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!”
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.
