wonder if he has really got over caring?" She had always thought of
Abel as a possession more absolutely her own than even Mr. Jonathan's
provision. When she had said so passionately that she wanted to be free,
she had not meant that at any minute she chose, Abel would not be ready
and willing to fly back into bondage. That Abel, after all these years,
should actually have ceased to care for her--should have refused even to
speak to her! It was absurd--it was vindictive--it was unchristian!
She had half a mind to get Mr. Mullen to talk to him. Then her heart
throbbed when she remembered the touch of his hand, the look in his
eyes, the thirst of his lips seeking hers. That was only six months
ago--such a very little while--and now he had rushed away from the sight
of her! She thought of their parting, when she had said that she wanted
to see the world, and he had offered at once to release her. Since then
she had seen the world until she was tired of it. At times she had been
terribly homesick for Old Church, and she had never been happy except
when Gay had taken her to see pictures or into wonderful parks. Always
the thought had lain hidden in her mind that some day, when she could
stand it no longer, she would go back and wear her red jacket and run
free in the fields with Abel again. Her very selfishness had seemed
natural to her because Abel had always been there, like the air and the
sky and the broomsedge; he was a part of the scene, and she found it
impossible to detach him from his surroundings.
At the station in Richmond, Gay met them, and for the first few minutes
his mother absorbed his attention. Molly had not seen him for six
weeks, and she noticed that he had grown fleshier and that this lent an
additional heaviness to his shaven chin. Even his charming smile
could not disguise the slight coarseness of feature, with which he was
beginning already to pay for his pleasures. By the time he was forty, he
would be quite stout and "lumpy," she thought.
There was much excitement about collecting Mrs. Gay's packages, and the
drive to the hotel was filled with anxious inquiries from Kesiah, who
was always nervous and fussy when she travelled.
"Molly, did you see my umbrella put in?"
"Yes, Aunt Kesiah, it is here in the corner by Jonathan."
"I forgot to notice Angela's medicine case. Did you see that it wasn't
overlooked?"
"Yes, Patsey has it."
Then came a solicitous exhibition of filial affection on the part
of Gay, and at last, to Molly's relief, they arrived at the new,
brilliantly lighted hotel, and were led through stifling corridors,
carpeted in red, to their rooms on the second floor in the front of the
building. As she passed over the velvet carpets, Molly had again the
sensation that she was walking over ploughed ground; and when she had
escaped from Mrs. Gay's sitting-room, on the pretext of dressing
for dinner, she threw open the window, and leaned out of the close
atmosphere into the freshness of the November evening. This was what she
had once looked upon as pleasure--or at least as exciting amusement--to
move continually from one hot and over furnished hotel to another, to
fuss about missing packages, to see crowds of strange faces passing
before her, all fat and overfed and all, somehow, looking exactly alike.
A wave of homesickness for the white roads and the golden broomsedge
of Old Church swept over her. She wanted the open fields, and more than
all, far more than all, she wanted Abel! It was her fault--she had made
her choice--no one else was to blame for it. And, then, though she had
made her choice and no one else was to blame for it, she felt that she
almost hated old Mr. Jonathan, as she still called him in her thoughts,
because he had left her his money. At the bottom of her heart, there
was the perfectly unreasonable suspicion that he had arranged the whole
thing out of spite.
In the sitting-room, meanwhile, which Kesiah's bedroom separated from
Molly's, Mrs. Gay was lying on a couch beside a table on which stood a
cut-glass bowl of purple orchids sent to her by her son. She was looking
a little pale, but this pallor was not unbecoming since it enhanced the
expression of appealing melancholy in her eyes. To look at her was to
recognize that life had crushed her, and yet that her soul exhaled an
intense sweetness in the midst of its suffering.
Jonathan had just gone down to buy the evening papers; in the next room
she could hear Kesiah at the unpacking; so she was left for a moment
alone with her imagination. The fatigue of the trip had affected her
nerves, and she sank, while she lay there in her travelling gown,
which she had not yet removed, into one of those spells of spiritual
discontent which followed inevitably any unusual physical discomfort.
She thought, not resentfully but sadly, that Kesiah managed to grow even
more obstinate with years, that Jonathan must have tired of her or he
would never have forgotten the list of medicines she had sent him, that
Molly took Kesiah away from the sickroom entirely too often. From these
reflections she drifted naturally into an emotion of self pity, and
the thought occurred to her, as it did invariably in such hours of
depression, that her world had never been large enough for the full
exercise and appreciation of her highest qualities. If she had only
lived in a richer century amid more congenial surroundings! Who could
tell what her usefulness might have been had not destiny continually
thwarted her aspirations? Before the idea of this thwarted usefulness,
which was always vaguely associated with the moral regeneration of
distinguished historic sinners of the opposite sex, like Lord Byron
or Alfred de Musset, she began to feel that she had been not only
neglected, but wasted in the atmosphere in which she had been placed.
Jonathan's entrance, with the evening papers in his hand, broke the
thread of her reverie, and as he sat down in a chair by her side, she
wondered if he had inherited her "nature" and if he, also, cherished in
his soul the same spiritual yearnings? Her wonder was, however, entirely
unnecessary, for Jonathan had very little imagination, and would never
have wasted his time yearning over a sinner whom he had never seen.
"I stopped a minute to get into my evening clothes," he said, in the
cheerful voice of one who is a stranger to aspirations of soul. "I
thought Molly would be dressed by this time. She is usually so quick."
"Yes, she is usually very quick," replied Mrs. Gay gently, while
she gathered all the forces of her character, which were slightly
disorganized by her recent indulgence in pensive musings, to do battle
against an idea which she had striven repeatedly of late to banish from
her thoughts. "I wish, dear Jonathan," she added, "that you would speak
a few words to Molly. You have such influence with her, and I am sure I
don't wonder."
"I'll speak them with pleasure, mother. Just drop me a hint as to what
they are to be about."
"She's a sweet, unselfish girl, we all know that, but there are
times, dear, especially when strangers are present, when she appears a
little--well, a little crude--you know what I mean?"
"I fancy I know, but I don't see just what we are to do about it. You
might as well attempt to reshape Molly's nose as her character. Let's
admit that both might be improved and then give up the job. She's got
charm--there's no doubt of that. I believe even if she were plain she'd
be almost as attractive. Why, I've seen her when she was very nearly
plain sometimes, and she hasn't been a whit less fascinating than when
she's looking her prettiest. It's the infinite variety and all that, you
know. Her soul does it, I suppose."
"Yes, she must have charm," replied Mrs. Gay, ignoring what he had said
about "soul" because she felt a vague dislike to hearing a word applied
indiscriminately to others which had become, as it were, associated with
herself. "I can't analyze it, however, for she hasn't a single really
perfect feature except her eyes."
"But such eyes! In the sunlight they are nearer the colour of a
humming-birds wing than anything I know of."
"I suppose they are rather unusual, but, after all a fine pair of eyes
can't make exactly a--well, a lady, Jonathan."
"The deuce!" he ejaculated, and then added quickly, "What has she done
now, mother?"
One of Mrs. Gay's first principles of diplomacy was that an unpleasant
fact treated as non-existent, was deprived in a measure of its power
for evil. By the application of this principle, she had extinguished her
brother-in-law's passion for Janet Merryweather, and she hoped that it
would prove equally effective in blighting her son's incipient fancy for
Molly. She looked upon Jonathan's infatuation as a mere sinister shadow
as yet, but she was shrewd enough to suspect that the shadow would be
converted into substance at the first hint of her recognition that
it was impending. Indirect influence alone remained to her, and she
surmised that her ultimate triumph would depend upon the perfection of
her indirectness. When it came to the game of strategy, Jonathan, being
of an open nature, was no match for his mother. He was inclined
by temperament to accept things at their face value--particularly
women--and not to worry about them unless they interfered with his
appetite. When he lost his desire for his meals, then he began, somewhat
to his surprise, to consider them seriously.
"Of course I feel just as you do about it," remarked Mrs. Gay, after a
weighty silence. "I'm fond of her and I see her good points--but there's
something about her--I suppose it's the strain of Merryweather blood,
or the fact of her being born in such unfortunate circumstances--" Her
manner grew severer. "But--whatever the cause, it shows itself in a kind
of social defiance that would always keep her from being just--oh, well,
you know---"
"She's bright enough, mother, she's quick enough, and she's pretty
enough, isn't she?"
