Adam Wick's bench and rule of Sabbath observance had been common talk in Preston Plains. But it had grown too familiar, for subjects of dispute ever gave way there to other subjects. Some one said it was pathetic. The minority thought it a happy instance to throw in the face of the bigoted majority, that they had driven from the church a man of religious feeling. The minister had consulted Andrew Hill, that thick-set man with the dry mouth and gray chin-beard.
“Not take out that pillar!” said Andrew Hill. “Ah,” said the minister, “I'm afraid that wouldn't do. It would seem like--”
“I wouldn't move that pillar if the whole town was sidin' with him.”
“Not while I'm alive. Adam Wick, he's obstinate.” Mr. Hill shut his mouth grimly.
The minister moved away. They were a stiff-necked people, but after all he felt himself to be one of them. It was his own race. He knew how Andrew Hill felt, as if something somewhere within him were suddenly clamped down and riveted. He understood Adam too, in his private pew on the side porch, the hymn-book on the chair, his eyes on Preston Plains steeple, fixed and glittering. He thought, “We don't claim to be altogether lovely.”
Adam was in his own eyes without question a just man suffering injustice. His fathers in their Genesis and Exodus had so suffered, faced stocks, pillory, the frowning edge of the wilderness, and possessed their souls with the same grim congratulation. No generation ever saw visions and sweat blood, and left a moderate-minded posterity. Such martyrs were not surer that the God of Justice stood beside them than Adam was sure of the injustice of that pillar in that pew, nor more resolved that neither death nor hell should prevail against the faithfulness of their protest.
And the turkey strutted in the yard, the chickens hurried and peeped, the thunder muttered at intervals as if the earth were breathing heavily in its hot sleep.
The church-bell rang for the end of the morning service. It floated up from the distance, sweet and plaintive.
Adam rose and carried the cushion, chair, and hymn-book into the house.
The storm was rising, darkening. It crouched on the hills. It seemed to gather its garments and gird its loins, to breathe heavily with crowded hate, to strike with daggers of lightning right and left.