John knew that he himself was unlike the people he was meeting for the first time in his life, and he was sure that he could never be as they were, but he had come upon the marvelous belief that he and Tilly were meant for each other. Somehow, by some intent of Fate, they were destined to breast the world side by side, arm in arm, as they had walked the dusty road that night. He was conscious of many stupid shortcomings on his part, but she would overlook them. Indeed, she was overlooking them already. Finally he slept, and, of all absurdities, he dreamed of carrying bricks and mortar as a small, ragged boy for Cavanaugh, who had just hired him for a few cents a day to see what there was in him. Later he seemed to be telling his powdered and painted mother of his success and displaying to her indifferent gaze the first few cents Cavanaugh had ever paid him.
CHAPTER XVI
The next day being Sunday, the family rose an hour later than usual.
Cavanaugh came into John's room after the sun was well up in the sky and found his young friend awake.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," he jested. "Here you are flat on your lazy back while that little last night's partner of yours is out milking the cow and feeding the chickens. I saw her from my window just now looking as fresh as a pink morning-glory wet with dew. Old Whaley and his wife are hard masters even of their own child. I reckon Tilly would love to lie and snooze after that late tilt of yours and hers, but her folks don't allow it when there is work to be done. I don't want to meddle, my boy, but take it from me for what it is worth, Tilly is the kind of a girl to make a working-man a fine wife. Why? Well, because she hasn't been raised with a gold spoon in her mouth, and a lot of fool ideas about style, rank, and what not. She'd be industrious, saving, and grateful for what her husband could give her. And you--well, I'm not giving you taffy to tickle your vanity, but you'd lavish your last cent on a wife of your choice. How do I know? Well, how do I know that mighty nigh all you ever made--now, I'm going to speak plain--mighty nigh every cent you ever made was lapped up by your ma and Jane Holder and that poor little girl at your house? Huh! Don't I know that a big, strapping fellow that will do all that for folks of--of that stripe will do even more for the sweet little maid that leaves all her own kin to cleave unto him?"
"You don't know what you are talking about," John said from the pillow which half hid his flushed face.
"Well, maybe I don't," the contractor smiled benignly, "but you get up and put on your best suit. We are all going to meeting to-day. You've dodged that too often to help you along with old Whaley. He is wondering where you stand, anyway, on these vital questions of man's duty to God and His written law as Whaley reads it. Don't you forget about the way he treated that son of his that tied up with a follower of the Pope. In spite of his harsh ways Tilly loves her old daddy, and--and well, there is no use of your rubbing the old hog's bristles the wrong way. They might stick in your hand in the long run. You've talked too much to our men on your line of free thought, I am thinking. I heard one say yesterday that you claimed to be an out and out atheist. They all like you, but they are members of some church or other and they were scandalized to hear it. We are in a narrow, hidebound community up here and we've got to watch where we step. Fellers like those will talk, and what they say will be added to by others."
"I won't keep my mouth shut for anybody," John said, firmly, as he got up and began to dress. "I don't want to go to-day, but I will if you say so."
"Well, I _do_ say so," Cavanaugh answered. "And we will set out as soon as the family does. I'm going to set, as usual, in the old man's Bible class that comes before the regular discourse, though I can't say that I get much profit out of it. I disagree with his interpretation of many passages, but he'd crawl over the benches and have a fist fight with me if I disputed his points. They say he is a regular devil when he is mad. Church member though he is, he actually shot a man once, and it was a wonder the chap didn't die. He carries a revolver. What do you think of that for an active disciple of the great Prince of Peace?"
"They are all that way," John said, warmly. "They are crooks and haven't brains enough to see how crooked their reasoning is."
Shortly after breakfast the three Whaleys started to church. Tilly walked between her father and mother, and John and Cavanaugh followed close behind. They found, on their arrival, a group of villagers, mountaineers, and farmers loitering on the grass-plot in front of the little building, but the Whaleys went straight in, and John and the contractor did likewise. Cavanaugh went forward to the benches at the front which were reserved for Whaley's Bible class. Eight or ten men and women were already seated there, and they nodded appreciatively to him and the Whaley family. John found himself quite alone on a bench near the door. He saw Tilly and her mother chatting with some other women, and Cavanaugh making himself quite at home as he shook hands with various smiling members of the class. Only half an hour was to be given to the class work and nearly all the students had arrived. John saw Whaley open his worn and interlined Bible and then step back to a bell-rope which hung down by the little white pulpit. He gave the rope a single forceful jerk and the cast-iron bell on the roof creaked and tapped lazily. That was a signal that the Bible class had begun its session.
