No special effort being put forth to restrain him, he presently made his way out, Father Forbes hospitably following him down to the door, and putting a very gracious cordiality into his adieux.
The night was warm and black.Theron stood still in it the moment the pastorate door had closed; the sudden darkness was so thick that it was as if he had closed his eyes.His dominant sensation was of a deep relief and rest after some undue fatigue.It crossed his mind that drunken men probably felt like that as they leaned against things on their way home.He was affected himself, he saw, by the weariness and half-nausea following a mental intoxication.The conceit pleased him, and he smiled to himself as he turned and took the first homeward steps.It must be growing late, he thought.
Alice would be wondering as she waited.
There was a street lamp at the corner, and as he walked toward it he noted all at once that his feet were keeping step to the movement of the music proceeding from the organ within the church--a vaguely processional air, marked enough in measure, but still with a dreamy effect.
It became a pleasure to identify his progress with the quaint rhythm of sound as he sauntered along.He discovered, as he neared the light, that he was instinctively stepping over the seams in the flagstone sidewalk as he had done as a boy.He smiled again at this.There was something exceptionally juvenile and buoyant about his mood, now that he examined it.He set it down as a reaction from that doctor's extravagant and incendiary talk.One thing was certain--he would never be caught up at that house beyond the race-course, with its reptiles and its Chinaman.
Should he ever even go to the pastorate again? He decided not to quite definitely answer THAT in the negative, but as he felt now, the chances were all against it.
Turning the corner, and walking off into the shadows along the side of the huge church building, Theron noted, almost at the end of the edifice, a small door--the entrance to a porch coming out to the sidewalk--which stood wide open.A thin, pale, vertical line of light showed that the inner door, too, was ajar.
Through this wee aperture the organ-music, reduced and mellowed by distance, came to him again with that same curious, intimate, personal relation which had so moved him at the start, before the doctor closed the window.
It was as if it was being played for him alone.
He paused for a doubting minute or two, with bowed head, listening to the exquisite harmony which floated out to caress and soothe and enfold him.There was no spiritual, or at least pious, effect in it now.He fancied that it must be secular music, or, if not, then something adapted to marriage ceremonies--rich, vivid, passionate, a celebration of beauty and the glory of possession, with its ruling note of joy only heightened by soft, wooing interludes, and here and there the tremor of a fond, timid little sob.
Theron turned away irresolutely, half frightened at the undreamt-of impression this music was making upon him.
Then, all at once, he wheeled and stepped boldly into the porch, pushing the inner door open and hearing it rustle against its leathern frame as it swung to behind him.
He had never been inside a Catholic church before.
