Within a year all suspicion seemed to have passed away from Goody Greene, but in a hundred ways more doubts gathered about the child and she was whispered of. Mrs. Bilby told many, here one and there two, usually with entreaties for prayers and commands for secrecy, that the girl was born and bred a witch. She told how her own unborn son (that thumping boy) had been blasted. She told them to watch—was not Mr. Bilby himself bewitched by her? So it seemed to many. There were no clothes fine enough in Boston for his dear Doll—he needs must send to England for them. Sometimes he held her on his knee—and she a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Even when the elders and the minister came to call on him, and Hannah, as befitted her gender, withdrew from the room, Bilby would keep his ridiculous hobgoblin squatting at his feet. As he talked, he patted her shaggy, spikey, hair.
The child had nothing to do with children of her own age, nor did godly parents wish their children to play with her. For the most part she was a silent thing, stealing about on feet as quiet as cats’ paws. To her foster father she was pretty and frolicsome. To Goodwife Greene she was loving, and stole from the Bilby larder food for the wretched paupers. With her mouth she said little to any one, but her eyes spoke—those round button eyes, and they spoke secret and evil things.
2
Monstrous facts regarding Doll’s earliest youth which Mr. Zelley repeated almost twenty years after her death. How she attended Black Sabbath, etc. How she saw the Devil in Brittany and probably swore to serve him, etc.
When the time came late in his life that Mr. Zelley, being old and broken, was accused of witchcraft, he told, after long questionings, much that he knew about Bilby’s Doll. For instance, he said she never forgot one of those wicked things which she had learned of her parents in Brittany.
It is true, the shock and horror of their death caused such mental anguish it seemed to her a black curtain (much like the smoke of the holocaust) dropped down upon her life. All that was actual in her life was before the curtain—that is, after her parents’ death; yet all that lay behind this curtain did exist for her—only infinitely small and infinitely far away. To see (for she did not call it remembering) what lay behind this barrier, she had to think and think only of blackness. Soon was her industry rewarded. Behold, the blackness disintegrated and little by little she saw strange scenes in piercing clarity, yet all in miniature. She saw these visions as though she were above them—say from the height of a church steeple, and she saw her own self, a little shaggy girl, walking below.
If no one disturbed her, if Mrs. Hannah did not cuff her for idleness, she could watch the movements of these people for hours. There were her father and mother, other witches and warlocks, phantom beasts, fiends, imps, goblins, fairies, and always her own self. Sometimes these people and creatures grew so small they were scarcely more than shifting sands. Yet the smaller they grew, the more intense was their actuality. Mr. Zelley said that she observed that when these images, visions, or what you will, were presented to her almost as large as life, they were vapoury and hard to see, but when they were no larger than a grain of sand she could see everything—the little frown on her father’s forehead, the scales on the imps’ shoulders, her mother’s teeth as she smiled, even the nails on the hands of her own self; yet how small must have been those hands when the whole body of an adult was no more than a grain of sand!
Mr. Zelley, an old and broken man, was commanded to tell further. What would she see—on what business would these folk be about? She would see naked men and women with goats’ horns on their heads. They danced back to back. As they danced, they cried ‘hu hu hura hu,’ in the manner of witch-people. She would see the sacrifice of a black kid, and the crucifixion of the sacred wafer. Did she ever see the Devil himself? Witch-people often select one of themselves to be, as it were, high priest in their infernal synagogue. Him they call devil. Such a one she often saw. He was young and lusty and dressed in green leaves. When they danced their sarabands, no one jumped as high as he. He was a pretty man and women loved him. It was only on Black Sabbath he had such power over men and women. At other times he was a cordwainer.
This devil that she saw was but a mock devil. Did she never see that Scriptural Devil—that Foul Fiend Lucifer? Ah, that she could never quite recall—not even with the powerful help of her strange minute images. It is true that after hours of application she would sometimes see a woman whom she knew to be her mother walking through great oak woods (mistletoe-infested) and with her, clinging to her skirts, was a child. The child was her own self. A great light pierced the green gloom of the forest and where it fell stood a man. He was an aristocrat, carried a small rapier with the hilt of which he toyed; he was dressed in green velvet, had a handsome, ruddy face, and loving blue eyes. Nor had he horns, she said, and if a tail, he kept it to himself; but his shoes she noticed were unsightly, as though contrived to accommodate clubbed foot or cloven hoof.
To him her mother knelt, and the child knelt also. The mother said she had a little servant for him, who she promised would obey him in all things. ‘What shall I do with so little a one?’ But he caressed her with his hands. His touch was cold as ice. Even to remember that touch raised the gooseflesh upon her. It was searing as the hands of Death. She never saw this particular scene enacted before her without experiencing a physical shock—pleasant and yet repellent. Then she could see the child accept the Book the man offered her, and she always made a mark in the Book with blood drawn from her own arm. But the end of this particular and much-loved vision was always the same and always disappointing, for she saw herself and her mother sitting by the hearth. Her mother was stirring the pot and as she stirred she talked, telling the story of a little girl who had walked with her mother in a great wood, had met the Devil, and had sworn to serve him. So it was Doll Bilby never could be sure whether or not she had actually promised to serve the Foul Fiend and had made her blood-mark in his Book, or whether it was but a tale told by her mother.