“Plunged in a gulf of dark despairWe wretched sinners lay.”
He expounded each stanza, as to the religious sense and the poetic meaning, before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture, as a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a sermon. His memory in them was unerring; women who knew their Bibles by heart sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not care for the relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture, all was the one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine, promising heaven, threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the people held in the strong witchery of the man's voice. They did not know whether he spoke long or not. Before they knew, he was as if sweeping them to their feet with a repetition of his opening hymn, and they were singing with him:
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despairWe wretched sinners lay.”
It ended, and he gave his wild brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking cry of “Salvation!”
Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him as their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. “You can have him,” he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, “if he wants to go with you.” He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with the women who crowded about her trying to make her say something that would feed their hunger to know more. She remained hard and cold, almost dumb; it seemed to them that she was not worthy to have had him under her father's roof. As for her father, they had no patience with him for not putting in a word to claim the stranger while the others were pressing him to come home with them. In spite of the indifference of Gillespie and his girl, Dylks elected to remain with them, and when he could pull himself from the crowd he went away into the night between them.
When Matthew Braile made his escape with his wife from the crowd and began to walk home through the dim, hot night, he said, “Is Jane Gillespie any particular hand at fried chicken?”
“Now you stop, Matthew!” his wife said.
“Because that would account for it. I reckon it was fried chicken the ravens brought to Elijah. All men of God are fond of fried chicken.”
His wife would not dispute directly with his perversity; she knew that in this mood of his it would be useless trying to make him partake the wonder she shared with her neighbors that the stranger had chosen David Gillespie again for his host out of the many leading men who had pressed their hospitality upon him, and that he should have preferred his apathy to their eagerness.
“I wish he had worn his yellow beaver hat in the pulpit,” Braile went on. “It must have been a disappointment to Abe Reverdy, but perhaps he consoled himself with a full sight of the fellow's long hair. He ought to part it in the middle, like Thomas Jefferson, and do it up in a knot like a woman. Well, we can't have everything, even in a man of God; but maybe he isn't really a man of God. That would account for a good many things. But I think he shows taste in preferring old Gillespie to Peter Hingston; next to Abe Reverdy he's the biggest fool in Leatherwood. Maybe the prophet knew by instinct that there would be better fried chicken at Gillespie's.”
His wife disdained to make a direct answer. “You may be sure they give him of their best, whatever it is. And the Gillespies may be poor, but when it comes to respectability and good works they've got a right to hold their heads up with the best in this settlement. That girl has done all the work of the house since her mother died, when she wasn't a little thing half grown; and old David has slaved off his mortgage till his farm's free and clear; and he don't owe anybody a cent.”
“Oh, I don't say anything against Gillespie; all I say is that Brother Dylks knows which side his bread is buttered on; inspired, probably.”
“What makes you so bitter, to-night, Matthew?” his wife halted him a little, with her question.
“Well, the Temple always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I hate to see brethren agreeing together in unity. You oughtn't to have taken me, Martha.”
“I'll never take you again!” she said.
“And that man's a rascal, if ever there was one. Real men of God don't wear their hair down to their waists and come snorting and shouting in black broadcloth to a settlement like this for the good of folks' souls.”
“You've got no right to say that, Matthew. And if you go round talking that way you'll make yourself more unpopular than you are already.”
“Oh, I'll be careful, Martha. I'll just think it, and perhaps put two or three of the leading intellects like Abe and Sally on their guard. But come, come, Martha! You know as well as I do, he's a rascal. Don't you believe it?”
“I believe in giving everybody a chance. Don't your own law books say a man's innocent till he's proved guilty?”
“Something like that. And I'm not trying Brother Dylks in open court at present. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt if he's ever brought before my judgment seat. But you've got to allow that his long hair and black broadcloth and his snort and shout are against him.”
“I don't believe in them any more than you do,” she owned. “But don't you persecute him because he's religious, Matthew.”
“Oh, I don't object to him because he's religious, though I think there's more religion in Leatherwood already than any ten towns would know what to do with. He's got to do more than preach his brand of religion before I'd want to trouble him.”
They were at the hewn log which formed the step to the porch between the rooms of their cabin. A lank hound rose from the floor, and pulled himself back from his forward-planted paws, and whimpered a welcome to them; a captive coon rattled his chain from his corner under the porch roof.
“Why don't you let that poor thing go, Matthew?” Mrs. Braile asked.
“Well, I will, some day. But the little chap that brought it to me was like our—”
He stopped; both were thinking the same thing and knew they were. “I saw the likeness from the first, too,” the wife said.
