"It is a pretty serious business to make such a change at your time of life.I take it for granted you will think it all over very carefully before you commit yourself."He said this with an almost indifferent air, which rather chilled his listener's enthusiasm.
"Oh, yes,", Theron made answer; "I shall do nothing rash.
But I have a good many plans for the future."Father Forbes did not ask what these were, and a brief further period of silence fell upon the table.
"I hope everything went off smoothly at the picnic,"Theron ventured, at last."I have not seen any of you since then."The priest shook his head and sighed."No," he said.
"It is a bad business.I have had a great deal of unhappiness out of it this past fortnight.That young man who was rude to you--of course it was mere drunken, irresponsible nonsense on his part--has got himself into a serious scrape, I'm afraid.It is being kept quite within the family, and we hope to manage so that it will remain there, but it has terribly upset his father and his sister.But that, after all, is not so hard to bear as the other affliction that has come upon the Maddens.
You remember Michael, the other brother? He seems to have taken cold that evening, or perhaps over-exerted himself.
He has been seized with quick consumption.He will hardly last till snow flies.""Oh, I am GRIEVED to hear that!" Theron spoke with tremulous earnestness.It seemed to him as if Michael were in some way related to him.
"It is very hard upon them all," the priest went on.
"Michael is as sweet and holy a character as it is possible for any one to think of.He is the apple of his father's eye.
They were inseparable, those two.Do you know the father, Mr.Madden?"Theron shook his head."I think I have seen him," he said.
"A small man, with gray whiskers."
"A peasant," said Father Forbes, "but with a heart of gold.
Poor man! he has had little enough out of his riches.
Ah, the West Coast people, what tragedies I have seen among them over here! They have rudimentary lung organizations, like a frog's, to fit the mild, wet soft air they live in.The sharp air here kills them off like flies in a frost.Whole families go.I should think there are a dozen of old Jeremiah's children in the cemetery.
If Michael could have passed his twenty-eighth year, there would have been hope for him, at least till his thirty-fifth.These pulmonary things seem to go by sevens, you know.""I didn't know," said Theron."It is very strange--and very sad." His startled mind was busy, all at once, with conjectures as to Celia's age.
"The sister--Miss Madden--seems extremely strong,"he remarked tentatively.
"Celia may escape the general doom," said the priest.
His guest noted that he clenched his shapely white hand on the table as he spoke, and that his gentle, carefully modulated voice had a gritty hardness in its tone.
"THAT would be too dreadful to think of," he added.
Theron shuddered in silence, and strove to shut his mind against the thought.
"She has taken Michael's illness so deeply to heart,"the priest proceeded, "and devoted herself to him so untiringly that I get a little nervous about her.
I have been urging her to go away and get a change of air and scene, if only for a few days.She does not sleep well, and that is always a bad thing.""I think I remember her telling me once that sometimes she had sleepless spells," said Theron."She said that then she banged on her piano at all hours, or dragged the cushions about from room to room, like a wild woman.
A very interesting young lady, don't you find her so?"Father Forbes let a wan smile play on his lips.
"What, our Celia?" he said."Interesting! Why, Mr.Ware, there is no one like her in the world.She is as unique as--what shall I say?--as the Irish are among races.
Her father and mother were both born in mud-cabins, and she--she might be the daughter of a hundred kings, except that they seem mostly rather under-witted than otherwise.
She always impresses me as a sort of atavistic idealization of the old Kelt at his finest and best.There in Ireland you got a strange mixture of elementary early peoples, walled off from the outer world by the four seas, and free to work out their own racial amalgam on their own lines.
They brought with them at the outset a great inheritance of Eastern mysticism.Others lost it, but the Irish, all alone on their island, kept it alive and brooded on it, and rooted their whole spiritual side in it.
Their religion is full of it; their blood is full of it;our Celia is fuller of it than anybody else.The Ireland of two thousand years ago is incarnated in her.They are the merriest people and the saddest, the most turbulent and the most docile, the most talented and the most unproductive, the most practical and the most visionary, the most devout and the most pagan.These impossible contradictions war ceaselessly in their blood.When I look at Celia, I seem to see in my mind's eye the fair young-ancestral mother of them all."Theron gazed at the speaker with open admiration.
"I love to hear you talk," he said simply.
An unbidden memory flitted upward in his mind.
Those were the very words that Alice had so often on her lips in their old courtship days.How curious it was!
He looked at the priest, and had a quaint sensation of feeling as a romantic woman must feel in the presence of a specially impressive masculine personality.
