Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “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!”

  VI

  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!”

  VII

  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’s sent; 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. I say, 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. Perhaps he will,” 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’ made him come; 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 ar
ound 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, I just want to squeal.” 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 what our cow’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.

  “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 c
leared his throat. “Nothing, yet. Let the Lord work His will.”

  “And let Joseph Dylks work his will, 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.”

  VIII

  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?”