The Gillespies arrived at their simpler log cabin half an hour later than the Brailes at theirs. It was on the border of the settlement, and beyond it for a mile there was nothing but woods, walnut and chestnut and hickory, not growing thickly as the primeval forest grew to the northward along the lake, but standing openly about in the pleasant park-like freedom of the woods-pastures of that gentler latitude. Beyond the wide stretch of trees and meadow lands, the cornfields and tobacco patches opened to the sky again. On their farther border stood a new log cabin, defined by its fresh barked logs in the hovering dark.
Gillespie pulled the leatherwood latch-string which lifted the catch of his door, and pushed it open. “Go in, Jane,” he said to his daughter, and the girl vanished slimly through, with a glance over her shoulder at Dylks where he stood aloof a few steps from her father.
Gillespie turned to his guest. “Did you see her?” he asked.
“Yes, I walked over to her house this morning.”
“Did any one seeyou?”
“No. Her man was away.”
Gillespie turned with an effect of helplessness, and looked down at the wood-pile where he stood. “I don't know,” he said, “what keeps me from spliting your head open with that ax.”
“I do,” Dylks said.
“Man!” the old man threatened, “Don't go too far.”
“It wasn't the fear of God which you pretend is in your heart, but the fear of man.” Dylks added with a vulgar drop from the solemn words, “You would hang for it. I haven't put myself in your power without counting all the costs to both of us.”
Gillespie waved his answer off with an impatient hand.
“Did she know you?”
“Why not? It hasn't been so long. I haven't changed so much. I wear my hair differently, and I dress better since I've been in Philadelphia. She knew me in a minute as well as I knew her. I didn't ask for her present husband; I thought one at a time was enough.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing—first. I might have told her she had been in a hurry. But if she don't bother me, I won't her. We got as far as that. And I reckon she won't, but I thought we'd better have a clear understanding, and she knows now it's bigamy in her case, and bigamy's a penitentiary offense. I made that clear. And now see here, David: I'm going to stay here in this settlement, and I don't want any trouble from you, no matter what you think of my doings, past, present, or future. I don't want you to say anything, orlookanything. Don't you let on, even to that girl of yours, that you ever saw me before in your life. If you do, you'll wish youhadsplit my head open with that ax. But I'm not afraid; I've got you safe, and I've got your sister safe.”
Gillespie groaned. Then he said desperately, “Listen here, Joseph Dylks! I know what you're after, here, because you always was: other people's money. I've got three hundred dollars saved up since I paid off the mortgage. If you'll take it and go—”
“Three hundred dollars! No, no! Keep your money, old man. I don't rob the poor.” Dylks lifted himself, and said with that air of mysterious mastery which afterwards won so many to his obedience, “I work my work. Let no man gainsay me or hinder me.” He walked to and fro in the starlight, swelling, with his head up and his mane of black hair cloudily flying over his shoulders as he turned. “I come from God.”
Gillespie looked at him as he paced back and forth. “If I didn't know you for a common scoundrel that married my sister against my will, and lived on her money till it was gone, and then left her and let her believe he was dead, I might believe youdidcome from God—or the Devil, you—you turkey cock, you stallion! But you can't prancemedown, or snort me down. I don't agree to anything. I don't say I won't tell who you are when it suits me. I won't promise to keep it from this one or that one or any one. I'll let you go just so far, and then—”
“All right, David, I'll trust you, as I trust your sister. Between you I'm safe. And now, you lay low! That's my advice.” He dropped from his mystery and his mastery to a level of colloquial teasing. “I'm going to rest under your humble roof to-night, and to-morrow I'm going to the mansion of Peter Hingston. His gates will be set wide for me, and all the double log-cabin palaces and frame houses of this royal city of Leatherwood will hunger for my presence. You could always hold your tongue, David, and you can easily leave all the whys and wherefores to me. I won't go from your hospitality with an ungrateful tongue; I will proclaim before the assembled multitudes in your temple that I left you secure in the faith, and that I turned to others because they needed me more. I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; they will understand that. So good night, David, and good morning. I shall be gone before even you are up.”
Gillespie made no answer as he followed his guest indoors. Long before he slept he heard the man's powerful breathing like that of some strong animal in its sleep; an ox lying in the field, or a horse standing in its stall. At times it broke chokingly and then he snorted it smooth and regular again. At daybreak Gillespie thought of rising, but he drowsed, and he was asleep when his daughter came to the foot of the ladder which climbed to his chamber in the cabin loft, and called to him that his breakfast was ready.
