CHAPTER II.

TEACHERS AND PREACHERS.

“_Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave_ _A paradise for a sect._”—_Keats, “Hyperion” (1820 Edition)._

The sultry heat of the April noon rose in tremulous vibrations from the barnyard, next day, when for a moment, absolute silence prevailed. From beneath his sun-splashed hat the shaded face of Bard scowled into the blue shadow of the barn where Mauney stood indolently biting at the end of a wisp of timothy.

“What are yuh mopin’ about?” Bard called sharply. “Wake up! I don’t want no more o’ this here mopin’, understand me. The mare is sold and that’s the end of it. Shake a leg, there, and go hitch up Charlie. You’ve got to drive up to Beulah an’ get this here cheque into the bank afore it closes. D’juh hear?”

Past the end of the kitchen Mauney’s eye caught the retreating figure of his pony being led up the clay road behind the preacher’s buggy. His dishevelled auburn hair was stuck to his glistening forehead, and his clear blue eyes burned with an emotion that gave a bitter firmness to his lips. Before he could pull himself from his mood his father had come with rapid strides near him.

“Are you goin’ to move?” he fiercely demanded, his eyes glaring hatred. “Or am I goin’ to move yuh?”

Mauney calmly ignored his threat, while his eyes focused indifferently on the cheque in his father’s hand.

“D’yuh want me to mess up yer pretty face?” fumed Bard.

“I’m not just a slave of yours,” said Mauney deliberately, with a perceptible straightening of his body, as he turned to enter the stable door.

“You better move, young fellow,” said Bard, following him. “Here, take this cheque. And mind you get back in time to finish that fence or you’ll work in the moon-light.”

Mauney drove off in a dazed state of mind, wondering if his lot were but typical of human life in general, or if, by some chance he had been born into an exceptionally disagreeable home. He wondered what particular power enabled him to bear the insulting treatment invariably accorded him and whether that mysterious force would always continue to serve him. He had tried faithfully to look for likeable traits in his father’s character. He admired his strength of purpose—that terrible will that drove him through his long days of labor under hot suns—and felt that he was very capable. He knew that the farm would always be skilfully run under his father’s guidance, but this was the full statement of his filial faith. For beyond this cold admiration there was no attraction, no hint of warm regard.

At the end of the swamp the road curved to the left in a broad bend, giving a view of the shining tin roofs of Beulah, on a hill two miles before him. Nearby stood the Brick School House, with its little bell-tower, its white picket fence, its turnstile and bare-worn playground, the neat pile of stove-wood by the weather-stained shed at the rear, and the two outhouses by the corners of the lot. As he drew nearer the bell rocked twice, giving out its laconic signal for noon recess. In a moment a scramble of children with tin lunch-pails poured forth, running to selected spots under the bare maples.

“Hello, Mauney,” came a familiar voice from the door as he passed.

“Are you going up to the village, Miss Byrne?” he asked, lifting his hat.

“I’d like to?” she smiled.

“Come on,” he invited, cramping the horse to the other side, that she might more conveniently enter.

Miss Jean Byrne was a graceful young woman whose manner breathed unusual freshness. Her oval face possessed a certain nun-like beauty, chiefly by reason of her deep hazel eyes, quiet emblems of a devotional disposition. Her good color, however, and an indulgent fulness of lips, saved her face from an ultra-spirituality and her low, contralto laughter neutralized a first impression of asceticism. Mauney had never noticed that she was really quite a large woman, although he had been a pupil in her school for two years.

“How goes it, Mauney?” she asked, having noticed an unwonted sadness in his face, usually so bright.

“Not too badly. I’m enjoying that book you lent me,” he replied, with a smile.

“Come now—something’s wrong,” she said, searching his face as they drove along together.

“I’m feeling sore to-day,” he admitted, striking the wheel with his whip. “My father sold my pony to the preacher, and I’m not going to forgive him. It was my pony. He hadn’t any right to sell it.”

After a pause he turned and looked into her eyes. “I guess we all have our little troubles, Miss Byrne, eh?”

