“Hold on!” the old man said. He had risen, and he began to walk up and down, swaying his figure and tilting his head from side to side, and frowning his shaggy eyebrows together in a tangled hedge. Suddenly, he stopped before Dylks. “Why, you poor devil, you’re not in any unusual fix. It must have been so with all the impostors in the world, from Mahomet up and down! Why, there isn’t a false prophet in the Old Testament that couldn’t match experiences with you! That’s the way it’s always gone: first the liar tells his lie, and some of the fools believe it, and proselyte the other fools, and when there are enough of them, their faith begins to work on the liar’s own unbelief, till he takes his lie for the truth. Was that the way, you miserable skunk?”
“It was exactly the way, Squire Braile, and you can’t tell how it gains on you, step by step. You see all those educated people like Mr. Enraghty, and all those good men like Mr. Hingston taking it for gospel, and you can’t deny it yourself. They convince you of it.”
“Exactly! And then, when the Little Flock gathers in all the mentally lame, halt and blind in the settlement, you couldn’t get out of it if you had the whole Herd of the Lost to back you, with the Hounds yelping round to keep your courage up; you’ve got to stay just where you put yourself, heigh?”
“There wouldn’t,” Dylks said, drying his eyes on a tatter of his coat sleeve, “be so much trouble if it wasn’t for the miracles.”
“Yes,” Braile replied to the thoughtful mood which he had fallen into, rather than to Dylks, “the ignorant are sure to want a sign, though the wise could get along without it. And you have to promise them a sign; you have to be fool enough to do that, though you know well enough you can’t work the miracle.”
“You ain’t sure you can’t. You think, maybe—”
“Then, why,” the Squire shouted at him, “why in the devil’s name, didn’t you work the miracle at Hingston’s mill that night? Why didn’t you turn that poor fool woman’s bolt of linsey-woolsey into seamless raiment?”
Dylks did not answer.
“Why didn’t you do it? Heigh?”
“I thought maybe — I didn’t know but I did do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I came up outside and told them that the miracle had been worked and the seamless raiment was inside the bolt, I thought it must be there.”
“Why, in the name of—”
“I had prayed so hard for help to do it that I thought it must be.”
“You prayed? To whom?”
“To — God.”
“To yourself?”
Dylks was silent again in the silence of a self-convicted criminal. He did not move.
Braile had been walking up and down again in his excitement, in his enjoyment of the psychological predicament, and again he stopped before Dylks. “Why, you poor bag of shorts!” he said. “I could almost feel sorry for you, in spite of the mischief you’ve made. Why, you oughtn’t to be sent to the penitentiary, or even lynched. You ought to be put amongst the county idiots in the poorhouse, and—”
There came a soft plapping as of bare feet on the puncheon floor of the porch; hesitating about and then pausing at the door of the opposite room. Then there came with the increased smell of cooking, the talking of women. Presently the talking stopped and the plapping of the bare feet approached the door of the room shutting the two men in. The Squire set it slightly ajar, in spite of Dylks’s involuntary, “Oh, don’t!” and faced some one close to the opening.
“That you, Sally? You haven’t come to borrow anything at this hour of the night?”
“Well, I reckon if you was up as early as Mis’ Braile, you’d know it was broad day. No, I hain’t come to borry anything exactly, but I was just tellin’ her that if she’d lend me a fryun’ of bacon, I’d do as much for her some day. She ast me to tell you your breakfast was ready and not to wait till your comp’ny was gone, but bring anybody you got with you.”
Sally peered curiously in at the opening of the door, and Braile abruptly set it wide. “Perhaps you’d like to see who it is.”
Sally started back at sight of the figure within. When she could get her breath she gasped, “Well, for mercy’s sakes! If it ain’t the Good Old Man, himself!” But she made no motion of revering or any offer of saluting her late deity.
“Well, now, if you’ve got some bacon for Abel’s breakfast you better stop and have yours with us,” the Squire suggested.
