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“There you've said it,” he broke in. “That's what I've come for. You're the only woman that could hurt me, not because you think you know me the best, but because you're the bravest woman that ever was. That's why I've got to have you with me in my dispensation. Male and female created He them in His image. I can swing all Leatherwood by myself, but Leatherwood's nothing. If I had you with me we could swing the world! Nancy, why don't you come to me?” He flung his arms wide and bent his stalwart shape toward her. “Leatherwood's nothing, I tell you. Why, you ought to see the towns Over-the-Mountains; you ought to see Philadelphia, where I came from the last thing. Everywhere the people are waiting for a sign, just as they've always been, and we would come with a sign—plenty of signs: the perfect Godhead, male and female, for the greatest sign of all. Why, I wonder there's a Christian woman living, with the slur that the idea of just one male God throws on women! Don't you know that the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, and everybody but the Hebrews, had a married God, and that the Godhead was husband and wife? If you had ever read anything at all you would know that.”
The bad, vulgar beauty of his face, set in its flowing beard and hair, glowed on her.
“You needn't look that way at me, Joseph Dylks,” she answered. “I don't want any book-l'arning to know whatyouare. You're what you always was, a lazy, good-for-nothing—Oh, I don't say you wasn't handsome; that was what done it for me when I made you my God; but I won't make you my God now, though you're as handsome as ever you was; handsomer, if that's any comfort to you.”
“Nothing to what you're coming to me would be, Nancy.”
“You'll have to do without, then. You think you can twist me round your finger, like you used to, if you willed it, but I've outlived you, you and your will. Now I want you to go, and not ever come near me again; or I'll have Laban here, the next time.”
“Laban? Laban? Oh, the man who is not thy husband! I'm not afraid of your having Laban, here; let him come. I've converted worse sinners than Laban.” He had remained, bent forward with his gaze still on her; now he lifted himself, and said, as if it were another word of his spell, “Come, Nancy!”
She answered, “If I thought there was any mercy in you—”
“Why, I'm All-merciful, as well as All-mighty, Nancy!” he jeered.
“No,”—as if concluding her thought, she said, “it's no use! You couldn't do a right thing if you wanted to; you can only do wrong things. I see that.”
“What is right and what is wrong? When you stand by my side in your half of the godhead, you will know that there is no difference. Why, even a poor human being can make wrong right by wanting it enough, and with God there is nothing but one kind of thing, the thing that God allows. It don't matter whether it's letting the serpent tempt that fool woman in Eden, or Joseph's brethren selling him into Egypt, or Samuel hewing Agag in pieces, or the Israelites smiting the heathen, or David setting Uriah in the forefront of the battle, or Solomon having hundreds of wives; it's all right if God wills it. You'll say it's put right by what happens to them that do wrong. Be God yourself and the right and the wrong will take care of themselves. I want you to come and help me. Why, with the sister and daughter of old David Gillespie both following me—”
She suddenly shrank from the grandeur of judging of him, to the measure of her need of his forbearance. “Oh, why can't you let David alone? What's he ever done to you?”
“What have I ever done to him?” Dylks demanded, temporizing on her ground.
“Why can't you let Jane alone?”
He gave his equine snort, as if the sense of his power could best vent itself so. “Why can't she letmealone? That girl bothers me worse than all the other women in Leatherwood put together. She won'tletme let her alone.”
“She was all right before you came. Why can't you let her go back to Hughey Blake?”
“Hughey Blake? Oh! Then it wasn't—” A light of malign intelligence shone in his eyes. “Well, I haven't got anything against Hughey Blake.”
“Oh, if you'd only let her go back to Hughey! If you'd only let her alone, I'd—”
“You'd what?” He bounded toward her, and at her recoil he laughed and said, “I didn't mean to scare you.”
“I wasn't scared. You can't scareme, Joseph Dylks. It's past that, long ago, with you and me. But if I only knowed what you was up to—what you would really take to let David alone; to let her go back to Hughey Blake—But there ain't any pity in you!”