The figure of a woman who held her hooded shawl under her chin, stole with steps often checked through the limp, dew-laden grass of the woods-pasture and slipped on the rotting logs. But she caught herself from tumbling, and safely gained the border of Gillespie's corn field. There she sat down trembling on the stone doorstep of the spring-house, and waited rather than rested in the shelter of the chestnut boughs that overhung the roof. She was aware of the spring gurgling under the stone on its way into the sunshine, from the crocks of cream-covered milk and of butter in the cool dark of the hut; she sensed the thick August heat of the sun already smiting its honeyed odors from the corn; she heard the scamper of the squirrels preying upon the ripening ears, and whisking in and out of the woods or dropping into the field from the tips of the boughs overhanging the nearer rows; but it all came blurred to her consciousness.
She was recognizably Gillespie's sister, but her eyes and hair were black. She was wondering how she could get to speak with him when Jane was not by. He would send the girl away at a sign from her, but she could not have that; the thing must be kept from the girl but not seem to be kept.
She let her arms rest on her knees; her helpless hands hung heavy from them; her head was bowed, and her whole body drooped under the burden of her heart, as if it physically dragged her down. Jane would be coming soon with the morning's milk to pour into the crocks; she heard a step; the girl was coming; but she must rest a moment.
“What are you doing here, Nancy?” her brother's voice asked.
“Oh, is it you, David? Oh, blessed be the name of the Lord! Maybe He's going to be good to me, after all. David, is he gone?”
“He's gone, Nancy.”
“In anger?”
“He's gone; I don't care whether he's gone in anger or not.”
“Did he tell you he saw me?”
“Yes.”
“And did you promise him not to tell on him? To Jane? To any one?”
“No.” Gillespie stood holding a bucket of milk in his hand; she sat gathering her shawl under her chin as if she were still coming through the suncleft shadows of the woods pasture.
“Oh, David!”
“What do you want me to do, Nancy?”
“I don't know, I don't know. I haven't slept all night.”
“You mustn't give way like this. Don't you see any duty for you in this matter?”
“Duty? Oh, David!” Her heart forboded the impossible demand upon it.
Gillespie set his bucket of milk down beside the spring. “Nancy,” he said, “a woman cannot have two husbands. It's a crime against the State. It's a sin against God.”
“But I haven'tgottwo husbands! What do you mean, David? Didn't I believe he was dead? Didn't you? Oh, David, what—Do you think I've done wrong? You let me do it!”
“I don't think you've done wrong; but look out you don't do it. Youaredoing it, now. I can't let you do it. I can't let you live in sin!”
“In sin? Me?”
“You. Every minute you live now with Laban you live in sin. Your first husband, that was dead, is alive. He can't claim you unless you allow it; but neither can your second husband, now. If you live on with Laban a day longer—an hour—a minute—you live in deadly sin. I thought of it all night but I had not thought it out till this minute when I first saw you sitting there and I knew how miserable you were, and my heart seemed to bleed at the sight of you.”
“You may well say that, David,” the woman answered with a certain pride in the vastness of her calamity. “If it was another woman I couldn't bear to think of it.Whydoes He do it?Whydoes He set such traps for us?”
“Nancy!” her brother called sternly.
“Oh, yes, it's easy enough for you! But if Rachel was here, she'd see it different.”
“Woman!” her brother said, “don't try to hide behind the dead in your sin.”
“It'snosin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married Laban—as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he wouldhaveme; and we all thoughthewas dead. Oh,whycouldn't he have been dead?”
“This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy,” the old man said, with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly unerring. “If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin you could wish it taken.”
“Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do.” She wailed out the words with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping over them.
“Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with Laban when he gets back tonight.”
She started erect. “And let him think I've left him? And the neighbors, let them think we've quarreled, and I couldn't live with him?”
“It won't matter what the world thinks,” Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. “Besides,” he faltered, “no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as ifheleftyou.”
“And I live such a lie as that? Is thisyou, David?”
It was she who rose highest now, as literally she did, in standing on the stone where she had crouched, above the level of his footing.
“I—I say it to spare you, Nancy. I don't wish it. But I wish to make it easy—or a little bit easier—something you can bear better.”
“Oh, I know, David, I know! You would save me if you could. But maybe—maybe it ain't what we think it is. Maybe he was outlawed by staying away so long?”
Neither of them named Dylks, but each knew whom the other meant, throughout their talk.
“A lawyer might let you think so till he got all your money.”
“Matthew Braile wouldn't.”
“That infidel?”
She drooped again. “Oh, well, I must do it. I must do it. I'll go and get ready and I'll come to you. What will Jane think?”
“I'll take care of what Jane thinks. When do you expect Laban back?”
“Not before sundown. I'll not come till I see him.”
