, and especially of it just at this point.
The reality seemed to him almost commonplace.  His failure
to be thrilled depressed him for the moment.

"I suppose those ARE the Palisades?" he asked his neighbor.

The man glanced up from his paper, nodded, and made
as if to resume his reading.  But his eye had caught
something in the prospect through the window which
arrested his attention.  "By George!" he exclaimed,
and lifted himself to get a clearer view.

"What is it?" asked Theron, peering forth as well.

"Nothing; only Barclay Wendover's yacht is still there.
There's been a hitch of some sort.  They were to have
left yesterday."

"Is that it--that long black thing?" queried Theron.
"That can't be a yacht, can it?"

"What do you think it is?" answered the other.
They were looking at a slim, narrow hull, lying at anchor,
silent and motionless on the drab expanse of water.
"If that ain't a yacht, they haven't begun building any yet.
They're taking her over to the Mediterranean for a cruise,
you know--around India and Japan for the winter, and home
by the South Sea islands.  Friend o' mine's in the party.
Wouldn't mind the trip myself."

"But do you mean to say," asked Theron, "that that little
shell of a thing can sail across the ocean?  Why, how many
people would she hold?"

The man laughed.  "Well," he said, "there's room for two
sets of quadrilles in the chief saloon, if the rest keep
their legs well up on the sofas.  But there's only ten
or a dozen in the party this time.  More than that rather
get in one another's way, especially with so many ladies
on board."

Theron asked no more questions, but bent his head to see
the last of this wonderful craft.  The sight of it,
and what he had heard about it, suddenly gave point
and focus to his thoughts.  He knew at last what it was
that had lurked, formless and undesignated, these many
days in the background of his dreams.  The picture rose
in his mind now of Celia as the mistress of a yacht.
He could see her reclining in a low easy-chair upon
the polished deck, with the big white sails billowing
behind her, and the sun shining upon the deep blue waves,
and glistening through the splash of spray in the air,
and weaving a halo of glowing gold about her fair head.
Ah, how the tender visions crowded now upon him!
Eternal summer basked round this enchanted yacht of his fancy--
summer sought now in Scottish firths or Norwegian fiords,
now in quaint old Southern harbors, ablaze with the hues
of strange costumes and half-tropical flowers and fruits,
now in far-away Oriental bays and lagoons, or among
the coral reefs and palm-trees of the luxurious Pacific.
He dwelt upon these new imaginings with the fervent longing
of an inland-born boy.  Every vague yearning he had ever felt
toward salt-water stirred again in his blood at the thought
of the sea--with Celia.

Why not?  She had never visited any foreign land.
"Sometime," she had said, "sometime, no doubt I will."
He could hear again the wistful, musing tone of her voice.
The thought had fascinations for her, it was clear.
How irresistibly would it not appeal to her, presented with
the added charm of a roving, vagrant independence on
the high seas, free to speed in her snow-winged chariot
wherever she willed over the deep, loitering in this place,
or up-helm-and-away to another, with no more care or weight
of responsibility than the gulls tossing through the air in
her wake!

Theron felt, rather than phrased to himself, that there
would not be "ten or a dozen in the party" on that yacht.
Without defining anything in his mind, he breathed in
fancy the same bold ocean breeze which filled the sails,
and toyed with Celia's hair; he looked with her as she
sat by the rail, and saw the same waves racing past,
the same vast dome of cloud and ether that were mirrored
in her brown eyes, and there was no one else anywhere
near them.  Even the men in sailors' clothes, who would
be pulling at ropes, or climbing up tarred ladders,
kept themselves considerately outside the picture.
Only Celia sat there, and at her feet, gazing up again
into her face as in the forest, the man whose whole
being had been consecrated to her service, her worship,
by the kiss.

"You've passed it now.  I was trying to point out the
Jumel house to you--where Aaron Burr lived, you know."

Theron roused himself from his day-dream, and nodded with
a confused smile at his neighbor.  "Thanks," he faltered;
"I didn't hear you.  The train makes such a noise, and I
must have been dozing."

He looked about him.  The night aspect, as of a tramps'
lodging-house, had quite disappeared from the car.
Everybody was sitting up; and the more impatient
were beginning to collect their bundles and hand-bags
from the racks and floor.  An expressman came through,
jangling a huge bunch of brass checks on leathern thongs
over his arm, and held parley with passengers along
the aisle.  Outside, citified streets, with stores
and factories, were alternating in the moving panorama
with open fields; and, even as he looked, these vacant
spaces ceased altogether, and successive regular lines
of pavement, between two tall rows of houses all alike,
began to stretch out, wheel to the right, and swing
off out of view, for all the world like the avenues of
hop-poles he remembered as a boy.  Then was a long tunnel,
its darkness broken at stated intervals by brief bursts
of daylight from overhead, and out of this all at
once the train drew up its full length in some vast,
vaguely lighted enclosure, and stopped.

"Yes, this is New York," said the man, folding up his paper,
and springing to his feet.  The narrow aisle was filled with
many others who had been prompter still; and Theron stood,
bag in hand, waiting till this energetic throng should
have pushed itself bodily past him forth from the car.
Then he himself made his way out, drifting with a sense
of helplessness in their resolute wake.  There rose in his
mind the sudden conviction that he would be too late.
All the passengers in the forward sleepers would be gone
before he could get there.  Yet even this terror gave him
no new power to get ahead of anybody else in the tightly
packed throng.

Once on the broad platform, the others started off briskly;
they all seemed to know just where they wanted to go,
and to feel that no instant of time was to be lost
in getting there.  Theron himself caught some of this
urgent spirit, and hurled himself along in the throng
with reckless haste, knocking his bag against peoples'
legs, but never pausing for apology or comment until
he found himself abreast of the locomotive at the head
of the train.  He drew aside from the main current here,
and began searching the platform, far and near, for those
he had travelled so far to find.

The platform emptied itself.  Theron lingered on in
puzzled hesitation, and looked about him.  In the whole
immense station, with its acres of tracks and footways,
and its incessantly shifting processions of people,
there was visible nobody else who seemed also in doubt,
or who appeared capable of sympathizing with indecision
in any form.  Another train came in, some way over to
the right, and before it had fairly stopped, swarms of
eager men began boiling out of each end of each car,
literally precipitating themselves over one another,
it seemed to Theron, in their excited dash down the steps.
As they caught their footing below, they started racing
pell-mell down the platform to its end; there he saw them,
looking more than ever like clustered bees in the distance,
struggling vehemently in a dense mass up a staircase in the
remote corner of the building.

"What are those folks running for?  Is there a fire?"
he asked an amiable-faced young mulatto, in the uniform
of the sleeping-car service, who passed him with some light
hand-bags.

"No; they's Harlem people, I guess--jes' catchin' the Elevated--
that's all, sir," he answered obligingly.

At the moment some passengers emerged slowly from one
of the sleeping-cars, and came loitering toward him.

"Why, are there people still in these cars?" he asked eagerly.
"Haven't they all gone?"

"Some has; some ain't," the porter replied.  "They most
generally take their time about it.  They ain't no hurry,
so long's they get out 'fore we're drawn round to the drill-yard."

There was still hope, then.  Theron took up his bag
and walked forward, intent upon finding some place from
which he could watch unobserved the belated stragglers
issuing from the sleeping-cars. He started back all at once,
confronted by a semi-circle of violent men with whips
and badges, who stunned his hearing by a sudden vociferous
outburst of shouts and yells.  They made furious gestures
at him with their whips and fists, to enforce the
incoherent babel of their voices; and in these gestures,
as in their faces and cries, there seemed a great deal
of menace and very little invitation.  There was a big
policeman sauntering near by, and Theron got the idea
that it was his presence alone which protected him from
open violence at the hands of these savage hackmen.
He tightened his clutch on his valise, and, turning his back
on them and their uproar, tried to brave it out and stand
where he was.  But the policeman came lounging slowly
toward him, with such authority in his swaying gait,
and such urban omniscience written all over his broad,
sandy face, that he lost heart, and beat an abrupt retreat
off to the right, where there were a number of doorways,
near which other people had ventured to put down baggage
on the floor.

Here, somewhat screened from observation, he stood
for a long time, watching at odd moments the ceaselessly
varying phases of the strange scene about him, but always
keeping an eye on the train he had himself arrived in.
It was slow and dispiriting work.  A dozen times his heart
failed him, and he said to himself mournfully that he
had had his journey for nothing.  Then some new figure
would appear, alighting from the steps of a sleeper,
and hope revived in his breast.

