The Cove was no longer silent. Akin to the cadence of the echo, one
with the ethereal essence of the sighing and lapsing of the mountain
stream, the distant choiring of the congregation in the unseen
“church-house” seemed some indigenous voice of the wilderness, so
sylvan, so plaintive, so replete with subtle solemn intimations, was
the sound. The juggler did not at once distinguish it. Then it came
anew with more definite meaning, and it smote upon his quivering,
lacerated sensibilities. Not that in the sophisticated life which
he had quitted he had valued the Sunday sermons, or cared for the
house of the Lord, save architecturally; but he had loved the Sunday
singing; the great swelling reverberations of the organ were wont to
stir his very heart-strings; and while he appreciated the scope and
the worth of the standard compositions of sacred music, he was always
keen and critically alert to hear any new thing, with due allowance
for the lower level. And should the consecrated hour prove heavy to
his spirits, did not his seat near the door, his hat at hand, his
quick, noiseless, deft step, provide amply for his retreat? With the
realization of the loss of his life, his home, poignantly renewed by
the vibrations of the long, sustained, psalmodic tones, he would fain
have turned back now; but the idea of the tedious solitude on the ledge
of the river-bank, his heavy thoughts, the dread of the remonstrances
and urgency of Mrs. Sims, constrained him. So he listened to the solemn
rise and fall of the hymning in the Cove, rising and falling with the
wind, with a new sense of aghast trouble fixed upon him, as if some
spectral thing had revealed itself in the wilderness as he walked
unwary.
Now and then, as they wended along amongst the great boles of the
trees, with a narrow brook splashing and foaming in the deep rocky
gully at one side of the red clay road, or losing itself in the
densities of the laurel pressing so close on either hand, he caught
in sudden turns through gaps in the foliage glimpses of the winding
way further on and of Euphemia’s rose-hued dress. She was making but
indifferent speed, despite the nimbleness of those “stout little
brogans” that could cover the ground so fast when the will nerved them.
Once he saw her standing in an open space and looking over the levels
of the Cove below. Her pink bonnet was on her head now, its flaring
brim pushed far back, and revealing that Pompadour-like effect of her
fair hair which he so much admired, and here and there the large loose
curls straying on her shoulders. With the short waist of her dress,
and the long, straight, limp skirt, the picture-like suggestion was so
complete that he had not one throb of that repulsion which ignorance
and coarse surroundings occasioned his dilettante exactingness. He
looked at her with a kindling eye, a new and alert interest. He began
to seek to divine her mental processes. Why was she so reluctant? why
did she hesitate? It could not be that the prospect of the dull droning
of the preacher affrighted her; she was not wont to seek her ease, and
he knew instinctively that her Spartan endurance would enable her to
listen as long as the longest-winded of the saints could hold forth.
Were her lips moving? He could not be sure at the distance. Was she
saying once more, “Ef he speaks so agin afore ’em all, I dunno _how_ I
kin abide it”?
He wondered who “he” could be--not Jack Ormsby, he was very sure. He
wondered how Euphemia should have mustered the feeling to care. She
seemed to him not complex, like other women. Her character was built
of two elements, kindred and of the nature of complement one to the
other,--pride and the love of power, the desire to rule. He had thought
her possessed of as much coquetry at eighteen as her grandmother might
have at eighty-five. And who was this “he” who brought that look of
sweet solicitude, almost a quiver, to her lips?
“I should like to knock ‘him’ down,” he said to himself, humoring the
theory of his pretended infatuation.
She turned suddenly, holding up her head with a look of determination,
and went on as before.
Far afield might Pride seem, to be sure, in the humble ways of these
few settlers in the wilderness, yet here he was in full panoply, to
walk, almost visibly, alongside the simple mountain maiden, to enter
even the church with her, and to take his seat beside her on one of the
rude benches, already crowded.
Her mother and the juggler were later still. The diurnal aspect of
the little gray unpainted building in the midst of the green shadows
of the great forests, with the wide-spreading boughs of the trees
interlacing above its roof, was not familiar to Royce, who had been
here only after dark on the evening of his memorable entertainment.
The array of yokes of oxen, of wagons, of saddle-horses hitched to the
trees, had been noisily invisible in the blackness, on that occasion.
The group of youths hanging about the sacred edifice outside had a
prototype in the Sunday curbstone gatherings everywhere, and he at once
identified the species. A vague haze of dust pervaded the interior; it
gave a certain aspect of unreality to the ranks of intent figures on
the benches, as if they were of the immaterial populace of dreams. A
slant of the rich-hued sunlight fell athwart the room in a broad bar of
a dully glamourous effect, showing a thousand shifting motes floating
in the ethereal medium. A kindred tint glowed in the folds of a yellow
bandanna handkerchief swinging from one of the dark brown beams, and
served to advertise its loss by some worshiper at the last meeting.
