“I’ll bet my old hat there wasn’t anybody there who could come within a mile of my reading,” glibly wagered the juggler, unabashed.
Tynes reflected doubtfully a moment. “I dunno what’s the matter with it,” he said. “It hurts me! I couldn’t git my cornsent ter read that-a-way. It sounds like ye jes’ been thar yestiddy, an’ it all happened fraish, an’ ye war tellin’ ’bout it, an’ ye hedn’t got over the pain an’ the grief of it yit—an’ mebbe ye never would.”
In the pause that ensued the juggler trifled with the pages, his eyes cast down, a smile of gratified vanity lurking in the lustrous pupils.
“Well,” Tynes said abruptly, “go on, John Leonard, go on.”
But as the reading proceeded, the face of the slight and pallid man sitting on the bench—now and again wincing palpably from the scenes seemingly enacted before him, from the old, old words all instinct with the present, from the terrible sense of the reality of those dread happenings of the last night in Gethsemane, and the denial of Peter, and the judgment-hall—all at once lighted up with a new and vivid gleam of animation. The chapter was at an end, the lingering musical cadences of the reverent voice were dying away, and as the reader lifted his head there were tears in his eyes, and the fisher of men had seen them.
“Ye ain’t so far from the kingdom, John Leonard,” he said, in solemn triumph.
The juggler recoiled in a sort of ashamed self-consciousness. “Don’t deceive yourself!” he exclaimed. “It is only my literary sensibility. All the four Gospels—speaking profanely—are works of high artistic merit, and they can floor me when nothing else can.”
But the worldly ambition of Tynes had suddenly fled. He was baiting his hook and reeling out his line; here was the prospect of a precious capture in the cause of religion. He might not learn to read the Bible in John Leonard’s illusive and soul-compelling way,—and he hardly knew if he cared to do this, so did it seem to penetrate into the very mystery of sacred things which had less poignancy under the veil of custom and indifference and a dull sense of distance in time and place,—but he would learn of him in secular things, he would remain by him, and now and again insidiously instill some sense of religious responsibility; and the soul of this sinner would indeed be a slippery fish if it could contrive to elude his vigilance at last.
He listened indulgently as the juggler declared he would have no more of the Reader, insisting that such literature would wreck his mind. But Tynes, for his own part, was not willing to trust himself to learn the arts of elocution from the sanctities of the Holy Book read with that immediate and vital certainty which tore so at his heart-strings.
“I wonder,” he said, his narrow, pallid face brightening with the inspiration,—“I wonder ef thar ain’t some o’ them books ye speak of over yander ter the sto’ what that valley-man keeps at New Helveshy Springs? They all bein’ valley folks, mebbe he hev some valley books ter sell ter ’em.”