At last, when over half an hour of expectancy had been
marked off by the big clock overhead, his suspense came
to an end.  He saw Father Forbes' erect and substantial
form, standing on the car platform nearest of all,
balancing himself with his white hands on the rails,
waiting for something.  Then after a little he came down,
followed by a black porter, whose arms were burdened
by numerous bags and parcels.  The two stood a minute
or so more in hesitation at the side of the steps.
Then Celia descended, and the three advanced.

The importance of not being discovered was uppermost
in Theron's mind, now that he saw them actually coming
toward him.  He had avoided this the previous evening,
in the Octavius depot, with some skill, he flattered himself.
It gave him a pleasurable sense of being a man of affairs,
almost a detective, to be confronted by the necessity
now of baffling observation once again.  He was still
rather without plans for keeping them in view, once they
left the station.  He had supposed that he would be able
to hear what hotel they directed their driver to take
them to, and, failing that, he had fostered a notion,
based upon a story he had read when a boy, of throwing
himself into another carriage, and bidding his driver
to pursue them in hot haste, and on his life not fail
to track them down.  These devices seemed somewhat empty,
now that the urgent moment was at hand; and as he drew
back behind some other loiterers, out of view, he sharply
racked his wits for some way of coping with this most
pressing problem.

It turned out, however, that there was no difficulty
at all.  Father Forbes and Celia seemed to have no use for
the hackmen, but moved straight forward toward the street,
through the doorway next to that in which Theron cowered.
He stole round, and followed them at a safe distance,
making Celia's hat, and the portmanteau perched on
the shoulder of the porter behind her, his guides.
To his surprise, they still kept on their course when they
had reached the sidewalk, and went over the pavement
across an open square which spread itself directly in
front of the station.  Hanging as far behind as he dared,
he saw them pass to the other sidewalk diagonally opposite,
proceed for a block or so along this, and then separate at
a corner.  Celia and the negro lad went down a side street,
and entered the door of a vast, tall red-brick building
which occupied the whole block.  The priest, turning on
his heel, came back again and went boldly up the broad
steps of the front entrance to this same structure,
which Theron now discovered to be the Murray Hill Hotel.

Fortune had indeed favored him.  He not only knew where
they were, but he had been himself a witness to the furtive
way in which they entered the house by different doors.
Nothing in his own limited experience of hotels helped him
to comprehend the notion of a separate entrance for ladies
and their luggage.  He did not feel quite sure about the
significance of what he had observed, in his own mind.
But it was apparent to him that there was something
underhanded about it.

After lingering awhile on the steps of the hotel,
and satisfying himself by peeps through the glass
doors that the coast was clear, he ventured inside.
The great corridor contained many people, coming, going,
or standing about, but none of them paid any attention to him.
At last he made up his mind, and beckoned a colored boy
to him from a group gathered in the shadows of the big
central staircase.  Explaining that he did not at that moment
wish a room, but desired to leave his bag, the boy took
him to a cloak-room, and got him a check for the thing.
With this in his pocket he felt himself more at his ease,
and turned to walk away.  Then suddenly he wheeled, and,
bending his body over the counter of the cloak-room,
astonished the attendant inside by the eagerness with
which he scrutinized the piled rows of portmanteaus,
trunks, overcoats, and bundles in the little enclosure.

"What is it you want?  Here's your bag, if you're looking
for that," this man said to him.

"No, thanks; it's nothing," replied Theron,
straightening himself again.  He had had a narrow escape.
Father Forbes and Celia, walking side by side, had come
down the small passage in which he stood, and had passed him
so closely that he had felt her dress brush against him.
Fortunately he had seen them in time, and by throwing himself
half into the cloak-room, had rendered recognition impossible.

He walked now in the direction they had taken, till he came
to the polite colored man at an open door on the left,
who was bowing people into the breakfast room.
Standing in the doorway, he looked about him till his eye
lighted upon his two friends, seated at a small table
by a distant window, with a black waiter, card in hand,
bending over in consultation with them.

Returning to the corridor, he made bold now to march
up to the desk and examine the register.  The priest's
name was not there.  He found only the brief entry,
"Miss Madden, Octavius," written, not by her, but by
Father Forbes.  On the line were two numbers in pencil,
with an "and" between them.  An indirect question to one
of the clerks helped him to an explanation of this.
When there were two numbers, it meant that the guest in
question had a parlor as well as a bedroom.

Here he drew a long, satisfied breath, and turned away.
The first half of his quest stood completed--and that
much more fully and easily than he had dared to hope.
He could not but feel a certain new respect for himself
as a man of resource and energy.  He had demonstrated
that people could not fool with him with impunity.

It remained to decide what he would do with his discovery,
now that it had been so satisfactorily made.
As yet, he had given this hardly a thought.  Even now,
it did not thrust itself forward as a thing demanding
instant attention.  It was much more important, first of all,
to get a good breakfast.  He had learned that there was
another and less formal eating-place, downstairs in the
basement by the bar, with an entrance from the street.
He walked down by the inner stairway instead,
feeling himself already at home in the big hotel.
He ordered an ample breakfast, and came out while it
was being served to wash and have his boots blacked,
and he gave the man a quarter of a dollar.  His pockets
were filled with silver quarters, half-dollars, and dollars
almost to a burdensome point, and in his valise was a bag
full of smaller change, including many rolls of copper
cents which Alice always counted and packed up on Mondays.
In the hurry of leaving he had brought with him the church
collections for the past two weeks.  It occurred to him
that he must keep a strict account of his expenditure.
Meanwhile he gave ten cents to another man in a silk-sleeved
cardigan jacket, who had merely stood by and looked at him
while his boots were being polished.  There was a sense
of metropolitan affluence in the very atmosphere.

The little table in the adjoining room, on which Theron
found his meal in waiting for him, seemed a vision of
delicate napery and refined appointments in his eyes.
He was wolfishly hungry, and the dishes he looked upon
gave him back assurances by sight and smell that he
was very happy as well.  The servant in attendance
had an extremely white apron and a kindly black face.
He bowed when Theron looked at him, with the air of a
lifelong admirer and humble friend.

"I suppose you'll have claret with your breakfast, sir?"
he remarked, as if it were a matter of course.

"Why, certainly," answered Theron, stretching his legs
contentedly under the table, and tucking the corner
of his napkin in his neckband.--"Certainly, my good man."



CHAPTER XXX


At ten o'clock Theron, loitering near the bookstall
in the corridor, saw Father Forbes come downstairs,
pass out through the big front doors, get into a carriage,
and drive away.

This relieved him of a certain sense of responsibility,
and he retired to a corner sofa and sat down.
The detective side of him being off duty, so to speak,
there was leisure at last for reflection upon the other
aspects of his mission.  Yes; it was high time for him
to consider what he should do next.

It was easier to recognize this fact, however, than to act
upon it.  His mind was full of tricksy devices for eluding
this task of serious thought which he sought to impose
upon it.  It seemed so much pleasanter not to think at all--
but just to drift.  He found himself watching with envy
the men who, as they came out from their breakfast,
walked over to the bookstall, and bought cigars from the
row of boxes nestling there among the newspaper piles.
They had such evident delight in the work of selection;
they took off the ends of the cigars so carefully,
and lighted them with such meditative attention,--
he could see that he was wofully handicapped by not
knowing how to smoke.  He had had the most wonderful
breakfast of his life, but even in the consciousness
of comfortable repletion which pervaded his being,
there was an obstinate sense of something lacking.
No doubt a good cigar was the thing needed to round out
the perfection of such a breakfast.  He half rose once,
fired by a sudden resolution to go over and get one.
But of course that was nonsense; it would only make
him sick.  He sat down, and determinedly set himself
to thinking.

The effort finally brought fruit--and of a kind which
gave him a very unhappy quarter of an hour.  The lover
part of him was uppermost now, insistently exposing all
its raw surfaces to the stings and scalds of jealousy.
Up to this moment, his brain had always evaded the direct
question of how he and the priest relatively stood in
Celia's estimation.  It forced itself remorselessly upon
him now; and his thoughts, so far from shirking the subject,
seemed to rise up to meet it.  It was extremely unpleasant,
all this.

