The other answered encouragingly, "More like death than life, so the women say." The minister waved the men aside and went swiftly down the street. The hen and chickens fled with shrill cries at his approach, and the old negress stopped her song. After he had passed she chuckled slowly to herself, thrust her head up sideways to get the sun in a new place, and began her crooning chant afresh.
"How is the boy?" asked the minister of his wife as he stepped inside the door. "Not still screaming out and——"
Mistress Everett shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, he is quiet now, up in his room."
Nathaniel lay on his trundle bed, his eyes fixed on the rafters, his pale lips drawn back. At the sight his father sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. The boy sprang upon him with a cry, "Oh, father, I see fire always there—last winter when I burned my finger—oh, always such pain!"
The minister's voice broke as he said, "Oh, Nathaniel, the blessed ease when all this travail is gone by and thou knowest thyself to be of the elect."
Nathaniel screamed out at this, a fleck of froth showing on his lips. "That is the horrible thing—I know I am not one of the saved. My heart is all full of carnal pleasures and desires. To look at the sun on the hillside—why I love it so that I forget my soul—hell—God—"
His father gave a deep shocked groan and put his hand over the quivering lips. "Be not a bitterness to him that begot you. Hush!"
The fever of excitement left the boy and he fell down with his face in the pillow to lie there motionless until his parents went out for second meeting, leaving him alone in the house. "Confidence must be rooted out of his tabernacle," said his father sternly. "The spirit of God is surely working in his heart in which I see many of my own besetting sins."
Nathaniel sprang up, when he heard the door shut, with a distracted idea of escape, now that his jailers were away, and felt an icy stirring in the roots of his hair at the realization that his misery lay within, that the walls of his own flesh and blood shut it inexorably into his heart forever. He threw open the window and leaned out.
The old negress came out of the woods at the other end of the street, her turban gleaming red. She moved in a cautious silence past the meeting-house, but when she came opposite the minister's house, thinking herself alone, she burst into a gay, rapid song, the words of which she so mutilated in her barbarous accent that only a final "Oh, Molly-oh!" could be distinguished. She carried an herb-basket on her arm now, into which, from time to time, she looked with great satisfaction.