"Catholic!" he said. "And right here in our valley!"
"No," said the father; "it's 'Piscopalian. Colonel Farley is one o' the vestries, or whatever you call 'em, of St. Michael's yonder in town. I reckon he wanted to get his own kind o' people round him out here, so he built this church, and they run it as a sort of side-show to the big church. Your mammy always looks the other way when we come by."
Tom looked the other way, too, watching anxiously for the first sight of the new home. They reached it in good time, by a graveled driveway leading up from the white pike between rows of forest trees; and there was a second negro waiting to take the team, when they alighted at the veranda steps.
The new house was a two-storied brick, ornate and palpably assertive, with no suggestion of the homely country comfort of the old. Yet, when his mother had wept over him in the wide hall, and there was time to go about, taking it all in like a cat exploring a strange garret, it was not so bad.
Or rather, let us say, there were compensations. The love of luxury is only dormant in the heart of the hardiest barbarian; and the polished floors and soft-piled rugs, the bath-room with its great china dish, and the carpeted stair with the old grandfather clock ticking bravely on the landing, presently began to thrum the tuneful chord of pride. Perhaps Ardea Dabney would not laugh and say, "What a funny, funny old place!" as she had once said when the Major had brought her to the log-walled homestead on the lower pike.
Still, there were incongruities—hopeless janglings of things married by increasing prosperity, but never meant to be bedfellows in the harmonious course of nature. One was the unblushing effrontery of the new brick pairing itself brazenly with the venerable gray stone manor-house on the adjoining knoll—impudence perceivable even to a hobbledehoy fresh from the school desk and the dormitory. Another was the total lack of sympathy between the housing and the housed.
This last was painfully evident in all the waking hours of the household. Tom observed that his father escaped early in the morning, and lived and moved and had his being in the industries at the lower end of the valley, as of old. But his mother's occupation was quite gone. And the summer evenings, sat out decorously on the ornate veranda, were full of constraint and awkward silences, having no part nor lot with those evenings of the older time on the slab-floored porch of the old homestead on the pike.
But there were compensations again, even for Martha Gordon, and Tom discovered one of them on the first Wednesday evening after his arrival. The new home was within easy walking distance of Little Zoar, and he went with his mother to the prayer-meeting.
The upper end of the pike was unchanged, and the little, weather-beaten church stood in its groving of pines, the same yesterday, to-day and for ever. Better still, the congregation, the small Wednesday-night gathering at least, held the familiar faces of the country folk. The minister was a young missionary, zealously earnest, and lacking as yet the quality of hardness and doctrinal precision which had been the boy's daily bread and meat at the sectarian school. What wonder, then, that when the call for testimony was made, the old pounding and heart-hammering set in, and duty, duty, duty, wrote itself in flaming letters on the dingy walls?
Tom set his teeth and swallowed hard, and let a dozen of the others rise and speak and sit again. He could feel the beating of his mother's heart, and he knew she was praying silently for him, praying that he would not deny his Master. For her sake, then ... but not yet; there was still time enough—after the next hymn—after the next testimony—when the minister should give another invitation. He was chained to the bench and could not rise; his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth and his lips were like dry leaves. The silences grew longer; all, or nearly all, had spoken. He was stifling.