"Few are thy days, and full of woe, O man, of woman born; Thy doom is written, 'Dust thou art And shalt to dust return.'"
So they sang; and the wailing air, upborne by the harsh, untrained voices, reverberated from the bare walls of the church, its jangling cadence pierced by one pure and bell-like voice, for Bing White, with the heart of a vulture, had the voice of a lark.
One passing outside smiled--half amusedly, half sadly--as he heard the singing, and went on his way with the music following him in ever fainter notes, forcing itself upon him.
On Sunday Myron Holder had her only relaxation. Her grandmother, preserving the prejudices of the little Kentish village from which she had come, detested all other religions save the Episcopal. Her folks had all been strong for Church and State, and she scorned the idea of going to the Methodist church, or, as she contemptuously said, "to chapel." Her vocabulary knew no more derisive epithet than "a Methody." This in itself was enough to isolate the Holders in the midst of a community that regarded Episcopalians as being "next door to out-and-out Catholics," and Catholics as surely doomed. As Mrs. Holder did not go to church herself, neither did she allow Myron to go after the work for the day was done, so she was free to lavish her heart on her child. It was her custom, whilst church was in and the streets empty, to take the boy and go out into the fields or lanes with him, severing herself from the house that had held such agony for her and from the woman whose stinging tongue kept her wound raw. Once with her boy--alone in the air and sunshine--she gave herself up to introspective soul-searchings. Upon one side she set herself, and upon the other all things good; in the great gulf between there hovered the shade of the man to whom she owed her misery. In the abandonment of her self-abasement, she did not place herself even upon his level, whilst as for little My--he shone amongst the holiest of those things to which it seemed to her she was herself in such direct opposition and contradiction. The great marvel of her life was this child, who owed its existence to her. She looked at it with eyes of adoration--touched it almost humbly, as the Madonna we are told of may have tended the Christ-child on her breast. The child seemed to embody all the dead delight of her own girlhood, to have absorbed all the peace, all the calm, all the gayety she had lost. There seemed no varying moods to cross its baby mind; it was the embodiment of trusting love.