"I'll lead to-night. He's gone out in the back-country to pray alone."
Aunt Nickerson wept quietly, peeping from the corners of her eyes.
Reverent awe struggled with an old rebellion in Emsy's face, and in
others as they came crowding. The trustee broke out bitterly:
"Miah White's took to the bottle again, along o' him. If only he'd do
his prayin' at Miah's house a spell, 'stead o' the back-country--"
"There was a back-country in Judea," Mate cried him down. "And some one
prayed there, not one night, but forty nights and days!"
What a far cry it was from the thwarted lover behind the prescription
screen, fanning the flames of hell-fire through the night, to the Seer
thundering in the vestry--had there been any there with heads enough to
wonder at it.
It happened from time to time, this mysterious retreat into the moors,
more frequently as the Infield Conference drew on and the hollows
deepened in the minister's cheeks and his eyes shone brighter with
foreboding. Nor was this the first time the back-country had been
mentioned in the same breath with the Wilderness of Judea. I can
remember our Miss Beedie, in Sunday School, lifting her eyes and sighing
at the first verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Luke.
And to-night, while I crept off tingling through the dark of Lovett's
Court, he was in the Wilderness again, and I had seen him last.
I brought up by one of the tubbed box-trees and peered in at the Pillar
House with a new wonder. I was so used to it there, dead on the outside
and living on the inside, that I had never learned to think of it as a
strange thing. Perhaps a dozen times I had seen little Hope Gibbs (they
still said "Gibbs") playing quietly among the lilacs in the back yard.
It was always at dusk when the shadows were long there, and she a shadow
among them, so unobtrusive and far away. As for her mother, no one ever
saw Sympathy Gibbs.
Crouching by the box-tree, I found myself wondering what they were doing
in there, Sympathy Gibbs and the little girl; whether they were
sleeping, or whether they were sitting in the dark, thinking, or
whispering about the husband and father who was neither husband nor
father, or whether, in some remote chamber, there might not be a lamp or
a candle burning.
The dead hush of the place oppressed me. I turned my head to look back
at the comfortable, bumbling devotion of Center Church, and this is what
I saw there.
The door was still open, a blank, bright rectangle giving into the
deserted vestry, and it was against this mat of light that I spied
Minister Malden's head and shoulders thrust furtively, as he peeped in
and seemed to harken to the muffled unison of the prayer.
You may imagine me startled enough at that, but what of my emotion
when, having peeped and listened and reassured himself for a dozen
seconds, Minister Malden turned and came softly down the Court toward
the gate and the box-trees and me, a furtive silhouette against the
door-light, his face turned back over one shoulder.
I couldn't bolt; he was too close for that. The wonder was that he
failed to see me, for he stopped within two yards of where I cowered in
the shadow and stood for a long time gazing in between the trees at the
pillared porch, and I could hear his breathing, uneven and laborious, as
though he had been running or fighting. Once I thought he struck out at
something with a vicious fist. Then his trouble was gone, between two
winks, and he was gone too, up the walk and up the steps, without any
to-do about it. I don't know whether he tapped on the door or not. It
was open directly. I caught a passing glimpse of Sympathy Gibbs in the
black aperture; the door closed on them both, and the Pillar House was
dead again.
Now this was an odd way for Minister Malden to fast and pray in the
Wilderness--odd enough, one would say, to keep me waiting there a while
to see what would come of it all. But it didn't. I had had enough of
mysteries for one Summer's night, or at any rate I had enough by the
time I got my short legs, full tilt, into the shore street. For I had
caught a fleeting glimpse, on the way, of a watcher in the shadow behind
the _other_ box-tree--Yen Sin, the heathen, with a surprised eyeball
slanting at me over one shoulder.
* * *
Among the most impressive of the phenomena of life, as noted in my
thirteenth year, is the amazing way in which a community can change
while one is away from it a month. Urkey village at the beginning of my
'teens seemed to me much the same Urkey village upon which I had first
opened my eyes. And then I went to make a visit with my uncle Orville
Means in Gillyport, just across the Sound, and when I came back on the
packet I could assure myself with all the somber satisfaction of the
returning exile that I would scarcely have known the old place.
Gramma Pilot's cow had been poisoned. There had been a fire in the
Selectmen's room at Town Hall. Amber Matheson had left Mrs. Wharf's
Millinery and set up for herself, opposite the Eastern School. And Mate
Snow, all of a sudden, had bought the old Pons house, on the hill
hanging high over the town, and gone to live there. With a leap, and as
it were behind my back, he sat there dominating the village and the
harbor and the island--our Great Man.
He took Minister Malden with him, naturally, out of the two rooms over
the store, into one room in the third story of the house on the
hill--where Sympathy Gibbs could see him if she chose to look that way,
as frankly and ignominiously a dependent as any baron's chaplain in the
Golden Days.
"She'd have done better with Mate, after all," folks began to say.
But of all the changes in the village, the most momentous to me was the
change in Yen Sin. I don't know why it should have been I, out of all
the Urkey youth, who went to the Chinaman's; perhaps it was the
spiritual itch left from that first adventure on the scow. At any rate,
I had fallen into a habit of dropping in at the cabin, and not always
with a collar to do.
I had succeeded in worming out of him the meaning of that first set of
bird-scratches on my collar-band--"The boy who throws clam-shells"--and
of a second and more elaborate writing--"The boy who is courageous in
the face of all the water of the ocean, yet trembles before so much of
it as may be poured in a wash-basin." There came a third inscription in
time, but of that he would not tell me, nor of Mate Snow's, nor the
minister's. It was a queer library he had, those fine-written collars of
Urkey village.
He had been growing feebler so long and so gradually that I had made
nothing of it. Once, I remember, it struck me queer that he wasn't
working so hard as he had used to. Still earliest of all and latest of
all, he would sometimes leave his iron cooling on the board now and
stand for minutes of the precious day, dreaming out of the harbor
window. When the sun was sinking, the shaft through the window bathed
his head and his lean neck with a quality almost barbaric, and for a
moment in the gloom made by the bright pencil, the new, raw things of
Urkey faded out, leaving him alone in his ancient and ordered
civilization, a little wistful, I think, and perhaps a little
frightened, as a child waking from a long, dreaming sleep, to find his
mother gone.
He had begun to talk about China, too, and the river where he was born.
And I made nothing of it, it came on so gradually, day by day. Then I
went away, as I have said, and came back again. I dropped in at the scow
the second day after the packet brought me home.
"Hello, there!" I cried, peeping over the counter, "I got a collar for
you to--to--" I began to stumble. "Mr. Yen Sin, dear me, what's the
matter of you?"
"Mista Yen Sin fine," he said in a strengthless voice, smiling and
nodding from the couch where he lay, half propped up by a gorgeous,
faded cushion. "Mista Yen Sin go back China way pletty quick now, yes."
"Honest?"
He made no further answer, but took up the collar I had brought.
"You been gone Gillypo't, yes? You take colla China boy, yes?"
"Yessir!"
"He pletty nice man, Sam Low, yes?"
"Oh, you know him, then? Oh, he's all right, Yen Sin."
It was growing dark outside, and colder, with a rising wind from
landward to seaward against the tide. A sense of something odd and wrong
came over me; it was a moment before I could make it out. The fire was
dead in the stove for the first time in memory and the Vestal irons were
cold. Yen Sin asked me to light the lamp. In the waxing yellow glow he
turned his eyes to mine, and mine were big.
"You know Mista God?" he questioned.
"Oh, yes," I answered soberly. "Yes, indeed."
"Mista God allee same like Mista Yen Sin, yes?"