The Damnation of Theron Ware Part 26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I saw you up here, Father Forbes," he said, with a thickened and erratic utterance. "Whyn't you come down and join us? I'm setting 'em up for everybody. You got to take care of the boys, you know. I'll blow in the last cent I've got in the world for the boys, every time, and they know it. They're solider for me than they ever were for anybody. That's how it is. If you stand by the boys, the boys'll stand by you. I'm going to the a.s.sembly for this district, and they ain't n.o.body can stop me.

The boys are just red hot for me. Wish you'd come down, Father Forbes, and address a few words to the meeting--just mention that I'm a candidate, and say I'm bound to win, hands down. That'll make you solid with the boys, and we'll be all good fellows together. Come on down!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Before strangers, too!" the young man called out, with beery sarcasm.

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

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

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

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

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

Madden," murmured Theron, confusedly.

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

You have the cheek to talk to me about being drunk--why--"

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

Theron and Celia stood and watched them disappear among the undergrowth.

"It's the dirty Foley blood that's in him," he heard her say, as if between clenched teeth.

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

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

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

"The further away the better," she answered bitterly, and he felt the s.h.i.+ver run through her again as she spoke.

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

CHAPTER XXIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's where you're wrong," put in Theron. "Not that I'd mind any trouble in this wide world, so long as you called me 'my friend,' but I'm not going to get into any at all. I know a trick worth two of that.

I've learned to be a showman. I can preach now far better than I used to, and I can get through my work in half the time, and keep on the right side of my people, and get along with perfect smoothness. I was too green before. I took the thing seriously, and I let every mean-fisted curmudgeon and crazy fanatic worry me, and keep me on pins and needles. I don't do that any more. I've taken a new measure of life.

I see now what life is really worth, and I'm going to have my share of it. Why should I deliberately deny myself all possible happiness for the rest of my days, simply because I made a fool of myself when I was in my teens? Other men are not eternally punished like that, for what they did as boys, and I won't submit to it either. I will be as free to enjoy myself as--as Father Forbes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," she said. "We mustn't snivel, and we mustn't sulk. When I get into a rage it makes me ill, and I storm my way through it and tear things, but it doesn't last long, and I come out of it feeling all the better.