Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The place where the hair had been torn from his head burned like fire; it burned like the wound of a man whom he had once heard tell how it felt to be scalped by an Indian; the man had recovered, but the wound had always hurt; and Dylks pitied himself that it should be so with him, and cursed himself for his unguarded boast that any one who touched a hair of his head should perish. He promised that if God would show him a little mercy, and send a raven with something for him to eat, something warm, or send him a cup of coffee, somehow, or even a raw egg, he would go forth before the people; he would get up in the Temple amidst his believers and declare himself a false prophet and a false god. He would not care what they did to him if only he had something cooked to eat, something hot to drink.

  Towards morning he slept, and then for days and nights, how many he did not know, it seemed to him that he did not wake but dreamed through a changing time when he was dimly aware of contending voices: voices of his believers, the Little Flock, and voices of his unbelievers, the Herd of the Lost, pleading and threatening in the forest round his place of refuge. His followers were trying to bring him food and raiment, and his enemies were preventing them and boasting that they would keep guard over his refuge till they starved him out. Then all again was a blur, a texture of conscious and unconscious misery till a night came when the woof broke and trailed away from him, and he lifted himself on his elbow and after he had drunk a long draft from the spring, found tremulous strength to get to his feet. He tried some steps in the open space, where the light of the full moon fell, and found that he could walk. He reached the tangled entrance to his covert, and stealthily put the vines aside. He peered out into the shadows striped with moonshine and could see no one, and he was going to venture farther, when he stopped stone still at the figure of a man crouched in the middle of the causeway. The man’s head was fallen forward and his gun lay across his lap; he must be one of the guards that his enemies had set on his refuge to keep him there and starve him out; and he must be asleep. Dylks stooped and peered into his face and knew the man for one of the Hounds who had often disturbed his meetings, and now he looked about in the rage that surged up through his penitence and self-pity for a stone or a club to strike him senseless, or dead if need be. But there was no such weapon that he could see, and the risk of a struggle was greater than the risk of trying to pass the man without waking him. After long doubt he tried with one foot and then another and the man did not wake; then he crept slowly by, and then with softly dragging steps he got farther from the sleeper and pushed on through the woods in the direction of the turnpike, as he imagined it. But he came out in a clearing where a new log cabin showed clear in the open under the moon.

  In the single room of the house a woman lay sleeping with a little child in its cradle beside her bed. She rose up and put out her hand instinctively to still the child, but it was sleeping quietly, and then she started up awake, and listened for the voice which she had dreamt was calling her. There was no voice, and then there was a voice calling hoarsely, weakly, “Nancy! Nancy!”

  In her dream she had thought it was the voice of her husband stealing back to her in the night, and it was in the terror of her dream that she now sprang from her bed, with her heart aching for pity of him, to forbid him and rebuke him for breaking his promise, and to scold him away. But as she stood listening, and the voice came again she knew it was not the voice of Laban. She ran to the ladder which led to the cabin loft, and called up through the open trapdoor, “Jane! Jane! Come down here to the baby, will you? I’ve got to leave her a minute.”

  “What for?” the girl answered sleepily. Then, “Oh, I’ll come. She ain’t sick, is she, Aunt Nancy? Oh, I do hope she ain’t sick!”

  “No. She ain’t sick,” Nancy said, as she put her hands up to help the girl place her feet aright on the rungs of the ladder. “But — listen!” she whispered as the voice outside called again. “It’s that miser’ble wretch! It’s Joseph Dylks! I’ve got to go to him! Don’t you say a word, Jane Gillespie! He’s Joey’s father, and he must be at death’s door, or he wouldn’t come to mine.”

  She left the girl standing dazed, and ran out and round the cabin. In the shadow that it cast in the moon, Dylks crouched close in the angle made by the chimney.

  “Oh, Nancy!” he implored her, “do give me something to eat! Something warm. Coffee, if you’ve got it. I’ve been sick, and I’m starving.”

  She knew without seeing it in the shadow how he was stretching out pleading hands to her, and she had mercy upon him. But she said stonily, “Wait a minute. Don’t be a cry-baby,” and ran back to the door, and called to the girl within, “Rake open the fire, Jane, and set the kittle on.” Then she ran back to Dylks and stood over him. “Where you been? Don’t you know they’ll kill you if they ketch you?”

  “Yes, I know it, Nancy. But I knew this would be the last place they would come for me. Will the coffee be ready soon? Oh, I’m so faint! I reckon I’m going to die, Nancy.”

  “I reckon you ain’t goin’ to die before you get your coffee. It’ll be ready as soon as the kittle boils.”

  She stood looking grimly down at him, while he brokenly told, so far as he knew it, the story of the days he had passed in hiding.

  “I reckon,” she said, with bitter scorn, “that I could have fetched you out. I’d ‘a’ brought you some hot coffee to the door of your den, and you’d ‘a’ come when you smelt it.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” he owned in meek acceptance of her scorn.

  The child cried, and she went in, but she had no need to comfort it except with a word. Jane had come to the little one, and was stooping above it, and cooing to it motherwise, and cuddling it to her body while it drowsed away to silence.

