To the men about him in the offices and the shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable cheeriness of demeanor.He had been always fortunate in the selection of lieutenants and chief helpers.
Two of these had grown now into partners, and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah himself.
They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or petulant word of his--much less any unworthy deed.
Once they had seen him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to nothing.A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of some apprentices;and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender implacably from his employ.It was years now since any one who knew him had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing.
Jokes of the sort which women might hear he was very fond of though he had not much humor of his own.
Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most perfunctory pretence now and again of reading the newspapers.
The elder son Michael was very like his father--diligent, unassuming, kindly, and simple--a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master.
If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a partner, he gave no hint of sharing it.
He attended to his religious duties with great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter of course.
This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries under his notice, certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works.To some few whom he knew specially well, Michael would confess that if he had had the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest.
He displayed no inclination to marry.
The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the product of a wholly different race.
The contrast between Michael's sandy skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy's handsome, rounded face, with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown eyes, and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their temperamental separation.
This second lad had been away for years at school,--indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage to keep him long.He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the Christian Brothers at Manhattan;the sectarian Mt.St.Mary's and the severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits.
The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful, bold, and showy boy who had gone away in his teens.He was still rather small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly tailored, that the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise.He never dreamed of going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good deal--in fact, most of the time--to the Nedahma Club.His mother spoke often to her friends about her fears for his health.
He never spoke to his friends about his mother at all.
The second Mrs.Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family pride.She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid.Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally because she was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable reputation for piety.It was at a time when the expansion of his business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting the removal to Octavius.He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social respectability were increasing;it was certain that the embarrassments of a motherless family were.Miss Foley had shown a good deal of attention to his little children.She was not ill-looking;she bore herself with modesty; she was the priest's sister--the niece once removed of a vicar-general.And so it came about.
Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all.The pious and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as a spinster.
It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife.
Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered, she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah Madden to drink or flight.
He may have had his temptations, but they made no mark on the even record of his life.He only worked the harder, concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of home-life would have claimed instead.
The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had his wage to earn.In the great house which had been built to please, or rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible.The popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man, and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe.
One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest mechanics to the music she played for them.
Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than a daughter and sister.They could not think there had ever been anything like her before in the world;the notion of criticising any deed or word of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
