The Last Supper: And Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

Squire, and that he had given her away without the maritagium. That was a marriage fee that was already archaic, a purchase price to the liege instead of the right of the first night, which had been fought down long past. But when the ruler of St. David heard that meetings were being held by those whose close-cropped hair was already giving them the name of Roundheads, he called before him once again the stiff-necked farmer Henry Adams. By now, it was a vendetta which he was compelled to pursue, and by now, in the mind of the ancestor, who read one book over and over until he knew almost every word of it by heart, this Lord of the Manor was indeed and literally Pharaoh. As Moses had come before, Pharaoh, so did he come before the Lord’s court.
    â€œPay me the maritagium , which is long overdue,” the Lord said.
    â€œIt is not mine to pay or any man’s to pay. What manner of free men are we to pay a fee to take a lass to wife. She has born me nine children and now you come to me for the fee.”
    â€œI am not disposed to argue that point. Is your back healed?”
    â€œIt will never heal,” Henry Adams answered.
    â€œAll flesh heals,” the Lord smiled.
    â€œIt was not the flesh that was seared but my immortal soul.”
    â€œAnd how would your immortal soul feel about distraint?”
    The farmer said nothing but his black eyes never wavered from their keen, unblinking scrutiny of this man who was persecuting him. To repeated demands that he pay a fee long outlawed, he kept silence, and then he went home. But that same evening, the Lord’s men came, and they picked the farm clean. This was distraint. They took his stock and his feed and his crop and his tools and even his dogs. They took the furniture from his home and the clothes from his small wardrobe. They took the pewter dishes and the copper pots. In other words, they took everything except the clothes off the backs of the man, the woman and the nine children; and they left behind them varying degrees of grief except in the man Henry Adams.
    So does Pharaoh serve those who are stiff-necked, but God has his own way of serving Pharaoh. Adams called his family around him and said to them,
    â€œWe will go away out of this place, but first there is something I must do. All of you set out now for Squire Aldrich’s place, and he will shelter you until I join you, and that will be before morning.” It was ten miles across the moors to the farm of this squire, who was a leader of the Puritan people thereabouts; but the family knew better than to argue with the father when he spoke like that, and they did as he told them to do.
    They went in tears and sorrow, weeping as the children of Israel had once wept when they left behind them the fair and goodly land of Goshen and fared forth into the wilderness to face they knew not what; but the man who was left behind moved through his empty house with dry eyes. What the Lord of the manor had taken away in distraint were but things, and what were things for a man to weep over? Aloud he said, as he stalked through the empty house and the lifeless barnyard,
    â€œThe Lord God is my rock and my salvation, and I shall not be afraid. I shall not fear. Naked and with only my two hands I came into this world, and naked I am now, with only my two hands, yet they serve the Lord God of hosts, in his righteous anger.”
    And indeed he felt such cold and righteous anger as would not be unbecoming the fierce and just God he served. He looked at a pigpen from which the pigs were gone, at a chicken coop from which the chickens were taken. Contemplatively, he examined a sheep fold that was bare of sheep, a stall bare of horse. All was gone; all was bare by distraint. Well, he had his own manner of distraint, and he thought of it aloud, since at this moment he felt compelled to share his bitter reflections with the only being he acknowledged as his superior.
    â€œI will wipe this land like dirt