2001
“To pray, I reckon.”
He sat down at the table-leaf lifted from the wall, and his sister served him his breakfast. He ate greedily, but his hand trembled so in lifting his cup that the coffee spilled from it.
When he had ended and sat leaning back from the board, she asked him: “What are you going to do?”
The old man cleared his throat. “Nothing, yet. Let the Lord work His will.”
“And let Joseph Dylks workhiswill, too! I'll have something to say about that.”
“Be careful, woman. Be careful.”
“Oh, I'll be careful. He has as much to lose as I have.”
“No, not half so much.”
Where Matthew Braile sat smoking most of the hot forenoon away on the porch of his cabin, there came to him rumor of the swift spread of the superstition running from mind to mind in the neighborhood, and catching like fire in dry grass. The rumor came in different voices, some piously meant to shake him with fear in the scorner's seat which he held so stubbornly; some in their doubt seeking the help of his powerful unfaith; but he required their news from them all with the same mocking. They were not of the Scribes and Pharisees, the pillars of the Temple, the wise and rich and proud who had been the first to follow Dylks, but the poorer and lowlier sort who wavered before the example of their betters, and were willing to submit it to the searching of the old Sadducee's scrutiny.
The morning after Abel Reverdy had finished his work at the Cross Roads, and had returned to the cares patiently awaiting him at home he rode his claybank so hesitantly toward the Squire's cabin that his desire to stop and talk was plain, and Braile called to him: “Well, Abel, what do they think of the Prophet over at Wilkins's? Many converts? Many dipped or sprinkled, as the case required?”
Reverdy drew rein and faced the Squire with a solemnity presently yielding to his natural desire to grin at any form of joke, and his belief that when the Squire indulged such flagrant irreverence as this he must be joking. Yet he answered evasively: “You hearn't he says now he hain't never go'n to die?”
“No. But I'm not surprised to hear it; about the next thing on the docket. Did he say that at the Cross Roads?”
“Said it right here in Leatherwood. Sally told me the first thing when I got home. You wasn't at the Temple last night, I reckon?”
“Well, notlastnight,” Braile said with an implication that he had been at the Temple all the other nights, which made Reverdy laugh with guilty joy.
“One o' the Hounds—no, it was Jim Redfield hisself—stopped on the way out, and he says, 'What's this I hear? You say you ain't goin' to die.' And Dylks he lifts his hands up over his head and he says, 'This shell will fall off'; and Jim he says, 'I've got half a mind tocrackyour shell,' and the believers they got round, and begun to hustle Jim off, but Dylks he told them to let him alone, and he says, 'I can endure strong meat, but I must be fed on milk for a while.' What you s'pose he meant, Squire?”
Braile took his pipe out and cackled toothlessly. “I'm almost afraid to think, Abel. Something awful, though. You say Sally told you?”
“Yes.”
“I should think Sally would know what he meant, if anybody.” He looked at Abel, and Sally's husband joined him in safe derision. “Tell you anything else?”
“Well, no, not just in so many words. But it 'pears he's been teachun' round all sorts of things in private, like. Who do you reckon he says he is?”
“Not John the Baptist, I hope. I don't know where we should get the locusts and wild honey for him inthissettlement. Might try grasshoppers, but the last bee-tree in the Bottom was cut down when I was a boy. I got a piece of the comb.”
“I don't know if he said John theBaptist;but it was John, anyway. And they say—or that's what Sally hearn tell—that when he was off with Enraghty and Hingston on some 'pointments down round Seneca there was doun's that 'uld make your hair stand up.”
“You don't happen to know just what the doings were?”
“Well, no, I don't, Squire. But they was doun's to deceive the very elec', from all I hearn.”
“That's just what Hingston and Enraghty both are—the very elect. What deceivedthem?”
“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire! You know I don't mean they were deceived! That's just a Bible sayin'. You see, Brother Briggs was sick and Brother Enraghty went along with Dylks and Brother Hingston to preach in his place.”
“Couldn't Dylks have done the preaching?”
“I reckon he could. But there was three 'p'intments, and may be Dylks couldn't fill 'em all, and may be he didn't want to. Fust Brother Enraghty preached in the Temple at Seneca, and then at Brother Christhaven's house off south of that, and then at David Mason's, the local preacher; but Brother Mason has got the consumption, and he couldn't preach, so Brother Enraghty had to doallthe preachun'.”