But then a calmer view asserted itself.  Why go out of
his way to invent anguish for himself?  The relations
between Celia and the priest, whatever they might be,
were certainly of old standing.  They had begun before
his time.  His own romance was a more recent affair, and must
take its place, of course, subject to existing conditions.

It was all right for him to come to New York, and satisfy
his legitimate curiosity as to the exact character and scope
of these conditions.  But it was foolish to pretend to be
amazed or dismayed at the discovery of their existence.
They were a part of the situation which he, with his
eyes wide open, had accepted.  It was his function
to triumph over them, to supplant them, to rear the
edifice of his own victorious passion upon their ruins.
It was to this that Celia's kiss had invited him.
It was for this that he had come to New York.  To let
his purpose be hampered or thwarted now by childish
doubts and jealousies would be ridiculous.

He rose, and holding himself very erect, walked with measured
deliberation across the corridor and up the broad staircase.
There was an elevator near at hand, he had noticed,
but he preferred the stairs.  One or two of the colored
boys clustered about the foot of the stairs looked at him,
and he had a moment of dreadful apprehension lest they
should stop his progress.  Nothing was said, and he went on.
The numbers on the first floor were not what he wanted,
and after some wandering about he ascended to the next,
and then to the third.  Every now and then he encountered
attendants, but intuitively he bore himself with an air of
knowing what he was about which protected him from inquiry.

Finally he came upon the hall-way he sought.  Passing along,
he found the doors bearing the numbers he had memorized
so well.  They were quite close together, and there was
nothing to help him guess which belonged to the parlor.
He hesitated, gazing wistfully from one to the other.
In the instant of indecision, even while his alert ear
caught the sound of feet coming along toward the passage
in which he stood, a thought came to quicken his resolve.
It became apparent to him that his discovery gave him
a certain new measure of freedom with Celia, a sort of
right to take things more for granted than heretofore.
He chose a door at random, and rapped distinctly on
the panel.

"Come!"

The voice he knew for Celia's. The single word, however,
recalled the usage of Father Forbes, which he had noted
more than once at the pastorate, when Maggie had knocked.

He straightened his shoulders, took his hat off, and pushed
open the door.  It WAS the parlor--a room of sofas,
pianos, big easy-chairs, and luxurious bric-a-brac. A tall
woman was walking up and down in it, with bowed head.
Her back was at the moment toward him; and he looked at her,
saying to himself that this was the lady of his dreams,
the enchantress of the kiss, the woman who loved him--
but somehow it did not seem to his senses to be Celia.

She turned, and moved a step or two in his direction before
she mechanically lifted her eyes and saw who was standing
in her doorway.  She stopped short, and regarded him.
Her face was in the shadow, and he could make out nothing
of its expression, save that there was a general effect
of gravity about it.

"I cannot receive you," she said.  "You must go away.
You have no business to come like this without sending up
your card."

Theron smiled at her.  The notion of taking in earnest
her inhospitable words did not at all occur to him.
He could see now that her face had vexed and saddened lines
upon it, and the sharpness of her tone remained in his ears.
But he smiled again gently, to reassure her.

"I ought to have sent up my name, I know," he said,
"but I couldn't bear to wait.  I just saw your name
on the register and--you WILL forgive me, won't you?--
I ran to you at once.  I know you won't have the heart
to send me away!"

She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her,
looking him fixedly in the face.  He had made a movement
to advance, and offer his hand in greeting, but her
posture checked the impulse.  His courage began to falter
under her inspection.

"Must I really go down again?" he pleaded.  "It's a
crushing penalty to suffer for such little indiscretion.
I was so excited to find you were here--I never stopped
to think.  Don't send me away; please don't!"

Celia raised her head.  "Well, shut the door, then,"
she said, "since you are so anxious to stay.  You would
have done much better, though, very much better indeed,
to have taken the hint and gone away."

"Will you shake hands with me, Celia?" he asked softly,
as he came near her.

"Sit there, please!" she made answer, indicating a
chair in the middle of the room.  He obeyed her,
but to his surprise, instead of seating herself as well,
she began walking up and down the length of the floor again.
After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked
him full in the eye.  The light from the windows was on her
countenance now, and its revelations vaguely troubled him.
It was a Celia he had never seen before who confronted him.

"I am much occupied by other matters," she said,
speaking with cold impassivity, "but still I find myself
curious to know just what limits you set to your dishonesty."

Theron stared up at her.  His lips quivered, but no speech
came to them.  If this was all merely fond playfulness,
it was being carried to a heart-aching point.

"I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,"
she went on.  "You come up here, pretending to have
discovered me by accident, but I saw you following me
from the Grand Central this morning."

"Yes, I did both these things," said Theron, boldly.
A fine bravery tingled in his veins all at once.
He looked into her face and found the spirit to
disregard its frowning aspect.  "Yes, I did them,"
he repeated defiantly.  "That is not the hundredth part,
or the thousandth part, of what I would do for your sake.
I have got way beyond caring for any consequences.
Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools--
what are they?  Life itself--what does it amount to?
Nothing at all--with you in the balance!"

"Yes--but I am not in the balance," observed Celia,
quietly.  "That is where you have made your mistake."

Theron laid aside his hat.  Women were curious creatures,
he reflected.  Some were susceptible to one line of treatment,
some to another.  His own reading of Celia had always
been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling,
almost cheeky, sort.  One got on best with her by saying
bright things.  He searched his brain now for some clever
quip that would strike sparks from the adamantine mood
which for the moment it was her whim to assume.  To cover
the process, he smiled a little.  Then her beauty, as she
stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly
fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before,
appealed afresh and overwhelmingly to him.  He rose to his feet.

"Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?" he murmured
with a wooing note.  "Have you forgotten the kiss?"

She shook her head calmly.  "I have forgotten nothing."

"Then why play with me so cruelly now?" he went on,
in a voice of tender deprecation.  "I know you don't
mean it, but all the same it bruises my heart a little.
I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft
glance in your eyes, that when they are not there, why,
I suffer, I don't know how to live at all.  So be kinder
to me, Celia!"

"I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in,"
she replied.  "I told you to go away.  That was pure kindness--
more kindness than you deserved."

Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet
by his feet.  He felt tears coming into his eyes.
"You tell me that you remember," he said, in depressed tones,
"and yet you treat me like this!  Perhaps I am wrong.
No doubt it is my own fault.  I suppose I ought not to have
come down here at all."

Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.

"But I swear that I was helpless in the matter,"
he burst forth.  "I HAD to come!  It would have been
literally impossible for me to have stayed at home,
knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--"

"Go on!" said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle,
and hardening still further the gleam in her eye,
as he stumbled over his sentence and left it unfinished.
"What was the other thing that you were 'knowing'?"

"Knowing--" he took up the word hesitatingly--"knowing that
life would be insupportable to me if I could not be near you."

She curled her lip at him.  "You skated over the thin
spot very well," she commented.  "It was on the tip
of your tongue to mention the fact that Father Forbes
came with me.  Oh, I can read you through and through,
Mr. Ware."

In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp.
The rising moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung
to Celia.

"Then if you do read me," he protested, "you must know
how utterly my heart and brain are filled with you.
No other man in all the world can yield himself so absolutely
to the woman he worships as I can.  You have taken
possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master
of myself any more.  I don't know what I say or what I do.
I am not worthy of you, I know.  No man alive could be that.
But no one else will idolize and reverence you as I do.
Believe me when I say that, Celia!  And how can you blame me,
in your heart, for following you?  'Whither thou goest,
I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people
shall be my people, and thy God my God; where thou diest,
will I die, and there will I be buried.  The Lord do
so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee
and me!'"

Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away
from him.  Something like despair seized upon him.

"Surely," he urged with passion, "surely I have a right
to remind you of the kiss!"

She turned.  "The kiss," she said meditatively.  "Yes, you
have a right to remind me of it.  Oh, yes, an undoubted right.
You have another right too--the right to have the kiss
explained to you.  It was of the good-bye order.  It signified
that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one little
moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you.  That was all."

He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed
blankly at her.  The magnitude of what he confronted
bewildered him; his mind was incapable of taking it in.
"You mean--" he started to say, and then stopped,
helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw.
It was too much to try to think what she meant.

