Cape Cod Folks Part 20

Mrs. Barlow, Lovell's mother, presented a charmingly antique appearance--antique not in the sense of advanced years, but the young antique--the gay, the lively, the never-fading antique. She had even a girlish way of simpering and uttering absurdly rapturous exclamations.

Her face might have struck one at first as being of a strangely elongated cast, but for its extreme prettiness and simplicity of expression. Her nose was marked by a becoming scallop or two. Her eyes were of the ocean blue. Her dark hair was arranged, behind, in the simplest and most compact manner possible but, in front, art held delightful play. There, it was parted, slightly to the left, over a broad, high forehead, and disposed in braids of eight strands each, gracefully and lovingly looped over Mrs. Barlow's ears.

The tide of cheerful converse was at its full when I came from school to lunch. Amid this preponderance of female society, my friend, Grandpa, shone with an ardent though faintly tolerated light, giving to the lively flow of the discourse, an occasional salty and comprehensive flavor, which dear Grandma Keeler held herself ever in calm and religious readiness to restrain.

I listened, intensely interested, to the conversation, quite content, for my own part, to keep silence; but I caught Mrs. Barlow's eye fixed on me as if in abstracted, beatific thought. Soon was made known the result of her meditation. She had concluded that I was incapable of descending to subjects of an ordinary nature. Leaning far forward on the table, with a smile more ecstatic than any that had gone before, she directed these words at me in a clear, swift-flowing treble:--

"Oh, ain't it dreadful about them poor delewded Mormons?"

"Why?" I exclaimed, involuntarily, blinded by the absolute unexpectedness of the question, and not knowing, in a dearth of daily papers, but that the infatuated people alluded to had been swallowed up of an earthquake, or fallen in a body into the Great Salt Lake.

"Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Barlow; "only I think it's dreadful, don't yew, settin' such an example to Christian nations?"

"Dreadful! certainly!" I murmured, with intense relief, and allowed my gla.s.ses to drop into my lap again.

Thus the conversation turned to subjects of a religious nature.

"Oh, I think it's so nice to have direct dealin's with the Almighty; don't yew?" said Mrs. Barlow. "Oh, I think it is! Brother Mark Barlow says he can hear the Lord speakin' to him jest as plain as they could in Old Testament times; oh, yes, jest as plain exactly; Abraham and all them, yew know! And Brother Mark Barlow generally means to go to Sunday school. He says he thinks it's so interestin'; but it's sich an awful ways. Don't yew think it is? Oh, yes, it's a dreadful ways! He don't always. But yew remember that Sat.u.r.day we had sich a dreadful storm? oh, wasn't it dreadful! Oh, yes! Well, the next day, that was Sunday, Brother Mark Barlow said he heard the Lord sayin' to him, jest as plain as day; 'Mark Barlow, don't you go to Sunday school to-day! You stay home and pick up laths!' and he did, and oh, he got a dreadful pile! most ten dollars worth; but I think it's so nice, don't yew, to have direct dealin's with the Almighty!"

The Barlows, by the way, were regarded with a sort of contemptuous toleration by the Wallencampers in general, on account of their thrift and penuriousness, the branded qualities of sordid and unpoetic natures.

I was sorry when the brief hour of the noon intermission was over, and I had to go back to school.

But at night the Ark became alive. Soon after supper, Mr. Barlow arrived and "Brother Mark Barlow" and Lovell. Then the little room began to fill rapidly. We adjourned to the "parlor" and the melodeon.

"Oh, I do think them plaster Paris picters are so beautiful, don't yew?"

said Mrs. Barlow, enraptured over a statuette or two of that truly vague description, which adorned the mantelpiece. But she became perfectly lost in delight when Lovell began to sing.

Lovell's was the one execrable voice among the Wallencampers--if anything so weak could be designated by so strong a term--and his manner of keeping time with his head was clock-like in its regularity and painfully arduous; yet, out of that pristine naughtiness which found a hiding-place in the hearts of the Wallencamp youth, Lovell was frequently encouraged to come to the front during their musicals, and if not actually beguiled into executing a solo, was generously applauded in the performance of minor parts. There was comfort, however, in the reflection that if Lovell had indeed possessed the tuneful gift of a Heaven-elected artist, he could not have been so supremely confident of the merit of his own performances, nor could his mother have been more delighted at their brilliancy. She sat with hands clasped in her lap and gazed at her manly offspring.

"Oh, I do think it's so beautiful!" she murmured occasionally to me, aside. "Oh, yes, ain't it beautiful?"

Once, she remarked in greater confidence; "Oh, he's dreadful wild!"

"Lovell?" I inquired, with impulsive incredulity.

"Oh, dreadful!" she continued. "I don't know what he'd ben if we hadn't always restrained him. But somehow, I think there's something dreadful bewitchin' about such folks. Don't yew?"

"Very," I answered with vague, though ardent sympathy.

"Oh, dreadful!" she responded.

Meanwhile the perspiration stood out on Lovell's grave countenance, and his head, like a laborious sledge-hammer, was swaying mechanically backward and forward.

"Sing ba.s.s, now, Lovell," said Mrs. Barlow; and the expression of awed delight and expectancy on her face, as she uttered these words, was a rebuke to all cynics and unbelievers of any sort whatever.

"Yes'm, so I will, certainly," said Lovell; "so I will, and if I hadn't got such a cold, I'd come down heavy on it too."

"What do you think?" Mrs. Barlow went on in the same confidential aside to me; "he's took it into his head that he wants to get married! Oh, yes, he has really! and I think it's a wonder he never got set on it before.

