IN WHICH PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON
As Abel crossed the poplar log he said to himself, "I shall not think of
Her again"; when he reached the end of the willows he said, "I must
not think of Her again"; and at the beginning of the kitchen garden, he
changed this to, "I will not think of Her again."
The scent of hyacinths, which floated from a row blooming on either
side of the white paling gate, whipped his senses into revolt, and
he quickened his steps in a vain effort to escape from the tormenting
fragrance. Yet even while he fled from his pain he knew in his heart
that he did not desire the strength to turn and renounce it--that to
banish the image of Molly from his thoughts was to drive the bloom from
the meadow, the perfume from the air, the sunlight from the orchard.
Spring became as desolate as winter when it was robbed of the thought of
her.
By the house a late pear-tree was in blossom, and the sunshine, falling
obliquely across it, awoke a white fire in its branches, as if piles
of new fallen snow had warmed suddenly to a reflected flame. Beneath
it Sarah Revercomb was sowing portulaca seeds in a rockery she had made
over a decaying stump. Her back was strained with bending, but not once
had she stopped to gaze at the glorified pear-tree overhead. All her
life she had distinguished carefully between the aristocracy and the
common herd of blossoms, and not all the magic gilding of the spring
sunshine could delude her into regarding the useful product of a
fruit-tree as a flower.
"I don't see why you want to go wearin' yo' Sunday clothes every day,
Abel," she observed as he was about to pass her.
"Why shouldn't I?" he retorted with the defiance of despair.
Something in his voice caused the woman who had borne him to raise
herself from her stooping posture, and stare at him with an amazed and
incredulous expression, as if she were asking herself when and where
she could have given him birth. In her mental vision, which saw only one
thing at a time, but saw that thing with great distinctness, the idea
of love slowly presented itself as the cause of such a reversal of the
natural order as a Sunday suit on week days. Her conceptions of life
were derived so closely from facts, or from a logic as inexorable as
facts, that she was conscious of a baffled and exasperated sensation
when she was confronted by anything intangible which would not, as she
put it in her own mind, "get out of her way." It was natural enough, she
knew, that a material object or condition should possess the power
to block one's progress or even to change the normal current of one's
existence. Such things had happened a dozen times at least in her
limited experience. But when a mere emotion assumed the importance
and the reality of a solid body, she was seized by the indignant
astonishment with which a mathematician might regard the differential
calculus if it ceased suddenly to behave as he expected it to do. She
had always controlled her own feeling with severity, and it was beyond
the power of her imagination to conceive a possible excuse--unless it
was a disordered liver--for another person's inability to do the
same. Besides, as she had often asked herself, what was the use of not
controlling your feelings when you came to think about it?
"Thar ain't a bit of use in yo' goin' on this way over that girl, Abel,"
she said presently, as an annotation to his last remark, "you'd better
jest start along about yo' work, an' put her right straight out of yo'
mind. I al'ays knew thar warn't a particle of sense in it."
There was sound reason in her advice, and he did not attempt to dispute
it. The unfortunate part was, however, that in the very soundness of
her reason lay its point of offence. Philosophy was dealing again in her
high handed fashion with emotion, and emotion, in its turn, was treating
philosophy with an absence of that respectful consideration to which
she was entitled. Abel knew quite as well as Sarah that there wasn't "a
particle of sense" in his thinking of Molly; but the possession of this
knowledge did not interfere in the least with either the intensity or
the persistence of his thought of her. His mind seemed to have as much
control over the passion that raged in his heart as an admonishing
apostle of peace has over a mob that is headed toward destruction. At
the moment he felt that the last straw--the one burden more that he
could not bear--was to be told to follow what he admitted to be the only
clear and rational course. Turning away from her without a reply, he
rushed through the open gate and across the road and the poplar log into
the friendly shelter of his mill.
"What he needs is to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of
quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her
trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in her
rockery.
In the twilight of the mill, where he was hunted through the door by the
scent of flowers, he went over to the shelf of books in a corner, and
taking down the volumes one by one, turned their leaves with a trembling
and eager hand, as though he were seeking some thought so strong, so
steadying, that once having secured it, the rush of his passion would
beat in vain against its impregnable barrier. But the books, like
Sarah, treated life in the grand manner and with the fine detachment of
philosophy. He could get no assistance from them, because they only told
him that he would be happier if he acted always as a rational being, and
this did not help him. They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of
unanimity, that human nature would be better and happier if it were not
human nature, but something else. Some of the writers believed that this
result might be attained by making many laws and some of them were of
the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that
were already made. All admitted that the world was very badly off and
that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it--but
the trouble was that each writer's remedy was different from every other
writer's, and yet each writer's was the imperative, the essential one.
There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human
nature would be better and happier if it were different. But poor human
nature, having known this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on,
just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be.
"There's no help for me here," said Abel, and moving away from the
shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping
wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with little round
greenish balls of flowers. On the hot agony in his heart the languorous
Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch. Beneath the throb
of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half
spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his
immediate suffering.
For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of
its presence. Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he
drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discussion
of politics. At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech
was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might
take the place of love in his life. The game of politics showed itself
to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.
A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream-haunted face and the
patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty
years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a
brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the
following Friday. Though the old clergyman had spent half a century in a
futile endeavour to persuade every man to love his neighbour as himself,
and thereby save society the worry and the expense of its criminal
code, he still hoped on with the divine far-sighted hope of the
visionary--hoped not because he saw anything particularly encouraging
in his immediate outlook, but because it was his nature to hope and he
would probably have continued to do so had Fate been so unjust as to
consign him to an Inferno. He was one of those in whom goodness is a
natural instinct, and whose existence, even in a more or less inglorious
obscurity, leavens the entire lump of humanity. Mr. Mullen, who regarded
him with the active suspicion with which he viewed all living examples
of Christian charity, spoke of him condescendingly as a "man of
impracticable ideas"--a phrase which introduced his index prohibitory of
opinions. But the old clergyman, having attained a serviceable sense
of humour, as well as a heavenly fortitude, went on quietly doing good
after the fashion in which he was made. In his impracticable way he
had solved the problem of life by an indiscriminate application of the
Golden Rule. This solution had appeared to him so simple and yet so
complete, that he had spent fifty years, with but moderate success, in
persuading others to adopt it. At the end he was not what Mr. Mullen
would have called a "shining light," in the Church, yet his bread cast
upon the waters had returned to him in quantities, which, though small
and moist, were sufficient, with stringent economy, to keep body and
soul together. One of these quantities he discerned now in the eager
young countryman, whose face accompanied him through a trying day, and
helped to brighten his self-sacrificing labours.
To Abel, driving home some hours later in his gig, the old clergyman was
present less as a mental image, than as a vague yet impelling influence
for good. The impression was still in his thoughts, when he overtook
Judy Hatch a mile or two before reaching the crossroads, and stopped to
ask her to drive with him as far as her cottage. At sight of her wan and
haggard face, he felt again that impulse of pity, which seemed while it
lasted to appease the violence of his suffering.
"I haven't seen you to speak to for a long time," he observed, as she
mounted over the wheel to her place at his side.
"Not since that day by the brook," she answered, and flinched as if a
raw wound had been touched.
Though she did not look at him, he was conscious, through some subtle
undercurrent of feeling, that her spirit was drenched with the young
summer, with the pulsing of life of the June forest and the scent of
wild grape and honeysuckle which filled the air. Her face was lifted to
the fluted leaves of a sycamore, from which the song of a thrush rippled
like running water, and which gave her, if he had only known it, a
likeness to one of the minor saints in a primitive Italian painting. So
little, however, did her passion use her body as its medium that, after
glancing casually at her parted lips, he decided that she was probably
counting the eggs she had set to hatch in her hen-house, and hesitated
to interrupt the absorbing business of her calculations. Mentally,
he regarded her with the ungrudging respect which a man of any sort
instinctively yields to a woman who obviously disdains to ensnare his
judgment in the mesh of his senses. The palpitations of her spirit were
communicated to him in so elusive a process, that, even while he felt
the stir of his pulses, he was not aware that it was due in any measure
to the woman at his side. If she had been pretty--if she had been
even attractively plain--it would hardly have occurred to him that her
intense and breathless expression was associated with the hatching of
chickens; but, like other philosophers of whom he had never heard,
it was impossible for him to distinguish the qualities of the
thing-in-itself from the qualities of the phenomenon beneath his eyes.
Had he winnowed his superficial impressions the underlying thought would
probably have been: "No woman with a bosom as flat as that can have any
nonsense about her." From the first moment of their meeting he had never
doubted that it was this lack of "nonsense" which had attracted him. He
liked her evident indifference to his opinion of her, and he liked, too,
her listless silence, when she sat, with clasped hands, gazing straight
ahead through the shadowy colonnade of the woods. Not once had her
troubled look wandered from the moist dead leaves on the ground, to the
misty edges of the forest, where small wild flowers thronged in a pale
procession of pipsissewa, ladies' tresses, and Enchanter's nightshade.
