A mirror for witches

By Esther Forbes

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Title: A mirror for witches

Author: Esther Forbes

Illustrator: Robert Gibbings

Release date: January 26, 2025 [eBook #75212]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928

Credits: Bob Taylor, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MIRROR FOR WITCHES ***

Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES

[Illustration: Demon and woman kissing]

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES

in which is reflected the Life, Machinations,
and Death of Famous DOLL BILBY, who,
with a more than _feminine perversity_, preferred
a Demon to a Mortal Lover. Here is
also told how and why a Righteous and Most
Awful JUDGEMENT befell her, destroying
both Corporeal Body and Immortal Soul.

ESTHER FORBES

With woodcuts by

ROBERT GIBBINGS

[Illustration: Decoration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

MARY AND GERHART JENTSCH

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES

CHAPTER I

_Certain Examples to Show Doll Bilby not alone among Women in her
preference for Evil. The Cases of Ry, Goose, Leda, Danaë, etc., cited._

It has long been known that, on occasions, devils in the shape of
humanity or in their own shapes (that is, with horns, hoofs, and tails)
may fancy mortal women. By dark arts, sly promises of power, flattery,
etc., they may prevail even upon Christian women, always to the
destruction of these women’s souls and often to that of their bodies.

For in Northumberland, Meslie Ry was burned in 1616 because she had
taken a fiend to love.

A few years later, Christie Goose, a single woman upwards of forty
years, suddenly flew lunatic—and that upon the Lord’s Day. Then she did
confess that each night and every night the Devil, wickedly assuming
the shape of Mr. Oates, God’s minister at Crumplehorn, Oxon., came to
her through her window. This fact amazed Crumplehorn, for Goose was of
all women most pious, and had sat for years in humble prayerfulness at
the feet of Mr. Oates. Some were astonished that even a devil should
find need for this same Goose, who was of hideous aspect.

There was a young jade, servant in an alderman’s house in London, who,
although she confessed nothing and remained obdurate to the end, was
hanged and then burned because she bore a creature with horns on its
head and a six-inch tail behind. Such a creature the just magistrates
determined no mortal man might beget, although the saucy wench
suggested that an alderman might. Moreover, certain children in the
neighbourhood testified that they had twice or thrice seen ‘a burly big
black man’ sitting on the ridgepole.

Some assume that as the gods of antiquity were in no way gods (being
seekers after evil—not after light), they should therefore be
considered caco-demons or devils. The Reverend Pyam Plover, of Boston,
has written learnedly on this subject, saying, in part, ‘For is it
not possible that the Lord God of Israel, being those days but the
God of _Israel_, may have permitted certain of his Fallen Angels to
stray from the vitals of Hell and disport themselves through Greece
and ancient Italy? Here they revealed themselves ... in many ways to
heathen people, who falsely worshipped them as _gods_. If this be true
Zeus might better assume his true name of _Satan_, and let us call
Apollo but _Apollyon_ and recognize in Mars, Hermes, etc., Beelzebub
and Belial. Then may the female “divinities” be true descendants of
Lilith.’ So one may learn from antiquity (consider Leda, Io, Danaë, and
others) how great is the ardour felt by devils for mortal women.

As is not yet forgotten, in 1662, near threescore years ago, a woman
called Greensmith, living at Hartford in New England, confessed the
Devil had carnal knowledge of her. For this she was hanged.

More strangely yet, lived, for brief space of years, famous Doll Bilby,
best known as ‘Bilby’s Doll’. She flourished at Cowan Corners, close
by the town of Salem, but an afternoon’s journey from my own parish of
Sudbury. Of other women devil-ridden, be it Leda or Ry, Greensmith or
Danaë, Christie Goose or La Voisin, little can be said, for but little
is known. All were witches (if we accept as witches such women as
traffic with fiends), but little else is known. Yet of Bilby’s famous
Doll, in the end all things were known. From old wives’ tales, court
records, and the diaries of certain men, from the sworn affidavits and
depositions of others, from the demonologies of Mr. Cotton Mather, and
the cipher journal of Mr. Zacharias Zelley, we may know with a nicety
what this woman was and how she lived, from whence she came, how she
grew to witchcraft, how she felt, thought, and at the last how she died.

_Mr. Bilby sails far to seek out_ TROUBLE, _and, having found Trouble,
nurtures it._

She was born of a wicked witch-woman and begotten by one who was no
better, that is, by a warlock. These two devil-worshippers and, they
say, two hundred more were burned in one great holocaust at Mont Hoël
in Brittany. Black smoke, screams of death, stench of flesh settled
down over town and harbour, causing sickness and even vomiting.

On that same day, by evil fortune, a brig manned by Dawlish men stood
in the Bouche de Saint-Hoël. These men, seeing that it was fête day,
and curious because of the smoke, the screams, and the stench, went to
the holocaust. There they saw a wild child, more animal or goblin than
human being. This wild child would have followed her mother, who burned
in the heart of the fire, if soldiers had not pushed her back. A priest
bade the soldiers let her pass to death, for, being of witch-people,
she would undoubtedly burn sooner or later. The Englishmen protested,
and Mr. Jared Bilby, captain and owner of the brig, caught and held
the wild child, who did not struggle against him as she had against
the soldiers. Instead she held fast to him, for even the wicked may
recognize goodness. The priest showed his yellow fangs at the Dawlish
men. He hated and scorned them. ‘Take the child and be gone. She was
born of a witch-woman and will grow to witchcraft and do much harm—but
in England among the heretics. Be gone.’

The child clung to Mr. Bilby and he to her. He took her in his arms,
and she lay corpse-pale and glass-eyed like one about to die. This men
remembered. When he put her down upon the deck of the brig, he was
badly sweated as though his burden had been more than he, a strong
young man, might bear. He told his men the child weighed as though a
child of stone. Some thought that his heart mistook him, and that he
already regretted the acceptance of so dangerous a gift.

Gathering his men about him and having prayed, he gave thanks to
Jehovah, Who, although He had never given him a child of his own body,
yet had seen fit to send this poor little one to him. Then he bade his
men keep their tongues behind their teeth, telling no one from whence
was this child (which in the future should be his child), nor the
manner of her parents’ death, nor the harm which the priest swore she
should live to perform. This promise his men kept for years, but in the
end, when they were old men, they preferred to serve Gossip and Scandal
rather than a kind master, long, long dead.

For days the child lay like death, only occasionally jumping madly from
her pallet, screaming ‘Le feu! Le feu! Le feu!’ then falling back,
covering her face with her hands and laughing horribly. The captain
coaxed and petted her, urged her to eat, and quieted her with his
hands. So by love he restored her to humanity.

Because of her small size he called her ‘Doll,’ which name she well
lived up to, never acquiring the height and weight of other women. No
one ever knew her real age. She may have been seven or perhaps six when
she first came to England. Being unable to talk English and at first
unable to serve herself, she may have seemed younger than she was. Yet,
on the other hand, Fear, Grief, and Sickness often make their Hosts
appear older than the fact.

Mr. Bilby believed that the shock of her parents’ death (for they were
burned before her eyes, her mother crying out to her most piteously
from the midst of flame) had broken the reins of memory. He thought she
had forgotten everything that lay back of her reawakening to life on
board his brig, which was called God’s Mercy. Also he comforted himself
with the belief that if—as might be—she had learned any little tricks
of witchery, or if she had ever been taken to Sabbat or Black Mass, or
if she had looked upon the Prince of Hell, or even if (being led on
by her parents) she had sworn to serve him, she would have forgotten
all these things. She was born again and this time of God and to God,
whom Mr. Bilby piously swore she should serve—Him and Him alone. The
child had been so vehemently frightened she had forgotten all good and
needful things, how to dress herself, how to eat with knife and spoon.
She had forgotten the language of her birth.

But of evil she remembered everything.

_He brings the Foundling to his own hearth and to the bosom of his
Goodwife. There the goblin-child rewards Kindness and Mercy with
Malediction and Evil. She overlooks the Goodwife._

Hannah, wife of Jared Bilby, would not accept her sterility with
Christian fortitude. She railed against the wisdom of God, saying,
‘Mrs. Such-and-Such is but half so big and fine a woman as I, yet she
has three sons. Goody This-and-That, the jade, can find but little
favour in the eyes of her Maker, yet, to _her_ He sends more children
than she can feed; but I, a pious, godly, praying woman, remain
barren.’ Which, she wickedly averred, showed the injustice of Divinity.
However, by curious chance or mischance, soon after Mr. Bilby set out
with his men and brig for the coasts of France and Spain, she found
herself with child. Some say the Lord tired of her railing, and, to
punish her, first raised up her hopes and then sent Doll to blight them
for her.

Summer wore away. The nights grew chill. She was four months with
child. Then Mr. Bilby, late one evening, came to Dawlish harbour. With
him was his goblin-child, now grown pretty and playful. He arrived
home in the black of the night and through pelting rain. The child he
carried wrapped in his greatcoat to protect her from the cruel storm.
He shook the shutter which he knew was by his wife’s bedboard.

‘Woman, woman, get up and open to me.’

The woman lay for warmth with her servant wench, Susan Croker. The fury
of the night shewed forth the grandeur of God. The wind howled above
the beating of the rain. Croker cried to her mistress not to open the
door on such a night. It could be no living man who knocked, for it is
on such vexed and angry nights as these the sea gives up its dead.

Hannah was a fearless woman. She got quickly to the door, unbarred it,
and, in a deluge of wind and wet, Mr. Bilby entered with his burden.
Her heart mistook her. She cried out, ‘Jared, what have you there in
that great bundle?’ So he took it to the hearth and, as the women
knelt, throwing kindling on the fire, he opened the bundle and out
popped the goblin-child. She shuddered away from the fire (a thing she
always feared) and clutched her foster father with her little hands,
gazing into his face with round black eyes. Every thread of her spikey
hair was tumbled up on end. The women cried in horror that this was no
child. This was an imp, a monkey, a pug. But Jared Bilby on his knees
protected the foundling, both from the fire and the women’s angry
glances. He soothed her with his body and kind words, ‘Ah, the fire
would never devour her.’ He was here, and he would never leave her.
She was his child, etc. He would always love and cherish her—and the
like. The child pushed her tously head under his chin and froze into
stillness.

[Illustration: Child holding man]

Susan Croker told many that, from the beginning, the child bewitched
him. Nor did the affection which Bilby gave his Doll ever seem like the
love which men feel to their children, but rather the darker and often
unholy passion which is evoked by mature, or almost mature women—a
passion which witches, when young and comely, have often engendered
with ferocious intensity. As long as he lived he was forever stroking
her shaggy black hair, looking lovingly into those button-round eyes,
and kissing a wide hobgoblin mouth which many a Christian would fear
to kiss. Hannah was a lusty, jealous woman who could not abide such
mean rivalry as that of a foundling child. The woman, who had always
been a gossiping wife, now, under the baleful influence of Doll, seemed
like to become a shrew. She was steely set in her hatred of the child,
although she fed her, gave her a corner to sleep in, and taught her
some small prayers. With her the child seemed dull, indifferent, but
with Mr. Bilby she was merry, playful, and loving. So the one thought
her a knowing child and the other a zany.

Mr. Bilby would not tell his wife where he had found Doll, but it did
trouble him that the woman so cunningly insisted that either she was
the child of a witch or the begotten of the Devil. Even Susan Croker,
who was kind to the foundling, had horrid suspicions of her. She could
not teach Doll the noble, sonorous lines of Our Lord’s Prayer, although
the imp was quick to learn worthless things, such as ‘This Little Pig
Goes to Market’ or ‘A Cat Comes Fiddling Out of the Barn.’

The child, having been in the house a month, there occurred a chance to
show what she could do—that is, what evil she could do.

_Doll covets a ship for a toy and the whole of her Foster Father’s
love. She nefariously gains her ends and slays a Dangerous Rival._

The midwife promised Hannah a great thumping boy handsome as his
mother, strong as his father. He should either wear the bands of the
clergy or walk the quarter-deck of the king’s navy. Because her husband
favoured the nautical life for his unborn son, he made him a rattle in
the shape of a ship. In the hull were seven balls which, when the ship
was shaken, rattled. Now Doll was forever leaning against his knees and
watching him as he carved out this bauble. As one after another of the
seven balls were liberated in the heart of the wood, she would laugh
and gloat. It was not a toy for her, but for him who should (according
to nature) supplant her in her foster father’s love. In her evil heart
she must have brooded on these things and come to hate this other child
that would possess the ship and Bilby’s affection. Her hands were
always outstretched to the rattle and she cried, ‘Give, give, give.’

One day as they were thus—man and child—Hannah came in from the
milk-house. The woman was jealous—not only for her own sake, but for
the sake of the unborn. ‘For,’ she thought, ‘what shall he, who gives
all to a foundling, have left for his own son? Not only has this wicked
girl turned him away from me, but she takes the rightful place of his
own child.’ Then she said:

‘It is not well that a woman in my condition should be exposed to
contrary and evil influences. Jared, send away your “pretty pet”;
give her to the wife of your ship’s cook to keep—at least until I am
delivered. Many wiser than I, yes, and wiser than you....’ Her jaw
swung loose as though broke. Her teeth stuck out, her eyes bulged, for
the goblin-child, through her mat of hair and out of her wild bright
eyes, was staring at her. She stared and moved her lips in a whisper,
then she skipped across the room, grinning in diabolical glee. Mrs.
Hannah felt the curse go through her. The babe in her womb moved in its
wretchedness, and was blasted. The woman felt its tiny soul flutter to
her lips and escape. She knew that Doll (being of some infernal origin)
could see this same soul, and she guessed, from the roving of her
eyes, how it clung for a moment to its mother’s lips, how it flew to
the Bible upon the stand (in which its name would never be recorded),
how it poised upon the window-sill, then, unborn and frustrated, it
departed to whatever Paradise or Hell God prepares for such half-formed
souls. Hannah began to screech and wail, then fell back upon the bed
in a swoon.

The body of the unborn child shrivelled within her, and, when a male
midwife was called from Dawlish, he said she had been but full of air.
She never was again with child. Some said (and Captain Bilby among
them) that she never had been—even on the ’bove-related most famous
occasion.

But if, as the most informed and thoughtful have said, the blasting of
Hannah’s infant was indeed a fact, then we have to hand, and early in
the life history of Doll Bilby, an actual case of witchcraft. And is it
likely such monstrous power (blasting unborn life with a glance or at
most a muttered curse) should be given to any one who had not already
set her name to the Devil’s Book, and compacted herself to Hell?

_The New Land holds greater promise than the Old. Mr. Bilby, Ux et
filia say fare-you-well to England and take up residence close to Salem
and not far from Boston, in the Bay Colony. They prosper. The child
grows an evil pace._

In those days England offered little peace to men (like Captain Bilby)
who would worship God in their own way, and in accordance with His
own holy teachings and the dictates of their own hearts—not according
to teachings of bishops or priests. So Mr. Bilby often yearned towards
that newer land which lay far west beyond the Atlantic. In time he sold
his brig, God’s Mercy, and his freehold. The agent of the Bay Colony,
in his office at Maiden Lane, London, told him to get to Southampton
with his wife, child, and gear. Within the month he should sail.

Mrs. Hannah protested that if the child went she would not. Then he
would humour and praise her, so at last she went, although with much
bad grace.

In the year 1663 the ship Elizabeth arrived, by the goodness of
God, to the colony at Massachusetts Bay, and in her came an hundred
souls. There were yeomen, farmers, braziers, wainers, pewterers,
etc., indentured servants, apprentices, etc., and certain gentlemen
scholars, etc. But in after years the most famous of all these people
was Bilby’s Doll, and it is she who has made the name of the ship
Elizabeth remembered. There was in the hold a cargo of close to an
hundred Bibles, and to this beneficent influence many attributed the
quick fair passage which the Elizabeth enjoyed. No one thought it
possible that the button-eyed foster child of Mr. Bilby could be a
weather breeder. In fact no one thought of the child except to wonder
at the foolish fondness which her ‘father’ continually showed her. They
thought of the Bibles below and thanked God for their sunny voyage.
Rather should they have thought of the witch-child. For good things,
such as fine weather, may spring from evil people.

Also on this ship came one Zacharias Zelley, an Oxford man and a
widower. He was no longer young, nor was he an old man. In demeanour he
was sad and thoughtful. After some shiftings he, too, like the Bilbys,
came to settle at Cowan Corners, and there he preached the Word of God.
But in time he fell from God, and of him more hereafter.

The new land prospered the Bilbys and they were well content. The
plantation which Mr. Bilby was able to buy was not only of admirable
size, well-set-up with house, barns, sheds, etc., but it was already
reduced to good order and its fertility was proved. Yet for many years,
down to this present day, Bilby’s lands can produce little if anything
except that coarse yellow broom which the vulgar call witches’ blood.

The cellar hole of this house still stands upon the skirts of Cowan
Corners, and but six miles removed from Salem. In those days there was
a good road before this house leading from Salem to Newburyport. Beyond
this road were salt meadows and the sea. To the north of the house lay
fields of maize, English grass, corn, peelcorn, barley, oats, pumpkins,
ending only at the waters of the River Inch (as it was called in those
days). To the south were the adjoining lands of Deacon Thumb. But to
the west, beyond the rough pastures, and too close for a wholesome
peace of mind, was a forest of a size and terror such as no Englishman
could conceive of unless he should actually see it. It stretched
without break farther than man could imagine, and the trees of it were
greater than the masts of an admiral or the piers of a cathedral. Yet
was it always a green and gloomy night in this forest, and over all was
silence, unbreakable.

Many thought the tawny savages who lived within were veritable devils,
and that, somewhere within this vastness, Satan himself might be found.
To this Mr. Zacharias Zelley, having taken up the ministry at Cowan
Corners, would not listen. ‘For,’ he said, ‘we left the Devil behind us
in England. Seek God in the heart of this majestic and awful forest—not
the Devil. When I was a boy in Shropshire I knew the very niche in the
rocks where old women said the Devil lived and had his kitchen. It was
there he kept his wife. Every holiday I hid close by the rocks, hoping
to see his children.... Let us leave him there in the Old England, but
in the New keep our eyes pure and open against the coming of the Lord.’

Atheism as the good and learned Glanvill, in his ‘Sadducismus
Triumphatus,’ has proved, is begun in Sadducism and those that dare
not bluntly say ‘there is no God’ (for a fair step and introduction)
content themselves to deny there are spirits or witches or devils. Yet
how sad to see one of the clergy first agree that the Devil could be
left behind in England and soon claim there is no Devil, no witches, no
spirits. For without these awful presences, who may be sure of God?

CHAPTER II

_There is a small smell of_ WITCHCRAFT _in and about Boston. A straw
doll taken to Meeting throws many into confusion._

In the fall of 1665 two were hanged in Boston for the bedevilment of an
elderly woman, her cousin Germain, and her swine.

In that same year Mr. Saul Peterham, a godly, decent man, refused some
small rotten apples to an ancient and malicious hag. For this the old
crone muttered at him, making an evil sign by her thumb and her nose,
and took herself off in great bad humour. Mr. Peterham, on returning
to his house, found that his wife—an estimable church woman—had fallen
from a ladder she had put to the loft for the purpose of observing the
conduct of her servant wench and the indentured male servant, the exact
moment the crone had made her evil sign. The elders of the Church had
at the old woman and forced her, weeping and on her knees, to forswear
the Devil, his imps, and his ways, and to continue more strictly in the
ways of God. It being observed that she could both weep and say the
Lord’s Prayer, many believed the accusation of witchcraft to be a false
one, such as is often launched against disagreeable and impotent old
women.

By spring there was yet another suspicion of witchcraft in the Bay
Colony, and this at Cowan Corners. In a hut close by the seashore, and
in great misery, lived an old pauper called Greene and his wife. He
was a tinker, but there were better tinkers than he, and he got little
work to do. His wife was a proud woman, born in Kent of high rank,
yet, by turn of fortune, she was so reduced as to have become the wife
of a tinker. Her craft in herbs got her some money and more ill fame,
nor was she content to raise and sell the honest herbs of England, but
she must continually associate herself with the heathen tawny savages
and thus learn arts—doubtless often evil arts—from them. The Indians
venerated her, calling her ‘White Mother’ and Moon Woman.’ She went
even into the great forest with more safety than any man. She was
loving towards these peoples and had much traffic with them, in spite
of the fact the Church elders had warned her twice, saying it is better
for a woman to keep her own house than to go abroad through the woods
alone and no one knew on what errand.

One Sabbath in the midst of the House of the Lord a poppet contrived
of straw and maize, with a leather head and a grinning face on it,
fell from below her skirts. None at the moment questioned her boldly
as to what purpose she contrived this poppet, yet all thought of those
dollies witches make but to destroy again, that their enemies may
dwindle with the dwindling dolly.

Later in the week three deacons called upon her and demanded
explanation. She was distrait, cried out upon them in anger because
of their suspicions, and said she had but made a toy for Bilby’s poor
little Doll, who, she said, was beaten and cruelly used by that shrew
Hannah. The incident was then dismissed except for a public reprimand
for a woman so depraved as to put into the hand of a child a toy upon
the Lord’s Day and in the Lord’s House. After this the Greenes lost
what friends they had, and no one came commonly to their hut upon the
salt marsh but Bilby’s wicked Doll.

On a February night Hannah Bilby woke overcome with retching and
vomiting. In the morning Mr. Kleaver, the surgeon, being called,
took away two ounces of blood from the forearm; still she continued
in wretched state three days. By the oppression on her chest and
especially because of certain night sweatings and terrors, she became
convinced she was bewitched and frankly accused Goodwife Greene. Mr.
Zelley roughly bade her hold her tongue (this being but one of many
times when he befriended a witch) and declared there was no reason why
Greene should wish her harm. At which statement many were amazed, for
they thought every one knew that Greene loved little Doll and hated
the foster mother because of her cruelty. Through all the clustering
villages—Salem, Ipswich, Cowan Corners, etc.—it was whispered how Doll
had surrendered to Greene either parings from Mrs. Hannah’s nails or
hair from her body, and had thus given Greene the wherewithal to work
magic.

Within a year all suspicion seemed to have passed away from Goody
Greene, but in a hundred ways more doubts gathered about the child and
she was whispered of. Mrs. Bilby told many, here one and there two,
usually with entreaties for prayers and commands for secrecy, that
the girl was born and bred a witch. She told how her own unborn son
(that thumping boy) had been blasted. She told them to watch—was not
Mr. Bilby himself bewitched by her? So it seemed to many. There were
no clothes fine enough in Boston for his dear Doll—he needs must send
to England for them. Sometimes he held her on his knee—and she a girl
of thirteen or fourteen. Even when the elders and the minister came
to call on him, and Hannah, as befitted her gender, withdrew from the
room, Bilby would keep his ridiculous hobgoblin squatting at his feet.
As he talked, he patted her shaggy, spikey, hair.

The child had nothing to do with children of her own age, nor did godly
parents wish their children to play with her. For the most part she was
a silent thing, stealing about on feet as quiet as cats’ paws. To her
foster father she was pretty and frolicsome. To Goodwife Greene she was
loving, and stole from the Bilby larder food for the wretched paupers.
With her mouth she said little to any one, but her eyes spoke—those
round button eyes, and they spoke secret and evil things.

_Monstrous facts regarding Doll’s earliest youth which Mr. Zelley
repeated almost twenty years after her death. How she attended Black
Sabbath, etc. How she saw the Devil in Brittany and probably swore to
serve him, etc._

When the time came late in his life that Mr. Zelley, being old and
broken, was accused of witchcraft, he told, after long questionings,
much that he knew about Bilby’s Doll. For instance, he said she never
forgot one of those wicked things which she had learned of her parents
in Brittany.

It is true, the shock and horror of their death caused such mental
anguish it seemed to her a black curtain (much like the smoke of the
holocaust) dropped down upon her life. All that was actual in her life
was before the curtain—that is, after her parents’ death; yet all that
lay behind this curtain did exist for her—only infinitely small and
infinitely far away. To see (for she did not call it _remembering_)
what lay behind this barrier, she had to think and think only of
blackness. Soon was her industry rewarded. Behold, the blackness
disintegrated and little by little she saw strange scenes in piercing
clarity, yet all in miniature. She saw these visions as though she
were above them—say from the height of a church steeple, and she saw
her own self, a little shaggy girl, walking below.

If no one disturbed her, if Mrs. Hannah did not cuff her for idleness,
she could watch the movements of these people for hours. There were her
father and mother, other witches and warlocks, phantom beasts, fiends,
imps, goblins, fairies, and always her own self. Sometimes these people
and creatures grew so small they were scarcely more than shifting
sands. Yet the smaller they grew, the more intense was their actuality.
Mr. Zelley said that she observed that when these images, visions, or
what you will, were presented to her almost as large as life, they were
vapoury and hard to see, but when they were no larger than a grain
of sand she could see everything—the little frown on her father’s
forehead, the scales on the imps’ shoulders, her mother’s teeth as she
smiled, even the nails on the hands of her own self; yet how small must
have been those hands when the whole body of an adult was no more than
a grain of sand!

