“Yes, it was like what?” he demanded impatiently.
“Like the cry of a soul in pain. No! you can’t tell what it was; but it hurt. It was as though a child had suddenly gained the power to tell of a deep, heart-breaking grief in a great way.”
“Yes,” Merriam said; and then he added very softly: “Yes, it was like that.”
They sat together until late, talking of many things; but they did not refer again to Zelda Dameron.
CHAPTER VII
A PRAYER FOR DIVINE GRACE
Mariona had not, when the Twentieth Century dawned, quite broken with all its traditions. It was still considered bad form to display wealth if you had it; and honest poverty still had sincere admirers among the first citizens. It was better to have had a grandfather who “settled” in the thirties than to be possessed of much money. There had been a time when it was not respectable to stay away from church,—when only here and there some persons, usually called “queer,” habitually refused the offices of religion. But the old churches had begun to follow their congregations up-town on the very sensible theory that the individual church is much like any other institution that depends on public support,—it must make itself easy for the public to find.
So, many people continued to go to church in Mariona,—the old element of the community from force of habit and later comers because their neighbors did, which is not to say that all were not moved by religious impulses of the sincerest sort. Though we may not love our neighbors as ourselves in the strictest sense of the commandment we nevertheless like to appear well in their eyes. The sight of Wiggins and Mrs. Wiggins going to church in their best clothes and of the Wiggins children, equally splendid, going to Sunday-school, is well calculated to awaken in the Morgansons over the way a worthy ambition to be equally virtuous and splendid. Copeland, the lawyer who never practised, had announced the dictum that in Mariona, to be respectable, a man must pay pew rent and own a lot in Beech Hill cemetery; and Copeland’s dicta were entitled to the respectful attention of all men.
Ezra Dameron was of the old order. He still attended all the services of the Central Presbyterian Church, of which he had been a member for forty years. He had held nearly all the offices in the giving of the congregation at one time or another, beginning in his young manhood as secretary of the Sunday-school and gradually rising to be an elder, a position of dignity and honor in the communion, which he held for twenty years. He had lately refused further election, on the plea of advancing years; but he continued a most faithful member of the Central Church, where his pew was under the very shadow of the pulpit.
The hypocrite is not a lovable character; and yet we may sometimes condemn him with an excess of zeal. It is something gained when a bad man realizes, no matter how ignobly, that he must deceive the outer world in order to be countenanced; the only weakness of his position being that he can not wholly deceive himself, though he may go far toward doing so. Ezra Dameron had begun to deteriorate in his young manhood and his pettiness and sordidness had grown steadily. Through many years he had submitted the other cheek and worn a grieved and wounded air, as though the world were using him harshly. His wife’s family had not understood him; they had taken his daughter away from him; and now that they had educated her according to their own ideas, they had flung her back upon him, with an injunction to take good care of her lest fierce penalties be visited upon him. He was a martyr, he told himself; and his vision was marred by that form of spiritual myopia which cuts man off from honest self-examination.
Ezra Dameron leaned upon his church—not in a spiritual so much as a social sense. It afforded him the only opportunity he cared for of appearing before his fellows clothed in his old broadcloth coat, that was a veritable garment of righteousness. He was a man of little imagination, but to walk down the long aisle to his pew during the playing of the voluntary, and to hear the hymns and the more ambitious efforts of the choir, and then to settle back for the sermon—these simple experiences touched him, much as a summer breeze plays upon the leafy crest of a rough old tree without communicating any motion to the trunk.