The Damnation of Theron Ware

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Alice heard it also, but being unillumined, she missed the romantic
pathos. "I call it disgraceful," she muttered from her pillow, "for
folks to be banging away on a piano at this time of night. There ought
to be a law to prevent it."

"It may be some distressed soul," said Theron, gently, "seeking relief
from the curse of sleeplessness."

The wife laughed, almost contemptuously. "Distressed fiddlesticks!" was
her only other comment.

The music went on for a long time--rising now to strident heights, now
sinking off to the merest tinkling murmur, and broken ever and again by
intervals of utter hush. It did not prevent Alice from at once falling
sound asleep; but Theron lay awake, it seemed to him, for hours,
listening tranquilly, and letting his mind wander at will through the
pleasant antechambers of Sleep, where are more unreal fantasies than
Dreamland itself affords.




PART II




CHAPTER XI


For some weeks the Rev. Theron Ware saw nothing of either the priest or
the doctor, or the interesting Miss Madden.

There were, indeed, more urgent matters to think about. June had come;
and every succeeding day brought closer to hand the ordeal of his first
Quarterly Conference in Octavius. The waters grew distinctly rougher as
his pastoral bark neared this difficult passage.

He would have approached the great event with an easier mind if he could
have made out just how he stood with his congregation. Unfortunately
nothing in his previous experiences helped him in the least to measure
or guess at the feelings of these curious Octavians. Their Methodism
seemed to be sound enough, and to stick quite to the letter of the
Discipline, so long as it was expressed in formulae. It was its spirit
which he felt to be complicated by all sorts of conditions wholly novel
to him.

The existence of a line of street-cars in the town, for example, would
not impress the casual thinker as likely to prove a rock in the path of
peaceful religion. Theron, in his simplicity, had even thought, when he
first saw these bobtailed cars bumping along the rails in the middle of
the main street, that they must be a great convenience to people living
in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He
was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when
this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been
fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The
then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself
above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this
insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius
still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its
management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At
least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it
and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that
this year they should be disappointed.

Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided
a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his
way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion
between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply
educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed
to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the
Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with
members who took their children "just to see the animals," and were
convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her
unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed
eye. One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the
church; and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee
of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do.

He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked
his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to
cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon
carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large
majority of interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a
case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in
numbers, was prodigious in virile force.

More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent body
known as Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its principal
disturbing element. The rupture came fittingly at that time when all the
"isms" of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently together into
the melting-pot of civil war. The great Methodist Church, South, had
broken bodily off on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself upon an issue
which may be most readily described as one of civilization. The seceders
resented growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the introduction
of written sermons and organ-music; they deplored the increasing laxity
in meddlesome piety, the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit
and classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary desire among
the younger people of the church to be like others outside in dress and
speech and deportment. They did battle as long as they could, inside
the fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow path of
primitive Methodism. When the adverse odds became too strong for them,
they quitted the church and set up a Bethel for themselves.

Octavius chanced to be one of the places where they were able to hold
their own within the church organization. The Methodism of the town had
gone along without any local secession. It still held in full fellowship
the radicals who elsewhere had followed their unbridled bent into the
strongest emotional vagaries--where excited brethren worked themselves
up into epileptic fits, and women whirled themselves about in weird
religious ecstasies, like dervishes of the Orient, till they
fell headlong in a state of trance. Octavian Methodism was spared
extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the
immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained
to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with
its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women
who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting,
unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to
enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its
controlling influence upon their official and public actions there could
be no doubt.

The situation had begun to unfold itself to Theron from the outset.
He had recognized the episodes of the forbidden Sunday milk and of the
flowers in poor Alice's bonnet as typical of much more that was to
come. No week followed without bringing some new fulfilment of this
foreboding. Now, at the end of two months, he knew well enough that
the hitherto dominant minority was hostile to him and his ministry, and
would do whatever it could against him.

Though Theron at once decided to show fight, and did not at all waver
in that resolve, his courage was in the main of a despondent sort.
Sometimes it would flutter up to the point of confidence, or at
least hopefulness, when he met with substantial men of the church who
obviously liked him, and whom he found himself mentally ranging on his
side, in the struggle which was to come. But more often it was blankly
apparent to him that, the moment flags were flying and drums on the
roll, these amiable fair-weather friends would probably take to their
heels.

Still, such as they were, his sole hope lay in their support. He must
make the best of them. He set himself doggedly to the task of gathering
together all those who were not his enemies into what, when the proper
time came, should be known as the pastor's party. There was plenty of
apostolic warrant for this. If there had not been, Theron felt that the
mere elementary demands of self-defence would have justified his use of
strategy.

