The Damnation of Theron Ware Part 27

I don't know that I've ever seen your wife. I suppose she hasn't got red hair?"

"I think it's a kind of light brown," answered Theron, with an effect of exerting his memory.

"It seems that you only take notice of hair in stained-gla.s.s windows,"

was Celia's comment.

"Oh-h!" he murmured reproachfully, "as if--as if--but I won't say what I was going to."

"That's not fair!" she said. The little touch of whimsical mockery which she gave to the serious declaration was delicious to him. "You have me at such a disadvantage! Here am I rattling out whatever comes into my head, exposing all my lightest emotions, and laying bare my very heart in candor, and you meditate, you turn things over cautiously in your mind, like a second Machiavelli. I grow afraid of you; you are so subtle and mysterious in your reserves."

Theron gave a tug at the ribbon, to show the joy he had in her delicate chaff. "No, it is you who are secretive," he said. "You never told me about--about the piano."

The word was out! A minute before it had seemed incredible to him that he should ever have the courage to utter it--but here it was. He laid firm hold upon the ribbon, which it appeared hung from her waist, and drew himself a trifle nearer to her. "I could never have consented to take it, I'm afraid," he went on in a low voice, "if I had known. And even as it is, I fear it won't be possible."

"What are you afraid of?" asked Celia. "Why shouldn't you take it?

People in your profession never do get anything unless it's given to them, do they? I've always understood it was like that. I've often read of donation parties--that's what they're called, isn't it?--where everybody is supposed to bring some gift to the minister. Very well, then, I've simply had a donation party of my own, that's all. Unless you mean that my being a Catholic makes a difference. I had supposed you were quite free from that kind of prejudice."

"So I am! Believe me, I am!" urged Theron. "When I'm with you, it seems impossible to realize that there are people so narrow and contracted in their natures as to take account of such things. It is another atmosphere that I breathe near you. How could you imagine that such a thought--about our difference of creed--would enter my head? In fact," he concluded with a nervous half-laugh, "there isn't any such difference. Whatever your religion is, it's mine too. You remember--you adopted me as a Greek."

"Did I?" she rejoined. "Well, if that's the case, it leaves you without a leg to stand on. I challenge you to find any instance where a Greek made any difficulties about accepting a piano from a friend. But seriously--while we are talking about it--you introduced the subject: I didn't--I might as well explain to you that I had no such intention, when I picked the instrument out. It was later, when I was talking to Thurston's people about the price, that the whim seized me. Now it is the one fixed rule of my life to obey my whims. Whatever occurs to me as a possibly pleasant thing to do, straight like a hash, I go and do it.

It is the only way that a person with means, with plenty of money, can preserve any freshness of character. If they stop to think what it would be prudent to do, they get crusted over immediately. That is the curse of rich people--they teach themselves to distrust and restrain every impulse toward unusual actions. They get to feel that it is more necessary for them to be cautious and conventional than it is for others. I would rather work at a wash-tub than occupy that att.i.tude toward my bank account. I fight against any sign of it that I detect rising in my mind. The instant a wish occurs to me, I rush to gratify it. That is my theory of life. That accounts for the piano; and I don't see that you've anything to say about it at all."

It seemed very convincing, this theory of life. Somehow, the thought of Miss Madden's riches had never before a.s.sumed prominence in Theron's mind. Of course her father was very wealthy, but it had not occurred to him that the daughter's emanc.i.p.ation might run to the length of a personal fortune. He knew so little of rich people and their ways!

He lifted his head, and looked up at Celia with an awakened humility and awe in his glance. The glamour of a separate banking-account shone upon her. Where the soft woodland light played in among the strands of her disordered hair, he saw the veritable gleam of gold. A mysterious new suggestion of power blended itself with the beauty of her face, was exhaled in the faint perfume of her garments. He maintained a timorous hold upon the ribbon, wondering at his hardihood in touching it, or being near her at all.

"What surprises me," he heard himself saying, "is that you are contented to stay in Octavius. I should think that you would travel--go abroad--see the beautiful things of the world, surround yourself with the luxuries of big cities--and that sort of thing."

Celia regarded the forest prospect straight in front of her with a pensive gaze. "Sometime--no doubt I will sometime," she said abstractedly.

"One reads so much nowadays," he went on, "of American heiresses going to Europe and marrying dukes and n.o.blemen. I suppose you will do that too. Princes would fight one another for you."

The least touch of a smile softened for an instant the impa.s.sivity of her countenance. Then she stared harder than ever at the vague, leafy distance. "That is the old-fashioned idea," she said, in a musing tone, "that women must belong to somebody, as if they were curios, or statues, or race-horses. You don't understand, my friend, that I have a different view. I am myself, and I belong to myself, exactly as much as any man.

The notion that any other human being could conceivably obtain the slightest property rights in me is as preposterous, as ridiculous, as--what shall I say?--as the notion of your being taken out with a chain on your neck and sold by auction as a slave, down on the ca.n.a.l bridge. I should be ashamed to be alive for another day, if any other thought were possible to me."

"That is not the generally accepted view, I should think," faltered Theron.

