He strode off, feeling that he had had the best of the discussion. He was discerning enough to be conscious that, despite his belligerencies, he was often inferior to his youthful confrère in the rhetoric of the pulpit, and he relished the more worsting him in argument, thus proving the superiority of his judgment and solid reasoning capacities.
Outside the door a group of loiterers still lingered. The juggler’s prudential motives had collapsed utterly in the prospect of Mrs. Sims’s society in the long walk home. He looked about him with a desperate hope of diversion, in which Euphemia and the curiosity she had newly excited were factors. But he was fain to be content with his elderly companion, for as Euphemia’s rose-hued dress blossomed in the portal against the dark brown background of the interior he noticed that Owen Haines was standing at the foot of the steps evidently awaiting her. The mountaineer gave her no greeting, but walked beside her as if his companionship were a matter of course.
“Warn’t that a plumb special sermon?” he said enthusiastically, turning his candid eyes upon her. “’Pears like ter me ’twar the best, the meltin’est, the searchin’est discourse I ever hear.”
There was a measure of contempt in her face. She would not have admitted that she thought herself too good for the need of salvation, but the theme with all its cognate elements was palling. She replied with a definite note of sarcasm in her voice. “The bes’? Waal, I hev hearn ye say that time an’ time agin. The sermons air all the bes’, ’cordin’ ter you-uns.”
“Yes,” he admitted a trifle drearily, “ef I lose my soul, ’twon’t be bekase I ain’t hed the bes’ chance fur salvation. I hev sot under a power o’ good an’ discernin’ sermons in my time.”
The seraphic suggestions of his face, now that he was recalled to earth, were little marked, and presently totally merged when he clapped his big broad-brimmed hat upon that mass of cloudy, fine-fibred fair hair. The irreverent juggler could have laughed at the swiftness and completeness of the transition. Haines still wore that dreamy, far-away look which, however, with mundane associations and modern garb, is apt to indicate an unpurposeful nature and a lack of energy rather than any lofty ideals and high resolves. The perfect chiseling and contour of his countenance and its refined intimations were still patent to the discerning observer; but without the preconceived idea drawn in the church from the aspect of his head, with the soul revealed for one rapt moment through its facial expression,—picture-like, dissevered from the suggestion of body—Royce would hardly have perceived any spiritual trait of a higher type in the young mountaineer. Thus it is that only the outer man is known of men, and that ethereal essence of thought and emotion, the real being, is a stranger upon earth and foreign from the beginning.
Royce, greedily snatching at the very straws of abstraction, watched the young couple as they strolled slowly along the red clay road. The slouching, thin, languid figure of the tall youth, the ill-fitting suit of brown jeans with the coat hanging so loosely from the narrow shoulders, the big white hat, the rough crumpled boots all appealed to him with a pleasant sense of incongruity as the accoutrement of this object of mistaken identity, when a golden harp and a white robe and a sweep of wings would better have become the first glimpse caught in the church. Now and again, mechanically, involuntarily, Euphemia looked furtively back over her shoulder at Royce. With all that surging pulse of pride in her heart she was strangely bereft of her wonted assurance. It would never have occurred to her, in her normal sphere of thought and action, to refer aught that concerned her to the judgment, the problematic opinion of another. But although she gave him so slight thought, although she could not definitely gauge its objects and interests, she had not been unnoting of that subtle pervasive mockery which characterized the juggler’s habit of mind. Until now, however, she had not cared at what or at whom the “game-maker” laughed, how loud, how long. The laughter of folly cannot serve to mock good substantial common sense which affords no purchase for ridicule; it rebounds only upon the mocker. She apprehended naught in herself, her home, her parents, the Cove, deserving of scorn or sneers. Her pride was proof against this. It was because she herself deemed her lover ridiculous that she winced from Royce’s imagined laugh now, as she had shrunk from the criticism of the rest of the congregation. But this mockery was of the intimate fireside circle. For Royce would go home with them, and bring it in his laugh, his glance; nay, she would be conscious of it even in his silent recollections. She felt she had no refuge from it. She told herself that because she loved Haines she deprecated mockery as unworthy of him, she would fain shield him from the sneers of those not half so good as he. She would rather he should eat out his heart in silence than besiege the throne of grace in any manner not calculated to inspire respect and admiration in those who heard his words addressed to the Almighty. As to the Deity, the goal of all these petitions, she never once thought of their spiritual effect, the possibility of an answer. She esteemed the prayer as in the nature of a public speech, a public exhibition, which, glorious in success, is contemptible in its failure in proportion to the number of witnesses and the scope of the effort. How could Owen Haines pray for the power to preach, when there was Absalom Tynes looking on so vainglorious and grand, doubtless esteeming himself a most “servigrous” exhorter, and obviously vaunting his own godliness by implication in the fervor with which he called sinners to repentance? How could Owen Haines seek so openly, so painfully, so terribly insistently, as a privilege, a boon, as an answer to all his prayers, as a sign from the heavens, as a token of salvation, as the price of his life, that capacity which was possessed so conspicuously, without a word of prayer, without a moment of spiritual wrestling, without a conscious effort, by Absalom Tynes?
“I’d content myself with the power ter plough,” she said to herself.
Then, as he fell into retrospective thought, she said aloud,—her voice not ringing true as was its wont, but with a tremulous uncertain vibration,—“’Pears like ter me, ez ye hain’t been gin the power arter sech a sight o’ prayer, ’twould be better ter stop baigin’ an’ pesterin’ the Lord ’bout’n it.”
There was a moment’s silence, during which the little roadside rill flung out on the air the rudiments of a song,—a high crystalline tremor, a whispering undertone, a comprehensive surging splash as of all its miniature currents resolved into one chord con tutta forza, and so to whispering and tentative tinklings again. He had turned his clear long-lashed blue eyes upon her, and she saw the reproach in them. That courage in the feminine heart which dares wreak cruelty on its own tender fibres urged her.