GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS
At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in
his uncle's room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on
his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the
haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October
morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the
graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung
over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on
the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they
had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled
into a frosty stillness at daybreak.
"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay,
with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had
been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves
more of a nuisance."
Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion,
he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had
thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt,
somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with
his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a
hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter
of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but
a condemnation."
With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as
a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass
in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made
through the mist. At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him,
and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly
across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung
from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with
muzzles held close to the moist ground.
For a minute Gay's angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot.
Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the
habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the
ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but
a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.
"You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "so you're not only shooting
my partridges, but you're actually shooting them before my eyes."
"What's that?" asked Archie, only half understanding the words, "were
you after that bird yourself then?"
"Well, rather, my friend, and I'll trouble you at the same time to hand
over that string on your shoulder."
"Hand them over? Well, I like that! Why, I shot them."
"But you shot them on my land didn't you?"
"What in the devil do you mean by that? My folks have shot over these
fields before yours were ever heard of about here. A bird doesn't happen
to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your
pasture."
"Do you mean to tell me that you don't respect a man's right to his
game?"
"A man's game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon. This
land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we're not going to
keep off of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he's got a
better right to it."
The assumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original
poaching had done. To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of
his own game by a handsome barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in
the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of
humour, if it had not enraged him.
"All the same I give you fair warning," he retorted, "that the next time
I find you trespassing on my land, I'll have the law after you."
"The law--bosh! Do you think I'm afraid of it?"
Somewhere at the back of Gay's brain, a curtain was drawn, and he saw
clearly as if it were painted in water colour, an English landscape and
a poacher, who had been caught with a stolen rabbit, humbly pulling
the scant locks on his forehead. Well, this was one of the joys of
democracy, doubtless, and he was in for the rest of them. These people
had got the upper hand certainly, as Aunt Kesiah had complained.
"If you think I'll tamely submit to open robbery by such insolent
rascals as you, you're mistaken, young man," he returned.
The next instant he sprang aside and knocked up Archie's gun, which had
been levelled at him. The boy's face was white under his sunburn, and
the feathers on the partridges that hung from his shoulder trembled as
though a strong wind were blowing.
"Rascal, indeed!" he stammered, and spat on the ground after his words
in the effort to get rid of the taste of them, "as if the whole county
doesn't know that you're another blackguard like your uncle before you.
Ask any decent woman in the neighbourhood if she would have been seen in
his company!"
His rage choked him suddenly, and before he could speak again the other
struck him full in the mouth.
"Take that and hold your tongue, you young savage!"
Then as he stooped for his gun, which he had laid down, a shot passed
over his head and whizzed lightly across the meadow.
"The next time I'll take better aim!" called Archie, turning away. "I'll
shoot as straight as the man who gave your uncle his deserts down at
Poplar Spring!"
Whistling to his dogs, he ran on for a short distance; then vaulting the
rail fence he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream
which flowed down from the mill.
While he watched him the anger in Gay's face faded slowly into disgust.
"Now I've stirred up a hornet's nest," he thought, annoyed by his
impetuosity. "Who, I wonder, was the fellow, and what a fool--what a
tremendous fool I have been!"
With his love of ease, of comfort, of popularity, the situation appeared
to him to be almost intolerable. The whole swarm would be at his head
now, he supposed; for instead of silencing the angry buzzing around his
uncle's memory, he had probably raised a tumult which would deafen his
own ears before it was over. Here, as in other hours and scenes, his
resolve had acted less as a restraint than as a spur which had impelled
him to the opposite extreme of conduct.
Still rebuking his impulsiveness, he shouldered his gun again, and
followed slowly in the direction Archie had taken. The half bared
willows by the brook distilled sparkling drops as the small red sun rose
higher over the meadows, and it was against the shimmering background of
foliage, that the figure of Blossom Revercomb appeared suddenly out of
the mist. Her scant skirts were lifted from the cobwebs on the grass,
and her mouth was parted while she called softly after a cow that had
strayed down to the willows.
"You, sir!" she exclaimed, and blushed enchantingly under the pearly dew
that covered her face. "One of our cows broke pasture in the night and
we think she must have crossed the creek and got over on your side of
the meadow. She's a wonderful jumper. We'll have to be hobbling her
soon, I reckon."
