On the morning after the meeting at Bottom's Ordinary, Abel Revercomb came out on the porch of the little house in which he lived, and looked across the steep rocky road to the mill-race which ran above a silver stream known as Sycamore Creek. The grist-mill, a primitive log building, worked after ancient methods, had stood for a hundred years or more beside a crooked sycamore tree, which grew mid-way of the stream and shaded the wheel and the shingled roof from the blue sky above. The old wooden race, on which the young green mosses shone like a coating of fresh paint on a faded surface, ran for a short distance over the brook, where the broad yellow leaves drifted down to the deep pond below. Across the slippery poplar log, which divided the mill from the road and the house occupied by the miller, there was a stretch of good corn land, where the corn stood in shocks after the harvest, and beyond this the feathery bloom of the broomsedge ran to the luminous band of marshes on the far horizon.
From the open door before which the miller was standing, there came the clatter of breakfast dishes and the sound of Scripture text quoted in the voice of his mother. Above his head several strings of red pepper hung drying, and these rustled in the wind with a grating noise that seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen.
"The Lord said that, an' I reckon He knew His own mind when He was speakin' it," remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot.
"I declare there's mother at it again," observed Abel to himself with a frown—for it was Sarah's fate that an excess of virtue should have wrought all the evil of a positive vice. From the days of her infancy, when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her pastor had marvelled, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations in a manner which had rendered unendurable the lives around her. Her parents had succumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the quality of their moral fibre. All her life she had laboured to make people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed and resentful family.
"Yo' buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don't come along in, Abel," she called now from the kitchen. "You've been lookin' kind of sallow these last days, so I've got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur laid right by yo' plate."
"For heaven's sake, take it away," he retorted irritably. "I don't need it."
"I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the feelin'," rejoined Sarah grimly, "an' if you know what's good for you, you'll come and swallow it right down."
"I'll be hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves. He was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick, dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny. A certain tenacity—a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class. An opinion once embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined, he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial submission which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather. Tradition had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his liberated intelligence—of a passionate desire to test to the fullest the certainty of that liberation. As the elder had suffered beneath the weight of the established order, so the younger showed the disturbing effects of a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in economic conditions rather than from the more gradual evolution of class. When political responsibility was thrust on the plainer people instead of sought by them, it was but natural that the process of adjustment should appear rough rather than smooth. The land which had belonged to the few became after the war within reach of the many. At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the shadow of the old names—the old customs. This mole-like blindness of the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the awakening was possible only after the newer authority was but a shadow; the past reverence but a delusion. When the black labourer worked, not freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by magic. To rise under the old system had been so impossible that Abel's ancestors had got out of the habit of trying. The beneficent charity of the great landowners had exhausted the small incentive that might have remained—and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single class, that to receive had become a part of the privileges of another. In that pleasant idyllic period the one act which went unhonoured and unrewarded was the act of toil. So in the odour of shiftlessness Abel's father had died; so after ninety years his grandparents still sat by the hearth to which his mother had called him.
The house, an oblong frame building, newly shingled, was set back from the road in a straggling orchard of pear-trees, which bore a hard green fruit too sour to be used except in the form of preserves. Small shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on. In Abel's dreams another house was already rising in the fair green meadow beyond the mill-race. He had consecrated a strip of giant pine to this purpose, and often, while he lingered in the door of his mill, he felt himself battling against the desire to take down his axe and strike his first blow toward the building of Molly's home. His mother might nag at him about Molly now, but let them be married, he told himself, with sanguine masculine assurance, and both women would reconcile themselves to a situation that neither could amend. Before the immediate ache of his longing for the girl, all other considerations evaporated to thin air. He would rather be unhappy with her, he thought passionately, than give her up!
"Abel, if you don't stop mopin' out thar an' come along in, I'll clear off the dishes!" called his mother again in her rasping voice which sounded as if she were choking in a perpetual spasm of moral indignation.
Jerking his shoulders slightly in an unspoken protest, Abel turned and entered the kitchen, where Sarah Revercomb—tall, spare and commanding—was preparing two bowls of mush for the aged people, who could eat only soft food and complained bitterly while eating that. She was a woman of some sixty years, with a stern handsome face under harsh bands of yellowish gray hair, and a mouth that sank in at one corner where her upper teeth had been drawn. Her figure was erect and flat as a lath, and this flatness was accentuated by the extreme scantiness of her drab calico dress. In her youth she had been beautiful in a hard, obvious fashion, and her eyes would have been still fine except for their bitter and hostile expression.
