第18章

Before the neighboring properties the fences had been swept away, so that one might stroll from the sidewalk straight across the well-trimmed sward to any one of a dozen elaborately modern doorways.Some of the residences, thus frankly proffering friendship to the passer-by, were of wood painted in drabs and dusky reds, with bulging windows which marked the native yearning for the mediaeval, and shingles that strove to be accounted tiles.Others--a prouder, less pretentious sort--were of brick or stone, with terra-cotta mouldings set into the walls, and with real slates covering the riot of turrets and peaks and dormer peepholes overhead.

Celia Madden stopped in front of the largest and most important-looking of these new edifices, and said, holding out her hand: "Here I am, once more.

Good-morning, Mr.Ware."

Theron hoped that his manner did not betray the flash of surprise he felt in discovering that his new acquaintance lived in the biggest house in Octavius.

He remembered now that some one had pointed it out as the abode of the owner of the wagon factories;but it had not occurred to him before to associate this girl with that village magnate.It was stupid of him, of course, because she had herself mentioned her father.

He looked at her again with an awkward smile, as he formally shook the gloved hand she gave him, and lifted his soft hat.The strong noon sunlight, forcing its way down between the elms, and beating upon her parasol of lace-edged, creamy silk, made a halo about her hair and face at once brilliant and tender.

He had not seen before how beautiful she was.She nodded in recognition of his salute, and moved up the lawn walk, spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.

Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had time to think about a good many things before he reached home.

First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions about the Irish.Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure among the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron had scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race before.

He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards, but he had never come in contact with any of them, or given to their existence even a passing thought.

So far as personal acquaintance went, the Irish had been to him only a name.

But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment.He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--qualities accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful influence of a false and idolatrous religion.

It is hardly too much to say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political, and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible together.When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of his classmates had come from a Republican household.When, later on, he entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions.One might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence of opinion on the Trinity as for a difference in political conviction.

Indeed, even among the laity, Theron could not feel sure that he had ever known a Democrat; that is, at all closely.

He understood very little about politics, it is true.

If he had been driven into a corner, and forced to attempt an explanation of this tremendous partisan unity in which he had a share, he would probably have first mentioned the War--the last shots of which were fired while he was still in petticoats.Certainly his second reason, however, would have been that the Irish were on the other side.

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.