The institution of pastoral calling, particularly that inquisitorial
form of it laid down in the Discipline, had never attracted Theron.
He and Alice had gone about among their previous flocks in quite a
haphazard fashion, without thought of system, much less of deliberate
purpose. Theron made lists now, and devoted thought and examination to
the personal tastes and characteristics of the people to be cultivated.
There were some, for example, who would expect him to talk pretty much
as the Discipline ordained--that is, to ask if they had family prayer,
to inquire after their souls, and generally to minister grace to his
hearers--and these in turn subdivided themselves into classes, ranging
from those who would wish nothing else to those who needed only a mild
spiritual flavor. There were others whom he would please much better by
not talking shop at all. Although he could ill afford it, he subscribed
now for a daily paper that he might have a perpetually renewed source of
good conversational topics for these more worldly calls. He also bought
several pounds of candy, pleasing in color, but warranted to be entirely
harmless, and he made a large mysterious mark on the inside of his new
silk hat to remind him not to go out calling without some of this in his
pocket for the children.

Alice, he felt, was not helping him in this matter as effectively as he
could have wished. Her attitude toward the church in Octavius might best
be described by the word "sulky." Great allowance was to be made, he
realized, for her humiliation over the flowers in her bonnet. That might
justify her, fairly enough, in being kept away from meeting now and
again by headaches, or undefined megrims. But it ought not to prevent
her from going about and making friends among the kindlier parishioners
who would welcome such a thing, and whom he from time to time indicated
to her. She did go to some extent, it is true, but she produced,
in doing so, an effect of performing a duty. He did not find traces
anywhere of her having created a brilliant social impression. When they
went out together, he was peculiarly conscious of having to do the work
unaided.

This was not at all like the Alice of former years, of other charges.
Why, she had been, beyond comparison, the most popular young woman in
Tyre. What possessed her to mope like this in Octavius?

Theron looked at her attentively nowadays, when she was unaware of his
gaze, to try if her face offered any answer to the riddle. It could not
be suggested that she was ill. Never in her life had she been looking so
well. She had thrown herself, all at once, and with what was to him
an unaccountable energy, into the creation and management of a
flower-garden. She was out the better part of every day, rain or shine,
digging, transplanting, pruning, pottering generally about among her
plants and shrubs. This work in the open air had given her an aspect of
physical well-being which it was impossible to be mistaken about.

Her husband was glad, of course, that she had found some occupation
which at once pleased her and so obviously conduced to health. This was
so much a matter of course, in fact, that he said to himself over and
over again that he was glad. Only--only, sometimes the thought WOULD
force itself upon his attention that if she did not spend so much of her
time in her own garden, she would have more time to devote to winning
friends for them in the Garden of the Lord--friends whom they were going
to need badly.

The young minister, in taking anxious stock of the chances for and
against him, turned over often in his mind the fact that he had already
won rank as a pulpit orator. His sermons had attracted almost universal
attention at Tyre, and his achievement before the Conference at
Tecumseh, if it did fail to receive practical reward, had admittedly
distanced all the other preaching there. It was a part of the evil luck
pursuing him that here in this perversely enigmatic Octavius his special
gift seemed to be of no use whatever. There were times, indeed, when he
was tempted to think that bad preaching was what Octavius wanted.

Somewhere he had heard of a Presbyterian minister, in charge of a big
city church, who managed to keep well in with a watchfully Orthodox
congregation, and at the same time establish himself in the affections
of the community at large, by simply preaching two kinds of sermons. In
the morning, when almost all who attended were his own communicants,
he gave them very cautious and edifying doctrinal discourses, treading
loyally in the path of the Westminster Confession. To the evening
assemblages, made up for the larger part of outsiders, he addressed
broadly liberal sermons, literary in form, and full of respectful
allusions to modern science and the philosophy of the day. Thus he
filled the church at both services, and put money in its treasury and
his own fame before the world. There was of course the obvious danger
that the pious elders who in the forenoon heard infant damnation
vigorously proclaimed, would revolt when they heard after supper that
there was some doubt about even adults being damned at all. But either
because the same people did not attend both services, or because the
minister's perfect regularity in the morning was each week regarded as a
retraction of his latest vagaries of an evening, no trouble ever came.

Theron had somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no
good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church
eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The
hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places
would be taken in the evening by less prejudiced strangers who wished
for intellectual rather than theological food, fell by the wayside. The
yearned-for strangers did not come; the familiar faces of the morning
service all turned up in their accustomed places every evening. They
were faces which confused and disheartened Theron in the daytime.
Under the gaslight they seemed even harder and more unsympathetic. He
timorously experimented with them for an evening or two, then abandoned
the effort.