She understood him. In fact Miss Byrne held him more intimately in her quiet thoughts than he surmised, and more intimately than their ages and contact would have explained. She had often stood over him, during his last term, observing the mould of his shoulders under his loose, flannel shirt, instead of the book on his desk. She had often lost the thread of her instructions in the unconscious light of his blue-eyed day-dreaming. Then, too, his English compositions had displayed such merit that she had marvelled at his ability, and wondered whether environment were really as strong an influence as heredity in forming a pupil’s mind. Every teacher who is fortunate has one pupil who becomes the oasis in the daily desert of thankless toil, the visible reward of seeds sown in darkness. Mauney Bard was easily her oasis and reward. She always maintained that there were only two classes of pupils who impressed their teacher, the noisy, empty ones and the “dog” kind. The canine qualities she meant were silent faithfulness and undemonstrative affection.

Her wistful eyes softened with delicate sympathy as she glanced at his clean profile, and she thought of a sculptor’s marble. But whenever he turned toward her, it was the trusting simplicity of a youth talking with his mother. Mother! It was forced upon her, so that her breast warmed with medleys of sensation.

“Oh, what’s wrong with your hand?” she asked.

“Nothing much—I jabbed it on a nail yesterday.”

“Aren’t you doing anything for it?”

“Annie’s the doctor—that’s our hired girl.”

“Mauney Bard, you go straight to the doctor’s,” she said. “You might lose your arm, or even your life, if it becomes inflamed.”

He looked at her quizzically, and then nodded with a smile. “All right,” he agreed.

The horse broke into a walk at the foot of the big hill, leading up to the main street of Beulah. At the top the thoroughfare with its bare archway of maples came into view. The houses were characteristic of the residential section, set back beyond lawns and well separated, although here and there small grocery stores were to be seen with well-filled windows and idle, white-aproned proprietors. As they passed the double-windowed front of the Beulah weekly, the blatant explosions of a gasoline engine indicated that the journal was on press. A little further along a lamp-post bearing a large coal-oil lamp stood by the board side-walk, with a signboard nailed at right angles to the street, displaying in large black letters the name “Doctor Horne,” while the physician’s residence, a neat stone house with black pencilled mortar, looked out from a grove of basswood trees.

“Do you know Dr. Horne?” she enquired.

He nodded.

“There he is now,” she said, “He’s certainly an odd genius. Look at the sleeves!”

Horne was a big, solid man of sixty, with jet-black hair under his grey cloth cap, and jet-black, bushy eyebrows raised airily. His neat, black moustache was pushed forward in a mock-careless pout. He walked with great speed, as if engrossed completely in his thoughts, but with an air of picturesque indifference, as if his thoughts were entirely lightsome. At intervals he tugged at his coat sleeves, first one and then the other, a nervous eccentricity of no significance except that it kept his coat cuffs near his elbows, displaying his white shirt sleeves for the amusement of other pedestrians. Beulah never tired of this sexagenarian bachelor. He drove a horse as black as his own hair and demanded the same degree of speed from it as from himself, namely, the limit. When starting on a country call he would jump into his buggy and race to the border of the village, beyond which the journey was made more leisurely, while on his return the whip was not taken from its holder until the houses came in sight. The Beulahite pausing on the street to watch him would remark with a chuckle:

“There goes Doc. Horne, hell-for-leather!”

Mauney left Miss Byrne at the post-office, visited the bank, and drove directly back to the doctor’s, hitching his horse to the lamp-post. The office was a smaller portion of the house at one side, which Mauney approached. He rang the bell.

“Come in out of that!” immediately came the doctor’s heavy voice.

Mauney stepped into an office furnished with several leather chairs, a desk on which reposed a skull, a safe holding on its top a stuffed loon, an open bookcase filled with dusty volumes of various colors, and a phalanx of bottles against one wall from which radiated a strong odor of drugs. He looked about in vain for the doctor.

“Sit down, young fellow!” came a stern command from the adjoining surgery. In a moment or two the big physician bustled out, and, stopping in front of Mauney’s chair, stared down at him savagely as if he were the rankest intruder, meanwhile smoking furiously and surrounding himself with blue cigar smoke.

“Say!” he said, at length, jerking the cigar roughly from his mouth. “Who the devil are you?”

“Mauney Bard!”

“Oh, God, yes! Of course you are. Of course you are!” Horne spluttered, walking impulsively to the bookcase and rivetting his attention on the binding of a book.

“So you’re one of Seth Bard’s curses, eh?” he said, at length, in a preoccupied tone, with his back still turned to Mauney. “Been fighting?”

“No, doctor, I ran a nail in my hand,” he replied, with a smile.

