When Doll saw this dwarfish man-woman standing in the fire-room, fitting iron rings to her fingers, she shrank from her in horror. Goody Goochey muttered at her, and Mr. Zelley was distressed because he believed she was calling the distrait young woman a witch. However, such was the hoarseness of Goochey’s voice and such was the coarseness of her nature, he could not be sure. She might have been calling her another, no more flattering, but surely less dangerous, epithet. Mr. Zelley sincerely hoped so, for he was far more concerned with the reputation of Doll than he was with the good or bad language of Goochey.
CHAPTER IV
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.