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Some of the sick began to recover: but on the evening of the 31st the Saviour took Abel's wife, Benigna, home to her blessed rest, and on the following morning, August 1, she was laid in her grave; at seven o'clock in the evening we held a meeting with the Esquimaux, especially with regard to improve the solemn warning given in that harvest the Lord had gathered from this church.
Sally gurgled. She did not yield quite with Abel's helplessness at a joke, but the Squire's blasphemous irony had its force with her too, though she felt it right to bring herself back to her religious conviction with the warning, "Some day you'll go too fur." "Yes, I'm always expecting the lightning to strike in the wrong place. Didn't Nixon or Redfield or Hughey Blake say anything?
Small shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on. In Abel's dreams another house was already rising in the fair green meadow beyond the mill-race.
There were rolls of golden butter, nut-brown eggs, snowy bouquets of broccoli, daffodils with the sun striking through their aery petals, masses of dark wallflower where a stray bee revelled. There was Abel's honey, with a large placard drawn by himself proclaiming in drunken capitals: ABEL WOODUS. BEE-MAN. COFFINS. HONEY. WREATHS.
The fiend that lurked in the bowers of Eden, and made its flowers dim with the smoke of fraternal blood, is whispering in your ear. Beware, my son, beware. Every sigh and tear caused by the indulgence of unhallowed passion, cries as loud to Almighty God for vengeance as Abel's reeking blood. Come, Gabriella, I leave him to reflection and prayer. I leave him to God and his own soul.
Thus we learn again the lesson that sin separates from our Father, and that chastisements, not accepted as signs of His love, build up a black wall between God and us. Nor had Cain been told that his life was in danger. But his conscience made a coward of him, as of us all, and told him what he deserved. There were, no doubt, many other children of Adam, who would be ready to avenge Abel's death.
Skipper Ed's trap boat, though a fine sea craft, was not so fast a sailer in a light breeze as Abel's, and though Skipper Ed and Jimmy had left the island some little time in advance the boats were now so close that Abel could make himself heard, and standing in the bow he bawled: "Pujolik! Pujolik!" A steamship in these waters was uncommon.
By this, Abel's heart excelled Cain's, and Seth obtained the pre-eminence, and Enoch walked with God. It was this that strove with the old world, and which they rebelled against, and which sanctified and instructed Noah to salvation.
Hazel moved about, seeing to supper, for she was as hungry as Foxy, talking all the time in her rather shrilly sweet voice, while she dumped the cracked cups and the loaf and margarine on the bare table. The kettle was not boiling, so she threw some bacon-grease on the fire, and a great tongue of flame sprang out and licked at Abel's beard.
The storm of rebellion that led to the parting, the wild and reckless life in the far country, the gambling, the drinking, the fighting, the things that he knew and the things that he guessed and then, the ways of Abel when he returned, at times, in the earlier years, with his pockets full of money to spend it in the worst company and with a high-handed indifference to all restraint, yet always with a personal charm of generosity and good-will that drew people to him and gave him a strange power over them and then, Abel's final refusal to listen any more to the pleadings of the true faith, his good-humoured obstinacy in unbelief, his definite choice of the world as his portion, and after that the long silence and the growing rumours of his wealth, his extravagance, his devotion, if not to the lust of the flesh, at least to the lust of the eyes and the pride of life all these thoughts and pictures rushed upon Nathaniel North and overwhelmed him with painful terror and foreboding.
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