Horne shuffled a pace to his left to transfer his keen attention to another bookbinding, which so completely absorbed him that Mauney was sure he had forgotten his patient. After what seemed five minutes, Horne turned about and, going to his desk, plumped himself down into a swivel-chair. His eye-brows nearly touched the line of his hair as his black eyes stole to the corner of his lids in a sly study of his patient.

“Nail eh? Rusty?”

Mauney commenced undoing the bandage.

“Hip! Hip!” admonished Horne. “I didn’t tell you to take that off. Wait till I tell you, young fellow. Lots of time. Rusty?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Come in here!”

Horne jumped up and went into the surgery. He quickly cut away the crude bandage and merely glanced at the wound.

“Soreness go up your arm, young fellow?”

“Yes, a little bit.”

“Uh—Hum!”

Horne clasped his arms behind his back and stamped dramatically up and down the surgery, rattling the instruments in their glass case by the wall. Suddenly he faced Mauney.

“How would you like to lose your arm, young man?” he asked seriously.

“I’d hate to.”

“Then I’m going to open up that wound freely,” he said, walking toward the instrument case. “Do you want to take chloroform?”

“No—I think I can stand it.”

Home selected a knife and pulling a hair out of his head tried its edge.

“She’s sharp—damned sharp!” he remarked, dropping the instrument into a basin of solution. “You think you can stand it, eh? Remember, I offered you chloroform.”

Presently he picked the knife out of the basin.

“Come here, you. Put your hand in that solution. Hold it there a minute. Does it nip?”

Mauney nodded.

“Well, let it nip. Now take your hand out. Stand up straight. Hold it out here.”

Horne pressed the blade deeply into the tissues, then withdrew it. Looking up into his patient’s face:

“Did you feel it?”

“Just a little, Doctor,” said Mauney, biting his lip.

“Don’t you faint, Bard!”

“I’m not going to.”

“Yes you are!”

“I am not!” insisted Mauney as the color returned to his face.

While the doctor put on a fresh dressing his manner altered. He whistled a snatch of a country dance.

“You look like your mother, boy,” he said more gently. “I looked after your poor mother. You were just a young gaffer then. She was a very fine woman. She was too damned good for your old man. I’ve told Seth that before now.”

“Will this need to be dressed again?” Mauney asked, as they later stood in the waiting room.

“Yes. On Saturday.”

Horne’s attention was drawn to the figure of a woman approaching the office.

“Hello!” he said softly. “Surely Sarah Tenent isn’t sick. I’ll bet she’s peddling bills for the revival services.”

The bell rang.

“All right, come in, Mrs. Tenent.”

“How do you do, doctor?” she said, very deferentially, as she entered.

“Just about as I choose, Mrs. Tenent,” he replied coldly, watching her minutely.

She took a large white paper notice from a pile on her arm.

“Will you serve the Lord,” she asked with great soberness, “by hanging this in your office, doctor?”

He glanced over it and read aloud, very hurriedly: “Revival Services, Beulah Church, commencing Sunday. Rev. Francis Tooker and Rev. Archibald Gainford, successful evangelists, will assist the new pastor, Rev. Edmund Tough. Special Singing. Come.”

He passed it back to her and shook his head.

“No, no—not here, I’d never hang it here. I have patients who are not of thy fold, Mrs. Tenent. My function is to cure the sick. That sign would make some of them sicker. No, no.”

The woman left the office in silent disapproval of Horne’s attitude. Mauney put on his hat and was leaving the office, when the doctor appeared in the door behind him.

“Hold on, young chap!” he commanded. “Wait you! Didn’t I see you driving into the village with a young lady?”

“I didn’t think you noticed us,” laughed Mauney.

“Who was she?”

“Miss Byrne. She teaches at the Brick School.”

“Yes, yes. Of course she does. Fine young lady,” he said, studying Mauney with much lifting of his brows and pouting of his lips. “But you’re too young, Bard. Why don’t you get somebody your own age?”

“Oh,” Mauney said quickly, while his face flushed; “She’s probably got a beau. It isn’t me, anyway, doctor.”

Horne, greatly amused at the emotional perturbation of his patient, chuckled, while his black eyes sparkled.

“Get along with you, Bard!” he said, “Get along home with you and don’t forget to come up on Saturday, mind!”

