Sometimes there would sound, too, a commotion among the horses without, unharnessed from the waggons and hitched to the trees; then in more than one of the solemn faces might be descried an anxious perturbation—not fear because of equine perversities, but because of the idiosyncrasies of callow human nature in the urchins left in charge of the teams. No one ventured to investigate, however, and, with that worldly discomfort contending with the spiritual exaltations they sought to foster, the rows of religionists swayed backward and forward in rhythm to the reader's voice, rising and falling in long, billowy sweeps of sound, like the ground swell of ocean waves.
It was strange, looking upon their faces, and with a knowledge of the limited phases of their existence, their similarity of experience here, where a century might come and go, working no change save that, like the leaves, they fluttered awhile in the outer air with the spurious animation called life, and fell in death, and made way for new bourgeonings like unto themselves—strange to mark how they differed. Here was a man of a stern, darkly religious conviction, who might either have writhed at the stake or stooped to kindle the flames; and here was an accountant soul that knew only those keen mercantile motives—the hope of reward and the fear of hell; and here was an enthusiast's eye, touched by the love of God; and here was an unfinished, hardly humanized face, that it seemed as presumptuous to claim as the exponent of a soul as the faces of the stupid oxen out-of-doors. All were earnest; many wore an expression of excited interest, as the details of the chapter waxed to a climax, like the tense stillness of a metropolitan audience before an unimagined coup de théâtre. The men all sat on one side, chewing their quids; the women on the other, almost masked by their limp sun-bonnets. The ubiquitous baby—several of him—was there, and more than once babbled aloud and cried out peevishly. Only one, becoming uproarious, was made a public example, being quietly borne out and deposited in the ox-waggon, at the mercy of the urchins who presided over the teams, while his mother creaked in again on the tips of deprecating, anxious toes, to hear the Word.
Brother Jake Tobin might be accounted in some sort a dramatic reader. He was a tall, burly man, inclining to fatness, with grizzled hair reached back from his face. He cast his light grey eyes upward at the end of every phrase, with a long, resonant 'Ah!' He smote the table with his hands at emphatic passages; he rolled out denunciatory clauses with a freshened relish which intimated that he considered one of the choicest pleasures of the saved might be to gloat over the unhappy predicament of the damned. He chose for his reading paragraphs that, applied to aught but spiritual enemies and personified sins, might make a civilized man quake for his dearest foe. He paused often and interpolated his own observations, standing a little to the side of the table, and speaking in a conversational tone. 'Ain't that so, my brethren an' sisters! But we air saved in the covenant—ah!' Then, clapping his hands with an ecstatic upward look, 'I'm so happy, I'm so happy!'—he would go on to read with the unction of immediate intention, 'Let death seize them! Let them go down quick into hell!'
He wore a brown jeans suit, the vest much creased in the regions of his enhanced portliness, its maker's philosophy not having taken into due account his susceptibility to 'chicken fixin's.' After concluding the reading, he wiped the perspiration from his brow with his red bandanna handkerchief, and placed it around the collar of his unbleached cotton shirt, as he proceeded to the further exertion of 'lining out' the hymn.
The voice broke forth in those long, lingering cadences that have a melancholy, spiritual, yearning effect, in which the more tutored church music utterly fails. The hymn rose with a solemn jubilance, filling the little house, and surging out into the woods; sounding far across unseen chasms and gorges, and rousing in the unsentient crags an echo with a testimony so sweet, charged with so devout a sentiment, that it seemed as if with this voice the very stones would have cried out, had there been dearth of human homage when Christ rode into Jerusalem.
Then the sudden pause, the failing echo, the sylvan stillness, and the chanting voice 'lined out' another couplet. It was well, perhaps, that this part of the service was so long; the soul might rise on its solemnity, might rise on its aspiration.
It came to an end at last. Another long pause ensued. Kelsey, sitting on the opposite side of the table, his elbow on the back of his chair, his hand shading his eyes, made no movement. Brother Jake Tobin looked hard at him, with an expression which in a worldly man we should pronounce exasperation. He hesitated for a moment in perplexity. There was a faint commotion, implying suppressed excitement in the congregation. Parson Kelsey's idiosyncrasies were known by more than one to be a thorn in the side of the frankly confiding Brother Jake Tobin.
'Whenst I hev got him in the pulpit alongside o' me,' he would say to his cronies, 'I feel ez onlucky an' weighted ez ef I war a-lookin' over my lef' shoulder at the new moon on a November Friday. I feel ez oncommon ez ef he war a deer, or suthin', ez hev got no salvation in him. An' eff he don't feel the sperit ter pray, he won't pray, an' I hev got ter surroun' the throne o' grace by myself. He kin pray ef he hev a mind ter, an' he do seem ter hev hed a outpourin' o' the sperit o' prophecy; but he hev made me 'pear mighty comical 'fore the Lord a many a time, when I hev axed him ter open his mouth an' he hev kep' it shut.'
Brother Jake did not venture to address him now. An alternative was open to him.
'Brother Reuben Bates, will ye lead us in prayer?' he said to one of the congregation.