"Did you know that the Gays are in Europe?" asked Judy turning her eyes
on his face for the first time.
His heart gave a throb and was quiet.
"No, I hadn't heard it," he replied in an arid voice.
"They say it's more than likely Molly will marry Mr. Jonathan. He's
waitin' on her."
Reaching for the whip, Abel touched the mare lightly on her glossy
flank. After that single pang his suffering had left him--for six weeks
of sleepless nights and tormented days had exhausted his endurance and
reduced him to a condition of emotional lassitude. In his brief
reaction from spiritual revolt into a state of apathetic submission, he
approached his mother's permanent austerity of mind as closely as he was
ever likely to do in the whole of his experience. The mere possibility
of a fresh awakening of feeling filled him with aversion. At the moment
he had as profound a distrust as Sarah of the immaterial elements; and
looking ahead, he saw his future stretching before him as firm and
flat as the turnpike which he was approaching. Delight and despair were
equally distasteful to him. He shrank as instinctively from the thought
of love as a man shrinks from re-opening an old wound which is still
sensitive to the touch, though it has ceased to ache. And so prone
is human nature to affirm its inherent belief in the eternity of the
present, that he was assured, not only that this was the most desirable
point of view he had ever reached, but that it was entirely out of the
question that he should ever travel beyond it to another. Forgetting
the many times when he had revolted from advice merely because it was
"sensible," he began calmly to arrange his life in accordance with that
law of practical expediency against which a month ago he had so hotly
rebelled.
As they drove out of the woods, and turned into the sunken road beyond
the ordinary which led in the direction of Solomon Hatch's farm, he
withdrew his gaze from the head of his mare and looked attentively at
his companion.
"I hope you are having an easier time, Judy," he said.
Her eyes brimmed. "You are the only person who cares about that, Abel."
"Why shouldn't I care? You are the best and the cleverest girl I know,"
he returned.
Her gratitude fanned his sympathy, which was beginning to smoulder, and
he felt again the pleasant sense of being in the position of benefactor
rather than of the benefited. His eyes rested without shrinking on her
sallow face, with the faint bluish tinge to the eyelids, and on her
scant drab coloured hair, which was combed smoothly back from her
forehead--and while he looked his pity clothed itself in the softer and
gentler aspect of reason. "She ought to be happy," he thought. "It's
a shame they should lead her such a life! It's a shame some good man
doesn't fall in love with her and marry her. She's really not so plain,
after all. I've seen many women who were worse looking than she is."
Unknown to him, an illusion was gradually shedding colour and warmth on
his vision of her. Mentally, he had endowed her with all the sober and
saner virtues to which his present mood was committed--though he had, in
reality, no better reason for so doing than the fact that she evidently
esteemed him and that she was deserving of pity. The discordant forces
of passion no longer disturbed the calm and orderly processes of his
mind, and he told himself that he saw clearly, because he saw stark
images of facts, stripped not only of the glamour of light and shade,
but even of the body of flesh and blood. Life spread before him like
a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely
conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these
perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly
unthinkable. Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for
him to conceive of it in motion.
And all the while, in that silence, which seemed so harmless while it
was, in reality, so dangerous, the repressed yet violent force in
Judy wrought on his mood in which bare sense and bare thought were
unprotected by any covering of the love which had clothed them as far
back as he could remember. That breathless, palpitating appeal for
happiness--an appeal which is as separate from beauty as the body of
flesh is separate from the garment it wears--was drawing him slowly yet
inevitably toward the woman at his side. Her silence--charged as it was
with the intoxicating spirit of June--had served the purpose of life as
neither words nor gestures could have done. It had reconciled him to her
presence in the very moment that made him conscious of the strength of
his pity.
Presently, as they drove through the burned out clearing, she spoke
again.
"I wonder why you are always so good to me, Abel?"
He liked the honest sound of the words, and he did not know that before
uttering them she had debated in her heart whether it was worth while
to marry Abel since she could not marry Mr. Mullen. Marriage, having
few illusions for her, possessed, perhaps for that reason, the greater
practical value. She was unhappy with her stepmother in a negative way,
but so impervious had she become to casual annoyances, that she
hardly weighed the disadvantages of her home against the probable
relinquishment of Mrs. Mullen's washing day after her marriage to Abel.
Her soul was crushed like a trapped creature in the iron grip of a
hopeless passion, and her insensibility to the lesser troubles of
life was but the insensibility of such a creature to the stings of the
insects swarming around its head. The outcome of her drive with Abel
aroused only a dull curiosity in her mind. Some years ago, in the days
before Mr. Mullen, she would probably have fallen a helpless victim to
the miller had his eyes wandered for an instant in her direction. But
those days and that probability were now over forever.
Unfortunately, however, it is not given to a man to look into the soul
of a woman except through the inscrutable veil of his own personality.
Had Abel pierced that purple calico dress and witnessed the pathetic
struggle in Judy's bosom, his next words would hardly have been uttered.
"I wish I could do something to make you happier, Judy."
She looked at him with mysterious, brooding eyes, and he was conscious
again of the attraction, as subtile and as penetrating as a perfume,
which she exhaled in the stillness, and which vanished as soon as she
broke the quivering intensity of the silence. That this attraction was
merely the unconscious vibration of her passion for another man, which
shed its essence in solitude as naturally as a flower sheds its scent,
did not occur to him. Without his newly awakened pity it could not have
moved him. With it he felt that he was powerless to resist its appeal.
"Why shouldn't I be good to you, Judy?" he repeated.
Tears overflowed her eyes at his words. Looking at her, he saw her not
as she was, but as he desired that she should be; and this desire, he
knew, sprang from his loneliness and from his need of giving sympathy
to some one outside of himself. The illusion that surrounded her bore
no resemblance to the illusion of love--yet it was akin to it in the
swiftness and the completeness with which it was born. If any one had
told him an hour ago that he was on the verge of marriage to Judy, he
would have scoffed at the idea--he who was the heartbroken lover of
Molly! Yet this sudden protecting pity was so strong that he found
himself playing with the thought of marriage, as one plays in lofty
moments with the idea of a not altogether unpleasant self-abnegation.
He did not love Judy, but he was conscious of an overwhelming desire to
make Judy happy--and like all desires which are conceived in a fog of
uncertainty, its ultimate form depended less upon himself than it did
upon the outward pressure of circumstances.
"I sometimes think it's more than anybody can stand to go on living as
I do," said Judy, breaking the silence, "to slave an' slave an' never to
get so much as a word of thanks for it."
For a moment he said nothing. Then turning he looked hard into her humid
eyes, and what he saw there made him bend over and take her hand.
"Do you think I could make you happier, Judy?" he asked.
BOOK SECOND
THE CROSS-ROADS
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED
Some six months after Abel's parting from Molly, he might have been seen
crossing the lawn at Jordan's Journey on a windy November morning, and
even to a superficial observer it would have been evident that certain
subtle modifications had been at work in his soul. Disappointed love had
achieved this result with a thoroughness which victorious love could
not have surpassed. Because he had lost Molly, he had resolved, in his
returning sanity, that he would make of himself the man who might have
won Molly had she known him in his completeness. And in the act of
resolving, his character had begun to ripen into the mellowness of
maturity.
The day was bleak, and something of this external bleakness was
reflected in the look which he raised to the ivy draped dormer-windows
in the hooded roof. Small greyish clouds were scudding low above the
western horizon, and the sorrel waste of broomsedge was rolling high as
a sea. The birds, as they skimmed over this billowy expanse, appeared
blown, despite their efforts, on the wind that swept in gusts out of
the west. On the lawn at Jordan's Journey the fallen leaves were dancing
madly like a carnival in rough carousal. Watching them it was easy to
imagine that they found some frenzied joy in this dance of death--the
end to which they had moved from the young green of the bud through the
opulent abundance of the summer. The air was alive with their sighing.
They rustled softly under foot as Abel walked up the drive, and then,
whipped by a strong gust, fled in purple and wine-coloured multitudes
to the shelter of the box hedges, or, rising in flight above the naked
boughs, beat against the closed shutters before they came to rest
against the square brick chimneys on the roof.
Beneath the trees a solitary old negro was spreading manure over
the grass, hauling it in a wheelbarrow from a pile somewhere in the
barnyard. Back and forth he passed, scattering the fine manure from his
spade until the wheelbarrow was empty, when he replenished it in
the barnyard and returned to his sprinkling. All the while he smoked
steadily a long corncob pipe, and to watch him at his task, was to
receive an impression that the hauling of manure was sufficient to fill
one's life with dignity and contentment. The work appeared no longer a
menial employment but a sober and serious share of the great problem of
production.
"That's the way I intend to go about the work of my mill," thought Abel,
as he watched him. "When you do it like that it really makes very little
difference what you are doing. It all comes to good." A minute before
his thought had been on the new roller mill he had recently bought and
was now working in his primitive little building, which he had slightly
remodelled. The next thing to go, he supposed, would be the old wooden
wheel, with its brilliant enamel of moss, and within five years he
hoped to complete the reconstruction of his machinery on lines that were
scientific rather than picturesque. His water power was good, and by the
time he could afford an entire modern equipment, he would probably have
all the grain at his door that he was ready to handle. Then he began to
wonder, as he had often done of late, if the work of the farm and
the mill might be left safely to Abner and Archie when he went up to
Richmond to the General Assembly, in the event of his future election?