Mr. Zelley, an old and broken man, was commanded to tell further. What
would she see—on what business would these folk be about? She would
see naked men and women with goats’ horns on their heads. They danced
back to back. As they danced, they cried ‘hu hu hura hu,’ in the manner
of witch-people. She would see the sacrifice of a black kid, and the
crucifixion of the sacred wafer. Did she ever see the Devil himself?
Witch-people often select one of themselves to be, as it were, high
priest in their infernal synagogue. Him they call devil. Such a one
she often saw. He was young and lusty and dressed in green leaves.
When they danced their sarabands, no one jumped as high as he. He was
a pretty man and women loved him. It was only on Black Sabbath he had
such power over men and women. At other times he was a cordwainer.

This devil that she saw was but a mock devil. Did she never see that
Scriptural Devil—that Foul Fiend Lucifer? Ah, that she could never
quite recall—not even with the powerful help of her strange minute
images. It is true that after hours of application she would sometimes
see a woman whom she knew to be her mother walking through great oak
woods (mistletoe-infested) and with her, clinging to her skirts,
was a child. The child was her own self. A great light pierced the
green gloom of the forest and where it fell stood a man. He was an
aristocrat, carried a small rapier with the hilt of which he toyed; he
was dressed in green velvet, had a handsome, ruddy face, and loving
blue eyes. Nor had he horns, she said, and if a tail, he kept it to
himself; but his shoes she noticed were unsightly, as though contrived
to accommodate clubbed foot or cloven hoof.

To him her mother knelt, and the child knelt also. The mother said
she had a little servant for him, who she promised would obey him in
all things. ‘What shall I do with so little a one?’ But he caressed
her with his hands. His touch was cold as ice. Even to remember that
touch raised the gooseflesh upon her. It was searing as the hands of
Death. She never saw this particular scene enacted before her without
experiencing a physical shock—pleasant and yet repellent. Then she
could see the child accept the Book the man offered her, and she always
made a mark in the Book with blood drawn from her own arm. But the
end of this particular and much-loved vision was always the same and
always disappointing, for she saw herself and her mother sitting by the
hearth. Her mother was stirring the pot and as she stirred she talked,
telling the story of a little girl who had walked with her mother in a
great wood, had met the Devil, and had sworn to serve him. So it was
Doll Bilby never could be sure whether or not she had actually promised
to serve the Foul Fiend and had made her blood-mark in his Book, or
whether it was but a tale told by her mother.

At first she felt no terror of the strange phantasies which, waking
and sleeping, were always before her eyes, but as she grew to young
womanhood, this uncertainty as to her true status came greatly to worry
her. If she had indeed signed the Book of Hell, then was she utterly
damned, and there was no hope for her. If she had not, then might
she, by prayer, watchfulness, etc., escape into Paradise. Thus she
endured great anguish of spirit. At last the Soul, which ever turns
and struggles in the heart of man, turned uneasily within her and she
tried to forget all the evil which she remembered—even the voice of her
mother, crying out piteously to her from the midst of flame.

Then Conscience—that gift from God to man—raised _its_ head, and she
lay and moaned upon her bed, listening to the holy voice of Conscience,
asking her over and over, to her utter weariness, what have you
done—what have you done? So she applied herself with burning intensity
to the ways of religion, and it was then, said Mr. Zelley, he first
came to ponder upon her, although she told him nothing of herself or
of her past until some years later. But all her pious exercises were
performed without that pleasure which the good Christian habitually
manifests, but rather with the terror of a lost soul. Mr. Zelley
kept a diary, and in that diary he wrote (Doll being at that time
in her sixteenth or even possibly in her seventeenth year) a wanton
suggestion, ‘I mark with interest the religious fructuations of Miss D.
B. but fear she fruits without roots, and but let a man, perhaps, Titus
Thumb, come into her life by the door, and then shall God but pass out
by the window ...’ and more light and blasphemous talk, suggesting
slyly that there may be some resemblance between the carnal love of
body and the spirit love of soul.

_A good young man is taken in a witch’s net._

This Titus Thumb, to whom Mr. Zelley referred, was the oldest child
and only son of Deacon Ephraim Thumb, whose lands lay south of and
adjoining to the lands of Mr. Bilby. There had always been intimacy
between the two farms, for the men of one helped the men of the other
at harvesting, planting, and building. The two women were gossips.
The two men were cronies. Titus had been much away because he was a
scholar at the new college in Cambridge. For one year he was home again
to help in the opening-up of certain new lands. He was a studious
youth who hoped in time to prepare himself for the ministry of God.
This, however, never came to pass, for God willed otherwise, and,
on completing his studies at Cambridge, he remains there, known to
hundreds of young Latinists as ‘Tutor Thumb.’

He was a young man of special parts and handsome person. He would be a
minister and his father was rich. The wenches of the village flocked
to him like moths to flame, ignoring often in the exuberance of the
chase (for they were unmannerly and bold to him) proper female conduct.
They mocked him among themselves, saying he was his mother’s darling or
cosset; that he would never seek out a woman for himself. They would
torment him, pulling him behind doors and kissing him, pushing their
bodies against him when he could not escape them, etc., etc. For which
wanton conduct they were well served, for he would have none of them,
and, keeping the fifth commandment well in mind, stayed close to his
parents’ house.

He had two younger sisters, born at one time, for they were twins. They
were sad and puny children, and many who saw them wondered that God had
seen fit to cut His cloth so close—that is, it seemed to many that He
had but enough material (brains, bones, spirits, hair, vitals, etc.)
to make one proper child, yet out of this little He had made two. In
answer to this questioning of Divine Wisdom, Mr. Zelley said no one
body could have endured as many diseases and ills as the Thumb twins
were heir to. Perhaps it was as well to divide up the maladies as well
as the strength. Labour had a falling sickness. She would stiffen with
a horrid din, foam, and go into convulsions. Nor was Sorrow of much
hardier stock. She was subject to nightmares and other delusions (which
Mr. Kleaver insisted arose from a cold stomach). Their mother vexed
herself greatly over them, and where another woman might think it well
if the miserable things but made a good end and returned early to that
God Who had sent them thus poorly fortified into the world, she was
always calling upon Mr. Kleaver or Goody Greene to dose them, or Mr.
Zelley to pray over them. They were pretty children with soft brown
eyes and yellow hair, fine and finicky, but their limbs were miserably
thin and their bellies somewhat swollen.

Mrs. Thumb told them not to play with Bilby’s Doll. She feared the
girl because her foster mother said she was a witch. Like most sickly
children, they were poorly trained in obedience. They met Bilby’s Doll,
whenever they could, by the willow brook which separated the two farms.
Of these meetings, however, they said little or nothing. The mother
often heard them whispering and laughing to each other, and, because
she would hear them talk of Mistress Dolly, she knew they saw her.
As they were too feeble to be whipped or even shaken, she had little
control over them.

She would have been vexed to know that often her husband, sitting at
the Black Moon Tavern with Mr. Bilby, planned that in due time this
same girl, whom Mrs. Thumb considered too dangerous even to cast an
eye upon the twins, should marry the handsome Titus. On such occasions
Mr. Bilby (although he would clap him on the back, and protest his
friendship) always put him off—Doll was but a child, not old enough to
marry. She had the immature body of a girl of twelve. Give her time and
she would grow. Deacon Thumb would not be put off. Was she not sixteen
at the youngest? Had not his own mother married before that?

He was most cupidous. He wanted his son to become heir to the fine
estate of Bilby. He did not heed what his wife said of danger. He cared
more that his son should have a great property in this world than that
his soul should be saved for the next. He was not an evil man, for
he was a deacon in the Church. He was a heedless man, and too easily
dismissed as gossip the true stories his wife forever whispered in his
ear, in regard to this same Doll.

Mrs. Bilby was anxious that the girl should marry and so be out of the
house. One day she said, ‘What shall we ever do with your Doll? There’s
not a man in the town that would marry her.’ Mr. Bilby said that every
unmarried man in the town would be glad to get her. Mrs. Bilby said,
‘You mean they would be glad to get a slice off your meadows.’ He said
he would box her ears for her. She said Doll would be lucky if she got
herself a vagabond, or a widowed man, or an old man of eighty. Mr.
Bilby boxed her ears and went down to the tavern. Then he told Deacon
Thumb that, although it broke his heart even to think of parting with
his treasure, yet was marriage the one and only proper state for woman,
and he would put her happiness even before his own. Moreover, his
wife still hated the girl, even more than she had the night she first
saw her, and although a good woman (and very handsome), yet she was
hard. He said he had just boxed her ears and suggested that he was now
willing to talk of the marriage settlement. He would do something very
handsome by Doll. ‘For God knows,’ he said, ‘she is dear to me.’

_In spite of the Warnings of his Better Nature a young man looks
covetously to Bilby’s Doll._

On certain days the men of the two farms combined their labours, then
Doll brought to her foster father his midday dinner. To suit his fancy
she would bring food for herself also. This food she would eat quickly
and without speaking to any one, keeping close to Mr. Bilby. On those
harvest days, when the sun was bright on the stubble and heat shimmered
in the air, the shade beneath the oaks was grateful. Doll Bilby, in the
bright dresses her foster father bought for her, looked as fresh within
this shade as one of those little summer flowers that go down before
the scythes of harvesters. This Titus noticed, and he knew, although
never a word had been spoken to him, that his father wished the match
and his mother opposed it.

Also he noticed that the young woman, although so small, was made in
a neat and most pleasing manner. She was more dainty, more finicky in
her cut than the big English girls. He often thought, as he stretched
himself to rest upon the earth, that to the eye of a man of rare
discernment such delicacy and small perfection might give more pleasure
than more opulent charms, yet he never went so far as to say that he
himself was that discerning man. Likewise it pleased him that she was
shy before him, for he had been over-courted. When he would stretch
his body along the ground close to where she sat, she would gaze
unsmilingly at him out of her wild, troubled eyes, and something in
that gaze—some necromancy—stirred his blood, so that at nights he felt
desire for her, and often dreamed impossible things of her.

During all that year of harvest he had no thought for another one but
only of Bilby’s wicked Doll. He knew the stories of her—for his mother
was forever at his elbow whispering things. He knew of her foreign
birth, how she had once blasted an unborn child, how she and Goody
Greene had afflicted Mrs. Bilby some years ago, making her vomit pins
and fur (for to such proportions had the story of the woman’s illness
already grown), and he could see for himself how she bewitched her
foster father out of his seven senses.

As he gazed upon her sometimes the marrow grew cold in his bones. He
thought if he were a wise and Christian man, he would have none of
her in spite of his own father’s cupidity. In his heart he, like his
mother, feared her. He could not understand the power she, without
effort, had over him, for the very sight of her coming across the hot
fields of noon threw him into a cold, dismal, unnatural sweat. Now
was his heart set towards this marriage, but he looked with dread as
well as joy to that day which should unite her to him. He believed
that whatever her secret might be she should deliver it up to him on
her bridal. Half he was persuaded that he would find that she, like
Sara in the Book of Tobit, had a demon lover, who would strangle any
bridegroom, nor had he an angel or a fish’s liver, with which to
protect himself.

_A malignant black Bull leads all astray. Young Thumb fears Doll and
suspects the creature is her Familiar._

The Thumbs had a young black bull, which, with other neat cattle and
quick stock, they had out from England on the ship Fawnley. This bull
was a wanderer, breaking stout fences, and seeking out his own pleasure
among his neighbours’ corn fields, cabbage plots, and herds.

On the last day of April, Ahab, the bull, loosed himself, and climbing
a high hedge of stumps, which looked strong enough to hold any creature
but an angel from Heaven, he set forth. Having crossed many pastures
and trampled down valuable rye, he came to the banks of the River Inch,
where it formed the northern boundary of the Bilby farm. The men were
far away burning brush. Mrs. Bilby was at her churn in the milk-house.
Doll, a shiftless wench, was loitering by the river’s edge, and there
she came across the bull. He was knee-deep among the cowslips. Seeing
her, he threatened playfully with his short horns, and set off as fast
as he could trot with a bunch of yellow flowers dangling from his blue
lips.

[Illustration: Bull eating]

She knew the animal to be of great value, and that she must quickly
give warning of his liberty lest he escape into the forest, and, being
set upon by savages or the _feræ naturæ_ of the place, become but meat
in the stomachs of those little schooled to appreciate his worth. She
ran quickly back to the house, calling that Black Ahab was loose and
she had seen him head for the forest. Mrs. Hannah, rushing from the
milk-house, caught the girl by the arm, shook her angrily because the
cows were up and ready for milking, and she was late to her work. She
would not let her run to the upland fields where the men burned brush,
nor to the Thumbs’ farm so that the creature might be caught. She flung
her milking-stool and her pail at her feet, and told her to be about
her own business, for if she had done as she should have done—that
is, if she had made cheese all the afternoon, instead of loitering
about the pastures—she never would have seen Ahab or known that he had
escaped. Doll sat upon her stool and bent herself silently to her work.

On his return in the evening, Mr. Bilby was angry to find that no word
had been sent to his neighbour in regard to the loss of his creature.
Nor did Doll tell him that it was his wife’s and not her fault. Partly
because she was ashamed that he thought her responsible for the loss,
and partly because she was a wild girl who loved to run about, she
joined the searching party, made up of the men of the two households.

They searched the pastures and the ploughed lands, the fields, the
meadows. There was no place else to search but the forest, for Ahab
was utterly gone. They searched the forest until it was black night,
following the snappings of twigs, blowings, stampings. Not once did
they see the body of the black bull. Doll kept to her foster father’s
heels. Her dress and hands were torn. Her feet soaked with wet. She
often called, and in a lovely voice, ‘Ahab ... Ahab.’ As often as she
cried, Titus knew her whereabouts, and took himself to her side. For
on that black night it was she and not the mischievous bull that he
was pursuing. He thought how heavy was the night, how awful in their
majesty the woods, and how wild and small the dark goblin-child. So
he prayed at the same moment that God might deliver his soul from her
soul, and her body unto his.

Weary and disheartened at last, all turned towards home. But Doll had
lost Mr. Bilby, who had started back with Deacon Thumb. Titus, amazed
and delighted to find her alone, walked by her side. Doll bitterly
reproached herself that she had not given warning in time. To comfort
her Titus said it was only his and his father’s fault because they
could not keep the beast in bonds. To his amazement he found that it
was not with their loss she was concerned, but only with the fortunes
or misfortunes of the wretched bull. He thought, has this woman a
familiar, and is it that accursed Ahab? So his marrow froze in his
bones.

Thinking that she was indeed no bigger than one of those little goblins
that live by the hob and bring good fortune to those who are kind to
them, and also how there was much about her shape to please a man of
rare discernment, he would have touched her with his hands (witch or
no witch) and supported her weariness through the rough dark pasture
lands. If she would accept this much from him, it was possible (for the
night was May night when all young men for hundreds of years have been
allowed special license from their sweethearts) she would permit more
and more, so that the day’s vexations might end joyously. Many times
had he felt a vital spark pass from her to him, and he could not but
believe that she was conscious of it as well as he. Doll seemed not to
realize his intent. As in the dark he approached his hands to her, she
floated from him. Before her home was reached he came to fancy she had
no body, or that by some charm (strong as that charm she had worked to
bind him to her) she now had made a barrier about herself which he had
not the physical strength to break.

He thought of Sara and her loving demon, Asmodeus, and wondered if
such a fiend might not now be protecting her. And he wished he had
never heard that holy story, for Sara, according to Sacred Writ, had
seven husbands and each young man in turn had been strangled upon his
marriage bed by the fiend Asmodeus, who loved her.

_A young Christian witnesses an Awful Metamorphosis and shoots a
bullet, but not a silver bullet._

The young man’s bodily fatigue was great, and his soul tormented. It
grieved him to think that when at last he had gotten Doll Bilby by
herself (and that upon a May night) it had profited him nothing. That
night he could not sleep, but lay hot and lustful upon his bed. When he
believed day about to dawn, he got himself into breeches, jerkin, hose,
and shoes, and, having drunk a jorgen of ale, he went again to the
search of Ahab.

Because there might be danger in the forest, he took with him his
bastard musket. He came out of the house. It was not yet day. There was
some light from the east, but it was a specious and unreal light, and
the mists and fog from up over the sea were heavy and blue. He misliked
the day.

First he looked about his own cow-pens and then about the cow-pens of
his neighbour, for he knew the creature loved the company of his own
kind and if alive would be like to return to them. There was neither
bull, nor sign of bull. With his musket upon his shoulder, he took a
path through Mr. Bilby’s meadows and came down to the smooth waters of
the River Inch. He thought, ‘This Ahab is a greedy drinker. As soon as
the sun is up he will get to the river and gorge himself with water.’
The fogs lay heaviest over the river, and they lay flat and white like
piled counterpanes. Steadily the watery light grew from the east. He
thought he would sit upon a boulder under a willow tree. The sun would
soon shine out and drink up the fogs and dews of night. He kept his
bastard musket on his knees, partly because the strangeness of the
twilight vexed him, and partly because he knew that not far from him—no
farther than he could shoot with his gun—was a path from out of the
woods down which wild animals often came early to drink from the river.
It was down this path he hoped to see Ahab, and in the meantime he
might get venison for his mother’s larder. He sat quietly, and a doe
stepped out, followed by twin fawns. But these he would not shoot, for
their grace and smallness reminded him of Doll. Everything reminded
him of Doll—the birds that sang, the flowers in the grasses, even the
mystery and silence of the dawn. Yet these things should not have
reminded him of a woman, but of her Maker.

In time he heard a crashing and breaking of twigs, and laughed to
himself that he had read the bull’s thoughts so well, for nothing
that lived in the forest would make such a commotion; only a
domestic barnyard animal would carry himself so noisily. Nor was he
disappointed, for out of the fogs and through the brush came the young
bull, looking vast and large in the unreal light of dawn. He thought to
let the creature settle himself to his drinking and then to steal up
from behind him and catch his halter. So he sat quietly until he saw
with astonishment that what he believed to be an Indian was astride
him, and, having rigged reins to the halter, was endeavouring to turn
him from the water.

To see a rider on Ahab did not surprise him, for he knew the bull had
often carried even his little sisters, the puny Labour and Sorrow.
It did astonish and anger him to see a savage in possession of his
father’s property. So he called out roughly and forbade the man to turn
the creature away from him. What next happened he never truly knew,
for he was sure that the tawny (which at the instant seemed a large
and ferocious brave) jumped from the bull’s back and made at him with
his tomahawk. Titus knelt upon one knee and fired. In spite of the
fogs and bushes that partly confused his sight, he took his aim most
accurately against a bit of beadwork above the heart of his enemy. Now
he saw this boy or man most clearly, the deerskin fringe to his jerkin,
the feathers, the dark, angry face, the tomahawk, the patterns made by
beads, and he knew that his aim was accurate and good; yet, even as
the bullet sped to its mark, the Indian was there no more, and instead
stood Doll Bilby with her hands clasped to her heart.

He knew the bullet went through her. When he first saw her, she was
still staggering from the impact, but, when he reached her side and
pulled away her hands (crying out and lamenting that he had killed
her), there was no mark of blood upon her grey gown, and she assured
him in a weak and frightened voice that she was unhurt. This gown Doll
had on that day was made of strong fustian, and, as Mrs. Hannah always
said, it had not a hole nor tear in it. Yet the next time Doll wore it
there was discovered above the heart a minute and perfect patch, put
on, evidently, to cover a hole no larger than a sixpence.

So great and so unreasonable was Titus’s love for Doll, he at first
hardly considered the awful metamorphosis he had witnessed. Instead he
was sick to think how close she had been to death.

As this story (which has just been set down in its true form) spread
through the village, it grew incredibly larger in the mouths of certain
people, and yet in the mouths of others it dwindled down into nothing.
For the former of these insisted that Doll did not come alone, but
was escorted by a vast troop of infernals, witches, etc., and that
Ahab spoke to his master, making sundry infantile observations, such
as might occur to the intelligence of a beast. Those who would make
nothing of the story (and among these was Mr. Zelley) said Titus was
no solid rock upon which to build the truth, and that his fancy had
ridden him. There never had been an Indian upon the bull’s back, only
Doll. He never had seen the beads, fringes, tomahawk. When he shot, his
aim was confused and he had gone wide the mark.

Mr. Zelley, in his diary, quotes Scripture in regard to this curious
incident, saying in part that Our Lord warns us against the putting of
new wine into old bottles, lest the new wine prove too strong and burst
the bottles. ‘So a torrent of feeling—especially when arising from the
passions—is of the greatest danger to a weak container, and young Mr.
Thumb is that weak container.’

At that moment, however, Titus had but one thought, and that was that
at last the wench was in his arms, for she was so weakened by fear (or
perhaps from the actual shock of the bullet) she could hardly stand. He
comforted her, stroking her hair, kissing her, and saying over and over
that he would have died rather than hurt a hair of her head. Concerning
the fact that, but a second before, she had been in other shape and
enjoying a different gender, he said nothing, for he thought that she
might wish to remain mute concerning the matter, and then he thought:
‘It was because of kindness, at least if not towards me, towards the
bull, that made this modest young female assume another shape. How
could she, as a white girl, have ventured to the forest and found
Ahab?’ So he said nothing. Now that at last his arms were about her,
he felt none of the fire and anguish he had endured the night before;
rather, it seemed to him, that he was caressing and comforting one of
his own sisters. So he set her sideways on the bull, and took her to
her own house.

By the time he had reached his father’s farm, he was once more swept by
such inordinate and passionate desire he could not believe that earlier
in the same morning he had kissed and comforted her, thinking her only
a child—not even a witch and much less a woman.

CHAPTER III

_Young Thumb dwindles. The witch torments him and her foster father
discerns that she is not nor ever can be a Christian woman._

From the day on which Ahab was lost and recovered, Titus began a secret
courting of Doll. Witch or no witch he would have no other. On the
one side of him was his father, winking at him and pointing out the
richness of Mr. Bilby’s fields, the weight of his cattle, the size of
his barns. On the other side of him was his fond mother, whispering
and whispering, ‘The girl’s a witch, she’ll come to no good end,
she’ll hang yet, the girl’s a witch ... witch ... witch.’ Of all these
matrimonial plans Mrs. Hannah knew nothing. She saw that Titus was
much about the house, but, being very proud of her beauty (which was
remarkable in a woman of her years), she believed in her own heart that
she was the reason for the young man’s constant presence. She could not
believe so handsome and sought after a young man could see anything to
desire in the ridiculous hobgoblin-child. Doll Bilby flouted him at
every turn, yet was he always after her, hungry as a cat for fish.

Many noticed, even by June and still more by July, that young Mr. Thumb
was suffering from some malady that sapped strength from body, color
from face, and dulled the eye. He was a listless worker in the fields,
leaning upon his scythe, scanning the horizon, sighing, and weakly
returning to his work. He ate little and slept less, so that his flesh
fell away enormously, and, where four months before had stood a hale
young man, now stood a haggard. He would mutter to himself, sit out in
night vapours to consider the moon as it shone on the distant roof of
Bilby’s house.

Thus things went from bad to worse. His mother noticed his condition
and guessed its cause. She brooded over the young man, and this made
him vexatious and bilious. When his little sisters had met (as they
sometimes did, in spite of their mother) ‘Mistress Dolly’ by the willow
brook, he would beg them to tell him everything the young woman said
to them. How did they play? Did they build a little house of pebbles?
Had they made dolls from stones? They would never tell him, but ran
quickly away. The truth came out later. Doll amused them with stories
of salamanders, elves, fairies, etc. They feared their mother would be
angry if she knew—for she often had said that all the _good_ stories
were in the Bible, and if a story could not be found there it was proof
that it was not good. So the twins ran away and told nothing of their
visits with Doll. They often talked to each other, however, after they
were in bed, and went on making up wicked things like those she had
told them.

All her life Mrs. Thumb swore she knew her son’s distress was from no
ordinary cause. If that were true, people asked her, how did she come
to give consent to her son’s marriage with this same Doll? When she was
an ancient lady, living in her son’s house at Cambridge, she once said:
‘I saw my son like to die, and he swore there was but one cure for
him—that is, marriage with this young woman whom our magistrates later
judged to be a witch. Therefore I said little to oppose the marriage.
Then, too, at that time I placed much confidence in the wisdom of Mr.
Zelley. He stood at my right hand, saying, “The girl is innocent. It
will be a fine match.” Titus would cry out in his sleep for this
witch-girl. How could I deny him when I thought it the only way to save
his life?’

Hannah raged when she learned that the marriage was arranged (although
nothing yet had been said to Doll). Bilby could not fathom her anger,
for he thought she would be pleased to get the girl out of the house.
He did not know that his wife believed herself the reason for Titus’s
mopings and pinings. Indeed she had ordered for herself a new red
riding-hood from Mr. Silas Gore, of Boston, so that she might have
finery with which to fascinate the young man.

At last Doll knew she was to marry the good young man, for her foster
father told her so. He told her roughly, for his heart broke to think
of losing her to another. Sorrow made his tongue unkind. She would not
listen to him, but, laughing, clung about his waist, saying she would
never leave him, that he was the only man she could ever love. He
wanted to keep her with him forever, but he knew that she was a strange
girl, not like others, and he believed that if she were married she
would become less secret and, having a house and children of her own,
she would be happier.

