Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/265

 Gideon—take up your duties as a cat.' A little girl sat up abruptly in her trundle bed. She had been sound asleep the moment before, now she was quiveringly awake. Over on the big red press, pewter plates and platters began to shimmer. The spinning-wheel was a great spider web. Nearer, so near her little hand could reach the valance, loomed the great bed on whose deck were stretched the sleeping bodies of Goody and Goodman Bale. Many times before she had awoken at this weird dawning hour and sat thus unreal in an unreal world staring at objects until they became part of her own enchantment. Strange tiny faces began to twist among the onions knotted in long strings from the hewn rafters—hobgoblin faces grimacing. Sometimes a little claw-like hand no larger than a man's thumb-nail would pick at the knots that held it. A whisper at the door—the blow of leaves, the rustles of a skirt. What skirt is that? Not of this world, surely. What woman taps her fingers on the pane? A hag from Hell. Now the red coals begin their cunning winking. The child sees the salamander sprawled contentedly in the fire...

Not frightened—not afraid. They are her people. Mine, mine, mine. And she thinks of her father and mother who burned for their witchcraft in France...

Two hundred witches had burned that day. The ashes had fallen upon the clean decks of the English boat at harbor there, and Captain Bale, a kind man, finding this witch's cub hungry and sobbing about the locked door of a cottage, picked her up and carried