“Was it? I didn’t notice.”
“Didn’t notice! Why, what ever were you doing?”
“I was talking to Victor.”
“Precious little fellow!”
“Oh, he seems a right nice little boy in spite of the way they spoil him—too bad his ears stick out so dreadfully. Margaret ought to do something. But I don’t mean him. I mean his father. He was speaking to me last night.”
Aunt Priscilla gave such a start she nearly went over the side of the pony carriage into the dusty yarrow. Of course, she knew about Lizzie’s spiritualism—but she hadn’t mentioned it for ever so long—and this—oh, dear!
“He talks to me every night. It all began with the table tipping—don’t you remember the afternoon you did it with me?”
Did she remember? Could she ever forget? She hadn’t slept for nights afterwards, and she had been almost afraid to go to church on Sunday, for fear God would strike her dead for being a necromancer. And Cousin Lizzie told her that was nothing to what the table had done afterwards, when she was alone. Aunt Priscilla had a vision of it running after Cousin Lizzie like a little dog, leaping up and down stairs on its mahogany legs and three claw feet, rapping out dreadful messages. Willie and Priscilla had gone to see the Blows one evening, and, when Lizzie set out homemade wine and sponge-cake on that table, Priscilla nearly had hysterics. She would as soon have eaten sponge-cake off a coffin. When they went home, she poured out the whole story to Willie in a flood of tears, and it was bliss to hear his shouts of laughter and to be told that they hadn’t been wicked, only a pair of fools. Still, she never liked to be in the room with that table, and as for playing solitaire on it, as Lizzie did—!
“At first I had to have things—the table, and raps to spell out messages—but he speaks right to me now, since I’ve learned how to listen.”
She smiled to herself, thinking of the coming night, with her husband asleep and the whole house still. She would get up and go softly out of the room, out of the house, and lying on the cool grass, looking up at the pale gleaming locust trees, she would make herself empty as she had learned to do—empty, to receive him.
“Oh, goodness!” Aunt Priscilla crammed the collar against her mouth and looked as if she were going to cry. “Goodness, Lizzie, ain’t you scared to death? Do you see him?”
“I feel him,” Lizzie said, smiling again her secret smile, and a little shudder of ecstasy went through her.
“Well, but—oh, gracious! Do you suppose it really can be him? You’d think he’d go to Margaret if he went to anyone—”
Cousin Lizzie said nothing, flicking a horsefly from the pony’s twitching flank.
“Does she know?”
“I don’t intend to tell her. You see, he never speaks of her.” Her voice was chanting, triumphant.
Aunt Priscilla felt ready to faint. What a relief to draw up before the store, to see Mr. Trewhitt hobbling down the ferny steps to take their orders and tell them it was a hot day, to drink the cold spring water he brought them.
Lizzie hardly spoke on the way home, except to say casually, “Oh, by the way, you needn’t repeat what I told you to Willie or Mr. B.—men are so funny,” and to mention that she was going to put up her brandied peaches tomorrow. But poor Aunt Priscilla felt as if she had been for a ride with a witch on her broomstick!
VI
“What is thy duty towards thy neighbor?” asked Miss Hessie Farley, brushing a bluebottle fly away from her nose; and the children chorused:
“My duty toward my Neighbor is To love him as myself an todotoallmenasIwouldtheyshudountome. To lovonoransuccor my father and mother. To honornobey the civil authority. To sumit myselto all my governors teachers spiritchal pastors an masters—”
Z-zzzzzz-ZZ-zz the bluebottle droned. Miss Hessie’s jaw set and her eyes watered as she tried to keep from yawning. A field sloped up like a curtain in front of the Sunday school door, its drifts of daisies dazzlingly white in the sunshine.
“What is the inward and spiritual grace?”
And the children, bored and docile, told her:
“A death unto sin an’ a new birth unto righteousness for beinby nature born in sin and the childerna frath—”
The little Campions saw their carriage go lurching and rocking past the Sunday school door down the steep rutty lane that led to the carriage sheds. Caesar always drove Mamma to church a little early, so that she would have time to fill the brass vases that stood on the altar in Grandmother’s memory. Grandfather had built the church, that looked, on its steep hillside, like a big brown hen sitting on its egg of Sunday school room. The reredos was sacred to his memory, the altar cross to Papa’s. The lectern was so that no one should forget Great-Aunt Clementina, and the big chair by the altar, with its inlaid cross of olive-wood beads from the Mount of Olives was to remind everyone of Great-Grandfather.
“Blow your nose, honey,” Maggie whispered to little Victor. “Blow!” She seized his nose gently in her handkerchief, and he obediently blew, his absent eyes fixed on the shimmer of daisies. May and Lily were in Aunt Priscilla’s class, and Victor should have been with the littlest children who were being told so earnestly by Mrs. Trewhitt, the storekeeper’s wife, about the Infant Moses, but he had wept so on his first Sunday that he had been allowed ever since to sit with Maggie.
The three girls had on plaid silk dresses of blue and cream and brown, and little straw hats tilted over their eyes, with blue streamers hanging down behind; they each carried a prayerbook with a sprig of shrub and a clean handkerchief between the leaves; their handkerchiefs for use were in their pockets.