Not so cheerful was another waif from past congregations,--a baby’s
white knitted woolen hood; it looked like the scalp of this shorn lamb
of the flock, and was vaguely suggestive of prowling wolves. On the
platform were four preachers who were participating in the exercises of
the day. Two of muscular and massive form had an agricultural aspect
rather than that of laborers in a spiritual vineyard, and were clad
in brown jeans with rough, muddy cowhide boots; they were dogmatic
of countenance, and evidently well fed and pampered to the verge of
arrogance; they sat tilted back in their splint-bottomed chairs,
chewing hard on their quids of tobacco, and wearing a certain easy,
capable, confident mien as of an assurance of heavenly matters and a
burly enjoyment of worldly prominence. They listened to a hymn which
the third--whom Royce recognized as old Parson Greenought--was “lining
out,” as he stood at the table, with a kind of corroborative air as
became past masters in all spiritual craft. They had traveled the
road their colleague sought to point out in metre, and were not to be
surprised at any of its long-ago-surmounted obstacles. At the end of
every couplet, each of them, while still seated, burst into song with
such patent disregard of the pitch of the other, the whole congregation
blaring after, that the juggler quaked and winced as he sat among the
men,--the women being carefully segregated on the other side of the
church,--and had much ado to set his teeth and avoid wry faces. The
fourth minister was not singing. He sat with his head bowed in his
hand, his elbow supported by the arm of his chair, as if lost in silent
prayer. The juggler watched his every motion as for deliverance from
the surging waves of sound, permeated with that rancorous independence
of unison, which floated around him, for he divined that this was the
orator of the day. This young man lifted his face expectantly after a
time,--a keen, thin, pale face, with black hair and dark gray eyes,
and an absorbed ascetic expression. But Parson Greenought still “lined
out” the sacred poetry, which was hobbling as to metre, and often
without connection and bereft of meaning; and with a wide opening of
the mouth and a toss of the head, the two musically disposed pastors
resolutely led the singing, and the congregation chorused tumultuously.
It was in some sort discipline for Brother Absalom Tynes to be
obliged to sit in silence and wait while stanza followed stanza and
theme was added to theme in the multifarious petition psalmodically
preferred. The words were on his lips; his heart burned for utterance;
he quivered with the very thought of his pent-up message. He was of
that class of young preachers who have gone into the vineyard early,
and with a determination to convert the world single-handed. Nothing
but time and Satan can moderate their enthusiasms; but time and
Satan may be trusted. Too much zeal,--misdirected, young, unseemly,
foolish,--Brother Tynes had been given to understand, was his great
fault, his besetting sin; it would do more harm than good, and he had
been admonished to pray against it. Perhaps the exhibition of it grated
on his elder _confrères_ as an unintentional rebuke, beneath which they
secretly smarted, remembering a time long ago--but of short duration,
it may be--when they too had been fired with wild enthusiasm and were
full of mad projects, and went about turning every stone and wearying
even the godly with the name of the Lord. So, to use the phrase of the
politicians, they “paired off” with Satan, as it were; forgetting that
zeal is like gunpowder, once damped, forever damaged, and that their
own had caught no spark from any chance contiguous fire this many a
long day.
That singing praises to the Lord should be a means of “putting down”
Brother Tynes savors of the incongruous; but few human motives are less
complex than those which animated Parson Greenought as he combined
the edification of the congregation, the melody of worship, and the
reduction of the pride of the pulpit orator, whose fame already
extended beyond Etowah, and even to Tanglefoot Cove. The science of
“putting down” any available subject is capable of utilizing and
amalgamating unpromising elements, and as Parson Greenought cast up
his eyes while he sang, and preserved a certain sanctimonious swaying
of the body to and fro with the rhythm of the hymn he “lined out,” the
triumph of “simulating” these several discordant mental processes cost
him no conscious effort and scarcely a realized impulse.
The juggler looked about him with a sort of averse curiosity; the
traits of ignorant people appealed in no respect to his somewhat
finical prepossessions. Among his various knacks and talents was no
pictorial facility, nor the perception of the picturesque as a mental
attitude. He resented the assumption of special piety in the postures
and facial expression here and there noticeable in the congregation; he
could have singled out those religionists whom he fancied thus vying
with one another. One broad-shouldered and stalwart young man was given
to particularly conspicuous demonstrations of godliness, exemplified
chiefly in sudden startling “A-a-a-mens” sonorously interpolated into
the reading, a breathy, raucous blare of song as he lifted up his
voice,--inexpressibly off the key,--and a sanctimonious awkward pose
of the head with half-shut eyes. The juggler could have trounced this
saint with hearty good will, for no other reason than that the man took
pleasure in showing how religious he was! Only Mrs. Sims exhibited no
outward token of her happy estate as a “perfesser,” but her salvation
was considered a very doubtful matter, and even that she had “found
peace” problematical, since she did not believe in special judgments
alighting on the mistaken or the unconverted, and had surmised that the
Lord would find out a way to excuse “them that had set on the mourners’
bench” in vain. “Ef you hev jes’ started out,” she would say to those
unfortunate wights whom the members were allowed to persecute with
advice and exhortation as they cowered before the throne of grace,
“don’t _you_ be ’feard. The Lord will meet ye more ’n halfway. Ef ye
don’t see him, ’tain’t because he ain’t thar. Jes’ start out. That’s
all!”
But Parson Greenought had warned her to forbear these promissory
pledges of so easy a salvation. For he wanted sinners all to gaze
on that lake of brimstone and fire which none but him could so
successfully navigate; and now and again he had his triumph when some
wretch in agonies of terror would screech out that he or she was “so
happy! so happy!” since to be “happy” by main force, so to speak, was
the alternative he offered to the prospect of weltering there forever.
So Jane Ann Sims held her peace, and preserved a fat and placid
solemnity of countenance, and sang aloud in such wheezy audacity that
the juggler could hear her breathe across the church.
Only one countenance was doubtful, wistful, its muscles not adjusted
to the discerning gaze of the congregation. Euphemia Sims sat near
a window, the tempered light on the soft contours of her face. The
flaring pink sunbonnet framed the rising mass of fair hair; she gazed
absently down at the floor; her delicate young shoulders were outlined
upon the masses of green leaves fluttering above the sill hard by.
Her look so riveted Royce’s attention that he sought to decipher it.
