Within the Capes

by Howard Pyle

That morning they held a silent meeting, no one speaking for all the hour between ten and eleven o’clock. Now and then the wind would rush in little puffs through the open window and across the gloom of the building. A fly buzzed against a window pane, and once a robin outside burst into a sudden gush of song.

No other sound broke the silence, saving for the rustling of a dress, as one of the women Friends would move in her seat, or the restless sighing of some poor boy in the back part of the building. The overseers sat ranged along on the raised bench facing the meeting, and amongst them was Isaac Naylor. All of them sat with their hats on, motionless, with downcast eyes, buried in serious thought: but no one spoke.

At such a time every one is supposed to address a sermon to his own heart, but I am very much afraid that Tom Granger addressed none to himself, for his thoughts flew here and there and everywhere, and his mind was never still a moment in the chase of them. Now and then he shifted himself uneasily on the hard wooden bench, trying to find a more comfortable position than the one in which he was sitting, but the seats in Friends’ meeting were not made with a thought to comfort in those days. There was a long partition that ran down the length of the meeting, separating the men’s from the women’s side.

After a while Tom’s eyes wandered over this partition in a way that they had no business to do. It was toward the place where his mother and his sisters sat that his eyes rested the most, but it was not at them that he was looking, for Patty Penrose sat between his mother and him.

After a man has reached the age of four and twenty, it becomes a continued source of wonder to him how the little girls about him grow up into young women. You leave a poor lean little chit of a thing; a few years pass, you meet her and, lo! she is transmogrified into a young woman, going her sedate way with very different thoughts in her head than when you saw her last. It seems as though it were only a week or two since you patted her upon the head and said kind things to encourage her; now your heart shrinks at the thought of such boldness, and you feel that she needs encouragement no longer.

When Tom had last seen Patty Penrose, three years before, he left her just such a little chit as I have spoken to you of,—lean and not graceful. She used to come over now and then to play with his sister Mary, but he had not noticed her excepting when she stayed to dinner or to supper. Even then he had not observed her very closely, and had not had much to say to her, for she was too shy to make it a pleasure to him to talk to her, and too young for it to be worth while for him to put himself out to amuse her. He would give her a nod with a “How is thee, Patty?” and then would turn his mind to other things.

Now, when he first looked at her sitting across the meeting beside his mother, he did not know her; then he saw first one little thing and then another, until it slowly dawned upon him that it was Patty Penrose, though not the Patty Penrose that he had known in times past. At first he looked with wonder and interest at the change that had come in three years; but, after a while, his interest took a very different shape with no wonder about it, and he thought that his sister Mary’s friend was a great deal better worth looking at than when he had last seen her, for Patty had grown into a very pretty girl,—a very pretty girl, indeed.

She sat looking calmly before her; but, though she seemed sedately unaware of his presence, as is becoming in a modest girl, I have not a grain of doubt that she knew that Tom Granger was at meeting that day, and, maybe, she even knew that he was looking at her at that moment.

Her head was uncovered, for she had worn a broad beaver hat, such as they used in those days, and she held the hat in her lap. She sat with her side turned to Tom, and it made his heart feel very warm as he looked at her pale, delicate face, the long lashes of her eyes, the smooth roundness of her chin and throat, and the soft curling of the brown hair at her forehead and temples. So, as I said, he was preaching no sermon to himself as he sat in silent meeting that day.

At length, the court-house clock around the corner of Market street struck eleven. They all sat in silence for a minute or two longer, and then old Thomas Winterapple shook John Stidham by the hand, and meeting was broken. After that they all went out into the sunlight and the open air again.