“We'll be ready for you.” He moved now to open the spring-house door; she turned and was lost to him in the lights and shadows of the woods-pasture. On its further border her cabin stood, and from it came the sound of a pitiful wail; at the back door a little child stood, staying itself by the slats let into grooves in the jambs. She had left it in its low cradle asleep, and it must have waked and clambered out and crept to the barrier and been crying for her there; its small face was soaked with tears.
She ran forward with long leaps out of the cornfield and caught it to her neck and mumbled its wet cheeks with hungry kisses. “Oh, my honey, my honey! Did it think its mother had left—”
She stopped at the word with a pang, and began to go about the rude place that was the simple home where after years of hell she had found an earthly heaven. Often she stopped, and wondered at herself. It seemed impossible she could be thinking it, be doing it, but she was thinking and doing it, and at sundown, when she knew by the eager shadow of a man in the doorway, pausing to listen if the baby were awake, all had been thought and done.
The emotional frenzies, recurring through the day, were past, and she could speak steadily to the man, in the absence of greeting which often emphasizes the self-forgetfulness of love as well as marks the formlessness of common life: “Your supper's waitin' for you, Laban; I've had mine; you must be hungry. It's out in the shed; it's cooler there. Go round; baby's asleep.”
The man obeyed, and she heard him drop the bucket into the well, and lift it by the groaning sweep, and pour the water into the basin, and then splash himself, with murmurs of comfort, presently muffled in the towel. Her hearing followed him through his supper, and she knew he was obediently eating it, and patiently waiting for her to account for whatever was unwonted in her greeting. She loved him most of all for his boylike submission to her will and every caprice of it, but now she hardly knew how to deny his tacit question as he ventured in from the shed.
“Don't come near me, Laban,” she said with a stony quiet. “Don't touch me. I ain't your wife, any more.”
He could not speak at first; then it was like him to ask, “Why—why—What have I done, Nancy?”
“You, you poor soul?” she answered. “Nothing but good, all your days! He's come back.”
He knew whom she meant, but he had to ask, “Joseph Dylks? Why I thought he was—”
“Don't say it! It's murder! I don't want you to have his blood on youtoo. Oh, if he wasonlydead! Yes, yes! I have a right to wish it! Oh, God be merciful to me, a sinner!”
“When—when—how did you know it, Nancy?”
“Yesterday morning or day before—just after you left. I reckon he was waitin' for you to go. I'm glad you went first.” The man looked up at the rifle resting on the pegs above the fireplace. “Laban, don't!” she cried. “Ilooked at it when he was walkin' away, and I know what you're thinkin'.”
“What is he goin' to do?” the man asked from his daze.
“Nothing. He said he wouldn't do nothing if I didn't. If he hadn't said it I might believe it!”
Laban shifted his weight where he stood from one foot to the other.
“He passed the night at David's. He's passed two nights there.”
“Was it the snorting man?”
“I reckon.”
“I heard about him at the Cross Roads. Why didn't David tell us yesterday?”
“Maybe he hadn't thought it out. David thinks slow. He likes to be sure before he speaks. He was sure enough this morning!” the woman ended bitterly.
“What did he say?”
“He said it was living in sin for us to keep together if he was alive.”
Laban pondered it. “I reckon if we come together without knowing he was alive, it ain't no sin.”
“Yes, it is!” she shrieked.
“We was married just like anybody; we didn't make no secret of it; we've lived together four years. Are you goin' to unlive them years by stoppin' now?”
“Don't you s'pose I been over all that a million times? My mind's sore workin' with it; there ain't a thought in me that don't ache from it. But David's right. We've got to part. I put your things in this poke here,” she said, and she gave him a bag made from an old pillow tick, with a few clothes lumping it half full. “I'll carry the baby, Laban.” She pulled back from him with the child in her arms. “Or no, you can carry her; you'll have to leave her, too, and you've got a right to all the good you can get of her now. Don't touch anything. I'll stay at David's, tonight, but I'll come back in the morning, and then I'll see what I'll do—stay, or go and live with David. Come!”
“And what about Joey?” Laban asked, half turning with the child when they were outside.
“I declare I forgot about Joey! I'll see, to-morrow. It seems as if my very soul was tired now.
“Joey will just think we've gone over to David's for a minute; he'll go to bed when he comes; he'll have had his supper at Peter Hingston's, anyway.”
As they walked away, she said, “You're a good man, Laban Billings, to feel the way you always do about Joey. You've been a true father to him; I wonder what hisownfather'd have been.”