“I see. Well?”
“Well, that wasn't anything out o' the common, but what Dylks done to the Devil beat all the preachun', I reckon.”
“How'd it get out? Devil tell?”
“No. Brother Enraghty told, and Sally she got it putty straight from the wife of the man that he told it to.”
“Go on,” Braile said. “I can hardly wait to hear.”
“Well, sir, they had just got acrost the Leatherwood, and Brother Enraghty felt as if he was lifted all at once into heaven; air diff'ent, and full of joy. Dylks's face got brighter and brighter, and his voice sounded like music. When they got to the top of the hill where you can look back and see the Temple, Dylks turned his horse and stretched out his hands, and says he, 'How ignorant them people is of my true natur'. But time will show 'em.' Well, not just them words, you know; more dictionary; and they preached with a great outpourun' at Seneca. They didn't go to bed that night at all, accordun' to the woman's tell that Enraghty told her man; sot up tell mornun' prayun', and singun' hymns and readun' the Bible. Next mornun' when they started out Brother Enraghty seen a bright ring round Dylks's head, and whenever Dylks got down to pray the ring just stayed in the air over the saddle tell he got back, and then it dropped round his head ag'in.”
Reverdy stopped for the effect, but Braile only said, “Go on! Go on!”
“Well, sir, so they kep' on all that day and all the next night, prayun', and singun', and readun' the Bible. The next mornun' when they started Brother Enraghty felt kind o' cold all over, and his teeth chattered, and Dylks looked at him hard in the face, and says he, 'Time is precious now. This is the time for work. I now reveal unto you that you are Paul the Apostle.'”
“And what did Paul the Apostle say? Did he own up that he was Paul?”
Reverdy halted in his tale. “Look here, Squire! I don't feel just right, havun' you say such things. It sounds—well, like profane swearun'.”
“Any worse than Dylks or Enraghty? You go right ahead, Abel. I'll take the responsibility before the law.”
“Well,” Reverdy continued with a reluctance that passed as he went on, “what Dylks told him was that he would increase his faith, so't he could see the sights of his power, and glorify him among men, and then Enraghty he commenced to git warm ag'in, and Dylks he turned up his eyes and kep' still, and it was so bright all round him that it made the daylight like dusk, and Dylks made him hark if he didn't hear a kind of rush in the air, and Dylks said it was the adversary of souls, but he would conquer him. They came into a deep holler in the woods and there they see the devil standun' in their way, and Dylks he lights and hollers out, 'Fear not, Paul; this day my work is done,' and he went towards Satan and Satan he raised his burnun' wings and bristled his scales, and stuck out his forked tongue and dropped melted fire from it; and he rolled his eyes in his head, hissun' and bubblun' like sinners boilun' in hell's kittles. Then Dylks he got down on his knees and prayed, and got up and give his shout of Salvation, and the devil's wings fell, and he took in his tongue, and his eyes stood still, and Dylks he blowed his breath at him, and Satan he turned and jumped, and every jump he give the ground shook, and Dylks and the balance of 'em follered him till the devil come to Brother Mason's house, and then he jumped through the shut winder out of sight. They found Brother Mason's son David in bed sick, but he got up and took Dylks in his arms and called him his Savior, and everybody got down on their knees and prayed, and their faces was shinun' beautiful, and Dylks he walks round David Mason, and rubs his hands over him, and says, 'I bind the devil for a thousand years,' and he hugged David, and said, 'The work is done.' And he wouldn't stay to preach there, but told 'em they must come back with him to the Temple here in Leatherwood. On the way back he wouldn't talk at all, hardly, but just kep' sayun', 'The perfect work is done,' and he didn't give his shout any more; just snorted.”
Braile's pipe had gone out, but he pulled at it two or three times, before he said, “Well, Abel, I don't wonder Sally is excited. I supposeyouwould be, if you believed a word of this yarn?”
“Well, it's poorty cur'ous doun's, Squire,” Reverdy said, daunted between his natural bent and his wish to be of the Squire's thinking. “Don'tyoubelieve it?”