Then, too, he knew that his wife was cruel to her, and he thought that
it would be better for her to live under a roof where there was only
love. It was in vain that he told her that she was now a woman grown,
and it was time that she went about the business of women—that is, the
bearing and raising of children. Did she have a deep aversion for her
handsome and godly young neighbour? Would she not be proud some day
to be a minister’s wife? No, no, never, never—she only wanted to be
his dear foster child. He hardened his heart against her, and unwound
her arms from about his waist. He told her to marry young Thumb, or to
think up better reasons why she should not. He would not have such an
ungrateful, stubborn woman about his house. If she did not wish to do
as he wished, she could find another place to live. He never meant such
hard words. He acted for her own best good. He pushed her from him, and
made off to the fields.

She overtook him in a field of flax where the flowers were even bluer
than the rare summer sky. The air was heavy with the murmur of bees.
She flung herself on her knees and caught him by the long blue smock he
wore.

‘Father,’ she cried, ‘wait, wait, I beg of you.’ She put her hands
over her face and wept. He could have wept himself to see her thus.
He hardened his heart and would have pushed by. She cried out she had
something to tell him, so he waited silently, but without looking at
her, for he was afraid that at the sight of her his heart would melt.
She seized him by the hem of his smock and began to talk in a hoarse
voice and a roaring voice like nothing he had ever heard out of her
before. She had something to tell him, she said. There were reasons
why she could not marry, especially not a young man who wished to be a
minister. She feared she was not a Christian woman. She looked up at
him from the ground, and he looked down upon her. Their eyes met, and
in one horrid instant Mr. Bilby realized what it was she meant, why
she feared she might not be a Christian woman. Of Evil she remembered
everything, and at that moment he knew it.

He did not dare question her. He did not dare know what she knew. He
essayed to comfort her and said he did not care who her parents really
were. It mattered no more to him than who might be the sire of the
cat that caught the mice in his barn. He also said what was not true,
for he assured her that what one may have done or promised at a very
tender age had no importance in the eyes of God. So he talked vaguely,
and made off to his labours.

She left him and went to a secret spot she had among the birch trees on
the hillside. She was not comforted, and her heart was hard set against
the thought of marriage.

Those things which Doll told Mr. Bilby frightened him. He went straight
to his neighbours that same afternoon and said the time had come when
Titus, with his own tongue and in his own body, should do a little
courting. Titus said how could he when Doll was never a flea-hop from
her foster father’s heels? Thus it was arranged. Doll, that very night,
should be left alone in her father’s house—Bilby and wife should go
to Thumb’s. Titus would come to her, court her, and persuade her to
marriage. After a sufficient time, all would return to Bilby’s and
celebrate the happy betrothal with sack-posset, hymns, psalms, prayers,
etc.

To this Titus and all agreed. Even Doll had nothing to say, but at her
foster father’s bidding she put on her most wanton dress—a giddy dress
of scarlet tiffany such as no pious woman would wish to possess.

_A woman is seized by a Frenzy. And how a man may court without profit._

Now, when she found herself alone, she ran back and forth, back and
forth, through the house. She locked and barred everything. She locked
the cupboards and the doors and shuttered the windows. She went to the
attic and locked the trunks, the boxes, the cribs, and the cases. She
went to the cellar and bolted the door. Doors she could neither bolt
nor bar, she barricaded. Even when this was done, she could not stop
her strange running round and round the house, sometimes turning in
small circles like a dog gone mad. She said over and over to herself,
‘I must be a witch, for I can feel myself weaving a charm.’ So she ran
fast through the house, but there was nothing more to lock.

It was not yet seven o’clock and the evening was still light. Yet so
closely had she barred and shuttered everything, the house inside was
dark as midnight. Then she got old blankets, and in the end, in her
desperation, new blankets, and tried to stuff the gaping chimney hole
in the fire-room so that the whole house should be utterly barred and
tight. But all the time (as she afterwards told Mr. Zelley) she would
ask herself, ‘Why, why do I do these things?’ In the midst of her most
desperate work with the chimney hole, she would stop and begin to run
through the house—unable to stop herself. She thought to herself that
she was working some charm or rather some charm worked within her. She
was powerless before her great need to run back and forth, back and
forth, through the locked and barred house.

Titus Thumb, dressed as though for a bridal and carrying a nosegay of
lad’s-love and a turkey-leather psalm book for gifts, came proudly to
the house, knocking to be let in. Doll heard him, for she was crouched
upon the cold hearth of the fire-room, striving to stuff the chimney
hole. She thought, ‘I will let him in, and then he can do this thing
better than I.’

Titus was astonished to find the house dark and his lady’s hair a
ragged black mat on her shoulders, her gay scarlet gown disordered and
torn open at the throat, as though she had but recently wrestled with
an enemy. And her face astonished him, for her cheeks were bright red.
Fuller and more beautiful than ever before, her eyes glittered indeed
like a goblin’s and her wide mouth was pulled up at the corners in a
wicked but most provocative smile. She, in the dark house, seemed more
like imp or puck than human woman. All that was human in him—that is,
intelligence, conscience, reason, and so forth—was afraid and bade
him turn back; yet all that was animal in him—that is, the hunger and
desire of his body—urged him to enter. So he entered.

Already that awful necessity that had made her run so madly through the
house was gone. She explained the blankets by the cold hearth, saying
that they were damp, and that she had planned to build a fire and dry
them out. So he built a fire. She explained her dishevelled condition.
She had heard a rat in the cellar and had taken a poker and hunted for
him. Could he not at that moment hear the rat scampering in the cellar?
So he took a light and a poker and went to the cellar, and Doll, a
little ashamed and frightened, quickly ordered her clothes and hair,
and unlocked everything she could before he returned. Yes, he said,
he found a rat and he had killed it. This surprised her, for she had
really heard no rat, and the thought came to her that perhaps the Devil
had sent that rat to excuse her conduct.

The young man sat on the settle with his head in his hands and prayed
God to deliver his soul from the woman’s soul, and her body unto his.
At last he spoke to her, his face turned away from her. He told her
that she knew why he was come. He wished to marry her, and that he
would be to her a true and loving husband. No, she said, she could not
marry him. He was surprised, for Mr. Bilby had told no one of the young
woman’s aversion to marriage. He had understood that he had only to
ask and she would assent. He told her that it was all settled—the very
spot on which their house should be built. How could she now so coldly
say no? She only said again that she could not marry him—nor any other.
‘If that is so,’ he said, ‘I’ll take my hat and go.’ But why, if she
had no idea of marrying him, had she so kept him at her heels? She had
not kept him at her heels. She was always trying to rid herself of him.
She knew that was not true. The very way she drew back from him was
the surest encouragement a man could have. She said she thought he was
talking nonsense. Her eyes glittered at him, round and bright in the
firelight, like a cat’s.

He was afraid. He got up. He said again that he would take his hat
and go. ‘I wish you would,’ said Doll. They could not find his hat. It
seems that, while Doll was straightening herself and ordering the house
(Titus at the moment ratting in the cellar), she had by chance picked
up his hat, with many other things, such as the sooty blankets, and had
stuck them under her own bed. So now they could not find his hat.

The young fellow was afraid, and now, as never before, he believed she
was a witch. His blood pumped through him as though about to burst the
veins; he knew that she wished this hat to work further charms upon
him. But if she were so set upon charming him, making him her slave,
why would she now have none of him? Why should she torture him, making
him love her past all human endurance, and yet now so coldly dismiss
him?

Doll said she was very sorry about the hat. ‘Oh, it is not the hat,’ he
cried in despair, his head again in his two hands, ‘but, my dear Doll,
why will you so torture me? Have I ever been anything but kind and
respectful to you? Look what you have done. A year ago I was twice the
man I now am. You have done it. You’ve sucked the strength and manhood
out of my veins.’ Then he talked strangely so that she could not at
first understand him. At last she understood him well. He believed that
she had cast a witch spell on him, and had thus made him love her so
beyond all reason. For, as he frankly told her, she really was not so
wonderful nor half so beautiful, etc., as he had come to think her.
He said he could remember back three years ago when he thought her a
scrawny, rather ugly, little thing with too big a mouth.

All this made her very angry. She jumped up and down in her rage—more
like an imp than ever—and screamed at him to be gone. She ran into her
own room and came back with his hat—for she had guessed where it really
was, but had not found an opportunity to get it for him. She jumped
up and clapped the hat onto his head, pulling it down so sharply over
his ears that she bent them, and continued to scream, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He
grabbed her roughly by the arm, called her witch, hellcat, succubus.
She turned and bit his wrist, so that it was marked for days. He pulled
her off him, shook her with great fury, and flung her from him so that
her head struck against the settle and she moaned in pain. Her plight
touched his heart infinitely, and he knew that, witch or no witch, she
was his dear, his own girl.

So the parents and foster parents, returning, found them. The man,
a valiant officer in the militia, a scholar, and the heir to a
fine estate, was convulsed with weeping and sobbing. The girl lay
terror-stricken in the corner, as harmless as a trapped rabbit. Mr.
Bilby had no idea that Titus had flung her into this corner. She was
a strange child, and he thought she had picked it out for herself.
He pitied the terrible (if somewhat unmanly) grief of the young man,
and swore that, in spite of Doll’s ridiculous and, he felt, unnatural
objections, the marriage must go ahead.

Mrs. Thumb took her son home, and Mr. Bilby took Doll to bed, and he
comforted her with that more than female solicitude that a man often
shows towards children or women in distress.

Mrs. Hannah was in a rage when she found her fine blankets blackened
with dirty soot. Nor would Doll offer an explanation to her foster
mother, although afterwards she told Mr. Zelley everything.

_The voice of Hell is heard in the House of the Lord._

Mrs. Thumb went everywhere whispering: ‘Look to my son. Is he not
bewitched? Look at my boy—so gentle he would not kick a cat, yet you
all know that once he shot at this Doll Bilby, and but a few nights ago
he struck her and flung her upon the ground. Then he cried for hours.
I took him home. Is it according to God and Nature for a man to love
thus? Hating her, loving her, loving her, hating her. Would God the
wench were dead, but she is not, and he will marry her.’

Every one thought the girl a witch. She went her own way quietly,
working as she always did, a little shiftlessly, her mind on other
things.

The harvest was late that year and heavy. One year Nature would starve
her stepchildren (for so the colonists felt in the new land) with too
little, and the next year break their backs with too much. Mr. Bilby,
harassed with many things, did a wrong thing. He went to Mr. Zelley
and begged him on the next Sabbath to publish the banns for his foster
child and young Thumb, and he led Mr. Zelley to believe that Doll had
assented to these plans.

It may well be that Doll, in some secret way common to witches (that
is, through some imp or familiar used as spy), really did know that
upon a certain Sunday the banns were to be read. If she did know, she
said nothing of this thing to any one, keeping her own dark counsel,
and working her secret spells. On a Friday Mr. Bilby sickened slightly,
and upon Saturday he could not touch his proper food, only a cheat-loaf
she baked with her own hands for him, and a barley gruel. Mrs. Hannah
always believed—and doubtless with reason—that the young woman was at
the bottom of this sickening and was endeavouring to keep him from the
Meeting-House, for when she heard he was set upon going she begged him
not to go, saying he was too ill, etc., and must be ruled by her, etc.,
and sit at home in idleness.

But he would not be persuaded, and he went to church as always. She
rode with him upon the pillion. Mrs. Hannah rode the fat plough horse.

By the windows and doors of the Meeting-House were nailed the grim
and grinning heads of wolves, freshly slain. In the stocks before the
Meeting-House were two Quaker women, the one in an extremity of despair
and cold (for there was some ice upon the ground) and the other
brazen, screaming out profanities and laughing in her disgrace. Upon
the roof-walk paced back and forth Captain Buzzey, of the train-band
troop, beating his drum in great long rolls, summoning all to come and
worship.

Inside the Church Mrs. Hannah and Doll sat together on the women’s
side, and Mr. Bilby, as befitted his station in the community, sat
close to the minister. After certain psalms, prayers, etc., Mr. Zelley
held forth from the Book of Judith for the space of two hours. There
were announcements by the clerk, etc., and then Mr. Zelley again
ascended the scaffold. Couched in proper form, he read how Titus, son
of Deacon Ephraim Thumb, and Doll, foster child of Jared Bilby, engaged
themselves for holy wedlock and desired the pronouncement of these
banns.

His voice was drowned by a sharp and most piteous lamentation. At
first none knew from where this infernal sound had come. Deacon looked
to deacon, wife to wife. Mr. Cuppy, the tithing-man, ran up and down
among the wretched small boys. Mr. Zelley stopped in astonishment,
looking first up, as if he thought the sound had come from the corn
crib in the loft of the Church—or from Heaven—and then down, as though
seeking its source from Hell. Doll Bilby was on her feet, her arms
outstretched, addressing her foster father. Her voice rose and died
out. None there could ever repeat what it was she said. That noon, in
the noon-house, between the two services, men and women got together
whispering, wondering, and asking each what it was that Bilby’s saucy
jade had—to her own unending shame and to the great indignity of the
sacred service—dared to pipe forth.

Mr. Zelley—the least disturbed of all—saw to it that Bilby and his
beloved Doll be got to horse and to home, without waiting for the
second service. He was perplexed and harassed by the occurrence, and
refused to discuss with his deacons what would be a fitting punishment
for the young woman, although most were agreed that it would be the
stocks or the pillory. Instead of listening to the discussions in the
noon-house, he went out of doors and stood before the evil women in the
stocks, exhorting them in the name of Christ Jesus to repent and to
be forgiven. Theodate Gookin, a stout child, mocked them and pelted
them with small apples. This action of the child enraged Mr. Zelley
more than had the foul blasphemies of the Quakers. He roughly ordered
Theodate to lay off his own warm overcoat. This he spread kindly upon
the back of the most insufferable of the blasphemers. By which act of
charity, he stilled her lying tongue, and reproved the levity of the
child who would sport about and enjoy himself on the Lord’s Day.

_Evil cursing bears bitter fruit. Mr. Bilby, though struck down,
swears to the innocency of his Destroyer and makes a Pious End._

Bilby went stiffly to his horse, his mouth drawn, his face grey. His
wife got on the pillion behind him and soon left Doll (on the fat work
animal) far behind. When the girl got to the house, she did not seem to
understand why her foster mother shook her fist, spat, and made at her
with a warming-pan. She did not seem to know that she had cursed the
man—that kind man, whom she loved.

Mr. Bilby suffered from a cruel congestion of the lights. Mr. Kleaver
said from the first there was little chance to save him. For on one
day came the surgeon, with his saddle-bags stuffed with motherwort and
goldenrod, and on the next came the minister with his big Bible, and on
the third day they were like to send for Goody Goochey, the woman who
had the laying-out of the dead—so sick was he.

But he delayed his passage into eternity, fighting death with hardly
Christian resignation; for to your true Christian the years spent on
this world must seem but as the nine months which the child spends in
the womb. His death-day is in fact his birthday into the kingdom of
God. Should he fight against death any more than the infant should
fight against birth?

There were gathered in his sick-chamber night and day rarely less than
ten or twelve people, praying for the departure of this fell disease,
or, if this were impossible, they prayed in the hope of giving the
shrinking soul a heavenward lift.

Mr. Bilby bade them save their breath, and, although his face was
settling into lines of death and he breathed horribly and with an
animal roaring, he still begged, as he had from the first, for a sight
of his child Doll. The room was then cleared of the pious exhorters,
who returned to the Thumb farm and there prayed and drank rumbullion.
Only Mr. Kleaver, Mr. Zelley, and the wife remained. Mr. Zelley
commanded Hannah to find the child, and Hannah, frowning, went away,
but she came back soon and said she was not about. The truth is the
woman had struck and cursed the girl so savagely that now, when she
heard her name called, she did not dare to come.

The doors of the death-chamber were shut and sealed. Camphor was burned
on the hearth; then the wife stood by her husband’s side, and, in the
presence of Mr. Zelley and the surgeon, asked him three times and in
a loud voice whether or not he believed he died of a curse pronounced
upon him by his foster child. Mr. Bilby rallied his wits, and, in spite
of the agony of his breathing, he stoutly denied the charge. But some
(among them Hannah) believe that he was already dead when he seemed to
speak, and that an evil spirit had succoured Doll by leaping into the
head of the corpse and thus making answer. For he spoke up in a loud,
clear voice, and yet one in no way like his own, and the next moment
he was not only dead, but looked as though he had been dead for a
half-hour or hour at the least.

_Doll forswears the God of our Deliverance and embraces Beelzebub who
prepares (for her instruction) a_ PROCESSION.

The four days Bilby was dying, Doll spent in the hayloft—night and day.
She had over-heard the farm servants talking, and she knew of what she
was accused and why it was Hannah would not let her into the house.
She remembered that strange time when she had run and run through the
house, working, she knew, a spell, or rather feeling a spell work
through her, and she was sick to think that perhaps she had some power
she did not understand, and had really put a charm upon her dear foster
father when she had not intended. Perhaps it was also true that unknown
to herself she had bewitched Titus Thumb. None went to her or knew
where she lay but the youngest of the indentured servants, a good and
gentle lad. This boy brought her food and water. When it was night he
went to his poor lodgings in the cow-shed and took a blanket from his
bed and gave it to her.

From the loft Doll stared down at the house and yard, and could guess,
by the close attendance of the surgeon and the clergyman and by the
multitudes gathered to pray, how sick he was. Every morning she saw
Hannah go early to the dunghill and catch a fowl. This bird Doll knew
would be laid for warmth at the sick man’s feet, for under the dark
covers the creature lay quietly and gave off a good and healing warmth,
yet was no bird imprisoned longer than twenty-four hours lest its heat
be translated into the chill of death.

On the fourth day—that is, the day on which Mr. Bilby died—Doll
determined to leave the loft and if possible to find Goody Greene,
who would at least tell her how her father did. Perhaps Greene might
stay his sickness, for Doll had more confidence in her and her herbs
than in Mr. Kleaver and his bleeding-cups. At this time of year the
woman often went to the Bilby river meadows after an herb called
‘Love-lies-bleeding,’ so Doll, finding the opportunity to slip out
unseen by any, got from the loft and decided first to hunt for her
Sister-in-Evil along the riverbanks. She dared not pass through the
town.

She sat by the river until sundown, crying long and bitterly. She
remembered that time Titus had found her there, and cried afresh—for
even those had been happier days.

Wherever she went she found the flower stems were broke off close to
the ground, and she saw the print of a small Indian moccasin in the
mud. She knew that Goody Greene (being a pauper) wore these moccasins
and that her feet were small, so she followed this trail, and this led
her to the great forest. Here she paused, for she feared it. But she
feared the cruel suspicions of her foster mother more, so she took a
farewell look about her at the pastures and fields, and, finding a
small path (still seeing here and there a moccasin print), she entered
boldly.

It would seem, then, that another of those fits of senseless weaving
back and forth overtook her. She knew the danger of being lost in this
great wood, and she had not for a long time seen a footprint. Suddenly
she began to run through the woods on those little paths beaten out by
animals, hunters, and Indians. She could not pause either to consider
her direction or to determine what it was she really sought, for she
had almost forgotten the idea of finding Greene. The sun had set and
the November night was coming down fast. The gloom and overwhelming
silence weighed her down. She began to think that she smelt smoke or
saw the glimmer of a fire. Wherever she looked she could see light
smouldering in the underbrush. Sometimes she thought there were
hundreds of tiny Indian encampments, with teepees but a few inches
high, and, because she knew of Goody Greene’s fondness for Indians, she
tried to come to these miniature encampments. She also knew that she
was lost (although this knowledge did not horrify her as it would a
reasonable person), and not only did she wish the goodwife’s company,
but she needed the warmth even of the smallest fire, for the night was
frosty cold.

At last, after much running, sniffing, and circling, she came to a
small cleared spot, where she always maintained she found a fire
burning, and over this fire was a great pall of black smoke. So she
gathered more twigs and fagots, and built up the fire—not knowing that
she only made a heap of rubbish upon the cold wet ground. At least her
‘fire’ seemed to warm and comfort her. She lay back upon the moss and
fell quickly into deep sleep.

After some time, she waked, startled, for she heard her name called.
‘Bilby’s Doll! cried the voice, ‘Bilby’s Doll!

‘Yes,’ she answered, springing up from her unhappy bed. There was no
answer to her ‘yes.’ Whatever it was, she considered her ‘fire’ was
almost out. ‘Who calls?’ she cried, and her voice echoed and the awful
silence of night mocked at her in solitude.

Then at last, being wide awake, she realized with terror and dismay
that the voice that called her was none other than that of her dear
foster father. Yet would he never have called her thus, saying ‘Bilby’s
Doll,’ but ‘Doll’ only.

Then she knew that he was dead, and that she would never see him
again. It was his lonely spirit, fresh torn from the earthly body,
that had stopped this moment on its heavenly flight to cry out to
her thus sadly. She flung herself, moaning, upon the ground, unable
to shed a tear. Witches, she knew, have no tears, and she realized
with horror that her tears had dried up. She began to pray to ‘Dear
God in Heaven....’ She heard a rustle in the forest, and then low and
malicious laughter. She stopped her prayer. After a moment of writhing
and moaning, she prayed again—‘Infinite Master, Lord God of Israel ...
I never meant to hurt him. He was the only person I have ever loved. I
never meant to kill him....’ ‘Why, then, did you curse him?’ asked a
voice, and she again heard malicious laughter. She would have found
relief for her remorse in tears, but there were no tears, nor did they
ever come to her again.

[Illustration: Wild tiger]

She felt the presence of a large and probably dangerous animal about,
so she flung more wood on her ‘fire.’ She listened to its padded feet,
and told herself it was lynx or wolf, yet in her heart she hoped and
feared that it might be at last a messenger from that infernal King to
whom she now was convinced her parents had promised her. For, between
the moment that she heard a voice call ‘Bilby’s Doll’ and that moment
in which she had felt a corporeal presence in the wood, she had become
fully convinced that she was a witch with all the powers that belong
to such an evil estate.

Slyly she made one last appeal to Jehovah, for she thought that He
might even for so evil a one as her own self make His awful majesty
manifest. ‘O God, who seest all things, who rulest above, O Great God
of Israel, give me a sign, give me a sign....’ Then in her impudence
she lifted up her impious voice and commanded God, ‘Put back the soul
of Jared Bilby, for it is not yet gone far and his body is yet warm.
Do this and I will serve You. Desert me now, and I wash my hands
of You and Your cruel ways!’ The rustling and the commotion crept
nearer. No angel this thing which approached her on its belly. She
stared, expecting to see horned head and grinning demon face. She saw
nothing. She cried once more to God. The solitude echoed her voice with
laughter. Then she cried to the powers of Hell below and to the Prince
of Lies, ‘Great King of Hell, if I serve you, you must serve me’ (for
she knew this was a stipulation in a witch’s contract). ‘I will do
anything, sign any book, if you will but give me back the soul of Jared
Bilby.’ But this poor soul was now in the keeping of angel hosts. Not
Lucifer himself could snatch it from such guardians. As she thought
thus, a windy voice cried, ‘Too late, too late.’ ‘Satan, you shall
give me a sign,’ she cried. And there close to the ground were two
great cat’s eyes, larger than saucers. They glared at her with a green
hellish light that transpierced the darkness and her very soul.

She cried out desperately to those eyes, ‘Whoever you are, step forth.
I will do anything, sign any book. Tell me now, in Satan’s name, is
there no way back to life for Jared Bilby? For it was I, I, I, who slew
him—with a witch’s look. Oh, kind spirit, if you are old, I will be
your daughter; if you are young, I will be your bride—stand forth now
to me.’

The yellow eyes turned from her as she struggled with her unhallowed
thoughts, and the thing was gone. Far away, mile after mile, a voice
no bigger than a sparrow’s cried sadly to her, and in great agony of
spirit, ‘Bilby’s Doll....’ She thought to run after the voice, to catch
the naked soul in her hands. Of what avail? Gone already a thousand
miles. In the littlest voice, no larger than voice of flea or worm, she
heard once more her foster father cry to her, ‘Bilby’s Doll....’

She knew that, as there are certain forms and incantations for the
destruction of life, so must there be others for the rekindling of
it. What had Our Lord said before the tomb of Lazarus? Could she but
remember the words she herself had said in church—perhaps by repeating
them backwards she could countermand the curse.

She fell to the ground in an ague, and lay sobbing dryly, exhorting the
powers of Hell. Twigs snapped in blackness about her. Feet padded in
silence.

The cold of the night, the terror of her soul, the dearth of food, the
sorrow of her heart struck her into a stupor from which she could not
move. Through this stupor, in steady procession, and with much pomp
and circumstance, a long parade of figures, fiends, witches, warlocks,
imps, beasts, familiars, satyrs, and even the beautiful chaste Diana
herself, moved in fleshly form: a wicked, most fantastic procession.
Goblins were there with faces of cats and owls, salamanders but lately
crawled from fire. Basilisks were there, serpents, vampires with bats’
wings and horrid mouths swollen with blood. The pretty pink bodies of
innocent babes were there, who had died unbaptized, and therefore must
stand as servants in the halls of Hell, and with them were pucks and
pugs.