"She would be, Jonathan, if her defiance did not come from pure
wilfulness. But she says and does the most unconventional things simply
for the pleasure of shocking people. It isn't that she doesn't know,
it's that she doesn't care."
"But she'll get to care--all women do, if you give them time." His tone
implied that the whole sex was comprised in an elementary branch of
psychology which he had mastered with the help of a few simple rules of
analogy.
"Well, she may, dear, but I doubt it. She is as absolutely without class
instinct as an anarchist, I believe. When she lived in the overseer's
cottage she never looked up and now that she has come out of it, she
never looks down. We've told her repeatedly that she mustn't talk to
strangers about that part of her life, but it isn't the least bit of
use. Only a few days ago I heard her telling Judge Grayson that nobody
appeared to do any 'courting' in New York."
To her amazement he burst into a laugh.
"By Jove, I suppose she misses it," he returned, "but what about that
fellow she picked up in the North who hung around her last summer?"
"Oh, there have been plenty of them hanging about her. Molly is the
kind, you know, that will have lovers wherever you put her." There was
a faint condescension in her voice, for she herself preferred adorers to
lovers.
"But she hasn't seemed to care about them," he said. "I believe she has
grown tired of flirting."
"I'm sure she doesn't flirt with them, and I think it's all because she
is pining for somebody she left at Old Church--the miller or the rector
or somebody we've never even heard of."
"What's that?" he started a little, and she saw at once that, although
she had used her most delicate weapon, he had flinched from the first
touch of the blade. "I'm positive she hadn't a real fancy for anybody
down there," he added, as he relapsed into his attitude of indifference.
"I know she says so, Jonathan, but there are other ways of telling."
"Oh, there's no truth in that--it's all nonsense," he said irritably.
Then a door creaked in the hall, there was a rustle of silken skirts
on the carpet, and Molly, having dried her tears, came in, pliant,
blushing, and eager to please them both.
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY
She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay
as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in
expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in
her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there
was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled
before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew
nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the
richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it
to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that
faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his
coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the
ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As
he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her
half-read letters in his travelling bag. "She's a dear good girl, and
just because I've got myself into a mess, I've no idea of behaving like
a cad to her," he thought.
That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he
faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to
himself with an additional emphasis--for when the woman before him in
flesh and blood looked up at him with entreating eyes, like a child
begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness.
"What's the matter, little girl?" he asked.
"Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church--to-morrow!" she said.
"Why in thunder do you want to do that?"
"There's something I must see about. I can't wait. I never can wait when
I want anything."
"So I have observed. This something is so important, by the way, that
you haven't thought of it for six months?"
"Well, I've thought of it--sometimes," she admitted.
"Can't you tell me what it is, Molly?"
She shook her head. Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it
was, it had obviously enriched her beauty.
"Tell me, little girl," he repeated and leaned closer. There had always
been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, and under
the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, "I want to go back to
find out if Abel still loves me! I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that
I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring. This suspense
is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he
means to me."
This was what she wanted to say, but instead of uttering it, she merely
murmured:
"I can't, Jonathan, you would never understand." Her whole being was
vibrant to-night with the desire for love, yet, in spite of his wide
experience with the passion, she knew that he would not comprehend what
she meant by the word. It wasn't his kind of love in the least that she
wanted; it differed from his as the light of the sun differs from the
blaze of a prairie fire. "It's just a feeling," she added, helplessly.
"You don't have feelings, I suppose?"
"Don't I?" he echoed. "Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!"
"While they last--but they don't last, you know, they have their
seasons. That's the curse of them, or the charm. If they only lasted
earth would be paradise or hell, wouldn't it?"
But generalizations had no further attraction for her. Her mind was one
great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she
could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes.
"All the same I want to go," she repeated obstinately.
Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short
moustache.
"Molly," he asked, "have you been thinking again about the miller?"
"How absurd! What put that into your head?" she retorted indignantly.
The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her. What a little
firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry!
"Well, I'm glad you haven't--because, you know, really it wouldn't do,"
he answered.
"What wouldn't do?"
"Your marrying a Revercomb--it wouldn't do in the least."
"Why wouldn't it?"
"You can see that for yourself, can't you? You've come entirely out of
that life and you couldn't go back to it."
"I don't see why I couldn't if I wanted to?" she threw out at him with
sudden violence.
Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he
couldn't agree that she would never become exactly a lady. Not with that
high-bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands!
"Well, in the first place, I don't believe you'd ever want to," he
said calmly, "and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my
little weather-vane, you'd regret it in ten minutes."
"If I did it, I don't believe I'd ever regret it," was her amazing
rejoinder.
Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge.
"You're talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he
said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd
be sorry before you got up to the altar."
"I'm not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but
I don't' believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it."
"You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle
down to raising chickens for a living?"
"I like raising chickens."
"And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would
sacrifice--for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you
please?"
"I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself,
as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the
same everywhere."
"The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any
difference?"
"No difference that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier
things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk
than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and
never mentioned anything but stocks. If I've got to hear about a single
subject I'd rather it would be crops than stocks--they seem more human,
somehow."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, under his breath, "what's got into you
to-night, Molly? I honestly believe you've begun to idealize the miller
now you've been away from him. He's a handsome fellow; you don't see
his physical match in a day, I'm willing to admit, but if you went back
again you'd be surprised to find how--well, how rustic he would appear
to you."
The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden
droop of her lashes.
"He's better than any one I've seen anywhere," she replied, "he's
bigger, he's stronger, he's kinder. I'm not good enough to marry him,
and I know it."
For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had
never indulged in verbal excesses. Then he said, coldly; "So you're
working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb. My dear child,
if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is. Nothing could be more
absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in
order to marry a poor man." The idea of her committing such folly was
intensely distressing to him. His judgment was now in the ascendant,
and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational
part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy
the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise
superior to reason.
"I don't care how poor he is," said Molly passionately, for her rational
part was plainly not in the ascendant. "Nobody ever thought about his
being so poor until your uncle left me all that horrid money. He was
honestly born and I wasn't, yet he didn't care. He was big and splendid
and I was little and mean, that was the matter!"
"By George, you're in love with him!" he exclaimed, and beneath the
coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang.
Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for
Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have strangled speedily in the
beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had,
he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had grown
strong enough to overleap them. While he stood there, with his angry
gaze on her flushing and paling beauty, he had the helpless sensation of
a man who returns at sunrise to find a forest fire raging where he had
left a few sticks smouldering at midnight.
"I'm not in love with anybody--you've no right to say so," she returned,
"but I'll not have him abused. It's not true, it's not just, it's not
generous."
This was too much for his forbearance, though he told himself that,
after all, there was no "getting at" Molly from the surface, and that
this outburst might conceal a fancy for himself quite as well as for
the miller. The last idea, while it tantalized him, was not without a
pleasant sting for his senses.
"You're a goose, Molly, and I've half a mind to shake you soundly,"
he said. "Since there's no other way to cure you of this foolish
infatuation, I'll take you down to Old Church to-morrow and let you see
with your own eyes. You've forgotten how things look there, that's my
opinion."
"Oh, Jonathan," she said, and grew dangerously sweet, while all her soft
flushing body leaned toward him. "You are a perfect dear, aren't you?"
"I rather think I am, since you put the question. Molly, will you kiss
me?"
She drew back at once, a little deprecating, because she was honestly
sorry, since he was so silly as to want to kiss her, that she couldn't
oblige him. For her own part, she felt, she wouldn't have cared, but
she remembered Abel's anger because of the kiss by the brook, and
the thought hardened her heart. It was foolish of men to make so much
importance of kisses.
"I'm sorry, but I can't. Don't ask me, Jonathan--all the same you are a
darling!"
Then before he could detain her, she had slipped away from him through
Kesiah's door, which she closed after her.
"Aunt Kesiah," he heard her exclaim joyously, "Jonathan is going to take
me to Old Church to spend to-morrow!"
Kesiah, in an ugly grey dressing-gown, tied at the waist with a black
cord, was drying Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator. At Molly's
entrance, she turned, and said warningly, "Patsey is rubbing Angela
after her bath. What was that about Old Church, dear?"
"Jonathan has promised to take me down there to-morrow."
"To spend the day? Well, I suppose we may trust you with him." From her
manner one might have inferred that the idea of not trusting anybody
with Jonathan would have been a joke.