What did she fear? There was a suggestion of wounded pride, most
appealing in its incongruity with her normal calm, or hardness, or
unresponsiveness, or whatever he might choose to call the nullity of
that habitual untranslated expression. Why was she so grave, so sad?
The sudden lifting of her long lashes and the intent fixing of her
eyes directed his attention to the pulpit, and there he perceived
that Brother Tynes was standing at last, beginning to elucidate his
text. The juggler, relieved of the torture of the singing, braced his
nerves for the torture of the sermon. Here he might have had a recourse
in his facility of abstracting his mind. He had sat through many a
sermon in this unreceptive state. He had cast up accounts, preserving
a duality of identity in the secular activity of his mental faculties
and the sabbatical decorum of his face and listening attitude. Between
firstly and secondly he had once chased down three vagrant cents,--an
error which had cost him fifteen hours of labor out of regular working
time,--without which he could not balance his accounts. Once--it was
during the Christmas holidays--he had utilized the peroration of a long
and searching discourse by the bishop of the diocese to evolve certain
new and effective figures for the german which he was to lead the next
evening, and he had always esteemed that hour a most fruitful occasion.
And again, during a special sermon, on foreign missions, he evolved a
little melody, hardly more than a repetitious phrase, forever turning
and coiling and doubling on itself, to which he adapted the artfully
repetitious words of a dainty chansonnette of a celebrated French poet
with such skill and delicate inspiration of fitness that he often sang
it afterward in choice musical circles to unbounded applause. He had
sat under the sound of the gospel all his life, and he was as thorough
a pagan as any savage. But alack! his was not the only deaf ear in
those congregations--more’s the pity! and while we send missionaries to
China and the slums of our own great cities, our civilized heathen of
the upper classes are out of reach.
It was perhaps because he now had no thought that would let him be
friends with it--no sedulously conserved accounts, no _bizarreries_
of the german to devise, no inspiration of melody in mind (the
psalmody of Etowah Cove was enough to strike the music in him dumb
for evermore)--that he followed the direction of Euphemia’s gaze and
composed himself to listen.
He encountered a sudden and absolute surprise. The sermon was one of
those examples of a fiery natural eloquence which sometimes serve to
show to the postulant of culture how endowment may begin at the point
where training leaves off. The rapt silence of Brother Tynes’s audience
and their kindling faces attested the reciprocal fervors of his
enthusiasms. He was awkward and unlettered, with uncouth gestures and
an uncultivated voice, but there burned like a white fire in his pale,
thin face a faith, an adoration, an exultation, which transfigured
it. He had a fine and lofty ideal in the midst of the contortions of
his ignorance, which he called doctrines, and presently he spoke only
and in proteanwise of the mystery and the mercy of Redeeming Love. The
idea of reward, of punishment, of the hope of heaven and the fear of
hell, did not seem to enter into his scheme of salvation. He sought to
grasp the realization of an infinite sacrificial love, and he adjured
his people to fall on their faces, with their faces in the dust, before
the sacred marvel of the Atonement. The text “He first loved us” rang
out again and again like a clarion call. Its simple cogency seemed
to need no argument. How could the politic and mercenary motives of
securing exemption from pain or the purchase of pleasure enter herein?
That phase of striking a fair bargain, so controlling to sordid human
nature, was for the moment preposterous. Many a one of his simple
hearers knew the joy of unrequited labor for love’s sweet sake, of
self-denial, of being hungry or tired or cold, in sacrificial content.
More than one mother could hardly have given a practical reason why
the crippled child or the ailing one should be the dearest, when its
nurture could rouse no expectation that it might live to work for her
sake. More than one gray-haired son loved and honored the paralytic
troublous old dotard in the warmest corner of the fireside all the more
for his helplessness and the toil for his sake. Love makes duty dear.
Love makes service light. In some one phase or other they all knew that
love is for love’s own sake.
And this was all that he demanded in the great prophetic name of Christ
even from the dread heights of Calvary, “My son, give me thine heart.”
Now and again sobs punctuated the discourse. Before there was any
call for mourners to approach the bench, an old white-headed man, who
had resisted many an appeal to his fears on behalf of his soul, rose
and shambled forward; others silently joined him where he sat looking
at them over his shoulder, very conscious, a trifle crest-fallen,
if not ashamed, thus to be forced from the stanch defenses which he
had defiantly held through many a siege. The assisting ministers
occasionally cleared their throats and shifted their crossed legs, with
an expression of countenance which might be interpreted as deprecation
of the factitious excitements of a sensational sermon.
Euphemia Sims hearkened with a face of perfect decorum and superficial
receptiveness. In her heart, rather than in her mind, she missed
the true interpretation of the discourse. It did not seem to her
so wonderful that she should be of a degree of importance to merit
salvation. To be sure, in the sense of sharing original sin she
supposed she was a sinner,--born so. But her life was ordered on a line
of rectitude. Who kept so clean a house, who wove and milked and cooked
and sewed so diligently, as she? Who led for years the spelling-class
in this very house, whose brown walls might tell of her orthographic
triumphs? And she had got her religion, too, and had even shouted one
day, albeit a quavering, half-hearted hosanna. So she looked on with a
calm post-graduate manner at the gathering penitents at the mourners’
bench. She too had passed through the preliminary stages of spiritual
culture, and had taken her degree.
The juggler, as he listened, repeatedly felt that cold thrill which he
was wont to associate with a certain effect on his critical faculties.
Only a high degree of excellence in whatever line appealing to them was
capable of eliciting it. He had experienced it in this measure hitherto
only in the pleasurable suspense and excitement, so intense as to be
almost pain, in the dress circle of some crowded play-house, at the
triumphant moment of a masterpiece in the science of histrionism.