At the table there were Abner Revercomb, some ten or twelve years older than Abel, and Archie, the youngest child, whom Sarah adored and bullied. Blossom was busy about something in the cupboard, and on either side of the stove the old people sat with their small, suspicious eyes fixed on the pan of mush which Sarah was dividing with a large wooden spoon into two equal portions. Each feared that the other would receive the larger share, and each watched anxiously to see into which bowl the last spoonful would fall. For a week they had not spoken. Their old age was racked by a sharp and furious jealousy, which was quite exclusive and not less exacting than their earlier passion of love.
With a finishing swirl of the big wooden spoon, the last drops of mush fell into grandfather's bowl, while a sly and injured look appeared instantly on the face of his wife. She was not hungry, but it annoyed her unspeakably that she should not be given the larger portion of food. Her rheumatism was severer than her husband's, and it seemed to her that this alone should have entitled her to the greater share of attention. There was a fierce contempt in her manner when she alluded to his age or to his infirmities, for although he was three years her elder, he was still chirpy and cheerful, with many summers, as she said resentfully, left in him yet.
"Breakfast is ready, grannies," remarked Sarah, who had allowed her coffee to grow cold while she looked after the others; "are you ready to eat?"
Grandmother's sly little eyes slanted over her hooked nose in the direction of the two bowls which her daughter-in-law was about to sprinkle with sugar. An idea entered her old head which made her chuckle with pleasure, and when her mush had been covered, she croaked out suddenly that she would take her breakfast unsweetened. "I'm too bad to take sugar—give that to him—he has a stomach to stand it," she said. Though her mouth watered for sweets, by this trick she had outwitted grandfather, and she felt that it was better than sugar.
The kitchen was a large, comfortable room, with strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling, and boards of sliced apples drying on upturned flour barrels near the door. The bright homespun carpet left a strip of bare plank by the stove, and on this stood two hampers of black walnuts ready for storing. A few coloured prints, culled from garden magazines, were tacked on the wall, and these, without exception, represented blossoms of a miraculous splendour and size. In Sarah's straitened and intolerant soul a single passion had budded and expanded into fulfillment. Stern to all mortal things, to flowers alone she softened and grew gentle. From the front steps to the back, the kitchen was filled with them. Boxes, upturned flour barrels, corners of china-shelves and window-sills, showed bowers of luxuriant leaf and blossom. Her calla lilies had long been famous in the county; they had taken first prizes at innumerable fairs, and whenever there was a wedding or a funeral in the neighbourhood, the tall green stalks were clipped bare of bloom. Many were the dead hands that had been laid in the earth clasping her lilies. This thought had been for years the chief solace in her life, and she was accustomed to refer to it in the heat of religious debates, as though it offered infallible proof of her contention. After calla lilies, fuchias and tuberoses did best in her hands, and she had nursed rare night blooming cereus for seven years in the hope that it would arrive at perfection the following June. Her marriage had been a disappointment to her, for her husband, a pleasant, good-looking fellow, had turned out an idler; her children, with the exception of Archie, the youngest, had never filled the vacancy in her life; but in her devotion to flowers there was something of the ecstasy and all of the self-abandonment she had missed in her human relations.
As he sat down at the table, the miller nodded carelessly to his brothers, who, having finished their bacon and cornbread, were waiting patiently until the buckwheat cakes should be ready. The coloured servant was never allowed to cook because, as Sarah said, "she could not abide niggers' ways," and Blossom, standing before the stove, with her apron held up to shield her face, was turning the deliciously browning cakes with a tin cake lifter.
"Ain't they done yet, daughter?" asked Abner in his amiable drawling voice. He was a silent, brooding man, heavily built, with a coarse reddish beard, stained with tobacco juice, which hung over his chest. Since the death of his wife, Blossom's mother, some fifteen years before, he had become more gloomy, more silent, more obstinately unapproachable. He was one who appeared to dwell always in the shadow of a great grief, and this made him generally respected by his neighbours though he was seldom sought. People said of him that he was "a solid man and trustworthy," but they kept out of his way unless there was road mending or a sale of timber to be arranged.
Blossom tossed the buckwheat cakes into a plate and brought them to her father, who helped himself with his knife. When she passed them to Abel, who was feeding his favorite hound puppy, Moses, with bacon, he shook his head and drew back.
