VI.
TheCove 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 vibrationsof 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 ignoranceand 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 dunnohowI 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, washis 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 elderconfrèresas 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’tyoube ’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. Whatdid 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 repetitiousphrase, 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, nobizarreriesof 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, thinface 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. Lovemakes 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-classin 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 publiclyapproaching 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 andpredicate 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 themind 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 membraof 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 reiterateddenial, 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, butIain’t a-goin’ ter lendmyear 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 sopatient! 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 Iknows 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 youthfulconfrèrein 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?” hesaid 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 airallthe 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 momentthrough 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. Untilnow, 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. Howcould 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 chordcon tutta forza, and so to whispering and tentative tinklings again. He had turned his clear long-lashed blue eyes upon her, and she sawthe 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 deniedye, 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’ muchhowthe 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 hecombined 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-pitstairs, 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—OwenHaines, ye ain’t even got the power ter pray! The Lord denies ye that—even the power ter ax so ez—ter be fitten furfolkster 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’tfeelit,” she protested, very cautiously sobbing, for since her grief would not be denied,she indulged it under strict guard,—“ye don’tfeelit! 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 impulseand 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 kasetheyair 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 rackmy 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 hisnature, 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.