The Damnation of Theron Ware | Page 7

It's a great Irish place, I've heard.
Our own church seems to be a good deal run down there. We must
build it up again; and the salary is better-- a little."
But he too was depressed, and they walked on toward their temporary
lodging in a silence full of mutual grief. It was not until they had come
within sight of this goal that he prefaced by a little sigh of resignation
these further words,--
"Come--let us make the best of it, my girl! After all, we are in the
hands of the Lord."
"Oh, don't, Theron!" she said hastily. "Don't talk to me about the Lord
tonight; I can't bear it!"
CHAPTER II
"Theron! Come out here! This is the funniest thing we have heard yet!"
Mrs. Ware stood on the platform of her new kitchen stoop. The bright
flood of May-morning sunshine completely enveloped her girlish form,

clad in a simple, fresh-starched calico gown, and shone in golden
patches upon her light-brown hair. She had a smile on her face, as she
looked down at the milk boy standing on the bottom step--a smile of a
doubtful sort, stormily mirthful.
"Come out a minute, Theron!" she called again; and in obedience to the
summons the tall lank figure of her husband appeared in the open
doorway behind her. A long loose, open dressing-gown dangled to his
knees, and his sallow, clean-shaven, thoughtful face wore a morning
undress expression of youthful good-nature. He leaned against the
door-sill, crossed his large carpet slippers, and looked up into the sky,
drawing a long satisfied breath.
"What a beautiful morning!" he exclaimed. "The elms over there are
full of robins. We must get up earlier these mornings, and take some
walks."
His wife indicated the boy with the milk-pail on his arm, by a wave of
her hand.
"Guess what he tells me!" she said. "It wasn't a mistake at all, our
getting no milk yesterday or the Sunday before. It seems that that's the
custom here, at least so far as the parsonage is concerned."
"What's the matter, boy?" asked the young minister, drawling his words
a little, and putting a sense of placid irony into them. "Don't the cows
give milk on Sunday, then?"
The boy was not going to be chaffed. "Oh, I'll bring you milk fast
enough on Sundays, if you give me the word," he said with
nonchalance. "Only it won't last long."
"How do you mean--'won't last long'?", asked Mrs. Ware, briskly.
The boy liked her--both for herself, and for the doughnuts fried with
her own hands, which she gave him on his morning round. He dropped
his half-defiant tone.

"The thing of it's this," he explained. "Every new minister starts in
saying we can deliver to this house on Sundays, an' then gives us notice
to stop before the month's out. It's the trustees that does it."
The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved out on to the
stoop beside his wife. "What's that you say?" he interjected. "Don't
THEY take milk on Sundays?"
"Nope!" answered the boy.
The young couple looked each other in the face for a puzzled moment,
then broke into a laugh.
"Well, we'll try it, anyway," said the preacher. "You can go on bringing
it Sundays till--till--"
"Till you cave in an' tell me to stop," put in the boy. "All right!" and he
was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud incredulity in his pail as
he went.
The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared round the
corner of the house, and another mutual laugh seemed imminent. Then
the wife's face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle
forward out of its place in the straight and gently firm profile.
"It's just what Wendell Phillips said," she declared. "'The Puritan's idea
of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his own business.'"
The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully, and let his gaze
wander over the backyard in silence. The garden parts had not been
spaded up, but lay, a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by last
year's cabbage-stumps and the general litter of dead roots and
vegetation. The door of the tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open.
Before it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into grimy
hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer still an ancient
chopping-block, round which were scattered old weather-beaten
hardwood knots which had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and
packing-boxes, and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and

general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the eyes, and look across the
neighbors' fences to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the morning sunlight, and
with what matchless