After them rolled through the forest a great orange cloud—like an old
and tarnished fire—no longer heat-giving. At first her eye could make
nothing of it. Then she saw projecting through the dun vapours were
naked legs and arms, bits of bodies, and drawn and skull-like heads
with tortured eyes. These were they the French burned at Mont Hoël in
Brittany. Although she might not know them, her parents were among
them. A group came slowly after these, shrouded and shuffling through
the woods. In the midst of these she saw Goody Greene. This woman,
alone of all the passers-by, turned and looked towards Doll. But her
eyes were blind.

Last of all came Ahab shaking his black head, a cowslip hanging from
his blue lips. She would sleep and wake, but the procession would still
be passing by, and every so often Ahab would pass by. The woods were
humming-full with an infinity of unearthly things. There was continuous
lovely singing—or rather a rhythmic humming that rose and fell and rose
again.

_With daylight the tides of Hell recede. Doll wakes but to a more
determined Evil._

At last she awoke to see, not the procession of Hell, but bright day.
The humming, however, still continued in her head, rising and falling,
but not going away. She was frozen cold to her marrow. Now the loss of
her foster father had become a tiny thing infinitely far away and long,
long ago. All her previous existence seemed removed from her as if
again a barrier had come down upon her, shutting one part of her life
from the next. So, although she thought sadly of the kind man’s death,
it already seemed one with the destruction of her parents—that is, a
thing which has happened long back in childhood.

She recalled to herself the story of a girl who had slept in a
fairy-wood for a hundred years, and she looked fearfully at her hands,
expecting them to be gnarled with a century. But they were as they
always had been. Her hair about her shoulders was black. She thought
that it was possible (and at that time it even seemed most probable)
that, although her body might have retained its youthful form, a great
flight of time had passed. She would go back to Cowan Corners to find
the dark forest had swallowed it. There would be cellar holes lost in
thickets, where Boston, Salem, Cowan Corners, Ipswich, etc., had stood.
She felt herself alone upon a whole continent. Her body had grown
so light and so unreal, she scarce could stand, nor was she wholly
convinced of her own reality until she observed she still could cast a
shadow.

Doll Bilby had always longed for the comforts of religion, so it was
natural that she, having as she believed just witnessed a manifestation
of her ‘god,’ should now reverently stand and give thanks. She called
upon her Father in Hell, thanking him that he had made manifest to her
visible proof of his greatness. She called upon her father and mother,
blessed them in the great name of Hell, and promised to serve them.
She called upon all that vast host of evil things, blessed them, and
promised to serve them.

So she floated lightly forth, intent to see the place where Cowan
Corners once had stood. Voices called her through the wood, and these
she knew were true voices of men, not the eerie cries of ghosts or
demons. She answered, ‘Here am I.’

Four men came to her, nor was one of them a minute older than he had
seemed last Sabbath at Meeting. Mr. Zelley cried out in pity, for her
five days of despair, suffering, and even the astounding pleasures
of the night before, had marked the face of Doll Bilby, altering its
pretty childish shape.

‘My child,’ he said, ‘you need not have run away. There is no reason to
believe Mr. Bilby’s death due to anything but nature. Such a congestion
of the lights is not uncommon and often results in death. Doll, as he
lay dying, we questioned him if he was worked upon by any witchcraft,
and he cried in a loud voice, “I die spirit free.”’

Doll wept with her hands over her face. None saw that she shed no
tears. But she knew that the springs of her tears had dried in the
night. Mr. Zelley kissed her gently upon the forehead, and with that
kiss he entered into pact with her, for after that he cherished her and
became at last her confidant in all things, even in all evil things.
And he had once been a minister of God.

Mr. Zelley walked by her side. The three other men looked at her
doubtfully, thinking each to himself, ‘This young woman is a murderess
and a witch.’ They soon outdistanced the minister and the woman, so it
was he alone who took her back to her own home.

He told her that from now on, for a little space of time, life would be
hard for her. She must live peaceably in the house with Hannah (there
was no other place for her to go). She must, by a godly, upright, and
virtuous life, and by the goodness of her conversation and dignity
of her demeanour, give the lie (he said) to all those who would with
tedious rustic simplicity believe her a witch. Both he and Mr. Kleaver
knew Mr. Bilby died by nature and not by art. She was, moreover, in
all things to trust him. He would clear her name (he said). He had
power among these people (he hoped). She was to be of good heart, and
the Lord God would be with her. Also he promised to come to her often,
praying with her, and strengthening her.

So he took her to her door. In the yard they saw the two indentured
servants nailing together a wooden coffin. A group of serious men
stood, watching them, and discussed the mutabilities of life, etc.
Now and again one helped himself at the barrel of cider that had been
rolled out to accommodate their thirst (for thirst is like to rise from
serious discourse and ponderous thought).

Mr. Zelley took her within the house. The ovens were fired and pots
boiled on the hearth. There was the leg of a great ox on a spit
over the coals. The little turnspit dog, which ordinarily served at
the tavern, had been brought over to serve for the sad yet pleasing
occasion. He turned the spit, as he had been trained to do. His eyes
were red and rheumy. The hair was burned away from his hind quarters,
and they were red and scorched. Doll remembered how often her foster
father at the tavern had given scraps of food to this same miserable
small dog, and how he called it ‘Old Father Time’ even when it was a
pup, for it had always seemed bent, wizen, and full of many cares. She
turned away her head.

The house was full of neighbour women who had come to help prepare
the funeral meats. Doll entered. All found reason they must go to the
milk-house, the cellar, the barn, the pantry, or to the best room where
the corpse lay and the widow sat in black. Doll and Mr. Zelley were
left alone except for a squat and horrid form, who stood its own and
feared no woman nor man nor witch. This was the form of Goochey, she
who had the laying-out of the dead. She had a face and voice like a
man’s. Indeed many believed that she was a man who, perhaps having
committed offence in the Old World, had fled, thus disguised, to the
New. She came from the Welsh borders, and would never touch a corpse
unless she had first set upon her hands ten iron rings—one to each
finger; for she feared that, without this protection, the spirit of the
corpse might enter her veins and thus havoc her body.

When Doll saw this dwarfish man-woman standing in the fire-room,
fitting iron rings to her fingers, she shrank from her in horror.
Goody Goochey muttered at her, and Mr. Zelley was distressed because
he believed she was calling the distrait young woman a witch. However,
such was the hoarseness of Goochey’s voice and such was the coarseness
of her nature, he could not be sure. She might have been calling her
another, no more flattering, but surely less dangerous, epithet.
Mr. Zelley sincerely hoped so, for he was far more concerned with
the reputation of Doll than he was with the good or bad language of
Goochey.

CHAPTER IV

_Two Women sleep in the House of Hate. Doll Bilby, having ruined the
fortunes of a Student of Divinity, now turns her powers upon a_ DIVINE.

As soon as the harvest was in and the grave of Jared Bilby was filled,
winter came raging in with unwonted ferocity. It came in foot after
foot of dazzling snow, at first snowing only in the night, the sun
sparkling out brightly in the daytime. But by the New Year (the snow
already standing up to the window-sills and over the fences) the winter
grew black. There was no sun, and such storms blew from out the north
and northeast as none had ever seen or heard of before. There was no
ceasing of wind, snow, and black days. The sea roared continuously,
like a thousand lions seeking food from a false god.

The dead could not be buried. The cattle froze. The wolves went to the
barnyards killing sheep, pigs, cattle, horses. A woman found a lynx
among her ducks. The deer came out of the forest, joining the dairy
herds, seeming to ask food of man and shelter in his barns. Such was
the cruel winter that settled down on the dead man’s house, where lived
his widow and adopted child.

These two women lived alone, shut off together from the world in
solitude. They lived almost without speaking and in hate. The two farm
servants slept in the cow-sheds, and often afterwards said they dreaded
even to enter that gloomy house, where the two women sat watching each
other, hating and being hated.

As was his duty, Mr. Zelley came often to see them. The snows were so
deep he could not travel by horse, so he came on snowshoes with his
Bible under his arm. Each woman he saw separately, praying with her
and trying to comfort her. What he said to Mrs. Hannah all heard as
soon as the roads were broken out and she was out among her gossips,
but what he said to Doll no one knew, although in after years much
that she said to him was known. Mrs. Bilby said that once he came out
of Doll’s chamber like a soul spewed out of Hell. He looked roundabout
him wildly as if he had seen a most frightful sight or heard most
frightful things. Without as much as a word for the woman (who hoped he
would pause and elucidate for her certain problems she had found in
Leviticus), he seized upon a bottle of rumbullion, swallowed half of
that, and made out of the house as though the devils were after him.
The truth is on that day Doll had confessed to him that she was a witch.

Up to this time he had always praised the Christian fortitude, the
piety, the humbleness, and sobriety of Bilby’s Doll. But after that he
came to be much agitated at the mere mention of her name, shaking his
head, exclaiming, ‘Dear me,’ or mentioning the fact that we are all
miserable sinners. He was about the Bilby house more than ever, seeing
Doll always alone and in her own chamber.

When it was said that Doll was a witch, he would reprove the speaker,
sadly bidding him keep such light thoughts on serious matters to
himself. Of course the Bible proves to us that there were witches in
the days of Leviticus and Kings—but to-day ... now, he was not sure
such things exist.

‘Then you do not believe that Jonet Greene...?’

‘There does not live a more excellent Christian. Fools call her a witch
because she begins to lean upon her staff and she has a wandering eye.
Many do so and have such.’

‘Nor yet in the justice done upon the bodies of certain witches in
Boston?’

‘I will not judge of Boston. I speak only of Cowan Corners.’

By these beliefs he gained some friends and lost others. If one does
not believe in witches, how can one believe in devils, and if not in
devils, how then in Hell?—and Hell is, as all know, the fundamental
principle on which good conduct and Christian faith are built.

The women in the Bilby house rarely spoke. Each knew her own duty and
did it. The indentured servants kept to the barn, so there was no noise
but the swish of the women’s skirts or brooms, the rattle of cooking
ware, the slam of a door. Even the house dog, grown old and deaf, never
barked. The cats, five in all, partook of the silence. They slipped
from room to room, eyeing the women suspiciously, but without half the
suspicion with which Hannah eyed them.

On a cold night, Gideon, a big malty tom, being chill, sought animal
warmth. He jumped upon Widow Bilby’s bed. She woke gagged with fear.
She seized Gideon and, in spite of the clawing that shredded her arms,
strangled him.

The next day with an axe she killed every cat in the house. This brutal
slaughter of innocent and pretty pets dismayed Doll almost beyond
endurance. She had loved and fed every one, and they often slept
upon her bed at night. Filled with abomination towards the woman,
she thought at least to give her a headache, or in some way work her
a small harm. She looked about for nail paring or wisp of hair with
which she might fortify a poppet and work magic against the woman. She
found to her astonishment that Hannah evidently suspected her, for any
combing from her hair was instantly burned, and she never pared her
nails except over a dark cloth which she shook out into the fire. While
she did these things, she would look slyly at Doll, as if to say she
understood her game, and would take every precaution against her. So
she had done ever since her husband died, but Doll did not notice this
precaution until February.

Much of the time Doll lay in her own room upon her own narrow bed, and
prayed to the Prince of Hell that he send some instructor or messenger
to her ... but thus far only Mr. Zelley came to instruct her. She
looked forward to the spring with longing, and because of a dream she
had three times concerning a young man asleep in a bed of violets (yet
the man she knew, even as she gazed at him, was infernal), she came to
believe that in spring, when the violets blossom, a messenger would
come.

By February, the roads being broken, Widow Bilby was again about, but
Doll in her discontent walked solitary. She saw no one except perhaps
once in a long time Goody Greene, and once a week Mr. Zelley (whom
she filled full of the phantasies of her childhood). She did not go
to Church, and this shocked and angered the whole community, although
Mr. Zelley himself insisted that she was too weak and sick to take the
hard trip on horseback. Of her neighbours, the Thumbs, she saw nothing.
Titus (because of the stories which Widow Bilby told his mother, and
she, in turn, told him) went in daily terror of his life. He believed
Doll had a poppet of him. If his head ached, it was because she pinched
or pricked the head of the poppet. Were it his stomach, lights, bowels,
that hurt him, he thought she was rubbing poison on the belly and
body of this same poppet. When a black sow he had raised up by hand
suddenly jumped into the air and fell dead, he thought she had in
passing glanced at it.

Of all things, however, Titus most feared Ahab, the black bull, who
had, from the day Doll found him in the forest, changed his gentle
nature to one most ferocious and perverse. He urged his father to
butcher the animal before it took human life. The deacon said it would
be gluttonous to put into the stomach such costly steaks, roasts, etc.,
and any man who did so deserved to have his bowels rot.

_Showing that the Sun will always shine again, no matter how black the
Winter._

The winter had come early, but (contrary to country superstition) it
remained late. For April was full of the racketing of wind, and May
was drenched and all but drowned in rain. Not until the end of that
month did the earth rally from adversity, and there come still and
sunny days. The skies were of heavenly blueness, crossed only by herds
of fleecy clouds, as sweet and innocent as wandering lambs. The grass
grew green and was prettily pied with multitudes of little flowers.
The fruit trees glanced but once at sun and sky, then burst into
rapturous blooming. The beauty of these trees is not idle and barren.
Their deeds (that is, their fructuation) is as good as their promise
(or blossoming). Man may enjoy the loveliness of these flowers, knowing
that their loveliness is one of accomplishment.

Special lectures were held at the Meeting-House, giving thanks (where
thanks were due) for the beneficent weather, the fertility of all
things, the abundance of fish, game, wild foods, and good health of the
community. In his praying Mr. Zelley (so it was observed) twice asked
with particular passion that the old hatreds, the old jealousies, and
the old cruel superstitions might be left behind, and that, in the new
land, the spirit of man might break forth as a chick breaks the egg.

The widow’s house had stood fast-shuttered for six months. Now it was
open to sun and gentle breeze. Doll had been pale, sad, all winter; now
she felt the gladness of the earth singing about her in the sweetest
voice, calling her to set aside the dark mantle of the soul to take on
joy, hope, and even pleasure. She felt frolicsome (as she had often
felt with her foster father) and played with the calves and colts,
secretly met the Thumb twins by the boundary brook, and filled them
full of devilish lies.

She went again to the Meeting-House, and even wantonly enjoyed herself
during service, for she found that (such were her latent powers for
harm), by merely twisting her fingers together and staring hard at
Deacon Pentwhistle as he led the psalm singing, she could twist his
throat so that he broke off into a coughing fit. Once, on seeing Titus
enter the pasture where Ahab grazed, she slyly and only by thought
ordered the creature to have at the young man. Behold! She had the
inimitable pleasure of seeing Ahab make at him, and Titus barely
reached a tree in time to save his limbs. If Ahab had gained too much
on this swift and willing runner, she would have crossed her legs
and this would have stopped the bull, for she wanted her old lover
frightened, but neither maimed nor slain.

Mr. Zelley continued to wrestle with her in prayer, begging her to
believe that she could not be a witch because he (being little better
than an atheist) thought such things could not exist. He always claimed
that he strove to save her soul. She rewarded him by destroying his.
She went often to his house and read in his library, especially of all
such books as the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ and ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus,’
etc., which treat of witches and witchcraft, for she was unskilled and
wished to learn proper charms and methods for working evil. She also
questioned Goodwife Greene. Still she never could learn (except by
accident) how to do any of the things she wished. She could not even
summon the Devil, who, when he came, came as pleased him—not to her
order.

_An Intimation comes to Doll that some Infernal is about. She believes
that he whom she (in wicked abomination) worships will soon send sign
to her._

On a morning she awoke, knowing she must go to Greene’s house. ‘I must
see Goody Greene,’ she thought. ‘I must talk to Goody Greene.’ She left
the pots unwashed, the room unswept. She put on neither coat nor hat,
but went as she was, for the day was warm. Now the new year seemed to
promise great things, and she felt confident these things she would
find. There was every happiness close to her, hiding, waiting to be
found. Through these pleasant and cheerful thoughts came racketing the
clangour of a brass bell and the terrible blasting of a fish horn, and
the voice of man (in this case the voice of the town crier) tolled out
to her and to all the world those things that were lost.

Mr. Minchon, the crier, put the fish horn under his arm and took the
brass bell by the clapper.

‘Gone away!’ he cried. ‘Gone away! Gone away! Four pirates from the
Boston Jail, one day before their trial. Calico Jack and Black Pig
Murch, Ben Bottle and the Bloody Shad. Likewise, from the pasture of
Deacon Thumb, one priceless bull known to you all, the young bull
Ahab.’ (Ding-dong! Ding-dong!)

‘Lost or stole, lost or stole, a wallet and the money in it of Captain
Tom Buzzey, for he put it on the tavern step, turned, and it was gone.
Lost or stole, the wallet of Tom Buzzey—a wallet with the money in
it.’ (Ding-dong!) Mr. Minchon, blowing again upon his fish horn, took
himself and his sad news of things lost or things stolen to the next
street corner; there, having gathered a crowd about him, he proclaimed
again. He moved again and yet again. Knowing the matter of which he
spoke, Doll could even at a long way recognize the names of the four
pirates, for he always began with full lungs, so she heard four times
the crying out of these names, Calico Jack and Black Pig Murch, Ben
Bottle and the Bloody Shad, but of Captain Buzzey’s loss she heard but
once, for Mr. Minchon arrived at it with spent ardour and small voice.
Doll continued on her way to Greene’s hut.

Between the house of Mr. Zelley and the House of God, she met seven
Indians who walked the one after the other, with feet silent as panther
paws. They were dressed in the paint and regalia affected by their
chief men, in the hope of giving to their persons, by external and
childish methods, that true dignity which never can come from without
but arises only from the soul. The Indians passed (as they always do)
without so much as glancing at the white woman, but she gazed hard upon
them, thinking that perhaps they really were devils—as many ignorant
people then believed—and that the sign or messenger which she had come
to look for constantly would be from them. As she watched, a feather
floated or rather seemed to be lifted from the headgear of one of
these, and, after wavering a second, it came to rest at her feet. This
was a scarlet feather with a yellow tip to it. She stooped to it, and
hid it in her bosom, looking longingly after the seven chief men,
thinking that having vouchsafed her this favour they might sign her to
follow them. They did not.

She went her way, but she went exulting, with red cheeks and smiling
mouth. The young men she passed at the tavern drew back that she might
not cast a roving eye upon them and desire them, for they all knew of
the bewitchment by which she had afflicted Thumb. They guessed, by the
unaccustomed red of her cheek and the sparkle of her eye, that (spring
having come again) she was wandering about looking for a new young man
to devour. The young men stood back; Doll went her way.

She came to the waste marshes by the sea on which sat the tinker’s hut.
She rapped on the door and cried out her own name. The woman did not
call ‘Come in,’ as was usual, and Doll heard rustlings, whisperings,
tramplings, within. She thought how this woman, like herself, was a
witch. Her heart beat quicker with the (to her) delightful thought that
perhaps at that very moment she had discovered Greene in confab with
some fiend spirit or familiar, and that was why the door was not opened
to her, that was why there were rustlings from within. Then Goody
Greene opened the door and with her usual affection drew the girl into
her miserable house, kissed her, and put out the stool, a jointstool,
for her to sit on. Greene went on with her own business which was
concerned with sorting out into heaps dried toadstools and mushrooms.

Doll stared at her and saw how hard the pulse throbbed in the old
woman’s neck, how her hands shook at her work, how again and again she
swallowed as if choked by an oppressive secret. But the girl could not
tell the woman she thought her a witch and say, ‘I would like to see
the familiar I know must be close by,’ for the moment she stopped upon
the threshold she was aware that she and the goodwife were not alone.
She could feel the air tremble about her; she could almost hear it,
all but see it. It was there, close in the one room of the hut, with
them. It had not flown at her coming; it had hid itself. She saw that
the hangings upon the bed were drawn. ‘It is yonder,’ she thought;
‘the fiend hides in the bed behind drawn curtains.’ She was sick with
fear, but her hopes rode high. She took from her bosom the feather the
Indian had dropped. What did Goody Greene think of the feather? Greene
said it was a bright and pretty feather, and proved the Indians to be
more skillful than we in dyeing. But did it mean nothing more to her
than that? No, nothing more. She put it back into her bosom. What would
Goody do with so many fungi? She would mix them with snake fat and cure
rheumatics. She said she did not know snakes had any fat. Greene said
that any distillation from flesh was called ‘fat.’ Then they sat for a
long time without speaking.

Doll helped with the sorting.

Doll thought to herself, ‘Be my friend, Goody Greene; confess you are
a witch, show me your familiar, and we will work magic together, for I
cannot bear to be so lonely.’ The woman set a pot on the fire to make
a gruel for dinner. She put three handfuls of maize into the pot. Doll
asked her, ‘Does the goodman come back for dinner?’ ‘No,’ said Greene,
‘I put in the extra handful by mistake.’ This was very strange, thought
Doll, but in her mind made note of the fact that a familiar will
condescend to eat maize gruel like a poor man. It distressed Doll that
the woman would not trust her and produce her familiar.

The woman squatted before the pot, Doll knelt beside her, and, because
she was sick with bitter loneliness, she pressed her face against the
woman’s sleeve and said, ‘You are the only mother I have ever had since
I was a tiny child, and I, Goody Greene, I am the only child you ever
had.’ The woman let the wooden spoon slip from her fingers so that it
was lost in the gruel, and Doll, who jumped up to fetch her another
one, saw from the corner of her eye that she glanced at the bed. ‘Ah,’
thought Doll, ‘perhaps she has made herself a popinjay from broom or
rags or scarecrow, and calls this thing “son.” Perhaps that is what she
has about her in this room—and in the bed most likely.’

As they ate their dinner (of which there was far too much for the
two women), Doll asked Greene to tell her again some of those old
stories by which she had enchanted her as a child. Greene told her of
the unfortunate earl’s daughter, who consented to a boat ride with
a handsome stranger-man. (The masts were of gold, but did not bend
before the wind. The sails were of taffety, and did not fill with the
breeze.) They sailed three leagues and then she spied his cloven hoof
and wept most bitterly, knowing it was no man but a devil with whom she
must cope.

Greene told her other ungodly stories from an ungodly antiquity. Doll
questioned her at every turn. She must know how each magic trick was
worked; she must hear how it was Fair Jennifer of Bageley Wood called
her demon to her. Greene told her the true story of how a lycanthropic
man, believing himself to be a wolf, killed fifteen in the Midlands
before the soldiers got him. She told her of Queen Mab and her tiny
tinsel court. At last Doll got to her feet to go. She heard the bed
creak, and saw a moving lump bulge out the drawn curtains. But the
familiar did not make itself manifest. As Greene stared at the hearth,
Doll slyly drew the red and yellow feather from her bosom and, brushing
by the bed, she slipped the feather within. Calling a hasty good-bye,
she left abruptly, and began to run, for she (in spite of hopes) half
feared a great, scaly, black fiend would leap from the bed and on the
instant shoulder her, and march off down to Hell.

_Doll finds an Imp in a cellar. It proves unfriendly to her._

On the next day Doll returned to the marsh hut. Again she found Goody
Greene seemingly alone, yet the one room was mysteriously filled with a
Presence. That day Greene was making teas, infusions, etc. She had four
pots on the coals, and was much confined, in her thoughts and in her
words, by watching them.

Beside the hut was a cold-cellar dug into the ground, and in this
Greene stored her herbs, her drugs, fats, oils, bottles, pans—all the
matter for her trade. She wanted organy, dittany, and galingale root.
Doll ran quickly to the cellar. She knew where these things were laid.

She opened the door, which was in the shape of a bulkhead, and ran down
the short flight of stairs. Here she had played in childhood, and the
strong odours of herbs, roots, and meat oils were fragrant to her. So
she paused a moment, sniffing about. There was a rattle on a dark shelf
behind a clay crock, and a snake skin shook. She thought she had left
the familiar behind her in the good woman’s bed, yet she cried out in
her horror, calling by mistake to the _true_ God—not to the Satan she
had sworn to serve; for there, peeking about the clay crock, was a
ball of tawny fur and from out the fur glared a little man’s face. His
features were like an Ethiop’s, and his head no bigger than an orange.
She noticed, even in the brief moment she paused to look at him, that
hands and even nails were perfect. Behind dangled a long ringed tail—a
pretty tail of black and dun.

This imp was much offended by her, for it scolded her in strange
languages, and its eyes were red with hate. So in terror she, who
thought herself brave enough to stand up before Lucifer, fled from the
littlest of his servants. This servant she saw again, and the next time
without fear.

She ran to Goody Greene, crying she had seen a terrible thing.

‘Hush,’ said Greene; ‘you saw a skull or two, or a snake skin....’

‘No, no, no, it was alive. It was a little imp.’

‘You dreamed it—or it may have been a cat. Cats get into my cellar for
the sake of the fats.’

‘It was not a cat.’

