They were not, taken altogether, a very fine collection, old maids and young girls, many of them apparently of the servant class, one or two sitting with open mouths and a vacancy of expression that seemed to demand a conjurer with a rabbit and a hat.Some faces were of the true fanatic cast, lit with the glow of an expectancy and a hope that no rational experience had ever actually justified.One girl, whom Maggie had seen with Aunt Anne on some occasion, had especially this prophetic anticipation in the whole pose of her body as she bent forward a little, her elbows on her knees her chin on her hands, gazing with wide burning eyes at Miss Avies.This girl, whom Maggie was never to see again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her life--the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin arms and pale hands--this figure remained a symbol for Maggie.She used to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away from all this world, what had happened to that girl.But she was never to know.
There were faces, too, like Miss Pyncheon's, calm, contented, confident, old women who had found in their religion the panacea of all their troubles.There were faces like Mrs.Smith's, coarse and vulgar, out for any sensation that might come along, and ready instantly to express their contempt if the particular "trick" that they were expecting failed to come off; other faces, again, like Amy Warlock's, grimly set upon secret thoughts and purposes of their own, faces trained to withstand any sudden attack on the emotions, but eager, too, like the rest for some revelation that was to answer all questions and satisfy all expectations.
Maggie wondered, as she looked about her, how she could have raised in her own imagination, around the Chapel and its affairs, so formidable an atmosphere of terror and tyrannic discipline.Here gathered together were a few women, tired, pale, many of them uneducated, awaiting like children the opening of a box, the springing into flower of a dry husk of a seed, the raising of the curtain on some wonderful scene.Maggie, as she looked at them, knew that they must be disappointed, and her heart ached for them all, yes, even for Amy Warlock, her declared enemy.She lost, as she sat there, for the moment all sense of her own personal history.She only saw them all tired and hungry and expectant; perhaps, after all, there WAS something behind it all--something for which they had a right to be searching; even of that she had not sure knowledge--but the pathos and also the bravery of their search touched and moved her.She was beginning to understand something of the beauty that hovered like a bird always just out of sight about the ugly walls of the Chapel.
"Whatever they want, poor dears," she thought, "I do hope they get it."Miss Avies opened the meeting with an extempore prayer: then they all stood up and sang a hymn, and their quavering voices were thin and sharp and strained in the stuffy close-ceilinged room.The hymn, like all the other Chapel hymns that Maggie had heard, had to do with "the Blood of the Lamb," "the sacrifice of Blood," "the Blood that heals." There was also a refrain:
And, when Thou comest, Lord, we pray That Thou wilt spare Thy sword, Or on that grim and ghastly day Who will escape the Lord? WHOwill escape the Lord?
There were many verses to this hymn, and it had a long and lugubrious tune, so that Maggie thought that it would never end, but as it proceeded the words worked their effect on the congregation, and at the last there was much emotion and several women were crying.