The orator was approaching his climax. To so great a height had he
risen that it seemed as if his utmost power could not reach beyond;
every moment tingled with the expectation that the next word must
herald a collapse, when, suddenly throwing himself on his knees, he
cried, “Lead us in prayer, Brother Haines,--lead us in prayer to the
foot of the cross!”
There was a startled movement among his colleagues of the pulpit,
charged with the prosaic suggestion that if they could they would
deny Brother Haines--apparently a layman and seated among the
congregation--the opportunity of thus publicly approaching the throne
of grace; but the people already had crowded upon their knees, and a
suppliant voice, pitched on a different key, rose into the stillness.
Euphemia Sims sat for a moment as if she were turned to stone. A light
both of pain and of anger was in her eyes. Her lips were stern and
compressed. She felt her blood beating hard in her temples. Then she
remembered the exacting decorums of the exercise, gathered her trim
pink skirts about her, softly knelt down, and Pride knelt down beside
her.
She hardly heard the voice of Brother Owen Haines at first, as she
put her dimpled elbows on the hard bench and held her head between
her hands, so tumultuous were the surging pulses of humiliation and
fear, and of love, too, in a way. And then it asserted itself upon her
senses, although she was conscious first merely of tones, rich, mellow,
of delicate modulations and lingering vibrations,--differing infinitely
from the clear, incisive, somewhat harsh utterances of the preacher;
but at last words came gradually to her comprehension.
Commonplace words enough, to be sure, to excite so poignant a torture
of agonized expectation in that heart, beating as one with Pride’s,
but presently too oft repeated. Now and again a raucously cleared
throat amongst the row of kneeling ministers told of a nervous stress
of anxiety as to these verbal stumblings and inadequacies. Sometimes
a sentence was definitely broken, subject and predicate hopelessly
disjointed. Sometimes a clause barely suggested the thought in the
brain, an irremediable solution of continuity in its expression. More
than once occurred a painful pause, in which the heads of certain newly
regenerate sinners, easily falling again under mundane influences or
the control of Satan, turned alertly from the prayerful attitudes
still conserved by their bodies to covertly survey the spellbound
suppliant. Like unto these was the juggler. He had, on the first
summons to prayer, decorously assumed that half-crouching posture
common to devotionally disposed men, which intimates to the surrounding
spectators the fact of a certain polite subduement of mind and body to
divine worship. Then, remembering suddenly the character of mountaineer
which he designed to assimilate, he plumped down on his knees--for the
first time in many a long day--like the rest. And if in the ensuing
excitements his mind did not match his lowly attitude, the juggler is
not the only man who has ever been upon his knees with no prayer in his
heart. Taking license from the stir near at hand, he too shifted his
posture that his furtive glance might command a view of the man thus
deputed to pray.
The suppliant was among the congregation, but his face, as he knelt
in an open space near the pulpit, was irradiated by the slant of the
sunset glow. Beheld above the benches and the kneeling congregation,
it had a singularly detached effect,--it was like the painting of
a head; all else was canceled. For a moment, the juggler, his
eyes growing intent and grave as he gazed, could not account for a
sense of familiarity with it, of having seen it often before. Then,
with a reminiscence of dim religious surroundings, of tempered
radiance streaming through translucent mediums, of flecks of deep
rich tints,--red and blue and purple and amber, always with emitted
undertones of light,--he realized its association with church windows,
with the heights of clerestory twilight, with catherine-wheels luminous
in dark transepts, with trifoliated symbols in chancel arches. It
might have seemed, the idealizing glamour of the sunset in the rapt
devotional expression, a study for a seraph’s face; in truth, one
could hardly desire a more fitting presentment of the angelic type.
The fair hair, not gold even under the heightening sunlight, lay in
gentle infantile curves along the broad forehead; as it fell to the
shoulder it showed tendencies to heavy undulations that were scarcely
curls or ringlets, and that grew diaphanous and cloudy toward their
fibrous verges. The large languid blue eyes had long dark lashes,
and the pathetic fervors, the adoration, the entreaty of their
expression, moved sundry covert glances to a twinkle of laughter;
for this surpassed in some humorous sort the liberal limits assigned
to the outward show of devotion in Etowah Cove. None of its other
denizens ever looked like that, saint or sinner! It was a subtle and
complex expression, and, being incomprehensible, it struck most of the
observers as simply funny. The high cheekbones and the pale unrounded
cheek might have impressed an artist as somewhat too attenuated of
contour to suggest the enjoyment of the eternal bliss of heaven, but
they added to the extreme spirituality of the effect of the eyes, and
with the congruous but delicate irregular nose and full lips made the
face unusual and individual.
An odd face for the butt of a coarse joke. The congregation, still
kneeling, stirred with a ripple of silent laughter. Here and there,
as the glances of curious worshipers, looking furtively over the
shoulder, encountered one another, a gleam of caustic comment or
deprecating amusement was exchanged; and once a newly caught saint,
not yet having wholly dropped the manners and quirks of the Old Man,
from force of habit winked, wrinkled his nose, and grinned. For
the halting supplication, still offered in that melting melody of
intonation, had passed from its disconnected plea for mercy, for the
conversion of sinners, for the guidance of the congregation, for the
spiritual profit of the meeting, and had boldly entered on a personal
and unique petition, a prayer for the power to preach the gospel.
The day of miracles, the learned say, is past. Even the illiterate
congregation in Etowah Cove expected none to be wrought in its midst.