The revival meetings became the talk of the countryside. Beulah, composed for the most part of retired farmers, had unusual leisure in which to think—a leisure captured by the glamor of religion, which was the strongest local influence. Although the village was a century old it had preserved, with remarkable success, the puritanism of the pioneer period, partly because it enjoyed so little touch with the commercial energies of the nation at large, and partly because the local churches had remained diligent in spiritual service. But in a population so uniformly composed of idle folk, the general view-point lay itself open to become biased. There was too much emphasis on the ghostly estate and too little on the need of practical endeavor. Beulah had forgotten long since that the Church must have its lost world, else it becomes unnecessary, and to the average citizen, lulled as he was by surfeit of beatific meditation, the board sidewalks had begun to take on an aureate tinge, the houses, a pearly lustre. The spiritual concern of the religiously eager Beulahite had in it, unfortunately, no concept of national character, but was pointed sharply at the individual. His sense of personal security was only less unhealthy than his over-bearing interest in the soul welfare of his neighbor. Saved by repeated redemptions himself, he remained strangely skeptical of the validity of the phenomenon in others. Hence, at fairly regular intervals, a general village consciousness of sin developed, becoming insistently stronger until it found its logical expression—the revival meeting.

Mauney, during the next week, listened to the religious talk of the community with mild curiosity. Mrs. McBratney, the pious mother of David, said to him one afternoon from the side of her buggy:

“I hope you’ll attend the revival meetings, Mauney. Your mother would want you to go. We are praying for great things.

“I’ve been on my knees for the young people,” she continued, “and I believe David has got conviction.”

Tears suddenly filled her eyes and her chin quivered with such tremulous emotion as to embarrass Mauney, who could fancifully imagine that David had been smitten by a plague.

“I believe he will be converted,” she managed to say, before her voice broke into a sob, “and I pray the Lord will show you the light, too, Mauney.”

He felt that perhaps it would have been good form to say “Thank you,” for he was sure her intentions were sterling, but he resented her reference to his mother, who seemed to him, in memory, a creature too much of sunshine and peace to be associated with anything so dolefully emotional.

He had never been a regular attendant at church. He remembered having sat beside his mother many times in the auditorium listening to unintelligible sermons and strenuous anthems. But from the day, five years ago, when as a chief mourner he had sat blankly stupefied, hearing comforting words that failed to comfort, and music whose poignant solemnity froze him with horrid fear, he had never been invited either by desire or family suggestion to return.

By the second week of the meetings David McBratney was reported to have been converted. He had stopped coming to see William as had been his custom. Neighbors said there could be no doubting the genuineness of his reformation for he had ceased chewing tobacco and was contemplating entry into the ministry of the Church. During supper at the Bard farm on Saturday evening a lull in the conversation was broken by a sarcastic laugh from William.

“Well, Dad, I guess they’ve got Dave,” he said. “Abe Lavanagh was tellin’ me to-day that Dave has went forward every night this here week. I never figured he’d get religion.”

Bard philosophically chewed on the idea as he peered at the lamp through his narrow eyes.

“There is just two kinds of people,” he asserted at length. “The fools and the damned fools. Now there’s a boy who’s got every chance of inheriting his old man’s farm. And I’m tellin’ you, Bill, it’s a purty good piece o’ land.”

“You bet.”

“Just about as good as is bein’ cultivated this side of Lockwood. There ain’t a stone left in the fields, but what’s piled up in the fences. William Henry has slaved this here thirty years—got the mortgage cleaned up—and that barn o’ his, Bill, why you couldn’t build it to-day for five thousand!”

“No, nor six, Dad.”

“Then look at the machinery the old man’s got. I’m tellin’ yuh Dave ain’t goin’ to drop into nothing like that, agin. William Henry must be seventy!”

“May be seventy-one, Dad.”

“Anyhow he ain’t goin’ to last a great while longer. If I was Dave I’d forget this religion business. ’Taint goin’ to get him nowhere. Ain’t that right, Snowball?”

The hired man, having finished supper, was sitting back drowsily, but at the sound of his name he winked his eyes cautiously.

“I dunno,” he said, “I don’t never bother much about religion, so I don’t!”

In Dr. Horne’s office that week the subject of the revival came up while Mauney was having his hand dressed.

“Some queer people here in this one-horse town!” mused Horne. “Do you remember George Pert who died a couple or three years ago?”

“Lived down by the toll-gate?”