She went on calmly shaking out Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator, as
if the conversation were over, while behind her on the pale green wall,
her shadow loomed distinct, grotesque, and sexless. But Molly was in
the mood when the need to talk--to let oneself go--is so great that the
choice of a listener is little more than an accident. She had discovered
at last--discovered in that illuminating moment in Applegate--the
meaning of the homesickness, of the restlessness, of the despondency of
the last few months. Before she could understand what Abel had meant to
her, she had been obliged to draw away from him, to measure him from a
distance, to put the lucid revealing silence between them. It was like
looking at a mountain, when one must fall back to the right angle of
view, must gain the proper perspective, before one can judge of the
space it fills on the horizon. What she needed was merely to see Abel
in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he
towered above them. Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning
sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and
the intoxication of magic was upon her. She had passed within the
Enchanter's circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes.
"Aunt Kesiah," she asked suddenly, and her voice thrilled, "were you
ever in love?"
Kesiah looked up from the sheets with the expression of a person who has
been interrupted in the serious business of life by the fluttering of
a humming-bird. It required an effort for her to recede from the
comfortable habit of thought she had attained to the point of view from
which the aspirations of the soul had appeared of more importance than
the satisfactions of the body. Only for a few weeks in the spring did
she relapse periodically into such a condition of mind.
"Never," she answered.
"Did you never feel that you cared about anybody--in that way?"
"Never."
It was incredible! It was appalling! But it really had happened! Love,
which filled the world, was not the beginning and the end, as it ought
to be, of every mortal existence. Subtract it from the universe and
there was nothing left but a void, yet in this void, life seemed to
move and feed and have its being just as if it were really alive. People
indeed--even women--would go on, like Kesiah, for almost sixty years,
and not share, for an instant, the divine impulse of creation. They
could exist quite comfortably on three meals a day without ever
suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them.
They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation
existence--this play of make-believe being alive. And around them all
the time there was the wonder and the glory of the universe!
Then Kesiah turned suddenly from the radiator, and there was an
expression in her face which reminded Molly of the old lady with the
bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria she had seen on the
train--an expression of useless knowledge and regret, as though she
realized that she had missed the essential thing and that it was life,
after all, that had been to blame for it. For a minute only the look
lasted, for Kesiah's was a closed soul, and the smallest revelation of
herself was like the agony of travail.
"If you don't mind, dear, will you carry these sheets to Patsey for
Angela's bed," she said.
At the time Gay had been only half in earnest when he promised to take
Molly to Old Church, and he presented himself at breakfast next morning
with the unspoken hope in his heart that she had changed her mind during
the night. When she met him with her hat on, he inquired facetiously if
she contemplated a journey, and proceeded to make light of her response
that the carriage was ordered to take them to the station.
"But we'll starve if we go there," he urged, "the servants are
scattered, and the luncheon I got last time was a subject for bad
language."
"I'll cook you one, Jonathan. I can cook beautifully," she said.
The idea amused him. After all they could easily get back to dinner.
"I wonder if you know that you are a nuisance, Molly?" he asked,
smiling, and she saw that she had won. Winning was just as easy with
Jonathan as it had been with Reuben or with Abel.
It was a brilliant day, in the midst of a brief spell of Indian
summer. When they left the train and drove along the corduroy road from
Applegate, the forest on either side of them was gorgeous in gold and
copper. Straight ahead, at the end of the long vista, they could see a
bit of cloudless sky beyond the low outlines of a field; and both sky
and field were wrapped in a faint purplish haze. The few belated yellow
butterflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift
pensively in the autumnal stillness.
On the long drive hardly a word was spoken, for Gay was occupied with
the cigar he had not had time to smoke after breakfast, and Molly was
thinking that but for Reuben's death, she would never have accepted Mr.
Jonathan's legacy and parted from Abel.
"All this happened because I went along the Haunt's Walk and not across
the east meadow that April afternoon," she thought, "but for that,
Jonathan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have
quarrelled." It was such a little thing--only the eighth of a mile which
had decided her future. She might just as easily have turned aside if
she had only suspected. But life was like that--you never suspected
until things had happened, and the little decisions, made in the midst
of your ignorance, committed you to your destiny.
The horses came out of the wood, plodding over the sandy soil, which
marked the beginning of the open country. Across the fields toward
Bottom's Ordinary, scattered groups of people were walking in twos and
threes, showing like disfiguring patches in the midst of the golden
rod and the life-everlasting. Old Adam, hobbling up the path, while
the horses stopped to drink at the well, touched his hat as he steadied
himself with the aid of his big knotted stick.
"It's a fine sight to see you back among us," he said. "If you'd come a
couple of hours earlier you'd have been in time for the wedding?"
"What wedding?" asked Gay in a clear voice, but moved by some intuitive
knowledge of what the answer would be, he did not look at Molly.
"Why, Solomon Hatch's daughter, Judy, to be sure. She's just married
the miller." For a minute he stopped, coughed, spat and then added: "Mr.
Mullen tied 'em up tight all by heart, without so much as glancin' at
the book. Ah, that young parson may have his faults, an' be unsound on
the doctrine of baptism, but he can lay on matrimony with as pious an
air as if he was conductin' a funeral."
He fell back as Gay nodded pleasantly, and the wheels grated over
the rocky ground by the well. With a slow flick on the long whip, the
carriage crossed the three roads and rolled rapidly into the turnpike.
And while she gazed straight ahead into the flat distance, Molly was
thinking, "All this has happened because I went down the Haunt's Walk
that April afternoon and not over the east meadow."
CHAPTER VII
A NEW BEGINNING TO AN OLD TRAGEDY
The wedding was over. Mr. Mullen had read the service in his melodious
voice, gazing straight over the Prayer-book as though he saw a vision in
the sunbeam above Judy's head. On that solitary occasion his soul, which
revolted from what he described in secret as the "Methodistical low
church atmosphere" of his parish, had adorned the simple word with the
facial solemnity that accompanies an elaborate ritual.
From the front pew, Sarah Revercomb, in full widow's weeds, had glared
stonily at the Reverend Orlando, as if she suspected him of some
sinister intention to tamper with the ceremony. At her side, Solomon
Hatch's little pointed beard might have been seen rising and falling
as it followed the rhythmic sound of the clergyman's voice. When the
service was over, and the congregation filed out into the leaf-strewn
paths of the churchyard, it was generally decided that Mr. Mullen's
delivery had never been surpassed in the memory of the several
denominations.
"'Twas when he came to makin' Abel say 'with all my worldly goods' that
he looked his grandest," commented old Adam, as he started for Solomon's
cottage between Sarah and Mrs. Hatch. "But, them are solemn words an'
he was wise to give a man pause for thought. Thar ain't a mo' inspirin'
sentence in the whole Prayer-book than that."
"Well, marriage ain't all promisin'," observed Sarah, "thar's a deal to
it besides, an' they're both likely to find it out befo' they're much
older."
Old Adam, who never contradicted a woman unless he was married to her,
agreed to this with some unintelligible mutters through his toothless
gums, while Mrs. Hatch remarked with effusive amiability that "it's a
sad sight to see a daughter go, even though she's a stepchild. It's
a comfort to think," she added immediately, "that Judy's got a
God-fearin', pious husband an' one with no nonsense about him for all
his good looks."
"I ain't so sure about the nonsense," retorted Sarah, "Abel's got to be
managed like all men folk, an' he ain't so different from the rest of
'em, unless it is that he's mo' set."
She harboured a carefully concealed opinion that Abel was "stooping" to
marry Judy, for the Hatches were particularly thriftless and had never
succeeded in paying a long standing mortgage. Besides, they were in the
habit of using their parlour commonly on week days, and Mrs. Hatch had
once been seen at church in a calico dress--though, it was true, she had
slipped out of the side door before the service was over. Added to these
things, Sarah had observed of late that Judy showed an inclination to
shirk her duties, and had a dangerous habit of "mooning" while she was
at the wash tub.
"Well, I like a man that's set, myself," rejoined Mrs. Hatch, as
effusive as ever. "I used to say thar never was anybody so set as my
first husband till I got my second."
"I ain't had so wide an experience as you," replied Sarah, as if
she were condescending to an acknowledged lapse in virtue. "Thar's a
difference between marryin' for the sake of matrimony, which is right
an' proper accordin' to Scripture, an' marryin' for the sake of a man,
which is a sign of weakness in a woman."
"You ain't a friend to the feelin's of natur, ma'am," remarked old Adam,
with respect.
