THE CHURCH AT SAMOSET.
The road to Samoset was up hill and down hill, and altogether uneven;
but it lay through a lovely country, just now colored with those soft
hues autumn wears before her gorgeous gala dress is ready. Beside the
way the squirrels leaped and chattered in the Sunday stillness as our
friends drove to church. Flossy had proposed that they call for Ease
Apthorpe; and her cousin, who had been secretly wishing her to make
this suggestion, assented with alacrity. Ease yielded to the temptation
of a ride on so beautiful an afternoon, and abandoned her own for the
Unitarian service at Samoset. In spite of Mrs. Sanford's reflections
upon the narrowness of modern buggies, the seat of their carriage
proved wide enough for the three, perhaps because Ease, like Flossy,
was rather small.
Halfway between Montfield and Samoset the country-road crossed a large
brook, which was known as Wilk's Run. It was deep and swift, being fed
by springs among the hills; and it foamed along its channel, fretting
at every bowlder, with a sense of its own importance, little more
reasonable than if it had been gifted with human intelligence. The
banks of the stream were rough, and broken with miniature coves and
shallows, cliffs and caves, where the schoolchildren, picnicking or
playing truant, frolicked joyously.
"Do you remember, Will," Ease said, as our friends halted upon the
bridge to look up and down the Run, "do you remember the May Day when
we hid Sol Shankland's pea-shooter in the hole in the rock?"
"I think I do," he returned, laughing. "He pelted Selina Brown until
she threatened to drown herself; and Emily Purdy inquired if we
supposed Mrs. Brown would get to the funeral in time to be called with
the mourners."
"I wonder if the thing is there now," continued Ease. "That was--why,
it was seven years ago: think of it!"
"We might see," Will suggested. "We are early enough."
"It would be such fun!"
"You don't mind staying with the horse, do you, Floss?" Will asked.
"Oh, no! I shall drive on if I do. I know the road to Samoset
perfectly."
"Come on, then, Ease: we'll investigate."
Off the pair went, laughing and chatting like two children. Flossy
waited until they had clambered down the rocky path to the water below
the bridge, and then shouted to them.
"What is it?" her cousin asked.
"I'll call when I come from church," she screamed in reply.
Then she deliberately drove off.
"By George!" Will exclaimed. "That's just like Floss: I might have
known."
"What shall we do?" asked his companion in dismay.
"Do? Make ourselves comfortable. Meeting won't be more than an hour,
and we can endure that. It is a great deal pleasanter here than in
church."
"Yes," she assented doubtfully.
"And, as we can't help ourselves, it is no use to fret."
They found a cosey nook, and a log for a seat, which Will, with a
praiseworthy care for Ease's Sunday raiment, covered with a newspaper
he chanced to have in his pocket. They fell to chatting of old times,
the theatricals, Will's college-scrapes, and the thousand things which
give to life its varied savors. Will in a quiet fashion had been fond
of his companion from childhood, but had never thought it necessary
to tell her so: indeed, he had never in any serious way considered
the fact himself, but, being fond of her companionship, had sought
and accepted it as a matter of course. This placid afternoon, with
the water at their feet, the trees rustling in the faintest whispers
overhead, and the air about them mellow and fragrant, a sensuous,
"lotus-fed content" stole over them, and the moments went by unheeded.
They were too much at ease for lovers, but they were the best of
friends.
Meanwhile, Flossy Plant, filled with a wicked glee, drove onward to
Samoset, found an old man to fasten her horse, and walked into church
as demurely as the most saintly maiden of them all. The party had set
out for the Unitarian church; but Flossy, having taken matters into her
own hands, drove to quite another sanctuary. She had often heard her
cousins laugh about the quaintness of a church of Scotch Presbyterians
which had been established in the earlier days of Samoset, and which
still retained much of its antique simplicity.
She had seen the building in driving with Will, and now the whim had
seized her to attend the service. She was a little late, and an icy
breath of stern theology seemed to meet her when she entered. She
slipped into a seat near the door, and half held her breath, lest a
precentor should start up from some unsuspected corner, and pounce upon
her for disturbing the awful solemnity of the assembly.