“Don't I tell you I'mfullof pity? Look here, Nancy; I don't ask you to come with me, to be one with me, to go halves in the godhead, all at once. It's been step by step with me: first exhorter, then prophet, then disciple, then the Son, then the Father: but it's been as easy! You don't know how faith, the faith of the elect, helps along; and you would have that from the beginning; they would take you on my word, you wouldn't have to say or do anything. But that's not what I'm expecting now,” he hurried to add, smiling at the cloud of refusal in her face. “I'm not fooling; all I ask now is to have you come and see me do a miracle at Brother Hingston's to-night. I'll do two miracles if you'll come, and one will be sending Jane Gillespie away from me and back to Hughey Blake. You'll want to see that, even if you don't want to see me turn a bolt of cloth into seamless raiment by the touch of my hand.”
“You are a wicked man, Joseph Dylks,” the woman solemnly answered. “And I'm sorry I asked you anything. Youcouldn'tdo good, if you tried.” She pulled her sunbonnet across her face, as if to hide it for shame, and went back slowly toward the cabin.
“Salvation!” Dylks shouted after her, and gave his equine snort. He began to sing, as he took his way through the woods,
“Plunged in a gulf of dark despairWe wretched sinners lay.”
At first he sang boldly, filling the woods with the mocking of his hymn. But at the sound of footsteps crackling over the dry falling twigs toward him intermittently, as if they paused in question, and then resumed their course toward him, his voice fell, brokenly silencing itself till at the encounter of a man glimpsed through the trees, and pausing in a common arrest, it ceased altogether.
“Who are you?” Dylks demanded of the slight, workworn figure before him.
“Laban Billings,” the man faltered.
“Well, then, Laban Billings, make way for the Lord thy God,” Dylks powerfully returned, and as if he had borne the man down before him, he strode over the place where he had stood, and lost himself in the shadows beyond.
Laban hurried on, stumbling and looking back over his shoulder, till he found himself face to face with Nancy at the door of the shed behind the cabin. She was looking, too, in the direction Dylks had ceased from their sight in the woods. They started from each other in mutual fright.
“Nancy!” he entreated. “I didn't see you. I—I wasn't comin' to see you, indeed, indeed I wasn't. I just thought I might ketch sight of the baby—It's pretty hard to do without you both! And I was just passin'—Well, they've knocked off work at the Corners, so's to come to the miracle at Hingston's Mill to-night—But I'll go right away again, Nancy.”
“You needn't, Laban. Come in and see the baby.”
“Nancy!” he uttered joyfully. Then he faltered, “Do you think it will be right—”
“Oh, who knows what's right?” she retorted. Then at his stare, she demanded, “Didn't you run across anybody in the woods?”
“Yes.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like what they tell the Leatherwood God looks like. They're half crazy about him at the Corners. They don't hardly talk about anything else.”
“Did you think he looked like God?”
“More like Satan, I should say. He's handsome enough for Satan.”
“It was Joseph Dylks.”
“Yes, I s'picioned that.”
“And he's been here, wanting me to go away with him—Over-the-Mountains.”
Laban made a dry sound in his throat and it was by a succession of efforts that he could say, “And—and—and—”
“Oh, could youask, Laban?” she lamented. “You're my husband, don't you know it?” At the sound of her lament a little voice of fear and hope answered from the cabin. The father-hunger came into the man's weak face, making it strong. “Come in and see our baby, Laban.”
She put out her hand to him innocently like a little girl to a little boy, and he took it. “I know it's just for the baby; and I feel to thank you, Nancy,” he said, and together they went into the cabin.
At sight of him the baby crowed recognition. “She knowed you in a minute,” the mother said, and she straightened the skirt of the little one which the father had deranged in lifting the child from the floor. “I don't believe she'll ever forget you; Ireckonshe won't if I have any say in it. Me and Joey talks about you every night when we're gettin' her to sleep.” She gurgled out a half-sob, half-laugh, as the little one pulled and pushed at his face, which he twisted this way and that, to get her hand in his mouth. “She always cared more for you than she did for me. I'll set you a piece, Laban; I was just going to get me a bite of something; I don't take my meals very regular, with you not here.”
“Well, Iama little hungry with the walk from the Corners, after such an early breakfast.”
“Well, you just keep her.”
“Oh,I'llkeep her,” he exulted.
She hustled about the hearth, getting the simple meal, which she made more than she had meant, and they had a joyous strange time together at the leaf she stayed from the well.
He kept the baby in his lap while he ate. Then he walked the floor till she fell asleep in his arms. When he lifted himself from laying her in the rough cradle which he had himself made for her, he said, without looking at the mother, “Now, I must be going, Nancy.”