"No, thar never was much natur in me," responded Sarah, lifting her
bombazine skirt with both hands as she stepped over a puddle. Her
floating crape veil, bought ten years after her husband's death, with
the money made from her turkeys, represented the single extravagance
as well as the solitary ambition of her life. Even as a child she had
longed ardently to wear crape, and this secret aspiration, which had
smouldered in the early poverty-stricken years of her marriage, had
burst suddenly into flame when she found herself a widow. During the
burial service over her husband, while she had sat bowed in musty
black cotton, which had been loaned her by a neighbour, she had vowed
earnestly that she would wear weeds yet for Abner before she died. Ten
years of scraping and saving were devoted to this sacred resolve, and
now, twenty years after the death of Abner Revercomb, she was wearing
a crape veil for him to his son's wedding. As she walked, so strong a
smell of camphor floated from her garments, that old Adam sneezed twice,
and then muttered hurriedly that "'twas the very season for chills."
Something of her secret pride in her garb of mourning had entered into
him while he limped beside her on his rheumatic old legs.
Instead of stopping with the others for the wedding feast at the
Solomon's cottage, Sarah pleaded a sudden palpitation of the heart, and
hurried home to put the house in order before the arrival of the bride.
Already she had prepared the best chamber and set the supper table with
her blue and white china, but as she walked quietly home from church
at the side of old Adam, she had remembered, with a sensation of panic,
that she had forgotten to make up the the feather bed, which she
rolled over for an airing. Not a speck of dust was left on the floor
or windows, and a little later, while she began spreading the sheets,
without waiting to remove her bonnet, she thought proudly that Judy
probably never stayed in so entirely respectable a chamber in her life.
Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies,
the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the
bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a
pincushion in the shape of a monstrous tomato.
Yes, it was all ready for them, she reflected, while she stood in the
doorway and surveyed the results of her handiwork. "Thar's something
wantin'," she observed presently to herself. "I never could feel that
a weddin' or a funeral was finished without a calla lily somewhere
around." Going downstairs to the kitchen, she clipped the last forced
blossoms of an unusual size from her "prize" plant, and brought them
back in a small glass vase to decorate Judy's bureau. "Now it's just
like it was when I was married," she thought, "an' it's just as it
will be when Abel's sons are bringin' home their brides." There was no
sentiment in her thoughts, for she regarded sentiment as a mere morbid
stimulant to the kind of emotion she considered both dangerous and
useless. Even the look on Abel's face, which she had been forced to
recognize as that of despair, seemed to her, on the whole, a safer
expression than one of a too-exultant joy. She was not afraid of
despair--its manifestations were familiar to her, and she had usually
found them amenable to the laws of propriety. But she felt vaguely that
happiness in some mysterious way was related to sin, and the shameless
ecstasy with which Abel had announced his engagement to Molly had
branded his emotion as positively immoral in her sight. "No decent
feelin' is goin' to make anybody's face shine like a brass plate," she
had said to herself.
After straightening the crocheted mats for the last time, she went
downstairs to the kitchen to describe the wedding to the two old
people, who, chained to their chairs by rheumatism, were on the point of
bursting with curiosity.
"An' you didn't bring me so much as a bite of cake," whimpered
grandmother, seeing her empty hands. "Here I've been settin' all day in
this cheer with my mouth waterin' for that weddin' cake."
"I'm just as sure as I can be that Mrs. Hatch is goin' to send you some
made by Blossom," replied Sarah soothingly.
"Ah, to think of Abel bein' at his own weddin' an' we settin' here,"
piped grandfather. "'Twas a hasty business, but we Revercombs were
al'ays the folk to swallow our puddin' while 'twas smokin' an' then cry
out that we didn't know 'twas hot. I never knew one of us that didn't
have to larn he was a fool befo' he could come at any wisdom."
"Well, I ain't got anything particular against the girl," said Sarah,
"but it's my bounden belief that she'll turn out a slattern. Thar's
something moonstruck about her--you can tell it by that shiftin'
skeered-rabbit look in her eyes. She's just the sort to sweep all the
trash under the bed an' think she's cleaned the room."
"It's amazin', the small sense men have in sech matters," remarked
grandfather. "Thar's a feelin' among us, I don't know whar it comes
from, that the little and squinched-up women generally run to virtue."
"Oh, I ain't sayin' she's not a good girl accordin' to her lights,"
returned Sarah, "an', after all, it ain't a man but his mother that
suffers from a slattern. Well, I must go an' lay off my weeds befo' it's
time for 'em to get here. Don't you fret, ma, Mrs. Hatch is surely goin'
to send you something."
Inspired by this prophecy, grandmother began immediately to show signs
of reviving hope, and a little later, when the sound of wheels was heard
on the road, she was seized with an anticipation so violent that she
fluttered like a withered leaf in the wind. Then the wheels stopped at
the gate, and Blossom and Mr. Mullen entered, bearing a small basket,
which contained disordered remains of the wedding feast.
"Whar's Abel?" inquired Sarah, bowing stiffly to the young clergyman.
"We passed them in the road. My horse for once outstripped his mare,"
replied Mr. Mullen, who felt a crawling sensation in the back of his
neck whenever Sarah was present, as if he were called upon to face in
her single person an entire parsimonious vestry. "I had the pleasure of
driving your granddaughter home, and now I must be going back to bring
mother. It was a delightful occasion, Mrs. Revercomb, and you are to be
congratulated on the charming addition to your family." He hadn't
meant to use the word "charming"--he had intended to say "estimable"
instead--but Sarah embarrassed him by her expression, and it slipped out
before he was aware of it. Her manner annoyed him excessively. It was as
bad as looking up suddenly in the midst of one of the finest paragraphs
in his sermon and meeting a supercilious look on a face in his
congregation.
"Humph!" observed Sarah shortly, and when he had gone, she emitted the
sound again, half to herself, half to her audience, "humph!"
"What's the matter, grandma?" inquired Blossom listlessly, "you don't
look as if you were pleased."
"Oh, I'm pleased," replied Sarah curtly. "I'm pleased. Did you notice
how yellow Abel was lookin' at the weddin'? What he needs is a good dose
of castor oil. I've seen him like that befo', an' I know."
"Oh, grandma! how can you? who ever heard of anybody taking castor oil
on their wedding day?"
"Well, thar's a lot of 'em that would better," rejoined Sarah in her
tart manner. The perfection of Mr. Mullen's behaviour in church combined
with her forgetfulness to make up the feather bed had destroyed her day,
and her irritation expressed itself as usual in a moral revolt from her
surroundings. "To think of makin' all this fuss about that pop-eyed Judy
Hatch," she thought, and a minute later she said aloud, "Thar they are
now; Blossom, you take Judy upstairs to her room an' I'll see after
Abel. It ain't any use contradictin' me. He's in for a bilious spell
just as sure as you are born." She spoke irritably, for her anxiety
about Abel's liver covered a deeper disquietude, and she was battling
with all the obstinacy of the Hawtreys against the acknowledgment that
the ailment she was preparing to dose with drugs was a simple malady
of the soul. In her moral universe, sin and virtue were two separate
entities, as easily distinguished on the surface as any other phenomena.
That a mere feeling, not produced by a disordered liver, could make a
man wear that drawn and desperate look in his face, appeared to her both
unnatural and reprehensible.
But Abel did not appear, though Sarah awaited his entrance with a
bottle in her hand. As soon as he had turned his mare out to pasture, he
crossed the road to the mill, and stopping beside the motionless wheel,
watched the excited swallows fly back and forth overhead. He knew how a
man felt who was given a life sentence in prison for an act committed in
a moment of madness. Why he had ever asked Judy to marry him--why he
had gone on calmly approaching the day of his wedding--he could no more
explain than he could explain the motives which impelled him to the
absurdities in a nightmare. It was all a part of the terrible and yet
useful perversity of life--of the perversity that enables a human being
to pass from inconsistency to inconsistency without pausing in his
course to reflect on his folly.
In front of him was the vivid green rise in the meadow, which showed
like a burst of spring in the midst of the November landscape. Beyond
it, the pines were etched in sharp outlines on the bright blue sky,
where a buzzard was sailing slowly in search of food. The weather was so
perfect that the colours of the fields and the sky borrowed the intense
and unreal look of objects seen in a crystal.
"Well, it's over and done," said Abel to himself; "it's over and done
and I'm glad of it." It seemed to him while he spoke that it was his
life, not his marriage, to which he alluded--that he had taken the
final, the irremediable step, and there was nothing to come afterwards.