Already he had achieved a modest local fame as a speaker--for his voice
expressed the gradual political awakening of his class. Though he was in
advance of his age, it was evident, even to the drowsy-eyed, that he was
moving in the direction whither lagging progress was bound. In the last
eighteen months he had devoured the books of the political economists,
and he had sucked in theories of social philosophy as a child sucks in
milk. That the business of the politician is not to reshape theories,
but to readjust conditions he was ready to admit, yet impelled by a
strong religious conviction, by a belief in the determining power of a
practical Christianity, he was sharing the slowly expanding dream of
his century--the dream of a poverty enriched by knowledge, of a
social regeneration that would follow an enlightened and instructed
proletariat. Ripples from the thought waves of the world had reached him
in the dusty corners of his mill at Old Church. Since no man thinketh to
himself, he could no more have escaped the mental impulsion of his
time than he could have arrested his embryonic development from the
invertebrate to the vertebrate. His mind being open, ideas had
entered, and having entered, they proceeded immediately to take active
possession. He was serving a distant Utopia of industrial democracy as
ardently as a lover serves his mistress.
As for his actual mistress, she had become not only visionary, but
enskied. Some months ago, while his wound was still fresh, he had not
suffered his thoughts to dwell on her because of the violence of the
pain. Pride as well as common sense, he had told himself during the
first weeks of his loss, demanded that he should banish her image from
his mind. Though he had never, even in his first anger, called her
"a light woman," he had come perilously near the feeling that she had
grazed the skirts of impropriety with a recklessness which no sober
minded son of Sarah Revercomb could countenance for a minute. His
very success as a miller depended upon an integrity of character which
permitted no compromise with the fundamental moralities. Youth is the
period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches
thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.
What Abel had never divined was that Molly, like himself, might
approach the angelic in one mood and fall short of the merely human in
another--that she, also, was capable of moments of sublimation and of
hours of recusancy. There were the ashes of a poet in her soul as in
his, and to contain the ashes of a poet one must have been first the
crucible for purifying flames.
But it was six months ago that he had condemned her, and since then the
subtle modifications had worked in his habit of thought. As the soreness
passed from his heart, he had nursed the scar much as a crusader might
have cherished a wound out of the Holy Wars. From the actual conditions
of life in which he had loved her, he now beheld her caught up into the
zone of ideal and impossible beauty. Through the outer covering of her
flesh he could see her soul shine, as the stars shone through the web of
purple twilight on the marshes. From his earlier craving for possession,
his love had grown, through frustration and disappointment, into a
simpler passion for service.
"Well, one has to find out things," he said to himself on this November
morning, while he watched the old negro at his work. Some red leaves
whirled into his face, and the wind, lifting the dark hair from his
forehead, showed three heavy furrows between his knitted brows. He
appeared a little older, a little braver, a little wiser, yet there was
about him still the look of superb physical vitality which had been the
result of a youth spent in the open fields.
"Howdy, Uncle Boaz," he said to the old negro, who approached with his
wheelbarrow. "Your folks have all gone away for good haven't they?"
"Hit looks dat ar way, marster, hit sutney do look dat ar way."
"Well, you keep good grass here all the same."
"Dar ain' but one way ter do hit, suh, en dat's ter dung hit," replied
Uncle Boaz, and he remarked a minute afterwards, as he put down the
lowered handles of the wheel barrow, and stood prodding the ashes in his
pipe, "I'se gwinter vote fur you, Marse Abel, I sholy is---"
"Thank you, Uncle Boaz!"
"En I'se got a sack er co'n I'd be moughty bleeged ter git ground up fur
hominy meal---"
With a laugh Abel passed on through the side-garden, and entered the
leafless shrubbery that bordered the Haunt's Walk. The old negro had
disturbed his dream, which had been of Molly in her red stockings, with
the red ribbon binding her curls. Then he thought of Spot, the aged
hound--"That dog must have lived to be seventeen years old," he said
aloud in the effort to smother the sharp pang at his heart, "I remember
how fond old Reuben was of him even as a puppy. He would never let him
run hares with anybody except himself." It was seventeen years ago that
Spot was a puppy and he a boy--and now the one was dust with old Reuben,
and the other had settled down so effectually that he was going to marry
Judy in a fortnight. At least Judy was a good woman--nobody had ever
said a word against her--and she would make him a good wife. That, after
all, was what a farmer must think of--a good, saving wife, without any
foolishness about her, who would be thrifty and lend a hand at his work
when he needed it. All the rest was nonsense when once a man married.
Dreams were all very well in their way, but realities and not dreams,
after all, were things he must live with. Looking ahead he saw his
future stretching smooth and firm, like the flat white turnpike that
dragged its solid length into the distance. On that road there was no
place for the absurdity of red stockings! And so, in the absence of all
elation, only the grim sense of duty in the doing soothed him as he made
his way to Solomon Hatch's cottage.
On the back porch he found Judy deftly taking butter out of the churn,
and watched her while she worked the soft lumps with a wooden paddle
in a large yellow bowl. Though he would have been the last to suspect
it--for passion like temptation appeared to him to beset the beautiful
alone--Judy, in her homely way, was also a crucible, and the little
earthern pot of her body was near to bursting at the moment from the
violence of the flames within. She had just seen a black coated figure
in a red gig spin by on the road, and for one blissful minute, she had
permitted herself a flight of fancy, in which she was the bride, not of
Abel Revercomb, but of Orlando Mullen. To sit in that red wheeled gig,
touching the sleeve of his black coat! To stitch the frayed seams in is
silk waistcoat! To iron his surplices as only she could iron when the
divine fury seized her! To visit his poor and afflicted! To lift her
swooning gaze every Sunday, with a sense of possession, to that pulpit!
For a minute only the rapture lasted, and all the time, she went on
placidly making butter in the large yellow bowl. She was in the mood to
commit sublime follies and magnificent indiscretions. For the sake of
a drive in that red wheeled gig she would have foresworn Abel at
the altar. For the ecstasy of ironing those surplices she would have
remained a spinster forever.
"That's nice butter, Judy," remarked her lover, and believed that he had
paid her a tribute peculiarly suited to the complexion of her soul.
His gaze followed the drab sweep of her hair, which was combed straight
back from her forehead. Her eyes were looking heavenward while she
worked, yet they caught no beam, no colour from her celestial visions.
Small hectic blotches burned in the centre of her cheeks, and her
thin lips were pressed tightly together as though she bit back a cry.
Sometimes she would remain dumb for an hour in his presence, while her
thoughts soared like birds in the blue region of dreams. She indulged
her imagination in grotesque but intoxicating reveries, in which she
passed nobly and with honour through a series of thrillingly romantic
adventures; and, in fact, only ten minutes before Abel's arrival, she
had beheld herself and the young clergyman undergoing a rapturous, if
slightly unreal, martyrdom, as missionaries to the Chinese.
Her dreams dropped suddenly, with broken wings, in their flight, for
her stepmother, a small sickly woman, with a twisted smile, looked out
through the dining-room window, and remarked facetiously:
"You all don't look much like a co'tin couple to my eyes."
"I've been admiring her butter," replied Abel, who was always unduly
regardful of his English in the presence of Mrs. Hatch.
"She's a good hand at butter when she chooses to be, but she has her ups
and downs like the rest of us."
"All of us have them, I suppose," he rejoined, and Mrs. Hatch drew in
her head.
"I never imagined that you got put out, Judy," he said, forgetting the
tears that had led him to his sacrifice; "you always seem so quiet and
sober."
She glanced up, for there was a sound of wheels on the road, and Mr.
Mullen drove by again, sitting very erect, and uncovering, with a
graceful bend, to some one who was visible at the front. Her face
flushed suddenly to the colour of the brickdust, and she felt that
the confusion in her soul must fill the universe with noise. Quiet and
sober, indeed, if he could only have heard it!
But Abel was busy with his own problems, while his gaze followed Mr.
Mullen's vanishing back, which had, even from a distance, a look of
slight yet earnest endeavour. He still liked the young rector for his
sincerity and his uprightness, but he had found, on the whole, that he
could approach his God more comfortably when the straight and narrow
shadow of the clergyman did not come between.
"Aren't you going to pat it any more?" he asked presently, returning to
his consideration of the butter.
Picking up a square linen cloth, Judy dipped it into a basin of brine,
and, after wringing it out, carefully folded it over the yellow bowl.
