The Mettle of the Pasture | Page 9

as possible
from his wife's side. When she a few moments later leaned toward him
with timidity and hesitation, offering him an open prayer-book, he took
it coldly and laid it between them on the cushion. Isabel shuddered: her
new knowledge of evil so cruelly opened her eyes to the full
understanding of so much.
Little rime was left for sympathy with Kate. Nearer the pulpit was
another pew from which her thoughts had never been wholly
withdrawn. She had watched it with the fascination of abhorrence; and
once, feeling that she could not bear to see him come in with his
mother and younger brother, she had started to leave the church. But

just then her grandmother had bustled richly in, followed by her aunt;
and more powerful with Isabel already than any other feeling was the
wish to bury her secret--Rowan's secret--in the deepest vault of
consciousness, to seal it up forever from the knowledge of the world.
The next moment what she so dreaded took place. He walked quietly
down the aisle as usual, opened the pew for his mother and brother with
the same courtesy, and the three bent their heads together in prayer.
"Grandmother," she whispered quickly, "will you let me pass! I am not
very well, I think I shall go home."
Her grandmother, not heeding and with her eyes fixed upon the same
pew, whispered in return;
"The Merediths are here," and continued her satisfying scrutiny of
persons seated around.
Isabel herself had no sooner suffered the words to escape than she
regretted them. Resolved to control herself from this time on, she
unclasped her prayer-book, found the appointed reading, and directed
her thoughts to the service soon to begin.
It was part of the confession of David that reached her, sounding across
how many centuries. Wrung from him who had been a young man
himself and knew what a young man is. With time enough afterwards
to think of this as soldier, priest, prophet, care-worn king, and fallible
judge over men--with time enough to think of what his days of nature
had been when he tended sheep grazing the pastures of Bethlehem or
abided solitary with the flock by night, lowly despised work, under the
herded stars. Thus converting a young man's memories into an older
man's remorses.
As she began to read, the first outcry gripped and cramped her heart
like physical pain; where all her life she had been repeating mere words,
she now with eyes tragically opened discerned forbidden meanings:
"Thou art about my path and about my bed . . . the darkness is no

darkness to thee. . . . Thine eyes did see my substance being yet
imperfect . . . look well if there be any wickedness in me; and lead me
in the way everlasting . . . haste thee unto me . . . when I cry unto thee.
O let not my heart be inclined to an evil thing."
She was startled by a general movement throughout the congregation.
The minister had advanced to the reading desk and begun to read:
"I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him: Father, I have
sinned against heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be
called thy son."
Ages stretched their human wastes between these words of the New
Testament and those other words of the Old; but the parable of Christ
really finished the prayer of David: in each there was the same young
prodigal--the ever-falling youth of humanity.
Another moment and the whole congregation knelt and began the
confession. Isabel also from long custom sank upon her knees and
started to repeat the words, "We have erred and strayed from thy ways
like lost sheep." Then she stopped. She declined to make that
confession with Rowan or to join in any service that he shared and
appropriated.
The Commandments now remained and for the first time she shrank
from them as being so awful and so near. All our lives we placidly say
over to ourselves that man is mortal; but not until death knocks at the
threshold and enters do we realize the terrors of our mortality. All our
lives we repeat with dull indifference that man is erring; but only when
the soul most loved and trusted has gone astray, do we begin to realize
the tragedy of human imperfection. So Isabel had been used to go
through the service, with bowed head murmuring at each response,
"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."
But the laws themselves had been no more to her than pious archaic
statements, as far removed as the cherubim, the candlesticks and the
cedar of Solomon's temple. If her thoughts had been forced to