The uncertainty and the suspense were at an end, for the clanging of the
prison doors behind him was still in his ears. To-morrow would be
like yesterday, the next year would be like the last. Forgetting his
political ambition, he told himself passionately that there was nothing
ahead of him--nothing to look forward to. Vaguely he realized that
inconsistent and irreconcilable as his actions appeared, they had been,
in fact, held together by a single, connecting thread, that one dominant
feeling had inspired all of his motives. If he had never loved Molly,
he saw clearly now, he should never have rushed into his marriage with
Judy. Pity had driven him first in the direction of love--he remembered
the pang that had racked his heart at the story of the forsaken
Janet--and pity again had urged him to the supreme folly of his
marriage. All his life he had been led astray by a temptation for drink.
"Poor Judy," he said aloud after a minute, "she deserves to be happy and
I'm going to try with all the strength that is in me to make her so."
And then there rose before him, as if it moved in answer to his resolve,
a memory of the past so vivid that it seemed to exist not only in his
thoughts, but in the radiant autumn fields at which he was looking. All
the old passionate sweetness, as sharp as pain, appeared to float there
in the Indian summer before him. Rapture or agony? He could not tell,
but he knew that he had lost it forever.
Turning away, he recrossed the log, and stood for a moment, hesitating,
with his hand on the gate. A decrepit figure, hobbling with bent head
through a golden cloud of dust, signed to him to stop, and while he
waited, he made out the person of old Adam, slightly the worse, he
gathered, for the wedding feast.
"I tarried thar till the last, hopin' to have still another taste of
toddy," remarked the aged merrymaker. "When a man has turned ninety he
might as well cease to take thought for his morals, an' let the natchel
bent of 'em have a chance."
It was plain that his last glass had been too much for him, and that,
for the first time in his temperate career, he was rapidly approaching a
condition of alcoholic ecstasy.
"You'd better go home and take a nap," said Abel kindly. "You can't very
well get lost between here and your house, or I'd go with you."
"It warn't the weddin' glass that was too much for me," replied the
old man at the point of tears, "'twas the one I had arterwards at the
or'nary. Not wishin' to depart from an old custom on account of a rare
festival, I stopped at Mrs. Bottom's just as young Mr. Jonathan an'
Reuben Merryweather's gal drove up from Applegate. Ah, sech a sight as
she was--all in shot silk that rustled when you looked at it--an' as
pretty as a pictur."
"So they've come back?" asked Abel, almost in a whisper.
"Yes, they've come back, an' a sad comin' it was for her, as I could see
in her face. 'What are you wearin' yo' Sunday best for, Mr. Doolittle?'
asked Mr. Jonathan, spry as a cricket. 'It's a fine weddin' I've been
to, Mr. Jonathan,' I answered, 'an' I've seen two lovin' hearts beatin'
as one befo' Mr. Mullen at the altar.' Then Reuben Merryweather's gal
called out right quickly, 'Whose weddin', old Adam?' an' when I replied,
'Abel Revercomb's,' as I was bound to, her face went as white as a han't
right thar befo' me---"
"You'd better go home or you won't be in any condition to walk there,"
said Abel angrily. "It's down right indecent to see a man of your age
rocking about in the road."
Turning quickly in his tracks, he went over the log again and on to the
loneliness of the meadows beyond.
"And she went as white as a haunt," he muttered under his breath.
CHAPTER VIII
A GREAT PASSION IN A HUMBLE PLACE
Time does not stand still even for the unhappily married. A man may
have wedded the wrong woman, but he comes down to his breakfast and goes
about his work as punctually as if he had wedded the right one. To Abel,
with the thought of Molly throbbing like a fever in his brain, it was
still possible to grind his grist and to subtract carefully the eighth
part as a toll--while Judy, hushed in day dreams, went on making
butter in a habit of absent-minded tranquillity. Life seldom deals in
cataclysmic situations--at least on the surface. Living side by side
in a married intimacy for months, Abel and Judy were still strangers to
each other. Their bodies touched while their souls were crucified at an
immeasurable distance.
To Sarah, who embraced Christian theology while she practised
religiously the doctrine of the physical basis of life, there had seemed
no cause for disturbance, until Judy entered the kitchen on a stormy
evening in June, and turned a pair of inflamed eyes on the face of her
mother-in-law. The young woman wore her wedding dress, now nearly seven
months old, and clasped in her hand a neatly bound prayer-book which had
been the gift of the Reverend Orlando. For more than six months she had
suffered silently under Sarah's eyes, which saw only outward and visible
afflictions. Now, at the first sign of quivering flesh, the older woman
was at once on the alert.
"Whar you goin', Judy?" she inquired. "You ain't thinkin' about
traipsin' out of doors on a night like this, are you?"
"Archie promised to take me to the Bible class, an' he hasn't come
back," replied Judy, while her face worked convulsively. "I've waited
for him since half past seven."
"If that don't beat all!" exclaimed Sarah. "Why, it's thunderin' like
Jedgment Day. Can't you hear it?"
"But I promised Mr. Mullen I wouldn't let anything prevent me," returned
Judy, growing sullen. "Archie said he'd be back here without fail, an' I
know he's stayed to supper over at the Halloweens'."
"Isn't it foolish to wear your best hat out in the rain?" asked Blossom,
not without surprise, for her sister-in-law had developed into something
of a slattern.
"I reckon hats are made to be worn," retorted Judy. As a rule her temper
was placid enough, but Archie's defection, after she had given him
her best neck-tie for the purpose of binding him to his promise, had
overstrained the tension of her nerves. "Where's Abner? He used to go
regular."
"He's gone upstairs so tired that he can barely hist his foot," replied
Sarah. "You'd better let that Bible class alone this evening, Judy. Yo'
salvation ain't dependin' on it, I reckon."
But in Judy's colourless body there dwelt, unknown to Nature, which has
no sense of the ridiculous, the soul of a Cleopatra. At the moment she
would cheerfully have died of an asp sooner than relinquish the study
of Exodus under the eyes of the rector. In the arid stretch of her
existence a great passion had flamed, and like most great passions, it
was ruthless, destroying, and utterly selfish. She had made butter
all day with the hope of that Bible class in her mind, and she was
determined that, whatever it cost the Revercombs, she should have her
reward this evening in the commendation of the young clergyman. That
mere thunder and lightning should keep her from his side appeared to her
little less than absurd. She knew that he had received a call within
the week, and she would have walked unshod over burning ploughshares in
order to hear him say that he had declined it.
"I've got to go," she insisted stubbornly. "If there isn't anybody to go
with me, I'll go alone."
"Why, if you're so bent on it I'll take you myself," said Abel, looking
up from the barrel of his gun, which he was cleaning. His manner to Judy
was invariably kind and even solicitous, to a degree which caused Sarah
to tell herself at times that "it wasn't natural an' wasn't goin' to
last." As long as men would behave themselves quietly, and go about
their business with the unfailing regularity of the orthodox,
she preferred, on the whole, that they should avoid any unusual
demonstration of virtue. An extreme of conduct whether good or bad made
her uneasy. She didn't like, as she put it in her mind, "anything out of
the way." Once when Abel, nettled by some whim of Judy's, had retorted
with a slight show of annoyance, his mother had experienced a positive
sensation of relief, while she said to herself with a kind of triumph
that "the old Adam was thar still."
"You've got that hackin' cough, Abel an' you oughtn't to go out in this
storm," remarked Sarah, with an uneasiness she could not conceal.
"Oh, it won't hurt me. I'm a pine knot. Are you ready, Judy?"
"It's such a little way," said Judy, still sullen under her
mother-in-law's disapproval. When Abel coughed once, while he was
getting into his rubber coat, she glanced at him angrily. Why couldn't
he have waited at least until he got out of doors? Instead of gratitude
she bore him a dull resentment for having married her, and when she
looked back on her hard life in her father's house, she beheld it
through that rosy veil of idealism in which the imaginative temperament
envelops the past or the future at the cost of the present. Then she had
had time, at least, to dream and to dawdle! During the seven months of
her marriage, she had learned that for the brooding soul there is no
anodyne so soothing as neglect, no comfort so grateful as freedom to be
unhappy.
When the door closed behind them Sarah looked at Blossom with an
eloquent expression. "Well, I never!" she exclaimed, and wrung the
dough from her hands into the tray over which she was standing. "Well I
never!"
"I don't believe it's right for Abel to give in to Judy as he does,"
said Blossom.
