When the three trustees had been shown in by the Rev.Mr.Ware, and had taken seats, an awkward little pause ensued.
The young minister looked doubtingly from one face to another, the while they glanced with inquiring interest about the room, noting the pictures and appraising the furniture in their minds.
The obvious leader of the party, Loren Pierce, a rich quarryman, was an old man of medium size and mean attire, with a square, beardless face as hard and impassive in expression as one of his blocks of limestone.
The irregular, thin-lipped mouth, slightly sunken, and shut with vice-like firmness, the short snub nose, and the little eyes squinting from half-closed lids beneath slightly marked brows, seemed scarcely to attain to the dignity of features, but evaded attention instead, as if feeling that they were only there at all from plain necessity, and ought not to be taken into account.
Mr.Pierce's face did not know how to smile--what was the use of smiles?--but its whole surface radiated secretiveness.
Portrayed on canvas by a master brush, with a ruff or a red robe for masquerade, generations of imaginative amateurs would have seen in it vast reaching plots, the skeletons of a dozen dynastic cupboards, the guarded mysteries of half a century's international diplomacy.
The amateurs would have been wrong again.There was nothing behind Mr.Pierce's juiceless countenance more weighty than a general determination to exact seven per cent for his money, and some specific notions about capturing certain brickyards which were interfering with his quarry-sales.But Octavius watched him shamble along its sidewalks quite as the Vienna of dead and forgotten yesterday might have watched Metternich.
Erastus Winch was of a breezier sort--a florid, stout, and sandy man, who spent most of his life driving over evil country roads in a buggy, securing orders for dairy furniture and certain allied lines of farm utensils.
This practice had given him a loud voice and a deceptively hearty manner, to which the other avocation of cheese-buyer, which he pursued at the Board of Trade meetings every Monday afternoon, had added a considerable command of persuasive yet non-committal language.To look at him, still more to hear him, one would have sworn he was a good fellow, a trifle rough and noisy, perhaps, but all right at bottom.But the County Clerk of Dearborn County could have told you of agriculturists who knew Erastus from long and unhappy experience, and who held him to be even a tighter man than Loren Pierce in the matter of a mortgage.
The third trustee, Levi Gorringe, set one wondering at the very first glance what on earth he was doing in that company.
Those who had known him longest had the least notion;but it may be added that no one knew him well.
He was a lawyer, and had lived in Octavius for upwards of ten years; that is to say, since early manhood.
He had an office on the main street, just under the principal photograph gallery.Doubtless he was sometimes in this office; but his fellow-townsmen saw him more often in the street doorway, with the stairs behind him, and the flaring show-cases of the photographer on either side, standing with his hands in his pockets and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, looking at nothing in particular.
About every other day he went off after breakfast into the country roundabout, sometimes with a rod, sometimes with a gun, but always alone.He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a restaurant close by.Though he had little visible practice, he was understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred that he "shaved notes."The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church.He had never, it is true, professed religion, but they had elected him as a trustee now for a number of terms, all the same--partly because he was their only lawyer, partly because he, like both his colleagues, held a mortgage on the church edifice and lot.
In person, Mr.Gorringe was a slender man, with a skin of a clear, uniform citron tint, black waving hair, and dark gray eyes, and a thin, high-featured face.
He wore a mustache and pointed chin-tuft; and, though he was of New England parentage and had never been further south than Ocean Grove, he presented a general effect of old Mississippian traditions and tastes startlingly at variance with the standards of Dearborn County Methodism.
Nothing could convince some of the elder sisters that he was not a drinking man.
The three visitors had completed their survey of the room now;and Loren Pierce emitted a dry, harsh little cough, as a signal that business was about to begin.At this sound, Winch drew up his feet, and Gorringe untied a parcel of account-books and papers that he held on his knee.
Theron felt that his countenance must be exhibiting to the assembled brethren an unfortunate sense of helplessness in their hands.He tried to look more resolute, and forced his lips into a smile.
"Brother Gorringe allus acts as Seckertary,"said Erastus Winch, beaming broadly upon the minister, as if the mere mention of the fact promoted jollity.
"That's it, Brother Gorringe,--take your seat at Brother Ware's desk.Mind the Dominie's pen don't play tricks on you, an' start off writin' out sermons instid of figgers."The humorist turned to Theron as the lawyer walked over to the desk at the window."I allus have to caution him about that," he remarked with great joviality."An' do YOUlook out afterwards, Brother Ware, or else you'll catch that pen o' yours scribblin' lawyer's lingo in place o'
the Word."