“Oh, yes,Ibelieve it. But you knowIbelieve anything. If Dylks did it, and Enraghty says he did it, why there we've got the gospel for it—right from St. Paul himself.”
He said no more, and Reverdy lingered a moment in vague disappointment. Then he sighed out, “Well, I must be goun', I reckon,” and thumped his bare heels into the claybank's ribs and rode away.
Day by day the faith in Dylks spread with circumstance which strengthened it in the converts; they accepted the differences which parted husband and wife, parent and child, and set strife between brothers and neighbors as proof of his divine authority to bring a sword; they knew by the hate and dissension which followed from his claim that it was of supernatural force, and when the pillars of the old spiritual temple fell one after another under his blows, they exalted in the ruin as the foundation of a new sanctuary. They drove the worshipers out of the material Temple, Methodists and Moravians and Baptists who had used it in common. They met to dedicate it solely to the doctrine of the prophet who came teaching that neither he nor they should ever die, but should enter in the flesh into the New Jerusalem which should come down to them at Leatherwood. His steps in passing from teacher to prophet and to Messiah were contested by a few with bitter and strenuous dissent, but on the night when Dylks proclaimed before the thronging assembly in the stolen Temple, “I am God and there is none else,” they pressed round him, men and women and children, and worshiped him. “I am God and the Christ in one,” he proclaimed. “In me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are met. There is no salvation except by faith in me. They who put their faith in me shall never taste death, but shall be translated into the New Jerusalem, which I am going to bring down from Heaven.” He snorted; the few unbelievers protested in abhorrence; but the Sisters in the faith shrieked and the Brothers shouted, “We shall never die!” Dylks came down from the pulpit among them, and Enraghty called out, “Behold our God!” and they fell on their knees before him. As it had been from the beginning, the wisest and best, the first in prayer and counsel, were foremost in the idolatry; and young girls, and wives and mothers joined in hailing Dylks as their Creator and Savior, and besought him to bless and keep them.
The believers were in such force that none of the Hounds, veteran disturbers of camp-meetings and revivals, who were there, dared molest them; the few members of the sects expelled from the Temple of their common worship held aloof from the tumult in dismay, and made no attempt to reclaim the sanctuary. One man, not of any church, but of standing in the community, tried to incite the sectarians to assert their rights, but found no following among them. They left the Temple together with certain others who had been trembling toward belief in Dylks, but whom the profanation repelled; when they were gone the tumult sank enough to let Enraghty announce another meeting a week hence, and then dismiss the congregation.
“An' afore that we're goin' to have a murricle,” Sally Reverdy told Squire Braile, sitting early the next morning at the receipt of gossip on his cabin porch with his pipe between his teeth; her cow had not come up the night before, and Abel had not found her in the woods-pasture when he went to look. “An' I couldn't wait all day, an' I just slipped over to git some milk of Mis' Braile,” she explained to the Squire as she paused with the bucket in her hand. “I told her I'd bring it back the first chance't I git at our cow; I reckon Abel will find her some time or 'nuther; and I 'lowed you had plenty.”
Braile had already heard her explaining all this to his wife, but now he kept her for the full personal detail of the last night's event at the Temple. She ended an unsparing report of the wonders seen with a prophecy of wonders to come.
“Why,” Braile said, “I don't see what you want of a miracle more than what you've had already. The fact that your cow didn't come up last night, and Abel couldn't find her in the woods-pasture this morning is miracle enough to prove that Dylks is God. Besides, didn't he say it himself, and didn't Enraghty say it?”
“Well, yes, they did,” Sally assented, overborne for the moment by his logic.
“And didn't you all believe them?”
“Well,weall did,” Sally said. “But look here, Squire Braile, what about them that didn't believe it?”
“Oh, then there were some there that didn't believe it! Well, I suppose nothing less than more miracles will do forthem. Who were they?”
“Well, of course, there was Jim Redfield; he's been ag'inst him from the first; and there was old George Nixon, and there was Hughey Blake, and a passel of the Hounds that I don't count.”
“Why, certainly not; the Hounds would doubt anything. But I'm surprised at Redfield and Nixon and Hughey Blake. What reason did they give for the faith that wasn't in them? When a man stood up and snorted like a horse and said he was God, why didn't they believe him? Or the other fellows that didn't snort, but said they knew it was God from a sound that he made?”