"Do you milk?" he asked, charmed by the mental picture of so noble a
dairymaid.
"Except when grandma is well enough. You can't leave it to the darkies
because they are such terrible slatterns. Put a cow in their hands and
she's sure to go dry before three months are over."
She looked up at him, while the little brown mole played hide and seek
with a dimple.
"Have you ever been told that you are beautiful, Miss Keren-happuch?" he
inquired with a laugh.
Her pale eyes, like frosted periwinkles, dropped softly beneath his
gaze.
"How can you think so, sir, when you have seen so many city ladies?"
"I've seen many, but not one so lovely as you are this morning with the
frost on your cheeks."
"I'm not dressed. I just slip on any old thing to go milking."
"It's not the dress, that doesn't matter--though I can imagine you in
trailing purple velvet with a trimming of sable."
An illumination shone in her face, as if her soul had suddenly
blossomed.
"Purple velvet, and what else did you say, sir?" she questioned.
"Sable--fur, you know, the richest, softest, queenliest fur there is."
"I'd like to see it," she rejoined.
"Well, it couldn't improve you!--remember always that the fewer fine
clothes you have on the better. Tell me, Blossom," he added, touching
her shoulder, "have you many lovers?"
She shook her head. "There are so few about here that any woman would
look at."
"I've been told that there's an engaging young rector."
"Mr. Mullen--well, so he is--and he preaches the most beautiful sermons.
But he fancies Molly Merryweather, they say, like all the others, though
he won't be likely to marry anybody from around here, I suppose."
Her drawling Southern tongue lent a charm, he felt, to her naive
disclosures.
"Like all the others?" he repeated smiling. "Do you mean to tell me
that Reuben's piquant little granddaughter is a greater belle in the
neighbourhood than you are?"
"She has a way with them," said Blossom sweetly. "I don't know what it
is and I am sure she is a good, kind girl--but I sometimes think men
like her because she is so contrary. My Uncle Abel has almost lost his
head about her, yet she plays fast and loose with him in the cruelest
fashion."
"Oh, well, she'll burn her fingers some day, at her own fire, and then
she'll be sorry."
"I don't want her to be sorry, but I do wish she'd try just a little
to be kind--one day she promises to marry Abel and the next you'd think
she'd taken a liking to Jim Halloween."
"Perhaps she has a secret sentiment for the rector?" he suggested, to
pique her.
"But I don't believe he will marry anybody around here," she insisted,
while the colour flooded her face.
The discovery that she had once cherished--that she still cherished,
perhaps, a regard for the young clergyman, added a zest to the
adventure, while it freed his passion from the single restraint of which
he had been aware. It was not in his nature to encourage a chivalrous
desire to protect a woman who had betrayed, however innocently, a
sentiment for another man. When the Reverend Mr. Mullen inadvertently
introduced an emotional triangle, he had changed the situation from one
of mere sentimental dalliance into direct pursuit. By some law of reflex
action, known only to the male mind at such instants, the first sign
that she was not to be won threw him into the mental attitude of the
chase.
"Are the fascinations of your Mr. Mullen confined to the pulpit?" he
inquired after a moment, "or does he wear them for the benefit of the
heterodox when he walks abroad?"
"Oh, he's not my Mr. Mullen, sir," she hastened to explain though her
words trailed off into a sound that was suspiciously like a sigh.
"Molly Merryweather's Mr. Mullen, then?"
"I don't think he cares for Molly--not in that way."
"Are you quite as sure that Molly doesn't care for him in that way?"
"She couldn't or she wouldn't be so cruel. Then she never goes to
lectures or Bible classes or mission societies. She is the only girl in
the congregation who never makes him anything to wear. Don't you think,"
she asked anxiously, "that if she really cared about him she would have
done some of these things?"
"From my observation of ladies and clergymen," replied Gay seriously, "I
should think that she would most likely have done all of them."
She appeared relieved, he thought, by the warmth of his protestation.
Actually Mr. Mullen had contributed a decided piquancy to the episode.
"I'm afraid, Blossom," he said after a moment, "that I am beginning
to be a little jealous of the Reverend Mullen. By the way, what is the
Christian name of the paragon?"