“Don't go on account of me, Laban,” she said with the same fierce courage she had shown in driving him from her before. “If it's for me—”
“Nancy, I've thought it all out since I been away. And I reckon I ain't your husband, in the sight of God. You was right about that; and I won't ever come back again till—as long as—” He glanced wistfully at the little one in the cradle, and then he turned to go out of the door. “And—and—good-by, Nancy.”
She followed him to the door. “Kiss me, Laban!”
He put away the arms she lifted toward him. “No,” he said, “I reckon it wouldn't be right,” and he turned and walked swiftly away, without looking back.
The woman stood watching the man, as long as she could see him, and long after, with her left hand lifted to the jamb of the door, higher than her head. Then from the distance where he passed from sight over the brow of the hill, another figure of a man appeared, and slowly made its way down to the cabin. As she knew while he was still far off, it was Matthew Braile who, as long as he sat in the seat of the scorner, with his chair tilted against the wall, seemed a strong middle-aged man; but when he descended from his habitual place, with the crook of his stick, worn smooth by use, in his hard palm, one saw that he was elderly and stiff almost to lameness. He carried himself with a forward droop, and his gaze bent ponderingly on the ground, as if he were not meaning to look her way, and would pass without seeing her.
“Squire Braile!” she called to him, and as he straightened himself and turned round toward her, she besought him, “Do you believe there's any God?”
“Oh!” he answered, and he smiled at the challenge from the somewhat lonely elevation which he knew the thoughts of his neighbors kept, aloof from the sordid levels of politics and business. “Why, Nancy, haven't we got one, right here in Leatherwood?”
“That's what makes me think there ain't any, Squire Braile. If you're not in too much of a hurry, I wish you'd stop and talk to me a minute. I'm in trouble.”
“Most women are; or men, for the matter of that. What is it, Nancy? I'm rather stronger on law than gospel; but if I can be any help, why you know your Joey's an old friend of mine, and I'll be glad to help you.”
He came toward her where she had stepped from the threshold and sat crouched on the hewn log, and stood looking down at her before he sank at her side.
“You may think it's pretty strange, my askingyoufor help. Won't you set? I can't let you come inside because the baby's just got to sleep.”
“Well,” he assented, “if you're not afraid to be seen with such an infidel in the full light of day,” he jested, confronting her from the log where he sank. “What would Brother Gillespie say?”
She ignored his kindly mockery, and again she began, “What makes you believe there's a God? You don't believe in the Bible?”
“Not altogether, Nancy.”
“Do you believe in the Bible God?”
“As much as the Bible'll let me.”
“Then, do you believe in the miracles?”
“What are you after, Nancy Billings?”
“If you saw a miracle, would you believe it?”
“That would depend on who did it. Now, I want you to letmedo a little of the catechizing. I've liked you and Laban ever since you came to Leatherwood, and you know how your Joey has all but brought my boy back to me. Well, doyoubelieve in God?”
“No!”
“Why don't you?”
“A God that would let Joseph Dylks claim to be Him, and let them poor fools kneel down to him and worship him? Would an all-wise and all-powerful God do that?”
“What makes you say all-powerful? Haven't you seen time and time again when good didn't prevail against evil, and don't you suppose He'd have helped it if He could? And why do you call Him all-wise? Is it because men are no-wise? That wouldn't prove it, would it? And about the miracles, what does a miracle prove? Does it prove that the person who does it is of God, or just that faith is stronger than reason in those who think it's happened?”
“But sin: do you think there's such a thing?” Nancy pursued.
“There you are, catechizingmeagain! Yes, I think there's sin, because I've known it in myself, if I haven't in others.”
“And what is it—sin?”
“Well, Nancy, it seems to vary according to the time and place. But I should say it was going against what you knew was right at the time being.”
“And do you always know?”
“Always!” the old man answered solemnly. “I never was mistaken in my life, whether I went for or against it, and I've done both.”
The woman drew a hapless sigh. “Yes, I reckon it's so.”
Braile was putting out his stick to help himself in rising, after the silence she let follow. She came from it, and reached a staying hand toward him. “And supposin'—supposin'—there was a woman—that there was a woman, and her husband left her, and he kept away years and years, till she thought he was dead, and she married somebody else, and then he come back, would it be a sin for her to keep on with the other one when she knowed the first one was alive?”
