Part 10

The Cove was no longer silent. Akin to the cadence of the echo, one with the ethereal essence of the sighing and lapsing of the mountain stream, the distant choiring of the congregation in the unseen “church-house” seemed some indigenous voice of the wilderness, so sylvan, so plaintive, so replete with subtle solemn intimations, was the sound. The juggler did not at once distinguish it. Then it came anew with more definite meaning, and it smote upon his quivering, lacerated sensibilities. Not that in the sophisticated life which he had quitted he had valued the Sunday sermons, or cared for the house of the Lord, save architecturally; but he had loved the Sunday singing; the great swelling reverberations of the organ were wont to stir his very heart-strings; and while he appreciated the scope and the worth of the standard compositions of sacred music, he was always keen and critically alert to hear any new thing, with due allowance for the lower level. And should the consecrated hour prove heavy to his spirits, did not his seat near the door, his hat at hand, his quick, noiseless, deft step, provide amply for his retreat? With the realization of the loss of his life, his home, poignantly renewed by the vibrations of the long, sustained, psalmodic tones, he would fain have turned back now; but the idea of the tedious solitude on the ledge of the river-bank, his heavy thoughts, the dread of the remonstrances and urgency of Mrs. Sims, constrained him. So he listened to the solemn rise and fall of the hymning in the Cove, rising and falling with the wind, with a new sense of aghast trouble fixed upon him, as if some spectral thing had revealed itself in the wilderness as he walked unwary.

Now and then, as they wended along amongst the great boles of the trees, with a narrow brook splashing and foaming in the deep rocky gully at one side of the red clay road, or losing itself in the densities of the laurel pressing so close on either hand, he caught in sudden turns through gaps in the foliage glimpses of the winding way further on and of Euphemia’s rose-hued dress. She was making but indifferent speed, despite the nimbleness of those “stout little brogans” that could cover the ground so fast when the will nerved them. Once he saw her standing in an open space and looking over the levels of the Cove below. Her pink bonnet was on her head now, its flaring brim pushed far back, and revealing that Pompadour-like effect of her fair hair which he so much admired, and here and there the large loose curls straying on her shoulders. With the short waist of her dress, and the long, straight, limp skirt, the picture-like suggestion was so complete that he had not one throb of that repulsion which ignorance and coarse surroundings occasioned his dilettante exactingness. He looked at her with a kindling eye, a new and alert interest. He began to seek to divine her mental processes. Why was she so reluctant? why did she hesitate? It could not be that the prospect of the dull droning of the preacher affrighted her; she was not wont to seek her ease, and he knew instinctively that her Spartan endurance would enable her to listen as long as the longest-winded of the saints could hold forth. Were her lips moving? He could not be sure at the distance. Was she saying once more, “Ef he speaks so agin afore ’em all, I dunno _how_ I kin abide it”?

He wondered who “he” could be--not Jack Ormsby, he was very sure. He wondered how Euphemia should have mustered the feeling to care. She seemed to him not complex, like other women. Her character was built of two elements, kindred and of the nature of complement one to the other,--pride and the love of power, the desire to rule. He had thought her possessed of as much coquetry at eighteen as her grandmother might have at eighty-five. And who was this “he” who brought that look of sweet solicitude, almost a quiver, to her lips?

“I should like to knock ‘him’ down,” he said to himself, humoring the theory of his pretended infatuation.

She turned suddenly, holding up her head with a look of determination, and went on as before.

Far afield might Pride seem, to be sure, in the humble ways of these few settlers in the wilderness, yet here he was in full panoply, to walk, almost visibly, alongside the simple mountain maiden, to enter even the church with her, and to take his seat beside her on one of the rude benches, already crowded.