"Orlando, sir."
"Ye Gods! The horror grows! Describe him to me, but paint him mildly if
you wish me to survive it."
For a minute she thought very hard, as though patiently striving to
invoke a mental image.
"He's a little taller than you, but not quite--not quite so broad."
"Thank you, you _have_ put it mildly."
"He has the most beautiful curly hair--real chestnut--that grows in two
peaks high on his forehead. His eyes are grey and his mouth is small,
with the most perfect teeth. He doesn't wear any moustache, you see, to
hide them, and they flash a great deal when he preaches---"
"Hold on!"
"I beg you pardon, sir."
"I mean that I am overcome. I am mentally prostrated before such
perfections. Blossom, you are in love with him."
"Oh, no, sir; but I do like to watch him in the pulpit. He gesticulates
so beautifully."
"And now--speak truth and spare not--how do I compare with him?"
"Oh, Mr. Jonathan, you are so different!"
"Do you imply that I am ugly, Blossom?"
"Why, no--not ugly. Indeed I didn't mean that."
"But I'm not so handsome as Reverend Orlando?--now, confess it."
She blushed, and he thought her confusion the most charming he had ever
seen.
"Well, perhaps you aren't quite so--so handsome; but there's something
about you, sir," she added eagerly, "that reminds me of him."
"By Jove! You don't mean it!"
"I can't tell just what it is, but it is something. You both look as
though you'd lived in a city and had learned to wear your Sunday clothes
without remembering that they are your Sunday clothes. Of course, your
hair doesn't curl like his," she added honestly, "and I doubt if you'd
look nearly so well in the pulpit."
"I'm very sure I shouldn't, but Blossom---"
"What, Mr. Jonathan?"
"Do you think you will ever like me as well as you like Mr. Mullen?"
His gay and intimate smile awaited her answer, and in the pause, he
stretched out his hand and laid it on her large round arm a little
above the elbow. The flush deepened in her face, and he felt a slight
trembling under his fingers like the breast of a frightened bird.
"Blossom," he repeated, half mocking, half tender, "do you think you
will ever like me better than you like Mr. Mullen?"
At this her rustic pride came suddenly between them, and withdrawing
her arm from his clasp, she stepped out of the bridle path into the wet
orchard grass that surrounded them.
"I've known him so much longer," she replied.
"And if you know me longer will you like me better, Blossom?"
Then as she still drew back, he pressed nearer, and spoke her name again
in a whisper.
"Blossom--Blossom, are you afraid of me? Do you think I would hurt you?"
The gentleness in his voice stayed her flight for an instant, and in
that instant, as she looked up at him, he stooped quickly and kissed her
mouth.
"What a damned ass I've made of myself," he thought savagely, when she
broke from him and fled over the mill brook into the Revercombs' pasture
beyond. She did not look back, but sped as straight as a frightened hare
to the covert; and by this brilliant, though unconscious coquetry, she
had wrested the victory from him at the moment when it had appeared to
fall too easily into his hands.
"Well, it's all right now. I'll take better care in the future," he
thought, his self-reproach extinguished by the assurance that, after
all, he had done nothing that justified the intrusion of his conscience.
"By Jove, she's a beauty--but she's not my kind all the same," he added
as he strolled leisurely homeward--for like many persons whose moral
standard exceeds immeasurably their ordinary rule of conduct, he
cherished somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain an image of
perfection closely related to the type which he found least alluring in
reality. Humanly tolerant of those masculine weaknesses he shared, he
had erected mentally a pinnacle of virtue upon which he exacted that
a frailer being should maintain an equilibrium. A pretty woman, it was
true, might go at a merry pace provided she was not related to him, but
he required that both his mother and his aunt should be above suspicion.
In earlier days he had had several affairs of sentiment with ladies to
whom he declined to bow if he happened to be walking with a member of
his family; and this fine discrimination was characteristic of him, for
it proved that he was capable of losing his heart in a direction where
he would refuse to lift his hat.
