"And now take Soulsby," she went on."Of course I take it for granted there's a good deal that he has never felt called upon to mention.He hasn't what you may call a talkative temperament.But there is also a good deal that I do know.He's been an actor, too, and to this day I'd back him against Edwin Booth himself to recite 'Clarence's Dream.' And he's been a medium, and then he was a travelling phrenologist, and for a long time he was advance agent for a British Blondes show, and when Ifirst saw him he was lecturing on female diseases--and he had HIS little turn with a grand jury too.In fact, he was what you may call a regular bad old rooster."Again Theron suffered the pause to lapse without comment--save for an amorphous sort of conversation which he felt to be going on between his eyes and those of Sister Soulsby.
"Well, then," she resumed, "so much for us apart.
Now about us together.We liked each other from the start.
We compared notes, and we found that we had both soured on living by fakes, and that we were tired of the road, and wanted to settle down and be respectable in our old age.
We had a little money--enough to see us through a year or two.
Soulsby had always hungered and longed to own a garden and raise flowers, and had never been able to stay long enough in one place to see so much as a bean-pod ripen.
So we took a little place in a quiet country village down on the Southern Tier, and he planted everything three deep all over the place, and I bought a roomful of cheap good books, and we started in.We took to it like ducks to water for a while, and I don't say that we couldn't have stood it out, just doing nothing, to this very day; but as luck would have it, during the first winter there was a revival at the local Methodist church, and we went every evening--at first just to kill time, and then because we found we liked the noise and excitement and general racket of the thing.After it was all over each of us found that the other had been mighty near going up to the rail and joining the mourners.
And another thing had occurred to each of us, too--that is, what tremendous improvements there were possible in the way that amateur revivalist worked up his business.
This stuck in our crops, and we figured on it all through the winter.--Well, to make a long story short, we finally went into the thing ourselves.""Tell me one thing," interposed Theron."I'm anxious to understand it all as we go along.Were you and he at any time sincerely converted?--that is, I mean, genuinely convicted of sin and conscious of--you know what I mean!""Oh, bless you, yes," responded Sister Soulsby.
"Not only once--dozens of times--I may say every time.
We couldn't do good work if we weren't.But that's a matter of temperament--of emotions.""Precisely.That was what I was getting at," explained Theron.
"Well, then, hear what I was getting at," she went on.
"You were talking very loudly here about frauds and hypocrisies and so on, a few minutes ago.Now I say that Soulsby and I do good, and that we're good fellows.
Now take him, for example.There isn't a better citizen in all Chemung County than he is, or a kindlier neighbor, or a better or more charitable man.I've known him to stay up a whole winter's night in a poor Irishman's stinking and freezing stable, trying to save his cart-horse for him, that had been seized with some sort of fit.The man's whole livelihood, and his family's, was in that horse;and when it died, Soulsby bought him another, and never told even ME about it.Now that I call real piety, if you like.""So do I," put in Theron, cordially.
"And this question of fraud," pursued his companion,--"look at it in this light.You heard us sing.Well, now, I was a singer, of course, but Soulsby hardly knew one note from another.I taught him to sing, and he went at it patiently and diligently, like a little man.
And I invented that scheme of finding tunes which the crowd didn't know, and so couldn't break in on and smother.
I simply took Chopin--he is full of sixths, you know--and I got all sorts of melodies out of his waltzes and mazurkas and nocturnes and so on, and I trained Soulsby just to sing those sixths so as to make the harmony, and there you are.He couldn't sing by himself any more than a crow, but he's got those sixths of his down to a hair.
Now that's machinery, management, organization.We take these tunes, written by a devil-may-care Pole who was living with George Sand openly at the time, and pass 'em off on the brethren for hymns.It's a fraud, yes; but it's a good fraud.So they are all good frauds.I say frankly that I'm glad that the change and the chance came to help Soulsby and me to be good frauds.""And the point is that I'm to be a good fraud, too,"commented the young minister.
She had risen, and he got to his feet as well.
He instinctively sought for her hand, and pressed it warmly, and held it in both his, with an exuberance of gratitude and liking in his manner.
Sister Soulsby danced her eyes at him with a saucy little shake of the head."I'm afraid you'll never make a really GOOD fraud," she said."You haven't got it in you.
Your intentions are all right, but your execution is hopelessly clumsy.I came up to your bedroom there twice while you were sick, just to say 'howdy,' and you kept your eyes shut, and all the while a blind horse could have told that you were wide awake.""I must have thought it was my wife," said Theron.