“I reckon that's what would be called a sin, Nancy. Not that I'd be very quick to condemn her—”
“And supposin' that the first one hadn't claimed her yet, and she'd made the other one leave her, and then the first one come and wanted her to join him in the wickedest thing that ever was, and she wasn't as strong as she had been, and she felt to need the protection-like of the other one: would it be a sin for her to take him back?”
Braile made again as if to rise. “I reckon you'd better talk to Mis' Braile about a thing like that. You see, a man—”
She stayed him again with a beseeching gesture.
“Squire Braile, do you believe that God is good?”
“Ah, now, I'm more at home in a question like that. You might say that if He lets evil prevail, it's either because He can't help it, or because He don't care, or even because He thinks it's best for mankind to let them have their swing when they choose to do evil. I incline to think that's my idea. He's made man, we'll say, made him in His own image, and He's put him here in a world of his own, to do the best or the worst with it. The way I look at it, He doesn't want to keep interfering with man, but lets him play the fool or play the devil just as he's a mind to. But every now and then He sends him word. If we're going to take what the Book says, He sent him Word made flesh, once, and I reckon He sends him Word made Spirit whenever there's a human creature comes into the world, all loving and all unselfish—like your Joey, or—my—my Jimmy—”
The old man's voice died in his throat, and the woman laid her hand on his knee. He trembled to his feet, now. “When I think of such Spirits coming into this world, I'm not afraid of all the devils out of hell Dylksing round.”
He walked on down the road, and Nancy went indoors and went about her household work. She cleaned the dishes and trimmed the hearth; she spun the flax which tufted her wheel; then she took the rags of some garments past repair, and in the afternoon shadow of her threshold she cut them into ribbons and sewed them end to end and wound them into balls, for weaving into carpets.
People, as the evening drew on, went by, singly, in twos, in groups, silent for the most part, but some talking seriously. These looked at Nancy without speaking, but some asked, “Ain't you goin' to the Miracle?” and she shook her head for answer.
She had brushed her hair and put it up neatly after her indoors work was done, but she was in what she would have called her every-day clothes, and the passers had on their Sunday clothes; the girls wore their newest plaids of linsey-woolsy, and the young men wore tall beaver hats, and long high-collared coats, with tight pantaloons, which some pretenders to the latest fashions had strapped under their boots. They had on their Sunday faces, too; some severe, some sly, some simple and kind, but all with an effect of condition for whatever might be going to happen. They went as the people of Leatherwood went to the Temple on the Sabbaths before their meetings had been turned from the orderly worship of the Most High to the riot of emotions raised by the strange man who proclaimed himself God. In their expectations of the Sign which he had promised to give them, both those who believed and those who denied him found themselves in a sort of truce. They were as if remanded to the peace of the time before the difference which had rent the community into warring fragments. In this truce brothers were speaking who had not spoken since they accepted or refused the new God; families walked together in the harmony which he had lately counseled; children honored their believing or disbelieving parents; fathers and mothers ceased to abhor their children as limbs of Satan, according to their faith or unfaith. “Let everybody come to the Sign,” he had exhorted them when he promised them the miracle, “just as if they had never seen or heard me before, and let His creatures judge their Creator with love for one another in their hearts.”
In all there was an air of release, and the young people looked as if they were going to one of the social gatherings they would have called a frolic, in the backwoods phrase. Nancy heard a girl titter in response to her companion's daring whisper, “Wonder if Mis' Hingston's going to pass round the apples and cider.” They walked in couples, openly or demurely glad of being together for the time; and as if the miracle before them were the wonder of coming home through the woods with their arms around each other, whether the miracle of the seamless raiment was wrought or not.
It was their elders who were more singly set upon the fulfilment of the sign, and who went with a more passionate expectation in the doubt or the faith which differenced them; children were more bent upon the affair of the evening than the young girls and the young men. They had been privileged in being allowed to go with their fathers and mothers when they had not been punished in being left at home and they subdued themselves as they could to the terms of keeping step beside them with the bare feet that felt winged and ached to fly. Old and young they passed Nancy's cabin thinly or at intervals, but sometimes in close groups; they glanced kindly or unkindly askance at her when they did not question her, and very possibly they read in her sitting there boldly aloof from them a defiance of the question which had begun to gather about her in the common mind since Laban had left her for his work at the Cross Roads, with none of those Saturday night returns which it had at first expected. It was known that Laban was of the same opposition to Dylks as Nancy and her brother, and it could not be that Dylks had caused the break between her and Laban which no one would have noticed if it had been an effect of religion. It could only be that Laban had left her, or that her temper had driven him away.
