Go Tell It on the Mountain: Part Two

This was in answer to the prayers of the faithful, who had never ceased, both day and night, to cry out for deliverance.

Soon it occurred to her that there was no longer any reason to tarry here.

When he came back at times like this he would be petulant and penitent.

When he came back at times like this he would be petulant and penitent.

She lingered only for this, and he knew it, even though she no longer exhorted him as she had in days but shortly gone by.

And he looked at her, full of gratitude and a sudden, wild conjecture: he had been real for her, she had watched him, and prayed for him during all those years when she, for him, had been nothing but a shadow.

He smiled in the instant before he knelt down at his thronelike chair to pray; and thought again, as he had been thinking for eleven nights, that there was about his elders an ease in the holy place, and a levity, that made his soul uneasy.

And this filled him for a moment with a holy rage — that she stood, so brazen, in the congregation of the righteous and refused to bow her head.

She did not know how to answer her mother’s shrill, meaningless questions, put with the furious affectation of maternal concern; she could not pretend, when she kissed her mother, or submitted to her mother’s kiss, that she was moved by anything more than an unpleasant sense of duty.

And it was this decision on the part of her aunt, for which Elizabeth did not forgive her for many years, that precipitated the third disaster, the separation of herself from her father — from all that she loved on earth.

To this perpetual accusation Elizabeth had never replied; she merely regarded her aunt with a wide-eyed, insolent stare, meant at once to register her disdain and to thwart any pretext for punishment.

He moved exactly like a cat, perpetually on the balls of his feet, and with a cat’s impressive, indifferent aloofness, his face closed, in his eyes no fight at all.

Reality, so to speak, burst in for the first time on her great dreaming, and she found occasion to wonder, ruefully, what had made her imagine that, once with Richard, she would have been able to withstand him.

She hurried up the steps, smiling a little at this fancy: it was because he looked so young and defenseless as he walked away, and yet so jaunty and strong.

And this caused her to stiffen with a tentative anger against Florence, and with pride and fear.