The building was plain to ugliness,--a square box, high and bare, with
stiff pews, whose uncushioned angles precluded the possibility of any
sacred drowsiness. The windows were devoid of shutters, the floor
was carpetless, the pulpit as guiltless of cushions as the pews. The
congregation had a blue, pinched look, as if their religion were too
difficult of digestion to be nourishing, and a moral dyspepsia had been
the result of swallowing large portions of it.
The preacher, however, was a noble-looking man, with snowy hair and
beard. He was reading and expounding the twenty-second Psalm when
Flossy entered; and she could not but be struck with the force of his
unaffected diction and the nobility of his thought, colored though it
necessarily was by his narrow theology.
But all solemn meditations were suddenly interrupted, when, the
exposition ended, the congregation sang the psalm which had been
read. No wicked hymns, the invention of men, are allowed in the
conservative precincts of orthodox Presbyterianism, but only the old
metrical versions of the Psalms of David. The old custom of having the
precentor sit in a box before the pulpit was not followed in the church
at Samoset, nor were the lines deaconed out; these two concessions
having been grudgingly made to the progressive spirit of the age. The
precentor sat in the front pew; and, suddenly stepping out before the
people, he began in a cracked, nasal tenor to sing the psalm read.
The congregation generously allowed him half a line the start, and
then one after the other attempted the hopeless task of overtaking him
before he completed the stanza. He had a great advantage from the fact
that he probably knew what tune he intended to sing; and by skilfully
introducing sundry original quavers, runs, and quirks, he succeeded
in throwing his pursuers so completely off the scent, that, although
at least a dozen different airs were tried by various members of the
chorus, no one seemed really to have hit the right one until the
precentor had triumphantly completed two stanzas, and got well into the
third.
The effect was indescribable. Flossy was at first too amazed to
understand what was the matter; and then it required all her energies
to keep from laughing aloud. How any human beings could stand up and
give vent to such unearthly sounds, and still preserve their gravity,
was beyond her comprehension. The volume of noise constantly increased
as one after another of the singers, having tried hastily half a dozen
or more tunes in various keys, came proudly into the right one, pouring
forth a torrent of sound to let the precentor know, that, after all,
he was conquered, and his secret wrested from him. That individual,
finding himself defeated in his endeavors to conceal the tune under new
and more elaborate variations, sulkily abandoned the contest, and tried
to sing it correctly, thereby coming so far from the original, that
once more the congregation were puzzled, and, concluding him to have
changed the air, struck anew into a wild variety of experiments more
discordant than before.
The singing was so astonishing, that the words did not at first impress
Flossy; but they were sufficiently remarkable when once her attention
was fixed on them.
"Like water I'm poured out, my bones
all out of joynt do part.
Amidst my bowels, as the wax,
so melted is my heart.
"My strength is like a pot-sheard dry'd,
my tongue it cleaveth fast
Unto my jaws; and to the dust
of death thou brought me hast."
And so on through innumerable stanzas.
For the remainder of the service Flossy gave her attention chiefly to
the book of psalms, and very entertaining she found it. She had a very
funny time all alone in the corner of the great bare pew, her golden
hair fluffed about her face, and her cheeks flushed with her efforts
to restrain her laughter. She grew more and more absorbed until at the
lines,--
"Like as the hart for water-brooks
in thirst doth pant and bray,"
she forgot herself entirely, and a little golden trill of laughter
rippled through the solemn old church. Then poor Flossy felt, rather
than saw, the looks of horror and indignation which were cast in her
direction, and her cheeks burned like fire. She relieved her mind by
pulling to pieces a ragged psalmody; and, as she grew calmer, the
printed paper used in the binding caught her eye. Upon it she read the
following notice:--
"Dec. 25, by the Rev. Edward French, William Sanford of Montfield, to
Linda, youngest daughter of Ezekiel Thaxter, Esq."
"Grandmother Sanford's wedding," Flossy said to herself, and dreamed
over the notice until the service ended.