"I never saw a Revercomb that warn't a fool about something," answered
Sarah. "It don't matter so much what 'tis about, but it's obliged to be
about something."
Blossom sighed and bent lower over the seam she was running. She had
long since ceased to draw any consolation from her secret marriage, and
her wedding ring (bought weeks after the ceremony by Gay) caused her
pain rather than pleasure when it pressed into her bosom, where it hung
suspended by a blue ribbon from her neck. Her strong Saxon instinct for
chastity--for the integrity of feminine virtue--sometimes awoke in her,
and then she would think exultingly, "At least I am married!" But even
this amazing triumph of morality--of the spirit of Sarah Revercomb over
the spirit of the elder Jonathan Gay--showed pallid and bloodless
beside the evanescent passion to which she had been sacrificed. Destiny,
working through her temperament, had marked her for victory, but it had
been only one of those brief victories which herald defeats. The
forces of law and order--the sound racial instincts which make for the
preservation of society--these had won in the event, though they had
been, after all, powerless to change the ultimate issue. The spirit of
old Jonathan, as well as the spirit of Sarah, was immortal. The racial
battle between the soldier of fortune and the militant Calvinist was not
yet fought to a finish.
"I believe Abel would give Judy the clothes on his back if he thought
she wanted them," said Blossom, in the effort to turn her musings away
from her own troubles.
"It ain't natural," rejoined Sarah stubbornly. "It's a man's natur to be
mean about money matters whar his wife is concerned, an' when he begins
to be different it's a sign that thar's a screw loose somewhar inside of
him. My Abner was sech a spendthrift that he'd throw away a day's market
prices down at the or'nary, but he used to expect the money from a
parcel of turkeys to keep me in clothes and medicines and doctor's
bills, to say nothin' of household linen an' groceries for the whole
year round."
Blossom sighed softly, "I don't suppose there ever was a man who could
see that a woman needed anything except presents now and then," she
said, "unless it's Abel. Do you know, grandma, I sometimes think he's so
kind to Judy because he knows he doesn't love her."
"Well, I reckon, if thar's got to be a choice between love and kindness,
I'd hold on to kindness," retorted Sarah.
It was ten o'clock before Abel and Judy returned, and from the hurried
and agitated manner of their entrance, it was plain that the Bible class
had not altogether appeased Judy's temper.
"She's worn out, that's the matter," explained Abel, while they stopped
to dry themselves in the kitchen.
"You go straight upstairs to bed, Judy," said Sarah, "an' I'll send you
up a cup of gruel by Abel. You oughtn't to have gone streakin' out in
this rain, an' it's natural that it should have upset you."
"It wasn't the rain," replied Judy, and the instant afterwards, she
burst into tears and ran out of the room before they could stop her.
"I declar', I never saw anybody carry on so in my life," observed Sarah.
Abel glanced at her with a perplexed and anxious frown on his brow. "You
ought to be patient with her condition," he said. His own patience
was inexhaustible, and its root, as Blossom had suspected, lay in his
remorseful indifference. With Molly he had not been patient, but he had
loved her.
"Don't talk to me about patience," rejoined Sarah, "haven't I had nine
an' lost six?"
She was entirely without the sentiment which her son felt regarding the
physical function of motherhood, for like the majority of sentiments, it
had worn thin when it had been stretched over a continual repetition of
facts. To Abel the mystery was still shrouded in a veil of sympathy,
and was hardly to be thought of without tenderness. But his solicitude
merely nettled Sarah. Nobody had ever "carried on" over her when she had
had her nine.
"Have you said anything sharp to her to-day, mother?" he inquired
suspiciously, after a minute.
"You know I ain't, Abel. She left a dirty glass in the dairy an' I never
so much as mentioned it. Did Mr. Mullen complain of her leavin' off
mission work?"
"Why, of course not. He talked to us only a few minutes and he seemed
absent-minded. He's had a good call somewhere in the North, and he told
us that he had prayed over it unceasingly and he believed that the Lord
was directing him to larger fields."
"Did Judy hear that?"
"Yes, he told us both."
Sarah was stirring the gruel, and she appeared so absorbed in her task
that the remark she let fall a minute later bore presumably no relation
to the conversation.
"I sometimes think men ain't got any mo' sense than an unborn babe!" she
observed.
Taking the cup from her hands, Abel went up the little staircase to the
bedroom, where Judy stood before the bureau, with a long black-headed
hat pin in her hand. She had evidently not begun to undress, for her hat
was still on her head, and under the heavy shadow of the brim her eyes
looked back at her husband with an accusing and hostile expression.
"Drink this, Judy, while it is hot," he said kindly, placing the cup on
the bureau.
"I don't want it," she answered, and her voice sounded as if she were
ready to burst again into tears.
"Are you sick?"
"No."
"I'm going to sleep in the attic. Call me if you want anything."
Without replying she took off her hat and placed it on the top shelf
in the wardrobe. Had he beaten her she felt that she could almost have
loved him, but the primitive sex instinct in her was outraged by his
gentleness.
"Has anybody hurt your feelings?" asked Abel, turning suddenly on his
way to the door.
"No."
"Then, for God's sake, what is it?" he demanded, at his wit's end. "You
look as if you'd lost the last friend you had on earth."
At this she broke into hard dry sobs which rattled in her throat before
they escaped. A spasm of self-pity worked convulsively in her bosom,
and, turning away, she buried her face in her arms, while the long,
agonized tremors shook her slender figure. Looking at her, he remembered
bitterly that he had married Judy in order to make her happy. By the
sacrifice of his own inclinations he had achieved this disastrous
result. If he had tried to do evil instead of good, he could hardly have
wrought more irreparable mischief--and with the thought, pity, which had
led him astray, winged off, like an ironic sprite, and left his heart
empty of comfort.
"God knows I am sorry for you, Judy," he said in the effort to reinforce
his compassion.
But Judy, though she was avid of sympathy, did not crave an expression
of it from her husband--for her temperament was of the morbid kind
that is happiest when it is most miserable. Her heart had fed upon the
sustenance of her brain until the abnormal enlargement of that single
organ had prepared her for inevitable suffering at the hands of men--if
not from actual unkindness, yet from an amiable neglect which could
cut even more deeply. She turned in the direction of sentiment as
instinctively as a plant turns toward light, and the Reverend Orlando
Mullen had had predecessors in her affections who had been hardly so
much as aware of her existence.
As Abel went out of the door, her accusing eyes followed him while she
thought, with sentimental regret, of the many things she had given up
when she married--of Mrs. Mullen's ironing day, of the rector's darning,
of the red flannel petticoats she had no longer time to make for the
Hottentots. It was over one of these flannel petticoats that Mr. Mullen
had first turned to her with his earnest and sympathetic look, as though
he were probing her soul. At the moment she had felt that his casual
words held a hidden meaning, and to this day, though she had pondered
them in sleepless nights ever since, she was still undecided.
"I don't believe he knew how much I cared," she said, as she started
mechanically to take out her hairpins.
CHAPTER IX
A MEETING IN THE PASTURE
As Judy did not appear next morning, her breakfast was carried up to
her by Sarah, who allowed her own cakes to become leathery while she
arranged the tray. Her feet were still on the staircase, when Blossom
turned to Abel and said in a furtive and anxious voice:
"Mrs. Bottom told me yesterday the Gays were coming back to Jordan's
Journey. Have you heard anything about it?"
"No, I haven't heard," he answered indifferently, though his pulses
throbbed at the words. Rising from the table an instant later, he went
out into the yard, where the sunshine filtered softly through June
foliage. By the porch a damask rose-bush was in bloom, and the fragrance
followed him along the path between the borders of portulaca. At the
gate he found a young robin too weak to fly, and lifting it carefully,
he returned it to the nest in a pear-tree. Like all young and helpless
things, it aroused in him a tenderness which, in some strange way, was
akin to pain.
On the crooked sycamore the young leaves fluttered with shirred edges,
and beyond the mill and the fallow field, the slender green ribbons of
the corn were unfolding. As he gazed at the pines on the horizon, he
remembered the day he had swung his axe in joy under their branches, and
it seemed to him, while he looked back upon it, that the hour belonged
to the distant memories of his boyhood.
"It's over now, and I'm not going to whine about it," he said aloud to
his hound. "A plain fool is bad enough, Moses, my boy, but a whining
fool is the meanest thing God ever made in man or dog. Because I've lost
the thing I wanted most, I've no mind to wallow in the dust--but, oh,
Molly, Molly!"