But Greene knew it was not an imp.

At the end Doll was cast down because Greene trusted her so little she
would not confess the truth, even when she had seen the actual fact of
the imp’s body, had heard it chatter. She was distressed, picked up her
bonnet and put it on her head. There was much work to do, she said.
Mrs. Hannah was plucking geese, and she must be back in time to rub
ointment on them where they bled.

‘Doll,’ said Greene, ‘I heard you cry out to God for help when you saw
the cat in the cellar.’

‘I forgot myself,’ murmured Doll, and was ashamed that in her extremity
she had called upon God and not upon the Foul Fiend she had sworn to
worship. She guessed this was the reason both for the imp’s rage and
Greene’s mistrust. ‘I will not forget again,’ she said.

Goody Greene assumed an attitude which seemed indeed to the girl one
of mock piety. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Always give thanks where
thanks are due.’

Doll thought she was reproving her. ‘I will next time,’ she promised.

Then she went away.

CHAPTER V

_The night crackles with Fire. Hell laughs and a Witch meets that which
she long has sought._

Still in the month of May, catastrophe came to Cowan Corners. On
three nights, consecutively, great fires broke out. The first took
the noon-house of the Church. The second the ropewalk of Deacon
Pentwhistle. The third took the barns, sheds, outhouses of Deacon
Ephraim Thumb. This last fire was upon the thirty-first day of May and
the morrow would be June.

The farm servants of Widow Bilby came up from the cow-sheds. They
called to the window in the attic where Hannah slept (for since the
nights were warm she preferred the desolation of an attic to the
proximity of her detested companion), ‘Widow Bilby, Widow Bilby,
there’s a great fire at our neighbour’s. Shall we not go to help?’
The widow told them to go and do their best, and God go with them.
She, too, would follow soon. She got into her clothes, and Doll heard
her stamping down the stairs and out of the house. Doll looked from
her window and the sky was orange. She clutched her throat, for fire
terrified her (because of her parents’ death), yet it fascinated her
(because of her unnatural yearning for Hell).

[Illustration: Building on fire]

Will she, nill she, the young woman dressed and, much perturbed, she
reached the outskirts of the onlookers. With them she could not mingle,
for they feared her, and she dreaded this same fear. She withdrew to a
big straw stack, and beneath its overhanging top (for the cattle had
rubbed against it) she found herself a hiding-place.

Every able man in the village was there, and half of the women. She saw
Titus passing buckets and getting out gear, nor could she have looked
at him without some slight regret, for he was a goodly, comely man and
a young witch has an amorous eye. She heard the shouting, the running
about, the snap and rustle of the flames. Sometimes other idle watchers
came close to where she hid, and from their talk she learned that these
three fires had all been started by a cat breathing fire. Widow Bilby
had said that this same cat could be no other than her old tom, Gideon,
now dead a three-month, thus maliciously returned from Hell. Doll heard
her own name spoken and saw heads shaken. She also heard that Ahab
was still within the vehemently burning barn. Because of his ferocity
as well as because of his wanderings, he had lately been closely
penned. So far no one had been able to loose him, although several
had essayed to do so. The horses, savage with fear, had been moved
far from the fire lest they, with the fondness of their kind, return
to their accustomed stalls and perish. The cattle were running about
the barnyard, where they interfered with the work, upsetting buckets,
etc. Such swine as the Thumbs possessed burned to their deaths, their
stench polluting the air. Doll sickened at the smell, for she never
could forget the holocaust of Mont Hoël. Until the fire burst the
ridgepole, the doves flew constantly from their cotes under the eaves.
Some were so singed they fell to the muck of the yard and, trampled
under foot, perished.

Just before the fall of the barn floor, Ahab was loosed. With sparks
upon his coat, his eyes rolling most horribly, he came out of danger
at a gallop. Seeing the crowd, he charged furiously, passing over the
bodies of three, yet not staying to gore them, so intent was he on
the men who ran. Wherever he went, the crowd melted and the shouting
rose. Many believed it was this wicked bull, and not the Hell cat,
that had set these fires, for now he seemed intent on guarding the
fire and would let no one near it. Doll thought the creature was her
friend—perhaps sometime he would become her familiar; but when she saw
him coming for her on a brisk and determined trot she ran up the short
ladder leaning against the straw stack, not relying unduly on either
charms or friendship.

The same moment the roof fell and sparks flew up, rising into the
night air an hundred feet and more, until the sky seemed filled with
departing souls flying up and up to the Throne of God.

Doll, panting from her vexatious exercise upon the ladder and sweating
from her recent fear, found herself upon the top of the straw stack.
She was sprawled upon hands and knees. In the fury of the orange light
(which with the fall of the roof suddenly was most horrible) she
gazed about her. Then she saw she was not alone, for with her was a
luggard fiend who stretched his length upon the straw. His eyes were
red as though filled with blood. He wore (she said) a costume like
a seaman’s, except that, where a seaman’s clothes are coarse, his
were fine and dainty. For instance, the hoops in his ears were not of
brass but jewels. She said he had a silk kerchief tied about his head.
Upon his breast he bare—as if in mockery of that virgin whose worship
the Catholics prefer to the worship of God—the very imp, the little
servant, whom she had seen in Greene’s cold-cellar. She guessed he was
her god, or a messenger from her god, so, crying out, ‘Master, master,
you have come for me,’ she further prostrated herself before him. Now
she was no more alone, for this fiend had come for her.

At first the demon made no response; then, after a little and with a
few high but kindly words, he permitted her to approach. She said she
could scarce believe that, after such long waiting and such unanswered
prayers, he had at last come. ‘Oh, I have been lonely, lonely; I have
had no one,’ and she sobbed (no tears came).

‘Why do you sob, Bilby’s Doll?’

‘Because I am happy at last.’

He reproved her gently because she had ever doubted his advent, which
he said he had announced to her by the lighting of these three great
fires. It was his will that turned her steps to the ladder and, as she
became too intent upon the fire to notice the summons of his will, he
loosed a fierce black bull who urged her up the humble ladder and into
his presence.

‘And you really are from....’

‘From Hell,’ he said, and showed her his teeth that were white and
strong as an animal’s. She shrank a little from him. He told her not
to fear to approach and touch him, for he was in human guise. There
was no sulphur on his person, no blasting fire in his hands. To prove
his wholesome humanity he touched her wrist, and she experienced a
shock of joy such as she had formerly experienced when her mother had
led her to Satan in the heart of the oak wood. This joy she accounted
a religious joy—such (so she explained to Mr. Zelley) as a Christian
would experience at receiving the visitations of an angel.

Now was she no longer alone in this sad world, for her god (that is,
Satan) had come to succour her, or had at least sent her a messenger.
She asked him which he was, Satan or lesser demon. At the mention of
Satan’s name, he bowed his head reverently. He admitted that he was but
one of many fallen angels who had left Paradise with the Awful Prince.
At first she was cast down, for she had hoped to hear that it was the
Prince himself. But she looked again, and marked how handsome a man he
was and of what a fine ruddy complexion. She saw how strong were his
shoulders, and how arched and strong his chest. She was thankful then
that Satan had not seen fit to send her merely some ancient hag or
talking cat, ram, or little green bird, but this stalwart demon. She
thought, ‘He can protect me even from the hate of Mrs. Hannah.’ She
thought, in her utter and damnable folly, ‘He can protect me from the
Wrath of God.’

The whole barn fell into the cellar hole. As she looked towards this
glowing pit, she thought of that vaster and crueller bonfire in which
her soul would burn forever. She thought well to ask him a little
concerning those pains which she later must suffer. He laughed at her.
There would be, he said, no pain. Those who served Satan faithfully in
this world were never burned in Hell. Was not Satan King of Hell? Why
should he burn those who loved and obeyed him? She was stuffed full of
lunatic theology. The only souls that suffered in Hell were such of
God’s subjects as had angered Him and yet had made no pact of service
with Satan. These the devils burned—even as God ordered. It gave them a
thing to do. He pointed out there were no angels in Hell watching out
that God’s orders be fulfilled, so naturally the devils did not carry
out the cruel sentences God meted out to true subjects of Satan. Again
he said, ‘Why should they?’

She asked him of news concerning her father and mother—good witches
whom the French had burned in Brittany. These he assured her roamed
happily and at free will, finding cooling breezes even in Hell. When
it pleased them, they sat and conversed with antiquity or with the
greatest kings, princes, etc., who had ever lived in this world. But
her mother was a kindly woman and got more pleasure out of good deeds
than from idle conversation. Therefore Satan permitted her to go about
among those who burn and give them water or fan away the smoke. Doll
was convinced that the messenger had indeed seen her mother, whom she
always remembered as a gentle and loving woman.

Was this kind mother aware of her daughter’s sufferings? Was it she
who had thought to send him to comfort her? No, no. A mortal who is
dead cannot see back into life. It was Satan himself who had pitied her
and ordered him to her side. Him he bade her worship, ‘Truth in and
humbly.’ At first she could not understand this reversal of many sacred
phrases. Later she came to know this blasphemous jargon well. For every
night she said Our Lord’s most holy prayer backwards—thereby addressing
herself to Satan; but what came to her as punishment for this wicked
practice we shall see.

He had about him a bottle of grog, and from this he baptized her,
‘Ghost holy and son, Father of name the in.’ Now he said she was no
longer Bilby’s Doll. Now she was the Devil’s Doll. And he kissed her
reverently upon the forehead. His pretty imp peeked out from within
his blue blouse where he kept it. He bade her stroke it. This she did.
She said it was a warm and gentle imp, with tired and thoughtful (but
not malicious, as she had at first thought) eyes. It was well furred
and, if it were not for its wise, sad face and minute black hands, she
might have thought it indeed but an animal. She came to love this imp,
playing with it and petting it. Its name, he said, was Bloody Shad.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘that is the name of one of the pirates that escaped.’
The fiend said he knew that fine fellow well. He had taken his nickname
from the imp the young woman now held in her pretty little hands.

The fire was laid and the dawn gave more light than the embers. Birds
shook the thin, watery air with their calling. A few men still stood
about the fire. The one called to the other that Ahab was in a village
garden devouring new-set cabbage plants and terrifying women. Doll
leaned towards these men, listening to their news. As she turned back
to inquire of her instructor the true status of Ahab in the community
and in the Hierarchy of Hell, she found to her great sorrow that he was
gone.

At the same time one of the barnyard fowls who the night before had
suffered bitterly, being as he was a cock, struck a gallant attitude
upon a heap of dung, and, lifting his head, greeted the coming day with
a triumphant cock-a-doodle-doo. She heard the cocks on her own farm
answer this challenge with distant fairy cries.

This was a new day, and with it came great hopes.

Later she was asked if she did not know that cocks crow at an earlier
hour—for they generally begin before the light. Yes, this she knew. But
her demon must have had the power to stay the crowing of the cocks, for
he never remained later than the first cry from such a bird, yet often
he stayed until the day was almost light—for instance, on that first
meeting. It was light when he left, and yet no cock cried until he was
gone.

Where did he go to?

He went back to Hell.

_How Doll became a Servant to the Servant of Hell._

This fiend—this caco-demon—came to her again and yet again. But after
his first visit there was a pause and it seemed likely that he might
not come again. She thought daily to get his summons, either to Black
Sabbath or to class of more instruction. Would he bid her mount a broom
and fly to him? Against this emergency she went to Dame Cosset’s, a
broom-maker, and paid sixpence ha’penny for a new red broom that she
might appear handsomely mounted before her lord. This broom she hid
in her chamber. Likewise she hid rushes and clay for the devising of
poppets, and glass, knives, pins, and needles, for the working of her
master’s will.

On the eighth night from the time of the Thumb fire, she heard close by
the house the hooting of an owl—which she knew was no owl. And Hannah,
too, recognized the falsity of that cry, for she started up, saying
that Indians were about. That was at eight o’clock. At nine they heard
again the crying of an owl, and the dog at the barn began to howl
dismally. Hannah swore that it was the bonded boys playing tricks. By
ten again the hooting of the owl, but Hannah slept. Doll Bilby got to
her room, and, taking clothes and a pillow, made a dummy of herself
which she thrust into the bed, thus to deceive Hannah if the woman
should look about for her. Grasping her red broom, but not essaying to
mount it, she ran joyously from the house, anxious to meet her god or
the accredited messenger of that god.

She came out of the house and found the moon to be rising and the night
to be of a dainty, delicate, springtime beauty. Birches twinkled in
the moonlight; their slender trunks seemed to be the white limbs of
nymphs. The grasses that her broom brushed were sweet with flowers. She
ran up and down the pastures, along the fences, over the fields. She
ran until she was like to drop, and then found him where hereafter she
always was to find him—in an opening in birch woods, enthroned upon a
tussock. In the flowery pasture land this spot which he had selected
for himself was a darling fairy bower. The exact spot is known to this
day, for Doll, on seeing the fiend, threw her red broom into the birch
trees, thus marking the spot, for she never took it back with her. Five
years later boys found it and, on being taken to Dame Cosset, the woman
said yes, it was one of her own brooms, and indeed the very one she
had once sold to wicked Bilby for sixpence ha’penny. It is noticeable
to this day that cattle will not graze there, and that dogs coursing
for rabbits will stop frozen at this place and howl; yet so inferior
is the good sense and righteousness of man to that of beasts, it has
become a common tryst for lovers, who, in each other’s arms, repeat
with foolish laughter (and yet, it may be hoped, with some sensible
fear) the story of how Bilby’s wicked Doll there met and loved a demon.
Then they will go by moonlight to the cellar hole of the Bilby house,
and pick a little of the yellow broom which country people call witch’s
blood.

The demon Prince permitted the witch to kneel to him and let her kiss
his feet (which were not cloven). She noticed how cold to touch he
was—like the fiends and devils in old tales. But the big hands he put
upon her head (she reverently kneeling) were warm as any man’s, and
this heartened her. So he welcomed her ‘Fellowship Christian in.’ Then
he seated himself and permitted her to sit. At first the talk was of
great dignity, but soon it was much like that of one gossip to another.
He told her how his work had prospered him in Salem, in Boston, and now
in Hartford. And how another fiend (but this one in shape of woman)
worked in New York among the silly Dutch, as far north as Albany, and
yet another (this fiend in the shape of a great tawny dog) in Virginia
and the Carolinas. ‘Ah,’ cried Doll, ‘how thankful I, or rather all of
us witches roundabout the Bay Colony should be that you have deigned
to appear to us in the shape of a true proper man.’ The fiend laughed
horribly, saying there had been much complaining among the wizards and
the warlocks because he was but a man—not a wild free wanton wench like
she of the Dutch country.

Then he asked her if she could come with ease to him on such nights
as he should call her, and she answered yes, she could come to him,
but she must always wait her foster mother’s sleeping and then leave
secretly by her own window. She begged him to cry no more as hooting
owl, for this aroused suspicion—the woman guessing it to be a man’s
voice. At this he seemed angry, and said the cries she had heard were
in truth no man’s cries, for he had bade an owl to go about the house
and hoot. He explained to her that, as man may not laugh convincingly
upon command, neither may owl hoot. Still, for such clumsiness the
owl must die. So they argued for a while, Doll pleading with him to
spare the unfortunate owl, and in the end, going back on her early
statements, she said the cry had not sounded like a man, but exactly
like an owl, and that the creature had hooted amazing well. He agreed,
therefore, to spare the owl and to send him often to call her out.

She was rejoiced and humbled to think that he, so great and busy
a fiend, would find time to send for her again and again, and she
confessed to him the unendurable loneliness, desolation, and despair of
her life—especially since her foster father had died; how even Titus,
who had once professed to love her, now fled in terror from her glance,
fearing her witchcraft; how Mrs. Hannah dreaded her so she would not
leave a combing of hair nor a paring of nail about the house, and also
how this woman had butchered Gideon and her other creatures.

As she talked the fiend came close to her, soothing her with his hands
upon her body. Then she suddenly stopped her rehearsal of sorrow, and
for a moment she went in deathly fear, for she guessed what the fiend
intended. Still, such was her wickedness, she also felt uplifted and
glorified, and in the end, it were these feelings that conquered in
her, for she entirely forgot or set aside Christian fears and Christian
modesty. The fiend kissed her and told her to be of good heart, for
of all the many witches he had met in his recent travels through New
England, it was she he most fancied and she should be his paramour. So
she consented, and thus came to be the servant of the servant of Hell.

_A thought for a Wise Man. Is Beauty of Flesh a good or evil thing?
And the opinions of pagan Antiquity as contrasted to our own_ THEOLOGY.

There is one quality in this world which men call goodness. This is
the beauty of the spirit, and is from God and of God. There is another
quality, which is beauty of the body, and from whence comes it?

The heathen Greeks, whom the Reverend Pyam Plover has suggested were
but devil worshippers, believed these two things to be identical; that
is, what is good is beautiful, what is ugly is evil. Yet need the
thoughtful Christian but read history, or look about him to-day, to
see that rather than identical these two beauties should be considered
non-congruent or mutually antagonistic. All must have observed how
often the most virtuous women have been of no great bodily beauty,
and yet certain famous wantons have been blessed (or cursed) with
bounteous fleshly charms. One should but consider the lives of
Cleopatra, that Helen known as Helen of Troy, Dido, etc.

Beauty of the body, in that it excites to lust and evil thoughts, is
wicked, but the sick, ugly, maimed body, in that it excites the sweet
and gentle passion of pity, is from God. For this reason modesty in the
young, blooming, comely female is of greater necessity than in the sick
and ancient.

But it is not alone in a consideration of the needful and (in its
proper place) decent female body that one may observe how often Evil
has wormed its way into the hearts of humanity under specious guise of
Beauty. For when the Devil would steal the soul of Bilby’s Doll, he
showed her lavishly and in wanton profusion such sights of pagan beauty
no Christian, godly woman may ever expect to see.

For her this seemly ordered earth, on which we set our houses, in
which we humbly plough and delve—this quiet earth for her brake open
into a rare flowering. She saw the satyrs (close by the salt marshes)
gambolling upon mud flats. In the morning she saw the goatprints of
their hooves. She heard nymphs sing all night in trees. She saw birch
trees in the moonlight spun out of solid silver, and those common
flowers, which by day (and in the sight of God) are but buttercups,
turned into glittering jewels which by their very brilliance frightened
her. Even that fiend the Devil sent to her was handsomer far than any
mortal man might be. He was lovely to the eye, and his touch was as the
touch of fire. The strength of his arms was beyond that of mortal men
(who are born but to praise God and die). So was every moment that she
spent with him a moment of ecstasy. How can mortal man contend with
fiends in the love of woman? Have they such unholy power to arouse
passion?

It is well known that no woman who has ever accepted an infernal lover
may content herself with the ruck of men—such seeming, after the love
of Hell, but pale, unsubstantial shadows. And the same may be said the
other way over, for men, it is said, who have known nymphs, elves,
or succubi, will long for them all their lives, eschewing the feeble
impuissant arms of women.

So it is an established fact that Beauty that delights the eye is
more often a curse from Lucifer than a blessing from God. Let the
reasonable and righteous man content himself with that which is plain
and seemly—whether it is a church or wife or horse or land that he
considers. Let him not yield to the delights of the eye, but rather to
the beauty of goodness, piety, etc., which burns from within.

_Some remarkable Wonders of an Invisible Kingdom._

For fairy women came to her by night, whispering.... ‘Get up ... get up
... get up....’

Strange hands plucked at her bedclothes, pinched or patted her.

Although her window was fast shut, once a great scaled and hairy arm
came in by that same window, and she trembled. Now the arm grew to
three times, four times, the length of human arm. She saw it sweep the
room with a blind and scythe-like motion. It searched for her. She
remained still. Then it was gone as miraculously as it had come.

There was a vast animal that rubbed nightly against the house, sniffing
and blowing.

A monster (she thought it a demon) treaded the roof-tree by night.

Such was her appreciation of these awful and yet to her (coming from
him she chose to accept as God) pleasing sights, she scarcely slept,
being more awake by night than day, for at night she could hardly lie
upon her bed nor close her eyes. She was forever staring and listening,
listening and staring. With the crowing of the cock these disturbing
visions retreated to that same Hell in which they had their geneses.

Sometimes she floated forth without volition, as on a certain night
when she cried out, ‘Master, command me and I will come.’ Then far away
and from the midst of the moonlight, she heard fairy women cry, ‘Get up
... get up ... get up....’

‘Then I will,’ she said. Of a sudden her body was filled with lightness
and (at first maintaining her horizontal position) she was elevated
from off her bed. Thrice around the room she floated and, looking down,
she saw her own vacant body as it lay still and flat as any corpse.
‘If I am going out to walk wet fields,’ she thought, ‘I should put
on slippers.’ Then the red slippers Mr. Bilby once had bought her in
Boston appeared upon her feet. She floated through the window, but once
this was cleared she was set in vertical position. However, she felt
no contact with the grass, and she took no steps. She floated on.

The moon was big upon the hills. The night air shook ravishing perfumes
from the flowers and new leaves. The air was full of birds’ songs
(although it was dead of night), of voices, strange music, laughter.
She floated on. The silver birches twinkled and bowed to her. Her name
was called by a thousand little voices. A million gleaming eyes watched
her. At last she was thus conveyed to the fiend, who was seated upon
a hillock, as on a throne. He raised her up when she would prostrate
herself to him. He bade her have no fear, for, although in Hell he was
indeed a great prince, upon earth he was as mortal man and her true
love.

In the morning, when she awoke in her own bed, she believed that the
adventure of the night had been but another dream. She drew her body
from between the sheets, and set her feet upon the floor. Upon her feet
were the red slippers, and they were wet. Upon the sheets were green
stains from the grass crushed beneath her feet.

Now could she know truth from dreams and dreams from truth.

_We are informed that there is no marriage nor giving in marriage in
Heaven, but in Hell it well may be otherwise._

She never saw her fiend by day. He came at dead of night. He went by
cock crow (yet, as already pointed out, sometimes delaying this same
crowing). He ruled by love and not by terror. She gave him soul and
body, both as act of impious homage, and of true love. So a month wore
away—the month of June.

At every turn and in every way he comforted and charmed her. She
confessed to him how greatly she dreaded that day, which he said must
now soon come, when he would be summoned back to Hell. She begged him
to take her with him—for without him she had no use for this dull
earth. She begged him to slay her now, and thus, her spirit released,
she would take her way with him to Hell, and there live with him, once
more with her parents—whom the French burned in Brittany. So she fitted
his hands to her throat. He would not. He only promised her again and
again that when she lay dying he himself would come to her once more,
and stand at her bed’s head. He promised her a short life, and life
everlasting.

So this young woman, who had often shown a need for true religion,
found great comfort in a false one. It was a fiend that fed, it
would seem, her soul’s hunger. By him and by the hopes of Hell she
was comforted, as the true Christian is by his Lord and the hopes
of Paradise. She became reconciled to life, to death, to adversity,
loneliness, and despair.

There was no problem that he could not answer for her, no doubt he
did not lay. For instance, she was distressed to think that when her
true life should begin (that is, when she died and entered Hell) she
would not see the kind foster father, but would undoubtedly encounter
his disagreeable wife. No, explained the demon, she was wrong, for he
knew that Jared Bilby was already there, well and at peace. He had
committed mortal sin by saving her when a child, for she was already a
witch, and it is mortal sin to save a witch. ‘But at the time he did
not know I was a witch. I do not think he ever believed it.’ The demon
said that made no difference. Mortal sin was mortal sin, but Satan,
grateful to him for saving the life of Doll, had never carried out the
cruel sentence which had been meted out to him at the Awful Judgement
Seat. Doll wanted to know what this sentence was. He said it was of
so revolting a nature he could not tell her. His words made her hate
Jehovah, and she felt Satan was a kinder ‘god.’

The demon went on to assure her that Mrs. Hannah would undoubtedly
be given place in Heaven. She was a pious woman, always at meeting,
lecture, and prayer. There were already millions of just such vixens
singing miserable psalms, badly out of tune, about the golden streets.
If she did in some way get sent down to Hell, he promised they would
all get together and make it hot for her. They couldn’t endure such
ugly scolds in Hell. Doll was surprised. ‘She is not ugly. She is
remarkably handsome.’ The devil was surprised. He said he had supposed
from what he heard that she must be very ugly.

There was now only one thing with which she could vex herself, for her
demon comforted her at every turn. Sometimes as he held her in his arms
she moaned a little and pulled away. He begged her to tell him. He
was her true love. Let her tell him and he would help. Then she told
him that she knew that upon occasions fiends do actually marry mortal
women. He laughed at her, and tried to turn her fancy from such homely
thoughts. She would not be turned. He said witches and women talked
alike, and yet he did not refuse to marry her.

With the commendable and proper thought of marriage in her head, she
sought out Goody Greene (whom she had seen but little of late). She
walked with her through the woods, helping her gather that bitter
flower which the Indians call the jug-woman’s-baby. The old woman was
tired and the two sat upon a stone. From where they sat Doll could see
the birch woods, the rough pastures, where by night she met her devil.