Her mother and the juggler were later still. The diurnal aspect of the little gray unpainted building in the midst of the green shadows of the great forests, with the wide-spreading boughs of the trees interlacing above its roof, was not familiar to Royce, who had been here only after dark on the evening of his memorable entertainment. The array of yokes of oxen, of wagons, of saddle-horses hitched to the trees, had been noisily invisible in the blackness, on that occasion. The group of youths hanging about the sacred edifice outside had a prototype in the Sunday curbstone gatherings everywhere, and he at once identified the species. A vague haze of dust pervaded the interior; it gave a certain aspect of unreality to the ranks of intent figures on the benches, as if they were of the immaterial populace of dreams. A slant of the rich-hued sunlight fell athwart the room in a broad bar of a dully glamourous effect, showing a thousand shifting motes floating in the ethereal medium. A kindred tint glowed in the folds of a yellow bandanna handkerchief swinging from one of the dark brown beams, and served to advertise its loss by some worshiper at the last meeting. Not so cheerful was another waif from past congregations,--a baby’s white knitted woolen hood; it looked like the scalp of this shorn lamb of the flock, and was vaguely suggestive of prowling wolves. On the platform were four preachers who were participating in the exercises of the day. Two of muscular and massive form had an agricultural aspect rather than that of laborers in a spiritual vineyard, and were clad in brown jeans with rough, muddy cowhide boots; they were dogmatic of countenance, and evidently well fed and pampered to the verge of arrogance; they sat tilted back in their splint-bottomed chairs, chewing hard on their quids of tobacco, and wearing a certain easy, capable, confident mien as of an assurance of heavenly matters and a burly enjoyment of worldly prominence. They listened to a hymn which the third--whom Royce recognized as old Parson Greenought--was “lining out,” as he stood at the table, with a kind of corroborative air as became past masters in all spiritual craft. They had traveled the road their colleague sought to point out in metre, and were not to be surprised at any of its long-ago-surmounted obstacles. At the end of every couplet, each of them, while still seated, burst into song with such patent disregard of the pitch of the other, the whole congregation blaring after, that the juggler quaked and winced as he sat among the men,--the women being carefully segregated on the other side of the church,--and had much ado to set his teeth and avoid wry faces. The fourth minister was not singing. He sat with his head bowed in his hand, his elbow supported by the arm of his chair, as if lost in silent prayer. The juggler watched his every motion as for deliverance from the surging waves of sound, permeated with that rancorous independence of unison, which floated around him, for he divined that this was the orator of the day. This young man lifted his face expectantly after a time,--a keen, thin, pale face, with black hair and dark gray eyes, and an absorbed ascetic expression. But Parson Greenought still “lined out” the sacred poetry, which was hobbling as to metre, and often without connection and bereft of meaning; and with a wide opening of the mouth and a toss of the head, the two musically disposed pastors resolutely led the singing, and the congregation chorused tumultuously. It was in some sort discipline for Brother Absalom Tynes to be obliged to sit in silence and wait while stanza followed stanza and theme was added to theme in the multifarious petition psalmodically preferred. The words were on his lips; his heart burned for utterance; he quivered with the very thought of his pent-up message. He was of that class of young preachers who have gone into the vineyard early, and with a determination to convert the world single-handed. Nothing but time and Satan can moderate their enthusiasms; but time and Satan may be trusted. Too much zeal,--misdirected, young, unseemly, foolish,--Brother Tynes had been given to understand, was his great fault, his besetting sin; it would do more harm than good, and he had been admonished to pray against it. Perhaps the exhibition of it grated on his elder _confrères_ as an unintentional rebuke, beneath which they secretly smarted, remembering a time long ago--but of short duration, it may be--when they too had been fired with wild enthusiasm and were full of mad projects, and went about turning every stone and wearying even the godly with the name of the Lord. So, to use the phrase of the politicians, they “paired off” with Satan, as it were; forgetting that zeal is like gunpowder, once damped, forever damaged, and that their own had caught no spark from any chance contiguous fire this many a long day.

That singing praises to the Lord should be a means of “putting down” Brother Tynes savors of the incongruous; but few human motives are less complex than those which animated Parson Greenought as he combined the edification of the congregation, the melody of worship, and the reduction of the pride of the pulpit orator, whose fame already extended beyond Etowah, and even to Tanglefoot Cove. The science of “putting down” any available subject is capable of utilizing and amalgamating unpromising elements, and as Parson Greenought cast up his eyes while he sang, and preserved a certain sanctimonious swaying of the body to and fro with the rhythm of the hymn he “lined out,” the triumph of “simulating” these several discordant mental processes cost him no conscious effort and scarcely a realized impulse.

The juggler looked about him with a sort of averse curiosity; the traits of ignorant people appealed in no respect to his somewhat finical prepossessions. Among his various knacks and talents was no pictorial facility, nor the perception of the picturesque as a mental attitude. He resented the assumption of special piety in the postures and facial expression here and there noticeable in the congregation; he could have singled out those religionists whom he fancied thus vying with one another. One broad-shouldered and stalwart young man was given to particularly conspicuous demonstrations of godliness, exemplified chiefly in sudden startling “A-a-a-mens” sonorously interpolated into the reading, a breathy, raucous blare of song as he lifted up his voice,--inexpressibly off the key,--and a sanctimonious awkward pose of the head with half-shut eyes. The juggler could have trounced this saint with hearty good will, for no other reason than that the man took pleasure in showing how religious he was! Only Mrs. Sims exhibited no outward token of her happy estate as a “perfesser,” but her salvation was considered a very doubtful matter, and even that she had “found peace” problematical, since she did not believe in special judgments alighting on the mistaken or the unconverted, and had surmised that the Lord would find out a way to excuse “them that had set on the mourners’ bench” in vain. “Ef you hev jes’ started out,” she would say to those unfortunate wights whom the members were allowed to persecute with advice and exhortation as they cowered before the throne of grace, “don’t _you_ be ’feard. The Lord will meet ye more ’n halfway. Ef ye don’t see him, ’tain’t because he ain’t thar. Jes’ start out. That’s all!”