She came to him again, not fair and flitting, but ardent and tender,
with her parted red mouth raised to his, and the light and darkness
trembling on her face like faint shadows in the wind. And this vision
of her, which was so vivid that it shook his heart with a pang of agony,
seemed saying to him in words which were not his--which were not words
at all, but some subtler communion of sense--"I am to be loved, but
never possessed, for, like the essence of desire, I elude forever the
conditions of mortality."
A week later, while the thought of her burned like fire in his brain, he
met her face to face in the path which led from the blazed pine over the
pasture to Jordan's Journey. Had he seen her in time, he would have fled
from the meeting, but she appeared without warning as he turned from the
turnpike to the bars. Almost before he was aware of it, he was within
touch of her and looking into her eyes. She wore her black dress still,
and the air of elegance, of strangeness, was even more obvious than when
he had met her at Applegate the day before his marriage. Her face had
lost a little of its bloom, and there was a look in it which he had
never seen there before--a look which was wistful and yet expectant, as
though, like old Reuben, she was hoping against knowledge and in despite
of disappointment.
"Molly!" he cried, and stopped short, longing to touch her hand and
yet with something, which was like conscience in the shape of Judy,
restraining him.
"Abel, how little you've changed!" she said.
"Haven't I? Well, you're yourself, too, and yet you're different."
"Different? I suppose you mean I'm wearing better clothes?"
He smiled for the first time. "I wasn't thinking about your clothes.
They never seemed to matter."
What he had meant, though he dared not utter the thought aloud, was that
she had grown softer and gentler, and was less the Molly of the flashing
charm and the defiant challenge.
"Yes, I've changed in a way, of course," she admitted presently, "I feel
grown up now, and I never felt so before. Life was all play to me until
grandfather died."
"And it isn't now?"
"Not entirely--I'm still growing."
Her hand rested on the bars beside which she was standing, and the
fragrant festoons of wild grape blooming beside the post, brushed softly
against her bosom. There was a quietness, a suggestion of restraint in
her attitude which he had never seen in the old Molly.
"The day you went away you told me you wanted to live," he said.
"I remember. I couldn't have done differently. I had to find out things
for myself. Of course, life is all just the same everywhere, but then
I didn't know it. I used to think that one had only to travel a certain
distance and one would pass the boundary of the commonplace and come
into the country of adventure. It was silly, of course, but you see
I didn't know any better. It was the fret of youth, I suppose, though
people never seem to think that women ever feel it--or, perhaps, as Mrs.
Bottom used to say, it was only the Gay blood working off."
"I don't like to hear you talk of the Gay blood in you," he said
quickly.
His voice betrayed him, and looking up, she asked quietly, "How is Judy,
Abel?"
"She's not well. It seems she suffers with her nerves."
"I'm coming to see her. Judy and I were always friends, you know."
"Yes, I know. You were a friend to every woman."
"And I am still. I've grown to love Aunt Kesiah, and I believe I'm the
only person who sees just how fine she is."
"Your grandfather saw, I think. Do you remember he used to say life was
always ready to teach us things, but that some of us were so mortal slow
we never learned till we died?"
Her eyes were starry as she looked away from him over the meadow. "Abel,
I miss him so," she said after a minute.
"I know, Molly, I know."
"Nothing makes up for him. All the rest seems so distant and unhuman.
Nothing is so real to me as the memory of him sitting in his chair on
the porch with Spot at his feet."
For a minute he did not reply, and when he spoke at last, it was only to
say:
"I wonder if a single human being could ever understand you, Molly?"
"I don't understand myself. I don't even try."
"You've had everything you could want for a year--been everywhere--seen
everything--yet, I believe, you'd give it all up to be back in the
cottage over there with Reuben and his hound?"
"Why shouldn't I?" she answered passionately, "that was what I loved."
"I suppose you're right," he said a little sadly, "that was always what
you loved."
She turned her head away, but he saw the delicate flush pass from her
cheek to her throat.
"I mean I am faithful to the things that really matter," she answered.
"And the things that do not really matter are men?" he asked with a
humour in which there was a touch of grimness.
"Perhaps you're right about some of them, at least," she answered,
smiling at a memory. "I was full of animal spirits--of the joy of
energy, and there was no other outlet. A girl sows her mental wild oats,
if she has any mind, just as a boy does. But what people never seem
to realize is that women go on and change just as men do. They seem to
think that a girl stands perfectly still, that what she is at twenty,
she remains to the end of her life. Of course that's absurd. After the
first shock of real experience that old make-believe side of things
lost all attraction for me. I could no more go back to flirting with Mr.
Mullen or with Jim Halloween than I could sit down in the road and make
mud pies for an amusement. How is Mr. Mullen, by the way?" she inquired
in a less serious tone.
"Just the same. He's had a call."
"And old Adam? Is he still living?"
"He can't walk any longer, but his mind is perfectly clear. Sometimes
his son puts his chair into an oxcart and brings him over to the
ordinary. He's still the best talker about here, and he frets if he is
left by himself."
For a moment they were silent again. Old Adam, having fulfilled his
purpose, was dismissed into space. Molly watched Abel's eyes turn to the
pines on the horizon, and in the midst of the June meadow, there was a
look in them that reminded her of the autumnal sadness of nature. She
had seen this look in Reuben's face when he gazed wistfully at the
blossoming apple boughs in the spring, and the thought came to her
that just this attitude of soul--this steadfast courage in the face of
circumstance--was the thing that life was meant to teach them both
at the end. If Abel's energy was now less effervescent, she realized
instinctively that it had become more assured. Life or marriage--or,
perhaps, both together had "tamed" him, as Reuben had prophesied, and
the rough edges of his character had worn smooth in the process.
A butterfly, marked gorgeously in blue and orange, alighted on the bar
by her hand, and when it fluttered off again, drunken with summer, her
gaze followed it into the meadow, where the music of innumerable bees
filled the sunshine.
"And you, Abel?" she asked, turning presently, "what of yourself?"
He smiled at her before answering; and with the smile, she felt again
the old physical joy in his presence--in his splendid animal vitality,
in the red-brown colour of his flesh, in the glow of his dark eyes,
which smiled down into hers. No other man had ever made this appeal to
her senses. She had struggled sometimes like a bird in a net against the
memory of it, yet it had held her, in spite of her will, even when she
was farthest away from him. The gentleness from which Judy revolted,
brought Molly's heart back to him with a longing to comfort.
"Well, I'm learning," he answered, still smiling.
"And you are happy?"
He made a gesture of assent, while he looked over her head at the
butterfly--which had found its mate and was soaring heavenward in a
flight of ecstasy. The same loyalty which had prevented his touching her
hand when they met, rebelled now against an implied reflection on Judy.
"I am glad," she said, "you deserve it."
She had given her eyes to him almost unconsciously, and their look was
like a cord which drew them slowly to each other. His pulses hammered
in his ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees,
and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces
which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her
eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact
of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization
has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the
sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only
the present, crowned, radiant, and sweet to the senses as the garlands
of wild grape around which the golden bees hung in a cloud. For an
instant only the vision held him; then the rush of desire faded
slowly, and some unconquerable instinct, of which he had been almost
unconscious, asserted its supremacy in his brain. The ghosts of dead
ancestors who had adhered to law at the cost of happiness; the iron
skeleton of an outgrown and yet indelibly implanted creed; the tenacity
of the racial structure against which his individual impulses had
rebelled--these things, or one of these things, proved in the end
stronger than the appeal of his passion. He longed with all his strength
to hold her in his arms--every nerve in his body ached for her--yet he
knew that because of this unconquerable instinct he was powerless to
follow his longing.
"I don't think I deserve much, Molly," he said quietly.
She hesitated still, looking away from him in the direction of her path,
which led over the meadow.
"Abel, be good to Judy," she said, without turning.
"I will, Molly, I promise you."
He moved a step toward the turnpike, stopped, and looked back.
"I can't do much for you, Molly," he said, "but if you ever need anybody
to die for you, remember I'm ready."
"I'll remember," she answered, with a smile, but her eyes were misty
when she passed the blazed pine and turned into the little path.
