I sat on the bench by the kitchen door and regarded Margaret Henan,
while with her callous thumb she pressed down the live fire of her
pipe and gazed out across the twilight-sombred fields. It was the
very bench Tom Henan had sat upon that last sanguinary day of life.
And Margaret sat in the doorway where the monster, blinking at the
sun, had so often wagged its head and brayed. We had been talking
for an hour, she with that slow certitude of eternity that so
befitted her; and, for the life of me, I could lay no finger on the
motives that ran through the tangled warp and woof of her. Was she
a martyr to Truth? Did she have it in her to worship at so
abstract a shrine? Had she conceived Abstract Truth to be the one
high goal of human endeavour on that day of long ago when she named
her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the
ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the
self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?--the one streak of
lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or,
reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of
the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a
steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or--and a subtler
thought--was she mastered by some vaster, profounder superstition,
a fetish-worship of which the Alpha and the Omega was the cryptic
SAMUEL?
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