Part 18 (2/2)

Theron paused in his walk to look absently at her. ”That thought,”

he said, in a vague, slow way, ”seems to be springing up in my path, whichever way I turn. It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me--this idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we do; that there is nothing new anywhere; that--”

”Never mind the dead men,” interposed Sister Soulsby. ”Just you come and sit down here. I hate to have you straddling about the room when I'm trying to talk to you.”

Theron obeyed, and as he sank into the low seat, Sister Soulsby drew up her chair, and put her hand on his shoulder. Her gaze rested upon his with impressive steadiness.

”And now I want to talk seriously to you, as a friend,” she began. ”You mustn't breathe to any living soul the shadow of a hint of this nonsense about leaving the ministry. I could see how you were feeling--I saw the book you were reading the first time I entered this room--and that made me like you; only I expected to find you mixing up more worldly gumption with your Renan. Well, perhaps I like you all the better for not having it--for being so delightfully fresh. At any rate, that made me sail in and straighten your affairs for you. And now, for G.o.d's sake, keep them straight. Just put all notions of anything else out of your head. Watch your chief men and women, and be friends with them. Keep your eye open for what they think you ought to do, and do it. Have your own ideas as much as you like, read what you like, say 'd.a.m.n' under your breath as much as you like, but don't let go of your job. I've knocked about too much, and I've seen too many promising young fellows cut their own throats for pure moons.h.i.+ne, not to have a right to say that.”

Theron could not be insensible to the friendly hand on his shoulder, or to the strenuous sincerity of the voice which thus adjured him.

”Well,” he said vaguely, smiling up into her earnest eyes, ”if we agree that it IS moons.h.i.+ne.”

”See here!” she exclaimed, with renewed animation, patting his shoulder in a brisk, automatic way, to point the beginnings of her confidences: ”I'll tell you something. It's about myself. I've got a religion of my own, and it's got just one plank in it, and that is that the time to separate the sheep from the goats is on Judgment Day, and that it can't be done a minute before.”

The young minister took in the thought, and turned it about in his mind, and smiled upon it.

”And that brings me to what I'm going to tell you,” Sister Soulsby continued. She leaned back in her chair, and crossed her knees so that one well-shaped and artistically shod foot poised itself close to Theron's hand. Her eyes dwelt upon his face with an engaging candor.

”I began life,” she said, ”as a girl by running away from a stupid home with a man that I knew was married already. After that, I supported myself for a good many years--generally, at first, on the stage. I've been a front-ranker in Amazon ballets, and I've been leading lady in comic opera companies out West. I've told fortunes in one room of a mining-camp hotel where the biggest game of faro in the Territory went on in another. I've been a professional clairvoyant, and I've been a professional medium, and I've been within one vote of being indicted by a grand jury, and the money that bought that vote was put up by the smartest and most famous train-gambler between Omaha and 'Frisco, a gentleman who died in his boots and took three sheriff's deputies along with him to Kingdom-Come. Now, that's MY record.”

Theron looked earnestly at her, and said nothing.

”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 I first 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 pa.s.s '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 grat.i.tude and liking in his manner.

<script>