“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire Braile!” Sally gurgled. She did not yield quite with Abel's helplessness at a joke, but the Squire's blasphemous irony had its force with her too, though she felt it right to bring herself back to her religious conviction with the warning, “Some day you'll go too fur.”
“Yes, I'm always expecting the lightning to strike in the wrong place. Didn't Nixon or Redfield or Hughey Blake say anything? Or did they just look ashamed of you, down there on your knees before a man that you worshiped for a God because he snorted like a horse? Didn't anybody in their senses say anything, or couldn't those that were out of their senses hear anything but their own ravings?”
The old man had pleased himself with his mockeries, but now he let the scorn which his irony had hidden blaze out. “Wasn't anybody ashamed of it all? Weren't you ashamed yourself, Sally?”
“Well, I dunno,” Sally said, easing herself from one foot to another and shifting the milk-bucket from her right hand to her left. “Where everybody is goun' one way, you don't know what to think exactly. Jane Gillespie was there, and she went on as bad as the best.”
“Jane Gillespie?”
“Yes. She come with me, and she was goun' to come home with me, as fur's the door, and she would ha' done it, if it hadn't ha' been for her father. He bruk through the believers and drug her up from the floor where she was kneelun' and stoopun' her forehead over to the ground, and pulled her out through the crowd. 'You come home with me!' says he, kind o' harsh like; and if it hadn't ha' been for Nancy Billuns's Joey I'd ha' had to git through the woods alone, and the dear knows I'm always skeered enough. But Joey and Benny Hingston they come with me, or I don't feel as if I'd been here to tell it.”
“You'd have been safe from the devil, though; he stayed with Dylks. Didn't David say anything to the girl?”
“Just, 'You come home with me,' and he looked so black that Hughey Blake he kind o' started from where he was standun' with the unbelievers, and he says, 'Oh, don't, Mr. Gillespie!'—like that—and Jane she said, 'It's my father, Hugh,' and she went along with him, kind o' wild lookun', like she was walkun' in her sleep. I noticed it at the time.”
“Didn't Dylks do anything—say anything?”
“Well, not thatIseen or hearn. But some o' them that was standun' nigh him was talkun' about it when we all got out, and they was sayun' he said, 'Go with your earthly father; your heavenly father will keep you safe!' I don't know whether he did or not; but that's what they was sayun.”
“And did Gillespie say anything back?”
“Not't anybody heared. Just give Dylks a look like he wanted to kill him, and then Dylks snorted, and yelled 'Salvation!' Squire,” Sally broke off, “some of us believers was talkun' it over, when we started home, and wonderun' what ought we to call him. Jest Dylks don't sound quite right, and you can't say Almighty, to a body, exactly, and you can't say Lord. What should you think was the right way?”
Braile got back to his irony. “Well, that's an important question, Sally. I should call him Beelzebub, myself; but then I'm not a believer. That night when he first came, didn't he tell the people to call him just Dylks?”
“Yes, he did, but that was for the present, he said.”
“Has he given himself any other name?”
“Well, no.”
“Then I should let it go at Dylks.”
“Just plain Dylks? Mr. Dylks wouldn't do; or Brother Dylks, wouldn't. Father Dylks don't sound quite the thing—”
“Might try Uncle Dylks,” Braile said, cackling round his pipe-stem, and now Sally perceived that it was in vain to attempt serious discussion of the point with him.
She said, “Oh, pshaw, Squire Braile,” and lankly let herself down sidewise from the porch, and flopped away on the road. Then she stopped, and called back, “Say, Squire, what do you think of the Good Old Man?”
“What good old man?”
“Why, Dylks. For a name. That's what most of 'em wants to call him.”
“Sounds like a good name for them that like a name like it.”
“He callsusthe Little Flock.”
“Well, well! Geese or sheep?”
“Oh, pshaw, now! I wouldn't belong to the Herd of the Lost, anyway. That's what he calls the unbelievers.”
“You don't tell me! Well, now Iwillbe scared in the dark.”
Failing of any retort, Sally now flopped definitively beyond calling back.
Braile watched her going with a sardonic smile, but when his wife, after waiting for her to be quite gone, came out to him, he was serious enough.