“That’s him. Lazy as twelve pigs. Use to lie abed till noon. Wife kept a market garden. Never paid his doctor’s bills. Yes, sir! George Pert! He got a cancer of the bowel, poor devil. Sick. Pretty far gone. I went in one day and found preacher Squires sitting by the bed. ‘Well, Mr. Pert,’” (Horne’s voice assumed an amusing clerical solemnity) “‘Are you trusting in the Lord?’ George nods his head. ‘Yes’ says he, ‘I’m so sartin o’ salvation, that if only one person in Beulah is going to heaven I know it’s me!’

“They’re a nosey bunch, here!” Horne continued, as he wound a bandage on Mauney’s hand. “Self-satisfied! Let your light so shine—good! But don’t focus your light into a red-hot spot to burn out your neighbor’s gizzard. Last night Steve Moran came into the office and sat down. ‘Doctor’ says he, ‘I just came in to see if your feet were resting on the Rock.’ Says I, ‘Steve, you blackguard, you owe me five dollars from your wife’s last confinement, fifteen years ago. If you don’t go to hell out o’ here, you’ll be resting in a long black box!’”

Mauney was surprised how much people talked about the revival. Enthusiasts carried out from the meetings, by their words and manner, an infectious fervor that directed the curious attention of others to the thing that was happening night by night in the Beulah church. Finally, on Sunday evening, he decided to see it for himself and drove to town. The church sheds were filled to overflowing so that he tied old Charlie to a fence post in the yard. Through the colored windows he heard the voluminous roar of voices lifted in the cadence of a hymn. The church was crowded. The vestry at the entrance was full of waiting people and, through one of the doors leading to the auditorium, he glimpsed a sea of heads. At the farther end of the great room, in a low gallery, sat the choir, facing him, and below them on the pulpit platform three preachers were seated in red plush chairs. The seated congregation were singing an unfamiliar hymn whose rhythm reminded him of march music he had heard bands playing in Lockwood. Ushers were carrying in chairs to accommodate the overflow.

David McBratney, carrying an armful of red hymn books touched Mauney on the shoulder.

“Here’s a book,” he whispered, proffering one. “I’ll get you a seat in a few minutes. Glad to see you here, Mauney.”

McBratney’s face glowed with a strange luminosity, puzzling to Mauney, and his speech and manner were quickened by nervous tension. Presently he led the way to a chair in the aisle.

At the end of a stanza one of the preachers jumped suddenly to his feet and interrupted the organ.

“You’re not half singing!” he shouted angrily. “You can do better than that. If you haven’t more voice than that, how do you expect the Lord to hear your words of praise? Now, on the next stanza, let yourself out. Ready!”

He raised both arms high above his head and, as the organ commenced, brought them to his side with such force that he was compelled to take a step forward to regain his balance. His words had the effect he desired, for a deafening volume of sound rose and fell quickly to the lilt of the march-music, suggesting to Mauney the image of neatly-uniformed cadets with stiffened backs and even steps, moving along Lockwood streets on a holiday.

When the hymn ended, a soft hand touched Mauney on the arm and, looking to his right, he saw Jean Byrne seated in the end of the oaken pew directly next to him. She was just letting her closed hymnal drop into her lap.

“Glad to see you,” she whispered, guarding her lips with her gloved hand.

One of the preachers rose slowly from his chair. He was a stout man of fifty, mild-appearing and pleasant, with clean-shaven face and grey hair. He walked forward to the edge of the carpeted platform, rested his elbow on the side of the pulpit and raised his face to gaze slowly over the quieting congregation. “My dear friends,” he said in soft, silver tone, “I thank God for the hymn we have just been singing. It has been indeed very inspiring. Brother Tooker and myself have been in your little town for two weeks now, and have grown so fond of the people that we view to-night’s meeting with inevitable feelings of regret, because, so far as we can see the divine guidance, it will be our last night with you. But we have also feelings of hope, because we are praying that there may be a great turning to God as a result of this meeting.”

As he paused to shift his weight slowly to his other foot and clasp his hands behind his frock coat, the congregation was silent. Only the sound of a horse stamping in the shed could be heard.

“During our fortnight with you,” he continued, “many souls have been led to the Cross. We thank God for that. But there are many more who are still living in sin—some of them are here to-night.”

As his glance shifted over the mass of upturned faces, Mauney fancied he paused perceptibly as he looked his way.

“It is to you, who are in sin, that we bring a message of hope. You have only to take God at his word, who sent His Son to save that which was lost.”

