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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Unluckily I—I don't read German readily," Theron explained with diffidence.

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

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

The others exchanged glances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," said Theron; "it is very interesting."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER VIII

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

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

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

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

"The difference does seem extremely curious to me," said Theron. "Now, those people in the hall—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You live there quite alone," commented Theron.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had never been inside a Catholic church before.



CHAPTER IX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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