But Parson Greenought had warned her to forbear these promissory pledges of so easy a salvation. For he wanted sinners all to gaze on that lake of brimstone and fire which none but him could so successfully navigate; and now and again he had his triumph when some wretch in agonies of terror would screech out that he or she was “so happy! so happy!” since to be “happy” by main force, so to speak, was the alternative he offered to the prospect of weltering there forever. So Jane Ann Sims held her peace, and preserved a fat and placid solemnity of countenance, and sang aloud in such wheezy audacity that the juggler could hear her breathe across the church.

Only one countenance was doubtful, wistful, its muscles not adjusted to the discerning gaze of the congregation. Euphemia Sims sat near a window, the tempered light on the soft contours of her face. The flaring pink sunbonnet framed the rising mass of fair hair; she gazed absently down at the floor; her delicate young shoulders were outlined upon the masses of green leaves fluttering above the sill hard by. Her look so riveted Royce’s attention that he sought to decipher it. What did she fear? There was a suggestion of wounded pride, most appealing in its incongruity with her normal calm, or hardness, or unresponsiveness, or whatever he might choose to call the nullity of that habitual untranslated expression. Why was she so grave, so sad? The sudden lifting of her long lashes and the intent fixing of her eyes directed his attention to the pulpit, and there he perceived that Brother Tynes was standing at last, beginning to elucidate his text. The juggler, relieved of the torture of the singing, braced his nerves for the torture of the sermon. Here he might have had a recourse in his facility of abstracting his mind. He had sat through many a sermon in this unreceptive state. He had cast up accounts, preserving a duality of identity in the secular activity of his mental faculties and the sabbatical decorum of his face and listening attitude. Between firstly and secondly he had once chased down three vagrant cents,--an error which had cost him fifteen hours of labor out of regular working time,--without which he could not balance his accounts. Once--it was during the Christmas holidays--he had utilized the peroration of a long and searching discourse by the bishop of the diocese to evolve certain new and effective figures for the german which he was to lead the next evening, and he had always esteemed that hour a most fruitful occasion. And again, during a special sermon, on foreign missions, he evolved a little melody, hardly more than a repetitious phrase, forever turning and coiling and doubling on itself, to which he adapted the artfully repetitious words of a dainty chansonnette of a celebrated French poet with such skill and delicate inspiration of fitness that he often sang it afterward in choice musical circles to unbounded applause. He had sat under the sound of the gospel all his life, and he was as thorough a pagan as any savage. But alack! his was not the only deaf ear in those congregations--more’s the pity! and while we send missionaries to China and the slums of our own great cities, our civilized heathen of the upper classes are out of reach.

It was perhaps because he now had no thought that would let him be friends with it--no sedulously conserved accounts, no _bizarreries_ of the german to devise, no inspiration of melody in mind (the psalmody of Etowah Cove was enough to strike the music in him dumb for evermore)--that he followed the direction of Euphemia’s gaze and composed himself to listen.

He encountered a sudden and absolute surprise. The sermon was one of those examples of a fiery natural eloquence which sometimes serve to show to the postulant of culture how endowment may begin at the point where training leaves off. The rapt silence of Brother Tynes’s audience and their kindling faces attested the reciprocal fervors of his enthusiasms. He was awkward and unlettered, with uncouth gestures and an uncultivated voice, but there burned like a white fire in his pale, thin face a faith, an adoration, an exultation, which transfigured it. He had a fine and lofty ideal in the midst of the contortions of his ignorance, which he called doctrines, and presently he spoke only and in proteanwise of the mystery and the mercy of Redeeming Love. The idea of reward, of punishment, of the hope of heaven and the fear of hell, did not seem to enter into his scheme of salvation. He sought to grasp the realization of an infinite sacrificial love, and he adjured his people to fall on their faces, with their faces in the dust, before the sacred marvel of the Atonement. The text “He first loved us” rang out again and again like a clarion call. Its simple cogency seemed to need no argument. How could the politic and mercenary motives of securing exemption from pain or the purchase of pleasure enter herein? That phase of striking a fair bargain, so controlling to sordid human nature, was for the moment preposterous. Many a one of his simple hearers knew the joy of unrequited labor for love’s sweet sake, of self-denial, of being hungry or tired or cold, in sacrificial content. More than one mother could hardly have given a practical reason why the crippled child or the ailing one should be the dearest, when its nurture could rouse no expectation that it might live to work for her sake. More than one gray-haired son loved and honored the paralytic troublous old dotard in the warmest corner of the fireside all the more for his helplessness and the toil for his sake. Love makes duty dear. Love makes service light. In some one phase or other they all knew that love is for love’s own sake.