“No truer father to him than I've been a husband to you, Nancy,” the man said, and as they walked along together, so far apart, his speech came to him, and he began to plead their case with her as before an adverse judge. Worn as she was with the arguments for and against them after the long day of iteration, she could not refuse to let him plead. She scarcely answered him, but he knew when they reached Gillespie's cabin that she had seen them in the fierce light of her conscience, where there was no shadow of turning.
David was alone; Jane, he said, had gone to the Reverdys, and was going with the woman to the Temple.
Nancy did not seem to hear him. She took the sleeping baby from its father's arms. “Laban has come with me to say good-by before you, David. I hope you'll be satisfied.”
“I hope your conscience will be satisfied, Nancy. It doesn't matter about me. Laban, do you see this thing like I do?”
“I see it like Nancy does.”
“God will bless your effort for righteousness. Your path is dark before you now, but His light will shine upon it.”
The old man paused helplessly, and Nancy asked “Does Jane know?”
“Not yet. And I will confess I'm not certain what to do, about her, and about the neighbors. This is a cross to me, too, Nancy. I have lived a proud life here; there has never been talk about me or mine. Now when you and Laban are parted, there will be talk.”
“There's no need to be,” Laban said; “not at once. They want me back at the Cross Roads, the Wilkinses do. I can go now as well as in the morning. I forgot to tell you,” he added to his wife. “It was drove out of my mind.”
“Oh, I don't blame you,” she answered.
“I can have work there all the fall.”
David Gillespie rubbed his forehead, and said tremulously: “I don't know what to say. I suppose I am weak. It'll beonekind of a lie. But, Laban—I thank you—”
“I can come back here Sundays and see Nancy and the baby,” Laban suggested.
The old man's voice shook. “You'll be making it harder for yourself,” was all he could say.
“But perhaps—perhaps there'll be light—that light you said—by and by—”
“Let us pray that there'll be no light from the Pit. I am a sinful man, Laban, to let you do this thing. I ought to have strength for all of us. But I am older now, I'm not what I was—the day has tried me, Nancy.”
“Good-by, then, Laban,” the woman said. “And don't you think hard of David. I don't. And I'm not sure I'll ever let you come. Say good-by as if it was for life.” She turned to her brother. “We can kiss, I reckon?”
“Oh, I reckon,” he lamented, and went indoors.
Laban opened his arms as if to take her in them; but she interposed the baby.
“Kiss her first. Me last. Just once. Now, go! I won't be weak with you like David is. And don't you be afraid forme. I can get along.I'm not a man!” She went into the cabin, with her baby over her shoulder; but in a little while she came back without it, and stared after the figure of Laban losing itself in the night. Then she sat down on the doorstep and cried; it seemed as if she never could stop; but the tears helped her.
When she lifted her head she caught the sounds of singing from the village below the upland where the cabin stood. It was the tune that carried, not the words, but she knew them from the tune; as well as if she were in the Temple with them she knew what the people were singing. While she followed the lines helplessly, almost singing them herself, she was startled by the presence of a boy, who had come silently round the cabin in his bare feet and stood beside her.
“Oh!” she cried out.
“Why, did I scare you, mom?” he asked tenderly. “I didn't mean to.”
“No, Joey. I didn't know any one was there; that's all. I didn't expect you. Why ain't you at home in bed? You must be tired enough, poor boy.”
“Oh, no, I ain't tired. Mr. Hingston is real good to me; he lets me rest plenty; and he says I'll make a first rate miller. I helped to dress the burrs this morning—the millstones, you know,” the boy explained, proud of the technicality. “Oh, I tell you I just like it there,” he said, and he laughed out his joy in it.
“You always was a glad boy, Joey,” his mother said ruefully.
“Well, you wouldn't thought so if you seen me over at our house. It seemed like there was somebody dead; I dasn't hardly go in, it was so dark and still. Whyn't you there? Didn't pop come home?”
“Yes, but he had to go back to the Cross Roads; he's got work there all the fall.”
“Well! We do seem to be gittin' along!” He laughed again. “I reckon you come over here because it seemed kind o' lonesome. Goin' to stay all night with Uncle?”
“Yes. You won't mind being there alone?”
“Oh, no! Not much, I reckon.”
“You can stay here too, if you want to—”
“Oh, no! Mom,” he confessed shyly, “I brung Benny Hingston with me. I thought you'd let him stay all night with me.”
“Why, certainly, Joey—”
“He's just behind the house; I wanted to ask first—”
“You know you can always bring Benny. There's plenty of room for both of you in your bed. But now when you go back with him be careful of the lamp. I put a fresh piece of rag in and there's plenty of grease. You can blow up a coal on the hearth. I covered the fire; only be careful.”