A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion
of his brain.  It grew until it spread a bitter smile
over his pale face.  "I know so little about kisses,"
he said; "I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing.
You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told
me just what brand of kiss it was I was getting.
Probably I ought to have been able to distinguish,
but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm.
They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there."

She bowed her head slightly.  "Yes, you are entitled
to say that," she assented.  "I was to blame, and it
is quite fair that you should tell me so.  You spoke
of your inexperience, your innocence.  That was why
I kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory
of that innocence of yours, to which you yourself had
been busy saying good-bye ever since I first saw you.
The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment.
I see now that it was too subtle.  I do not usually err
on that side."

Theron kept his hold upon her gaze, as if it afforded
him bodily support.  He felt that he ought to stoop and
take up his hat, but he dared not look away from her.
"Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?" he asked
her piteously.

It seemed for the instant as if she were wavering,
and he swiftly thrust forth other pleas.  "I admit that I
did wrong to follow you to New York.  I see that now.
But it was an offence committed in entire good faith.
Think of it, Celia!  I have never seen you since that day--
that day in the woods.  I have waited--and waited--
with no sign from you, no chance of seeing you at all.
Think what that meant to me!  Everything in the world had been
altered for me, torn up by the roots.  I was a new being,
plunged into a new existence.  The kiss had done that.
But until saw you again, I could not tell whether this
vast change in me and my life was for good or for bad--
whether the kiss had come to me as a blessing or a curse.
The suspense was killing me, Celia!  That is why,
when I learned that you were coming here, I threw
everything to the winds and followed you.  You blame
me for it, and I bow my head and accept the blame.
But are you justified in punishing me so terribly--
in going on after I have confessed my error, and cutting
my heart into little strips, putting me to death by
torture?"

"Sit down," said Celia, with a softened weariness
in her voice.  She seated herself in front of him as he
sank into his chair again.  "I don't want to give you
unnecessary pain, but you have insisted on forcing yourself
into a position where there isn't anything else but pain.
I warned you to go away, but you wouldn't. No matter how
gently I may try to explain things to you, you are bound
to get nothing but suffering out of the explanation.
Now shall I still go on?"

He inclined his head in token of assent, and did not
lift it again, but raised toward her a disconsolate
gaze from a pallid, drooping face.

"It is all in a single word, Mr. Ware," she proceeded,
in low tones.  "I speak for others as well as myself,
mind you--we find that you are a bore."

Theron's stiffened countenance remained immovable.
He continued to stare unblinkingly up into her eyes.

"We were disposed to like you very much when we first
knew you," Celia went on.  "You impressed us as an innocent,
simple, genuine young character, full of mother's milk.
It was like the smell of early spring in the country to come
in contact with you.  Your honesty of nature, your sincerity
in that absurd religion of yours, your general NAIVETE of
mental and spiritual get-up, all pleased us a great deal.
We thought you were going to be a real acquisition."

"Just a moment--whom do you mean by 'we'?" He asked
the question calmly enough, but in a voice with an effect
of distance in it.

"It may not be necessary to enter into that," she replied.
"Let me go on.  But then it became apparent, little by little,
that we had misjudged you.  We liked you, as I have said,
because you were unsophisticated and delightfully fresh
and natural.  Somehow we took it for granted you would
stay so.  Rut that is just what you didn't do--just what
you hadn't the sense to try to do.  Instead, we found you
inflating yourself with all sorts of egotisms and vanities.
We found you presuming upon the friendships which had been
mistakenly extended to you.  Do you want instances?
You went to Dr. Ledsmar's house that very day after I
had been with you to get a piano at Thurston's, and
tried to inveigle him into talking scandal about me.
You came to me with tales about him.  You went to
Father Forbes, and sought to get him to gossip about
us both.  Neither of those men will ever ask you inside
his house again.  But that is only one part of it.
Your whole mind became an unpleasant thing to contemplate.
You thought it would amuse and impress us to hear you
ridiculing and reviling the people of your church,
whose money supports you, and making a mock of the things
they believe in, and which you for your life wouldn't dare
let them know you didn't believe in.  You talked to us
slightingly about your wife.  What were you thinking of,
not to comprehend that that would disgust us?  You showed
me once--do you remember?--a life of George Sand that you
had just bought,--bought because you had just discovered
that she had an unclean side to her life.  You chuckled
as you spoke to me about it, and you were for all the
world like a little nasty boy, giggling over something
dirty that older people had learned not to notice.
These are merely random incidents.  They are just samples,
picked hap-hazard, of the things in you which have been
opening our eyes, little by little, to our mistake.
I can understand that all the while you really fancied
that you were expanding, growing, in all directions.
What you took to be improvement was degeneration.
When you thought that you were impressing us most by your
smart sayings and doings, you were reminding us most
of the fable about the donkey trying to play lap-dog.
And it wasn't even an honest, straightforward donkey
at that!"

She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands
clasped in her lap, and her eyes sinking to the floor.
A silence ensued.  Then Theron reached a groping hand
out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless,
automatic step to the door.

He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in
this way towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him.
He slammed the door to, and turned as if he had been
whirled round by some mighty wind.  He came toward her,
with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements,
and in the wild look upon his white, set face.
Halting before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure,
the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its simulated calm,
the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers,
with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.

"This is what you have done to me, then!"

His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears--
hoarse and broken, but with a fright-compelling something
in it which stimulated his rage.  The horrible notion
of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the
chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light--
red and abnormally evil.  It was like that first devilish
radiance ushering in Creation, of which the first-fruit
was Cain.  Why should he not kill her?  In all ages,
women had been slain for less.  Yes--and men had
been hanged.  Something rose and stuck in his dry throat;
and as he swallowed it down, the sinister flare of
murderous fascination died suddenly away into darkness.
The world was all black again--plunged in the Egyptian
night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth
was yet without form and void.  He was alone on it--
alone among awful, planetary solitudes which crushed him.

The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front
of him, was plain enough to his eyes.  It was an illusion.
She was really a star, many millions of miles away.
These things were hard to understand; but they were true,
none the less.  People seemed to be about him, but in fact
he was alone.  He recalled that even the little child
in the car, playing with those two buttons on a string,
would have nothing to do with him.  Take his money, yes;
take all he would give her--but not smile at him, not come
within reach of him!  Men closed the doors of their houses
against him.  The universe held him at arm's length as
a nuisance.

He was standing with one knee upon a sofa.  Unconsciously he
had moved round to the side of Celia; and as he caught
the effect of her face now in profile, memory-pictures began
at once building themselves in his brain--pictures of her
standing in the darkened room of the cottage of death,
declaiming the CONFITEOR; of her seated at the piano,
under the pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her
chin on her hands, and gazing meditatively at the leafy
background of the woods they were in; of her lying back,
indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht
of his fancy--that yacht which a few hours before had
seemed so brilliantly and bewitchingly real to him,
and now--now--!

He sank in a heap upon the couch, and, burying his face
among its cushions, wept and groaned aloud.  His collapse
was absolute.  He sobbed with the abandonment of one who,
in the veritable presence of death, lets go all sense
of relation to life.

Presently some one was touching him on the shoulder--
an incisive, pointed touch--and he checked himself,
and lifted his face.

"You will have to get up, and present some sort of
an appearance, and go away at once," Celia said to him
in low, rapid tones.  "Some gentlemen are at the door,
whom I have been waiting for."

As he stupidly sat up and tried to collect his faculties,
Celia had opened the door and admitted two visitors.
The foremost was Father Forbes; and he, with some whispered,
smiling words, presented to her his companion, a tall,
robust, florid man of middle-age, with a frock-coat
and a gray mustache, sharply waxed.  The three spoke
for a moment together.  Then the priest's wandering eye
suddenly lighted upon the figure on the sofa.  He stared,
knitted his brows, and then lifted them in inquiry as he
turned to Celia.

"Poor man!" she said readily, in tones loud enough to
reach Theron.  "It is our neighbor, Father, the Rev. Mr. Ware.
He hit upon my name in the register quite unexpectedly,
and I had him come up.  He is in sore distress--
a great and sudden bereavement.  He is going now.
Won't you speak to him in the hall--a few words, Father?
It would please him.  He is terribly depressed."