“No, I reckon not,” Sally answered. “I ain’t exactly sure Abel would like it. He ain’t ever been one of the Flock, although at the same time he ain’t ever been one of the Herd: just betwixt and between, like.” As she spoke she edged away backward. “Well, I must be goun’, Squire. Much obleeged to you all the same.”
The Squire followed her backward steps with his voice. “If you should happen to see Jim Redfield on his way to his tobacco patch, I wish you’d tell him to come here; I’d like to see him.”
He went in again to Dylks.
“What are you going to do with me, Squire Braile?” he entreated. “You’re not going to give me up?”
“I know my duty to my Maker,” the old man answered. “I’ll take care of you, Jehovah Dylks. But now you better come in to breakfast — get some hot pone. I’ll bring you a basin of water to wash up in.”
He reopened the door in the face of Sally Reverdy, who gasped out before she plapped over to the steps and dropped away, “I just seen Jim Redfield, and I tole him you wanted him, and he said he would be here in half an hour, or as soon as he could see that the men had begun on his tubbacco. I didn’t tell him who you had here, and I won’t tell anybody else; don’t you be afraid.”
“Well, that’s a good girl, Sally. Abel couldn’t have done better himself,” the Squire called after her, and then he turned to Dylks. “Come along now, and get your hot pone. Jim Redfield won’t hurt you; I’ll go bail for him, and I’ll see that nobody else gets at you. I’ve got a loft over this room where you’ll be safe from everything but a pet coon that your Joey gave my little boy; and I reckon the coon won’t bite you. I wouldn’t, in his place.”
XVII
Redfield came rather later than he had promised, excusing himself for his delay. “I was afraid the frost had caught my tobacco, last night; but it seems to be all right, as far as I can see; I stayed till the sun was well up before I decided.”
“It was a pretty sharp night, but I don’t believe there was any frost,” the Squire said. “At least Dylks didn’t complain of it.”
“Dylks?” Redfield returned.
“Yes. Didn’t you know he was out again?”
“No, I didn’t. If I had that fellow by the scruff of the neck!”
The Squire knew he meant the sleeping sentinel at the thicket where Dylks had been hidden, and not Dylks. But he said nothing, and again Redfield spoke.
“Look here, Squire Braile, I think you did a bad piece of business letting that fellow go.”
“I know you do, Jim, but I expect you’ll think different when you’ve seen him.”
“Seen him? You mean you know where he is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, all I’ve got to say is that if I can lay hands on that fellow he won’t give me the slip again.”
“Well, suppose we try,” the Squire said, and he opened the door into the room where Dylks was cowering, and remarked with a sort of casualness, as if the fact would perhaps interest them both, “Here’s one of the Lost, Dylks. I thought you might like to see him. Now, sit down, both of you and let’s talk this thing over.”
He took a place on the side of the bed and the enemies each faltered to their chairs in mutual amaze.
“Oh, sit down, sit down!” the Squire insisted. “You might as well take it comfortably. Nobody’s going to kill either of you.”
“I don’t want to do anybody any harm,” Dylks began.
“You’d better not!” Redfield said between his set teeth; his hands had knotted themselves into fists at his side.
“I’m all weak yet from the fever I had there, with nothing but water and berries,” Dylks resumed in his self-pity. “I did think some of my friends might have come—”
“I took good care of that,” Redfield said. “They did come, at first, with something to eat, but they knew blame well we’d have wrung their necks if we’d ‘a’ caught ‘em. We meant to starve you out, that’s what, and we did it, and if it hadn’t been for that good-for-nothing whelp sleeping over his gun you wouldn’t have got out alive.”
“Well, that’s all right now, Jim, and you’d better forgive and forget, both of you,” the Squire interposed. “Dylks has reformed, he tells me; he’s sorry for having been a god, and he’s going to try to be a man, or as much of a man as he can. He’s going to tell the Little Flock so, and then he’s going to get out of Leatherwood right off—”
Dylks cleared his throat to ask tremulously, “Did I say that, Squire Braile?”
“Yes, you did, my friend, and what’s more you’re going to keep your word, painful as it may be to you. I’ll let you manage it your own way, but some way you’re going to do it; and in the meantime I’m going to put you under the protection of Jim Redfield, here—”
“My protection?” Redfield protested.