“Did that fool tell you of the goings on at the Temple last night?”
“As much as I would let her. I suppose it had to come to something like that. It seems as if the people had gone crazy.”
“Yes,” the Squire sighed heavily, “there's no doubt about that. And it's a pity. For such a religious community Leatherwood Creek used to be a very decent place to live in. They were a lot of zealots, but they got on well with one another; that Temple of theirs kept them together, and they didn't quarrel much about doctrine. Now with the Dylksites driving the old-fashioned believers out of the sanctuary and dedicating it to the exclusive worship of Dylks, the other denominations are going to fight among themselves; and there'll be no living with them. And that isn't the worst of it. This new deity isn't going to be satisfied with worship merely. Money, of course, he'll want and get, and he'll wear purple and fine linen, and feed upon fried chicken every day. Still the superstition might die out, and no great harm done, if the faith was confined to men. But you know what women are, Martha.”
“They're what men make 'em,” Mrs. Braile said sadly.
“It's six of one and half a dozen of another, I'm afraid. But this god of theirs is a handsome devil, and some poor fool of a girl, or some bigger fool of a married woman, is going to fall in love with him, and then—”
“Did you just think of that? Well, you can't help it by lettin' your coffee get cold.”
Braile tilted his chair down and rose from its rebound to follow his wife stiffly indoors. “The question is, Who will it be? Which poor girl? Which bigger fool? And nothing can be done to prevent it! The Real God put it into human nature, and all Hell couldn't stop it. Well, I suppose it's for some wise purpose,” he ended, in parody of the pious resignation prevailing on the tongues of the preachers.
David Gillespie woke later than his daughter, and when he had put away the shadows of his unhappy dreams he took up the burden of waking thoughts which weighed more heavily on him. The sight of his child groveling at the feet of that blasphemous impostor and adoring him as her God pitilessly realized itself to him as a thing shameful past experience and beyond credence, and yet as undeniable as his pulse, his breath, his seeing and hearing. The dread which a less primitive spirit would have forbidden itself as something too abominable, possessed him as wholly possible. He had lived righteously, and he had kept evil from those dear to him, both the dead and the quick, by the force of his strong unselfish will; now he had seen his will without power upon the one who was dearest, and whom he seemed to hold from evil only by the force of his right hand. But his hand could not be everywhere and at all times; and then?
The breakfast which the girl had got for him and left on the hearth was warm yet, when he put it on the table, and she could not have been gone more than a few minutes, but she had gone, he did not know where, without waiting to speak with him after the threats and defiances which they had slept upon. When he had poured the coffee after the mouthfuls he forced down, he acted on the only hope he had and crossed the woods-pasture to his sister's cabin.
She understood the glance he gave within from the threshold where he paused, and said, “She ain't here, David.” Nancy had cleared her breakfast away and was ironing at the shelf where she had eaten; the baby was playing on the floor.
Gillespie looked down at it. “I didn't know but what she'd come over to dress it; she cares so much for it.”
“It cares for her, too. But what brings you after her?”
“She's gone somewhere without her breakfast. We had high words last night after I brought her home.”
“I'm afraid you'll have higher words, yet, David. Joey was at the Temple.”
“Nancy, I don't know what to do about her.”
“You knew what to do aboutme, David.” She gave her stab, and then she pitied him, not for the pain she was willing he should feel from it, but for the pain he was feeling before. “I know it isn't like that. I'm sorry for you both. You haven't come to the end of your troubles.”
“I can't understand the girl,” he said desolately. “Up to a year ago she was like she had always been, as biddable as a child, and meek and yielding every way. All at once she's got stiff-necked and wilful.”
“She couldn't tell you why, herself, David. We are all that way—good little girls—and then all of a sudden wilful women. I don't know what changes us. It's harder on us than it is on you. It came on me like a thief in the night and stole away my sense. It gave Joseph Dylks his chance over me; if it had been sooner or later I should have known he was a power of darkness as far as I could see him. But my eyes were holden by my self-conceit, and I thought he was an angel of light.”
“He's got past being an angel now,” Gillespie said, forcing himself to the real matter of his errand, far from the question of his daughter's estrangement from her old self. “Did Joey tell you about—last night?”