  “You mind her, Jane,” the mother said, and she lifted the pot of coffee from the bed of coals, sending a dim glow into the room to meet the dawn at the open door. She put some sugar into the bowl she got from its shelf, and covered it with a piece of cold corn-pone, and then went out to Dylks who had remained on his knees, and now stretched out his trembling hands toward her.

  She did not speak, but poured the bowl full of the steaming coffee, and watched him while he gulped half of it down. Then he reached eagerly for the bread. “Is it hot?” he asked.

  “No, it ain’t,” the woman said. “You can eat cold pone, I reckon, can’t you?”

  “Oh, yes; oh, yes, and glad to get it. Only I thought—” He stopped and washed down the mouthful he had torn from the cake with a draft of the coffee which emptied the bowl. She filled it mechanically from the pot in her hand, and he drank again more slowly, and devoured the pone as he drank.

  “Now,” he said, “I should be all right if it wasn’t for my head where they tore out my hair. It burns like fire.”

  She bent over him and looked at the wound unflinchingly. “I can’t see very good in this light; if I only had some goose-grease — but I reckon hog’s lard will do. Hold on till I can wash it.”

  “Oh, Nancy,” he moaned gratefully.

  She was gone rather long and there was talk within and the cooing and babble of the child. When she came out with a basin of warm water and some lard in a broken saucer in her hands, and a towel caught under her arm, he suggested, “I heard you talking with some one, Nancy.”

  “And I suppose it scared you,” she answered unsparingly. “Well, you may thank your stars it wasn’t Laban. I do believe he’d kill you, meek as he is.”

  Dylks drew a quivering breath. “Yes, I reckon he would. I suppose you must have told him about me.”

  “Of course, I did. Here! Hold still!” She had begun to wash his wound, very gently, though she spoke so roughly, while he murmured with the pain and with the comfort of the pain. “If you want to know,” she continued, “it’s Jane. She’s been with me ever since that night they caught you. You made her ashamed before her father, and between her shame and his pride her and him don’t speak, or hain’t, since then. She stays with me and Joey stays with him.”

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p; “Our Joey?” he asked plaintively.

  “My Joey!” she returned, and she involuntarily twitched at the hair she was smoothing.

  “Oh!” he cried from the pain, but she did not mind his pain.

  “There!” she said, beginning to put on the lard. Then she bound over the wound the soft pledget of old linen she had brought, and tied round his head a cotton rag to hold the dressing in place. She said, “There!” again, “I reckon that will do.”

  He moaned gratefully. “It’s the first time I’ve been out of pain for I don’t know how many days and nights. Nancy!” he burst out in all recognition of her goodness, “I oughtn’t to have left you.”

  She had been kneeling before him in dressing his hurt, and then in critically regarding her handiwork, she got to her feet. “I know you oughtn’t,” she retorted, “but I’m glad you done it. And I’m thankful every breath I draw. And now I want you to go. And don’t you think I done what I done out of love for you, Joseph Dylks. I’d ‘a’ done it for any hurt or hungry dog.”

  Dylks got to his feet too, with little moans for the stiffness in his joints. “I know you would, Nancy,” he said humbly, “but all the same I won’t forget it. If there was anything I could do to show—”

  “There’s something you could do besides drownin’ yourself in the creek, which I don’t ask you: in the first place because I don’t want your death on my hands, and in the next place because you’re the un-fittin’est man to die that I can think of; but there’s something else, and you know it without my tellin’ you, and that is to stop all this, now and forever. Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I mean!”

  “I know what you mean, Nancy, and the good Lord knows I would be glad enough to do it if I could. But I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

  “Begin,” she said with a scornful glance at the long tangle of his hair, “begin by cuttin’ off that horse’s tail of yours, and then stop snortin’ like a horse.”

  He shook his head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t do, Nancy. They wouldn’t let me draw back now. They would kill me.”

  “They?”

  “The — the — Little Flock,” he answered shamefacedly.

  “The Herd of the Lost will kill you if you don’t.” She said it not in mocking, but in realization of the hopeless case, and not without pity. But at his next words, she hardened her heart again.

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I have nowhere to lay my head.”

  “Don’t you use them holy words, you wicked wretch! And if you’re hintin’ at hidin’ in my house, you can’t do it — not with Jane here — she would kill you, I believe — and not without her.”

  “No, Nancy. I can see that. But where can I go? Even that place in the woods, they’re watching that, and they would have me if I tried to go back.”

  From an impulse as of indifference rather than consideration she said, “Go to Squire Braile. He let you off; let him take care of you.”

  “Nancy!” he exclaimed. “I thought of that.”

  She gathered up the basin and the towel she brought, and without looking at him again she said, “Well, go, then,” and turned and left him where he stood.

  XVI

  Matthew Braile was sitting in his wonted place, with his chair tilted against his porch wall, smoking. Dylks faltered a moment at the bars of the lane from the field of tall corn where he had been finding his way unseen from Nancy’s cabin. He lowered two of the middle bars and when he had put them up on the other side he stood looking toward the old man. His long hair hung tangled on his shoulders; the white bandage, which Nancy had bound about his head, crossed it diagonally above one eye and gave this the effect of a knowing wink, which his drawn face, unshaven for a week, seemed to deprecate.