The words had drawn Theron to his feet, as by some
mechanical process.  He took up his hat and moved dumbly
to the door.  It seemed to him that Celia intended offering
to shake hands; but he went past her with only some
confused exchange of glances and a murmured word or two.
The tall stranger, who drew aside to let him pass,
had acted as if he expected to be introduced.
Theron, emerging into the hall, leaned against the wall
and looked dreamily at the priest, who had stepped out with him.

"I am very sorry to learn that you are in trouble, Mr. Ware,"
Father Forbes said, gently enough, but in hurried tones.
"Miss Madden is also in trouble.  I mentioned to you
that her brother had got into a serious scrape.  I have
brought my old friend, General Brady, to consult with her
about the matter.  He knows all the parties concerned,
and he can set things right if anybody can."

"It's a mistake about me--I 'm not in any trouble at all,"
said Theron.  "I just dropped in to make a friendly call."

The priest glanced sharply at him, noting with a swift,
informed scrutiny how he sprawled against the wall,
and what vacuity his eyes and loosened lips expressed.

"Then you have a talent for the inopportune amounting
to positive genius," said Father Forbes, with a stormy smile.

"Tell me this, Father Forbes," the other demanded,
with impulsive suddenness, "is it true that you don't
want me in your house again?  Is that the truth or not?"

"The truth is always relative, Mr. Ware," replied the priest,
turning away, and closing the door of the parlor behind
him with a decisive sound.

Left alone, Theron started to make his way downstairs.
He found his legs wavering under him and making zigzag
movements of their own in a bewildering fashion.
He referred this at first, in an outburst of fresh despair,
to the effects of his great grief.  Then, as he held tight
to the banister and governed his descent step by step,
it occurred to him that it must be the wine he had had
for breakfast.  Upon examination, he was not so unhappy,
after all.



CHAPTER XXXI


At the second peal of the door-bell, Brother Soulsby
sat up in bed.  It was still pitch-dark, and the memory
of the first ringing fluttered musically in his awakening
consciousness as a part of some dream he had been having.

"Who the deuce can that be?" he mused aloud, in querulous
resentment at the interruption.

"Put your head out of the window, and ask,"
suggested his wife, drowsily.

The bell-pull scraped violently in its socket,
and a third outburst of shrill reverberations clamored
through the silent house.

"Whatever you do, I'd do it before he yanked the whole
thing to pieces," added the wife, with more decision.

Brother Soulsby was wide awake now.  He sprang to the floor,
and, groping about in the obscurity, began drawing on some
of his clothes.  He rapped on the window during the process,
to show that the house was astir, and a minute afterward
made his way out of the room and down the stairs,
the boards creaking under his stockinged feet as he went.

Nearly a quarter of an hour passed before he returned.
Sister Soulsby, lying in sleepy quiescence, heard vague
sounds of voices at the front door, and did not feel
interested enough to lift her head and listen.  A noise
of footsteps on the sidewalk followed, first receding
from the door, then turning toward it, this second
time marking the presence of more than one person.
There seemed in this the implication of a guest, and she
shook off the dozing impulses which enveloped her faculties,
and waited to hear more.  There came up, after further
muttering of male voices, the undeniable chink of coins
striking against one another.  Then more footsteps,
the resonant slam of a carriage door out in the street,
the grinding of wheels turning on the frosty road,
and the racket of a vehicle and horses going off at
a smart pace into the night.  Somebody had come, then.
She yawned at the thought, but remained well awake,
tracing idly in her mind, as various slight sounds rose
from the lower floor, the different things Soulsby
was probably doing.  Their spare room was down there,
directly underneath, but curiously enough no one seemed
to enter it.  The faint murmur of conversation which from
time to time reached her came from the parlor instead.
At last she heard her husband's soft tread coming
up the staircase, and still there had been no hint
of employing the guest-chamber. What could he be about?
she wondered.

Brother Soulsby came in, bearing a small lamp in
his hand, the reddish light of which, flaring upward,
revealed an unlooked-for display of amusement on his thin,
beardless face.  He advanced to the bedside, shading the
glare from her blinking eyes with his palm, and grinned.

"A thousand guesses, old lady," he said, with a dry
chuckle, "and you wouldn't have a ghost of a chance.
You might guess till Hades froze over seven feet thick,
and still you wouldn't hit it."

She sat up in turn.  "Good gracious, man," she began,
"you don't mean--" Here the cheerful gleam in his small eyes
reassured her, and she sighed relief, then smiled confusedly.
"I half thought, just for the minute," she explained,
"it might be some bounder who'd come East to try and
blackmail me.  But no, who is it--and what on earth
have you done with him?"

Brother Soulsby cackled in merriment.  "It's Brother
Ware of Octavius, out on a little bat, all by himself.
He says he's been on the loose only two days; but it looks
more like a fortnight."

"OUR Brother Ware?" she regarded him with open-eyed surprise.

"Well, yes, I suppose he's OUR Brother Ware--some,"
returned Soulsby, genially.  "He seems to think so, anyway."

"But tell me about it!" she urged eagerly.  "What's the
matter with him?  How does he explain it?"

"Well, he explains it pretty badly, if you ask me,"
said Soulsby, with a droll, joking eye and a mock-serious voice.
He seated himself on the side of the bed, facing her,
and still considerately shielding her from the light
of the lamp he held.  "But don't think I suggested
any explanations.  I've been a mother myself.
He's merely filled himself up to the neck with rum,
in the simple, ordinary, good old-fashioned way.
That's all.  What is there to explain about that?"

She looked meditatively at him for a time, shaking her head.
"No, Soulsby," she said gravely, at last.  "This isn't
any laughing matter.  You may be sure something bad
has happened, to set him off like that.  I'm going to get
up and dress right now.  What time is it?"

"Now don't you do anything of the sort," he urged persuasively.
"It isn't five o'clock; it'll be dark for nearly an hour yet.
Just you turn over, and have another nap.  He's all right.
I put him on the sofa, with the buffalo robe round him.
You'll find him there, safe and sound, when it's time
for white folks to get up.  You know how it breaks you up
all day, not to get your full sleep."

"I don't care if it makes me look as old as the everlasting hills,"
she said.  "Can't you understand, Soulsby?  The thing
worries me--gets on my nerves.  I couldn't close an eye,
if I tried.  I took a great fancy to that young man.
I told you so at the time."

Soulsby nodded, and turned down the wick of his lamp
a trifle.  "Yes, I know you did," he remarked in placidly
non-contentious tones.  "I can't say I saw much in him myself,
but I daresay you're right."  There followed a moment's silence,
during which he experimented in turning the wick up again.
"But, anyway," he went on, "there isn't anything you
can do.  He'll sleep it off, and the longer he's left
alone the better.  It isn't as if we had a hired girl,
who'd come down and find him there, and give the whole
thing away.  He's fixed up there perfectly comfortable;
and when he's had his sleep out, and wakes up on his
own account, he'll be feeling a heap better."

The argument might have carried conviction, but on the instant
the sound of footsteps came to them from the room below.
The subdued noise rose regularly, as of one pacing to and fro.

"No, Soulsby, YOU come back to bed, and get YOUR sleep out.
I'm going downstairs.  It's no good talking; I'm going."

Brother Soulsby offered no further opposition, either by
talk or demeanor, but returned contentedly to bed,
pulling the comforter over his ears, and falling into
the slow, measured respiration of tranquil slumber
before his wife was ready to leave the room.

The dim, cold gray of twilight was sifting furtively through
the lace curtains of the front windows when Mrs. Soulsby,
lamp in hand, entered the parlor.  She confronted a figure
she would have hardly recognized.  The man seemed to have
been submerged in a bath of disgrace.  From the crown
of his head to the soles of his feet, everything about him
was altered, distorted, smeared with an intangible effect
of shame.  In the vague gloom of the middle distance,
between lamp and window, she noticed that his shoulders
were crouched, like those of some shambling tramp.
The frowsy shadows of a stubble beard lay on his jaw
and throat.  His clothes were crumpled and hung awry;
his boots were stained with mud.  The silk hat on the piano
told its battered story with dumb eloquence.

Lifting the lamp, she moved forward a step, and threw its
light upon his face.  A little groan sounded involuntarily
upon her lips.  Out of a mask of unpleasant features,
swollen with drink and weighted by the physical craving
for rest and sleep, there stared at her two bloodshot eyes,
shining with the wild light of hysteria.  The effect
of dishevelled hair, relaxed muscles, and rough,
half-bearded lower face lent to these eyes, as she caught
their first glance, an unnatural glare.  The lamp shook
in her hand for an instant.  Then, ashamed of herself,
she held out her other hand fearlessly to him.