"No more is it the accepted view that young married Methodist ministers should sit out alone in the woods with red-headed Irish girls. No, my friend, let us find what the generally accepted views are, and as fast as we find them set our heels on them. There is no other way to live like real human beings. What on earth is it to me that other women crawl about on all-fours, and fawn like dogs on any hand that will buckle a collar onto them, and toss them the leavings of the table? I am not related to them. I have nothing to do with them. They cannot make any rules for me. If pride and dignity and independence are dead in them, why, so much the worse for them! It is no affair of mine. Certainly it is no reason why I should get down and grovel also. No; I at least stand erect on my legs."

Mr. Ware sat up, and stared confusedly, with round eyes and parted lips, at his companion. Instinctively his brain dragged forth to the surface those epithets which the doctor had hurled in bitter contempt at her--"mad a.s.s, a mere bundle of egotism, ignorance, and red-headed lewdness." The words rose in their order on his memory, hard and sharp-edged, like arrow-heads. But to sit there, quite at her side; to breathe the same air, and behold the calm loveliness of her profile; to touch the ribbon of her dress--and all the while to hold these poisoned darts of abuse levelled in thought at her breast--it was monstrous. He could have killed the doctor at that moment. With an effort, he drove the foul things from his mind--scattered them back into the darkness.

He felt that he had grown pale, and wondered if she had heard the groan that seemed to have been forced from him in the struggle. Or was the groan imaginary?

Celia continued to sit unmoved, composedly looking upon vacancy.

Theron's eyes searched her face in vain for any sign of consciousness that she had astounded and bewildered him. She did not seem to be thinking of him at all. The proud calm of her thoughtful countenance suggested instead occupation with lofty and remote abstractions and n.o.ble ideals. Contemplating her, he suddenly perceived that what she had been saying was great, wonderful, magnificent. An involuntary thrill ran through his veins at recollection of her words. His fancy likened it to the sensation he used to feel as a youth, when the Fourth of July reader bawled forth that opening clause: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary," etc. It was nothing less than another Declaration of Independence he had been listening to.

He sank again rec.u.mbent at her side, and stretched the arm behind her, nearer than before. "Apparently, then, you will never marry." His voice trembled a little.

"Most certainly not!" said Celia.

"You spoke so feelingly a little while ago," he ventured along, with hesitation, "about how sadly the notion of a priest's sacrificing himself--never knowing what love meant--appealed to a woman. I should think that the idea of sacrificing herself would seem to her even sadder still."

"I don't remember that we mentioned THAT," she replied. "How do you mean--sacrificing herself?"

Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and boldly patted and caressed them. "You, so beautiful and so free, with such fine talents and abilities," he murmured; "you, who could have the whole world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know what love means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that my imagination can conceive."

Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears traced elements of tenderness. "You must regulate that imagination of yours," she said playfully. "It conceives the thing that is not. Pray, when"--and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of arch mock-seriousness--"pray, when did I describe myself in these terms?

When did I say that I should never know what love meant?"

For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his eyes, and held his face against the draperies encircling her. "I cannot think!" he groaned.

The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.

The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread, wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism, his nature contained.

"We were speaking of our respective religions," he heard Celia say, as imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.

"Yes," he a.s.sented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky. The wish to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin as well, was very strong upon him. "Yes?" he repeated.

"I cannot talk to you like that," she said; and he sat up again shamefacedly.

"Yes--I think we were speaking of religions--some time ago," he faltered, to relieve the situation. The dreadful thought that she might be annoyed began to oppress him.

"Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too. That ent.i.tles you at least to be told what the religion is. Now, I am a Catholic."

Theron, much mystified, nodded his head. Could it be possible--was there coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? "Yes--I know," he murmured.

"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its symbolism is pleasant to me. You remember what Schopenhauer said--you cannot have the water by itself: you must also have the jug that it is in. Very well; the Catholic religion is my jug. I put into it the things I like. They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago. The Jews threw them out; we will put them back again. We will restore art and poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.

The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and dirt and the thought of h.e.l.l-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes one almost forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. It is that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world. It was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without s.e.x in it."

"I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room," said Theron, feeling more himself again. "I wondered if they quite went with the statues."

The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.

"They get along together better than you suppose," she answered.

"Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all these were similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its Immaculate Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that man turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea? That is the deepest of all our instincts--love of woman, who is at once daughter and wife and mother. It is that that makes the world go round."

Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a confident yet wistful smile on his face.

"It is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute," he said, in steady, low tone. "Then you would realize the tremendous truth of what you have been saying. It is only your intellect that has reached out and grasped the idea. If you were in my place, you would discover that your heart was bursting with it as well."

Celia turned and looked at him.

"I myself," he went on, "would not have known, half an hour ago, what you meant by the worship of the maternal idea. I am much older than you. I am a strong, mature man. But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes--because the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me. It was absolutely as if I were a boy again, a good, pure-minded, fond little child, and you were the mother that I idolized."

Celia had not taken her eyes from his face. "I find myself liking you better at this moment," she said, with gravity, "than I have ever liked you before."

Then, as by a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet. "Come!" she cried, her voice and manner all vivacity once more, "we have been here long enough."

Upon the instant, as Theron was more laboriously getting up, it became apparent to them both that perhaps they had been there too long.