With the last came a crowd of boys, whose lagging she understood when her own boy jumped down from the cabin door beside her.
“Did I scare you, mother?” he asked, at her start.
“No; I was expecting you, and you always come in at the back. You'll want your supper, I'll be bound. What made you so late, and all out of breath, so?”
“I been running. We just got the last of the tobacco in, this evening, and Mis' Hingston made me stay and eat with Benny; she said she'd excuse me to you. I just left the other boys up over the hill, and run through the woods to get here in time and ask you.”
“To ask me what, Joey dear?” She put her arms fondly round the boy's knees, and pulled him down to her.
“The boys said you let me go to the Temple all I want to; but I told them the Miracle was different, and I'd have to ask you first. I told Mis' Hingston, and I told the boys. Me 'n' Benny got them to come round. Kin I, mother? Mis' Hingston thought may be—may be—you might come yourself. But I told her I didn't believe you would.”
“No, I won't go, Joey. What makes you want to go?”
“Oh, I don't know. All the boys are goin'. And I never seen a miracle yet.”
“Do you believe he can do a miracle?”
“Well, it would be some fun to see what he would do if he didn't. I'd like to hear what he'd say.”
“And what would you think if he did do it? That he was—God?”
“Oh,no, mother! He couldn't be. Mr. Dylks couldn't. I ain't ever thought for a minute that he wasthat.”
“And if he failed—if he tried, and put himself to shame before everybody, how would you feel?”
“Well, mother, nobody as't him to.” Nancy was silent for so long that the boy said discouragedly, “But if you don't want me to go—”
Her face hardened from the pity of her inward vision of the man's humiliation, as if his own son had judged him justly. “Yes, you can go, Joey. But be careful, be careful! And don't stay too late. And if anything happens—”
“Oh, surely, mother, nothing willhappen,” he exulted, and he broke from her hold and ran down the road where the group of boys had waited for him, and as he ran he leaped into the air, and called to them, “She's let me; she's let me!” and the boys leaped up in response, and called back, “Hurrah, hurrah!” and when he had come up with them, they all tried to get their arms round him, and trod on his heels and toes in pushing one another from him.
In the August twilight which now began to pale the hot sunset glow, as if she had waited to come alone, in her pride or in her shame, the woman who was bearing the body of the miracle to the place where the wonder was to be wrought came last of all to pass Nancy where she sat at her door. She was that strong believer who in her utter trust, when she heard that cloth would be needed for the seamless raiment of his miracle, had offered to provide it; and now, neither in pride nor in shame, but in defiance of her unbelieving husband, she was bearing away from her house the bolt of linsey-woolsey newly home from the weaver, which was to have been cut into the winter's clothing of her children. She had spun the threads herself and dyed them, and they had become as if they were of her own flesh and blood. She carried the bolt wrapped about with her shawl, bearing it tenderly in her arms, as if it were indeed her flesh and blood, her babe which she was going to lay upon an altar of sacrifice.
The crowd at Hingston's mill grew with the arrival of the unbelievers as well as the believers in Dylks. They came from all sides, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, and the groups came disputing as often as agreeing among themselves. When a group was altogether believing they exchanged defiances with a party of those religious outcasts, the Hounds, disturbers of camp-meetings and baptisms, and notorious mockers, now, of the Leatherwood god in his services at the Temple. But the invitation given to see the promised miracle had beento all; the Hounds had felt in it the tenor of a challenge, and they had accepted it defiantly. They jeered at the believers as these arrived, sometimes hailing them by name; they neighed and whinnied, and shouted “Salvation!” and in the intervals of silence they burst out with the first lines of the Believers' hymn.
There were those who mocked, “I am God Almighty,” “The Father and the Son are one, and I am both of 'em put together,” and “Oh, Dylks, save us!” “Don't leave us, Dylks!” “Make the Devil jump, Joseph! Make him rattle his scales for us!” “Fetch on your miracle!” The believing women turned away; some of the younger tittered hysterically at a droll profanation of their idol's name, and then one of the ruffians applauded. “That's right, sisters! We like to have you enjoy yourselves. Promised to let anybody in particular see you home to-night?” The girls tried to control themselves, and laughed the more, and the Hound called, “Say, girls, let's have a dance—a dance before the Lord.”