“Yes, I’ve sworn you in as special constable, or I will have as soon as I can make out the oath, and have you sign it. And Dylks will get out of the county as soon as he can — he tells me it won’t be so easy as we would think; and when he does, it will be much more to the purpose than riding on a rail in a coat of tar and feathers. Why!” he broke off, with a stare at Dylks as if he saw his raggedness for the first time, “you’ll want a coat of some kind to show yourself to the Little Flock in; the Herd of the Lost won’t mind; they don’t want to be so proud of you. I must look up something for you; or perhaps send to Brother Hingston; he’s about your size. But that don’t matter, now! What I want is your promise, Jim Redfield, and I know you’ll do what you say, that you won’t tell anybody that the Supreme Being is hiding in my loft, here, till I say so, and when I do, that you’ll see no harm comes to him from mortals — from Hounds, and such like, or even the Herd of the Lost. Do you promise?”
Redfield hesitated. “If he’ll leave the county, yes.”
“And you, ‘Jehovah, Jove or Lord’?”
“I will, as quick as I can, Squire Braile; I will, indeed.”
The Squire rose from the edge of the bed. “Then this court stands adjourned,” he said formally.
Redfield went out with him, leaving Dylks trembling behind. He said, “I ain’t sure you ain’t making a fool of me, Squire Braile.”
“Well, I am,” the Squire retorted. “And don’t you make one of yourself, and then there won’t be any.”
Redfield still hesitated. “I’d just like to had another pull at that horse-tail of his,” he said wistfully.
“Well, I knew old man Gillespie hadn’t quite the strength. But I thought maybe Hughey Blake helped pull—”
“Hughey Blake,” Redfield returned scornfully, “had nothing to do with it.”
“Well, anyway, I hear it’s converted Jane Gillespie, and she was worth it, though it was rather too much like scalping a live Indian.”
“She’s worth more than all the other girls in this settlement put together,” Redfield said, without comment on the phase of the act which had interested the Squire, and went down the cabin steps into the lane.
Braile turned back and opened the door of the room where Dylks was lurking.
“Better come out, now,” he said, not ungently, “and get into a safe place before folks begin to be about much. Or wait — I’ll put the ladder up first.” He brought the ladder from the kitchen where he exchanged a fleeting joke with his wife, still at her work of clearing the breakfast things away, and set it against the wall under the trapdoor of the loft. “Now, then!” he called and Dylks came anxiously out.
“Ain’t you afraid—” he began.
“No, but you are, and that’ll do for both of us. There’s nobody round, and if you’ll hurry, nobody’ll see you. Push the lid to one side, and get in, and you’ll be perfectly safe,” he said as Dylks tremulously mounted the ladder. “I don’t say you’ll be very comfortable. There’s a little window at one end, but it don’t give much air, and this August sun is apt to get a little warm on the clapboards. And I don’t suppose it smells very well in there; but the coon can’t help that; it’s the way nature scented him; she hadn’t any sweet brier handy at the time. And be careful not to step on him. He’s not very good-tempered, but I reckon he won’t bite you if you don’t bite him.”
The kitchen door opened and Mrs. Braile put her head out. She saw the ladder and the two men. Then she came out into the porch. “Well, Matthew Braile, I might have knowed from the sound of your voice that you was up to some mischief. Was you goin’ to send that poor man up into that hot loft? Well, I can tell you you’re not.” She went into the room they had left, and they heard her stirring vigorously about beyond its closed door, with a noise of rapid steps and hard and soft thumpings. She came out again and said, “Go in there, now, Mr. Dylks, and try to get some rest. I’ve made up the bed for you, and I’ll see that nobody disturbs you. Matthew Braile, you send and tell Mr. Hingston, — or go, if you can’t ketch anybody goin’ past, — and tell him he’s here, and bring some decent clothes; he ain’t fit to be seen.”
“Well, he don’t want to be,” the Squire said in the attempt to brave her onset. “But I reckon you’re right, mother. I should probably have thought of it myself — in time. I’ll send Sally or Abel, if they go past — and they nearly always do — or some of the hands from the tobacco patches. Or, as you say, I may go myself, towards evening. He won’t want to be troubled before then.”