At the late breakfast to which he returned, he found Mr. Chamberlayne,
who had ridden over from Applegate to consult with Kesiah. In appearance
the lawyer belonged to what is called "the old school," and his manner
produced an effect of ostentation which was foreign to his character
as a Christian and a gentleman. His eyebrows, which were still dark
and thick, hung prominently over his small, sparkling eyes behind gold
rimmed spectacles, while a lock of silver hair was brushed across his
forehead with the romantic wave which was fashionable in the period when
Lord Byron was the favorite poet. Kindness and something more--something
that was almost a touching innocence, looked from his face. "It is a
good world--I've always found it to be a good world, and if I've ever
heard anything against it, I've refused to believe it," his look seemed
to say.
All through breakfast he rambled on after his amiable habit--praising
the food, praising the flowers, praising the country, praising
the universe. The only creature or object he omitted to praise was
Kesiah--for in his heart he regarded it as an outrage on the part of
Providence that a woman should have been created quite so ugly. While
he talked he kept his eyes turned away from her, gazing abstractedly
through the window or at a portrait of Mrs. Gay, painted in the first
year of her marriage, which hung over the sideboard. In the mental world
which he inhabited all women were fair and fragile and endowed with
a quality which he was accustomed to describe as "solace." When
occasionally, as in the case of Kesiah, one was thrust upon his
notice, to whom by no stretch of the imagination these graces could be
attributed, he disposed of the situation by the simple device of gazing
above her head. In his long and intimate acquaintance, he had never
looked Kesiah in the face, and he never intended to. He was perfectly
aware that if he were for an instant to forget himself so far as to
contemplate her features, he should immediately lose all patience with
her. No woman, he felt, had the right to affront so openly a man's ideal
of what the sex should be. When he spoke of her behind her back it was
with indignant sympathy as "poor Miss Kesiah," or "that poor good soul
Kesiah Blount"--for in spite of a natural bent for logic, and more than
forty years of sedulous attendance upon the law, he harboured at the
bottom of his heart an unreasonable conviction that Kesiah's plainness
was, somehow, the result of her not having chosen to be pretty.
"Any sport, Jonathan?" he inquired cheerfully, while he buttered his
waffles. "If I scared up one Molly Cotton-tail out of the briars I did
at least fifty."
"No, I didn't get a shot," replied Gay, "but I met a poacher on my land
who appeared to have been more successful. There seems to be absolutely
no respect for a man's property rights in this part of the country. The
fellow actually had the impudence to stop and bandy words with me."
"Well, you mustn't be too hard on him. His ancestors, doubtless, shot
over your fields for generations, and he'd probably look upon an attempt
to enforce the game laws as an infringement of his privileges."
"Do you mean that the landowner is utterly unprotected?"
"By no means--go slow--go slow--you might search the round globe, I
believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbours. But
they've always been taught, you see, to regard the bird in the air as
belonging to the man with the gun. On these large estates game was so
plentiful in the old days and pot-hunters, as they call them, so few,
that it didn't pay a man to watch out for his interest. Now that the
birds are getting scarce, the majority of farmers in the State are
having their lands posted, but your uncle was too little of a sportsman
to concern himself in the matter."
"Well, I knocked a tooth out of the fellow, so the whole county will be
after me like a pack of hounds, I suppose. I wonder who he was, by the
way--young, good looking, rather a bully?"
"The description fits a Revercomb. As they are your next neighbours it
was probably the miller or his brother."
"I know the miller, and it wasn't he--but when I come to think of it,
the youngster had that same rustic look to him. By Jove, I am sorry it
was a Revercomb," he added under his breath.
A frown had settled on the face of the old gentleman, and he poured the
syrup over his buckwheat cakes with the manner of a man who is about to
argue a case for the defence when his natural sympathies are with the
prosecution.
"They are an irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and
I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is
probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his
throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her
bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they
remained in her presence.
A little later, when the two men were smoking in the library, Gay
brought the conversation back again to the point at which the lawyer had
so hastily dropped it.
"Am I likely, then, to have trouble with the Revercombs?" he asked, with
a disturbing memory of Blossom's flaxen head under the hooded shawl.
"It's not improbable that the family will take up the matter. These
country folk are fearful partisans, you see. However, it may lead
to nothing worse than the miller's refusing to grind your corn or
forbidding you to use the bridle path over his pasture."
"Had my uncle any friction in that quarter when he lived here?"