"All the buttermilk is out of it," she answered, and thought of the
unfinished pair of purple slippers laid away in tissue paper upstairs in
her bureau drawer. As a married woman could she, with virtue, continue
to embroider slippers in pansies for her rector? These had been laid
aside on the day of her engagement to Abel, but she yearned now to riot
in purple shades with her needle. While she listened with a detached
mind to Abel's practical plans for the future, her only interest in
the details lay in the fact that they would, in a measure, insure the
possibility of a yearly offering of slippers. And while they looked into
each other's eyes, neither suspected for a moment the existence of a
secret chamber in the other's soul. All appeared plain and simple on the
surface, and Judy, as well as Abel, was honestly of the opinion that she
understood perfectly the situation and that the passionate refusal of
her heart was the only element that threatened the conventional security
of appearances.
She was in the morbid condition of mind when the capacity for feeling
seems concentrated on a single centre of pain. Her soul revolved in a
circle, and outside of its narrow orbit there was only the arid flatness
which surrounds any moment of vivid experience. The velvet slippers,
which might have been worn by the young clergyman, possessed a vital
and romantic interest in her thoughts, but the mill and the machinery
of which Abel was speaking showed to her merely as sordid and mechanical
details of existence.
Looking at her suddenly, he realized that she had heard nothing of what
he was saying. If he had looked deeper still he would have seen the
tragedy of her lovely little soul spinning the web of its perishing
illusion. Of all the martyrdoms allotted to love's victims, she was
enduring the bitterest, which is the martyrdom of frustration. Yet
because she appeared dull and undesirable on the surface, he had
declined, with the rest of Old Church, to regard her emotions any less
casually than he regarded her complexion.
"Well, I ought to be a proud man to have you, Judy," he remarked, and
rose to his feet.
"I hope neither of us will ever regret it," she returned.
"Not if I can help it," he said, and, putting his arm around her, he
drew her to him and kissed her lips. It was the second time he had
kissed her, and on the first occasion she had burst into hysterical
weeping. He did not know that it was the only caress she had ever
received, and that she had wept because it had fallen so far short of
what her imagination had deluded her into expecting. Now, though she
had herself well in hand and gave no visible sign of her disappointment,
there was a fierce, though unspoken, protest in her heart. "To think
that after all the nights I've lain awake an' wondered what 'twas
like, it should turn out to be so terrible flat," she said bitterly to
herself.
"It's just a fortnight off now, Judy," he remarked gently, if not
tenderly.
"I hope your mother will get on with me, Abel."
"She sets great store by you now. You're pious, and she likes that even
though you do go to the Episcopal church. I heard her say yesterday that
it was a rare thing to see a girl find as much comfort in her religion
as you do."
"You'll never want to come between me and my church work, will you,
Abel? I do most of the Foreign Mission work, you know, an' I teach in
Sunday school and I visit the sick every Friday."
"Come between? Why, it makes me proud of you! When I asked Mr. Mullen
about marrying us, he said: 'She's been as good as a right hand to me
ever since I came here, Revercomb.'"
"Tell me over again. What were his words exactly?"
"'She's been as good as a right hand to me, Revercomb,' that was what he
said, and he added, 'She's the salt of the earth, that's the only way to
describe her.' And now, goodbye, Judy, I must be going back to work."
Without glancing round, he went at his rapid stride down the narrow walk
to the whitewashed gate, which hung loose on broken hinges. In the road
he came face to face with Jonathan Gay, who was riding leisurely in the
direction of Jordan's Journey.
"How are you, Revercomb? All well?"
"Yes, all well, thank you." Turning in his tracks, he gazed thoughtfully
after the rider for a moment.
"I wonder why he came out of his way instead of keeping to the
turnpike?" he thought, and a minute later, "that's the third time he's
come back since the family left Jordan's Journey."
CHAPTER II
THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH
At the gate before the Revercombs' house Blossom was standing in a dress
of vivid blue.
"Are you going to a party?" Abel inquired as he reached her, and she
answered impatiently:
"I promised to wear this dress over to Judy's, so that she could see how
it is trimmed."
"Does she want a blue one?" he asked. It seemed to him little short of
ludicrous that Judy should buy a new dress because she was going to be
married to him; but in the presence of a custom so firmly entrenched
behind the traditions of respectability, he knew that protest would be
useless. Judy would check out her unromantic person in wedding finery
because finery was customary on such occasions.
"Of course we couldn't dress just alike, Abel," replied Blossom. His
question had seemed foolish to her and her usual soft solemnity was
ruffled by a passing irritation. "Judy's frock will be green, but she
wants bretelles like these on it."
"Bretelles?" he repeated as incredulously as if he had possessed any but
the vaguest idea of the article the word described. "Why didn't she wait
until she was married, and then I'd have bought them for her," he added.
"Of course she wants her wedding clothes--all girls do," said Blossom,
invoking tradition. "Are you coming in now. We're having dinner a little
earlier."
She turned and moved slowly up the walk, while he followed, caressing
the head of Moses, his spotted hound. From the kitchen he could hear
Sarah Revercomb scolding the small negro, Mary Jo, whom she was training
to wait on the table. On one side of the hearth grandmother sat very
alert, waiting for her bowl of soup, into which Mary Jo was crumbling
soft bread, while across from her grandfather chuckled to himself over a
recollection which he did not divulge.
At Abel's entrance, the old man stopped chuckling and inquired in an
interested tone,
"Did you buy that ar steer, Abel?"
"Not yet, I'm to think it over and let Jim Bumpass know."
"Thar never was sech a man for steers," remarked grandmother,
contemptuously. "Here he's still axin' about steers when he can't hist
himself out of his cheer. If I were you, Abel, I'd tell him he'd better
be steddyin' about everlastin' damnation instead of steers. Steers ain't
goin' to haul him out of hell fire if he once gits down into it."
"Well, you can tell her, Abel," retorted grandfather, "that it's time
enough to holler 'hell-fire!' when you begin to burn."
Mary Jo prevented a rejoinder by appearing with a napkin, which she tied
under his wife's chin, and a little later the old woman could be heard
drinking greedily her bowl of soup. She lived for food, yet, like most
passions which have become exaggerated by concentration out of all
proportion to the fact upon which they depend, the moment of fulfilment
seemed always brief and unsatisfactory after the intensity of
anticipation. To-day the trouble was there were no carrots in the soup,
and this omission reduced her to tears because it had blighted the hopes
of her entire morning.
"An' I'd been hankerin' arter them carrots ever since breakfast," she
whimpered.
"Don't cry, ma, I'll mash you up some nice ones for supper. That'll
be something to look forward to," said Sarah, who might have won
an immortal crown had such trophies been awarded to the patience of
daughters-in-law. "So you didn't buy that steer, Abel?"
"No, I didn't buy it."
"Have you seen Judy to-day?"
"I stopped there on my way home. She was making butter, and we talked
about buying an extra cow or two and letting Blossom and her send some
to market."
"Well it beats me!" observed Sarah, but whether her discomfiture was due
to Judy's butter or to Abel's love making, she did not explain. On the
whole the staidness of the courtship was pleasing to her. Her sense
of decorum was flattered by it, for she had as little tolerance of the
softer virtues as of the softer vines. It had been years since she
had felt so indulgent toward her second son; yet in spite of the
gratification his dejection afforded her, she was, as she had just
confessed, utterly and entirely "beat." His period of common sense--of
perfect and complete sobriety--had lasted for half a year, but she
was too shrewd a woman to be deceived by the mere external calmness of
appearances. She had had moreover, a long experience with males of
the Revercomb stock, and she knew that it was when their blood flowed
quietest that there was the greatest danger of an ultimate "rousing."
All her life she had lived in dread of this menace to respectability--to
that strict observance of the letter of the social law for which the
Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen
a Revercomb really "roused," and when the transformation was once
achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the
force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock
would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She
hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she had once remarked.
If anything could have put her into a cheerful humour, it would have
been the depressed and solemn manner with which Abel went about the
preparations for his marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had
passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her
to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations
of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of
human happiness--as something which must be paid for, either literally
in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure of the materials of
salvation.
"I declar' things are goin' on so smooth that something must be gettin'
ready to happen," she said anxiously to herself at least twenty times a
day--for she had observed life, and in her opinion, the observation had
verified the rigid principles of her religion. Do what you would the
doctrines of original sin and predestination kept cropping up under the
surface of existence. And so--"It looks all right on top, but you never
can tell," was the habitual attitude of her mind.
When dinner was over, Abel went out to the mill, with Moses, the hound,
trotting at his heels. The high wind was still blowing, and while he
stood by the mill-race, the boughs of the sycamore rocked back and forth
over his head with a creaking noise. At each swing of the branches a
crowd of broad yellow leaves was torn from the stems and chased over the
moving wheel to the open meadow beyond.
With the key of the mill in his hand, Abel stopped to gaze over the
green knoll where he had once planned to build his house. Beyond it he
saw the strip of pines, and he knew that the tallest of the trees had
fallen uselessly beneath his axe. The great trunk still lay there, fast
rotting to dust on the carpet of pine cones. He had never sold it for
timber. He would never use it for the rafters of his home.