Nancy did not quit the psychological question at once. “Up to that time we think our fathers and brothers are something above the human; then we think they're not even up to the common run of men. We think other men are different because we don't know them. Yes,” she returned to his question with a sigh, “Joey told me something about it—enough about it. I suppose it isn't right to let him be a spy on his father; but I have to. If I didn't he might want to go, from the talk of those fools, and get to believin' with them. He said there was boys and girls kneelin' with the rest—little children, almost, and shoutin' and prayin' to Joseph. Did you see 'em?”
“Yes; it was dreadful, Nancy. But it was worse to see the women, the grown-up girls, and the mothers of the children. It looked like they had been drinking. It fairly turned me sick. And my own daughter groveling on her knees with the worst! If I didn't know Dylks for the thing he is, without an idea beyond victuals and clothes, I might ha' thought he had thrown a spell on 'em, just for deviltry. But they done it all themselves; he just gave them thechanceto play the fool.”
Nancy resumed from her own more immediate interest, “Well, I let Joey go; and I don't know whether it helps or hurts to have him come home feelin' about him, and all the goings on, just like I would myself. He always says he's glad I wasn't there, and he pities the poor fool women more than he despises his father. Or I ortn't to say despise; Joey don't despise anybody; he's all good, through and through; I don't know where he gets it. He's like Laban, and yet he ain't any kin to Laban.”
“It must be hard on you, Nancy. I don't know how you can bear up the way you do. It is like a living streak of fire in me.”
“That's because there's some hope left in you. I can bear what I've got to because the feeling is all burnt out of me. It's like as if my soul was dead.”
“You mustn't say that, Nancy.”
“I say anything I please, now; anything I think. I'm not afraid any more; I hain't got anything left to be afraid of.”
“Well, I have,” David returned. “Something I'm ashamed to be afraid of it: his hold on Jane. I don't understand it. We've always thought alike and believed alike, and now to see her gone crazy after a thief and liar like that! It's enough to drive me mad the other way. I don't only want to killhim; I want to kill—”
“David!” she stopped him, and in his pause she added, “You're worse than what I ever was. Where is your religion?”
“Where isherreligion? I raised her to fear God, the Bible God that I've prayed to for her since she was a little babe, but now since she's turned to this heathen image I begin to turn fromHim. What'sHebeen about if He's All Seeing and All Powerful, to let loose such a devil on a harmless settlement like this where we were all brethren and dwelt together in unity, no matter whether we believed in dipping or sprinkling? We loved one another—in the Scripture sense—and now look! Families broken up, brothers not speaking, wives and husbands parting, parents cursing the day their children were born, and children flying in the face of their parents. Did you hear about Christopher Mills, how he come crying to his father and mother and tried to make them believe in Dylks, and when his father said it was all a snare and a delusion, Christopher went away telling them their damnation was sealed?”
“No,” the woman said with bitter pleasure in the mockery, “but I heard how our new Saint Paul Enraghty went over to his uncle's the other day, and said he should never see corruption, and should never die, and told his uncle he couldn't shoot him. Them that was there say the old man just reached for his rifle, and was going to shoot Saint Paul in the legs, and then Paul begged off and pretended that he was only in fun!”
She laughed, but David Gillespie looked sadly at her. “I don't believe I like to hear you laugh, Nancy.”
“Why, are you turning believer too, David? It'll be time for me next,” she mocked. “I couldn't laugh at Joseph, may be, but Saint Paul Enraghty is a bigger rascal or a bigger fool than he is. Some say that Joseph is just crazy, and some that he's after money, and that Enraghty's put him up to everything.”
“Yes,” David moodily assented to the general tenor of her talk. “The way they've roped in between 'em that poor fool Davis who'd been preaching for the United Brethren, and now preaches Dylks! First he wouldn't hardly go into the same house, and then he wouldn't leave it till he could come with Dylks. I don't know how they do it! Sometimes I think the decentest man left in the place is that red-mouthed infidel, Matthew Braile! Sometimes I'm a mind to go to his house and get him to tell me what Tom Paine would do in my place.”