‘Dear Goody, tell me as you used to tell the story of the goblin or
infernal who came to a maid’s window on a May eve and wed her in a
respectful and seemly manner. Why cannot devils always do so? It is sad
to think that a loving wench—betrayed by love—may become but the doxy
of the devil.’ She was near tears—although now she never had tears to
shed.

The old woman told the story of Fair Jennifer of Bageley Wood. She had
a demon lover—a black and scaly fellow, cold to touch as serpent or
any ice or iron. He came to her window three times, calling her to
get up and come to him. She lay disobedient upon her bed. Then on the
third occasion he entered her chamber by the chimney hole, bearing in
his hands green branches, and he was dressed in green leaves. Jennifer
and the demon walked around and around the bed. He promised to be her
loving husband until death, to avenge her of her enemies, and she
promised to be his obedient wife until death and after death, and to
deny God and Christ Jesus. Then upon the hearth she made him a cake,
and in the cake they put blood drawn from the veins of both their arms.
They ate this cake and were man and wife. His name was Karlycuke. But
Fair Jennifer of Bageley Wood has been dead three hundred years. Such
a thing cannot happen to-day. Doll thought otherwise, but kept her own
counsel. Nor was she wrong.

On the way back to the hut on the waste land, Doll asked her how it was
she could always remember these old stories. The woman said she had
told them many, many times. ‘To other children, as once you told them
to me?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘to other children.’ Then she set down her
basket and put her arms about Doll. She said once she had a son, but
she would say no more of him and Doll guessed he was a long time dead.

One night, a night of full moon, Doll woke and found the fiend there in
the room beside her bed. He signed her to silence, but Doll, who had
many times by night stolen out of the house, knew that Hannah in her
attic room slept soundly. All that the black and scaly fiend did for
Jennifer, he now did for his love, and more. He set his imp upon the
bedpost for a witness, and on the whole nothing could have been more
seemly. There was no hearth in Doll’s chamber. They could bake no cake.
He pricked his wrist and her wrist, and each drank a little from the
other’s veins. This slight cut upon her wrist never healed, as would a
normal cut. It was red and angry to the day she died. Thus does Nature
(which usually essays to heal) shrink from the lips of Hell.

It was the last of June, and the summer solstice (for on that day he
married her) was passed. The leaves broadened into summer and the
night air no longer held the rhapsody of spring. Now Doll had always
known that he must leave her, but it hurt her to find that he could go
without farewell. She comforted herself with the memory of his sweet
love and her hopes for the future.

_The Quenching of three Evil Firebrands._

There were hanged upon a spit of mud in the tidal waters of the Charles
at Boston, on the tenth day of July, 1671, three pirates, long wanted
for their unparalleled offences. These three, Black Pig Murch, Ben
Bottle, and the Bloody Shad, had been taken into custody some two
months earlier, but, having escaped their guardians, separated each to
his own hiding. By agreement they came together again upon the second
of July, thinking the hunt to be up and that they could get a pinnace
and sail south to safety. So all three were taken together, but the
fourth, Calico Jack, was never taken. Being duly indicted and tried,
these fine rogues were found guilty of many homicides, robberies, and
cruel acts of mayhem upon the high seas, so were condemned to hang.

Justice was done upon their bodies, and in due time (after the corpses
had hung in chains some weeks, serving as due warning to others,
especially to seamen) these bodies were buried in mud, close to the
place where they had died.

_Sic transeunt maleficii mundi!_

CHAPTER VI

_A Trap is set for two Tender Souls._

Doll never thought the demon would wait until her death-bed to come
to her. Every moonlight night and every sunny day she looked for him
and thought, ‘Perhaps this day or this night he will come to me.’ She
always wore even quite commonly her prettiest, most worldly clothes,
and she kept her shaggy black hair as neat as she was able. She
thought, ‘He sees me always, everything I do, everything I wear,’ and
she kept herself comely for him. She guessed he even knew her thoughts,
and so she dedicated them to him.

In her own chamber she daily worshipped and prayed to Satan, as the
fiend had taught her; that is, by foul blasphemies, such as the
reversal of the Lord’s Prayer, etc. She even wrote little hymns to
Satan and entuned them for him. She felt that she should be about some
harm, such, for instance, as the bewitchment of the godly, but she
received no command, so she did, for some time at least, no devilment.
She was happy and grew sleek.

The widow was already courted by three men, all reputable widowers and
church members. Now that the windows were opened and Doll sang as she
worked, and her own mind was taken up with her suitors, she did not
fear her so much. Each went her own way.

Doll had always shown a dawdling and trifling attitude towards honest
labour. And in this offence Bilby had encouraged her. For he had had
her out in the woods and the fields (where there was nothing a young
female could do) with himself, instead of leaving her at home to serve
Hannah, as would have been more proper.

Now that he was gone, Doll still continued in her childish and
frivolous wanderings. She often sat herself on the stone fence by the
willow brook which divided the lands of the Bilbys and the Thumbs. The
bonded boys upon the farm said they often saw her sitting upon the
stone fence and feeding small rotten apples to Ahab (whose ferocity
now had grown hideous). Yet this girl patted him freely, talking to
him, laying her face against his cheek, and all these attentions Ahab
accepted of. She wished him for her familiar, but the creature (so she
told Mr. Zelley) would never do one of the things she asked of him,
except to pursue and render ridiculous young Thumb.

Mrs. Thumb heard that her black bull was often down on the boundary
with Bilby’s Doll. She asked that he be penned, for she guessed that
Doll was at the bottom of Ahab’s remarkable dissatisfaction in Titus.
She wished the bull withdrawn from the young woman’s influence. By so
doing and thus making these fields by the willow brook safe to cross,
she did great harm to her own household, for now it was Labour and
Sorrow who came daily (if they could) to see Doll. Undoubtedly she
had been waiting for the twins to come and play with her. She must
have seen in these weak and disobedient little girls fit matter for
her to work upon to the further enlargement of the Kingdom of Hell.
For she lay in wait there, and finally they came to her. They came
slyly. No one at first knew they came, and they played at ungodly
games, furtively, where no one of either house could know. Thus passed
September, and October, and the half of November.

_The Horrible Example of the Thumb Twins, or to what a Pass
Disobedience may bring a Child._

Doubtless some who read these words will recall how in childhood they
were brought to obedience and wholesome respect for authority by
hearing a mother, or grannie, or aunt, or servant tell them the awful
story of the Thumb twins, and to what their disobedience brought them.
It is true that these children had never been well, and for them to
fall from health to point of death was not a long fall. Nor when one
considers what good use has been made of their example, and how many
other children have learned decent docility from their story, can one
wholly regret the incident which occurred as follows.

On the twentieth day of November (the day had been a mellow, warm,
yellow day) the disobedient Labour and Sorrow went to the willow brook,
and there found, as they hoped to find, the witch-woman awaiting them.
She was all in fine scarlet as her fancy was. The children said they
dared not stay and play—their mother had sent them to Goody Greene’s to
buy mints. She would wonder if they did not return within the hour.
They said (a long time later) that Doll smiled at them in a terrible
fashion and suggested to them that what their mother wanted was of no
importance. But the twins for once were mindful of their good mother’s
wishes. They said again they could not stay. They had only come to tell
her that they could not stay. ‘Well, take that then,’ said the witch,
and angrily tossed across the brook and to their feet two dolls that
she had contrived out of corn husks and pumpkin seeds. So she went
away, and the twins went to Greene’s.

[Illustration: Woman with two kids and a cow]

They came home again and they were late as usual, or rather as always,
for they were dawdling, mischievous children. Their mother was angry
with them. She could not whip nor even shake them. She dared not,
they were too feeble. She put them to bed without their dinner and
there they lay to supper-time, talking and whispering, laughing to each
other. She bade them get up for supper. They would not, but lay in
their bed. No one thought further of them until morning. The truth is
that, having no dinner and no supper, they grew hungry and so they ate
the dollies, which were made mostly of pumpkin seeds. The pumpkin in
all its parts, even the seeds of it, is wholesome food. It could not be
this that sickened the children, yet from that day they sickened.

For forty-eight hours they were afflicted in their stomachs. This
passing a little, an even more grievous malady seized their bowels,
which seemed to rot away. Their very bones gave out from within them,
refusing to support their weight, etc. They pined, would not eat
because of the pain they were in. First it was ‘My belly, mamma, oh,
my belly!’ and the next, ‘My throat, mamma!’ or ‘My head, mamma, my
miserable bowels! My vitals are decaying within me.’ These frightful
pains were the result of their disobedience, for if they had done as
bidden—that is, if they had eschewed the young woman and received no
presents from her—they never would have so suffered.

They had thus sickened and suffered for a week, and then Mrs. Thumb,
putting fresh linen upon their bed, found, between bed and wall, all
that remained of the pumpkin-seed poppets. It was plain that these
two poppets were intended to represent the twins. They were all but
identical, yet was the one (Sorrow) plumper than the other (Labour).
They had dark eyes, made from little buttons, and light hair fashioned
from corn silk. In this respect they simulated the brown eyes and
yellow hair of the twins. The one was tied about the waist with a red
rag, and the other with a blue, and it was thus in these two colours
Mrs. Thumb habitually dressed them.

The twins gaped at their mother as she found these things, and their
eyes were guilty eyes. She asked them from whence came these dollies.
They swore they did not know. Perhaps a cat had brought them in. They
were sure a cat had brought them in. Their mother told them they were
lying and they said nothing. She said she would shake them, and they
said that they were far too sick, and Labour offered to fall into a
spasm. Well, if they would not tell from whence these things were,
would they tell who it was that had eaten out the pumpkin seeds that
had made their vitals. The twins responded heartily, yes, it was they
themselves who had eaten up the vitals. The woman cried out in anguish,
‘My children, oh, my poor children, it is your own vitals that you have
eaten, God help us all!’ And she rushed from the sick-room, weeping,
wringing her hands, screaming to her husband, her son.

For three days the twins would not say from whence were these poppets.
Their mother fancied it was old Goody Greene had given them, because
she knew that the girls had been to her evil hut on the very day they
sickened. Now Greene, as well as Mr. Kleaver, had been called in every
few days to advise in the care of the twins. Mrs. Thumb was enraged
to think that she had thus allowed the woman access to her darlings.
But Widow Bilby told her to look to Doll, for she knew that she had in
her own room pumpkin seeds with red and blue rags, and corn silk. She
warned her, ‘Look to Doll.’

In her heart the woman was convinced that her little ones suffered
from witchcraft. Mr. Zelley, who showed at that time a most stubborn
disbelief in such infernal manifestations, or perhaps wishing to
protect the wicked, pooh-poohed the idea. Mr. Kleaver also said that
such wasting fevers were indeed far from rare. By the New Year he
promised the twins would be well or in their coffins. He himself had
seen no signs of demoniacal possession.

The woman asked the children—for who should know as well as they? At
first they stoutly denied the idea and then weakened, admitting that it
was possible. When their mother pressed them further, they put their
heads under the bedclothing and remained mute. The mother decided to
spy upon them to see if between themselves they might not prove more
honest.

She told them she was going abroad. And she left the door of the
chamber open into the fire-room. Having bid them farewell and slammed
the front door, she returned on tiptoe to the stool she had set herself
behind the chamber door. There she listened. They talked little and
but casually. And then at last Labour said, ‘I wish we had not eaten
the pretty poppets Mistress Dolly made us. I wish we had them to play
with.’ So she knew that in truth the poppets were from Doll. Nothing
more of consequence was said.

That very night, however, they woke up the whole house, screaming that
a great tawny cat had come down the chimney and had sat upon their
chests, kneading its paws and purring most hideous. Father, mother, and
brother flew to them. They saw no cat, but there were two red fresh
scratches on the face of Labour. Their father reproved them for their
fancies, reminding his wife how since early childhood they had been
subject to night fears. The children were ashamed. They put their heads
under the bedclothing. From then on, however (when their father was
not present), they often spoke of this cat, and suggested even more
horrible visions that came to torment them. Every day their plight was
more piteous.

Almost in the middle of December, close to the shortest day of the
year, the woman sat by her hearth, pondering these things. She was
determined to find the truth for herself. Husband, doctor, and minister
were all wilfully blind.

The children lay sick in the next room, and often seemed like to die.
The one said to the other, ‘She will come again to-night.’ At the
word ‘she’ the woman pricked her ears. It was only of the cat they had
spoken before, and this cat they called ‘he.’ The child said, ‘She will
bring her baby and let us play with it.’ The other said, ‘Oh, I hope
she will not come. Although she seems kind to us, I am afraid that it
is she who hurts us, for God knows we are bewitched.’ (She vomited a
little.)

The woman went to the door, saying, ‘Pretty pets, who comes to you,
and of whom is this baby?’ She spoke quietly. They hid their heads and
would not answer. The woman went again to the fireplace and listened.
‘I think,’ said one, ‘it is her cat that comes to hurt us,’ and the
children whispered together. The woman trembled with excitement. She
did not go immediately to the children! Instead she sat close by the
fire and listened. Sorrow said, ‘And the little black man with the
little black hat....’ She could hear no more. But later Sorrow was
saying, ‘Little people came, no bigger than my finger. They ate a
little feast of honey and suet, served out to them in acorn cups—like
those Mistress Dolly makes for us....’ And later, ‘There was a tiny
queen. She looked just like Mistress Dolly, only smaller, a Mistress
Dolly you could put away in a teacup, and her baby was no bigger than a
thumb nail....’ The mother now felt she had proof. She hurried to her
children, begging them to tell her all. Could Mistress Dolly, then,
shrink no bigger than a poppet? And who was the little black man? At
first the children would not speak, but, as was usual, stubbornly hid
their heads.

She wept and prayed over them, begging them to be frank with her, for,
if it were only known who bewitched them and how, they might be cured.
As it was they would grow sicker and weaker, and finally languish and
die. They protested they did not want to die, and began to weep and
cast themselves about. And at last they confessed to everything (but
in the midst, Labour was thrown into a grievous fit). They told how it
was Bilby’s Doll had given them the poppets; how she came to them every
night—not cruelly using them, but amusing and diverting them. ‘And she
had with her a book ...’ said Sorrow. ‘My children, my poor miserable
children ... was it a black book, and have you signed?’ Yes, it was a
black book. No, they had not signed.

Then the pious woman got out the Bible, and she made them kiss it and
swear that no matter how ill-used they were, or how delicately they
were tempted by the witch, they would remain fast-sealed to God and not
sign away their souls to Hell—no matter if devils did come and pull
their vitals up by the roots and run needles through their eyeballs
and brain-pans. The children, lamenting, shrieking, and yet for once
obedient, promised and swore as they were bid.

_A Hideous Malady and a Bridle for it._

From the day mentioned above Doll made no further pretence at kindness,
for she began to come to these twins in hideous and cruel aspect. The
deacons of the Church, the elders, the constables, the neighbours, took
turn and turn about, in praying with them. These good words would often
frighten away the witch, with her black book and infernal troop, and
the little ones would rest a little or even sleep.

At last was the godly father of the haunted children convinced that
this was witchcraft. He or his son Titus sat night and day with a
bastard musket in the hand and a silver bullet in it.

At last was Mr. Kleaver convinced, and the doctor from Salem was
convinced, and Mr. Increase Mather from Boston was convinced, that
here at Cowan Corners was being enacted the most heinous and wicked
witchcraft ever practised by any one in the New World. Here was indeed
a witchcraft. Where was the witch?

Doll Bilby claimed that at this time she knew the children to be sick,
but because week in and week out no one spoke to her (she went no more
to Meeting) she had not guessed they were bewitched nor that she was
talked about. She said she was sorry for what she mockingly called ‘her
little friends.’ So she made a junket, and a fowl being killed she made
a broth and put expensive cloves and nutmegs in this broth. She laid
these things in a basket and asked the youngest of the farm servants to
go present this basket to the Thumb twins, but not to say from whom it
was.

When the mother saw the basket she cried out. Upon the handle of the
basket in pretty Indian fashion were strung blue beads, identical
with those the poor little wretches had but lately spewed forth.
The children set up a great clamour at the sight of this food, for,
although so hard to tempt, this particular food they would eat. She
consulted Mr. Zelley (it was the last time she ever consulted him). He
said it was good food and let the children eat. So they ate and quickly
fell to sleep. That night they woke in horrid writhing fits, and almost
died. Not only did they see Doll Bilby as she floated about over their
bed, but Deacon Pentwhistle saw her and three others. Also Mr. Minchon,
on going to the horse barn to get out his horse and ride home (for it
was late), was bitten mysteriously in the arm. Lot Charty, a poor boy,
that same night saw a fiery rat, and he said to this same rat, ‘Who are
you?’ The rat said, ‘I am who I am.’ And he said, ‘Whom serve you?’ And
the creature replied, ‘I serve Hell and the will of Bilby’s Doll.’ Then
with a clap like thunder he was up the fire hole.

A woman by the Ipswich Road that selfsame night sat nursing a feeble
babe. She said the room grew light and there before her stood an
awful female form. She never had set an eye upon Bilby’s Doll, but by
description she knew that this was she or her apparition. The child
in her arms gave a great screech and the female form made off. Then
(although it was midwinter) to the mother’s apprehension, lightning
came and struck the babe, squeezing it flat as a plank so it died.

Doubtless there were many devils abroad. The blessed God permitted
their escapement from Hell that they might give bodily confutation to
all atheists who should say ‘there is no God.’ So must ever the Prince
of Lies and his servants serve the will of God. Because of the powers
of an invisible Kingdom manifested in the years 1671-72, the churches
were gorged with the pious and the entire community awoke to an awful
realization of the potency of God.

_Non est religio ubi omnia patent._ (Which might be translated, Where
there is no mystery there is no religion.)

All in all there seemed no proof lacking that Cowan Corners and more
particularly the Thumb twins were suffering from a cruel demoniacal
tormentation. Mr. Kleaver and the Salem doctor, the deacons, the
elders, Captain Buzzey, the marshal, and others gave affidavit in
writing to the magistrates that the woman Bilby was a witch of provable
perversity and that she should be set in jail. Mr. Zelley alone among
all the men of standing had nothing to do with the signing and
drawing-up of this paper. In fact, such was his strange, distrait, and
heretical attitude, no one asked him to assist. Already it was bruited
abroad that he was a man to be looked at, for, after all, have not some
of the most potent wizards done their blasphemies under a cloak of
piety?

[Illustration: People on horseback]

So Captain Tom Buzzey, of the Train-Band troop (and he was also
sheriff), taking two constables with him, rode to the house of Widow
Bilby and there served warrant upon the young woman. She showed neither
surprise nor terror, but looked up at her captors fearlessly. She
wanted to know of what she was accused. She was primarily accused of
afflicting the Thumb twins. Why, then she was as innocent as a babe
unborn. She would have explained to the sheriff that she had been the
friend of these little ones ever since they could toddle. The sheriff
told her that all were agreed that they were bewitched. If not she, who
was it? Then she became confused and in the end said, ‘It was the work
of _another witch_,’ thereby denying all and confessing all.

Captain Buzzey, as he had been instructed, searched her chamber and the
house. He did not find the pumpkin seeds, corn husks, etc., etc., that
Widow Bilby said the girl kept under her bed to work evil out of. It is
likely the young woman really did know that her name was talked about
and had rid herself of them.

She rode upon a pillion back of Captain Buzzey. A great jeering crowd
had gathered to see her off to Salem jail. Widow Bilby laughed loudly
from where she stood in the crowd between two of her suitors, ‘You’ve
got it now, you jade, you jade!’ she cried.

Captain Buzzey said the girl bowed her head and he heard her whisper,
‘He has not abandoned me. My god, my god, protect me and save me.’
Thinking that she was referring to our Lord Jesus Christ and to the
true God, he, in his heart, pitied her. She begged Captain Buzzey to
hurry. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake take me out of this crowd.’ He clapped
spurs to his stallion, and the young horse, in spite of his double
load, put off at a gallop. The day was a winter day, crisp and cold,
and the snow was fresh and spotless under the horses’ hooves. So at a
tremendous pace the cavalcade of armed men and the one prisoner passed
through dark woods and by a winter sea. They rode for six miles and
came to Salem, where again they encountered angry faces, hoots, gibes,
and threats of instant death.

That night she lay upon straw and without a mattress. The dungeon was
so cold the water froze in the jug. She could not sleep for cold, but
spent hours upon her knees in prayer (as the jailor later reported),
yet now it is known it was to her demon or to Satan that she prayed. At
last a heavenly quiet descended upon her and she slept.

Concurrent to her jailing, the Thumb twins were a little eased in their
misery. It would seem that the witch had been put to fright at the fear
of bodily incarceration and pain, and that she had diminished the force
and malignancy of her spells.

CHAPTER VII

JUSTICE _arrives. She will not be stayed nor thrown from her scent,
although the morning wears slowly and some fear_ JUSTICE _will be
balked._

On the twenty-seventh day of December, 1672, Judge Lollimour and
Judge Bride, of the Court of Assistants, Boston, entered with pomp
into Salem. They were escorted by the Boston marshal, by constables,
aides, etc., in full regalia. This pretty cavalcade drew rein by the
horse-block of the Black Moon, where ordinarily preliminary hearings
were conducted.

Judge Bride (this was the great Judge Bride) said to Judge Lollimour,
his colleague, ‘Sir, what will we do with this great crowd gathered
hereabout, waiting to hear the findings of Justice?’

‘Sir,’ said Judge Lollimour, ‘the tap-room of the Black Moon could not
accommodate one fifth of this great multitude. Let us move on to the
Meeting-House.’

After them straggled the populace of some five villages—yes, and
learned men, elders, doctors, jurists, etc., out from Boston. The
crowd was black with the gowns of the clergy.

Every seat in the Meeting-House was quickly taken. The aisles were
filled. Body pressed close to body, rendering breathing difficult. In
this way a stale heat was engendered, and a fear, and an expectation.
One said to another it was a fatal day. Some would have left if it had
been allowed them, but the room being filled the Judges ordered the
constables to permit neither egress nor entry. They feared a milling
about and a turmoil that would be a detriment to the dignity of the
Court.

The magistrates were set in great chairs before the pulpit. At their
feet were pallets whereon the sick children should be laid when their
time came to testify. The constables pulled a table (a heavy oak table)
close to the magistrates. Upon this the accused should stand in the
sight of all men—yes, and in the sight of God.

Certain men cried out, ‘Make way! Make way!’ and in came Captain Buzzey
and the prisoner. She looked most wild and shaggy and of a touchingly
small size. Captain Buzzey lifted her to the table set for her, and
then, addressing the Court, showed true warrant for her arrest and
swore that as commanded he had diligently searched the house for
poppets, images, etc.; having found what he found, he now produced
these things in the bundle which he laid at their honours’ feet.

Judge Bride, looking about him at the many black-robed clergy, said,
‘Gentlemen of the ministry, who among you officiating in these parts
is senior?’ He was told Mr. Zelley was senior in these parts, but that
the famous Mr. Increase Mather was present. ‘Sir,’ said Judge Bride,
‘will you, Mr. Zelley, offer up a prayer?’ Mr. Zelley prayed, begging
God to discover evil where there was evil and innocency where there was
innocency. He prayed that the prisoner confess if she might be guilty,
but if she were innocent, God strengthen her not to confess merely to
save her life. To this prayer the magistrates gave fervent amen.

Judge Lollimour thus addressed the prisoner at the bar: ‘You
understand, Doll Bilby, whereof you are now charged, that is, to be
guilty of sundry acts of witchcraft, more specifically the wasting and
afflicting of twin sisters, Labour and Sorrow Thumb. What say you to
it?’

‘I am as innocent as the babe unborn.’

‘You are now in the hands of authority and, God helping, you shall have
justice, and the afflicted shall have justice. May God help us all.’

Then Judge Lollimour called on many witnesses. He called on Mr. Kleaver
the surgeon, and the older doctor from Salem whose name was Bunion. He
called upon the Thumbs and upon Widow Bilby. This latter woman showed
such spite and malice in her testimony that Judge Bride frowned upon
her and reproved her. Thus, instead of hurting the accused, she helped
her, for the Judges felt some pity for the tousled, wild child (she
seemed but a child) perched upon the table in the sight of all men—yes,
and in the sight of God.

Mr. Zelley was called. He was a bony man of fifty years, and his hair
was white. In contrast to the big fine presence of Mr. Mather and
many another clergyman then present, he seemed a poor thing; that is,
uncertain, ill at ease. He spoke in a low voice, saying how good had
been this young woman as a child. How in earliest womanhood she had
shown a most exemplary piety. How she was often at her prayers, and
came to him for religious comfort, etc. As he spoke, he twisted his
hands in his sleeves as a boy might. Then he said in a defiant voice
that the girl had since childhood endured the most cruel abuse from her
foster mother—that is, from this same Widow Bilby, who had but lately
been heard. This last statement had much weight with the Judges, who
thereafter did not permit Widow Bilby to testify, or, if they did,
they took her words with knowing glance. By this dismissal of Hannah
they also dismissed the earlier tales of Doll’s witchcraft. Although
they heard how the green fruit of Hannah’s womb was blasted, how she
had suffered a wretched and unaccountable illness, it was evident they
were not impressed—rather were they bored. To the death of Mr. Bilby
they listened with more attention, questioning a number (especially Mr.
Kleaver and Mr. Zelley) with some pains. When they heard that the dying
man with his last breath denied any witchcraft, they would not permit
Hannah to explain how it may be that an evil spirit enter a corpse and
then cry out.

