“I hope she is feeling better,” Theron found himself saying. “Father Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with him last night.”
“I am glad that you came,” said Michael, after a little pause. His earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of their own. “I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to speak of to you, now that you are here.”
Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried the experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back again irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man’s gaze, and clung there.
“I am next door to a dead man,” he went on, paying no heed to the other’s deprecatory gesture. “It is not years or months with me, but weeks. Then I go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful will, I shall see God. So I say my goodbyes now, and so you will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a change for the good.”
Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his glance.
“I don’t know if Protestants will be saved, in God’s good time, or not,” continued Michael. “I find there are different opinions among the clergy about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds—they will never be saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hellfire.”
“I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,” said Theron, with surface suavity.
“Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!”
The impulse to smile tugged at Theron’s facial muscles. This was really too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing, and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching inspection bent upon him by the young man’s hollow eyes. What did Michael suspect? What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this strange talk of his?
“I saw you often on the street when first you came here,” continued Michael. “I knew the man who was here before you—that is, by sight—and he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many decent, kindly people, old schoolmates and friends and neighbors of mine—and, for that matter, others all over the country must lose their souls because they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen’t to sleep a whole night long, for thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps in his own house, that very day, would be taken when he died, and his mother too, when she died, and thrown into the flames of hell for all eternity. It made me so unhappy that finally I wouldn’t go to any Protestant boy’s house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me cake and apples—and me thinking all the while that they were bound to be damned, no matter how good they were to me.”
The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a personal application of the monologue had been hinted at.
“But then later, as I grew up,” the sick man went on, “I learned that it was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and as I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and I talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how could we?”
“Did you ever discuss the question with your sister?” it occurred suddenly to Theron to interpose. He was conscious of some daring in doing so, and he fancied that Michael’s drawn face clouded a little at his words.
“My sister is no theologian,” he answered briefly. “Women have no call to meddle with such matters. But I was saying—it was in the middle of these doubtings of mine that you came here to Octavius, and I noticed you on the streets, and once in the evening—I made no secret of it to my people—I sat in the back of your church and heard you preach. As I say, I liked you. It was your face, and what I thought it showed of the man underneath it, that helped settle my mind more than anything else. I said to myself: ‘Here is a young man, only about my own age, and he has education and talents, and he does not seek to make money for