“Oh, we'll be careful. Benny's about the carefullest boy the' is in Leatherwood. Oh, I do like being in the mill with Mr. Hingston.” He laughed out his joy again, and then he asked doubtfully, “Mom?”
“Yes, Joey.”
“Benny and me was wonderin'—we'd go straight back home, and not light any lamp at all—if you'd let us go to the Temple. There's a big meetin' there to-night.” The mother hesitated, and the boy urged, “They say that strange man—well, some calls him the Snorter and some the Exhorter—is goin' to preach.” The mother was still silent, and the boy faltered on: “He dresses like the people do Over-the-Mountains, and he wears his hair down his back—”
The mother gasped. “I don't like your being out late, Joey. I'd feel better if you and Benny was safe in bed.”
“Oh, well.” The boy's voice sank to the level of his disappointment; but after a silent interval he caught it up again cheerily. “Oh, well, I reckon Benny won't care much. We'll go right back home. We can have a piece before we go to bed?”
“Yes—”
“Benny thinks our apple-butter is the best they is. Can we have some on bread, with sugar on top?”
His mother did not answer at once, and he said again, as if relinquishing another ideal, “Oh, well.”
Nancy rose up and kissed him. “Yes, go to the Temple. You might as well.”
“Truly, mom? Oh, Benny, hurrah! She's let me! Come along!”
He ran round the cabin to his comrade, and she heard them shouting and laughing together, and then the muted scamper of their bare feet on the soft road toward the settlement.
The mother said to herself, “He'd get to see him sooner or later.” She drew her breath in a long sigh, and went into the cabin. “What a day, what a day! It seems a thousand years,” she said aloud.
“Are you talking to me, Nancy?” her brother asked from somewhere in the dark.
“No, no. Only to myself, David. Where did I put the baby? Oh! I know. I've let Joey go to the Temple to hear his father preach. Lord have mercy!”
The discourse of Dylks the second night was a chain of biblical passages, as it had been the first night. But an apparent intention, which had been wanting before, ran through the incoherent texts, leaping as it were from one to another, and there binding them in an intimation of a divine mission. He did not say that he had been sent of God, but he made the texts which he gave, swiftly and unerringly, say something like that for him to such as were prepared to believe it. Not all were prepared; many denied; the most doubted; but those who accepted that meaning of the inspired words were of the principal people, respected for their higher intelligence and their greater wealth.
He had come to the Temple with Peter Hingston and he went with him from it. Hingston's quarter section of the richest farmland in the bottom bordered his mill privilege, with barns and corncribs and tobacco sheds, and his brick house behind the mill was the largest and finest dwelling in the place. His flocks and herds abounded; his state was patriarchal; and in the neighborhood which loved and honored him, for some favor and kindness done nearly every man there: for money when the crops failed; for the storage of their wheat and corn in the deep bins of his mill when the yield was too great for their barns; for the use of his sheds in drying their tobacco before their own were ready. His growing sons and daughters, until they were grown men and women, obeyed his counsel as they had obeyed his will while children. But he was severe with no one; since his wife had died his natural gentleness was his manner as it had always been his make, and it tempered the piety, which in many was forbidding and compelling, to a wistful kindness. His faith admitted no misgiving, for himself, but his toleration of doubts and differences in others extended to the worst of skeptics. He believed that revelation had never ceased; he was of those who looked for a sign, because if God had ever given Himself in communion with His creatures it was not reasonable that he should afterwards always withhold Himself. A friendly humor looked from his dull eyes, and, in never quite coming to a formulated joke, stayed his utterance as if he were hopeful of some such event in time. He stood large in bulk as well as height, and drew his breath in slow, audible respirations.
The first people of the community tacitly recognized him as the first man in it, though none would have compared him in education with his nearest friend, Richard Enraghty, who had been the schoolmaster and was now the foremost of the United Brethren. He led their services in the Temple, and sometimes preached for them when it came their turn to occupy the house which they shared with the other sects. Hingston was a Methodist, but perhaps because their sects were so akin in doctrine and polity their difference made no division between the friends: Enraghty little and fierce and restless, Hingston large and kind and calm. What they joined in saying prevailed in questions of public interest; those who yielded to their wisdom liked to believe that Enraghty's opinion ruled with Hingston. Matthew Braile alone had the courage to disable their judgment which he liked to say was no more infallible than so much Scripture, but the hardy infidel, who knew so much law and was inexpugnable in his office, owned that he could not make head against their gospel. He could darken their counsel with citations from “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason,” but the piety of the community remained safe from his mockery.