[Illustration: Two men talking]

At noon, while they ate their bloaters and drank their rum punch at the
Black Moon, the barmaid heard Judge Bride say to Judge Lollimour that
it was easy to see through the whole miserable affair. _In primo_: This
rustic town was so tedious they had to patch up an excitement—he would
begin seeing devils himself if he lived there. _Secundo_: This jealous,
scolding widow was at the bottom of it. _Tertio_: The wench indeed
looked like a goblin, and, no matter how pious a life she might lead,
village gossips would always speak ill of her—especially, as in her own
ungodly way she was a pretty mouse. _Quarto_: They would both of them
be back in Boston within the three-day, the case being dismissed and
the local people reproved for their gullibility. Said Judge Lollimour,
‘Sir, we have not as yet seen these afflicted children.’ Judge Bride
said, ‘Blah,’ draining the last of his rum punch.

_From Noon to Sundown rages a famous battle, with Righteousness and
Justice on the one hand and Witchcraft and Evil upon the other._

On the afternoon of the same day, Doll Bilby was set again upon the
table. The crowd within the Meeting-House was even greater than it had
been in the morning. Many had not even gone out for dinner, so ravenous
was their hunger to hear the findings of Justice and to observe the
conduct of a witch.

_Judge Bride_: Once again are we assembled in the eyes of all men and
in the eyes of God to administer justice as well as mortal man (a
puny, weak, and miserable creation) is able. Mr. Mather, of Boston,
sir, we beg your blessing and your prayers.

Then Mr. Mather prayed most decently, and as if in sight of God’s
most awful throne. To this prayer the Judges gave amen and bade the
sheriff go and fetch the bodies of the Thumb twins, who should next be
questioned. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings wise men may be
instructed, and an innocent child may speak with greater knowledge
than is given to the cloudy heart of maturity. Mrs. Thumb was asked
to tell all she might concerning the health and humour of these twins
since birth. These things she told. She told of the past-nature love
her son Titus bore this woman now accused, and at the moment the
sheriff entered and the cry ‘Make way!’ went up. After him was Deacon
Thumb, and he bore Sorrow Thumb, and after him was Titus. He bore
Labour Thumb. It was explained that the children were taken in fits at
the threshold of the courtroom. They lay in a swoon as though dead,
their faces green with pallor, their eyes closed. The bearers laid them
on the pallets.

_Judge Bride_: Titus Thumb, stand up and answer me. You see this
woman who stands thus before and above you all. Now is she charged
with crimes which, if proven, shall cost her her life, yet a year and
a little more and she was your dear heart and you were about to wed
with her. You have heard your mother say that this Bilby won you by
wicked spells, that once she assumed the shape of an Indian and you
shot her through the heart—yet she did not suffer for it. That again
she perversely set upon you, tempting and staying you beyond the puny
endurance of our sex, and you struck her a blow that would have killed
an ox, yet _she_ rose up unharmed. We have listened to some length of
how violent and beyond the usual wants of nature was your desire for
her. Your flesh fell away, etc. What do you now say? Are these things
true?

_Thumb_: Sir, as God hears me, these things are true.

_Judge Bride_: There has been no enlargement upon fact?

_Thumb_: None.

_Judge Bride_: It does not seem to you that you mistook for
enchantment what another would call lust? Possibly you are a young man
of gross sensual nature, who might strike what he loved?

_Thumb_: God knows I am the least sensual of all men. I have never
sought out women. Ask any here.

At that a girl was possessed and now a demon began manifestly to speak
in her. The demon belched forth most horrid and nefarious blasphemies.
The constable took her out. A dozen cried to the Judges, begging to
vouch for the young man’s purity. All were silenced.

_Judge Bride_: Thumb, I see your eyes avoid to look towards this young
woman. Perhaps your heart regrets that you give testimony most like to
lead her in the halter. Look upon her now. Is she not your enemy? Tell
her she is a witch and that you wish her hanged for it.

_Thumb_ (after a most tedious pause, looked to her feet): You are a
witch.

_Judge Bride_: Better than that, louder and firmer. Come, you shall
look upon her face. You shall not mock this Court.

_Thumb_: Sir, I cannot.

_Judge Bride_: What, are you still bewitched, or is it that you still
love her and will not harm her?

_Thumb_: I love her. (He put his arm across his eyes. He wept.)

_Judge Bride_: Get to your chair again. How can you who love her give
good and valid testimony? Get to your chair again. Your mother, she is
made of sterner stuff. I see the children stir. They are about to be
recovered to consciousness. Sheriff, cover the face and body of the
accused so that they may not see her until the time comes.

Captain Buzzey took off his scarlet cape. It was a good new cape that
had cost him two pounds. Within the month it rotted mysteriously, and
the Assistants bought him another one. With this scarlet cape he now
covered Bilby’s Doll from head to foot.

_Labour_: Oh, for Christ’s dear sake, sister, where are we now? Oh,
for God’s sake....

_Sorrow_: Oh, my back, oh, my bowels!

The children aroused themselves a little, sat up, and gazed about the
court. Now it is noticeable that Judge Lollimour took to himself the
questioning of the children. The reason is he had seven such at home,
while the great Judge Bride had none.

_Judge Lollimour_: Children, do not be afraid, for is there none among
us but wish you well. You are only to speak the truth as your good
mother has taught you—the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

_Sorrow_ (in loud, bold voice): There is one here who does not wish us
well. I can feel her presence.

The Judge gave no heed, although many were amazed that the child had
not seen Doll, yet knew there was one there who did not wish her well.

_Judge Lollimour_: You have been strangely sick, and I see you are not
well. What, think you, caused this sickness?

_Sorrow_: Oh, sir, have you not heard? We are bewitched. She gave us
our own vitals to eat, and she comes at night and torments us.

_Judge Lollimour_: You say ‘she,’ yet half the world are ‘she.’ To
whom do you refer?

_Sorrow_: I can’t say her name, oh-oh-oh....

She gagged and went purple in the face, she clawed at her windpipe.

_Labour_: Oh, don’t you see, don’t you see, the witch has her by the
throat? She won’t let her answer. Oh, sir, she’ll die. (The puny child
struck the air above her sister’s head.) Go away, you wicked witch, go
away!

_Judge Lollimour_: Now that you are restored, I shall name some to
you, and when you reach the name of her whom you think torments you,
you shall make a sign. Abigail Stone, Sarah Black, Obedience Lovejoy,
Alice May, Delilah Broadbent, Doll Bilby....

Then the afflicted did cry out, and fell back weak and dumb.

_Judge Lollimour_: So you accuse Doll Bilby, that she bewitches you,
causing your sickness? What else does she do to you?

_Sorrow_: She will have us sign in the Black Book.

_Judge Lollimour_: Come, you contrive a fancy. I do not believe she
comes with a black book. Tell me how.

_Sorrow_: She comes with devils and imps and hideous animals, and they
torment us, pressing out our lives, sticking pins and knives into us,
and while they torment us she presses close to us, bidding us sign her
book. But we will none of her, and God helps us and will save us.

_Judge Lollimour_: You claim that this woman comes to you by night,
bringing such with her as prick and torment you. How does she come, in
her own proper form?

_Sorrow_: At first she would come as a great tawny cat, and then again
as a pig, or as a mouse, and once I remember she came as a black dog.
And she brings fiends with her, hairy little black men, and these
torment us. Of late I think she comes only in her own proper form.
Sometimes it is hard to tell, for she can at will assume any shape.
And sometimes a hand puts into the bed amongst us and pulls at our
vitals.

_Judge Lollimour_: When this woman came to you and offered you a book
to sign (as you claim), what would she say?

_Sorrow_: She would say, ‘Sign.’

_Judge Lollimour_: And no other word?

_Sorrow_: Sometimes she would say, ‘Sign, or I’ll squeeze your vitals
for you.’

_Judge Lollimour_: But you, being good and Christian girls, would not
sign?

_Labour_: Oh, sir, once a most awful and majestic voice spoke out, and
I do believe it was the voice of God, and He bade us not to sign. Then
the fiend flew away in a clap and did not return for a three-day.

Their mother said, yes, this was true. She herself heard the clap and
it was three days before the affliction again commenced.

_Judge Lollimour_: And if you sign, what does she promise you?

_Sorrow_: Prettiest things to play with—little goats, no larger than
a cat and a cat as small as a kit, and brooms to ride on through the
sky—and her own pretty babe to play with.

_Judge Lollimour_: And when you refuse to sign?

_Sorrow_: Oh, she pinches and torments us, or lets her fiends and
familiars torment us. They but do her bidding and I do not think are
as wicked as she. Once she set my father’s great black bull Ahab upon
us. He tramples us like to break our bones.

The mother interrupted to say, yes, this was true. The bull was a
witch’s familiar beyond good doubt, and they but waited the finding of
the Court before they butchered him.

_Sorrow_: Sometimes the witch shakes us cruelly.

_Thumb_: Sir, it is true. Those small and puny girls were so shaken
two strong men could not hold them in their beds.

_Judge Bride_: What, young Thumb, is this girl, even though proved a
witch, so strong, she can best two strong men—how think you?

_Thumb_: Sir, I think the Devil helps her and he gives her strength.

_Judge Bride_: You who were once her lover—you should know her
strength. Was she then so brawny-strong those times you bundled her?

Titus was confused. He believed the Court to be against him. The
congregation was angry, for bundling is a pleasantry for yokels, and no
more likely to occur in Salem than in Boston, nor in the Thumb house
than in the house of Bride or Lollimour. It was felt the Judge intended
an insult. Some feared the magistrates might dismiss the whole case but
from caprice. But Judge Bride was a godly man, who would not lift his
nose from a scent until Justice herself was satisfied, although those
who knew him best said he often seemed to pause and idly bay the moon.

_Thumb_: I never got such favour from her.

_Judge Bride_: One more thing you shall tell us, although you are not
a likely witness. Is it true, as your mother has said, that you shot
silver bullets up the fire hole, and that upon occasion you think you
struck the accused?

_Thumb_: It is true, sir, but I shot only three silver bullets—these
were buttons from my coat. My sisters cried, ‘There she goes up the
flue.’ I fired where they pointed and they exclaimed that I had struck
her on the wrist. Some here will tell you that there was indeed the
next day a bullet-gouge on her wrist, nor has it yet healed—to this
day. I saw it when you bade me look at her. You may see this mark
yourself. Her apparition came commonly to afflict my sisters in an old
black riding-hood.

Captain Buzzey said he had the very one with him in the bundle at their
honours’ feet. He took it out, and Labour and Sorrow both said, yes, it
was the very one. Captain Buzzey held it up before the magistrates. It
was riddled with bullet holes.

_Captain Buzzey_: Widow Bilby gave me this coat. See, it is burnt with
fire, shot full of holes as a sieve, and still smells of soot from the
Thumb chimney, and gunpowder from Thumb’s musket.

_A boy_ (crying out from the back of the court): I know that coat,
sir, well.

_Judge Bride_: And who may you be?

_The boy_: Jake Tulley, bonded man to Widow Bilby, and I know that
coat for the one our scarecrow has worn these three years, and but
yesterday I saw the coat gone and the scarecrow naked. Mate and I
(that is the other farmhand) often shot at it for practice. Why, it
means nothing that it is full of holes.

_Judge Bride_: And are you and Mate such miserable poor shots you must
press your pieces into the very belly of the scarecrow to be assured
of your aim? Look, how the powder has burned the cloth.

The Judges took the coat up between them and discussed in low voices.
Jake sat down in confusion.

_Judge Bride_: Mr. Kleaver, you have already given generously of your
knowledge. You have told us in what way the maladies arising from
witchcraft differ from those arising from the proper body—in other
words, what are the differences between diseases inflicted by the
Devil for wicked ends, and those by Jehovah for our own good. And
you have told us how you came to recognize the case in hand as one
provoked by art. Will you tell us further?

_Mr. Kleaver_: Invisible hands often clutched the twins by the throat.
I have seen them.

_Judge Bride_: The invisible hands?

_Mr. Kleaver_: No. I have seen the throats. And I have also taken the
needles, pins, and such from their flesh. These children have vomited
strange things—fur, insects, glass, long hanks of hair—blue beads....
(He stooped to the bundle at their honours’ feet.) Sirs, here is the
basket in which the young woman sent poisoned or possessed food to
the afflicted—mark the blue beads on the handle. Three days earlier,
the one of them spewed forth these blue beads I now take from my
pocket—mark, gentlemen—they are identical.

_Mrs. Thumb_: There was never a bead like that before in my house.

She wept. The children screamed out in gibberish at sight of the beads,
and fell back upon their pallets.

_Judge Bride_: Mark the children, Mr. Kleaver, are they now, in your
opinion, possessed?

_Mr. Kleaver_: Not exactly possessed. (He whispered to the
magistrates.) They are conscious of a malignant presence. They know
the witch is in the room.

_The twins_: Oh, oh, oh, God help us, oh, oh, oh!

_Judge Bride_: Sheriff, uncover to us the accused. Now, children,
stand up, if able, and look there at the table above you.

The room was filled with their piercing din. Labour fell in a fit,
foaming, rolling her eyes. She was stretched out stark and dead. Sorrow
flung herself in hideous terror upon the feet of the Judges, crying
out piteously that they save her. Then she fell back stark and dumb.
Judge Lollimour was touched by her plight, her fear, and the appeal she
made to him. He raised her up, felt of her hands and face. They were
dank with a cold sweat which both Judges knew no art could imitate. Her
pulse scarce moved. Her tongue was tied in her throat. She could not
speak. She looked up out of tortured eyes.

_Mr. Mather_: Here, sir, if ever, is demoniacal possession.

_Judge Bride_: Here is witchcraft—now to find the witch.

_Mr. Mather_: It has been proved an hundred times in English courts
that a spell cast by a witch’s eye must return to the witch’s body—if
the witch touch the afflicted.

_Judge Bride_: Sheriff, carry the body of this Labour Thumb to the
prisoner. She shall touch her. We shall see. Observe. The child is
utterly lifeless now.

_Captain Buzzey_: She has no pulse, sir.

_Mrs. Thumb_: Sir, sir, you have let her slay my child before my eyes.
Oh, God, oh, God!...

_Judge Bride_: No one can say that this child knows who touches her.
Sheriff, take her, alive or dead, to the prisoner.

Captain Buzzey took her up. The witch readily assented. She reached
down and touched the child. The colour returned to the child’s face.
Captain Buzzey felt her pulse leap in her wrist. He felt her heart
stir under her hand. The child turned in his arms, smiling prettily,
as though in sleep. With a smile she woke. She glanced to the Judges,
noted her sister (still in semi-trance). She smiled at her mother. Her
eyes went up, and there on the table beside and above her was the awful
vision of Bilby’s Doll. With a wail of terror no art could simulate,
she clung to Captain Buzzey. At that moment all in the courtroom
realized how hideous had been her weeks of anguish. No one could so
fear a person who had never done her harm.

_Judge Bride_: Lay the child upon her pallet—and you, Sorrow, go you
now and lie upon your pallet.

_Sorrow_ (her tongue still tied): Gar, gar, gah, gah, gah.

_Judge Bride_: Labour and Sorrow, as you fell into these fits, tell
me what occurred. Did a fiend or familiar come to torment you? Did
the accused send her apparition to you, there before your very
eyes—leaving her body, as it were, vacant upon the table? Tell us.

Now was Labour also taken with dumbness. All saw how the lower lips
of the afflicted were sucked in, and the teeth were clamped down upon
them. Mr. Kleaver essayed to break the lock on their teeth. He could
not.

_Widow Bilby_: Look to the witch, look, look!

It was seen the witch bit her lip—thus locking the jaws of the
children. Captain Buzzey struck her slightly, and bade her loose her
lip. Then the children were released. They said it was her own devil
came to them.

_Judge Bride_: Doll Bilby, I have asked several the meaning of the
manifestation of evil, so recent among us. Mr. Kleaver and Mr. Mather
have both explained it to the satisfaction of many—is it to your
satisfaction?

_Doll Bilby_: I am an ignorant woman. I cannot explain.

_Judge Bride_: Now you are to talk freely, deny the truth of the
statements which you have heard made, explain and elucidate for us—or,
if you wish, you may confess.

She was silent.

_Judge Bride_: At least you can concur with the judgement of those
wiser than yourself. At least say this, Was it or was it not a devil
who tied the children’s tongues for them?

_Doll Bilby_: That I do know—it was not.

_Judge Bride_: How do you know? No one else can claim to be so wise.

_Doll Bilby_: If it were a demon, I would have seen him.

_Judge Bride_: You have, then, so nice a sight you can see devils?

_Mr. Zelley_: May I speak?

_Judge Bride_: Speak.

_Mr. Zelley_: If this young woman could command a devil to serve her,
would he then be so unmindful of her safety as to come into this court
and work tricks so likely to hurt her cause?

_Mr. Mather_: Cannot God as well as this wretched girl or Satan
command devils? Has it not been proved often and often that it
sometimes pleases Him to suffer them to do such things in this
world as shall stop the mouths of gainsayers and exhort a Christian
confession from those who will believe only the most obvious of His
truths?

_Judge Bride_: Bilby, give us your thoughts on the matter. These
Divines have spoken wisely.

_Doll Bilby_: I think it was perhaps an angel—come to do me a mischief.

_Judge Bride_: Do angels come to do mischief to good and baptized
women?

The defendant saw she was in difficulty. She twisted her hands in the
folds of her gown. Then were the children afflicted.

_Judge Bride_: Bilby, if these are indeed your tricks, keep them for
more seemly time. Constable, seize her hands. And if, as you suggest,
these manifestations are the actions of angels, I pray God to spare us
His angels until the Court is adjourned.

A woman was taken in a fit. She fell down laughing and sobbing, and was
passed out through a window.

_Judge Bride_: Do you think those who are afflicted suffer voluntarily
or involuntarily?

_Doll Bilby_: I cannot tell.

_Judge Bride_: That is strange; every one may judge for himself.

_Doll Bilby_: I must be silent.

_Judge Bride_: You have heard this morning two learned medici explain
in what way witchcraft is like to resemble natural ailment, and in
what ways it differs. Keep this counsel in your mind, and tell me what
you would say of the illness of these children.

_Doll Bilby_: It would seem they suffer from witchcraft.

_Judge Bride_: So it would seem to many here. And where there is a
witchcraft there must be a witch.

_Doll Bilby_: Yes.

_Judge Bride_: Where is that witch?

_Doll Bilby_: God knows I do not know. God knows I never hurt a child.
I know of no witch that would afflict these children.

Captain Buzzey stood up. He said that when he and his men came to
arrest this woman, now standing trial for witchcraft, he and his men
heard her deny clearly the afflicting of the Thumb twins, and yet she
had said—most meaningly—‘’Tis the work of _another witch_.’

_Judge Bride_: You shall explain this for us, Bilby.

_Doll Bilby_: How shall I explain?

_Judge Bride_: Confess now, as you did then, that you are a witch.

She was silent.

_Judge Bride_: Confess now, and your life shall be spared.

She was silent.

_Judge Bride_: Confess now and turn against these other witches—for it
is possible that many are about—and I swear to you your life will be
spared.

She was silent.

_Judge Lollimour_: Will the prisoner at the bar recite the Lord’s
Prayer?

Doll began readily enough. As she spoke the Holy Words, Mr. Zelley
covered his face in his hands, and made them with his lips as though
he would help her. She went on without chance or mishap till she came
to the last sentence, which begins, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ She
got no further. Mr. Zelley clenched his hands until his knuckles went
white. He turned up his eyes to God. Then quickly she began and said,
to the horror and consternation of all, ‘Ever for, glory the and, power
the, kingdom the, is thine for, evil from us deliver, but temptation
into not us lead—Amen.’ She did not know what she had done. She looked
about with assurance. There was an incessant and horrid silence in the
court. The Judges looked to each other. Clergyman looked to clergyman,
then turned eyes to God. So was she utterly undone, but the Court was
not yet satisfied.

_Judge Bride_: You have responded to my colleague’s request to the
satisfaction of all, but there are some small matters yet to clear.
Be of good heart, soon we will let you go. I see you are pale and
distrait. Constable, see to it she does not fall from the table. What
did you mean when you said the bewitchment of the Thumb twins was ‘the
work of another witch’?

_Doll Bilby_: Sir, how can I explain?

_Judge Bride_: There is nothing you cannot either confess to, or
explain.

_Doll Bilby_: Sir, I am confused and amazed.

_Judge Bride_: Answer but a few minutes with frankness, and you shall
go to your own cell—we are not your enemies—open your heart to us.

She was mute.

_Judge Bride_: Be stubborn, and you shall stand there all night—yes,
and the next day. Come, have you ever seen a devil?

She nodded her head.

_Judge Bride_: Ah, then you have seen a devil. Do not feel ashamed of
that. Did not Christ Himself see Satan? Was not Luther often tormented
by his presence? Some of the best of men have been the most foully
pursued. Feel no shame, Doll Bilby. Speak out freely. When was it
first?

_Doll Bilby_: I was a child in Brittany; my mother took me to see him
in a great wood.

_Judge Bride_: An instructive and remarkable experience—and have you
seen him since?

_Doll Bilby_: Last spring I saw him—he came to me again.

_Judge Bride_: In proper human form?

_Doll Bilby_: He came to me by night. Yes, he came in form of proper
man. He wore seaman’s clothes and with him was an imp—a black-faced
imp with a long ringed tail. He wore this imp upon his bosom.

There was a commotion at the back of the hall.

_Judge Bride_: When did he come last spring to you?

_Doll Bilby_: The last night in May—the night the Thumbs’ barn burned.
Oh, sir, I am sick, let me go to my cell.

Captain Buzzey held her up.

_A high, wild voice from the midst of the confusion_: I will speak,
sirs, you shall hear me.

_Judge Bride_: Who cries out?

_Voice_: I am Jonet Greene, the tinker’s wife. There are things I
know....

_Judge Bride_: Stand back, all, from the woman. Dame Greene, deliver
yourself of these things.

The crowd drew back. Goody Greene, an old woman and of great dignity,
was revealed to the Judges. Mr. Kleaver whispered to the Judges that
she was an evil woman.

_Goody Greene_: This girl never saw a devil. She saw my own son
Shadrach. He was wanted for piracy—Heaven help me, I hid him by day,
but he prowled by night. He had a monkey, he wore seaman’s clothes. He
saw in my house the girl and lusted after her. I speak....

_A man from back_: Her husband says she lies—she never had no son.

_Goody Greene_: Believe me, for Christ’s dear sake, believe me. I had
a son and I hid him ... but they found him just the same ... God found
out his sin. They hanged him; he was called the Bloody Shad.

_The man_: The woman’s husband, sir, says she never had no son. Time
has broken her memory.

_Goody Greene_: Husband, you are afraid. You coward, who will not
confess to the son of your own loins, lest you come to shame—now is
Doll indeed undone....

_Judge Lollimour_: The woman is lunatic. See how she rolls her eyes.

_Judge Bride_: Could you have had a son of which your husband knew
nothing—why did you never speak of him to your neighbours? How can we
believe your fables? You are lunatic.

_Goody Greene_: God help me! God help me.... May God help Doll!

_Judge Bride_: Constable, throw out this ancient—let her learn to be
a sager hag—and her husband after her.

A confusion and clamour of tongues rose from all parts of the
courtroom. Some wished to say what they knew of the Greenes; others
had stories to tell of lunacy, devils, etc. And there was laughing and
crying among women, and children wailed and would be taken home. Judge
Bride stood up in a noble wrath.

_Judge Bride_: Clear the court! Clear the court! What, shall Justice
find her house in Bedlam? Constables, pick up and carry out—if they
are too weak to walk—the Thumb twins, and you, madame, who are their
mother, go with them. Every one shall now be turned out into the snow
except those who are the witnesses and proper officers of the law, and
the six that I shall name. Mr. Increase Mather, Mr. Seth Dinsmore,
Dr. Zerubbabel Endicott, Mr. Zacharias Zelley, Mr. John Wilson, and
you, sir, also, Colonel Place Peabody. Gentlemen, the case shall be
continued _in camera_. I beg of you few, however, to stay to the end.

_From Sundown to black Night the battle continues. The Witch is thrown
to confusion. Justitia triumphans. Deus regnat._

Now was the courtroom, empty and vast, silent as the grave. Only twenty
remained in the room where a minute before had been many hundreds.
The day had worn to sunset and the room was dark. Flares were lighted
and candles were set where there was need. But the light of flare and
candle made the far reaches of the room and the dark corners behind the
scaffold even blacker. Such humanity as was present were huddled about
the platform and the great chairs of the Judges. By candlelight Judge
Bride glanced over the notes that he had taken, and by candlelight
Titus Thumb looked to the witch upon the table. She stood there ghastly
pale and like to swoon. Her eyes were round and struck terror to all.
She did not look again to Titus, only to Judge Bride, whom she in her
simplicity thought to be her friend.