"Give them to mother, Blossom, she never eats a bite of breakfast," he said. He was the only one of Sarah's sons who ever considered her, but she was apt to regard this as a sign of weakness and to resent it with contumely.
"I ain't hungry," she replied grimly, "an' I reckon I'd rather you'd say less about my comfort, Abel, and do mo'. Buckwheat cakes don't come well from a son that flies into his mother's face on the matter of eternal damnation."
Without replying, Abel helped himself to the cakes she had refused and reached for the jug of molasses. Sarah was in one of her nagging moods, he knew, and she disturbed him but little. The delight and the desire of first love was upon him, and he was thinking rapturously of the big pine that would go to the building of Molly's house.
Grandmother, who wanted syrup, began to cry softly because she must eat her tasteless mush. "He's got the stomach to stand it," she repeated bitterly, while her tears fell into her bowl.
"What is it, granny? Will you try a bite of buckwheat?" inquired Sarah solicitously. She had never failed in her duty to her husband's parents, and this virtue also, she was inclined to use as a weapon of offense to her children.
"Give it to him—he's got teeth left to chaw on," whimpered grandmother, and her old chest heaved with bitterness because grandfather, who was three years the elder, still retained two jaw teeth on one side of his mouth.
A yellow-and-white cat, after vainly purring against grandmother's stool, had jumped on the window-sill in pursuit of a belated wasp, and Sarah, rushing to the rescue of her flowers, cuffed the animal soundly and placed her in grandfather's lap. He was a lover of cats—a harmless fancy which was a source of unceasing annoyance to his wife.
"Abel, I wish you'd mend that leak in the smokehouse after breakfast," remarked Sarah, in an aggressive tone that meant battle. "Two shingles are gone an' thare four more that want patchin'."
"I can't, I've got work to do at the mill," replied Abel, as he rose from his chair. "Solomon Hatch sent me his corn to grind and he's coming over to get the sacks."
"Well, I reckon I'm worth as much as Solomon Hatch, a little pasty faced critter like that," rejoined Sarah.
"Why can't Archie do it? What is he good for?"
"I'm going hunting with Jim Halloween," returned Archie sullenly, "he's got some young dogs he wants to break in to rabbit running."
"I might have known thar warn't nobody to do what I ask 'em," observed Sarah in the voice and manner of a martyr. "It's rabbits or girls, one or the other, and if it ain't an old hare it's some light-moraled critter like Molly Merryweather."
Abel's face had changed to a dull red and his eyes blazed.
"Say anything against Molly, mother, an' I'll never speak to you again!" he cried out angrily.
"Thar, thar, ma, you an' Abel are too pepper tongued to get into a quarrel," remarked Abner, the silent, who seldom spoke except for the promotion of peace. "I'll mend the roof for you whenever you want it."
"I reckon I've got as much right to use my tongue as anybody else has," retorted Sarah, indignant because a solution had been found and her grievance was annulled. "If a girl ain't a fast one that gets as good as engaged to half the young men in the county, then I'd like to know who is, that's all?"
Then, as Abel called sharply to his fox-hound puppy and flung himself from the room, she turned away and went to sprinkle her calla lilies. There was an agony in her breast, though she would have bitten out her tongue sooner than have confessed it. Her strength lay in the fact that never in her life had she admitted even to herself, that she had been in the wrong.
Outside, a high wind was driving the fallen leaves in swirls and eddies, and as Abel crossed the road to the mill, he smelt the sharp autumn scent of the rotting mould under the trees. Frost still sparkled on the bright green grasses that had overgrown the sides of the mill-race, and the poplar log over the stream was as wet as though the dancing shallows had skimmed it. Over the motionless wheel the sycamore shed its broad yellow leaves into the brook, where they fluttered downward with a noise that was like the wind in the tree-tops.