And surely only the hand of God could touch that faltering tongue to
the full expression of the thought that trembled impotently upon it.
What subtle unimagined rift was it between the mind and the word,
what breach in their mysterious telegraphy! Elsewhere the phenomenon
exists: the silent poet, whose metre beats in certain dumb fervors of
the pulse; the painter, whose picture glows only upon the retina of the
mind’s eye; or those, unhappily not quiescent, who blurt and blunder
as did Owen Haines in his incoherent monologue to Almighty God. But he
was the single example in the experience of Etowah Cove, and to the
literal-minded saints the spectacle of a man bent upon preaching the
gospel, and yet so ill fitted for the task that he could scarce put
half a dozen words into a faltering sentence, moved them now to mirth
and now to wrath, according to the preponderance of merry or ascetic
religionists in the assembly. Again and again, whenever an opportunity
was vouchsafed, Owen Haines, with his illumined face and passionate
appealing voice, publicly besought of God in the congregations of
worshipers, where he felt prayer must most surely prevail, with the
pulse and the heart and the word of all his world to bear him company
to the throne of grace, the power to preach the gospel:--in such
phrase, such few repetitious disjointed words, _disjecta membra_ of
supplication, with so flagrant a display of hopeless incapacity, that
it became almost the scandal of the meetings, and there had been a
tacit agreement among the ministers who were to conduct the revival
that he should not be called upon to pray. The exhibition of his
eloquent burning face and his halting words, his faith and its open
reiterated denial, was not deemed edifying; and indeed it had latterly
begun to affect the gravity of certain members of the congregation of
whose conversion the leaders had had great hopes.
“He hev got ter fight that thar question out alone,” said old man
Greenought in indignation. “I won’t gin him nare ’nother ‘Amen.’ He
an’ his tomfool wantin’ ter preach the gorspel whenst he can’t pray
a ’spectable prayer is a puffick blemish on the divine service; it’s
fairly makin’ game o’ serious things,--his prayin’ fur the power,--an’
I dunno what the Lord is a-goin’ ter do about it, but _I_ ain’t a-goin’
ter lend _my_ ear nare ’nother time.”
It was this choleric gentleman who at last half rose from his knees,
and with a peremptory jerk of his thumb toward the failing sunlight
brought Haines’s aspiring spirit back to earth. He had gone far on
the wings of those poor words, he had flown high. His thought had so
possessed him that he did not realize what slight tincture of it his
speech distilled for those who heard him. The ministerial thumb jerking
a warning of the flight of time, a certain covert jeer in the bent
half-covered faces of those about him, brought the fact to him that
this prayer was like so many others, voiced only in the throbs of his
heart. The light was dying out of his eyes, the sunset glow had quitted
him; no fine illumined countenance now he bore, as of one who looks on
some transcendent vision; only a conscious disciplined face, quiet and
humbled and so patient! He broke off suddenly to say “Amen,” for he
sacrificed no connection,--he hardly knew whither he was rambling,--and
the people scrambled noisily to their feet, eager for dispersing.
“What did you-uns call on him fur, ennyhow?” said old Greenought
bluffly to Absalom Tynes. He had somewhat of a swaggering manner as he
came up close to the thin, pallid young man. He took great joy in all
the militant tropes descriptive of the Christian estate, and with the
more liberty suited his secular manner to his ministerial rhetoric.
Since he waged so brisk a warfare against Sin and Satan, he often
seemed about to turn his weapons, as if to keep his hand in, against
his unoffending fellow man.
Absalom Tynes did not flinch. “I called on him,” he said a trifle
drearily, for the fire of his exaltation, too, was quenched in that
pathetic and ineffectual “prayin’ fur the power,” “kase ez I war
a-preachin’ the word I knowed he war a-followin’ me, an’ I ’lowed I hed
got him ter the p’int whar surely he mought lift up his heart. I ’lowed
the Lord mought take pity on him ez longs ter serve him, an’ so touch
his lips an’ gin him the gift o’ a tongue o’ fire. I can’t sense it,
somehow,--I don’t onderstand it.”
“I do,” Parson Greenought capably averred. “The Lord’s put him in
the place whar he wants him, an’ he’ll be made ter stay thar,--jes’
a-persistin’ in prayin’ fur the power!”
“Thar ain’t no lock an’ key on prayer ez I knows on,” responded the
other a trifle testily. “A man kin pray fur what he wills.”
“Yes, an’ he kin do without it, too, unless the Lord wills. Fight the
devices o’ Satan, an’ don’t git ter be a beggar at the throne fur
gratifyin’ yer own yearthly quirks. Prayin’ an’ a-prayin’ fur the
power! The power’s a gift, my brother, a free gift, an’ no man will git
it by baigin’ an’ baigin’ an’ teasin’ fur it.”
He strode off, feeling that he had had the best of the discussion. He
was discerning enough to be conscious that, despite his belligerencies,
he was often inferior to his youthful _confrère_ in the rhetoric of the
pulpit, and he relished the more worsting him in argument, thus proving
the superiority of his judgment and solid reasoning capacities.
Outside the door a group of loiterers still lingered. The juggler’s
prudential motives had collapsed utterly in the prospect of Mrs. Sims’s
society in the long walk home. He looked about him with a desperate
hope of diversion, in which Euphemia and the curiosity she had newly
excited were factors. But he was fain to be content with his elderly
companion, for as Euphemia’s rose-hued dress blossomed in the portal
against the dark brown background of the interior he noticed that Owen
Haines was standing at the foot of the steps evidently awaiting her.
The mountaineer gave her no greeting, but walked beside her as if his
companionship were a matter of course.