"Mercy!" she remarked to the horse, looking at her watch as she drove
out of Samoset: "how late it is! Do get along faster. What will Ease
and Will think has become of me? Get up! Mercy, who's that?"
It was the stalwart form of Burleigh Blood she saw, walking along the
grassy edge of the road. He turned his head as she approached, lifting
his hat, and blushing diffidently.
"How do you do?" she said, drawing rein beside him. "Will you ride?"
"Thank you," he answered confusedly, "I--I think not."
"Very well," she returned, "get in then."
He laughed and obeyed her, as if he had given the acceptance her words
assumed.
"Where have you been?" Flossy asked as they drove on. "How in the world
do you happen to be straying about so on Sunday? Have you been to
church?"
"Yes: I rode over this morning, and staid all day."
"But you didn't eat your horse for dinner, I hope."
"Oh, no! I had dinner at aunt Phelena's. I lent the horse. Joe
Brown and his wife came over to see their cousin. Her husband has
disappeared, and nobody knows what has become of him."
"Disappeared?"
"Yes. He went out to his office, and never came back."
"How disgusting for a man to act so!" exclaimed Flossy. "Why, the
friends can't tell whether to have a funeral, or be chirky. It must be
dreadfully aggravating. It keeps them all at home, and yet they don't
know what to expect."
"It is usually safe to expect the worst."
"But that isn't pleasant. One doesn't like to be in the dumps without
being obliged to be. And it's not only the immediate family, but other
folks,--sort of cousins, and the like. I should be awfully cross if I
were a cousin. They can't even have the comfort of the services, or
of wearing black, no matter how becoming it is to them. For my part,
I think it would be a great deal less selfish to leave word whether
there's a funeral or not."
"I don't think people who disappear can always help it," he
said, laughing. "But I suppose you'll leave a note saying,
'Farewell--farewell forever;' or something like that."
"Yes, I'll say 'Funeral at such a time, and I'll be ready.' How
shockingly I talk! So saying, she folded her lips, and sank into
silence. Will you drive, please?"
"This cousin of the Browns," Burleigh remarked, "just went off, or was
carried off, or something else: at least, he is gone. The Browns were
going home in the mail-team at nine o'clock this morning, but Mrs.
Brown didn't get ready until about one this afternoon."
"And you lent them your horse. That was very good of you."
"Oh, no! It was only casting bread upon the waters. I shall want a good
turn of him some time, likely enough."
"I never supposed," Flossy returned critically, "that bread cast upon
the waters could be worth much when it came back after many days. It
most likely would be mouldy, and so water-soaked it wouldn't be fit to
eat."
"I don't like to joke about Scripture," he said gravely, flushing at
his own boldness. "Of course," he added, "I don't think you meant any
harm."
"Of course not. It is a trick I have caught from father: it is part of
my inheritance, like dyspepsia and a liver. Though why," she added,
"it should be called a liver, I can't see. I think _dier_ would be more
appropriate."
At that moment Wilk's Run came in sight.
"Dear me!" Flossy exclaimed. "I entirely forgot them, but this man put
them all out of my head."
Her companion answered only by a puzzled stare.
"This one that disappeared, you know," she explained lucidly. "And they
went to find a popgun, or something, and the service was so very long,
you know."
Burleigh, vainly endeavoring to catch some clew to her meaning, said
nothing. In another moment they reached the bridge. No person was to be
seen.
"I wish you'd shout," Flossy said. "They can't be far off."
"What shall I shout?"
"I don't believe you know a word I've been saying," she remarked,
looking into his face. "I want you to call them."
Burleigh was not without a sense of humor, and his bashfulness had
yielded in a great degree to the pleasure which Miss Plant's presence
gave him. He accepted the command literally, and roared, "Them! them!"
so lustily that the rocky banks of the brook re-echoed.
"Mercy!" cried his companion. "You've lungs like organ-bellows. I'll
get out and look for them before I'm stone-deaf."
"If 'them' means Will and Ease Apthorpe," Burleigh said, "there they
come now."