All this made her very angry. She jumped up and down in her rage—more like an imp than ever—and screamed at him to be gone. She ran into her own room and came back with his hat—for she had guessed where it really was, but had not found an opportunity to get it for him. She jumped up and clapped the hat onto his head, pulling it down so sharply over his ears that she bent them, and continued to scream, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He grabbed her roughly by the arm, called her witch, hellcat, succubus. She turned and bit his wrist, so that it was marked for days. He pulled her off him, shook her with great fury, and flung her from him so that her head struck against the settle and she moaned in pain. Her plight touched his heart infinitely, and he knew that, witch or no witch, she was his dear, his own girl.
So the parents and foster parents, returning, found them. The man, a valiant officer in the militia, a scholar, and the heir to a fine estate, was convulsed with weeping and sobbing. The girl lay terror-stricken in the corner, as harmless as a trapped rabbit. Mr. Bilby had no idea that Titus had flung her into this corner. She was a strange child, and he thought she had picked it out for herself. He pitied the terrible (if somewhat unmanly) grief of the young man, and swore that, in spite of Doll’s ridiculous and, he felt, unnatural objections, the marriage must go ahead.
Mrs. Thumb took her son home, and Mr. Bilby took Doll to bed, and he comforted her with that more than female solicitude that a man often shows towards children or women in distress.
Mrs. Hannah was in a rage when she found her fine blankets blackened with dirty soot. Nor would Doll offer an explanation to her foster mother, although afterwards she told Mr. Zelley everything.
3
The voice of Hell is heard in the House of the Lord.
Mrs. Thumb went everywhere whispering: ‘Look to my son. Is he not bewitched? Look at my boy—so gentle he would not kick a cat, yet you all know that once he shot at this Doll Bilby, and but a few nights ago he struck her and flung her upon the ground. Then he cried for hours. I took him home. Is it according to God and Nature for a man to love thus? Hating her, loving her, loving her, hating her. Would God the wench were dead, but she is not, and he will marry her.’
Every one thought the girl a witch. She went her own way quietly, working as she always did, a little shiftlessly, her mind on other things.
The harvest was late that year and heavy. One year Nature would starve her stepchildren (for so the colonists felt in the new land) with too little, and the next year break their backs with too much. Mr. Bilby, harassed with many things, did a wrong thing. He went to Mr. Zelley and begged him on the next Sabbath to publish the banns for his foster child and young Thumb, and he led Mr. Zelley to believe that Doll had assented to these plans.
It may well be that Doll, in some secret way common to witches (that is, through some imp or familiar used as spy), really did know that upon a certain Sunday the banns were to be read. If she did know, she said nothing of this thing to any one, keeping her own dark counsel, and working her secret spells. On a Friday Mr. Bilby sickened slightly, and upon Saturday he could not touch his proper food, only a cheat-loaf she baked with her own hands for him, and a barley gruel. Mrs. Hannah always believed—and doubtless with reason—that the young woman was at the bottom of this sickening and was endeavouring to keep him from the Meeting-House, for when she heard he was set upon going she begged him not to go, saying he was too ill, etc., and must be ruled by her, etc., and sit at home in idleness.