1
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.