XVIII
At the first meeting in the Temple after the open return of Dylks to his dispensation, the Little Flock had apparently suffered no loss in number. Some of his followers had left him, but his disciples had been busily preaching him during his abeyance, and the defection of old converts was more than made up by the number of proselytes. The room actually left by the Flock was filled by the Herd of the Lost who occupied all the seats on one side of the Temple, with Matthew Braile and his wife in a foremost place, the lower sort of them worsening into the Hounds who filled the doorway, and hung about the outside of the Temple.
The whole assembly was orderly. Those of the Little Flock who conducted the services had a quelled air, which might have been imparted to them by the behavior of Dylks; he sat bowed and humble on the bench below the pulpit, while Enraghty preached above him. It was rumored that at the house-meetings the worship of Dylks had been renewed with the earlier ardor; there had been genuflections and prostrations before him, with prayers for pardon and hymns of praise, especially from the proselytes. Dylks was said to have accepted their adoration with a certain passivity but to have done nothing to prevent it; there was not the more scandalous groveling at his feet which had stirred up the community to his arrest. There was as much decorum as could consist with the sacrilegious rites which were still practised with his apparent connivance.
He now sat without apparent restiveness under the eyes of the two men who had the greatest right to exact the fulfilment of his promise, to forbid this idolatry, to end the infamy of its continuance, and to go out from among the people whose instincts and conventions his presence outraged. Near Redfield sat David Gillespie with his eyes fixed on Dylks in a stare of hungry hate, and with him sat his daughter, who testified by her removal from the Little Flock her renunciation of her faith in him. Redfield showed greater patience than Gillespie, and at times his eyes wandered to the face of the girl who did not seem to feel them on her, but sat gazing at her forsaken idol in what might have seemed puzzle for him and wonder at herself. Others who had rejected him merely kept away; but she came as if she would face down the shame of her faith in him before the eyes of her little world. Sometimes Dylks involuntarily put his hand to the black silken
cap which replaced the bandage Nancy Billings had tied over the place where the hair had been torn out. When he did this, the girl moved a little; her face hardened, and she stole a glance at Redfield.
The schoolmaster went on and on, preaching Dylks insistently, but not with the former defiance. He did not spare to speak of the cruel sufferings inflicted upon their Savior and their God, who had borne it with the meekness of the Son and the mercy of the Father. The divine being who had come to sojourn among them at Leatherwood in the flesh, for the purposes of his inscrutable wisdom might have blasted his enemies with a touch, a word, but he had spared them; he had borne insult and injury, but in the Last Day he would do justice, he the judge of all the earth. Till then, let the Little Flock have patience; let them have faith sustained by the daily, hourly miracles which he had wrought among them since his return to their midst, and rest secure in the strong arms which he folded about them.
Dylks sat motionless. “Well, mother,” Matthew Braile hoarsely whispered to his wife, “I reckon you’d better have let me put him up with the coon. The heat might have tried the mischief out of him. He hasn’t kept his word.”
“No, Matthew, he hasn’t,” she whispered back, “and I think his lying to you so is almost the worst thing he’s done. The next time you may put him with the coon. Only, the coon’s too good for him. But I reckon Jim Redfield will look out for him.”
“Jim’ll have to let him alone. We can’t have any more mobbing, and there’s no law that can touch Dylks in the State of Ohio. We settled that the first time.”
Enraghty abruptly closed his discourse with a demand for prayer, and addressed his supplication to the Savior and the Judge incarnate there among them. The Little Flock sang the hymn which always opened and closed its devotions, and at the end, Hingston, who sat by Dylks on the bench below the pulpit, made a movement as if to rise. But Dylks put out his hand and stayed him. He welcomed Enraghty to the place which he left beside Hingston, and slowly, with the step of one in a dream, mounted the stairs of the pulpit, amidst the silent amaze of the people. He began without preamble in the blend of scriptural text and crude every-day parlance which he ordinarily used.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 920