“Youarepretty far gone, David. But I don't wonder at it; and I don't believe I think so badly of Matthew Braile, either. He may be an infidel, but he believes in some kind of a God that wants people to do right; he don't believe in mortal sin, and may be that's where he's out; and I hear tell he don't think there's going to be any raisin' of the body, or any Last Day, or any Hell; but he keeps it to himself unless folks pester him. I was afraid once to have Joey talk with him, before the plow went over me. But now I let Joey go to him all he wants to. He lets Joey come and pet the coon Joey give him because he heard that the Squire's little boy used to want one. From all I can make out they don't do much but talk about the little boy; he seems to take comfort in Joey because Joey's like him, or the Squire thinks so.”
“If Jane had died when she was his little boy's age, I wouldn't feel as if I had lost her half as much as I do now.”
Nancy lifted herself from her ironing-board and looked at her brother. “You told me what the duty of a woman was that found out she had two husbands. Don't you know what the duty of a man is that has a daughter turned idolater?”
“No, I don't, Nancy,” David answered doggedly.
“Then, why don't you wrestle with the Lord in prayer? Perhaps He'd make you some sign.”
“Oh, prayer! The thought of it makes me sick since I saw them fools wallowing round at Dylks's feet, and beseeching that heathen image to save them.”
“Then if you hain't got any light of yourself, and you don't believe the Lord can give you any, what do you expectmeto do for you?”
“I don't expect anything, Nancy. If she was a child I could whip it out of her, but when your child has got to be a woman you can't whip her.”
They left the hopeless case, and began to talk of the things they had heard, especially the miracle which Dylks had promised to work. “He's appointed it for to-night,” Gillespie said, “but I don't believe but what he'll put it off, if the coast ain't clear when the time comes. He always had the knack of leaving the back door open when he saw trouble coming up to the front gate.”
“You can't tell me anything about Joseph Dylks,” Nancy said. She was ironing, and at the last word she brought the iron down with the heavy thump that women give with it at an emphatic word in their talk. “What I wonder is that a man like you, David, could care what people in such a place as this would say if they found out that I was livin' with Laban when I knowed Dylks was alive. There wouldn't be any trouble with his followers, I reckon. He'd just tell 'em he never saw me in his life before, and that would do them.”
“Nancy,” her brother turned solemnly upon her, “as sure as I'm standing here I don't care for that any more. If you say the word, I'll go and tell Laban to come back to you.”
“You're safe there, David. If you've parted with your conscience, I've got it from you. I wonder you don't go and follow after Joseph Dylks too. All the best and smartest men in the place believe in him. Just look at Mr. Enraghty! A man with more brains and book learnin' than all the rest put together; willin' to be the Apostle Paul because Joseph Dylks called him it, and gets up in the Temple where he used to preach Christ Jesus and Him crucified, and tells the people to behold their God in Joseph Dylks! There's just one excuse for him: he's crazy. If he ain't he's the wickedest man in Leatherwood, the wickedest man in the whole world; he's worse than Joseph Dylks, because he knows better. Joseph is such a liar that he could always make himself believe what he said. But it's no use your stayin' here, David!” She suddenly broke off to turn on her brother. “If you're a mind to let Jane come, I'll try what I can do with her.”
The old man faltered at the door. “Are you going to tell her, Nancy?”
“I'm not going to tellyou, whether I am or not, David!”
Her words began harshly, but ended with his name tenderly, pitifully uttered.
She called after him as he moved from her door, heavily, weakly, more like an old man than she had noted him yet, “I'll talk to Jane, and whatever I say will be for her good.” She watched him out of sight from where she was working; then she went to the door, with some mind to call more kindly yet to him; but he was not to be seen, and she went back to her ironing, and ironed more swiftly than before, moving her lips in a sort of wrathful revery. From time to time she changed her iron for one at the hearth, which she touched with her wetted finger to test its heat, and returned to her table with an unconscious smile of satisfaction in its quick responsive hiss. In her movements to and fro she spoke to the baby, which babbled inarticulately up to her from the floor. Then she seemed to forget it, and it was in one of these moments of oblivion that she was startled by a sharp cry of terror from it. A man was looking in at the door.
The man stood with one foot on the log doorstep outside and the other planted on the threshold of the cabin.
Nancy came toward him with her iron held at arms' length before her. “What do you want?” she demanded fiercely.