“Warn’t that a plumb special sermon?” he said enthusiastically,
turning his candid eyes upon her. “’Pears like ter me ’twar the best,
the meltin’est, the searchin’est discourse I ever hear.”
There was a measure of contempt in her face. She would not have
admitted that she thought herself too good for the need of salvation,
but the theme with all its cognate elements was palling. She replied
with a definite note of sarcasm in her voice. “The bes’? Waal, I hev
hearn ye say that time an’ time agin. The sermons air _all_ the bes’,
’cordin’ ter you-uns.”
“Yes,” he admitted a trifle drearily, “ef I lose my soul, ’twon’t be
bekase I ain’t hed the bes’ chance fur salvation. I hev sot under a
power o’ good an’ discernin’ sermons in my time.”
The seraphic suggestions of his face, now that he was recalled to
earth, were little marked, and presently totally merged when he clapped
his big broad-brimmed hat upon that mass of cloudy, fine-fibred fair
hair. The irreverent juggler could have laughed at the swiftness and
completeness of the transition. Haines still wore that dreamy, far-away
look which, however, with mundane associations and modern garb, is apt
to indicate an unpurposeful nature and a lack of energy rather than any
lofty ideals and high resolves. The perfect chiseling and contour of
his countenance and its refined intimations were still patent to the
discerning observer; but without the preconceived idea drawn in the
church from the aspect of his head, with the soul revealed for one rapt
moment through its facial expression,--picture-like, dissevered from
the suggestion of body--Royce would hardly have perceived any spiritual
trait of a higher type in the young mountaineer. Thus it is that only
the outer man is known of men, and that ethereal essence of thought and
emotion, the real being, is a stranger upon earth and foreign from the
beginning.
Royce, greedily snatching at the very straws of abstraction, watched
the young couple as they strolled slowly along the red clay road. The
slouching, thin, languid figure of the tall youth, the ill-fitting
suit of brown jeans with the coat hanging so loosely from the narrow
shoulders, the big white hat, the rough crumpled boots all appealed to
him with a pleasant sense of incongruity as the accoutrement of this
object of mistaken identity, when a golden harp and a white robe and
a sweep of wings would better have become the first glimpse caught
in the church. Now and again, mechanically, involuntarily, Euphemia
looked furtively back over her shoulder at Royce. With all that surging
pulse of pride in her heart she was strangely bereft of her wonted
assurance. It would never have occurred to her, in her normal sphere of
thought and action, to refer aught that concerned her to the judgment,
the problematic opinion of another. But although she gave him so
slight thought, although she could not definitely gauge its objects
and interests, she had not been unnoting of that subtle pervasive
mockery which characterized the juggler’s habit of mind. Until now,
however, she had not cared at what or at whom the “game-maker” laughed,
how loud, how long. The laughter of folly cannot serve to mock good
substantial common sense which affords no purchase for ridicule; it
rebounds only upon the mocker. She apprehended naught in herself, her
home, her parents, the Cove, deserving of scorn or sneers. Her pride
was proof against this. It was because she herself deemed her lover
ridiculous that she winced from Royce’s imagined laugh now, as she had
shrunk from the criticism of the rest of the congregation. But this
mockery was of the intimate fireside circle. For Royce would go home
with them, and bring it in his laugh, his glance; nay, she would be
conscious of it even in his silent recollections. She felt she had no
refuge from it. She told herself that because she loved Haines she
deprecated mockery as unworthy of him, she would fain shield him from
the sneers of those not half so good as he. She would rather he should
eat out his heart in silence than besiege the throne of grace in any
manner not calculated to inspire respect and admiration in those who
heard his words addressed to the Almighty. As to the Deity, the goal of
all these petitions, she never once thought of their spiritual effect,
the possibility of an answer. She esteemed the prayer as in the nature
of a public speech, a public exhibition, which, glorious in success, is
contemptible in its failure in proportion to the number of witnesses
and the scope of the effort. How could Owen Haines pray for the power
to preach, when there was Absalom Tynes looking on so vainglorious
and grand, doubtless esteeming himself a most “servigrous” exhorter,
and obviously vaunting his own godliness by implication in the fervor
with which he called sinners to repentance? How could Owen Haines seek
so openly, so painfully, so terribly insistently, as a privilege, a
boon, as an answer to all his prayers, as a sign from the heavens, as a
token of salvation, as the price of his life, that capacity which was
possessed so conspicuously, without a word of prayer, without a moment
of spiritual wrestling, without a conscious effort, by Absalom Tynes?
“I’d content myself with the power ter plough,” she said to herself.
Then, as he fell into retrospective thought, she said aloud,--her
voice not ringing true as was its wont, but with a tremulous uncertain
vibration,--“’Pears like ter me, ez ye hain’t been gin the power
arter sech a sight o’ prayer, ’twould be better ter stop baigin’ an’
pesterin’ the Lord ’bout’n it.”
There was a moment’s silence, during which the little roadside rill
flung out on the air the rudiments of a song,--a high crystalline
tremor, a whispering undertone, a comprehensive surging splash as of
all its miniature currents resolved into one chord _con tutta forza_,
and so to whispering and tentative tinklings again. He had turned his
clear long-lashed blue eyes upon her, and she saw the reproach in
them. That courage in the feminine heart which dares wreak cruelty on
its own tender fibres urged her.
“I hev tole ye that afore,” she added sternly.
He was still silent. So sacred was that disregarded petition of his
that, despite the publicity of its preferment, its free unrestrained
fervors, he could hardly discuss it, even with her.