As he looked back now all that past life of his appeared to him fair and
desirable. He remembered the early morning risings in his boyhood,
and it seemed to him that he had enjoyed every one of them to its
fullest--that it was only the present that showed stale and unprofitable
in his eyes. A rosy haze obscured all that was harsh and unlovely in the
past, and he thought of himself as always eager and enthusiastic then,
as always finding happiness in the incidents that befell him. The year
when he had gone away, and worked in the factory in order to educate
himself, was revealed as a period of delightful promise, of wonderful
opportunity. In remembering his love for Molly, he forgot the quarrels,
the jealousies, the heartburnings, and recalled only the exquisite
instant of their first lover's kiss. Then, he told himself, that even
while he had enjoyed his life, it had cheated him, and he would not live
it over again if he could.
Turning presently in the other direction, he discerned a patch of vivid
blue in the pasture, and knew that it was Blossom crossing the fields to
Solomon Hatch's. "She's gone a good piece out of her road," he thought,
and then, "I wonder why she doesn't marry? She might have anybody about
here if she wasn't so particular." The vivid blue spot in the midst of
the russet and brown landscape held his gaze for a moment; then calling
Moses to his side, he unlocked the door of the mill and began counting
the sacks of grist.
Outside, in the high wind, which made walking difficult, Blossom moved
in the direction of the willow copse. Gay had promised to meet her,
but she knew, from the experience of the last few months, that he would
neither hasten his luncheon nor smoke a cigar the less in order to do
so. As she pressed on the wind sang in her ears. She heard it like the
sound of rushing wings in the broomsedge, and when it died down, she
waited for it to rise again with a silken murmur in the red-topped
orchard grass. She could tell from the sound whether the gust was still
in the field of broomsedge or had swept on to the pasture.
In spite of her blue dress, in spite of the flush in her cheeks and
the luminous softness in her eyes, the joy in her bosom fluttered on
crippled wings. Gay was kind, he was gentle, he was even solicitous on
the rare occasions when she saw him; but somehow--in some way, it was
different from the ideal marriage of which she had dreamed. If he was
kind, he was also casual. She had hoped once that love would fill her
life, and now, to her despair, it looked as if it might be poured into
a tea-cup. She had imagined that it would move mountains, and the most
ordinary detail of living was sufficient to thrust it out of sight.
When she reached the brook, she saw Gay coming slowly along the Haunt's
Walk, to the spring. As he walked, he blew little clouds of smoke into
the air, and she thought, as he approached her, that the smell of his
cigar was unlike the cigar of any other man she knew--that it possessed,
in itself, a quality that was exciting and romantic. This trait in
his personality--a disturbing suggestion of the atmosphere of a richer
world--had fascinated her from the beginning, and after eighteen months
of repeated disappointments, it still held her, though she struggled now
in its power like a hare in a trap.
"So you're here!" he exclaimed as he reached her. Then, after a swift
glance over the fields, he drew her into the shelter of the trees, and
holding his cigar in his left hand, kissed her lips.
Closing her eyes, she leaned against him, while the scent of tobacco
intoxicated her with its train of happier associations.
"You're looking all right, though your letters have been rather jumpy.
My dear girl, when you pounce on me like that you frighten me out of my
wits. You really mustn't, you know."
"O Jonathan!" she gasped, and clung to him.
"Why, I had to manufacture some excuse on the instant for coming down. I
couldn't tell what foolishness you'd be capable of if I didn't."
His tone was half caressing, yet beneath it there was a serious
annoyance, which killed the suffering joy in her heart. She was slowly
learning that it is not safe to remind the man of pleasure of his
obligations, since he is attracted chiefly by his opportunities.
"The time was when you wanted to come just as much as I," she said.
"Don't I still? Haven't I proved it by telling a tremendous lie and
rushing down here on the first train? Come, now, kiss me like a good
girl and look cheerful. You've got to make up, you know, for all the
trouble you've put me to."
She kissed him obediently, yielding to his casual embraces with a
docility that would have charmed him had his passion been in its
beginning instead of its decline.
"You're glad now you came, aren't you?" she asked presently pleading to
be reassured.
"Oh, yes, of course, I like it, but you mustn't write to me that way
again."
Putting his arm closer about her, he pressed her to his side, and they
sat in silence while the wind whistled in the tree-tops above them. From
their shelter they could see the empty chimneys of Jordan's Journey, and
a blurred and attenuated figure on the lawn, which was that of the old
negro, who passed back and forth spreading manure. Some swallows with
slate grey wings were flying over the roof, and they appeared from a
distance to whirl as helplessly as the dead leaves.
"You do love me as much as ever, don't you, Jonathan?" she asked
suddenly.
He frowned, staring at the moving figure of the old negro. Again she had
blundered, for he was disinclined by temperament to do or say the thing
that was expected of him.
"Why, of course I do," he answered after a pause.
She sighed and nestled against him, while his hand which had been on
her shoulder, slipped to her waist. Her heart had turned to lead in her
breast, and, like Judy, she could have wept because the reality of love
was different from her virgin dreams.
CHAPTER III
ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION
Two nights before the wedding a corn shucking was held in the barn at
Bottom's Ordinary--a usually successful form of entertainment, by which
the strenuous labours of a score of able-bodied men were secured at the
cost of a keg of cider and a kettle of squirrel stew. In the centre of
the barn, which was dimly lighted by a row of smoky, strong-smelling
kerosene-oil lanterns, suspended on pegs from the wall, there was a
huge wooden bin, into which the golden ears were tossed, as they were
stripped of the husks, by a circle of guests, ranging in years from
old Adam at the head to the youngest son of Tim Mallory, an inquisitive
urchin of nine, who made himself useful by passing the diminishing
pitcher of cider. It was a frosty night, and the faces of the huskers
showed very red above the knitted woollen comforters which wrapped their
throats. Before each man there was a small pile of corn, still in the
blade, and this was replenished when it began to dwindle by a band of
workers in the moonlight beyond the open windows. In his effort to keep
warm somebody had started a hymn, which was vigorously accompanied by
a beating of numbed feet on the scattered husks on the floor. Above the
volume of sound old Adam's quavering falsetto could be heard piping on
like a cracked and discordant flute.
"O-ver thar, O-ver thar,
Th-ar's a la-nd of pure de-light.
O-ver th-ar,
We will la-y our bur-den do-wn.
An' re-ceive our gol-den cro-wn.
In that la-nd of pure de-light
O-ver th-ar."
"That's a cold hymn, an' unsuitable to the weather," remarked Tim
Mallory at the end of the verse. "If you ask me, I'd say thar was mo'
immediate comfort in singin' about the redness of hell-fire, an' how
mortal close we're comin' to it."
"We don't want no impiousness at this here shuckin', Tim," observed
William Ming, who occupied the position of host in Betsey's absence
about the more important matter of supper. "You fill up with cider an'
go at that thar pile befo' you."
"Then pass it on," replied Mallory, reaching for the jug of cider, which
travelled in a regular orbit from old Adam's right hand round the circle
to the neighbour on his left, who chanced to be Solomon Hatch.
"Speakin' of impiousness," remarked that sour-faced little man, "have
you all heard the tales about Reuben Merryweather's gal sence she's had
her windfall? Why, to see the way she trails her skirt, you'd think
she was the real child of her father." Then rushing hurriedly to
generalization at Abel's entrance, he added in a louder tone--"Ah, it's
a sad pass for things to come to, an' the beginnin' of the end of public
morality, when a gal that's born of a mischance can come to act as if a
man was responsible for her. It ain't nothin' mo' nor less than flyin'
in the face of the law, which reads different, an' if it keeps up,
the women folks will be settin' up the same rights as men to all the
instincts of natur'."
Old Adam--the pride and wonder of the neighbourhood because he could
still walk his half mile with the help of his son and still drink his
share of cider with the help of nobody--bent over the heap of corn
before him, and selecting an ear, divested it of the husks with a
twirling, sleight-of-hand movement.
"They're losing virtue fast enough," he observed, throwing the naked
ear into the bin and reaching for another. "Why, when I was young thar
warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up
with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose
the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty."
"Ah, the times have changed now!" sighed Solomon Hatch, "but thar's one
thing sho' to my mind, an' that is, that if a woman thinks she's goin'
to attract men by pryin' an' peekin' into immorality an' settin' it
straight ag'in, she's gone clean out of her head. Thar's got to be
indecency in the world because thar al'ays has been. But a man sets a
heap mo' sto' by his wife if she ain't too inquirin' upon the subject."
"True, true, Solomon," said old Adam, "I for one was al'ays set against
teachin' women to read for fear they'd come to know things. Thar's a
deal of evil that gits into print, an' if you ain't acquainted with yo'
letters thar's less temptation to nose arter it. Reuben Merryweather
would have his daughter Janet taught, though I urged strongly against
it--holdin' that she could learn about sins an' immoralities even in
Holy Writ. Who knows if she'd ever have gone wrong if she hadn't learned
to read printed words?"
"Well, I'm glad print is too difficult for me," observed young Adam.
"The pains I take to spell out the words would stand greatly in the way
of my enj'yin' any immorality if I was to stumble across it. What part
of Scripture, pa, is it that deals with sech doin's?"