Once there had seemed the beginning of a chance. The richest banker in
Octavius--a fat, sensual, hog-faced old bachelor--surprised everybody
one evening by entering the church and taking a seat. Theron happened
to know who he was; even if he had not known, the suppressed excitement
visible in the congregation, the way the sisters turned round to
look, the way the more important brethren put their heads together and
exchanged furtive whispers--would have warned him that big game was in
view. He recalled afterward with something like self-disgust the eager,
almost tremulous pains he himself took to please this banker. There was
a part of the sermon, as it had been written out, which might easily
give offence to a single man of wealth and free notions of life. With
the alertness of a mental gymnast, Theron ran ahead, excised this
portion, and had ready when the gap was reached some very pretty general
remarks, all the more effective and eloquent, he felt, for having
been extemporized. People said it was a good sermon; and after
the benediction and dispersion some of the officials and principal
pew-holders remained to talk over the likelihood of a capture having
been effected. Theron did not get away without having this mentioned
to him, and he was conscious of sharing deeply the hope of the
brethren--with the added reflection that it would be a personal triumph
for himself into the bargain. He was ashamed of this feeling a little
later, and of his trick with the sermon. But this chastening product
of introspection was all the fruit which the incident bore. The banker
never came again.

Theron returned one afternoon, a little earlier than usual, from a group
of pastoral calls. Alice, who was plucking weeds in a border at the
shady side of the house, heard his step, and rose from her labors. He
was walking slowly, and seemed weary. He took off his high hat, as
he saw her, and wiped his brow. The broiling June sun was still high
overhead. Doubtless it was its insufferable heat which was accountable
for the worn lines in his face and the spiritless air which the wife's
eye detected. She went to the gate, and kissed him as he entered.

"I believe if I were you," she said, "I'd carry an umbrella such
scorching days as this. Nobody'd think anything of it. I don't see why a
minister shouldn't carry one as much as a woman carries a parasol."

Theron gave her a rueful, meditative sort of smile. "I suppose people
really do think of us as a kind of hybrid female," he remarked. Then,
holding his hat in his hand, he drew a long breath of relief at finding
himself in the shade, and looked about him.

"Why, you've got more posies here, on this one side of the house alone,
than mother had in her whole yard," he said, after a little. "Let's
see--I know that one: that's columbine, isn't it? And that's London
pride, and that's ragged robin. I don't know any of the others."

Alice recited various unfamiliar names, as she pointed out the several
plants which bore them, and he listened with a kindly semblance of
interest.

They strolled thus to the rear of the house, where thick clumps of
fragrant pinks lined both sides of the path. She picked some of these
for him, and gave him more names with which to label the considerable
number of other plants he saw about him.

"I had no idea we were so well provided as all this," he commented at
last. "Those Van Sizers must have been tremendous hands for flowers. You
were lucky in following such people."

"Van Sizers!" echoed Alice, with contempt. "All they left was old tomato
cans and clamshells. Why, I've put in every blessed one of these myself,
all except those peonies, there, and one brier on the side wall."

"Good for you!" exclaimed Theron, approvingly. Then it occurred to him
to ask, "But where did you get them all? Around among our friends?"

"Some few," responded Alice, with a note of hesitation in her voice.
"Sister Bult gave me the verbenas, there, and the white pinks were
a present from Miss Stevens. But most of them Levi Gorringe was good
enough to send me--from his garden."

"I didn't know that Gorringe had a garden," said Theron. "I thought he
lived over his law-office, in the brick block, there."

"Well, I don't know that it's exactly HIS," explained Alice; "but it's a
big garden somewhere outside, where he can have anything he likes." She
went on with a little laugh: "I didn't like to question him too closely,
for fear he'd think I was looking a gift horse in the mouth--or else
hinting for more. It was quite his own offer, you know. He picked them
all out for me, and brought them here, and lent me a book telling me
just what to do with each one. And in a few days, now, I am to have
another big batch of plants--dahlias and zinnias and asters and so on;
I'm almost ashamed to take them. But it's such a change to find some one
in this Octavius who isn't all self!"

"Yes, Gorringe is a good fellow," said Theron. "I wish he was a
professing member." Then some new thought struck him. "Alice," he
exclaimed, "I believe I'll go and see him this very afternoon. I don't
know why it hasn't occurred to me before: he's just the man whose advice
I need most. He knows these people here; he can tell me what to do."

"Aren't you too tired now?" suggested Alice, as Theron put on his hat.