“Ye hain’t hed no advices from the Lord,” she argued. “Ye hev been
prayin’ fur the power constant, ever since ye got religion, an’ the
Lord don’t take no notice o’ ye.”
A shadow was on his face, pain in his eyes. Any one more merciful than
the proud woman who loved him, and who would fain conserve his pride,
might have pitied the sudden revulsion from the enthusiastic pleasure
in the sacred themes of the sermon so late upon his lip and firing his
eye--which she accounted merely the triumphs of Absalom Tynes--to this
abasement and sorrow and prescient despair.
“I kin wait on his will,” he said humbly.
“Waal, ye better wait in silence,” Euphemia declared, near to the brink
of tears,--angry and wounded and scornful tears.
“‘Ask an’ ye shall receive, seek an’ ye shall find,’” he quoted
pertinently, with that upbraiding look in his eyes which hurt her for
his sake, and which she resented for her own.
“How long! how long!” she cried impetuously. “Will ye spen’ yer life
askin’ fur what’s denied ye, seekin’ fur what’s hidden from ye? The
Lord’s got nuthin’ fur ye, Owen, an’ by this time ye oughter hev sensed
that.”
“Then I kin pray fur the grace ter take denial from his hands like a
rich gift,” he declared, his face kindling with an illumined, uplifted
look.
“Oh, yer prayin’ an’ prayin’! I’m plumb wore out with it!” she cried,
stopping still in the road; then realizing the advance of the others
she walked on hastily, and with the affectation of a careless gesture
she took off her bonnet and swung it debonairly by the string, lest
any emotional crisis be inferred from her abrupt halt. “Owen Haines,”
she said, with sudden inspiration, “ye air deceived by Satan. Ye ain’t
wantin’ the power ter preach the gospel ter advance the kingdom. Ye
want the power ter prance ez prideful ez a peacock in the pul-_pit_,
like Absalom Tynes an’ them other men what air cuttin’ sech a dash
afore the yearth ez keeps ’em from keerin’ much _how_ the nangels in
heaven air weepin’ over ’em.”
He recoiled from this thrust, for, however his charity might seek to
ignore the fact, however his simplicity might fail to discern it, his
involuntary intuition made him well aware that “prancing ez prideful ez
a peacock” was not altogether foreign to the pulpit here or elsewhere,
and that undue vainglory must needs wait on special proficiency. She
felt that she struck hard in imputing to him a motive of which he knew
himself to be incapable. Perhaps he would have pleased her better had
he combined his religious fervors with any intention so practical, so
remunerative, so satisfying to the earthly sentiment of one not too
good to live in this world.
It was eminently in keeping with that phase of his character which she
most contemned that he should, with his cheek still flushed, with his
eyes wincing and narrowing as from a blow, begin a vehement defense,
not of himself and his motives, but of Absalom Tynes.
She would hardly listen. “I hev hearn ye talk about Absalom Tynes, an’
I don’t want ter hear no mo’. I know what I know. Tell me thar ain’t
no pride in the pul-_pit_,--a-readin’ an’ a-talkin’ an’ a-preachin’ so
glib an’ precise, an’ showin’ off so gran’ afore the wimminfolks, an’
a-singin’ so full-mouthed an’ loud, an’ bein’ the biggest man thar;
fur Satan, though he often gits his club-foot on the pul-_pit_ stairs,
ain’t never been knowed ter step up! Ye tell me that ain’t true ’bout
some, ef not that precious friend o’ yourn, Absalom Tynes?”
“Euphemia,” he said sternly in his turn, and her heart was full at
the tone of his voice, “I dunno what idee you-uns hev got; ye ’pear
so--so--diff’unt--so”--He hesitated; his words were not wont to be
ready.
“So diff’unt from what? From you-uns? I reckon so! Ef I war ter drap
dead this minit, nuthin’, nuthin’ could hev made me act like you-uns,
prayin’ an’ prayin’ fur the power ter preach--whenst--whenst--Owen
Haines, ye ain’t even got the power ter pray! The Lord denies ye
that--even the power ter ax so ez--ter be fitten fur _folks_ ter hear!”
“The Lord kin hear, Euphemy; he reads the secret thoughts.”
“Let yourn be secret, then!” cried Euphemia. “Fur the folks air
listenin’ too ter the thoughts which the Lord kin hear ’thout the need
o’ words--listenin’ an’--an’, Owen Haines, laffin’!” She choked back
a sob, as her eyes filled and the tears ran out on her scarlet cheek.
With a stealthy gesture she wiped them away with the curtain of her
pink sunbonnet, carrying herself very stiffly lest some unconsidered
turn of the head betray her rush of emotion to the other church-goers
loitering behind. When she lifted her eyes, the flow of tears all
stanched, her sobs curbed, she beheld his eyes fixed sorrowfully upon
her.
“D’ye ’low I dunno that, Euphemy?” he said, his voice trembling. “D’ye
’low I don’t see ’em an’ hear ’em too when I’m nigh the Amen?”
Her tears burst out anew when she remembered that the “Amen” was often
said for him by the presiding minister, with such final significance of
intonation, ostentatiously rising the while from the kneeling posture,
as to fix perforce a period to this prolix incoherency of “prayin’ fur
the power.”
“Ye don’t _feel_ it,” she protested, very cautiously sobbing, for
since her grief would not be denied, she indulged it under strict
guard,--“ye don’t _feel_ it! But me,--it cuts me like a knife!”
“Why, Phemie,” he said softly, walking closer to her side,--noticing
which she moved nearer the verge of the stream, that she might keep the
distance between them exactly the same as before, not that she wished
to repel him, but that the demonstration might escape the notice of
those who followed,--“’pears ter me like ye oughtn’t ter keer fur the
laffin’ an’ mockin’, fur mebbe I’ll be visited with a outpourin’ o’ the
sperit, an’ be ’lowed ter work fur my Lord like I wanter do.”