But he never has so but what we could restrain him. But William and I, we're beginning to think he might as well if he wants to. Oh, yes, I think it will be so nice. Don't yew? I think it will be just splendid!

And I tell William, Lovell's wife shan't do nothing but set in the parlor and fold her hands, if she don't want to; and she shall have a music, and everything. When we built our new house, you know we used to live in that little house that Brother Mark Barlow lives in now, oh, yes, and I think it's so nice to have a new house, don't yew? I had 'em make the window seats low on purpose, so that Lovell's children could sit on them! Oh, I think it will be so pleasant, don't yew?"

Mrs. Barlow turned her enraptured gaze on me.

"Lovell's wife," I hastened to reply, toying with my gla.s.ses; "whoever she may be, is certainly to be envied--and Lovell's children, too"--I added, induced by that transcendently beaming smile; "who will have such a broad window seat to sit on."

Never an evening began in heartier fas.h.i.+on at the Ark.

George Olver, standing next to Rebecca, rolled out a grand and powerful ba.s.s.

Lars Thorjon, the Norwegian, maintained a smiling silence, except when he was giving utterance in song to his inspiring tenor.

Madeline played the "music."

I saw her wince sometimes, when the fine though untutored voices around her took on a too wild and exuberant strain. The little woman's own voice was exceedingly gentle and refined; more than that, it had a pa.s.sionately sweet, sad tone, a rare pathos. I used to wonder what there was in Madeline's heart--what there had been in her life--to make her sing so.

Then I remembered how easy it was for her to get out of temper, and how often she slapped the children, and I concluded that it was only a voice after all, and not necessarily indicative of any inward sentiment or emotion.

And the mischievous Harvey Dole--could it be the same youth who stood there now with tearful eyes, chanting his longings to be pure and sanctified and heavenly. This merry youth had a predilection for those religious songs which contained the deepest and saddest sentiment.

"Now, what's the matter with you, Harvey?" said Emily Gaskell, who had but just dropped in. "You know you'll go along hum to-night stunin' my cats! You know what a precious nice time you're calculatin' to have, about two months from now, up in my trees stealin' my peaches, you young devil. 'Wash you from your sins!' Humph! Yes, you need it bad enough, Lord knows! A good poundin', and boilin', and sudzin', you need--and a good soakin' in the bluein' water over night, too."

Emily's eyes sparkled with keen though good-natured satire. There was a flood of crimson color in her cheeks, not entirely the effect of her brisk walk in the open air. She had a spasm of coughing, which she endured as though such discomforts had become quite a matter of course, merely remarking when she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak:--

"Thar', that'll last me for one spell, I guess."

"Won't you set, Emily?" said Grandma.

"No," said Emily. "I can't. I jest come up to tell my man, there, to go home! Levi is over from West Wallen, and wants to see him. Lord, I didn't know you'd got a party, Miss Keeler!" she continued, glancing with an irresistibly comical expression about the room.

"Oh, no! we ain't got no party," said Grandma Keeler, pleasantly. "They jest happened to drop in along."

"Wall now, I should think there'd ben a shower and rained 'em all down at once:" again surveying the occupants of the room with a comprehensively critical air that was hardly flattering.

"I don't see what on 'arth!" she went on. "Half the time you might ransack Wallencamp from top to bottom, and you'd find everybody a'most somewhere, and n.o.body to hum! It ain't much like the cake Silvy made last week--she's crazier than ever--'Where's the raisins, Silvy?' says I--I always make it chock full of 'em, and there wasn't one,--'Oh,' says Silvy, 'I mixed 'em up so thorough you can't a hardly find 'em.' 'I guess that's jest about the way the Lord put the idees into your head, Silvy,'

says I. 'Bless the Lord!' says that poor fool, as slow and solemn as a minister."

"We've been a singing" interposed Grandma Keeler in a voice that contrasted with Emily's, like the flow of a great calm river with the impatient fall of a cataract. "It seems a' most as though I'd been in Heaven. They was jest a singin'--'The Light of the World is Jesus,' I shall never forgit, when I was down to camp-meetin' to Marthy's Vin'yard a good while ago--there was a little blind boy stood up on a bench and sung it all alone; and it made me cry to see him standin' there with his poor little white face, and eyes that couldn't see a' one of all the faces lookin' up to him, a singin' that out as bold and free, and he did p.r.o.nounce the words so beautiful so as everybody could hear--I can hear him a singin' of it out, now--'The Light of the World is Jesus.' And I suppose we git to thinkin' that the light's in our eyes, maybe, or the light's in the sun, or the light's in the lamp, maybe. But you might put out my eyes,"--said Grandma Keeler, closing her eyes as she spoke, and looking very peaceful and happy--"and you might put out the sun, and you might put out the lamp, and say--'Thar', Almiry's all in the dark room, she can't see nothin' now'--but the Light of the World 'ud be thar jest the same, you couldn't put out the light--'The Light of the World is Jesus.'"

"Oh, I didn't know ye was havin' a meetin'," said Emily Gaskell, mockingly.

"No more we ain't, Emily," said Grandma Keeler. "We was jest cheerin'

ourselves up a little, singin' about home. Come you, now, and sing with us":

"We're goin' home, No more to roam."

With eyes still closed, with head thrown back, and a heavenly serene expression on her face, Grandma began the refrain, while Madeline struck the chords on the melodeon, and the singers took up the words with a hearty cheer:--

"We're goin' home, No more to roam, No more to sin and sorrow; No more to wear The brow of care, We're goin' home to-morrow."

Then the chorus, "We're going home," joyfully repeated, died away at last, more plaintively, "We're going home to-morrow."