Jane Gillespie had come with her father in the family pride which forbade them to reject each other publicly. The girl stood a little apart from her father, and near her hung, wistfully, fearfully, the young farmer whom the neighborhood gossip had assigned her for an acceptable if not accepted lover. She looked steadfastly away from Hughey Blake, with her head lifted and her cheeks coldly flushed under the flame of her vivid hair: she was taller than the other girls, and showed above the young man.
“Say, Hughey,” one of the Hounds spoke across the space they had left between them and the decent unbelievers, “Can't you gimme a light? Reach up!” He held out a cigar, in the joke of kindling it at the girl's hair.
Hughey Blake turned, and his helpless retort, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” redoubled the joy of the Hounds. The girl glanced quickly at him, with what meaning he could not have made out, and it might have been fear of her which kept him hesitating whether to cross over and fall upon his tormentor. He looked at her as if for a sign, but she made as if she had heard nothing; then while he still hesitated a slender, sinewy young fellow came down the open ground, with a soft jolt in his gait like that of a rangy young horse. He wore high boots with his trousers pushed carelessly into their tops, and for a sign of week-day indifference to the occasion, a checked shirt, of the sort called hickory; he struck up the brim of his platted straw hat in front with one hand, and with the other on his hip stood a figure of backwoods bravery, such as has descended to the romance of later times from the reality of the Indian-fighting pioneers.
“You fellows keep still!” he called out. “If you don't I'll make you.”
Retorts of varied sense and nonsense came from the Hounds, but without malice in their note. One voice answered, “I'd like to see you try, Jim Redfield!”
The other jolted closer toward the line of the Hounds, and leaned over. “Did I hear somebody speak?” he asked.
“I reckon not, Jim,” the voice of his challenger returned. “Come to join the band?”
“I didn't come to worry helpless women,” Redfield said.
“That's right, Jim. There's where we're with you. D'you reckon Apostle Hingston'll let us in to see the miracle if we'll keep the believers straight while the Almighty is at it?”
“I can't say for Mr. Hingston,” Redfield returned. “But if I was in his place I'd want to keep my jug out of sight when you fellows were on duty.”
Redfield passed the Gillespies as he lounged back to his place with a covert glance at the girl, who made no sign of seeing her champion.
The woman who was bringing the body of the miracle came round the corner of the mill, and showed herself in the open space with the bolt of cloth borne carefully in her arms.
“Why, it's a baby!” came from that merriest of the Hounds whom Redfield had turned from an enemy into a troublesome friend of the believers. “Reckon the women'll have something to say to that if he tries to turn e'er a baby into seamless raiment.”
The fellow got the laugh he had tried for, and when Redfield looked toward him again he said, “All right, Jim. I'm keepin' 'em quiet the best I can. But the electwillmake a noise, sometimes.”
The woman with her bundle passed through the open door of the house behind the mill. The public entrance was at the front where by day the bags of grain were lifted by rope and tackle to the upper story, and the farmers who brought them climbed up by the inner stairways. The believers had expected that they were to come in by way of the dwelling, but now the burly figure of the miller, with the light of a candle behind it, showed black in the doorway, and he spoke up, in his friendly voice: “Neighbors, we want you all to go round to the front of the mill and come in there. The miracle is going to be done on the bolting-cloth floor, where there will be room for all that wants to see. We don't mean to keep anybody out, whether they believe or don't believe. The only thing we want is for you all to be quiet, and not make trouble. And now, come in as quick as you can, so you can be sure we haven't had time to do anything to the cloth that the seamless raiment is going to be made out of.”
“Hounds and everybody?” called that gayest voice among the outcasts.
“Hounds and everybody,” the miller humorously assented, and his black bulk melted into the dark as the candle disappeared within.
The dim light from tin lanterns threw the pattern of their perforations on the walls and roofs of the interior, and showed the tracery of the floury cobwebs. The people could scarcely see their way to the stairs by the glimmer, and there was more talking with nervous laughter than there had been outside. One of the Hounds called out, “I don't want any of you girls to kissme!” and gave the relief of indignation to the hysterical emotion of the believers; the more serious of the unbelievers found escape in their helpless laughter from their tense expectation of triumph in the failure of the promised miracle.
