The Argonauts of North Liberty | Page 3

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THE ARGONAUTS OF NORTH LIBERTY
by Bret Harte

CHAPTER I
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PART I

CHAPTER I
The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just
ceased ringing. North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful
town, was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the
Sabbath sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness
from the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere
dwellings and the equally sealed and hard- set churchgoing faces of the
people, at last settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment. On
this chilly March evening of the year 1850, that stare had kindled into
an offended sunset and an angry night that furiously spat sleet and hail
in the faces of the worshippers, and made them fight their way to the
church, step by step, with bent heads and fiercely compressed lips, until
they seemed to be carrying its forbidding portals at the point of their
umbrellas.

Within that sacred but graceless edifice, the rigors of the hour and
occasion reached their climax. The shivering gas-jets lit up the austere
pallor of the bare walls, and the hollow, shell-like sweep of colorless
vacuity behind the cold communion table. The chill of despair and
hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from the
sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm
exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the
presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary
apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless,
neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only to
accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few
children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back
benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture,
were laboriously drawn out and painfully picked apart by a watchful
deacon.
The dry, monotonous disturbance of the bell had given way to the
strain of a bass viol, that had been apparently pitched to the key of the
east wind without, and the crude complaint of a new harmonium that
seemed to bewail its limited prospect of ever becoming seasoned or
mellowed in its earthly tabernacle, and then the singing began. Here
and there a human voice soared and struggled above the narrow text
and the monotonous cadence with a cry of individual longing, but was