  Braile stared hard at him. Then he tilted his chair down and came to the edge of his porch, and called in cruel mockery, “Why, God, is that you?”

  “Don’t, Squire Braile!” Dylks implored in a hoarse undertone. “They’re after me, and if anybody heard you—”

  “Well, come up here,” the Squire bade him. Dylks hobbled slowly forward, and painfully mounted the log steps to the porch, where Braile surveyed him in detail, frowning and twitching his long feathery eyebrows.

  “I know I don’t look fit to be seen,” Dylks began “but—”

  “Well,” the Squire allowed after further pause, “you don’t look as if you had just come ‘down from the shining courts above in joyful haste’! Had any breakfast?”

  “Nancy — Nancy Billings — gave me some coffee, and some cold pone—”

  “Well, you can have some hot pone pretty soon. Laban there?”

  “No, he’s away at work still. But, Squire Braile—”

  “Oh, I understand. I know all about Nancy, and her first husband and how he left her, and she thought he was dead, and married a good man, and when that worthless devil came back she thought she was living in sin with that good man — in sin! — and drove him away. But she’s as white as any of the saints you lie about. It was like you to go to her the first one in your trouble. Well, what did she say?” “She said—” Dylks stopped, his mouth too dry to speak; he wetted his lips and whispered— “She said to come to you; that you would know what it was best for me to do; to—” He stopped again and asked, “Do you suppose any one will see me here?”

  “Oh, like as not. It’s getting time for honest folks to be up and going to work. But I don’t want any trouble about you this morning; I had enough that other morning. Come in here!” He set open the door of one of the rooms giving on the porch, and at Dylks’s fearful glance he laughed, not altogether unkindly. “Mis’ Braile’s in the kitchen, getting breakfast for you, though she don’t know it yet. Now, then!” he commanded when he sat down within, and pushed a chair to Dylks. “Tell me all about it, since I saw you going up the pike.”

  In the broken story which Dylks told, Braile had the air of mentally checking off the successive facts, and he permitted the man a measure of self-pity, though he caught him up at the close. “Well, you’ve got a part of what you deserve, but as usually happens with us rascals, you’ve got too much, at the same time. And what did Nancy advise?”

  “She told me to come to you—”

  “What did Nancy advise?” the Squire repeated savagely.

  “She advised me to stop all this” — he waved his hands outward, and the Squire nodded intelligently— “to tell them it wasn’t true; and I was sorry; and to go away—”

  He stopped, and Braile demanded, “Well, and are you going to do it?”

  “I want to do it, and — I can’t.”

  “You can’t? What’s to hinder you?”

  “I’m afraid to do it.”

  “Afraid?”

  “They would kill me, if I did.”

  “They? Who? The Herd of the Lost?”

  “The Little Flock.”

  The men were both silent, and then after a long breath, the Squire said, “I begin to see—”

  “No, no! You don’t begin to see, Squire Braile.” Dylks burst out sobbing, and uttering what he said between his sobs. “Nobody can understand it that hasn’t been through it! How you are tempted on, step by step, all so easy, till you can’t go back, you can’t stop. You’re tempted by what’s the best thing in you, by the hunger and thirst to know what’s going to be after you die; to get near to the God that you’ve always heard about and read about; near Him in the flesh, and see Him and hear Him and touch Him. That’s what does it with them, and that’s what does it in you. It’s something, a kind of longing, that’s always been in the world, and you know it’s in others because you know it’s in you, in your own heart, your own soul. When you begin to try for it, to give out that you’re a prophet, an apostle, you don’t have to argue, to persuade anybody, or convince anybody. They’re only too glad to believe what you say from the first word; and if you tell them you’re Christ, didn’t He always say He would come back, and how do they know but what it’s now and you?”


  “Yes, yes,” the Squire said. “Go on.”

  “When I said I was God, they hadn’t a doubt about it. But it was then that the trouble began.”

  “The trouble?”

  “I had to make some of them saints. I had to make Enraghty Saint Paul, and I had to make Hingston Saint Peter. You think I had to lie to them, to deceive them, to bewitch them. I didn’t have to do anything of the kind. They did the lying and deceiving and bewitching themselves, and when they done it, they and all the rest of the believers, they had me fast, faster than I had them.”

  “I could imagine the schoolmaster hanging on to his share of the glory, tooth and nail,” the Squire said with a grim laugh. “But old Hingston, good old soul, he ought to have let go, if you wanted him to.”

  “Oh, you don’t know half of it,” Dylks said, with a fresh burst of sobbing. “The worst of it is, and the dreadfulest is, that you begin to believe it yourself.”

  “What’s that?” the Squire demanded sharply.

  “Their faith puts faith into you. If they believe what you say, you say to yourself that there must be some truth in it. If you keep telling them you’re Jesus Christ, there’s nothing to prove you ain’t, and if you tell them you’re God, who ever saw God, and who can deny it? You can’t deny it yourself—”