By nightfall that Saturday Caleb had gathered, with a sinking of the heart, that Will designed to accompany his elders on the morrow—and to Early Service! The boy had apparently failed to remark the breach in the old chapel routine the previous Sabbath: the Sunday had been hushed up only too successfully. It was as far as Caleb dared go, in the first plunge of confession, to say that, in the absence of a vehicle, Early Service at Chipstone was out of the question nowadays.
Such was the situation that faced the old couple in the sleepless watches of the second Saturday night, and dimmed even Martha’s joy in the prodigal’s return to religion.
“Best go with him, like when he was little,” she decided. “We mustn’t unsettle him so soon, now he’s found God again.”
“Ain’t so sure he’s found God,” said Caleb shrewdly. “God ain’t in a goose-quill, and writin’ a piece about Daniel ain’t the road to heaven, else where would me and most o’ the Brethren be? To my thinkin’ Will’s onny lost the Devil.”
“It’s the same thing. What else does he want to go to chapel for, and Early Service at that?”
“To make trouble,” said Caleb fretfully. “We was all so happy till he come—and you had Maria.”
“Oh, Caleb, you don’t deserve the Lord should give him back to you! And if you don’t go to-morrow, I’ll withdraw from you.”
“That ain’t right,” said poor Caleb, puzzled by the unscrupulous threat. “But ef it’s onny for Morning Sarvice he’ll expect you to goo too.”
“He knows about my rheumatics, dear heart,” she said casuistically. “He knows I couldn’t walk even to get my bonnet cleaned.”
“But ef you were to tell him about the New Jerusalem——?”
“He’d best find that himself, now he’s on the way. It’s not far from Daniel.”
Thus it was that Uncle Lilliwhyte was again defrauded of his ritual and that after a still more furtive and still earlier service in the sanctity of their airless bedroom, with hymns muted and prayers guiltily whispered, the couple appeared at an eight o’clock breakfast with an air of devotions unpaid, and Caleb, hurrying the meal, remarked that ’twas time to get ready for chapel or they would miss even the Morning Service.
At this, Will, who was in his fashionable London jacket—to the admiring awe of his elders—sprang up, and rushing to the back of the house near the water-barrel, brushed away hastily at a dull speck on his boot where a spurt from the boiling kettle had blotted out the shine he had so laboriously imparted. The male ferret, caged just above his stooping head, awoke at the agitation, and started rubbing itself under the neck as if in parody, but far more swiftly and persistently; then it jerked its nose and its thin whiskers through the wires.