"Tell me all about it, Theron," she said calmly,
and with a soothing, motherly intonation in her voice.

He did not take the hand she offered, but suddenly,
with a wailing moan, cast himself on his knees at her feet.
He was so tall a man that the movement could have no grace.
He abased his head awkwardly, to bury it among the folds
of the skirts at her ankles.  She stood still for a moment,
looking down upon him.  Then, blowing out the light,
she reached over and set the smoking lamp on the piano
near by.  The daylight made things distinguishable in a wan,
uncertain way, throughout the room.

"I have come out of hell, for the sake of hearing some
human being speak to me like that!"

The thick utterance proceeded in a muffled fashion from
where his face grovelled against her dress.  Its despairing
accents appealed to her, but even more was she touched
by the ungainly figure he made, sprawling on the carpet.

"Well, since you are out, stay out," she answered,
as reassuringly as she could.  "But get up and take
a seat here beside me, like a sensible man, and tell
me all about it.  Come!  I insist!"

In obedience to her tone, and the sharp tug at his shoulder
with which she emphasized it, he got slowly to his feet,
and listlessly seated himself on the sofa to which
she pointed.  He hung his head, and began catching
his breath with a periodical gasp, half hiccough, half sob.

"First of all," she said, in her brisk, matter-of-fact manner,
"don't you want to lie down there again, and have me tuck
you up snug with the buffalo robe, and go to sleep?
That would be the best thing you could do."

He shook his head disconsolately, from side to side.
"I can't!" he groaned, with a swifter recurrence of the
sob-like convulsions.  "I'm dying for sleep, but I'm too--
too frightened!"

"Come, I'll sit beside you till you drop off," she said,
with masterful decision.  He suffered himself to be pushed
into recumbency on the couch, and put his head with
docility on the pillow she brought from the spare room.
When she had spread the fur over him, and pushed her
chair close to the sofa, she stood by it for a little,
looking down in meditation at his demoralized face.
Under the painful surface-blur of wretchedness and
fatigued debauchery, she traced reflectively the lineaments
of the younger and cleanlier countenance she had seen a few
months before.  Nothing essential had been taken away.
There was only this pestiferous overlaying of shame and
cowardice to be removed.  The face underneath was still
all right.

With a soft, maternal touch, she smoothed the hair from
his forehead into order.  Then she seated herself, and,
when he got his hand out from under the robe and thrust
it forth timidly, she took it in hers and held it in
a warm, sympathetic grasp.  He closed his eyes at this,
and gradually the paroxysmal catch in his breathing lapsed.
The daylight strengthened, until at last tiny flecks
of sunshine twinkled in the meshes of the further
curtains at the window.  She fancied him asleep,
and gently sought to disengage her hand, but his fingers
clutched at it with vehemence, and his eyes were wide open.

"I can't sleep at all," he murmured.  "I want to talk."

"There 's nothing in the world to hinder you,"
she commented smilingly.

"I tell you the solemn truth," he said, lifting his
voice in dogged assertion:  "the best sermon I ever
preached in my life, I preached only three weeks ago,
at the camp-meeting. It was admitted by everybody to be far
and away my finest effort!  They will tell you the same!"

"It's quite likely," assented Sister Soulsby.  "I quite
believe it."

"Then how can anybody say that I've degenerated, that I've
become a fool?" he demanded.

"I haven't heard anybody hint at such a thing,"
she answered quietly.

"No, of course, YOU haven't heard them!" he cried.
"I heard them, though!"  Then, forcing himself to a
sitting posture, against the restraint of her hand,
he flung back the covering.  "I'm burning hot already!
Yes, those were the identical words:  I haven't improved;
I've degenerated.  People hate me; they won't have me
in their houses.  They say I'm a nuisance and a bore.
I'm like a little nasty boy.  That's what they say.
Even a young man who was dying--lying right on the edge
of his open grave--told me solemnly that I reminded him
of a saint once, but I was only fit for a barkeeper now.
They say I really don't know anything at all.  And I'm
not only a fool, they say, I'm a dishonest fool into
the bargain!"

"But who says such twaddle as that?" she returned consolingly.
The violence of his emotion disturbed her.  "You mustn't
imagine such things.  You are among friends here.
Other people are your friends, too.  They have the very
highest opinion of you."

"I haven't a friend on earth but you!" he declared solemnly.
His eyes glowed fiercely, and his voice sank into a grave
intensity of tone.  "I was going to kill myself.  I went
on to the big bridge to throw myself off, and a policeman
saw me trying to climb over the railing, and he grabbed me
and marched me away.  Then he threw me out at the entrance,
and said he would club my head off if I came there again.
And then I went and stood and let the cable-cars pass close
by me, and twenty times I thought I had the nerve to throw
myself under the next one, and then I waited for the next--
and I was afraid!  And then I was in a crowd somewhere,
and the warning came to me that I was going to die.
The fool needn't go kill himself:  God would take care
of that.  It was my heart, you know.  I've had that terrible
fluttering once before.  It seized me this time, and I
fell down in the crowd, and some people walked over me,
but some one else helped me up, and let me sit down
in a big lighted hallway, the entrance to some theatre,
and some one brought me some brandy, but somebody else said
I was drunk, and they took it away again, and put me out.
They could see I was a fool, that I hadn't a friend
on earth.  And when I went out, there was a big picture
of a woman in tights, and the word 'Amazons' overhead--
and then I remembered you.  I knew you were my friend--
the only one I have on earth."

"It is very flattering--to be remembered like that,"
said Sister Soulsby, gently.  The disposition to laugh
was smothered by a pained perception of the suffering he
was undergoing.  His face had grown drawn and haggard
under the burden of his memories as he rambled on.

"So I came straight to you," he began again.
"I had just money enough left to pay my fare.  The rest
is in my valise at the hotel--the Murray Hill Hotel.
It belongs to the church.  I stole it from the church.
When I am dead they can get it back again!"

Sister Soulsby forced a smile to her lips.  "What nonsense
you talk--about dying!" she exclaimed.  "Why, man alive,
you'll sleep this all off like a top, if you'll only lie
down and give yourself a chance.  Come, now, you must do
as you're told."

With a resolute hand, she made him lie down again,
and once more covered him with the fur.  He submitted,
and did not even offer to put out his arm this time,
but looked in piteous dumbness at her for a long time.
While she sat thus in silence, the sound of Brother Soulsby
moving about upstairs became audible.

Theron heard it, and the importance of hurrying on
some further disclosure seemed to suggest itself.
"I can see you think I'm just drunk," he said, in low,
sombre tones.  "Of course that's what HE thought.
The hackman thought so, and so did the conductor,
and everybody.  But I hoped you would know better.  I was
sure you would see that it was something worse than that.
See here, I'll tell you.  Then you'll understand.
I've been drinking for two days and one whole night,
on my feet all the while, wandering alone in that big
strange New York, going through places where they murdered
men for ten cents, mixing myself up with the worst
people in low bar-rooms and dance-houses, and they saw I
had money in my pocket, too, and yet nobody touched me,
or offered to lay a finger on me.  Do you know why?
They understood that I wanted to get drunk, and couldn't.
The Indians won't harm an idiot, or lunatic, you know.
Well, it was the same with these vilest of the vile.
They saw that I was a fool whom God had taken hold of,
to break his heart first, and then to craze his brain,
and then to fling him on a dunghill to die like a dog.
They believe in God, those people.  They're the only ones
who do, it seems to me.  And they wouldn't interfere
when they saw what He was doing to me.  But I tell you I
wasn't drunk.  I haven't been drunk.  I'm only heart-broken,
and crushed out of shape and life--that's all.  And I've
crawled here just to have a friend by me when--when I come
to the end."

"You're not talking very sensibly, or very bravely either,
Theron Ware," remarked his companion.  "It's cowardly
to give way to notions like that."

"Oh, I 'm not afraid to die; don't think that,"
he remonstrated wearily.  "If there is a Judgment,
it has hit me as hard as it can already.  There can't
be any hell worse than that I've gone through.
Here I am talking about hell," he continued, with a
pained contraction of the muscles about his mouth--
a stillborn, malformed smile--as if I believed in one!
I've got way through all my beliefs, you know.  I tell
you that frankly."