"No, the sooner the better," he replied, moving now toward the gate.

"Well," she began, "if I were you, I wouldn't say too much about--that
is, I--but never mind."

"What is it?" asked her husband.

"Nothing whatever," replied Alice, positively. "It was only some
nonsense of mine;" and Theron, placidly accepting the feminine whim,
went off down the street again.



CHAPTER XII


The Rev. Mr. Ware found Levi Gorringe's law-office readily enough, but
its owner was not in. He probably would be back again, though, in a
quarter of an hour or so, the boy said, and the minister at once decided
to wait.

Theron was interested in finding that this office-boy was no other than
Harvey--the lad who brought milk to the parsonage every morning. He
remembered now that he had heard good things of this urchin, as to the
hard work he did to help his mother, the Widow Semple, in her struggle
to keep a roof over her head; and also bad things, in that he did
not come regularly either to church or Sunday-school. The clergyman
recalled, too, that Harvey had impressed him as a character.

"Well, sonny, are you going to be a lawyer?" he asked, as he seated
himself by the window, and looked about him, first at the dusty litter
of old papers, pamphlets, and tape-bound documents in bundles which
crowded the stuffy chamber, and then at the boy himself.

Harvey was busy at a big box--a rough pine dry-goods box which bore the
flaring label of an express company, and also of a well-known seed firm
in a Western city, and which the boy had apparently just opened. He was
lifting from it, and placing on the table after he had shaken off the
sawdust and moss in which they were packed, small parcels of what looked
in the fading light to be half-dried plants.

"Well, I don't know--I rather guess not," he made answer, as he pursued
his task. "So far as I can make out, this wouldn't be the place to start
in at, if I WAS going to be a lawyer. A boy can learn here first-rate
how to load cartridges and clean a gun, and braid trout-flies on to
leaders, but I don't see much law laying around loose. Anyway," he went
on, "I couldn't afford to read law, and not be getting any wages. I have
to earn money, you know."

Theron felt that he liked the boy. "Yes," he said, with a kindly tone;
"I've heard that you are a good, industrious youngster. I daresay Mr.
Gorringe will see to it that you get a chance to read law, and get wages
too."

"Oh, I can read all there is here and welcome," the boy explained,
stepping toward the window to decipher the label on a bundle of roots
in his hand, "but that's no good unless there's regular practice coming
into the office all the while. THAT'S how you learn to be a lawyer. But
Gorringe don't have what I call a practice at all. He just sees men in
the other room there, with the door shut, and whatever there is to do he
does it all himself."

The minister remembered a stray hint somewhere that Mr. Gorringe was
a money-lender--what was colloquially called a "note-shaver." To his
rustic sense, there was something not quite nice about that occupation.
It would be indecorous, he felt, to encourage further talk about it from
the boy.

"What are you doing there?" he inquired, to change the subject.

"Sorting out some plants," replied Harvey. "I don't know what's got
into Gorringe lately. This is the third big box he's had since I've been
here--that is, in six weeks--besides two baskets full of rose-bushes.
I don't know what he does with them. He carries them off himself
somewhere. I've had kind of half a notion that he's figurin' on getting
married. I can't think of anything else that would make a man spend
money like water--just for flowers and bushes. They do get foolish, you
know, when they've got marriage on the brain."

Theron found himself only imperfectly following the theories of the
young philosopher. It was his fact that monopolized the minister's
attention.

"But as I understand it," he remarked hesitatingly, "Brother
Gorringe--or rather Mr. Gorringe--gets all the plants he wants,
everything he likes, from a big garden somewhere outside. I don't
know that it is exactly his; but I remember hearing something to that
effect."

The boy slapped the last litter off his hands, and, as he came to the
window, shook his head. "These don't come from no garden outside," he
declared. "They come from the dealers', and he pays solid cash for 'em.
The invoice for this lot alone was thirty-one dollars and sixty cents.
There it is on the table. You can see it for yourself."

Mr. Ware did not offer to look. "Very likely these are for the garden I
was speaking of," he said. "Of course you can't go on taking plants out
of a garden indefinitely without putting others in."

"I don't know anything about any garden that he takes plants out of,"
answered Harvey, and looked meditatively for a minute or two out upon
the street below. Then he turned to the minister. "Your wife's doing a
good deal of gardening this spring, I notice," he said casually. "You'd
hardly think it was the same place, she's fixed it up so. If she wants
any extra hoeing done, I can always get off Saturday afternoons."

"I will remember," said Theron. He also looked out of the window; and
nothing more was said until, a few moments later, Mr. Gorringe himself
came in.