The Presiding Elder was known to enjoy visits to old-fashioned congregations like that of Octavius, where he could indulge to the full his inner passion for high-pitched passionate invocations and violent spiritual demeanor, but this time he spoke temperately, almost soothingly.
The most tempestuous of the local witnesses for the Lord gave in their testimony in relatively pacific tones, under the influence of the spell which good music had laid upon the gathering.There was the deepest interest as to what the two visitors would do in this way.
Brother Soulsby spoke first, very briefly and in well rounded and well-chosen, if conventional, phrases.His wife, following him, delivered in a melodious monotone some equally hackneyed remarks.The assemblage, listening in rapt attention, felt the suggestion of reserved power in every sentence she uttered, and burst forth, as she dropped into her seat, in a loud chorus of approving ejaculations.
The Soulsbys had captured Octavius with their first outer skirmish line.
Everything seemed to move forward now with a new zest and spontaneity.Theron had picked out for the occasion the best of those sermons which he had prepared in Tyre, at the time when he was justifying his ambition to be accounted a pulpit orator.It was orthodox enough, but had been planned as the framework for picturesque and emotional rhetoric rather than doctrinal edification.
He had never dreamed of trying it on Octavius before, and only on the yesterday had quavered at his own daring in choosing it now.Nothing but the desire to show Sister Soulsby what was in him had held him to the selection.
Something of this same desire no doubt swayed and steadied him now in the pulpit.The labored slowness of his beginning seemed to him to be due to nervous timidity, until suddenly, looking down into those big eyes of Sister Soulsby's, which were bent gravely upon him from where she sat beside Alice in the minister's pew, he remembered that it was instead the studied deliberation which art had taught him.
He went on, feeling more and more that the skill and histrionic power of his best days were returning to him, were as marked as ever--nay, had never triumphed before as they were triumphing now.The congregation watched and listened with open, steadfast eyes and parted lips.
For the first time in all that weary quarter, their faces shone.The sustaining sparkle of their gaze lifted him to a peroration unrivalled in his own recollection of himself.
He sat down, and bent his head forward upon the open Bible, breathing hard, but suffused with a glow of satisfaction.
His ears caught the music of that sighing rustle through the audience which bespeaks a profound impression.
He could scarcely keep the fingers of his hands, covering his bowed face in a devotional posture as they were, from drumming a jubilant tattoo.His pulses did this in every vein, throbbing with excited exultation.
The insistent whim seized him, as he still bent thus before his people, to whisper to his own heart, "At last!--The dogs!"
The announcement that in the evening a series of revival meetings was to be inaugurated, had been made at the love-feast, and it was repeated now from the pulpit, with the added statement that for the once the class-meetings usually following this morning service would be suspended.
Then Theron came down the steps, conscious after a fashion that the Presiding Elder had laid a propitiatory hand on his shoulder and spoken amiably about the sermon, and that several groups of more or less important parishioners were waiting in the aisle and the vestibule to shake hands and tell him how much they had enjoyed the sermon.His mind perversely kept hold of the thought that all this came too late.
He politely smiled his way along out, and, overtaking the Soulsbys and his wife near the parsonage gate, went in with them.
At the cold, picked-up noonday meal which was the Sunday rule of the house, Theron rather expected that his guests would talk about the sermon, or at any rate about the events of the morning.A Sabbath chill seemed to have settled upon both their tongues.They ate almost in silence, and their sparse remarks touched upon topics far removed from church affairs.Alice too, seemed strangely disinclined to conversation.The husband knew her face and its varying moods so well that he could see she was laboring under some very powerful and deep emotion.
No doubt it was the sermon, the oratorical swing of which still tingled in his own blood, that had so affected her.
If she had said so, it would have pleased him, but she said nothing.
After dinner, Brother Soulsby disappeared in his bedroom, with the remark that he guessed he would lie down awhile.
Sister Soulsby put on her bonnet, and, explaining that she always prepared herself for an evening's work by a long solitary walk, quitted the house.Alice, after she had put the dinner things away, went upstairs, and stayed there.
Left to himself, Theron spent the afternoon in the easy-chair, and, in the intervals of confused introspection, read "Recollections of my Youth" through again from cover to cover.
He went through the remarkable experiences attending the opening of the revival, when evening came, as one in a dream.Long before the hour for the service arrived, the sexton came in to tell him that the church was already nearly full, and that it was going to be impossible to present any distinction in the matter of pews.
When the party from the parsonage went over--after another cold and mostly silent meal--it was to find the interior of the church densely packed, and people being turned away from the doors.
