“I can’t!” he cried, shrilly. “I’m ’feard! I’m ’feard o’ my life. I wouldn’t hev done sech ’ceptin’ I war drunk,—drunk with liquor an’ drunk with spite.”
He felt that he was saying too much. He sat down, biting his lip till the blood started. Then he rose and faltered, “I want yer prayers fur light.”
“Amen!” said Brother Sims.
Rood had recovered himself abruptly. He was looking about with furtive sharpness through the congregation, seeking to gauge the effect of what he had said when under the strong spell of religious excitement that had swayed the crowd. Fearful as he was, he detected only curiosity, interest, nothing more marked; for in the rhetoric of frenzied repentance these good men often apply to themselves language that seriously entertained could only grace an indictment.
The rain had ceased; the quiet without seemed to conduce to a calmer spirit within. The fervor of the meeting had spent itself. Only a few of the brethren were “workin’” with Ben Doaks; his face was troubled and perplexed, his anxious eyes turned from one to another.
“Can’t ye feel ye air jes’ a wuthless worm a-crawlin’ round the throne o’ grace? Can’t ye feel that only mercy kin save ye?—fur ye richly desarve damnation.”
“Laws-a-massy, naw,” said poor, candid Ben, greatly harried. “I think mighty well o’ myself!”
And so they left him in his sins. The crowd was breaking up, chiefly seeking their several camps, as the shanties were called. But a few had come merely to participate in the exercises of the evening, and these were busy in harnessing their horses or yoking their oxen into their wagons on the hillside without the inclosure. The declivity was veined with rivulets, into which the heavy feet of the men and beasts splashed; the leaves continuously dripped; frogs were croaking near at hand in the sombre woods,—not so dark now, for the melancholy waning moon shone among the breaking clouds. The rumble of wheels presently intruded upon the low-toned conversation, the burden of which was the meeting and reminiscent comparison with other meetings. Several of the boys, not burdened with immortality, took leave less decorously, whooping loudly at each other as they galloped past the vehicles, and were soon out of sight and hearing.
The red clay road was presently lonely enough as Alethea trudged along it. There was no room for her in the little wagon which Buck drew in single harness, as might be called the ropes by which the ox, fastened between the shafts, was made to dispense with a yoke-fellow. A rope tied to his horn was intended to guide him along any intricacies of the road with which he might not be acquainted. Mrs. Sayles, her daughter-in-law, and several of the children were seated in the wagon, and sometimes Alethea walked in advance, and sometimes fell into the rear. It was no great distance that they were to travel,—their destination being her aunt’s house in Eskaqua Cove, where they were to spend the night before wagoning up the Great Smoky.
Alethea was beset with her own unquiet thoughts; the remorse that would not loose its hold; the strange wrong which the right had wrought. Her conscience, forever on the alert—serving, if need were, as proxy—could find no flaw in what she had counseled; and thus perverse fate, in the radiant guise of rectitude, had led Reuben Lorey to despair, and delivered her to grief.