第37章
And if you like HIM, I shall hate you! He has done mischief enough already.I am counting on you to help undo it, and to choke him off from doing more.It would be different if you were an ordinary Orthodox minister, all encased like a terrapin in prejudices and nonsense.
Of course, if you had been THAT kind, we should never have got to know you at all.But when I saw you in MacEvoy's cottage there, it was plain that you were one of US--I mean a MAN, and not a marionette or a mummy.
I am talking very frankly to you, you see.I want you on my side, against that doctor and his heartless, bloodless science.""I feel myself very heartily on your side," replied Theron.
She had set their progress at a slower pace, now that the lights of the main street were drawing near, as if to prolong their talk.All his earlier reservations had fled.
It was almost as if she were a parishioner of his own.
"I need hardly tell you that the doctor's whole attitude toward--toward revelation--was deeply repugnant to me.
It doesn't make it any the less hateful to call it science.
I am afraid, though," he went on hesitatingly, "that there are difficulties in the way of my helping, as you call it.
You see, the very fact of my being a Methodist minister, and his being a Catholic priest, rather puts my interference out of the question.""No; that doesn't matter a button," said Celia, lightly.
"None of us think of that at all."
"There is the other embarrassment, then," pursued Theron, diffidently, "that Father Forbes is a vastly broader and deeper scholar--in all these matters--than I am.How could I possibly hope to influence him by my poor arguments?
I don't know even the alphabet of the language he thinks in--on these subjects, I mean."
"Of course you don't!" interposed the girl, with a confidence which the other, for all his meekness, rather winced under."That wasn't what I meant at all.We don't want arguments from our friends:
we want sympathies, sensibilities, emotional bonds.
The right person's silence is worth more for companionship than the wisest talk in the world from anybody else.
It isn't your mind that is needed here, or what you know;it is your heart, and what you feel.You are full of poetry, of ideals, of generous, unselfish impulses.
You see the human, the warm-blooded side of things.
THAT is what is really valuable.THAT is how you can help!""You overestimate me sadly," protested Theron, though with considerable tolerance for her error in his tone.
"But you ought to tell me something about this Dr.Ledsmar.
He spoke of being an old friend of the pr--of Father Forbes.""Oh, yes, they've always known each other; that is, for many years.They were professors together in a college once, heaven only knows how long ago.Then they separated, "I fancy they quarrelled, too, before they parted.
The doctor came here, where some relative had left him the place he lives in.Then in time the Bishop chanced to send Father Forbes here--that was about three years ago,--and the two men after a while renewed their old relations.
They dine together; that is the doctor's stronghold.
He knows more about eating than any other man alive, I believe.He studies it as you would study a language.
He has taught old Maggie, at the pastorate there, to cook like the mother of all the Delmonicos.
And while they sit and stuff themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort.It makes me sick!""I can readily see," said Theron, with sympathy, "how such a cold, material, and infidel influence as that must shock and revolt an essentially religious temperament like yours."Miss Madden looked up at him.They had turned into the main street, and there was light enough for him to detect something startlingly like a grin on her beautiful face.
"But I'm not religious at all, you know," he heard her say.
"I'm as Pagan as--anything! Of course there are forms to be observed, and so on; I rather like them than otherwise.
I can make them serve very well for my own system; for Iam myself, you know, an out-an-out Greek.""Why, I had supposed that you were full blooded Irish,"the Rev.Mr.Ware found himself remarking, and then on the instant was overwhelmed by the consciousness that he had said a foolish thing.Precisely where the folly lay he did not know, but it was impossible to mistake the gesture of annoyance which his companion had instinctively made at his words.She had widened the distance between them now, and quickened her step.
They went on in silence till they were within a block of her house.Several people had passed them who Theron felt sure must have recognized them both.
"What I meant was," the girl all at once began, drawing nearer again, and speaking with patient slowness, "that Ifind myself much more in sympathy with the Greek thought, the Greek theology of the beautiful and the strong, the Greek philosophy of life, and all that, than what is taught nowadays.Personally, I take much more stock in Plato than I do in Peter.But of course it is a wholly personal affair; I had no business to bother you with it.
And for that matter, I oughtn't to have troubled you with any of our--""I assure you, Miss Madden!" the young minister began, with fervor.
"No," she broke in, in a resigned and even downcast tone;"let it all be as if I hadn't spoken.Don't mind anything I have said.If it is to be, it will be.You can't say more than that, can you?"She looked into his face again, and her large eyes produced an impression of deep melancholy, which Theron found himself somehow impelled to share.Things seemed all at once to have become very sad indeed.
"It is one of my unhappy nights," she explained, in gloomy confidence."I get them every once in a while--as if some vicious planet or other was crossing in front of my good star--and then I'm a caution to snakes.