“Give me to drink,” he said, with a grin.
“Go round to the well,” she answered.
The man bent his body a little forward, and looked in, but he did not venture to lift his other foot to the threshold. “Where is your husband?” he asked.
“I have no husband. What is it to you?”
“'Thou sayest well ... for him whom thou now hast, is not thy husband.' You don't look a bit older, and you're as handsome as ever, Nancy. I suppose that's his,” he said, turning his eye towards the little one on the floor, lifted by her hands half upright, and peering at him, in conditional alarm.
“It's mine,” she retorted.
“Oh, anybody could see that. It's the image of you. And so is our Joey. You don't let your young ones favor your husbands much, Nancy; and yet you was not always so set against me. What's your notion letting Joey come to the Temple?”
“To see for himself what you are.”
“That's what I thought, maybe. Well, he don't seem to take to me much, if I can judge from his face when he looks my way. I hain't been able to give him all the attention I may later. But you needn't be troubled about him. I won't do anything to make you anxious. Nancy, I wish you could feel as friendly to me as I do to you. Will you let me have something to drink out of?”
“Go round,” she said, “and I'll bring the gourd to you.”
Dylks laughed, but he obeyed, and found his way to the well where he lowered the bucket at the end of the swoop, and stood waiting for Nancy to follow him with the dipper fashioned from a long-necked gourd, as the drinking cup oftenest was in the western country of those days. She held it out to him with her head turned and he carried it to his lips from the brimming bucket.
He drank it empty, and then turned it over with a long, deep “Ah—h—h!” of satisfaction. “That was good! Good as the buttermilk would have been that you didn't think to offer me. Well, I thank you for the water, anyway, you woman of Samaria.” He held the gourd toward her but she did not take it, and he laughed again. “If you could have had your way without sin you'd have made it poison, I reckon. Don't you know I could drink poison the same as water?”
“Youdon't,” she said, and as he swung the gourd in tacit question what to do with it since she did not offer to take it, she bade him, “Put it down.”
He did so, and she set her foot on the thin bowl and crushed it like an egg shell. He laughed. “Is that the way you feel about me, Nancy? Pity for the gourd, but don't you believe that if I was to will it so, it would come good and whole again?”
“Youdon't believe it,” she said.
“It's not for me to believe or to unbelieve,” he answered. “I am that I am.”
“Oh, yes,” she taunted him, “you've tried saying such things, and you're not afraid because it ha'n't killed you yet. You think if youwasjust a man it would kill you.”
“Who can tell what I think? Perhaps something like what you say has gone through my mind. Why, Nancy, if you would listen once, I could convince you of it, too. Come, now, look at it in this light! If God lets a man say and do what the man pleases—and Hehasto do it every now and then according to what the Book tells—why ain't the man equal with God? You believe, maybe, that you would be struck dead if you said the things that I do; but why ain't I struck dead? Why, either because it ain't so, at all, or because I'm God. It stands to reason, don't it? What is God, anyway? If He was so mighty and terrible, wouldn't He have ways of showing it in these times just as much as in those old times that we read about in the Book?
“Don't you know that if there was anything besides you and me, here now, it would have sent the lightning out of this clear sky and blasted me when I said, I was God? Well, now we'll try it again. Listen! Iam God, Jehovah, ruler of heaven and earth!” He stood a moment, smiling. “There you see! I'm safe and sound as ever. May be you think it would be worse ifyousaid I was God. Lots have said it. Last night all Leatherwood was hanging to my arms and legs down there in the Temple worshiping me. If I hadn't been God it would have made me sick! No mere man could stand the praising God gets in the churches all the time. Why that proves I'm what I say I am, if nothing else does. I saw it from the first; I felt it; I knew it.” He ended with his laugh.
She stayed herself by the trunk of the tree overhanging the well. “Yes, you've got all Leatherwood with you, or as good as all, and I don't wonder it's made you crazy. But don't you be so sure. Some day there's going to be a reckoning with you, and you're going to wake up from this dream of yours.” She seemed to gather force as she faced him. “I could feel to be glad itwasa dream; I could feel to pity you. But don't you believe but what it's going to turn against you. Some day, sooner or later, some man's going to show the people what you are; some woman—”