"They crop up powerful thick in Kings, son, but I've found 'em when I
looked sharp in Leviticus."
"If you are goin' to talk free, men, you can go to yo' own homes to do
it," remarked Betsey, who was accustomed to appear at unexpected moments
in order to impress them with the necessity of earning their supper.
"This ain't no place for loose speakin'," she added, solemnly eyeing
young Adam, who, having a weak memory, was striving to fix the names of
Kings and Leviticus in his mind by repeating them slowly to himself.
"Axin' yo' pardon, Mrs. Bottom, we didn't know a lady was in hearin' or
we'd never have made so bold," said old Adam. "Stop workin' yo' lips,
son, an' hand Mrs. Bottom a cheer."
"What's all this talk anyway about Molly Merryweather an' Mr. Jonathan?"
she demanded. "Abel, have you heard anything about it?"
The men glanced at each other with uneasy eyes, while they worked
nervously at the shucking, for the question had been in the air from the
moment of Abel's entrance, though none of them had been bold enough
to speak it aloud. And now a woman, with characteristic feminine
recklessness, had uttered the thought which had been revolving in each
mind for ten minutes--yet nothing had happened!
Old Adam, pausing for the first time in his work, glanced with
ungrudging respect at the short, lumpy figure in the black calico dress.
Her face was still comely, and there was the mild mulishness in
her expression that is seen in the countenances of many amiable yet
obstinate persons.
"No, I haven't heard," replied Abel, and he added a moment later, "What
do they say?"
"Well, Mr. Halloween had it from a man in Applegate who had it from a
man in Petersburg who had it from a man in Richmond."
"Had what?"
"That Mr. Jonathan had been waitin' on her steady for some months, an'
'twas mo' likely than not to end in marriage. She's a good girl, is
Molly. I ain't got no use for a woman that don't stand up for her sex in
the face of men."
"True, true," admitted her hearers solemnly, one after another, for none
among them had ever dared to defy the source of so many benefactions.
"Thar're some that thinks morals ain't meant for any but women," she
pursued, "but I ain't one of 'em, as William Ming can testify, that
holds to that view. Viciousness is viciousness whether it be male or
female, and Mr. Mullen himself in the pulpit couldn't convince me that
it don't take two to make an impropriety."
"True, true," they repeated, belying themselves under coercion in the
accents of the chorus in a Greek drama. "'Tis true, ma'am, as you speak
it."
"Thar were some mean enough to side against the po' innocent from the
hour of her birth," she continued oracularly, while she looked severely
at Solomon, who nodded in response, "an' these same folks have been
preachin' over her an' pintin' at her ever sence she larned to crawl out
of the cradle. But thar never was a kinder heart or a quicker hand in
trouble than Molly's, an' if she did play fast and loose with the men,
was it any worse, I'd like to know, than they deserve?"
"Thar's truth in what you say, ma'am, thar's a deal of truth in it,"
they agreed, nodding dejected craven heads over their pipes. Like all
born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for
the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to
forego a comfort.
"Well, I'm roastin' a young possum along with the squirrel stew, so
you'd better work up an appetite," she said in a mollified tone at at
the end of her lecture, as though she were desirous of infusing a more
ardent spirit into them before her departure.
When the barn door closed behind her, a sigh of relief, half stifled
through fear of detection, passed round the group.
"Thar goes a woman in a thousand," observed old Adam, edging nearer the
bin.
"In a million--let's make it a million," urged Solomon Hatch.
"If they were all like that the world would be different, Mr.
Doolittle," remarked Jim Halloween.
"Ah, yes, it would be different," agreed old Adam, and he sighed again.
"Thar'd be strict walkin' among us, I reckon," said his son.
"An' a chalk line the same as we draw for the sex," added Solomon Hatch.
"Sin would be scarce then an' life earnest," remarked William Ming,
who had alluded to Betsey in the most distant terms ever since he had
married her.
"We'd abide by the letter like the women, not by the spirit as we do,"
reflected Solomon.
They sighed for the third time more heavily, and the dried husks on the
floor around the bin rattled as though a strong wind had entered.
"But she's one in a million, Mr. Doolittle," protested Solomon, after a
pause, and his tone had grown cheerful.
"Yes, I reckon it's a million. Thar ain't mo' than one in a million of
that rare sort," responded old Adam, falling to work with a zest.
"Was that ar young possum she spoke of the one yo' dawg Bess treed day
befo' yesterday, William?" inquired Jim Halloween, whose hopes were
centred upon the reward of his labours.
"Naw! that was an old un," replied William. "But thar never was a better
possum dawg than that Bess of ours. I declar, she's got so much sense
that she'll tree anything that grins at her, whether it's nigger or
possum. Ain't that so, old gal?" he inquired of the spotted hound on a
bed of husks at his side. "It wan't no longer than last week that she
kept that little nigger of Uncle Boaz's up a persimmon tree for mo'n an
hour."
"Thar's some niggers that look so much like possums when they git up in
persimmon branches that it takes a sharp eye to tell the difference,"
observed Tim Mallory.
"Well, I'm partial to possum," remarked old Adam. "When all's said, thar
ain't a better meat to the taste as long as it's plump an' juicy. Will
you hand on that jug of cider, Tim? It's wonderful the way corn shuckin'
manages to parch the throat an' whet the appetite."
The miller, who had declined Betsey's feast of possum, went out as soon
as he had finished his pipe, and turned into the sunken road that led
to Solomon Hatch's. In the little "best room," which was opened only for
"courtings" or funerals, he found Judy seated under a dim lamp with a
basket of darning in her lap.
"I was over at Mrs. Mullen's this morning," she explained, "an' she told
me her eyesight was failing, so I offered to do her darnin'."
Slipping a small round gourd into the toe of a man's black sock, she
examined it attentively, with her needle poised in the lamplight. Then
bending her head slightly sideways, she surveyed her stitches from
another angle, while she smoothed the darn with short caressing strokes
over the gourd. He thought how capable and helpful she was, and from the
cheerful energy with which she plied her needle, he judged that it gave
her pleasure merely to be of use. What he did not suspect was that her
wedding garments had been thrust aside as of less importance than Mrs.
Mullen's basket of darning. She was just the girl for a farmer's wife,
he told himself as he watched her--plain and sensible, the kind that
would make a good mother and a good manager. And all the time a voice in
the back of his brain was repeating distinctly. "They say it will end in
a marriage--they say it will end in a marriage." But this voice seemed
to come from a distance, and to have no connection either with his
thought or with his life. It was independent of his will, and while it
was speaking, he went on calmly thinking of Judy's children and of how
well and properly she would bring them up.
"I went over again to look at the steer to-day," he said, after a
moment. "There's a Jersey cow, too, I think of buying."
She nodded, pausing in her work, yet keeping her gaze fixed on the point
of her needle. If he had looked at her darning, he would have seen that
it was woven of exquisite and elaborate stitches--such stitches as went
into ecclesiastical embroideries in the Middle Ages.
"They're the best kind for butter," she observed, and carefully ran her
needle crosswise in and out of the threads.
Conversation was always desultory between them, and when it flagged, as
it did now, they could sit for hours in the composed and unembarrassed
silence of persons who meet upon the firm basis of mutual assistance
in practical matters. Their relation was founded upon the simple law of
racial continuance, which is as indifferent to the individual as it is
to the abstract, apotheosis of passion.
"I'm going to Applegate to-morrow to order a new mill-stone," he said
at last, when he rose. "Is there anything you would like me to get for
you?"
She reflected a moment. "I need a quarter of a yard of braid to finish
the green dress I am making. Could you match it?"
"I'll try if you'll give me a sample."
Laying her work aside for the first time, she hunted amid a number of
coloured spools in her basket, and brought to light a bit of silver
braid, which she handed to him.
"Was Mr. Mullen at your house to-day, Abel?" she asked suddenly, turning
her face from the lamp.
"Yes, he comes to see Blossom now, but she doesn't appear to care for
him. I thought she did once, didn't you?"
"Yes, I thought she did, but that was when he was in love with Molly,
wasn't it?"
For an instant he gazed at the bit of braid, as though his soul were
intent upon unravelling the intricate pattern.
"I wonder whether it is that we get a thing when we stop wanting it or
that we merely stop wanting it when we get it?" he demanded passionately
of fate.
But Judy had no mind for dubious philosophies. The thing she wanted she
knew she should never get and she knew as well that, in all likelihood,
she should never stop wanting it. Only a passionate soul in a
commonplace body could have squandered itself with such superb
prodigality.
"I don't know," she answered wearily, "I've never noticed much either
what people get or what they want."
"Well, Blossom wanted Mr. Mullen once and now he wants Blossom. I wish
mother didn't have so poor an opinion of him."
She flushed and looked up quickly, for in her heart she felt that she
hated Sarah Revercomb. A disgust for her coming marriage swept over her.
Then she told herself stubbornly that everybody married sooner or later,
and that anyway her stepmother would never forgive her if she broke off
with Abel.
"She doesn't even go to his church. I don't see what right she has to
find fault with him," she said.
