Ghost stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
Passing the door of the Temple which reared its massive front and
glittering windows out of the darkness of the street, her ear was caught
by the faint, muffled sound of some anthem the choir were singing. She
drew the hood of her cloak over her face, turned into the shadow of the
steps, and, standing so, listened. Why, she hardly knew. Perhaps it was
the mere entreaty of the music, for her dulled ear had never grown deaf
to it; or perhaps a memory, flitting as a shadow, of other places and
other times, in which the hymns of God's church had not been strange to
her. She caught the words at last, brokenly. They were of some one who
was wounded. Wounded! she held her breath, listening curiously. The wind
shrieking past drowned the rest; only the swelling of the organ murmured
above it. She stole up the granite steps just within the entrance. No
one was there to see her, and she went on tiptoe to the muffled door,
putting her ear to it, her hair falling over her face. It was some
plaintive minor air they were hymning, as sad as a dying wail, and as
sweet as a mother's lullaby.
"But He was wounded; He was wounded for our transgression; He was
bruised for our iniquities."
Then, growing slower and more faint, a single voice took up the strain,
mournfully but clearly, with a hush in it as if one sang on Calvary.
"Yet we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised, and we
esteemed him not."
Well; He only knows what it spoke to the woman, who listened with her
guilty face hidden in her hair; how it drew her like a call to join the
throng that worshipped him.
"I'd like to hear the rest," she muttered to herself. "I wonder what it
is about."
A child came down from the gallery just then, a ragged boy, who, like
herself, had wandered in from the street.
"Hilloa, Meg!" he said, laughing, "_you_ going to meeting? That's a good
joke!" If she had heard him, she would have turned away. But her hand
was on the latch; the door had swung upon its noiseless hinges; the
pealing organ drowned his voice. She went in and sat down in an empty
slip close by the door, looking about her for the moment in a sort of
childish wonder. The church was a blaze of light and color. One
perceived a mist of gayly dressed people, a soft flutter of fans, and
faint, sweet perfumes below; the velvet-cushioned pulpit, and pale,
scholarly outlines of the preacher's face above; the warmth of
rainbow-tinted glass; the wreathed and massive carving of oaken cornice;
the glitter of gas-light from a thousand prisms, and the silence of the
dome beyond.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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