"O Lord," he groaned presently, "you know I'm not a wolf in sheep's clothing. More like I'm a sheep in a wolf's. Nobody understands it. Not even Luella. I want to tell her, and yet it seems like I hadn't ought to yet awhile. One minute I think one way and the next minute another. O Lord, I vow I don't know what to do!"
Then he caught the words of the song. It was not one of the usual hymns that floated out to him across the scent of the apple-boughs, but an old tune that he had heard years ago at a camp-meeting:
"John went down to the river Jordan!
John went down to the river Jordan!
John went down to the river Jordan
To wash his sins away!"
Little did the congregation think, as they lifted their lusty voices, that with the thread of that old tune lay the unravelling of Bap Sloan's riddle. For this is the scene it brought back to him, out of one of the earliest years of his childhood. There was a white face lying back among the pillows of a great bed, with carved posts and a valance of flowered chintz that smelled faintly of lavender. Somebody had lifted the big family Bible and laid it open on the edge of the bed, and he saw himself, a sober-faced little fellow in brown dress and apron, standing on tiptoe to look at the pictures. That white face on the pillows was his mother's, and this was the only recollection he had of her. Pointing to a queer old engraving, she had told him the story of John the Baptist, adding, with her thin hand on his curls: "And your name is John, too. Little John Baptist, though we don't call you by all of it. I named you that a purpose. Give you a good name, so 't you'd be a good man. Mebbe it's just a whim of mine, but I've thought a good deal about it while I've been lying here sick. Mebbe some day you'll be able to go to the Holy Land, 'way over the mountains and over the seas, and be baptized in that same river Jordan, where the dove descended. See the pretty dove?"
Even though the baby brain understood but dimly what she said to him, the light in her uplifted eyes filled him with solemn awe, and from that moment the mantle of her ambition rested henceforth on his young shoulders. It was a vague, intangible thing at first, when he used to go back to the old Bible and study the picture in secret. He never understood when it began to fold itself about his life, or how it grew with his years till it completely enveloped him.
He was a man little given to introspection, and with a mind so slow to arrive at a conclusion that it always seemed doubtful if he would ever reach it. Still, when he once settled down on an opinion, his sister Sarah used to say it was with the determination of a snapping-turtle. "He wouldn't let go then till it thundered." His sister Sarah took charge of him, mind and body, when their mother died, and so thoroughly did she manage him that her will was always his, except in that one matter. He would not join the church of his fathers until he got ready, and he would give no reason for his delay.
He was twenty when he made his first stubborn stand against her, and for thirty years Sarah wept over him both in public and private, and for thirty years Luella Clark's heart battled with her conscience, which would not let her be "unequally yoked together with an unbeliever." And through all that time Baptist Sloan had kept his own counsel, hoarding every penny he could save, to the refrain of his mother's remembered words: "Over the mountains and over the seas, and be baptized in that same river Jordan, where the dove descended."
He had so firmly made up his mind that after that pilgrimage to his Mecca he would marry Luella that he had never viewed his conduct from her standpoint until Sister Bowles opened his eyes. Her speech about the widower aroused him to an undefined sense of danger. All that next hour his inclination shifted like a weather-vane, first to take Luella into his confidence, then not to. By the time the congregation rose for the last hymn he had made up his mind.
The moon was coming up now, a faint, misty light struggling through the clouds. He waited until most of the congregation had passed his gate, and then striking out across the potato-field, waited at the turn of the road on the other side of the cedar-grove. It was here that Luella always parted company with the Robinson girls, and went the remaining way alone. It was only a few steps farther to her mother's brown cottage, and he hurried to overtake her before she should reach the gate.
"Land o' Goshen! Bap Sloan!" she exclaimed, with a startled little cry, as he came puffing along by her side. "Who'd 'a' dreamed of seeing you here? Why wa'n't you at church to-night? Everybody was asking if you were sick, it's been so long since you've missed."