“Amen!” came a vigorous response from an old man in the front pew.

“You have only to believe on Him who is righteous and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

“Amen!” from near the back.

“Amen!” also, from the side, half-way up.

At this juncture a woman in the body of the auditorium burst forth, in good voice, singing the first verse of “Though your sins be as scarlet,” whereat the preacher indulgently acquiesced, and waved for the congregation to join her. At the end of the first stanza he raised his hand.

“The lesson for to-night is taken from the first chapter of the beloved Mark.” As he carefully read the passage of scripture the ushers were busy leading in more people, so that, when he finished, the floor was entirely filled save for two narrow aisles, one on either side, leading from the back to the altar railing.

The Reverend Francis Tooker, as he walked confidently forward, was seen to be tall and thin, with a long, florid face and a great mass of stiff, black hair. He raised his large, bony hand.

“Let every head be bowed!” he commanded, sharply.

After a short invocation he commenced his discourse. He dealt at length with the experiences of the prodigal son, pictured in adequate language the depths of profligacy to which he had sunk, stressed the moment of his decision to return home, and waxed touchingly eloquent over the reception which his father accorded him.

“And now, people,” he said more brusquely, as he slammed shut the big pulpit Bible and ran his long fingers nervously through his hair. “You’ve got a chance to do what that boy did. You’ve been acting just the way he acted—don’t dare deny it! You’ve been wallowing in the dirt with the pigs, and you’re all smeared up. What are you going to do about it?”

The audience, keyed up to the former flow of his unfaltering eloquence, were now mildly shocked by the informality of his pointed question. He walked to the very edge of the platform while his eyes grew savage and his face red.

“What are you going to do about it?” he shouted, clenching his fists and half-squatting. Then, rising quickly, he hastened to the other side of the pulpit. “Are you going to arise and go to your Father? Or are you going to keep on mucking about with the pigs? Don’t forget that for anyone of you this night may be your last. To-night, perhaps you” (he pointed), “or you,” (he pointed again) “may be required to face God. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to die forgiven of your sins like a man, or are you going to shut your ears to the word of God and die like any other pig?”

No sound interrupted the intense silence. No one moved. Even the flickering lamps seemed to steady their illumination to a glaring, yellow uniformity.

Suddenly his manner altered. Moving to a position behind the pulpit he rested his elbows on the Bible and folded his hands together out over the front edge of the book-rest, while his voice assumed a quiet, conversational tone.

“Remember that on this night, the twentieth day of April, 1914, you were given an opportunity to come out full-breasted for God. I have discharged my duty. The rest remains for you to do. If you are sorry for your sins, say so. If you regret the kind of life you’ve been leading, confess it. Come out and get washed off clean. The invitation is open. The altar awaits to receive you.”

As he pointed to the altar railing, his black eyes flashed hypnotically.

“Those who have sinned, but are repentant and seek redemption, please stand.”

For about ten seconds a great inertia possessed the seated congregation. Then two men stood up near the front of the pews, followed soon after by groups of both men and women in various parts of the auditorium, until, at length, only a sporadic rising here and there marked a new mood of hesitancy.

“While the choir sings,” the preacher said softly, “I will ask you to steal away to the foot of the altar. The choir will please sing the first two verses of ‘Come Ye Disconsolate,’ and you who have, by standing, thus signified your desire for salvation, will move quietly forward and kneel by the railing.”

As the slow, full chords of the hymn began the preacher’s voice kept calling “Come away, Brother,” and the standing penitents sought the narrow aisles and moved slowly forward to kneel with their heads touching the oaken railing. The Rev. Archibald Gainford and the Rev. Edmund Tough descended from the platform to the crescent-shaped altar space and, bending down, spoke words of comfort to the suppliants.

As the choir stopped and the organ notes faded, the exhorter produced a silver watch and examined it, hurriedly.

“If we had more time,” he said, “how many more would like to come forward? Please stand.”

A dozen or more rose to their feet.

“Well,” he said, with a smile, as he returned his watch to his pocket, “we have plenty of time. Come out, brother!”

Caught by this subtle snare, many of the presumably wavering individuals found it impossible to refuse his invitation, while a few sat down again.