The wide space on the bolting-cloth floor, before the bins mounded high with new wheat, and the rows of millstones, motionless under their empty hoppers, was lighted by candles in tin sconces, but these were so few that they shone only on the foremost faces and left those behind a gleam of eyes or teeth. The familiar machinery had put on a grewsome strangeness which had its final touch from the roll lying on the table like something dead. A table had been set in front of the barrels under the bolting cloths, and the muslin funnels, empty of flour, hung down into the barrels with the effect of colossal legs standing in them. The air of the hot night was close within; a damp odor from the water flowing under the motionless mill wheels seemed to cool it, but did not; the perspiration shone on the faces where the light fell on them.
The miller and his family had places in the front line of the spectators, and with them was the woman who had given the cloth for the miracle; and who stood staring at the stuff, which she had known so intimately in every thread and fiber, with an air of estrangement.
When the stumbling feet of the last arrivals ceased on the stairs, the miller stood out facing the crowd, and told them that he expected the Good Old Man, now, any minute, together with the Apostle Paul, whom they all knew by his earthly name as their neighbor, Mr. Enraghty. He asked them to be as still as they could, and especially after the Good Old Man came, to be perfectly silent; not to whisper, and not to move if they could help it. There was nothing, though, he said, to hinder the believers from joining in their favorite hymn; and at once the wailing of it began to fill the place. When it ended, the deep-drawn breath of some wearied expectant made itself heard with the shifting of tired feet easing themselves. The minutes grew into an hour, with no sign of Dylks or Enraghty, and the miller was again forced to ask the patience of his neighbors. But there began to be murmurs from the unbelievers, and more articulate protests from the Hounds. Some children, whom the believers had brought with them to see the divine power manifest itself, whimpered, and were suffered to lie down at the feet of their fathers and mothers and forget their disappointment in sleep. A babe, too young to be left at home, woke and cried, and was suckled to rest again, with ironical applause from the Hounds.
At the end of two hours of waiting, relieved with pleas and promises from the miller, there was no word from Dylks and no token of his bodily presence. With the scoffing of the unbelievers, the prayers of the faithful rose. “Come soon, oh Lord!” “Send thy Power!” “Remember thy Little Flock!” Upon these at last broke falteringly, stragglingly, a familiar voice, the voice of Abel Reverdy, kindly and uncouth as himself, and expressive, like his presence, of an impartial interest in the feelings of both the faithful and the unfaithful. He was there in the company of his wife, who held a steadfast place among the believers, while Abel ranged freely from one party to the other, and could not well have known himself of either, though friendly with both. He was of a sort of disapproving friendship even with the Hounds, and now his voice said in impartial suggestion, “Why not somebody go and fetch him?”
“Good for you, Abel!” came from the Hound who was oftenest spokesman for the others. “Why don't you go yourself, Abel?”
Other voices applauded, and Abel was beginning to share a general confidence in his fitness for the mission, when his wife spoke up, “'Deed and 'deed, I can tell you he ain't agoun' to do no such a thing, not if we stay here all night, murricle or no murricle. I ain't agoun' to have him put his head into the Lion of Judah's mouth, and have it bit off, like as not. I can't tell from one minute to another whether he's a believer or not, and if anybody is to go for the Good Old Man it's got to be a studdy believer, and not a turncoat of many colors like Abel.”
If Sally had satisfied her need of chastizing her husband for his variableness, and found a comfort in her scriptural language, not qualified by its wandering application, Abel loyally accepted her open criticism. “That's so, Sally, I ain't the one to send. I misdoubted it myself, or I'd 'a' gone without sayin' nothin' in the first place. But, as Sally says,” he addressed the crowd, “it ought to be a believer.”
“Then why not Sally?” a scorner suggested. She did not refuse, and there was a whispering between her and those next her in debate of the question. But it was closed by the loud, austere voice of one of the believing matrons in the apostolic mandate, “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” The text was not closely apt; it was not a precept obeyed in the revivals of any of the sects in Leatherwood; it was especially ignored in the meetings of the Dylks believers; but its proclamation now satisfied the yearning always rife in them to affiliate their dispensation with the scriptural tradition.
“Well, that settles it, Sister Coombs,” Sally promptly assented, “I wasn't agoun' to, anyway, and I ain't agoun' to now, if I stay here all night, or the Good Old Man don't ever come.”
