Having thus hedged as best she could, Mrs. Ranger gave herself up to lugubrious anticipation.
On Monday Dole watched the parsonage gate narrowly, but when Sidney at length came forth he found the little street silent, the doorways dumb, the windows as expressionless as the patch upon a beggar’s eye. But silence is often eloquent, speech lurks behind closed lips, and the beggar’s patch is frequently only a pretence; as Sidney advanced, the children, playing marbles or hop-scotch in the shade of the houses, rose and ran within, the doors were closed by invisible hands as he drew near, upon the window blinds he could see sometimes the silhouette, sometimes the shadow of a peering face.
Dole had its preacher beneath its most censorious microscope—beneath the lens of prejudice virtues are distorted to the semblance of vices, but beneath the lens of personal disapproval faults become so magnified that the virtues dwindle to mere shadows, and finally vanish. Furtive scrutiny is nearly always condemnatory, and is in its very nature a thing abhorrent; to a sensitive spirit it is simply a sentence of death. The chill of it fell upon Sidney’s spirit and weighted its wings as with leaden tears. Coming after the curious circumstance of his people’s abrupt departure from the church, Sidney could not but connect their present manifestation of coldness with his sermon.
What had he said? he asked himself, with an agonized effort to force his memory to serve him, but like a spoiled, indulgent servant memory had become a saucy menial and refused to do his bidding. It was impossible for him to dream however that it was the substance of his sermon which had offended them; he had never spoken aught to them but words of peace and hope. It was the spirit doubtless to which they objected. Could it be that, detecting the false ring in his faith, they had turned upon him, as one who had led them from out the wholesome wind-swept places of their stern creed, to the perilous shelter of an oasis of false hope, where they would be crushed in the wreck of the palms of peace, whose stems had no stability, but had sprung up mushroom-like out of human love, instead of spiritual faith?
And such was the innate generosity of this man, that in the midst of his own personal pain, he endured a yet more poignant pain when he thought how their fears and their sorrows would rise to slay them, strong as lions refreshed by rest. He had lulled them to sleep for awhile, was it only that they might gather fresh strength?