When the meeting eventually drew to a close, after a long hymn, sung with the same exciting rhythm as the first one, Mauney rose with the rest and moved impatiently toward the door, walking beside Jean Byrne and talking to her of obvious matters. Her face, he noticed, was flushed and her eyes shining with unusual brightness from delicately moist lids, while her voice seemed husky and uncertain. The auditorium emptied slowly. The steps leading down from the front doorway to the walk presented the customary Sunday night groups of village beaux waiting to accompany their sweethearts home, or perhaps stroll with them through quiet, moonlit streets.

Beulah village council, anxious to keep taxes at a minimum, had never provided street-lighting, so that pedestrians, on dark nights, carried lanterns, unless they were lovers, in which case they relied either on moonlight or familiarity with the local geography.

Jean Byrne had come to the village in the buggy of Mr. and Mrs. Fitch with whom she boarded on the Lantern Marsh road, but Mauney, being alone, invited her to drive down with him. She accepted and soon they were off together.

“I could have kicked over a pew in there to-night,” said Mauney at length, tersely.

“I knew you wouldn’t like it,” she said. “Personally I think it’s very unreal. Perhaps some people derive good from it, though.”

“Perhaps. But it hasn’t any connection with real life, Miss Byrne. I can’t help feeling you’ve got to let the common daylight into things.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s easy enough to see how they get pulled into it,” he went on. “There’s a sort of excitement about it. I don’t think one person by himself could get so excited.”

“You mean there’s a mob consciousness?”

“Yes, exactly—a lot of minds rubbing each other, like.”

“I believe you’ve hit it, Mauney,” she said. “I never thought of it like that before. How did you manage to think that out?”

“Well, I’ve always noticed, if I’m in a crowd, that it’s hard for me to stay just as I am when I’m alone. Now, I hate people who are always chirping like chipmunks—you’ll meet them at socials and dances. They don’t say anything that matters and might better keep their mouths shut. But if I get with them I’ll notice how it affects me, for after I leave I feel sort of weak.”

“You must enjoy observing things like that, Mauney.”

“No, I don’t enjoy it,” he replied. “That’s just what I’m up against the whole time at home. My father and brother and the hired girl keep up an endless rattle of talk, all the time, about things that aren’t important. I keep quiet on purpose because I don’t want to talk about them.”

“What sort of things do they discuss?”

“Oh—the price of eggs, what somebody did with a certain horse, who married so-and-so and who she was before she did it, and whether the preacher’s wife is human, and then they’re always teasing Snowball; but he isn’t such a fool as they think he is.”

For a moment Miss Byrne studied Mauney’s face, bright with moonlight.

“Well, what kind of things do you think are important?” she asked. “I mean what would you like to discuss, if you had your own way at home?”

“I couldn’t say exactly,” he said, reflectively. “But I’m discontented all the time, and feel ignorant. I want an education. I’m interested in history, most.”

While she listened to his words, Miss Byrne was enjoying the landscape as they drove slowly along. It was no new thing for her to feel fresh attractions toward Mauney, but to-night, for some reason that she did not seek, she felt uncomfortably warm toward him, and presently her soft, gloved hand pressed his hand tenderly, and remained holding it. It came as a surprise to him, and he glanced quickly at her face, across which the sharp shadow of her hat formed a line just above her lips. He could distinguish her eyes turned away in the direction of the moonlit fields she was admiring, and her pretty lips, vivid and tender, sent a strange thrill through his body. Although he made no effort to draw away his hand, he disliked the situation as something he could not grasp. Lying helplessly captured, his fingers felt the heat of her hand. She had stopped talking and he noticed her bosom moving as deeply as if she were asleep, but more quickly. He had the same feeling, for an instant, as in the meeting, of an outside power insidiously exciting his mind, but noticed with a definite sense of relief that they were nearing Fitch’s gate. In a moment he freed his hand from hers and pulled up the horse.

“Mauney!”

She spoke his name in a low, unsteady voice and pressed her hand against his arm. That she was not warning him of some sudden obstacle in their way, was clear, for, on looking toward the road, he saw nothing. When he turned to her, her hat was hiding her bowed face and her hand was relaxing slowly—so very slowly—and falling from his arm. The emotion that caused her breathing to be broken by queer, jerky pauses mystified him.

“Are you ill, Miss Byrne?” he ventured to ask, and noticed that his own voice was tremulous.

She shook her head slowly and began to climb out of the buggy. “No, Mauney boy,” she replied softly. “I was just lonesome, I guess. Goodnight!” He was puzzled. As he drove along he grew exceedingly impatient. There were so many things, he thought, beyond his comprehension.