And this was all that he demanded in the great prophetic name of Christ even from the dread heights of Calvary, “My son, give me thine heart.”

Now and again sobs punctuated the discourse. Before there was any call for mourners to approach the bench, an old white-headed man, who had resisted many an appeal to his fears on behalf of his soul, rose and shambled forward; others silently joined him where he sat looking at them over his shoulder, very conscious, a trifle crest-fallen, if not ashamed, thus to be forced from the stanch defenses which he had defiantly held through many a siege. The assisting ministers occasionally cleared their throats and shifted their crossed legs, with an expression of countenance which might be interpreted as deprecation of the factitious excitements of a sensational sermon.

Euphemia Sims hearkened with a face of perfect decorum and superficial receptiveness. In her heart, rather than in her mind, she missed the true interpretation of the discourse. It did not seem to her so wonderful that she should be of a degree of importance to merit salvation. To be sure, in the sense of sharing original sin she supposed she was a sinner,--born so. But her life was ordered on a line of rectitude. Who kept so clean a house, who wove and milked and cooked and sewed so diligently, as she? Who led for years the spelling-class in this very house, whose brown walls might tell of her orthographic triumphs? And she had got her religion, too, and had even shouted one day, albeit a quavering, half-hearted hosanna. So she looked on with a calm post-graduate manner at the gathering penitents at the mourners’ bench. She too had passed through the preliminary stages of spiritual culture, and had taken her degree.

The juggler, as he listened, repeatedly felt that cold thrill which he was wont to associate with a certain effect on his critical faculties. Only a high degree of excellence in whatever line appealing to them was capable of eliciting it. He had experienced it in this measure hitherto only in the pleasurable suspense and excitement, so intense as to be almost pain, in the dress circle of some crowded play-house, at the triumphant moment of a masterpiece in the science of histrionism.

The orator was approaching his climax. To so great a height had he risen that it seemed as if his utmost power could not reach beyond; every moment tingled with the expectation that the next word must herald a collapse, when, suddenly throwing himself on his knees, he cried, “Lead us in prayer, Brother Haines,--lead us in prayer to the foot of the cross!”

There was a startled movement among his colleagues of the pulpit, charged with the prosaic suggestion that if they could they would deny Brother Haines--apparently a layman and seated among the congregation--the opportunity of thus publicly approaching the throne of grace; but the people already had crowded upon their knees, and a suppliant voice, pitched on a different key, rose into the stillness.

Euphemia Sims sat for a moment as if she were turned to stone. A light both of pain and of anger was in her eyes. Her lips were stern and compressed. She felt her blood beating hard in her temples. Then she remembered the exacting decorums of the exercise, gathered her trim pink skirts about her, softly knelt down, and Pride knelt down beside her.

She hardly heard the voice of Brother Owen Haines at first, as she put her dimpled elbows on the hard bench and held her head between her hands, so tumultuous were the surging pulses of humiliation and fear, and of love, too, in a way. And then it asserted itself upon her senses, although she was conscious first merely of tones, rich, mellow, of delicate modulations and lingering vibrations,--differing infinitely from the clear, incisive, somewhat harsh utterances of the preacher; but at last words came gradually to her comprehension.

Commonplace words enough, to be sure, to excite so poignant a torture of agonized expectation in that heart, beating as one with Pride’s, but presently too oft repeated. Now and again a raucously cleared throat amongst the row of kneeling ministers told of a nervous stress of anxiety as to these verbal stumblings and inadequacies. Sometimes a sentence was definitely broken, subject and predicate hopelessly disjointed. Sometimes a clause barely suggested the thought in the brain, an irremediable solution of continuity in its expression. More than once occurred a painful pause, in which the heads of certain newly regenerate sinners, easily falling again under mundane influences or the control of Satan, turned alertly from the prayerful attitudes still conserved by their bodies to covertly survey the spellbound suppliant. Like unto these was the juggler. He had, on the first summons to prayer, decorously assumed that half-crouching posture common to devotionally disposed men, which intimates to the surrounding spectators the fact of a certain polite subduement of mind and body to divine worship. Then, remembering suddenly the character of mountaineer which he designed to assimilate, he plumped down on his knees--for the first time in many a long day--like the rest. And if in the ensuing excitements his mind did not match his lowly attitude, the juggler is not the only man who has ever been upon his knees with no prayer in his heart. Taking license from the stir near at hand, he too shifted his posture that his furtive glance might command a view of the man thus deputed to pray.