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 I 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. But 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.”