When Blatchley Turrentine had asserted this thing to her at Garyville, she found somewhere—after her first gust of unreasoning resentment was past—strength to disbelieve it utterly. But now it came again in more plausible guise. It gained likeliness from mere repetition. And hardest of all to bear, she was totally unsupported in her trust. She knew Creed, knew his love for her; yet to cling to it was to fly in the face of probabilities, and of everything and everybody about her. The lover who is silent, absent from her who loves him, at such a time, runs tremendous risks.
It was the set or turn of the year’s tide; sunsets were full, rich, yellow, and a great round, golden moon swung in the evening sky above the purple hills. A soft, purring monotone of little tree crickets in the night forest replaced the shriller insect chorus of midsummer. Garden patches, about through their summer yield, were a tangle of bubble-tinted morning glories, the open woods misty with wild asters, bell flowers trembling from the crevices of rocks; and along fence-row and watercourse turkey-pea, brook sunflower, queen of the meadow, and joepye-weed made gay the land.
Such farm work as remained was only garnering—fodder-pulling, pea-hay and millet hay to gather; with a little sowing of wheat, rye, or turf oats.
In late midsummer and early fall revivalists, preachers, and exhorters go through the Cumberlands holding protracted meetings in the little isolated churches. At this time of year the men as well as the women are most at liberty. To a people who live scattered through a remote and inaccessible region, who have few and scanty public gatherings and diversions, this season of religious activity offers the one emotional outlet which their conception of dignity permits them, and it is proportionately precious in their eyes. In addition to the women and the girls and boys, who usually make up the rank and file of religious gatherings elsewhere, here at this favoured season old fellows, heads of families and life-long pillars of the Church, give up their entire time to the meetings. The family is put into the waggon with a basket of dinner, and they make a day of it. Services hold as late as twelve and one o’clock, and after them this contained, stoic folk will go home through the woods, carrying pine torches, singing, shouting, laughing, sobbing.
Hiram Bohannon came into the two Turkey Tracks this year and held services at Brush Arbour church. He was very much in earnest, Brother Bohannon, a practical man with a rough native eloquence that spoke loud to his hearers.
Every afternoon the wild, sweet hymns rang out over the little cup-like valley in which Brush Arbour church stood. The month was extremely warm, and they used the outside brush arbour from which the schoolhouse-church received its name.
Judith went day and night in a feverish attempt to get away from herself and her sorrows. Even the fact that Elihu Drane was very much to the fore in these gatherings could not deter her. Sitting in the open there, her hands clasped upon her knee, her sombre eyes on the ground, or interrogating the distance with an unseeing stare, she would let hymn and sermon, prayer and the weeping and shouting which always close night meeting, go past her ears well-nigh unheard. Before those darkened, bereaved eyes, turn where they would, Love’s ever-renewed idyl of rustic courtship was enacting, since Big Meetin’ was the time and occasion of all the year for Corydon to encounter Phyllis, to stroll or sit beneath the trees with her, possibly to “carry her home.”
Andy and Jeff began taking the Lusk girls to meeting, and within a week’s time two very pale young men—the twins always acted in concert—stumbled up the earthen aisle between the puncheon seats to join the group at the mourners’ bench and ask for the prayers of the congregation. Brother Bohannon knew what quarry he had netted, and he hurried down at once, half in doubt that this was another scheme of these young daredevils to make game of his meeting. But both boys were on their knees, and the tears with which they began confessing to him past sins, the penitence of their shaking voices, proclaimed the genuineness of their conversion.
Cliantha and Pendrilla left behind—they had been sober church members since they were twelve years old—fluttered to Judith and demanded her instant attention to the miracle.
“Oh, Judith, ain’t it jest too good to be true?” panted little Cliantha. “Jeff never did lack anything of bein’ the best man that ever walked this earth except to jine the church—an’ now look at him!”