Judge Bride bade the sheriff fetch a chair—a good chair with a back to
it, for he said he saw that the accused was tired past human strength.
Captain Buzzey got a chair. It was a great chair similar to those
in which the Judges sat. Judge Bride had it placed on the platform
between himself and Judge Lollimour. The three sat thus for a moment in
silence, a judge, and next a witch, and then a judge. So they sat in
great chairs and upon crimson damask cushions. The witch’s feet could
not reach the floor. Judge Bride gave her wine to drink from the silver
goblet set out for his own use. She drank the wine and was grateful to
him.

Little by little—tenderly—he questioned her. And little by little she
told him all. Of the Thumb twins he asked no word, he asked her only
of her own self, and of that demon who had but so recently gone from
her. She told in so low a voice those but a few yards away could not
hear, and Mr. Mather several times cried out, ‘Louder—an it please the
wench.’ She told of her father and mother in Brittany, and the night
that Mr. Bilby died. She told of the long winter, and the expectations
of the spring and the fulfilment of these expectations—for the
messenger had come, a most vigorous and comely fiend. Sometimes she
reddened and turned away as might a modest Christian woman. Sometimes
she sighed, and once or twice she smiled a small and secret smile. And
three times she said she loved and did not fear the demon, and that he
had been kind and pitiful to her.

_Judge Bride_: You say this devil was your lover and that he conducted
himself as has many a shameless mortal man to many a woman, for
he loved you, and when he had stayed himself of you he went away,
whistling, we may presume, and shrugging his shoulders—ah, gentlemen,
how shocking is the conduct of the male, be he demon or tomcat! And
now, Doll Bilby, we are almost to the end. Do not fear to weary us
with the length and detail of your history. Come, tell us more. The
ears of Justice must ever be long and patient ears.

She told more. There was nothing left untold, and where she would have
turned aside, Judge Bride encouraged and helped her. Mr. Zelley moaned
and cried out, and his head was in his hands. Titus went ghostly white
and, trembling, staggered from the room.

_Judge Bride_: But did not your conscience hurt? Did you not know that
you lived with this strange lover of yours in sin?

_Doll Bilby_: I begged him to marry me. So he did.

_Judge Bride_: A most virtuous and homely fiend. And did you find
clerk or magistrate to register your vows?

_Doll Bilby_: No, we married ourselves.

_Judge Bride_: Ah, the Governor of Connecticut but recently gave you
example.

And he pointed out to Judge Lollimour with much leisure how evil is bad
example in high places. He questioned Doll further. She told him all
there was to tell about the marriage, and it humiliated her to tell
that she had accepted this fiend before marriage.

_Judge Bride_: Come, come, is it then so sorry a sin for two young
people to be too hot and previous in their love? Surely honest
marriage may be considered salve to such misconduct.

He glanced through his notes. There was not a sound in the room, not
the scamper of a mouse, not the taking of breath, no sound except the
fiery rustle of the flares and the crackle of the paper.

_Judge Bride_: Doll Bilby, I notice that the children spoke often of a
pretty babe—which they called yours. Now to what do they refer?

_Doll Bilby_: Sir, I cannot be sure.

_Judge Bride_: You may guess, perhaps?

_Doll Bilby_: Oh, sir, sir....

Her eyes sought Mr. Zelley, but his face was in his hands.

_Judge Bride_: Speak freely.

_Doll Bilby_: I think it was to my own babe they referred.

_Judge Bride_: And where now is this child?

_Doll Bilby_: It is not yet born.

_Judge Bride_: And to whom the honour of its paternity?

_Doll Bilby_: Who else would it be but the fiend who came to comfort
me?

_Judge Bride_: Do not hang your head, young Bilby, for to conceive is
natural to woman. Rather should you redden and look down if after such
expenditure of infernal ardour you had proved sterile. Conception is
the glory of woman.

He stood up and dismissed the hearing. Then Captain Buzzey in a great
sweat of fear took the witch back to her cell, and all others went
home. That night the Boston Judges lay at the Black Moon. The barmaid
heard Judge Lollimour say to Judge Bride, as these two sat by the
hearth and drank their sack-posset: ‘Sir, this hearing is done as
quickly as ever you prophesied. We will be back to Boston on the third
day. I warrant the finding is more than any expected. There is enough
against the wench to hang her three times over—but that is yet for the
magistrates of the Superior Court to decide. We, at least, shall hold
her without bail or bond.’ Then he said in wonder, ‘To think that God
has vouchsafed to our eyes the sight of a woman who has embraced a
demon....’ The Judges whispered. The barmaid would not repeat what they
said.

These learned men called for ink-horn, sand, and pens. By ten o’clock
they had written thus:

Doll Bilby of Cowan Corners, (Essex County,) being this day brought
before us upon suspicion of witchcraft and upon the specific charge of
afflicting Labour and Sorrow Thumb, twin daughters of Deacon Ephraim
Thumb, we heard the aforesaid, and seeing what we did see, together
with hearing charges of the persons then present, we committed this
same Doll Bilby (she denying the matter of fact, yet confessing
herself a witch, also confessing having had carnal knowledge of a
fiend, also to being at this time pregnant by him, also to being
married to him by the ceremony of Max Pax Fax) unto their majesties’
jail at Salem, as per mittimus then given out in order to further
examination.

ADAM BRIDE }
RALPH LOLLIMOUR } Magistrates

By eleven they slept upon their beds.

_Doll having cooked her goose, now must sit to eat it. And one who
later proves a warlock comes to sit by her side._

Next day Doll rose early, thinking she would be called again before
the magistrates. Judge Bride had talked kindly to her and at the end
nothing had been said about the Thumb twins. She had not guessed his
mind to be made up against her.

She rose early, an hour before dawn, and by a rushlight prepared
herself for court. The jailor, John Ackes, could watch her through
a chink in the masonry. He saw her put on hat and cloak and set out
wooden pattens. He ran in fear to the Black Moon where Mr. Zelley
that night lay, and begged him—if he dared—to come a-running, for
he believed the witch was about to fly though the roof. She was all
dressed and set to go.

Mr. Zelley went to the dungeon and found her waiting to be taken before
the magistrates. He sat upon her straw bed by her side, and he took her
hands. He said, ‘Poor child, lay by your hat and riding-gear, for ’tis
all done.’

Done? She had thought they were but started. The matter of the Thumb
twins was not yet proven—Judge Bride himself had confessed as much.
Mr. Zelley said that now there was another warrant for her and another
_mittimus_. But Mr. Zelley must have heard Judge Bride say there was no
offence in having seen a devil—had not even Christ talked with Lucifer?
And obviously the magistrates had approved her marriage and had even
forgiven her that she had been too pliant to her lover’s desires. How,
therefore, could the Court be done with her—unless they were about to
set her free?

‘You are to be held for a jury—a jury, my poor Doll, of your own angry
neighbours, and for the February sessions of the Superior Court of
Judicature.’ He explained that Judges Bride and Lollimour could only
examine her and hold her over to a higher court. It is true they could
have dismissed her as innocent—if it had pleased them; but they could
not give sentence of death.... He wished her to think of death and it
might be to prepare her mind and more especially her soul (if she had a
soul) against this likely contingence.

‘Death?’ she said. ‘How can I die? God, God, oh, God! I do not want
to die.’ At the first moment she was afraid of death like any other
wicked woman. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the masonry
of her cell, remaining a long, long time silent, but her lips moved.
Mr. Zelley sat beside her. His head was in his hands. When next she
spoke she had conquered fear of death. She spoke bravely in a clear,
strong voice. Then she told Mr. Zelley more concerning the fiend whom
Hell had sent to love her. She said that he had promised her that,
when she should come to die, he would stand at her bed’s head. After
death he would be with her and she with him forever and ever. She said
boldly that she did not fear to die. But she flung herself to her knees
and laid her tousled head in Mr. Zelley’s lap and then confessed that
she had a most hideous horror of gallows and halter. As he could he
comforted her. Tears streamed from his eyes, though hers were always
dry. He knelt and seemed to pray to God.

John Ackes at his chink saw him pray and heard his prayer. He said it
was an unseemly prayer—not like those one hears in church—not like the
majestic and awful utterances of Mr. Increase Mather. Zelley talked
to God as you might talk to a friend. So many thought that it was not
to the true God that he prayed, but to some demon whom he privately
worshipped. When his own day came to hang, this thing was remembered
against him.

The witch-woman crouched upon her straw bed the while he prayed. She
had put her hat on her head again and was wrapped in her scarlet
riding-coat. She stared out of round cat’s eyes at the man who prayed
for her.

_Abortive attempts to save a_ SOUL _and more infernal manifestations of
the Demon Lover_.

Now was her physical body in sore plight, for she was bound in irons
heavier than a strong man might bear. The jailors feared her, and,
although an eye was forever at the chink, they did as little for her
as might be. The Court permitted only these to go to her: her jailors;
the two ministers of God, labouring in Salem, and Mr. Increase Mather
whose mind was at that time big with a demonology. He wished to study
and examine her. It was three weeks before Mr. Zelley got a permit from
Boston to visit her. He guessed by the cold, tardy manner in which his
request was answered that he himself had fallen into ill-repute. This
was true. His people thought him a warlock and feared and hated him.

When twenty years later, in the days of the great witch-hunting and
hanging in Salem, Mr. Zelley himself came to be tried, John Ackes was
commanded to tell the Court (if he could remember) of what it was the
witch and the warlock had talked through those long hours they had sat
side by side upon the witch’s straw bed. He testified (swearing to his
truth upon the Bible) that they talked but little. Zelley’s head was
forever in his hands. He did not see the witch-woman’s face—nor her
eyes. He did not see how constantly she gaped at empty corners; how she
smiled and nodded into space; how sometimes she would close her eyes
and raise her mouth for the empty air to kiss. All this she did behind
Mr. Zelley’s back. They asked John Ackes if Mr. Zelley made no attempt
to save the woman’s soul. No, he only sat. Sometimes he talked a little
to Doll and sometimes he talked to one whom he designated as ‘god.’ But
he did not really pray at all—not as Mr. Mather prayed—him you could
hear through stone walls and up and down the street. The crowd would
gather outside the jail when Mr. Mather prayed. He was a most fearful
and righteous suppliant before the Throne of God. After his prayers
the wonder was no lightning came to destroy the young witch where she
sat—grimacing and leering at spectres. When one considered Mr. Mather,
one could not say that Zelley prayed at all.

However, it was true that Zelley would sometimes seem to beg Doll Bilby
to turn to God before it was too late. She would always explain to him
that she wanted no other God than Lucifer and no Heaven, for where her
parents were and her foster father and her dear husband—there with them
was her Paradise, not in Heaven with the cold angels singing psalms
forever to an angry and awful God; not in Heaven where doubtless
Hannah Bilby would be found and all her cruel neighbours—no, no, a
thousand times no. Hell was her true home—her Paradise.

Sometimes he would read to her from a stout big book, and John Ackes
swore he thought it was a Bible, although it was possible that the book
was a book of magic—perhaps this was even probable. Still the stories
he read to her from this book sounded to him like Bible stories. What
would he read to her? He read to her of Mary of Magdala, how she laid
her head upon our Saviour’s feet and wiped them with her hair. He read
to her the holy promises of John. It was evident, said John Ackes, that
Zelley was not for a long time conscious of the fiend which lurked
forever in the witch’s cell.

Towards the end no one but Mr. Zelley dared go to her dungeon. They
were all afraid. It was remembered and marked against him that, where
other and more godly men felt fear, he felt no fear. At last even Mr.
Zelley knew that he and the witch were never alone. There was another
and more awful presence about.

Now he would look up quickly from his reading and catch her eyes as
they sought those of some one or something close behind his own
shoulder. When their eyes met, she would smile so softly and happily
he knew that the invisible presence must be that of the one she loved.
Mr. Zelley confessed that this consciousness of a third and unseen
party in the cell sadly upset and confused him. He sweated, he could
not read. One afternoon she gave him such close attention he decided
that the fiend had left, so he closed his book and asked her abruptly
if her demon lover had come back again. She was surprised that he asked
this question. ‘Of course he is back,’ she said. ‘Now he will not leave
me until the end.’ It was not he, she said, whom the Thumb twins saw
at the trial, and Doll again wickedly said that perhaps that creature
had been an angel. ‘My fiend never came near me as I stood all day on
trial. Now he has sworn to stay with me. If I go to Gallows Hill, he
will go with me. If I die here first, he will hold my hands.’

Zelley asked her if she could really see this demon. For instance,
was he at that very moment in the room? Oh, yes. He sat yonder by the
cupboard. His head, she said, rested upon his bosom. ‘Last night I had
a fearful fit of terror. I thought I could not face the gallows. He
held me in his arms and sang to me until sunrise. Now he sleeps.’

‘Is he now in seaman’s clothes and has he the likeness of proper man?’
(Mr. Zelley whispered. He feared to wake the demon.)

‘No. He has returned in shape of true fiend. For he is horned, naked,
scaly, black. His feet are cloven. He has vast leathery bat-pinions.
His tail is long and spiked.’

‘How, then, can you know that this is your own fiend and not another
one?’

‘By his eyes and by his loving voice. These things have not changed.’

‘How is it he returned to you? In what manner did he make himself
manifest?’

‘You recall that day after the trial when you came to me and let me
know beyond a doubt that I must die? All the next day I felt him in
the cell with me. Then little by little he took visible form. At first
he was a vapour that seemed to rise between the flags of the dungeon
floor, and then I could see the shadow of his great and most awful
form—a transparent shadow through which one could look, even as one
looks through smoke. But daily he gained more and more in body and he
now is as hard and sturdy as mortal man. At first seeing horns, tail,
and so fearsome a scaly black body, I cried out in my disappointment
and despair. I, in my simplicity, had imagined he would always be to
me as he had been—shaped, dressed, and coloured like comely, mortal
man. He seemed monstrous to me—more likely to inspire fear than love.
At last I could see his eyes and they were unchanged. And his voice
(for, having gained complete actuality, he could speak) was the same.
So I knew him as my own husband, and now I love him more in his present
infernal majesty than I did in seaman’s form. This shape is fairer to
me.’ (Thus twenty years later Mr. Zelley testified in court as to his
conversation with Doll Bilby.)

On being pressed, Mr. Zelley confessed still further. He said he
asked her why it was that no one—not even the jailors—dared go to her
cell. Did they fear the spectral presence? She was amazed that he had
heard no gossip. Surely the village must by now be buzzing with the
tricks her demon had performed. Had he not heard what had befallen her
peeping jailors? They used (to her unutterable torment and vexation) to
watch her through a chink in the masonry. But the demon punished them
by blowing into their eyes. This had given them the pink-eye. Surely
he must have noticed that her jailors suffered from pink-eye? Now
that she mentioned it he said he believed he had noticed it. And she
was to tell him further. Why did the great Mr. Mather come no more?
She clapped her hands, laughing and purring. Her demon had hated Mr.
Mather so bitterly, and had so resented his long, loud prayers, that
he had several times been on the point of strangling him. In his utter
foolishness the man had dared to read the story of Tobit to her—how
Sara was beloved of the fiend Asmodeus and how this fiend strangled
her many husbands upon their marriage beds, but how at the last this
fine fiend Asmodeus had been driven to farthest Egypt by the stench
of a burning fish’s liver. This story the wicked witch claimed to be
utterly false—it made no jot of difference to her that it was found in
Holy Writ. She said it was a black lie that did much to minimize that
dignity of Prince Asmodeus—who was a close friend to her own lover. She
put up her hand and whispered to Mr. Zelley that, although her fiend
had never told her his own true name, she had reason to suspect that
he himself was none other than this same Asmodeus, for he was touchy
beyond all reason for the dignity of the Prince and he had told her at
some length how dull, tedious, and complaining a woman Sara had been,
and how gladly her lover had surrendered her in the end to the young
Jew. The burning fish’s liver had never driven him forth—he went as
it pleased himself. The stench had almost expelled the bride from her
bridal chamber, but it had had no effect upon the stalwart demon Prince.

Mr. Mather had insisted on reading this story thrice over to her, and
on the last reading he had also endeavoured to burn the large liver
of a cod-fish. Then her husband rushed at the fire. His tail stood up
rigid in rage; he shook his horns like an angry bull; he rustled his
vast pinions, and, as he snuffed out the fire that made the stench with
his two horny hands, Mr. Mather looked up and of a sudden saw him there
and was close to dying of terror. Doll begged the fiend again to assume
invisibility and not to strangle the distinguished Divine. So Mr.
Mather went away and never came again. But surely, surely Mr. Zelley
had heard this thing spoken of? And how her demon had served the two
Salem clergymen—the tricks he had put on them—surely these things were
common gossip? No, of these things he had heard never a word. No one
gossiped with him—now.

It was then at that moment he first came to know he was under
suspicion. Doll knew this too. She told him how she had never heard
that the Thumb twins were bewitched until the very day Captain Buzzey
rode up and accused her of their bewitchment. She said she pitied Mr.
Zelley and he said his life grew strange. Every one in all the world
was far removed, and even God had turned His face away from him. He
said (foolishly) that all his life he had felt that if he believed in
witches, demons, etc., he could not believe in God; for that God Whom
he worshipped would not tolerate such evil things. Yet now had he seen
the proof that such things were true—and, if true, where, then, was
that great and good God whom he had long worshipped? ‘My Doll,’ he
said, ‘you have taken away my reason and my God—now I have nothing. I
have not even one man I may call “friend.”’

She comforted him, not by words, but by putting her small hands (now
thin as a bird’s claws) upon his bent head. She kissed his forehead.
He got up and went away. He did not stay as he should have stayed with
his flock in Cowan Corners. He slept at the Black Moon, for such was
the bewitchment that Doll had set upon him he must see her again and
that early upon the next day.

_The Labours of a Witch and the Prayers of the Godly._

The year was nine days old and no more. Then was Doll Bilby taken in
labour and brought prematurely to bed.

The Salem midwife—ancient Nan Hackett—would have none of her, and it
seemed that, whatever it was she must bear, she should bear alone.
Nor did she ask for mortal aid. She was content with that phantom
which stood night and day (as many saw) at her bed’s head. Mr. Zelley
remembered that Goody Goochey, when first she came to Cowan Corners,
had served the beginning as well as the end of life—that is, she had
been a midwife as well as a layer-out of the dead. He went to the woman
and begged her, in pity’s name and partly commanded her in the name of
the General Court, to get herself to Salem jail and there give such
service as might be.

She was afraid. She did not wish to be midwife to a witch and the first
to welcome a black imp into the world. She drank three piggins of ale
and took a leather bottle of brandy with her. She set upon her thumbs
and fingers those iron rings with which she was accustomed to guard
herself against the ghosts of the dead. She thought, after all, is not
a live imp of greater danger to a good Christian’s soul than the body
of a dead church elder? Mr. Zelley went with her to the jail.

The witch at the moment was not in pain. She lay with eyes black as the
pits of Hell. Her white mouth was open. She roused herself a little and
made Mr. Zelley a brief speech in which she said that she had, as he
knew, sought God and spiritual peace, and now, let him look into her
face and say that she had failed to find either. It was true, said Mr.
Zelley. Her face was fulfilled of heavenly peace. He left her without a
word.

Outside he found a conclave of idle men and women who laughed and
joked coarsely. One big ruddy wench (who had already borne, to the
embarrassment of the community, three fatherless children) was crying
out loudly that God knew it was enough for woman to give birth to
human child, which is round and sleek as a melon. God help the witch
now in labour with an imp, for it would come into the world with spiked
tail and horns. Such a thing would be the death of any mortal woman.
All were afraid. Some believed a clap of thunder would come down from
Heaven and destroy the woman. Others that a fiend would rise up from
Hell to succour her. Some said that the witches and warlocks for an
hundred miles had gathered together and now, mounting broomsticks, were
about to charge down upon Salem. One said, ‘Have you not heard? Judge
Bride has suffered an apoplexy. Judge Lollimour is at death’s door.’
This was not so.

Another said Captain Tom Buzzey’s hands (those hands that had held the
witch) had withered. They had shrivelled to the size of a child’s. This
was not so.

All said the witch is in labour. She’s with child by the Devil. God
will burn her soul in Hell. This was so.

The day wore on. The sun, as sometimes may be in the midst of winter,
was so warm the snow melted and water dripped from the eaves of the
jail. It was tender as a day in spring. Planks and rugs were laid in
the slush, for certain clergymen came to pray and must have dry land to
kneel upon. They prayed that God recollect the number of good, pious
Christian people there were at Salem and not destroy all, for they
feared His wrath might blast the whole village. God made no sign, but
the water dripped from the eaves and a sweet spring fragrance rose from
the melting snow.

The multitude gaped and feared. Sometimes they smelt sulphur,
saltpeter, brimstone, and the stench as of a sloughing serpent. They
heard the crying of a phantom voice and the swishing of a thousand
brooms. So they waited through the day expecting every moment to see
crabbed Goody Goochey hobble out with a black imp upon a blanket to
show them.

There was no sound from the cell. Not one cry nor moan from the witch,
not one word from Goochey. The jailors would open the door. It stuck.
Their keys would not fit it. They could not open the door, and believed
devils were holding it fast. They dared not peek in the chink because
of their pink-eye.

By sundown most went home.

_Mr. Zelley opens a Dungeon Door, and what came of it._

The next day dawned cold and grey over an icy sea, and the gulls and
terns came in from the harbour crying and lamenting. There was now no
tenderness in the air, and the water that had but yesterday melted
under the rays of a genial sun froze to glassy ice. A wind sharp as
needles came in off the sea and few if any watched the night out on
their knees beside the dungeon walls. As soon as it was possible to
see six feet ahead, the multitude again began to assemble, but this
time they came without laughter or conversation. They were shrouded
in hoods, shawls, etc., for warmth, and seemed a spectral band. Now
and then one or another of them would raise a pious voice in prayer,
lamentation, or thanksgiving, but for the most part they stood bowed
and mute. All night there had been no sound from the witch’s cell—never
a sound. Who was there so bold as to enter in to her and bring back a
report, for John Ackes’s hand shook so he could not manage the key?
Some said Mr. Zelley would go—he had no normal, wholesome fear of
witches or demons. Others said, ‘Where does he lie to-night?’ Others,
‘Go, run and fetch him’; and a boy (it was Widow Hannah’s bonded boy
Jake Tulley) said the man lay at the Black Moon and that he would run
and fetch him. This he did.

Mr. Zelley came in a steeple hat and a greatcoat. He spoke to no one.
No one spoke to him. He entered the jail and took the cell key from
Ackes, and, after some shaking and effort, he turned the lock and
pushed hard on the door, which swung in so suddenly he almost fell on
his knees beside that straw bed where he had sat so many wicked hours
with the witch-girl. A hundred had crowded down the passage and into
the doorway after Mr. Zelley. All stopped at the threshold of the cell.
They stood agape, some filled with curiosity, some with fear, others
with pious ejaculations and elevated thoughts.

Goody Goochey (who indeed proved to be no woman, but a man) lay in a
drunken fit in a corner. His face was purple and his throat twisted and
bruised as though he had been half strangled—which he always averred to
his dying day was the truth, for he had seen the scaly black demon come
at him with great hands outstretched to his throat, and that was the
last he could really remember until certain ones tumbled him out into
the snow. He was sure, however, that, as he lay thus almost unconscious
in a corner, a great concourse of spectrals and infernals had filled
the cell. They had danced, sung, and made much of the witch, praising
her, encouraging her, etc. Because the man was known to be an impostor
(he had for many years made all think him a woman) and because of his
swinish, drunken ways, many did not believe what he said.

All could see that Bilby’s Doll was dead. She lay with her round eyes
open to the ceiling, and her expression was one of peace and content.
Whatever she might have borne was dead within her.

_Without_ HELL _where is_ HEAVEN? _And without a Devil where is_ GOD?
_Also the last of Doll Bilby and an end to these instructions._

There are court records, affidavits, etc.; there are diaries, letters
and such; there is the memory of old gaffers and goodies to prove that
once Doll Bilby flourished. But of physical, inanimate objects nothing
that was associated with her evil life and awful end now exists. The
house she lived in mysteriously rotted and fell into the cellar hole.
The grave they dug her is now lost under a ploughed field (a sterile
field that yields little). Where the dungeon was now is a brick house,
a fine big house of red bricks had out from England. No one will live
there. Yet any gamin, for a copper penny, and any courting couple, for
wanton pleasure, will show you the very spot in the white birch thicket
where Doll met her demon lover night after night under the moonlight,
in that world of witchery which none to-day will ever see. For in
those days there were sights and wonders that will not come again. In
those days God was nearer to man than He is to-day, and where God is
there also must be His Evil Opponent—the Prince of Lies, for show me
Paradise, and there, around a corner, I will show you Hell.

_Finis coronat opus_

[Illustration: Demon and woman laying down]

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 12 Changed: (a thing she aways feared)
to: (a thing she always feared)

pg 59 Changed: but here was nothing more to lock
to: but there was nothing more to lock

pg 122 Changed: and how in Hartford
to: and now in Hartford

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