The large charity of Hingston covered the multitude of the Squire's sins; he would have argued that he had not been understood perhaps in the worst things he said; but the fiercer godliness of Enraghty was proof against the talk of a man whose conversation was an exhalation from the Pit. He had bitterly opposed Matthew Braile's successive elections; he had made the pulpit of the Temple an engine of political warfare and had launched its terrors against the invulnerable heathen. He was like Hingston in looking for a sign; in that day of remoteness from any greater world the people of the backwoods longed to feel themselves near the greatest world of all, and well within the radius of its mysteries. They talked mostly of these when they met together, and in the solitude of their fields they dwelt upon them; on their week days and work days they turned over the threats and promises of the Sabbath and expected a light or a voice from on high which should burst their darkness and silence.
To most of them there was nothing sacrilegious in the pretensions which could be read into the closely scriptured discourse of Dylks when he preached the second time in the Temple. The affability which he used in descending from the pulpit among them, and shaking hands and hailing them Brother and Sister, and personally bidding each come to the mercy seat, convinced them of his authority; no common man would so fearlessly trust his dignity among those who had little of their own. They thronged upon him gladly, and the women, old and young alike, trembled before him with a strange joy.
“Where is your father, Sister Gillespie?” he demanded of the girl, who wavered in his strong voice like a plant in the wind.
“I don't know—he's at home,” she said.
“See that he comes, another time. I send him my peace, and tell him that it will not return to me. Say that I said he needs me.”
He went out between Enraghty and Hingston, and as they walked away, he sank his voice back in words of Scripture; farther away he began his hymn:
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despair,We wretched sinners lay”—
and ended with his shout of “Salvation!”
The cabin of the Reverdys stood on a byway beyond the Gillespies. Sally had joined the girl on her way out of the Temple, and was prancing beside her as they went homeward together. “Oh, ain't it just great? I feel like as if I could fly. I never seen the Power in Leatherwood like it was to-night. He'ssent; you can tell that as plain as the nose on your face. How happy I do feel! I believe in my heart I got salvation this minute. Don't you feel the Spirit any? But you was always such a still girl! I did like the way the women folks was floppun' all round.Isay, if you feel the Power workun' in you, show it, and help the others to git it. What do you s'pose he meant by your paw's needun' him?”
“I don't know. Perhapshewill,” the girl answered briefly.
“Goun' to tell him? Well, that's right, Janey. I kep' wonderun' why he didn't come to-night. If Abel hadn't be'n so beat out with his work at the Cross Roads to-day, you bet I'd 'a' madehimcome; but he said I'd git enough glory for both. I believe his talkun' with Squire Braile don't do him no good. You b'lieve Washington and Jefferson was friends with Tom Paine? The Squire says they was, but I misdoubt it, myself; I always hearn them two was good perfessun' Christians. Kind o' lonesome along here where the woods comes so close't, ain't it? Say, Janey: I wisht you'd come a little piece with me, though I don't suppose the bad spirits would dast to come around a body right on the way home from the Temple this way—”
They had reached the point where Sally must part with the girl, who stopped to lift the top rail of the bars to the lane leading from the road to her father's cabin. She let it drop again. “Why, I'll go the whole way with you, Sally.”
“Will you? Well, I declare to gracious, you're the best girl I ever seen. I believe in my heart, I'll rout Abel out and make him go back home with you.”
“You needn't,” the girl said. “I'm not afraid to go alone in the dark.”
“Well, just as you say, Janey. What do you do to keep from beun' afraid?”
“Oh, I don't know. I just think, I suppose.”
“Well,Ijust want tosqueal.” Sally had been talking in her loud, loose voice to keep her courage up. “Well, I declare if we ain't there a'ready. If you just say the word I'll have Abel out in half a minute, and—”
“No,” the girl said. “Good night.”
“Well, good night. I've got half a mind to go back with you myself,” Sally called, as she lifted her hand to pull the latchstring of her door.
Jane Gillespie found her father standing at the bars when she went back. He mechanically let them down for her.
“I thought you would be in bed, Father,” she said gently, but coldly.
“I've had things to keep me awake; and it's hot indoors,” he answered, and then he demanded, “Well?”
If it was his way of bidding her tell him of her evening's experience, she did not obey him, and he had to make another attempt on her silence. “Was Hughey there?”
“Hughey? I don't know.”
“Didn't he ask to come home with you?”
“I didn't see him. Sally Reverdy came with me.”
“Yes, I knew that.”
She was silent for another moment and then she said, “Father, I have a message for you. He said, 'I send my peace to him; and it will not return unto me.' He said you needed him.”
Gillespie knew that she meant Dylks and he knew that she kept out of her voice whatever feeling she had in delivering his message.
In the dark, she could not see her father's frown, but she was aware of it in his answer. “You went there against my will. Well?”