Just now, to John's great discomfiture, Whaley, with his Bible in his stubby hands, came down the aisle to him.
"You can't hear back this far," Whaley said. "Move on up and join us."
"I'd rather not," John stammered, trying to steady his eyes and voice in his bewilderment.
"Well, I can't see why. It certainly can't hurt you to hear us go through the lesson, and you might learn a lot. Bible reading and study is fairly sweeping broadcast over the country. Over in Dadeville they have hired that woman blackboard teacher to come several hundred miles and are paying five dollars a head for the course. I've read some of her points in our Leaflet, and I'm here to tell you if she ever comes this way I'll refute her, if they oust me for disorder. It would be my duty, considering the light I have. Come on up."
There was nothing else to do, for the entire class, with the exception perhaps of Tilly, was looking toward him. John rose and followed the old man up the aisle, and found Cavanaugh gravely and sympathetically making space for him at his side. Tilly and her mother were just in front of him. John could have bent forward and whispered in the girl's ear, had he dared. The exercises began by a chapter being read, first a verse by Whaley and then a verse in turn by each of the class. John was fairly chilled by the horror of his predicament. It was plain that Whaley would expect him to read aloud, and he determined that he would refuse. He told himself that he would refuse if the whole silly bunch of fanatics were infuriated by it. He had been forced into the class and he would be forced no farther. As luck would have it, the book was handed to Cavanaugh before it reached John, and the old man read in a clear, confident tone the verse which had fallen to him. Then he started to hand the Bible to John, but John shook his head firmly.
"Pass it on to some one else," he said, almost aloud and with guttural sullenness. "I won't do it."
Then Cavanaugh displayed friendly diplomacy. "I'll read for my young friend, if it is all right," he said. "Me and him have a lot of talks on these same lines, but usually I do the reading."
Whaley frowned and glared, but, being impatient with any delay, he said, gruffly: "Well, well, go ahead. I don't know where Mr. Trott stands, anyway. He is bound to see the light sooner or later, and then he won't have to be begged to read the grandest Book the world ever saw, or be slow about joining a class like this, either. As many of you know, with pride, it is the best and biggest in the county, if not in the state."
Cavanaugh proceeded to read the verse, and the book went over to Mrs.
Whaley and then to her daughter. And as Tilly read in her clear, unruffled voice John was conscious of a certain twinge of shame for his avoidance of a thing so simple as she made the act seem.
The reading was concluded, and Whaley set in to analyze the text, line by line. He would read a verse, and then ask the class what particular significance it held to their understanding. Answers came rapidly from all the class, and sometimes John noticed that, when all the others had failed to grasp Whaley's particular version, he would call on Tilly to reply and what she said always met with her father's approval, the reason being that the girl had already gone over the chapter with her parents at home. The lesson was concluded by a long-winded lecture from Whaley, and then the bell was rung for the regular service.
John failed to hear what the aged minister was saying, but he did note that Whaley now and then called out, "Amen!" in deep, self-satisfying tones. John could not keep his eyes from the back part of Tilly's head.
He worshiped her hair, the very ribbons of her simple straw hat, the curve of her brave little shoulders. What a marvel she was in human form! It was almost impossible to realize that only a few hours before she had been alone with him, telling that dazzling story of her inability to love another man. He wondered if he might walk home with her. He was afraid not, and yet could not tell whence his fears came, unless they were due to his vague sense of having opposed her father's religion.
When the service was over, however, the opportunity came. It might have been brought about by deliberate design on the part of the contractor, for Cavanaugh drew the husband and wife into conversation about the sermon, and that threw Tilly and John together. The Whaleys seemed to forget Tilly's existence, and John and she fell in behind the three.
"I wondered what you were going to do when father went back after you,"
Tilly said, with a smile. "I was afraid to look around."
"What did you think when I refused to read in the class?" John inquired, forcing a lifeless smile.
"I hardly know," Tilly said, as she studied his face with bland sincerity. "It almost frightened me. I was afraid father would forget himself and storm out at you. But--but as for your reading out loud, of course, if you really do not believe in the Bible and love it, you ought not to read it in public. That would be sacrilege."
