“Ah,” said Hants, thoughtfully, “that's a rattlin' good word.”
Time dragged on, and yet no denouncing voice came from the further shore. The door of the hut was a darker hole in the shade of the hemlocks. Hants Corby proposed going over to investigate.
“If he ain't there, we'll carry off his boat.”
Tad fell into Hants's boat quite absorbed in the greatness of the thought. It was not a good thing generally to follow Hants Corby, who was an irresponsible person, apt to take much trouble to arrange a bad joke and shiftlessly slip out from under the consequences. If he left you in a trap, he thought that a part of the joke, as I remember very well.
“A-a-a-ow!” wailed Cissy Armitage from the bank; for it dawned on her that something tremendous was going forward, in which Tad was likely to be suddenly obliterated. She sat on the bank with her stubby shoes hanging over, staring with great frightened blue eyes, till she saw them at last draw silently away from the further shore—and behold, the Hermit's boat was in tow. Then she knew that there was no one in the world so brave or so grandly wicked as Tad.
Cissy Armitage used to have fluffy yellow hair and scratches on her shins. She was a sunny little soul generally, but she had a way of imagining how badly other people felt, which interfered with her happiness, and was not always accurate. Tad seldom felt so badly as she thought he did. Tad thought he could imagine most things better on the whole, but when it came to imagining how badly other people felt, he admitted that she did it very well. Therefore when she set about imagining how the Hermit felt, on the other side of the river, with no boat to come across in, to where people were cosy and comfortable, where they sang the Doxology and put the kittens to bed, she quite forgot that the Hermit had always before had a boat, that he never yet had taken advantage of it to make the acquaintance of the Doxology or the kittens, and imagined him feeling very badly indeed.
Bazilloa Armitage held family prayers at six o'clock on Sunday afternoons; and all through them Cissy considered the Hermit.
“I sink in deep waters,” read Bazilloa Armitage with a rising inflection. “The billows go over my head, all his waves go over me, Selah,” and Cissy in her mind saw the Hermit sitting on the further shore, feeling very badly, calling Tad an “evil generation,” and saying: “The billows go over my head, Selah,” because he had no boat. She thought that one must feel desperately in order to say: “Selah, the billows go over me.” And while Bazilloa Armitage prayed for the President, Congress, the Governor, and other people who were in trouble, she plotted diligently how it might be avoided that the Hermit should feel so badly as to say “Selah,” or call Tad an “evil generation”; how she might get the boat back, in order that the Hermit should feel better and let bygones be; and how it might be done secretly, in order that Tad should not make a bear of himself. Afterwards she walked out of the back door in her sturdy fashion, and no one paid her any attention.
The Hermit muttered in the dusk of his doorway.
Leather clothes are stiff after a rain and bad for the temper; moreover, other things than disordered visions of the heavens rolling away as a scroll and the imperative duty of denouncing some one were present in his clouded brain,—half memories, breaking through clouds, of a time when he had not as yet begun to companion daily with judgment to come, nor had those black spots begun to dance before his eyes, which black spots were evidently the sins of the world. He muttered and shifted his position uneasily.