"That's her way, you know. You can't make her over. She pretends he
doesn't know his Scripture and when he comes to see Blossom, she asks
him all sorts of ridiculous questions just to embarrass him. Yesterday
she told him she couldn't call to mind the difference in cubits between
the length and the breadth of Solomon's temple, and would he please save
her the trouble of going to the Bible to find out?"
"Does she want him to stop coming?" inquired Judy, breathlessly.
"I don't know what she wants, but I wish Blossom would marry him, don't
you?"
"Don't I?" she repeated, and her basket of spools fell to the floor,
where they scattered on the square rag carpet of log-cabin pattern. As
they were gathering them up, their heads touched by accident, and he
kissed her gravely. For a moment she thought, while she gazed into his
brilliant eyes, "Abel is really very handsome, after all." Then folding
her work carefully, she stuck her needle through the darn and placed
the basket on a shelf between a bible with gilt clasps and a wreath of
pressed flowers under a glass case. "He couldn't have got anybody to
fill in those holes better," she said to herself, and the reflection was
not without a balm for her aching heart.
At dawn next morning Abel passed again, driving in the direction of
the Applegate road. The day was breaking clear and still, and over the
autumnal pageantry in the abandoned fields, innumerable silver cobwebs
shone iridescent in the sunrise. Squirrels were already awake, busily
harvesting, and here and there a rabbit bobbed up from beneath a shelter
of sassafras. Overhead the leaves on a giant chestnut tree hung as
heavily as though they were cut out of copper, and beyond a sharp twist
in the corduroy road, a branch of sweet gum curved like a bent flame
on the edge of the twilight dimness of the forest. The scarlet of the
leaves reminded him of the colour of Molly's jacket, and immediately
the voice somewhere in his brain repeated, "They say it will end in
marriage." The words awoke in him a violent and unreasonable resentment.
He could think of his own marriage quite calmly, as something that did
not bear directly upon his ideal of Molly; but the conception of her as
Gay's wife, struck a blow at the image he had enskied and then schooled
himself into worshipping from a distance. He was willing to relinquish
her as too fair and flitting for mortal embraces, but the thought that
another man should possess that elusive loveliness was like the thrust
of hot iron into his wound. That Molly loved Gay he could not believe.
That she was willing to marry him without loving him, was a suggestion
which appeared to him little short of an insult. True, he did not love
Judy to whom he was to be married to-morrow, but that was a case so
entirely and utterly different that there could be no comparison! He was
doing it because he was sorry for Judy and it was the only way he could
help her. Besides, had not Molly urged such a step upon him repeatedly
as the fulfillment of his obvious destiny?
The reasons were all there. He had them labelled and assorted in his
mind, ready for instant reference should they be required. Sleepless
nights had gone to the preparation of them, and yet--and yet--in his
heart he knew, beyond contradiction, that he was wedding Judy because
his pity had once made a fool of him. He had acted from the loftiest
motives when he had asked her to marry him, and twenty-four hours later
he would have given ten years of his life to have been able to eliminate
those lofty motives from his character. To go back on her was, of
course, out of the question. In the history of Old Church no man--with
the exception of two drunkards and old Mr. Jonathan Gay--had ever
gone back on a woman. With girls it was different, since they, being
sentimentally above the proneness to error as well as practically below
the liability for maintenance, might play fast and loose wherever
their fleeting fancy alighted. But in the case of his unhappy sex an
honourable inclination once yielded to, was established forever. His
sacrifice was sanctioned by custom. There was no escape since it was
tradition that held him by the throat.
His business in Applegate, which included a careful matching of Judy's
braid, took up the entire morning; and it was dinner time before he
turned back to the little inn, known as Raleigh's Tavern, at which the
farmers usually stopped for meals. Here, after washing his hands in a
basin on the back porch, he hastily smoothed his hair, and passed into
the small paved court in front of the tavern. As he approached the
doorway, the figure of a young woman in a black dress, which he felt
instinctively did not "belong" to Applegate, came down the short steps,
and paused an instant to caress a large dog that was lying in the
sunshine near the entrance. The next minute, while he fell back, hat in
hand, behind a pile of boxes in the yard, he heard his name called in
a familiar voice, and lifting his eyes found himself face to face with
Molly.
"Abel, aren't you going to speak to me?" she asked, and moving a step
toward him, held out both hands with an impulsive gesture.
As his hand met hers, he withdrew it quickly as though he were stung by
the touch of her soft fingers. Every nerve in his body leaped suddenly
to life, and the moment was so vivid while he faced her, that he
felt half convinced that all the long months since their parting had
dissolved in shadows. The border line between the dream and actuality
was obliterated. It seemed to him not only impossible, but absurd that
he should ever have believed himself engaged to Judy Hatch--that he
should be going to marry her to-morrow! All that side of his life had
no closer relation to his real self than it had to the self of old Adam
Doolittle. While he had planned it he had been a corpse not a living
man, but at the sound of Molly's voice, at the clasp of her fingers,
at the touching, expectant brightness in her eyes, the resurrection had
happened. Judy was a corpse preparing to wed a corpse that had become
alive--and the mating of death with life was abhorrent to him in his
illumination.
"We are on our way to Richmond," explained Molly, very gently, "and we
are waiting to change trains. Oh, Abel, I have wanted so much to see
you!"
It was the old Molly, in truth--Molly in her softest, in her most
dangerous, in her divinest mood. While he gazed at her he could make
no answer because an emotion that was half self-reproach, half furious
longing, choked back his words, and had he opened his lips it would have
been to utter some foolish inarticulate arraignment of destiny. In the
confusion of his senses, he did not notice that she had altered, but the
next day he remembered that her face looked smaller and more delicate,
like a tinted egg-shell he had once seen, and that her eyes in
consequence were wondrously, were almost startlingly, large. All that he
was conscious of when he turned and rushed from her after that one look,
was that the old agony of his loss had resurged afresh in his heart.
CHAPTER IV
HIS DAY OF FREEDOM
He crossed the courtyard, and turned mechanically into a street which
led in the opposite direction from the road to Old Church. A crowd of
men, gathered in the doorway of the post-office, called to him to join
them, and he answered in a voice that sounded remote and cheerful in his
own ears.
"If you want to whip the bosses in these parts there's a man for you,"
he heard one of them remark, and knew that they were discussing his
political chances. Quickening his steps, he walked rapidly to the end
of the street, passed the scattered negro hovels, surrounded by blighted
sunflowers, and turned into a road which ran between fields of dusty
stubble into a stretch of brown and desolate country.
Suddenly, as though a screw had loosened in his brain, he felt his
passion slip the control of his will and beat down, one by one, the
orderly procession of reasons that had risen against it. A sense of
exhilaration, of joy so fierce that it was akin to pain, took possession
of him. "I won't go back!" he said defiantly, "I won't go back!" And
with the words his longing for Molly was swallowed up in the tumultuous
consciousness of his release. It was as if he had burst his bonds by a
single effort of strength, and was stretching his cramped limbs in the
open. The idea of escape from captivity was so strong, that he looked
neither to right or left of him, but kept his gaze fixed on the road
straight ahead, as a man does who saves his energy for the final break
from his pursuers. At the moment he would have bartered his soul in
exchange for the unholy, the nameless rapture of the vagabond and the
gipsy, of all the neglected and the despised of civilization. Duty,
love, ambition--all these were nothing beside the perfect, the
incommunicable passion of the open road!
It is a mood that comes once to every man--to some men more
frequently--a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is
stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic
freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited by civilization cry out
for the strong meat of the jungle--for the scent of the raw, dark earth
and for the gleam of the yellow moonlight on the wet, rustling leaves.
This longing may come but once in adolescence, or many times until
the frost of age has withered the senses. It may come amid the showery
warmth and the roving fragrance of an April day, or beside the shining,
brown, leaf-strewn brooks of November. But let it come to a man when
it will, and that man renounces, in spite of himself, his little leaden
gods of prosperity, and in his heart, beneath the woven garment of
custom, he exchanges his birthright of respectability for a mess of
Romany pottage. Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel
laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy. Obstacles which
had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and
evanescent as shadows.
"I won't go back!" he repeated exultantly, "I won't go back!"
"You're talkin' to yo'self, mister," said a voice at his side, and
looking down he saw a small barefooted boy, in overalls, with a bag of
striped purple calico hanging from one shoulder.
"You've been talkin' to yo'self all along the road," the boy repeated
with zest.
"Have I? What are you up to?"
"I've been chinquapinin'. Ma, she thinks I'm at school, but I ain't."
He looked up wickedly, bubbling over with the shameless joys of truancy.
"Thar's a lot of chinquapin bushes over yonder in Cobblestone's wood an'
they're chock full of nuts."
"And they're in your bag now, I suppose?"
"I've got a peck of 'em, an' I'm goin' to make me a chain as long
as--that. It'll be a watch chain, an' I've made a watch out of a walnut.