"It's none of my business," she reassured him.  "I'm not
your Bishop, or your confessor.  I'm just your friend,
your pal, that's all."

"Look here!" he broke in, with some animation and a new
intensity of glance and voice.  "If I was going to live,
I'd have some funny things to tell.  Six months ago I was
a good man.  I not only seemed to be good, to others and
to myself, but I was good.  I had a soul; I had a conscience.
I was going along doing my duty, and I was happy in it.
We were poor, Alice and I, and people behaved rather hard
toward us, and sometimes we were a little down in the
mouth about it; but that was all.  We really were happy;
and I--I really was a good man.  Here's the kind
of joke God plays!  You see me here six months after.
Look at me!  I haven't got an honest hair in my head.
I'm a bad man through and through, that's what I am.
I look all around at myself, and there isn't an atom left
anywhere of the good man I used to be.  And, mind you,
I never lifted a finger to prevent the change.  I didn't
resist once; I didn't make any fight.  I just walked
deliberately down-hill, with my eyes wide open.  I told
myself all the while that I was climbing uphill instead,
but I knew in my heart that it was a lie.  Everything about
me was a lie.  I wouldn't be telling the truth,
even now, if--if I hadn't come to the end of my rope.
Now, how do you explain that?  How can it be explained?
Was I really rotten to the core all the time, years ago,
when I seemed to everybody, myself and the rest, to be good
and straight and sincere?  Was it all a sham, or does God
take a good man and turn him into an out-and-out bad one,
in just a few months--in the time that it takes an ear
of corn to form and ripen and go off with the mildew?
Or isn't there any God at all--but only men who live
and die like animals?  And that would explain my case,
wouldn't it?  I got bitten and went vicious and crazy,
and they've had to chase me out and hunt me to my death
like a mad dog!  Yes, that makes it all very simple.
It isn't worth while to discuss me at all as if I
had a soul, is it?  I'm just one more mongrel cur
that's gone mad, and must be put out of the way.
That's all."

"See here," said Sister Soulsby, alertly, "I half believe
that a good cuffing is what you really stand in need of.
Now you stop all this nonsense, and lie quiet and keep still!
Do you hear me?"

The jocose sternness which she assumed, in words
and manner, seemed to soothe him.  He almost smiled
up at her in a melancholy way, and sighed profoundly.

"I've told you MY religion before," she went on with gentleness.
"The sheep and the goats are to be separated on Judgment Day,
but not a minute sooner.  In other words, as long as human
life lasts, good, bad, and indifferent are all braided up
together in every man's nature, and every woman's too.
You weren't altogether good a year ago, any more than
you're altogether bad now.  You were some of both then;
you're some of both now.  If you've been making an extra
sort of fool of yourself lately, why, now that you
recognize it, the only thing to do is to slow steam,
pull up, and back engine in the other direction.
In that way you'll find things will even themselves up.
It's a see-saw with all of us, Theron Ware--sometimes up;
sometimes down.  But nobody is rotten clear to the core."

He closed his eyes, and lay in silence for a time.

"This is what day of the week?" he asked, at last.

"Friday, the nineteenth."

"Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth.  That was
the day ordained for my slaughter.  On that morning,
I was the happiest man in the world.  No king could
have been so proud and confident as I was.  A wonderful
romance had come to me.  The most beautiful young woman
in the world, the most talented too, was waiting for me.
An express train was carrying me to her, and it
couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness.
She was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to
live in eternal summer, wherever we liked, on a big,
beautiful yacht.  No one else had such a life before
him as that.  It seemed almost too good for me, but I
thought I had grown and developed so much that perhaps
I would be worthy of it.  Oh, how happy I was!  I tell
you this because--because YOU are not like the others.
You will understand."

"Yes, I understand," she said patiently.  "Well--you
were being so happy."

"That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth--
early in the morning.  There was a little girl
in the car, playing with some buttons, and when I
tried to make friends with her, she looked at me,
and she saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool.
"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings," you know.
She was the first to find it out.  It began like that,
early in the morning.  But then after that everybody
knew it.  They had only to look at me and they said:
'Why, this is a fool--like a little nasty boy; we won't
let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'  That is
what they said."

"Did SHE say it?"  Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.

For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under
the fur, and pushed his scowling face into the pillow.
The spasmodic, sob-like gasps began to shake him again.
She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot brow.

"That is why I made my way here to you," he groaned piteously.
"I knew you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you.
And it was so awful, to die there alone in the strange city--
I couldn't do it--with nobody near me who liked me,
or thought well of me.  Alice would hate me.
There was no one but you.  I wanted to be with you--
at the last."

His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping,
and his face frankly surrendered itself to the distortions
of a crying child's countenance, wide-mouthed and tragically
grotesque in its abandonment of control.

Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard
descending the stairs, rose, and drew the robe up to half
cover his agonized visage.  She patted the sufferer
softly on the head, and then went to the stair-door.

"I think he'll go to sleep now," she said, lifting her voice
to the new-comer, and with a backward nod toward the couch.
"Come out into the kitchen while I get breakfast, or into
the sitting-room, or somewhere, so as not to disturb him.
He's promised me to lie perfectly quiet, and try to sleep."

When they had passed together out of the room, she turned.
"Soulsby," she said with half-playful asperity,
"I'm disappointed in you.  For a man who's knocked
about as much as you have, I must say you've picked
up an astonishingly small outfit of gumption.
That poor creature in there is no more drunk than I am.
He's been drinking--yes, drinking like a fish; but it
wasn't able to make him drunk.  He's past being drunk;
he's grief-crazy. It's a case of 'woman.'  Some girl has
made a fool of him, and decoyed him up in a balloon,
and let him drop.  He's been hurt bad, too."

"We have all been hurt in our day and generation,"
responded Brother Soulsby, genially.  "Don't you worry;
he'll sleep that off too.  It takes longer than drink,
and it doesn't begin to be so pleasant, but it can be
slept off.  Take my word for it, he'll be a different man
by noon."

When noon came, however, Brother Soulsby was on his way
to summon one of the village doctors.  Toward nightfall,
he went out again to telegraph for Alice.



CHAPTER XXXII


Spring fell early upon the pleasant southern slopes of
the Susquehanna country.  The snow went off as by magic.
The trees budded and leaved before their time.  The birds
came and set up their chorus in the elms, while winter
seemed still a thing of yesterday.

Alice, clad gravely in black, stood again upon a kitchen-stoop,
and looked across an intervening space of back-yards and
fences to where the tall boughs, fresh in their new verdure,
were silhouetted against the pure blue sky.  The prospect
recalled to her irresistibly another sunlit morning,
a year ago, when she had stood in the doorway of her
own kitchen, and surveyed a scene not unlike this;
it might have been with the same carolling robins,
the same trees, the same azure segment of the tranquil,
speckless dome.  Then she was looking out upon surroundings
novel and strange to her, among which she must make herself
at home as best she could.  But at least the ground
was secure under her feet; at least she had a home,
and a word from her lips could summon her husband out,
to stand beside her with his arm about her, and share
her buoyant, hopeful joy in the promises of spring.

To think that that was only one little year ago--the mere
revolution of four brief seasons!  And now--!

Sister Soulsby, wiping her hands on her apron, came briskly
out upon the stoop.  Some cheerful commonplace was on
her tongue, but a glance at Alice's wistful face kept
it back.  She passed an arm around her waist instead,
and stood in silence, looking at the elms.

"It brings back memories to me--all this," said Alice,
nodding her head, and not seeking to dissemble the tears
which sprang to her eyes.

"The men will be down in a minute, dear," the other
reminded her.  "They'd nearly finished packing before I
put the biscuits in the oven.  "We mustn't wear long
faces before folks, you know."

"Yes, I know," murmured Alice.  Then, with a sudden
impulse, she turned to her companion.  "Candace," she
said fervently, "we're alone here for the moment;
I must tell you that if I don't talk gratitude to you,
it's simply and solely because I don't know where to begin,
or what to say.  I'm just dumfounded at your goodness.
It takes my speech away.  I only know this, Candace:
God will be very good to you."

