“Well,” the juggler was fain to contend in a sentiment of loyalty to the roof that sheltered him, “she is busy; she has her household duties to look after.”
“Shucks, ye young buzzard! ye can’t fool me!” exclaimed Tip Wrothers, in half-jocular triumph. “Don’t all the Cove know ez Jane Ann Sims don’t turn a hand ef Phemie’s thar ter do it fur her?”
“Yaas,” drawled Gideon Beck, “an’ Phemie ain’t got much mo’ religion ’n her mammy. Jes’ wunst hev she been ’tendin’ on the meetin’,—an’ this air Thursday, an’ the mourners constant, an’ a great awakenin’. Phemie Sims would set the nangel Gabriel down ter wait in the passage whilst she war a-polishin’ of her milk-crocks, ef he hed been sent ter fetch her ter heaven, an’ she warn’t through her dairy worship.”
“If Mrs. Sims doesn’t turn her hand, there’s obliged to be somebody there to turn one. We don’t have any rations of manna served out these days,” argued the juggler. “It’s well that somebody stays at home. Tubal Cain and I are enough church-goers for one house.”
“Air you-uns a mourner?” demanded Beck, with a sudden accession of interest.
“No,” answered the juggler, “though I’ve lots and cords to mourn over.” He shifted his position with a sigh.
Wrothers and Knowles exchanged a significant glance which Beck did not observe. With a distinct bridling he said, “I be a perfesser. I hev been a perfesser fur the past ten year.”
“It must be a great satisfaction,” responded the juggler.
It was something, however, which he did not envy, and this fact was so patent that it roused the rancor of Beck. One of the dearest delights of possession is often the impotent grudging of him who hath not.
The juggler, despite his assured demeanor, had reverted to that sense of discomfort which had earlier beset him when he went abroad in the Cove. In the church he had marked a certain agitated curiosity as members of the congregation who had been at the “show” recognized the man who was deemed so indisputably in league with Satan. But this was merged in the fast accumulating interest of the meetings, and upon a second attendance, barring that he was here and there covertly pointed out to wide-eyed newcomers, denizens of further heights and more retired dells, his entrance scarcely made a ripple of excitement. This he accounted eminently satisfactory. It had been his intention to accustom the mountaineers to the sight of him, to have his accomplishments as a prestidigitator grow stale as a story that is told, to be looked upon as a familiar and a member of the Sims household; all this favored his disguise and his escape from notoriety and question. He had been prepared for the surprise and curiosity which the presence of a stranger in so secluded a region naturally excites. Since learning somewhat of the superstitions and distorted religious ideas which prevailed among so ignorant and sequestered a people, he could even understand their fear of his simple feats of legerdemain, and the referring of the capacity to work these seeming miracles to collusion with the devil. But altogether different, mysterious, threatening, unnerving, was the keen inimical vigilance which he discerned in Peter Knowles’s eye; the sense of some withheld thought, some unimagined expectation, which might be apprehended yet not divined, roused afresh the terror of detection which had begun to slumber in the security of this haven with its new life and absolute death to the old world. As the juggler lay on his back, with his eyes fixed on that deep blue sky of May, fringed about with the fibrous pines above his head, he tried to elucidate the problem. Something alien, something dangerous, something removed it was from the fantasies of the ignorant mountaineers. But for all his keenness and his long training in the haunts of men, for all his close observation and his habit of just deduction, that thin-lipped, narrow, ascetic visage gave him no inkling what this withheld thought might be,—how it could be elicited, met, thwarted. Only one gleam of significance from the eye he interpreted, a distinct note of interrogation. Whatever the expectation might be, to whatever it might be leading, it was not devoid of uncertainty and of involuntary inquiry.