"And do you believe in it?" he demanded, almost rebukingly. "Do you believe that that Book is the actual word of some far-off God that no living man ever saw with his eyes or heard speak with his ears?"
"Yes," Tilly answered. "If I didn't believe it I'd be miserable. I can't see how you can doubt the existence of God--how you can keep from actually feeling His presence, especially when you are in trouble and seriously need His help."
John sneered. He loved Tilly with his whole being, but he despised her belief. "I can tell you why I don't believe," he said, a billow of feeling behind his words. "I believe if there were a God, that God would have to be a God of love, power, and pity, and with my own eyes I've seen-- I have told you about that little orphan girl at home, Dora Boyles. She is a little, helpless, overworked rat without father or mother, in the care of an aunt who is no earthly good--and is crazy about men--crazy about clothes, cards, liquor, and dancing. That little dirty scrap of a girl is a child of God, the same as those polite, well-fed, well-dressed girls and boys we met last night, eh? Well, tell me what is God doing for her? As for me, myself, as I look back on what I went through among those haughty, hidebound people at Ridgeville, before Sam Cavanaugh held out a helping hand-- Well, never mind about that, but I know I've been my own God, and I never run across any other except in the dreams of persons who get the best things of life and don't care whether anybody else gets them or not."
"You will think otherwise some day--you will _have_ to," was Tilly's regretful ultimatum. "Someday you will need God so badly that you will turn to Him. I did once, and was answered, too."
"You don't mean it," John disputed, warmly. "No prayer was ever answered by any God, on the earth or off of it."
"Mine was," Tilly asseverated. "It was one night, and I was at home all alone. Father had lost his temper at an election and--and wounded a man in a dispute. Father was put in jail and mother hurried to him. The man was bleeding to death--the doctors couldn't stop the flow of blood. You can't imagine how I felt. I fell on my knees and prayed with all my soul to God to save my father and the man he had shot. At two o'clock--oh, I don't know how to express it!--at two o'clock I seemed to be lifted up into something like light, but it wasn't that. It was something finer and holier, but I knew, I knew that all was well. My mother came at sunup. She said they had stopped the flowing blood at two o'clock--exactly at two o'clock. My father was released the next day and the man finally recovered."
"Things like that happen once in a thousand times," John said, with an indulgent smile, "and people say it is in answer to prayer."
"But I know, for I _felt_ it," Tilly responded, simply, and she said no more, for the three older persons had turned and were waiting for them on the street corner.
CHAPTER XVII
One morning a week later Cavanaugh mounted the scaffold on which John was working. He held some letters in his hand.
"That car of brick has been delayed," he announced. "It will be three days before it can be delivered. The men won't like it, but we'll have to shut down for that long, anyway."
John frowned and swore, as he stood scraping his trowel on the edge of a brick which he had just tapped into line.
"Never mind; we needn't be idle--you and me, anyway," Cavanaugh said, gently. "You heard about Mason & Trubel's storehouse being burned down last week, didn't you? Well, the agents for the insurance company have written me to come home and help adjust the loss. Some of the walls may be usable in rebuilding, and they want me to be one of the arbitrators.
Now, there will be a lot of close figuring to do, and I want you to be there. How about both of us going? There will be a fee for us that will more than cover expenses, and the trip will do us good."
"I'll go with you," John said. "When will you start?"
"First train in the morning," was the reply, and the contractor went about among the men, explaining the situation.
The two friends arrived at Ridgeville the following morning at ten o'clock and at once started for their homes. To John's surprise, at the end of the first street Cavanaugh did not turn toward his home, as would have been natural, but kept on in the direction John was to go.
"You are out of your beat, aren't you?" John asked.
"I am and I ain't," Cavanaugh smiled. "I want to show you something--a little house and lot that I hold a mortgage on. You know the cottage I built for Pete Carrol, this side of your mother's house? Well, he couldn't pay for it and it is on my hands. He went West, you know, and left all his furniture in it. I've had a rent-sign on it for two months, but haven't had a single applicant for it. I'd like to take a peep at it."
The cottage was in quite an isolated spot, near the end of the street railway, in full view of the lots containing shanties in which negroes and the very poorest whites lived. Above the tree-tops, not far away, could be seen the patched roof of John's ramshackle home.