"Tut! tut!" replied Sister Soulsby, "that's all right,
you dear thing.  I know just how you feel.  Don't dream
of being under obligation to explain it to me, or to thank
us at all.  We've had all sorts of comfort out of the thing--
Soulsby and I. We used to get downright lonesome, here all
by ourselves, and we've simply had a winter of pleasant
company instead, that s all.  Besides, there's solid
satisfaction in knowing that at last, for once in our lives
we've had a chance to be of some real use to somebody
who truly needed it.  You can't imagine how stuck up
that makes us in our own conceit.  We feel as if we were
George Peabody and Lady Burdett-Coutts, and several other
philanthropists thrown in.  No, seriously, don't think
of it again.  We're glad to have been able to do it all;
and if you only go ahead now, and prosper and be happy,
why, that will be the only reward we want."

"I hope we shall do well," said Alice.  "Only tell
me this, Candace.  You do think I was right, don't you,
in insisting on Theron's leaving the ministry altogether?
He seems convinced enough now that it was the right thing
to do; but I grow nervous sometimes lest he should find
it harder than he thought to get along in business,
and regret the change--and blame me."

"I think you may rest easy in your mind about that,"
the other responded.  "Whatever else he does, he will
never want to come within gunshot of a pulpit again.
It came too near murdering him for that."

Alice looked at her doubtfully.  "Something came near
murdering him, I know.  But it doesn't seem to me
that I would say it was the ministry.  And I guess you
know pretty well yourself what it was.  Of course,
I've never asked any questions, and I've hushed up
everybody at Octavius who tried to quiz me about it--
his disappearance and my packing up and leaving, and all that--
and I've never discussed the question with you--but--"

"No, and there's no good going into it now," put in
Sister Soulsby, with amiable decisiveness.  "It's all
past and gone.  In fact, I hardly remember much about it
now myself.  He simply got into deep water, poor soul,
and we've floated him out again, safe and sound.
That's all.  But all the same, I was right in what I said.
He was a mistake in the ministry."

"But if you'd known him in previous years," urged Alice,
plaintively, "before we were sent to that awful Octavius.
He was the very ideal of all a young minister should be.
People used to simply worship him, he was such a perfect preacher,
and so pure-minded and friendly with everybody, and threw
himself into his work so.  It was all that miserable,
contemptible Octavius that did the mischief."

Sister Soulsby slowly shook her head.  "If there
hadn't been a screw loose somewhere," she said gently,
"Octavius wouldn't have hurt him.  No, take my word
for it, he never was the right man for the place.
He seemed to be, no doubt, but he wasn't. When pressure
was put on him, it found out his weak spot like a shot,
and pushed on it, and--well, it came near smashing him,
that's all."

"And do you think he'll always be a--a back-slider,"
mourned Alice.

"For mercy's sake, don't ever try to have him pretend
to be anything else!" exclaimed the other.  "The last
state of that man would be worse than the first.
You must make up your mind to that.  And you mustn't show
that you're nervous about it.  You mustn't get nervous!
You mustn't be afraid of things.  Just you keep a stiff
upper lip, and say you WILL get along, you WILL be happy.
That's your only chance, Alice.  He isn't going to be
an angel of light, or a saint, or anything of that sort,
and it's no good expecting it.  But he'll be just an
average kind of man--a little sore about some things,
a little wiser than he was about some others.  You can get
along perfectly with him, if you only keep your courage up,
and don't show the white feather."

"Yes, I know; but I've had it pretty well taken out of me,"
commented Alice.  "It used to come easy to me to be cheerful
and resolute and all that; but it's different now."

Sister Soulsby stole a swift glance at the unsuspecting
face of her companion which was not all admiration,
but her voice remained patiently affectionate.
"Oh, that'll all come back to you, right enough.
You'll have your hands full, you know, finding a house,
and unpacking all your old furniture, and buying new things,
and getting your home settled.  It'll keep you so busy you
won't have time to feel strange or lonesome, one bit.
You'll see how it'll tone you up.  In a year's time you won't
know yourself in the looking-glass."

"Oh, my health is good enough," said Alice; "but I can't
help thinking, suppose Theron should be taken sick again,
away out there among strangers.  You know he's never
appeared to me to have quite got his strength back.
These long illnesses, you know, they always leave a mark
on a man."

"Nonsense!  He's strong as an ox," insisted Sister Soulsby.
"You mark my word, he'll thrive in Seattle like a green bay-tree."

"Seattle!" echoed Alice, meditatively.  "It sounds
like the other end of the world, doesn't it?"

The noise of feet in the house broke upon the colloquy,
and the women went indoors, to join the breakfast party.
During the meal, it was Brother Soulsby who bore the
burden of the conversation.  He was full of the future
of Seattle and the magnificent impending development
of that Pacific section.  He had been out there,
years ago, when it was next door to uninhabited.
He had visited the district twice since, and the changes
discoverable each new time were more wonderful than
anything Aladdin's lamp ever wrought.  He had secured
for Theron, through some of his friends in Portland,
the superintendency of a land and real estate company,
which had its headquarters in Seattle, but ambitiously linked
its affairs with the future of all Washington Territory.
In an hour's time the hack would come to take the Wares
and their baggage to the depot, the first stage in their
long journey across the continent to their new home.
Brother Soulsby amiably filled the interval with reminiscences
of the Oregon of twenty years back, with instructive
dissertations upon the soil, climate, and seasons of Puget
Sound and the Columbia valley, and, above all, with helpful
characterizations of the social life which had begun to take
form in this remotest West.  He had nothing but confidence,
to all appearances, in the success of his young friend,
now embarking on this new career.  He seemed so sanguine
about it that the whole atmosphere of the breakfast room
lightened up, and the parting meal, surrounded by so many
temptations to distraught broodings and silences as it was,
became almost jovial in its spirit.

At last, it was time to look for the carriage.  The trunks
and hand-bags were ready in the hall, and Sister Soulsby
was tying up a package of sandwiches for Alice to keep
by her in the train.

Theron, with hat in hand, and overcoat on arm, loitered restlessly
into the kitchen, and watched this proceeding for a moment.
Then he sauntered out upon the stoop, and, lifting his head
and drawing as long a breath as he could, looked over at the elms.

Perhaps the face was older and graver; it was hard to tell.
The long winter's illness, with its recurring crises and
sustained confinement, had bleached his skin and reduced
his figure to gauntness, but there was none the less
an air of restored and secure good health about him.
Only in the eyes themselves, as they rested briefly upon
the prospect, did a substantial change suggest itself.
They did not dwell fondly upon the picture of the lofty,
spreading boughs, with their waves of sap-green leafage
stirring against the blue.  They did not soften and glow
this time, at the thought of how wholly one felt sure
of God's goodness in these wonderful new mornings
of spring.

They looked instead straight through the fairest
and most moving spectacle in nature's processional,
and saw afar off, in conjectural vision, a formless
sort of place which was Seattle.  They surveyed
its impalpable outlines, its undefined dimensions,
with a certain cool glitter of hard-and-fast resolve.
There rose before his fancy, out of the chaos of these
shapeless imaginings, some faces of men, then more behind
them, then a great concourse of uplifted countenances,
crowded close together as far as the eye could reach.
They were attentive faces all, rapt, eager, credulous to
a degree.  Their eyes were admiringly bent upon a common
object of excited interest.  They were looking at HIM;
they strained their ears to miss no cadence of his voice.
Involuntarily he straightened himself, stretched forth
his hand with the pale, thin fingers gracefully disposed,
and passed it slowly before him from side to side,
in a comprehensive, stately gesture.  The audience rose at him,
as he dropped his hand, and filled his day-dream with a
mighty roar of applause, in volume like an ocean tempest,
yet pitched for his hearing alone.

He smiled, shook himself with a little delighted tremor,
and turned on the stoop to the open door.

"What Soulsby said about politics out there interested
me enormously," he remarked to the two women.  "I shouldn't
be surprised if I found myself doing something in that line.
I can speak, you know, if I can't do anything else.
Talk is what tells, these days.  Who knows?  I may turn
up in Washington a full-blown senator before I'm forty.
Stranger things have happened than that, out West!"

"We'll come down and visit you then, Soulsby and I,"
said Sister Soulsby, cheerfully.  "You shall take us to
the White House, Alice, and introduce us."

"Oh, it isn't likely I would come East," said Alice, pensively.
"Most probably I'd be left to amuse myself in Seattle.
But there--I think that's the carriage driving up to the door."