“I believe.”
“You believe? What do you believe?”
“Him. That he is sent.”
“Why?”
“I can't tell you. He made me; he made all the people there.”
Her father was standing between her and the door. He stood aside. “Go to bed now. But be quiet. Your Aunt Nancy is there.”
“Aunt Nancy?”
“Laban came, but he went back to the Cross Roads, and she's over for the night with the baby.”
“The baby? Oh, I'll be careful!” A joy came into her voice, and the strain left it in something like a laugh.
Early in the morning she crept down the ladder from the loft; her father had looped his cot up against the cabin wall and gone out. Nancy was sitting up in the bed she had made for herself on the floor, coiling a rope of her black hair into a knot at her neck. The baby lay cooing and kicking in her lap. The morning air came in fresh and sweet at the open door.
“Oh, Aunt Nancy, may I take her?”
“Yes; I'll get the breakfast. Your father'll be hungry; he's been up a good while, I reckon.”
“I'll make the fire first, and then I'll take the baby.”
The girl uncovered the embers on the hearth and blew them into life; then she ran out into the cornfield, and gathered her apron full of the milky ears, and grated them for the cakes which her aunt molded to fry for breakfast. She took the baby and washed its hands and face, talking and laughing with it.
“You talk to it a sight more than you do to anybody else, Jane,” the mother said. “Don't put anything but its little shimmy on; it's goin' to be another hot day.”
“I believe,” the girl said, “I'll get some water in the tub, and wash her all over. There'll be time enough.”
“It'd be a good thing, I reckon. But you mustn't forget your milkin'. I dunno whatourcow'd do this morning if it wasn't for Joey. But he'll milk her, him and Benny Hingston, between them, somehow. Benny stayed with him last night.”
“I did forget the milking,” the girl said, putting the baby's little chemise on. “But I'll do it now. Sissy will have to wait till after breakfast for her washing.” She got the tin bucket from where it blazed a-tilt in the sun beside the back door of the cabin, and took her deep bonnet from its peg. She did not ask why the boys slept alone in the cabin, but her aunt felt that she must explain.
“Laban's got work for the whole fall at the Cross Roads. He went straight back last night. I come here.” She had got through without telling the lie which she feared she must. “I'm goin' home after breakfast.”
Jane asked nothing further, but called from the open door, “Sukey, Sukey! Suk, Suk, Suk!” A plaintive lowing responded; then the snapping sound of a cow's eager hoofs; the hoarse drumming of the milk in the bucket followed, subduing itself to the soft final murmur of the strippings in the foam. Jane carried the milk to the spring house before she reappeared in the cabin with a cup of it for the baby.
“It's so good for her to have it warm from the cow,” she said, as she tilted the tin for the last drop on the little one's lips. “I wish you'd leave her here with me, Aunt Nancy.”
“It's about time she was weaned,” the mother said. “I reckon you better call your father now. He must be ready for his breakfast, bendin' over that tobacco ever since sun-up.”
Jane took down the tin dinner horn from its peg, and went to the back door with it, and blew a long, loud blast, crumbling away in broken sounds.
The baby was beating the air with its hands up and down, and gurgling its delight in the noise when she came back. “Oh, honey, honey, honey!” she cooed, catching it up and hugging it to her.
The mother looked at them over her shoulder as she put the cakes of grated corn in the skillet, and set it among the coals on the hearth. “It's a pity you ha'n't got one of your own.”
“I don't want one of my own,” the girl said.
“I thought, a spell back,”—the woman took up the subject again after a decent interval—“that you and Hughey Blake was goin' to make a match.” The girl said nothing, and her aunt pursued, “Was he there, last night?”
“I didn't notice.”
“Many folks?” her aunt asked with whatever change or fulfilment of a first intent.
From kneeling over to play with the baby the girl sank back on her heels with her hands fallen before her.
“I don't know.”
“What did he preach?”
“The Word of God; God's own words. All Scripture; but it was like as if it was the first time you ever heard it.”
The girl was looking at the woman, but seemed rapt from the sight of her in a vision of the night before.
“I reckon Satan could make it sound that way,” Nancy said, but her niece seemed not to hear her. Nancy stood staring at her, with words bitter beyond saying in her heart; words that rose in her throat and choked her. When she spoke she only said, “Get up, Jane; your father'll be here in a minute.”
“I'm not going to eat anything. I'm going into the woods.” She staggered to her feet, and dashed from the door. The child looked after her with outstretched arms and whimpered pitifully, but she did not mind its call.
“Where's Jane?” her father said, coming in at the back door.
“Gone into the woods,” she said.