The Damnation of Theron Ware | Page 8

charm came the song of the robins, freshly
installed in their haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above them,
in the fresh, scented air, glowed the great blue dome, radiant with light
and the purification of spring.
Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed it in a slow arch
of movement to comprehend this glorious upper picture.
"What matter anyone's ideas of hell," he said, in soft, grave tones,
"when we have that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs with? It
seems to me that we never FEEL quite so sure of God's goodness at
other times as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring."
The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested for a brief moment,
with pleased interest, upon the trees and the sky. Then they reverted,
with a harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.
"Those Van Sizers ought to be downright ashamed of themselves," she
said, "to leave everything in such a muss as this. You MUST see about
getting a man to clean up the yard, Theron. It's no use your thinking of
doing it yourself. In the first place, it wouldn't look quite the thing, and,
second, you'd never get at it in all your born days. Or if a man would
cost too much, we might get a boy. I daresay Harvey would come
around, after he'd finished with his milk-route in the forenoon. We
could give him his dinner, you know, and I'd bake him some cookies.
He's got the greatest sweet-tooth you ever heard of. And then perhaps if
we gave him a quarter, or say half a dollar, he'd be quite satisfied. I'll
speak to him in the morning. We can save a dollar or so that way."
"I suppose every little does help," commented Mr. Ware, with a doleful
lack of conviction. Then his face brightened. "I tell you what let's do!"
he exclaimed. "Get on your street dress, and we'll take a long walk,
way out into the country. You've never seen the basin, where they float
the log-rafts in, or the big sawmills. The hills beyond give you almost
mountain effects, they are so steep; and they say there's a sulphur

spring among the slate on the hill-side, somewhere, with trees all about
it; and we could take some sandwiches with us--"
"You forget," put in Mrs. Ware,--"those trustees are coming at eleven."
"So they are!" assented the young minister, with something like a sigh.
He cast another reluctant, lingering glance at the sunlit elm boughs, and,
turning, went indoors.
He loitered for an aimless minute in the kitchen, where his wife, her
sleeves rolled to the elbow, now resumed the interrupted washing of the
breakfast dishes-- perhaps with vague visions of that ever-receding time
to come when they might have a hired girl to do such work. Then he
wandered off into the room beyond, which served them alike as
living-room and study, and let his eye run along the two rows of books
that constituted his library. He saw nothing which he wanted to read.
Finally he did take down "Paley's Evidences," and seated himself in the
big armchair--that costly and oversized anomaly among his humble
house-hold gods; but the book lay unopened on his knee, and his
eyelids half closed themselves in sign of revery.
This was his third charge--this Octavius which they both knew they
were going to dislike so much.
The first had been in the pleasant dairy and hop country many miles to
the south, on another watershed and among a different kind of people.
Perhaps, in truth, the grinding labor, the poverty of ideas, the
systematic selfishness of later rural experience, had not been lacking
there; but they played no part in the memories which now he passed in
tender review. He recalled instead the warm sunshine on the fertile
expanse of fields; the sleek, well-fed herds of "milkers" coming lowing
down the road under the maples; the prosperous and hospitable
farmhouses, with their orchards in blossom and their spacious red barns;
the bountiful boiled dinners which cheery housewives served up with
their own skilled hands. Of course, he admitted to himself, it would not
be the same if he were to go back there again. He was conscious of
having moved along--was it, after all, an advance?--to a point where it
was unpleasant to sit at table with the unfragrant hired man, and still

worse to encounter the bucolic confusion between the functions of
knives and forks. But in those happy days--young, zealous, himself
farm-bred-- these trifles had been invisible to him, and life there among
those kindly husbandmen had seemed, by contrast with the gaunt
surroundings and gloomy rule of the theological seminary, luxuriously
abundant and free.
It was there too that the