and Ben shambled through it, more in flight than obedience.
The place was clammily cold, and dark. Ben remembered to avoid Grandfather Matthew's throne. He stood by the fireplace spreading his hands where no warmth was. Pain gnawed at his knee; he wondered if he ought to have kept on Goody Hawks' poultice. Almost at once Grandmother Cory was confronting him in the gloom. "Jonas!" When the big man tiptoed in she said: "Open the shutters." Thin light brought no comfort. "Light the fire—boy appears to be cold. Nay, first go wake that child upstairs if he's slept through all this—I wonder he could."
"Oh, he could!" Ben snatched clumsily for something harmless to ease the tension. "Wide awake one minute and then——"
"Benjamin, do please to be quiet. Jonas, bring Reuben down. He is to stay with Anna; he is not to come in here." Ben saw Jonas' witch-wife join him in the hallway and they went upstairs together. "Ah, Benjamin!—about your miserable clothes, I had hoped to employ part of this day in buying suitable garments for you and your brother, but now I suppose the time must be spent otherwise—and Lecture Day at that, when I must be at meeting after the noon hour. And you and Reuben ought to go too, but of course I cannot take you to the meeting-house looking like beggar boys and very likely lousy."
"We are not! Grandmother, I——"
"You won't find me failing in understanding, Benjamin, but pray understand this once and for all: your failure last night to tell me about that fellow Plum was a lie—a lie of silence.... Oh, when word came yesterday I did pray that you and your brother might be brands from the burning. I do pray for it yet. I made plans for you, I searched my heart, I sought guidance, I even trusted I had found it. D'you think me cold, unnatural? D'you imagine I don't love you, my grandson?" She brushed with dry impatience at sudden tears. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Ben tried to catch a glimpse of Reuben, but the bulk of the Lloyds hid him as they passed the doorway. "Benjamin, what am I to do with you? What do you yourself think would be right for me to do with you, a liar, a wilderness child who hath something like the conversation of a savage?"
"Grandmother, about Jesse——"
"Plum again! And thus I'm answered! Why, the constable will see after all that."
"Constable?"
"Town authorities, boy. Burial. Is that what you meant?"
"A pauper's burial."
"Thankful heart, boy, I can't understand you. You wish the creature buried among the Saints?"
"No, I...." Ben searched his mind hopelessly. During the night many polite convincing speeches had been prepared—scattered, one and all. He blurted the one thought his mind could hold: "Reuben and I must go to Uncle John Kenny at Roxbury."
"What!" She was whitely horrified. "You don't know what you say."
"Why, Grandmother, he was a friend to my father. They wrote to one another. Once Uncle John sent me a book."
"He did?" She sat down slowly, little white hands stiff as ivory on the arms of the chair. "That may serve to explain much.... Benjamin, I require you to listen to me if only this once. I have reason to believe that my poor brother John is an atheist. I will trust you did not know this; now you do. He is an old man—as I'm old—and hardened, corrupt with false learning, evil conversation, a blasphemer, often fuddled with drink, a—a fornicator. He hath kept a mistress, at Roxbury, quite openly, under the name of housekeeper—for all I know the whore is there yet. Being wealthy, with friends in high places, none dares deal with him—that's the pass our colony hath arrived at. We builded a Zion; it becometh an abomination, a pen of swine, a nest of adulterers, blasphemers, sodomites, worshippers of the golden calf—vipers.... And now you wish me to allow you and that poor child your brother to go into that—that filthiness. Benjamin, I will hear nothing more about going to my brother at Roxbury. I will not send you to an even worse darkness than you dwelt in at Deerfield."
"We dwelt in no darkness there!"
"Benjamin, be careful!"
The avalanche had him, all fences of caution swept aside. "You have no right to speak so of my father! We will go to Roxbury!"
"Benjamin, stop!"
"And you'll bury Jesse like a dead dog—your Christian charity! Judgments—my father—you lie, lie!"
"Jonas!"
"Wasn't he your son? I believe nothing."
"Jonas! Jonas!"
"I won't bear it!" But now Jonas was behind him and twisting his right arm up between the shoulders.
"Jonas, lock him in his room. Here!" She fumbled a bunch of keys from her belt, with difficulty, for doubtless she could not see plainly. "Here, take it, Jonas! The boy is possessed!" Eyes flaring to the whites, she lifted the cluster of keys and struck Ben twice across the mouth.
As Jonas frogmarched him to the stairs, Ben tried to see down the hallway into the kitchen. Anna Lloyd was restraining Reuben, though at the moment the boy was not trying to break free but stood leaning away from her in a frozen motion, his white face empty.
Jonas hurled Ben into the bedroom. Ben pulled himself upright by a leg of the four-poster in time to hear the door slam and the key chatter in the lock. He spat blood from his lips, and heard the floor creak under Jonas' swift departure; heard silence fall on the room like the booming of another, larger door. Even then a part of his mind could fret at what seemed the strangest thing of all: when she struck him with the keys, his grandmother had looked exalted, almost happy—satisfied....
Hours crawled.
Now and then Ben Cory tried to retreat from images of the recent past and terrors of the immediate present within the shelter of a lethargy, a temporary refusal to think of anything at all. This was no good, since no power could shut away the thought of Reuben alone with these people, his own twelve-year-old temper explosive and perilous. Sooner or later Ru was bound to lose control and fetch down the wrath as Ben himself had done. Now when it was too late, Ben saw his outbreak as a betrayal of Reuben, a betrayal of trust. Once or twice he pressed his forehead on the window glass and tried to pray—seeing then that if only Reuben were with him it would be quite possible to jump from this window with fair safety into the snow.
A square of thin sunshine moved across the floor. It had neared the window when high clouds obscured the sun of March; the square yielded, grayed, vanished, like Ben's own trust in ancient certainties. Footsteps sounded often, not for him. Voices flowed on somewhere; Ben heard the homely commotion of household activity—doors closing, the hiss of sweeping, a shovel scraping ash from a hearthstone, clatter of kitchen gear.
Continually his ears strained for Reuben's treble or a light tread that would be his. But plainly Reuben was forbidden to come to him. Someone would, some time soon, he supposed. Someone in authority would be obliged to deal with the wild beast, the blasphemer.
He sprawled on the bed, raising his right knee to soften the nagging of the splinter-wound. Anxious to avoid the refuge of sleep, he fell into it anyway, having had little or none last night, and woke to what was surely the pallor of late afternoon. The house was quite silent; maybe everyone had gone to the Lecture Day sermon. In spite of himself he slept again, and roused, feeling ill and disoriented, in total dark.
From the window small lights could be found twinkling over on the left where the hill road must be. Ben groped for the stub candle on the mantel, and fought a dreary battle with his tinderbox, winning at last the consolation of a pale candle-flame. His knee felt hot, and throbbed. He let down his breeches but could find nothing very wrong. The splinter-wound was slightly raised; he saw or imagined faint steaks of red up his thigh. His clothing must have chafed the wound while he slept. As he moved sluggishly about the room the throbbing ceased and he could forget it. The lightheadedness—that would be hunger. Anger was no longer hot but heavy, lead in the stomach.
He thought what had roused him had been a murmur of talk somewhere. He no longer heard it. Nothing happened; no one came. The flame of the candle worked downward. One of the lights near the hill road winked