She turned and looked at him; they had reached the top of a sort of
promontory that jutted out over a leafy sea of the budding forests
on the levels of the Cove below. The whole world of the spring was
a-blooming. Even the tulip-trees, with their splendid dignity of
height and imposing girth, seeming well able to spare garlands, wore
to their topmost sprays myriads of red and yellow bells swaying in the
breeze. The azaleas were all a-blow, and a flowering vine, the merest
groundling, but decked with delicate white corymbs, lay across the
path. The view of the sinking sun was intercepted by a great purple
range, heavy and lowering of shadow and sombre of hue, but through the
gap toward the west, as if glimpsed through some massive gate, was
visible a splendid irradiation overspreading the yellow-green valley
and the blue mountains beyond; so vividly azure was this tint that the
color seemed to share the vernal impulse and glowed with unparalleled
radiance, like some embellishment of the spring which the grosser
seasons of the year might not compass. From below, where the beetling
rock overhung a wilderness of rhododendron, voices came up on the soft
air. The others of the party had taken the short cut. She heard her
mother’s wheeze, the juggler’s low mellow voice, her father’s irritable
raucous response, and she realized that she might speak without
interruption.
“The Lord’s got nuthin’ fur ye,” she averred vehemently; “he don’t need
yer preachin’ an’ he don’t listen ter yer prayers. Ye hev come ter be
the laffin’-stock o’ the meetin’ an’ the jye o’ the game-makers o’ the
Cove. An’ ef--ef ye don’t gin it up--I--I--ye’ll hev ter gin me up--one
or t’other--me or that.”
Haines was not slow now. He understood her in a flash. The covert grin,
the scornful titter, the zestful wink,--she cared more for these small
demonstrations of the unthinkingly merry or the censorious scoffer than
for him or the problematic work that his Master might send him the
grace to do. Nevertheless, he steadied himself to put this into words
that he might make sure beyond peradventure. He had taken off his hat.
The wind was blowing back the masses of his fine curling fair hair
from his broad low brow. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes alight and
intense. He held his head slightly forward. “I must gin you up, or gin
up prayin’ fur the power ter preach?”
“Prayin’ in public--’fore the folks--I mean; in the church-house or at
camp-meetin’. Oh, I can’t marry a man gin over ter sech prayin’ afore
the congregations! but ye kin go off yander alone in the woods or on
the mountings, an’ pray, ef so minded, till the skies fall, for all I’m
keerin’.”
“Ye mind kase people laff,” he said slowly.
“Ef people laff at me kase I be foolish, I mind it. Ef people laff at
me kase _they_ air fools, they air welcome ter thar laffin’ an’ thar
folly too.” This discrimination was plain. But as he still looked
dreamy and dazed, she made the application for him. “Ye can’t preach;
ye can’t pray; ye make a idjit o’ yerself tryin’. I can’t marry no sech
man ’thout ye gin up prayin’ ’fore folks.”
“Ye think mo’ o’ folks ’n the Lord?” Haines demanded, with a touch of
that ministerial asperity expert in imputing sin.
But so widely diffused are the principles of Christianity that the
well-grounded layman can rarely be silenced even by a minister with a
call, much less poor uncommissioned tongue-tied Owen Haines.
“The Lord makes allowances which people can’t an’ won’t,” she retorted.
“He hears the thought an’ the sigh, an’ even the voice of a tear.”
“He does! He does!” cried Owen Haines, fired by the very suggestion,
his face, his eyes, his lips aflame. “An’ may my tongue cleave to the
roof of my mouth an’ my right hand be withered an’ forget its cunning,
may agues an’ anguish rack my body an’ may my mind dwindle ter the
sense of a brute beastis, ef ever I promise ter put bonds on prayer
or eschew the hope of my heart in the house of God. I’ll pray fur the
power--I’ll pray fur the power ter preach till I lose the gift o’
speech--till I kin say no word but ‘the power!--the power!--the power’!”
Euphemia cowered before the enthusiasm her chance phrase had conjured
up. She had not, in a certain sense, doubted the sincerity of her
lover’s religious fervor. She secretly and unconsciously doubted the
validity of any spiritual life. She could not postulate the sacrificial
temperament. She could not realize how he would have embraced any
votive opportunity. He was of the type akin to the anchorite, the
monastic recluse,--who in default of aught else offers the kernel of
life, if not its empty shell,--even the martyr. For he had within him
that fiery exaltation which might have held him stanch at the stake,
and lifted his voice in triumphant psalmody above the roar of the
flames. But although he had had his spiritual sufferings of denial, and
floutings, and painful patience, and hope that played the juggler with
despair, he had anticipated no ordeal like this. He looked in her eyes
for some token of relenting, his own full of tears above the hardly
quenched brightness of his fervor of faith, a quiver on his lips.
Her face was set and stern. With a realization how deeply the fantasy
had struck roots in his nature, she perceived that she must needs
share it or flee it. She was hardly aware of what she did mechanically,
but as she painstakingly tied the pink strings of her bonnet under her
dimpled chin it was with an air of finality, of taking leave. She was
not unconscious of a certain pathetic appeal in his life, seemingly
unnoted by God, yet for God’s service, and rejected by love. But she
thought that if he pitied himself without avail she need not reproach
herself that she did not pity him more. And truly she had scant pity to
spare. And so he stood there and said “Farewell” as in a dream, and as
in a dream she left him.