Mr. Chamberlayne's cigar had gone out while he talked, and striking a
match on a silver box, he watched the thin blue flame abstractedly an
instant before he answered.
"Were you ever told," he inquired, "that there was some talk of
arresting Abner Revercomb before the coroner's jury agreed on a
verdict?"
"Abner? He's the eldest of the brothers, isn't he? No, I hadn't heard of
it."
"It was only the man's reputation for uprightness, I believe, that
prevented the arrest. The Revercombs are a remarkable family for their
station in life, and they derive their ability entirely from their
mother, who was one of the Hawtreys. They belong to the new order--to
the order that is rapidly forging to the surface and pushing us
dilapidated aristocrats out of the way. These people have learned a
lot in the last few years, and they are learning most of all that the
accumulation of wealth is the real secret of dominance. When they get
control of the money, they'll begin to strive after culture, and acquire
a smattering of education instead. It's astonishing, perhaps, but the
fact remains that a reputable, hard-working farmer like our friend the
miller, with his primitive little last century grist-mill, has probably
greater influence in the State to-day than you have, for all your two
thousand acres. He has intelligence enough to go to the Legislature and
make a fair showing, if he wants to, and I don't' believe that either of
us could stand in the race a minute against him."
"Well, he's welcome to the doubtful honour! But the thing that puzzles
me is why in thunder his brother Abner should have wanted to shoot my
uncle?"
"It seems--" the lawyer hesitated, coughed and glanced nervously at
the door as if he feared the intrusion of Kesiah--"it seems he was a
lover--was engaged in fact to Janet Merryweather before--before she
attracted your uncle's attention. Later the engagement was broken, and
he married a cousin in a fit of temper, it was said at the time. There
was always ill blood after this, it appeared, and on the morning of your
uncle's death Abner was seen crossing the pasture from Poplar Spring
with his gun on his shoulder."
"It's an ugly story all round," remarked Gay quietly, "and I wish to
heaven that I were out of it. How has my poor mother stood it?"
"She has known very little about it," Mr. Chamberlayne answered, while
his jutting eyebrows twitched nervously as he turned away. "Your mother,
my dear boy, is one of those particularly angelic characters from whose
presence even the thought of evil is banished. You have only to look
into her face to discern how pure and spotless she has kept her soul.
My old friend Jonathan was very devoted to her. She represented, indeed,
the spiritual influence in his life, and there was no one on earth whose
respect or affection he valued so highly. It was his consideration for
her alone that prevented him from making a most unfortunate marriage."
"The girl died insane, didn't she?"
"It was a distressing--a most distressing case; but we must remember,
in rendering our verdict, that if Janet Merryweather had upheld the
principles of her sex, it would never have happened."
"We'll rest it there, then--but what of her daughter? The child could
hardly have been accessory before the fact, I suppose?"
An expression of suffering patience came into the old gentleman's face,
and he averted his gaze as he had done before the looming countenance of
Kesiah.
"Your uncle rarely spoke to me of her," he answered, "but I have reason
to know that her existence was a constant source of distress to him. He
was most anxious both to protect your mother and to provide generously
for the future of Janet's daughter.
"Yet I understand that there was no mention of her in his will."
"This omission was entirely on your mother's account. The considerable
property--representing a third of his entire estate--which was left in
trust to me for a secret purpose, will go, of course, to the girl. In
the last ten years this property has practically doubled in value, and
Molly will take possession of the income from it when she reaches her
twenty-first birthday. The one condition is that at Reuben's death she
shall live with your aunt."
"Ah," said Jonathan, "I begin to see."
"At the time, of course, he believed that your mother would survive
him only a few months, and his efforts to shield her from any painful
discoveries extended even after his death. His wish was that the
girl should be well educated and prepared for any change in her
circumstances--but unfortunately she has proved to be rather a wilful
young person, and it has been impossible entirely to fulfil his
intentions with regard to her. Ah, he wasn't wise always, poor Jonathan,
but I never doubted that he meant well at bottom, however things
may have appeared. His anxiety in the case of your mother was very
beautiful, and if his plans seem to have miscarried, we must lay the
blame after all, on the quality of his judgment, not of his heart."
"And the girl will be twenty-one next April, I am told?"
"Her birthday is the seventeenth, exactly ten years from the date of
Jonathan's death."