“An’ yo’ came, Missy!” he replied.
“Parson,” Prebol pleaded, “I’m alone mos’ the time. Mout yo’ two eat hyar on my bo’t? The table—hit’d be comp’ny.”
“Certainly we’ll come,” Nelia promised, “if he’d just soon.”
“I’d rather,” Rasba assented, and at his tone Nelia felt a curious sensation of pity and mischievousness. At the same time, she recovered her self-possession. She demanded that Rasba let her help him bring over the supper, add a feminine relish, and set the table with a daintiness which was an addition to the fascination of her presence. Gaily she fed Prebol the delicate things which he was permitted to eat, then sat down with Rasba, her face to the light, and Prebol could watch her bantering, teasing, teaching Parson Rasba things he had never known he lacked.
After supper she brought over a basket full of books, twenty volumes. She dumped them onto the table, leather, cloth, and board covers, of red, blue, gray, brown, and other gay colours. Parson Rasba had seen government documents and even some magazines with picture covers, but in the mountains where he had ridden his Big Circuit with such a disastrous end he had never seen such books. He hesitated to touch one; he cried out when three or four slipped off the pile onto the floor.
“Missy, won’t they git muddied up!”
“They’re to read!” she told him. “Listen,” and she began to read—poetry, prose at random.
The Prophet did not know, he had never been trained to know—as few men ever are trained—how to combat 170 feminine malice and spoiled power. He listened, but not with averted eyes. Prebol, himself a spectator at a scene different from any he had ever witnessed, was still enough more sophisticated to know what she was doing, and he was delighted.
By and by the injured man drifted into slumber, but Rasba gave no sign of flagging interest, no traces of a mind astray from the subject at hand. He felt that he must make the most of this revelation, which came after the countless revelations which he had had since arriving down the river. There was a fear clutching at his heart that it might end; that in a moment this woman might depart and leave him unenlightened, and unable ever to find for himself the unimaginable world of words which she plucked out of those books and pinned into the great vacant spaces of his mind which he had kept empty all these years—not knowing that he was waiting for this night, when he should have the Mississippi bring into his eddy, alongside his own mission boat, what he most needed.
He sat there, a great, pathetic figure, shaggy, his heart thumping, taking from this trim, neat, beautiful woman the riches which she so casually, almost wantonly, threw to him in passing.