It can't keep time, of course," he added, "'cep'n for that it's really a
sho' nough watch." His small freckled face, overhung by a mat of carroty
hair, was wreathed in a contagious, an intoxicating smile--the smile of
one who has bought happiness at the price of duty, and whose enjoyment
is sweetened by the secret knowledge that he has successfully eluded the
Stern Daughter of the Voice of God. Instinctively, Abel was aware that
the savour was not in the chinquapins, but in the disobedience, and his
heart warmed to the boy with the freckled face.
"Are you going home now?" he asked.
"You bet I ain't. I've got my snack ma fixed for me." He unrolled a
brown paper package and revealed two thin slices of bread with a fishing
hook stuck in one corner. "Thar's apple-butter between 'em," he added,
rolling his tongue, and a minute later, "Ma'd whip me jest the same,
an' I'd ruther be whipped for a whole day than for a half. Besides," he
burst out as though the mental image convulsed him with delight, "if I
went home I'd have to help her tote the water for the washin'."
"But what are you going to do with yourself?"
"I'm goin' huntin' with a gravel shooter, an' I'm goin' fishin' with a
willow pole, an' I'm goin' to find all the old hare traps, an' I'm goin'
to see 'em make hog's meat over at Bryarly's an' I'm goin' to the cider
pressin' down here at Cobblestone's. She ain't goin' to ketch me till
I've had my day!" he concluded with a whoop of ecstasy. Startled by the
sound, a rabbit sprang from a clump of sassafras, and the boy was over
the fence, on a rush of happy bare feet, in pursuit of it.
The road curved abruptly into a short wood, filled with dwarfed holly
trees, which were sown thickly with a shower of scarlet berries--and
while Abel walked through it, his visions thronged beside him like the
painted and artificial troupe of a carnival. He saw Molly coming to him,
separating him from Judy, surrendering her warm flesh and blood to his
arms. "I won't go back!" he said, still defiantly, "I'll love Molly if
I pay for it to the last day I live." With a terrible exultation he felt
that he was willing to pay for it--to pay any price, even the price of
his honour. His passion rushed like flame through his blood, scorching,
blackening, devouring.
Beyond the wood, the winding ash-coloured road dipped into a hollow, and
when he reached the brow of the low hill ahead, a west wind, which had
risen suddenly from the river, caught up with his footsteps and raced on
like a wild thing at his side. He could hear it sighing plaintively in
the bared trees he had left, or driving the hurtled leaves like a flock
of frightened partridges over the sumach and sassafras, and then lashing
itself into a frenzy as it chased over a level of broomsedge. Always
it sang of freedom--of the savage desire and thirst for freedom--of the
ineffable, the supreme ecstasy of freedom! And always while he listened
to it, while he felt the dead leaves stinging his flesh, he told
himself passionately that he "would not go back--that he would not marry
to-morrow!"
For hours he stalked with the wind. Then, turning out of the road, he
flung himself down on the broomsedge and lay for other hours gazing over
the autumn landscape to the softly luminous band on the far horizon.
Somewhere in a darkened corner of his brain there was the resolve that
he would not return until, like the freckled faced, barefooted boy, he
had "had his day."
At nine o'clock that night he entered an inn in the town of Briarwood,
twenty miles north of Applegate, and sitting down at one of the tables,
ordered something to eat. His limbs ached, not from the walk in the
wind, but from the passion that had whipped his body like a destroying
fire. He felt still the burning throb of the sore that it had left.
Apart from this dull agony he could feel nothing--he could desire
nothing--he could remember nothing. Everything was over except the
instinct that told him that he was empty and must be fed.
While he sat there, with his aching forehead bowed in his hands, there
came a light touch on his shoulder, and looking up he saw the Reverend
Orlando Mullen, standing at his side like an embodiment of all the
things from which he had fled. For an instant he could only stare
blindly back at him. Then something which had opened in his soul, closed
softly, as if it were a shell of custom, and he knew that he was again
a prisoner. With the sight of that conventional figure, the scattered
instincts of habit and of respectability--of all the qualities for which
the race stood and against which the individual had rebelled--all these
rallied anew to the battlefield from which they had been routed by his
insurgent emotions.
"I suppose you're waiting, like myself, for the nine-forty-five train?"
"Yes, I'm waiting for the train."
"Business brought you so far away?"
"Yes, business brought me." Lifting his glass of beer, he drained it
slowly under Mr. Mullen's friendly and curious eyes.
"It looks as if we should have a perfect day for the wedding," remarked
the rector, after a pause. "Like you, I was called off on an urgent
matter, but fortunately, it only means losing a little sleep."
Then the whistle of the train blew, and ten minutes later, Abel followed
the young clergyman into the single coach and sat down in a vacant seat
at his side.
It was two o'clock when at last he drove into the back gate at the mill,
and unhitching his mare, turned her out into the pasture. As he crossed
the road to the house, he lifted his eyes mechanically to the sky, and
saw that the stars shone soft and near as if they were watching over a
night of love.
CHAPTER V
THE SHAPING OF MOLLY
Leaning back in the uncomfortable plush-covered chair in the train to
Richmond, Molly watched the flat landscape glide past, while she thought
a little wistfully of the morning she had made this same trip dressed
in one of Mrs. Gay's gowns. On her knees Mrs. Gay's canary, extinguished
beneath the black silk cover to his cage, uttered from time to time a
feeble pipe of inquiry, and on the rack above her head Mrs. Gay's tea
basket rattled loudly in a sudden lurch of the train. Since the hour in
which she had left the overseer's cottage and moved into the "big house"
at Jordan's Journey, the appealing little lady had been the dominant
influence in her life--an influence so soft and yet so overpowering that
she had at times a sensation of being smothered in scented swansdown.
For several months after leaving Old Church her education had absorbed
her energies, and she had found time merely to gasp occasionally in
the oppressive sweetness of the atmosphere which Mrs. Gay's personality
diffused. Everything was strange then, and her desire for strangeness,
for unfamiliar impressions, had amounted to a passion. She had been very
anxious, too, very much afraid lest she should make a mistake. When she
had entered the hotel dining-room in New York she had felt as if she
were walking on ploughed ground, and the red velvet carpet had seemed
to rise and sink under her feet. That first night had been exquisite
torture to her, and so, she surmised through some intuitive
understanding, had it been to Kesiah. For weeks after that time
of embarrassment, she had watched herself carefully--watched every
instant--and in the end she had triumphed. With her growing ease,
her old impulsiveness had returned to her, and with the wonderful
adaptability of the Southern woman, she had soon ceased to feel a sense
of discomfort in her changed surroundings. The instinct of class she had
never had, and this lack of social reverence had helped her not a
little in her ascent of the ladder. It is difficult to suffer from a
distinction which one does not admit--and her perfect unconsciousness of
inferiority to Mrs. Gay had placed her, without her being aware of it,
in the position of an equal.
With her hands clasped on the cage of the canary, she gazed thoughtfully
at Kesiah, who was sitting a little in front of her, with her eyeglasses
on her nose and the daily paper opened before her. Gay was to meet them
in Richmond, and as Molly remembered this now, she realized that her
feeling about their meeting had changed during the last few hours. She
liked Gay--she responded to his physical charm, to the indefinable air
of adventure which hangs sometimes about men who have lived hard without
wasting their surplus vitality--but in spite of the strong attraction he
possessed for her, she knew that in her heart she had never thoroughly
believed in him. Unconsciously to herself she had measured his stature
against Abel's and he had come short of her standard.
"Molly," asked Mrs. Gay, turning her head suddenly, "did you write
Jonathan to expect us by this train?"
"Yes, Aunt Angela, he knows we are coming. Shall I lower the shade? Is
the sunlight too strong on you?"
"A little," murmured Mrs. Gay in a tone of resigned sweetness and the
conversation was over.
At the sound of Molly's voice an old lady, travelling South with a
trained nurse, turned in her chair, and looked at the girl as she might
have looked at a fruit for which she longed, but which she had been
forbidden to touch. Her face, under an elaborate bonnet trimmed with
artificial purple wistaria, was withered and crossed with lines, and her
poor old hands were so knotted from gout that she could hardly lift the
tea-cup from the small table which had been fastened in front of her.
Yet for one instant, as she gazed on Molly's girlish freshness, her
youth stirred feebly somewhere in the dregs of her memory, and her eyes
grew deprecating and piteous, as though her soul were saying, "I know I
have missed it, but it isn't my fault---"
The tea-cup trembled in her hand, and her old lips fumbled pathetically
for her bit of toast, while across from her, with only the narrow aisle
of the car between, youth incarnate sat weaving its separate dream of a
universe.
"Yes, two hours earlier," ran Molly's thoughts, "I looked forward to
the meeting with Jonathan, and now, in so short a time, I have grown to
dread it." She tried to think of his pleasant, well-coloured face, of
his whimsical, caressing smile, but in the niche where his image should
have stood, she saw Abel in his country clothes, with his red-brown
throat rising out of his blue shirt and his brilliant eyes under the
dark hair on his forehead. Then suddenly memory played her a ridiculous
trick, for she remembered that his hair grew in a close clipped circular
wave, like the hair which has been bound by a fillet on the head of a
child.