The Last Supper: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

countered, “and I will bear no lashes unless they are ordered me in court.”
    â€œThey will be ordered you,” the Lord replied.
    Twelve days later, he sat as magistrate and summoned Henry Adams before him. As a justice of the peace, the Lord felt inspired by the notion that a simple sequence of punishment would not only silence this stiff-necked man but might very well put down the whole curse of Puritanism that was sweeping the countryside, and might particularly influence a nearby squire, another of “God’s chosen people,” who affected homespun dress, close-cropped hair, and a constant castigation of the Lord’s morals and way of life. Whereby, the ruler of St. David heard three witnesses against Adams:
    â€œI saw him poach.”
    â€œHe cut a hare and I found the entrails.”
    â€œHis wife cooked up the stew, which I heard from Miller, which he heard from Cooper.”
    It was flimsy evidence at best, and the, dark face of Henry Adams clouded over with rage. “What have you to say?” the Justice asked him, and he answered, “They lie.”
    â€œI think you be too stiff-necked in your words and too imprudent,” the Lord said. “You and your kind have a new way of making the lie out of anything that does not come from you. Soon you will want the whole of England.”
    â€œI have done nothing in crime,” Henry Adams said. “I am a God-fearing man and I keep God’s law. I do not poach; am I some dirty thief that you tell me I poach with the testimony of pimps and hirelings?”
    â€œThey only do their tithing,” the Lord said patiently, since he could well afford to be patient.
    â€œTheir cursed tithing,” Henry Adams said, “that has made out of all our folk a community of informers and Iscariots. What kind of fires do you stoke?” he cried, raising his voice.
    â€œEnough,” the Lord said. “I have been patient enough.” He prided himself as a lawyer, which he was not, even to the extent of the ordinary squire. “I could put distraint or escheat upon you, but I give you lashes instead. I give you thirty lashes to make you humble. Then thank God your ears remain.”
    So the ancestor was given thirty lashes, and with a bleeding, lacerated back returned to his stone cottage, his wife, his nine children and his worldly goods. But from that day on he was different, and it got about that he had met with a number of other yoemen and even a squire—all of them of that peculiar persuasion that was yet neither church nor movement, but a way of life and a hatred, puritanism , that took fire as its weapon and the Lord God as its ally. They had no secrets because the system of tithing or informing, long established, brought all news to whoever was master. But they had something that was more potent than secrets; they had a fierce and righteous conviction that the old way was over and done with and that the future belonged to them. And slowly but insistently they were gathering their forces to take hold of the future.
    The ancestor was a stubborn, stiff-necked man who was driven by what some would call perverseness and others a fanatical inability to compromise with the principles he had come to live with. The Lord God had put weapons in his hands with which to defy authority, level aristocracy and drive out whatever devils Rome might send. That his whole world was changing, that a new era of commerce and industry was being born, and that the forces within this new way were powerful beyond resistance the ancestor did not know. He was a vessel in which the wrath of God dwelled, and he was not minded to inquire as to how he had become that vessel. What he was, he was; what would come would come.
    His wife might have suffered, his children too; be that as it may be. We don’t know what his wife, Edith, suffered or if she did, but only that she was the daughter of another farmer, dead by this time, whose name was