“Why not Jim Redfield?” a Hound demanded, and the miller tried to be stern in calling out, “No trifling!” but lost effect by gently adding, “Friends.” The unbelievers laughed, but the miller's retreat from the bold stand he had taken was covered by Redfield's threat that if those fellows kept on he would give them something to laugh about.
As he stepped into the neutral space between the friends and enemies of Dylks, he had a sort of double fearfulness for the women, because he was not only not of their faith, but because he was of no religious sect in a community where every one but an open infidel like Matthew Braile was of some profession. He came to the Baptist services with his mother, but he had not been baptized, and he was not seen at the house to house prayer meetings, where the young people came with the old, or at the frolics where dancing was forbidden, but not kissing in their games or in their walks home through the woods. He was not supposed to be in love with any one, and he lived alone on a rich bottom-land farm with his mother, in a house which his father had built where his grandfather's log cabin had stood. He was of a tradition which held him closer to the wilderness than most of the people of Leatherwood; in the two generations before him the Redfields had won and held their lands against the Indians, and had fought them in the duels, from tree to tree, which the pioneers taught the savages, or learned from them, risking their lives and scalps in the same chances. He was of the sort of standing which old family gives, even where all families are new, and he was now making his way politically, in spite of his irreligion; he meant to go to the legislature, eventually, and in a leisurely sort he was reading law, and reciting his Blackstone to Matthew Braile. As he came and went from the old infidel's house, he was apt to stop at the tavern porch, where the few citizens who could detach their minds from the things of another world gave them in cloudy conjecture to the political affairs of this, or to scrutiny of the real motives actuating the occasional travelers who apparently arrived for a meal's victuals or a night's lodging. With these Redfield had scarcely a social life, but he could talk with them almost to the point of haranguing them, for they were men; at the store, where his mother's errands sometimes took him, he shrank from the women as timid as they when they dismounted from their saddles or wagons, and slipped in with their butter and eggs, and passed out again deeply obscured in their sunbonnets.
They were mostly women past the time of life when men look at them curiously, but once Redfield was startled by meeting a young girl, as he was trying to go out, and began losing himself with her in that hopeless encounter of people who try to give way to each other and keep passing to the same side at once. Her face and her red hair burned one fire, but at last she stopped stone still, and let him go by, with a sort of angry challenge in her blue eyes. He knew that it was Jane Gillespie without knowing her to speak with, as he would have said, and he knew that against her father's will she was one of the followers of Dylks. The idolatry was not yet open and scandalous, but since then he had heard his mother denouncing her as a worthless hussy with the other women who had worshiped Dylks in that frenzy at the Temple. He walked up and down, passing near where she stood with her father and Hughey Blake, and lost his breath at each approach and caught it again at each remove. It so vividly seemed that he must speak to her, though he did not know what he wished to say, that it was as if he really had done so, when he heard one of the Hounds saying, “Well, and what are you goin' to do about it, Jim?”
Then he heard himself boasting, “I'm going after Dylks myself; and if he'll come peaceably, and do his miracle I'll take him for my god, and if he won't, God have mercy on him!”
He was answering his jeering questioner in his words, but his eyes were on the girl; her own eyes were lowered after a glance at her father and Hughey Blake, and his vow remained in his ears a foolish vaunt. While he stood unable to return to his place, a voice which no one knew, came from the darkness outside.
“Behold,” it said, “I am the Presence of the Most High, and I come to you with my Peace. The miracle that ye wait to see has been wrought already unseen of you. The cloth before you has been touched by my Power, and turned into the seamless raiment which ye seek as a sign. But it shall not be shown to you now. Ye shall see it seven days and seven nights hence on the eighth night at the Temple. Till then, have patience, have faith. Thus saith the Lord.”
The voice died from the medley of scriptural phrase and a shiver of awe passed over those who had heard. One of the believing women called out, “Praise ye the Lord!” Then a yell of mockery broke from the Hounds and some one shouted, “Let's have a look!” and the crowd rushed upon the roll of cloth which lay on the table, where the woman who had brought it in her arms had put it, and had stood patiently, anxiously, trustfully waiting.
She spread her arms out over it, with a piteous gesture, like a mother trying to keep her child from harm. “Oh, don't! Oh, don't!” she implored. “It'smycloth! I spun it, I wove it, every thread! It's all we've got for our clothes this winter! Don't touch it, don't tear it!”