“I had no idea that they took such good pictures in Octavius,” Theron remarked after a minute’s silence, still bending in examination of the photographs.
“They ought to; they charge New York prices,” observed the lawyer, sententiously.
Theron found in the words confirmation of his feeling that Gorringe was not naturally a lavish or extravagant man. Rather was he a careful and calculating man, who spent money only for a purpose. Though the minister continued gazing at the stiff presentments of local beauties and swains, his eyes seemed to see salmon-hued hollyhocks and spotted lilies instead. Suddenly a resolve came to him. He stood erect, and faced his trustee.
“Speaking of the price of things,” he said, with an effort of arrogance in his measured tone, “I have never had an opportunity before of mentioning the subject of the flowers you have so kindly furnished for my—for my garden.”
“Why mention it now?” queried Gorringe, with nonchalance. He turned his cigar about with a movement of his lips, and worked it into the corner of his mouth. He did not find it necessary to look at Theron at all.
“Because—” began Mr. Ware, and then hesitated—“because—well, it raises a question of my being under obligation, which I—”
“Oh, no, sir,” said the lawyer; “put that out of your mind. You are no more under obligation to me than I am to you. Oh, no, make yourself easy about that. Neither of us owes the other anything.”
“Not even goodwill—I take that to be your meaning,” retorted Theron, with some heat.
“The words are yours, sir,” responded Gorringe, coolly. “I do not object to them.”
“As you like,” put in the other. “If it be so, why, then all the more reason why I should, under the circumstances—”
“Under what circumstances?” interposed the lawyer. “Let us be clear about this thing as we go along. To what circumstances do you refer?”
He had turned his eyes now, and looked Theron in the face. A slight protrusion of his lower jaw had given the cigar an upward tilt under the black mustache.
“The circumstances are that you have brought or sent to my garden a great many very expensive flower-plants and bushes and so on.”
“And you object? I had not supposed that clergymen in general—and you in particular—were so sensitive. Have donation parties, then, gone out of date?”
“I understand your sneer well enough,” retorted Theron, “but that can pass. The main point is, that you did me the honor to send these plants—or to smuggle them in—but never once deigned to hint to me that you had done so. No one told me. Except by mere accident, I should not have known to this day where they came from.”
Mr. Gorringe twisted the cigar at another angle, with lines of grim amusement about the corner of his mouth. “I should have thought,” he said with dry deliberation, “that possibly this fact might have raised in your mind the conceivable hypothesis that the plants might not be intended for you at all.”
“That is precisely it, sir,” said Theron. There were people passing, and he was forced to keep his voice down. It would have been a relief, he felt, to shout. “That is it—they were not intended for me.”
“Well, then, what are you talking about?” The lawyer’s speech had become abrupt almost to incivility.
“I think my remarks have been perfectly clear,” said the minister, with dignity. It was a new experience to be addressed in that fashion. It occurred to him to add, “Please remember that I am not in the witness-box, to be bullied or insulted by a professional.”
Gorringe studied Theron’s face attentively with a cold, searching scrutiny. “You may thank your stars you’re not!” he said, with significance.
What on earth could he mean? The words and the menacing tone greatly impressed Theron. Indeed, upon reflection, he found that they frightened him. The disposition to adopt a high tone with the lawyer was melting away.
“I do not see,” he began, and then deliberately allowed his voice to take on an injured and plaintive inflection—“I do not see why you should adopt this tone toward me—Brother Gorringe.”
The lawyer scowled, and bit sharply into the cigar, but said nothing.
“If I have unconsciously offended you in any way,” Theron went on, “I beg you to tell me how. I liked you from the beginning of my pastorate here, and the thought that latterly we seemed to be drifting apart has given me much pain. But now it is still more distressing to find you actually disposed to quarrel with me. Surely, Brother Gorringe, between a pastor and a probationer who—”
“No,” Gorringe broke in; “quarrel isn’t the word for it. There isn’t any quarrel, Mr. Ware.” He stepped down from the door-stone to the sidewalk as he spoke, and stood face to face with Theron. Workingmen with dinner-pails, and factory girls, were passing close to them, and he lowered his voice to a sharp, incisive half-whisper as he added, “It wouldn’t be worth any grown man’s while to quarrel with so poor a creature as you are.”
Theron stood confounded, with an empty stare of bewilderment on his face. It rose in his mind that the right thing to feel was rage, righteous indignation, fury; but for the life of him, he could not muster any manly anger. The character of the insult stupefied him.
“I do not know that I have anything to say to you in reply,” he remarked, after what seemed to him a silence of minutes. His lips framed the words automatically, but they expressed well enough
