While he drank in the wine of autumn on the air, that had a bare taste of frost, like the first acid in the sweet cider, he saw a carriage or two come over the level roads towards Princess Anne, and the church-bell told their errand as it dropped into the serenity its fruity twang, like a pippin rolling from the bough. So easily, so musically, so regularly it rang, like the voice of something pure, that was steady even in its joys, that the Judge took off his broad white fur hat, as if to a lady, and listened with something between courtesy and piety.
As the bell continued other carriages came towards town, and some passed him, their inmates all bowing, and often stealing a look back to see Judge Custis again, the first man in the county.
They looked upon an humbled heart, a gladdened soul, which the sharp hand of affliction had made to bleed, while an unforeseen Providence in his darling child had kissed the wound to sleep and sucked the poison from it.
Raising his brow towards the bright blue sky, as if he could not raise it high enough to feel more of that heavenly rest encinctured there, the Judge sighed forth a happy wish, like the kiss of love after a quarrel, when doubt is all dispelled or wrong forgiven:
"O make me as a little child! Wash out my stains! Lead me in the path my child has walked, or I shall never see her in the life to come!"
His lips trembled and his breast heaved convulsively. In that idea of being unfit to enter where his child would go, in the more abundant life beyond the present, he received a distinct sermon from the long-empty pulpit of nature and conscience, and revelations from within clearer than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and selfishness to detain the spirit in its husk of swine. His agony increased.
"Where shall I drift if I go on," he said, "playing the sleek magistrate and family head, and loving to slip away in the dark, like negroes hunting coons by night? What is escaping discovery to the increasing degradation of my own sanctuary, my created spirit? Can I find the way I have wandered down and retrace my steps? There is but little of life left me to do it in, but by God's help I will try! Yes, this golden Sabbath I will do something to begin. What shall it be?"
He put on his hat, and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church, and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship to another now. If I go to church this morning it must be to our own. Is there any excuse but cowardice for not going?"
He looked into his debtor nature, to see what he owed to anybody, that might be owned and settled this day.
Slowly and almost to his dislike there arose an obligation to his wife—the obligation of love he was defrauding her of, if, indeed, he loved her at all with the ardor of old times.