CHAPTER X
TANGLED THREADS
In front of Molly, the path, deep in silvery orchard grass, wound
through the pasture to the witch-hazel thicket at Jordan's Journey; and
when she entered the shelter of the trees, Gay came, whistling, toward
her from the direction of the Poplar Spring. He walked rapidly, and
his face wore an anxious and harassed expression, for he was making the
unpleasant discovery that even stolen sweets may become cloying to a
surfeited palate. His passion had run its inevitable course of desire,
fulfilment, and exhaustion. So closely had it followed the changing
seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much
a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed
in the Haunt's Walk. The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had
sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn. He was
conscious of a distinct relief because the torment of his earlier love
for Blossom was over. There was no regret in his mind for the poignant
sweetness of the days before he had married her--for the restlessness,
the expectancy, the hushed waitings, the enervating suspense--nor even
for those brief hours of fulfilment, when that same haunting suspense
had seemed to add the sharpest edge to his enjoyment. He did not suffer
to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked
suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never
compensated for the pang of it. Her failures now merely made his
manufactured excuses the easier. Once, when she had not been able to
come, he had experienced a revulsion of feeling; like the sudden lifting
of a long strain of anxiety. She still pressed for an acknowledgment
of their marriage, while his refusal was still based on a very real
solicitude for his mother. Only in the last six months had his feeling
for Molly entered into the situation; but like all swift and unguarded
emotions, it absorbed the colour in his thoughts, while it left both the
past and the future in the cover of darkness.
"I wish you wouldn't wander off alone like this, Molly," he began as he
joined her.
"Oh, it's perfectly safe, Jonathan--everybody knows me for miles
around."
"But it would make mother nervous if she were to hear of it. She has
never allowed Aunt Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself."
"Poor Aunt Kesiah," said Molly softly.
He glanced at her sharply. "Why do you say that?" he asked, "she has
always seemed to me to have everything she wanted. If she hadn't had
mother to occupy her time, what under heaven would have become of her?"
"I wonder?" she returned; "but has it ever occurred to you that Aunt
Kesiah and I are not exactly alike, Jonathan?"
"Well, rather. What are you driving at?"
Her answering smile, instead of softening the effect of her words,
appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated
Kesiah's generation from her own. The edge of sweetness to her look
tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced. This
quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he
watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he
told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever seen
whose infinite variety he could not exhaust. The mere recollection of
the others wearied him. Almost imperceptibly he was beginning to feel
a distaste for the side of life which had once offered so rich an
allurement to his senses. The idea that this might be love, after all,
had occurred to him more than once during the past six months, and he
met the suggestion with the invariable cynical retort that "he hadn't it
in him." Yet only ten minutes before, he had watched Molly coming to him
over the jewelled landscape, and the heavens had opened. Once more the
unattainable had appeared to him wrapped in the myriad-coloured veil of
his young illusions.
"Molly," he said almost in spite of himself, "what would have happened
to us if we had met five or six years ago?"
"Nothing, probably."
"Well, I'm not so sure--not if you like me half as well as I like you.
You understand, don't you, that I got myself tied up--entangled before
I knew you--but, by Jove, if I were free I'd make you think twice about
me."
"There's no use talking about what might have been, is there?"
The hint of his "entanglement," she had accepted quite simply as a
veiled allusion to an incident in his life abroad. Her interest in it
would have been keener had she been less indifferent to him as a lover,
but while she walked by his side, smiling in response to his words, she
was thinking breathlessly, like one hushed in suspense, "If Abel had
only been like that a year ago, I should not have left him." That the
qualities she had always missed in the miller had developed only through
the loss of her, she refused to admit. A swift, an almost miraculous
change had passed over her, and all the warm blood in her body seemed
to rush back to her heart, giving it the abundance of life. The world
appeared to her in a clearer and fresher light, as though a perpetual
dawn were hanging above it; and this light shone into the secret
chambers of her mind as well as over the meadows and into the shadowy
places of the Haunt's Walk. "Yes, if he had been like that I should
never have left him and all this would not have happened," she thought
again; "and if I had been like this would he ever have quarrelled with
me?" she asked herself the instant afterwards.
And Gay, walking at her side, but separated by a mental universe, was
thinking resentfully, "The deuce of it is that it might just as well
never have happened! If I'd only been a little less of a fool--If I'd
only not walked my horse across the pasture that October afternoon--If
I'd only had sense enough to see what was coming--If I'd only--oh, hang
it!"
"I'd be a better man to-day if I'd known you sooner, Molly," he said
presently. "A man couldn't tire of you because you're never the same
thing two days in succession."
"Doesn't a man tire of change?"
"I don't--it's the most blessed thing in life. I wonder why you've given
up flirting?"
"Perhaps because there isn't anybody to flirt with."
"I like that. Am I not continually at your service?"
"But I don't like your kind of flirting, somehow."
"What you want, I suppose, is a perpetual supply of Mullens. Have you
seen him, by the way?"
"He called on Aunt Angela this morning and read a chapter from the
Bible. I heard it all the way downstairs on the porch."
"And the miller?"
She was walking beside a clump of lilies, and the colour of the flowers
flamed in her face.
"I saw him for a few minutes this morning."
"How has his marriage turned out?"
"I haven't heard. Like all the others, I suppose."
"Well he's as fine a looking animal as one often encounters. His wife is
that thin, drawn out, anaemic girl I saw at Piping Tree, isn't she? Such
men always seem to marry such women."
"I never thought Judy unattractive. She's really interesting if you take
the trouble to dig deep enough."
"I suppose Revercomb dug, but it isn't as a rule a man's habit to go
around with a spade when he's in want of a wife."
With an impetuous movement, he bent closer to her:
"Look here, Molly, don't you think you might kiss me?"
"I told you the first time I ever saw you that I didn't care for
kissing."
"Well, even if you don't care, can't you occasionally be generous?
You've got a colour in your cheeks like red flowers."
"Oh, have I?"
"The trouble is, I've gone and fallen in love with you and it's turning
my head."
"I don't think it will hurt you, Jonathan."
She broke away from him before he could detain her, and while a protest
was still on his lips, ran up the walk and under the grape arbour into
the back door of the house.
Left to himself, Gay wheeled about and passed into the side-garden,
where he found Kesiah snipping off withered roses with a pair of pruning
shears.
At his approach, she paused in her task and stood waiting for him, with
the expression of interested, if automatic, attention, which appeared on
her face, as in answer to some secret spring, whenever she was invited
to perform the delicate part of a listener. She had attained at last
that battered yet smiling acquiescence in the will of Providence which
has been eloquently praised, under different names, by both theologians
and philosophers. From a long and uncomplaining submission to boredom,
she had arrived at a point of blessedness where she was unable to be
bored at all. Out of the furnace of a too ardent youth, her soul had
escaped into the agreeable, if foggy, atmosphere of middle age. Peace
had been provided for her--if not by generously presenting her with the
things that she desired, still quite as effectually by crippling the
energy of her desires, until they were content to sun themselves quietly
in a row, like aged, enfeebled paupers along the south wall of the
poorhouse.
"Aunt Kesiah," said Gay, stopping beside her, "do you think any of us
understand Molly's character? Is she happy with us or not?"
It is a pleasant thing to be at the time of life, and in the possession
of the outward advantages, which compel other persons to stop in the
midst of their own interesting affairs and begin to inquire if they
understand one's character. As Kesiah lifted a caterpillar on a leaf,
and carefully laid it in the centre of the grassy walk, she thought
quite cheerfully that nobody had ever wondered about her character, and
that it must be rather nice to have some one do so.
"I don't know, Jonathan; you will tread on that caterpillar if you
aren't careful."
"Hang the caterpillar! I sometimes suspect that she isn't quite so happy
as she ought to be."
"She didn't get over Reuben's death easily, if that is what you mean."
"I don't know whether it is what I mean or not."
"Perhaps her development has surprised you, in a way. The first touch
of sorrow changed her from a child into a woman. No one ever realized, I
suppose, the strength that was in her all the time."
Turning away from her, he stared moodily at Uncle Boaz, who was trimming
the lawn beyond the miniature box hedges of the garden. Furrows of mown
grass lay like golden green wind-drifts behind the swinging passage of
the scythe, and the face of the old negro showed scarred and wistful
under the dappled sunshine. June beetles, coloured like emeralds, spun
loudly through the stillness, which had in it an almost human quality of
hushed and expectant waiting. All Nature seemed to be breathing softly,
lest she should awake from her illusion and find the world dissolved
into space.
"I wonder if it is really the miller?" said Gay suddenly. "The truth is
her life seems empty of something."
"I beg your pardon?" returned Kesiah, startled, for she had been
thinking not of Molly's life, but of her own. It was not much of a life,
to be sure, but it was all she had, so she felt it was only natural that
she should think about it.