"Why, you know, Barb, most girls are distressed with doubts of their own love. I'm not. It's about his that I'm afraid. What do you reckon's the reason I've held him off for years?"
"Just because you could, Fannie."
"No, my dear little goosie, I did it because he never was so he couldn't be held off. I knew, and know yet, that after the wedding I've got to do all the courting. I don't doubt he loves me, but Barb, love isn't his master. That's what keeps me scared." They went in.
The service began. In this hour for the putting away of vanities the choir was dispensed with and the singing was led by a locally noted precentor, a large, pert, lazy Yankee, who had failed in the raising of small fruits. His zeal was beautiful.
"Trouble! 'Tain't never no trouble for me to do nawthin', an' even if 'twas I'd do it!" He sang each word in an argumentative staccato, and in high passages you could see his wisdom teeth. Between stanzas he spoke stimulating exhortations: "Louder, brethren and sisters, louder; the fate of immortal souls may be a-hangin' on the amount of noise you make."
As hymn followed hymn the church filled. All sorts—black or yellow being no sort—all sorts came; the town's best and worst, the country's proudest and forlornest; the sipper of wine, the dipper of snuff; acrid pietist, flagrant reprobate, and many a true Christian whose God-forgiven sins, if known to men, neither church nor world could have pardoned; many a soul that under the disguise of flippant smiles or superior frowns staggered in its darkness or shivered in its cold, trembling under visions of death and judgment or yearning for one right word of guidance or extrication; and many a heart that openly or secretly bled for some other heart's reclaim. And so the numbers grew and the waves of song swelled. The adagios and largos of ancient psalmody were engulfed and the modern "hyme toons," as the mountain people called them, were so "peert an' devilish" that the most heedless grew attentive, and lovers of raw peanuts, and even devotees of tobacco, emptied their mouths of these and filled them with praise.
Garnet had never preached more effectively. For the first time in Barbara's experience he seemed to her to feel, himself, genuinely and deeply the things he said. His text was, "Be sure your sin will find you out." Men marvelled at the life-likeness with which he pictured the torments of a soul torn by hidden and cherished sin. So wonderful, they murmured, are the pure intuitions of oratorical genius! Yet Barbara was longing for a widely different word.
Not for herself. It was not possible that she should ever tremble at any pulpit reasoning of temperance and judgment from the lips of her father. Three things in every soul, he cried, must either be subdued in this life or be forever ground to powder in a fiery hereafter; and these three, if she knew them at all, were the three most utterly unsubdued things that he embodied—will, pride, appetite. The word she vainly longed for was coveted for one whose tardy footfall her waiting ear caught the moment it sounded at the door, and before the turning of a hundred eyes told her John March had come and was sitting in the third seat behind her.
In the course of her father's sermon there was no lack of resonant Amens and soft groanings and moanings of ecstasy. But Suez was neither Wildcat Ridge nor Chalybeate Springs, and the tempering chill of plastered ceiling and social inequalities stayed the wild unrestraint of those who would have held free rule in the log church or under the camp-meeting bower. The academic elegance of the speaker's periods sobered the ardor which his warmth inspired, and as he closed there rested on the assemblage a silence and an awe as though Sinai smoked but could not thunder.
Barbara hoped against hope. At every enumeration of will, pride, and appetite she saw the Pastor's gaze rest pleadingly on her, and in the stillness of her inmost heart she confessed the evil presence of that unregenerate trinity. Yet when he rose to bid all mourners for sin come forward while the next hymn was being sung, she only mourned that she could not go, and tried in vain not to feel, as in every drop of her blood she still felt, there behind her, that human presence so different from all others on earth. "This call," she secretly cried, "this hour, are not for me. Father in Heaven! if only they might be for him."