第32章

Jeremiah Madden was supposed to be probably the richest man in Octavius.There was no doubt at all about his being its least pretentious citizen.

The huge and ornate modern mansion which he had built, putting to shame every other house in the place, gave an effect of ostentation to the Maddens as a family; it seemed only to accentuate the air of humility which enveloped Jeremiah as with a garment.Everybody knew some version of the many tales afloat which, in a kindly spirit, illustrated the incongruity between him and his splendid habitation.

Some had it that he slept in the shed.Others told whimsical stories of his sitting alone in the kitchen evenings, smoking his old clay pipe, and sorrowing because the second Mrs.Madden would not suffer the pigs and chickens to come in and bear him company.But no matter how comic the exaggeration, these legends were invariably amiable.

It lay in no man's mouth to speak harshly of Jeremiah Madden.

He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one.

When he was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his neighbors, starve to death.

He could remember looking at the stiffened figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the green stain of nettles on her white lips.A girl five years or so older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the poor-law officers were dealing out food.He could recall her coming back next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone."While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation," they had explained to her.

The girl died without profiting by this official apothegm.

The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain.

Now, after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he remembered best about Ireland.

He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that vast flight of the famine years.Others whom he rubbed against in that melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had done badly.

Somehow he did well.He learned the wheelwright's trade, and really that seemed all there was to tell.The rest had been calm and sequent progression--steady employment as a journeyman first; then marriage and a house and lot;the modest start as a master; the move to Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of late years stupendous--all following naturally, easily, one thing out of another.Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again, that he was entitled to feel proud of all this.He smiled to himself at the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile.

What was it all but empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he had known--none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he.

He could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it would have been like sneering over their poor graves.

Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man of a reddened, weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect.He had blue eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows.

The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one's recollections of his face.The long vertical upper-lip and irregular teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth;its smile, though, sweetened the whole countenance.

He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard, passing from ear to ear under his chin.His week-day clothes were as simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his steadfast devotion to his business.

On Sundays he dressed with a certain rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least to the public view.He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite alone.His family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.

There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this family.Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen children.Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs.Madden's offspring--Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife, who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore.

This minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street.Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence of the majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated ground.

If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean forgotten.

The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive, neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles.

Fully half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--1

The latest date on any stone was of the remoter 'fifties.

They had all been stricken down, here in this strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them.

Musing upon the clumsy sculpture, with its "R.I.P.," or "Pray for the Soul of," half to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.

What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the passing of the planets overhead.

He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery, where his ten children were.He never left this weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.

One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as his fellows met and knew him.Mr.Madden kept his griefs, racial and individual, for his own use.