Inserting a key into the rusty lock, which was much too large for it, Abel opened the door, and counted Solomon Hatch's sacks of grist, which stood in a row beside a raised platform where an old mill-stone was lying. Other sacks belonging to other farmers were arranged in an orderly group in one corner, and his eye passed to them in a businesslike appraisement of their contents. According to an established custom of toll, the eighth part of the grain belonged to the miller; and this had enabled him to send his own meal to the city markets, where there was an increasing demand for the coarse, water-ground sort. Some day he purposed to turn out the old worn-out machinery and supply its place with modern inventions, but as yet this ambition was remote, and the mill, worked after the process of an earlier century, had raised his position to one of comparative comfort and respectability. He was known to be a man of character and ambition. Already his name had been mentioned as a possible future representative of the labouring classes in the Virginia assembly. "There is no better proof of the grit that is in the plain people than the rise of Abel Revercomb out of Abner, his father," some one had said of him. And from the day when he had picked his first blackberries for old Mr. Jonathan and tied his earnings in a stocking foot as the beginning of a fund for schooling, the story of his life had been one of struggle and of endurance. Transition had been the part of the generation before him. In him the democratic impulse was no longer fitful and uncertain, but had expanded into a stable and indestructible purpose.
Before starting the wheel, which he did by thrusting his arm through the window and lifting the gate on the mill-race, Abel took up a broom, made of sedges bound crudely together, and swept the smooth bare floor, which was polished like that of a ballroom by the sacks of meal that had been dragged back and forth over the boards. From the rafters above, long pale cobwebs were blown gently in the draught between the door and window, and when the mill had started, the whole building reverberated to the slow revolutions of the wheel outside.
The miller had poured Solomon Hatch's grist into the hopper, and was about to turn the wooden crank at the side, when a shadow fell over the threshold, and Archie Revercomb appeared, with a gun on his shoulder and several fox-hounds at his heels.
"You'll have to get Abner to help you dress that mill-rock, Abel," he said, "I'm off for the morning. That's a good pup of yours, but he's old enough to begin learning."
With the inherited idleness of the Revercombs, he combined the headstrong impulses and dogged obstinacy of his mother's stock, yet because of his personal charm, these faults were not only tolerated but even admired by his family.
"You're always off in the mornings when there's work to be done," replied Abel, "but for heaven's sake, bring home a string of hares to put ma into a better humour. She whets her tongue on me and I'll be hanged if it's right."
"She never used to do it till you went over to Mr. Mullen's church and fell in love with Molly Merryweather. Great Scott, I'm glad I don't stand in either of your shoes when it comes to that. Life's too short to pay for your religion or your sweetheart every day you live."
"It would have been the same anyway—she's put out with me about nothing. I had a right to go to Old Church if I wanted to, and what on earth has she got against Mr. Mullen anyway, except that he couldn't recite the first chapter in Chronicles? What kind of religion does that take I'd like to know?"
The meal poured softly out of the valve into the trough beneath, and lifting a wooden scoop he bent over and scattered the pile in the centre. A white dust had settled on his hair and clothes, and this accentuated the glow in his face and gave to his whole appearance a picturesque and slightly theatrical cast.
"If it hadn't been Molly, it would have been some one else," he added impulsively. "Ma would be sure to hate any woman she thought I'd fallen in love with. It's born in her to be contrary just as it is in that hopvine out yonder that you can't train up straight."
"All the same, if I were going through fire and water for a girl, I'd be pretty sure to choose one that would make it worth my while at the end. I wouldn't put up with all that hectoring for the sake of anybody that was as sweet to half a dozen other fellows as she was to me."
Abel's face darkened threateningly under his silvered hair.
"If you are trying to hint anything against Molly, you'd as well stop in the beginning," he said. "It isn't right—I'll be hanged if it is!—that every man in the county should be down on a little thing like that, no bigger than a child. It wasn't her fault, was it, if her father played false with her mother?"
"Oh, I'm not blaming her, am I? As far as that goes all the women like her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children. The trouble seems to be, doesn't it, merely that the men like her too much? She's got a way with her, there's no question about that."
"Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?"
"I wasn't blackenin' her character. I merely meant that she was a flirt, and you know that as well as I do—better, I shouldn't wonder."
"It's the way she was brought up. Her mother was crazy for ten years before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the meanness of men."
"Oh, well, it's all right," said Archie carelessly, "only look out that you don't go too near the fire and get scorched."
Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.
After he had gone, the miller stood for a long while, watching the meal pour from the valve. A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes, but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp. "Why do they keep at me about her?" he asked passionately. "Is it true that she is only playing with me as she plays with the others?"—but the pain was too keen, and turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; and as the bit of colour drew nearer amid the stubble, he recognized the jacket of crimson wool that the girl wore as a wrap on chill autumn mornings. On her head there was a small knitted cap matching the jacket, and this resting on her riotous brown curls, lent a touch of boyish gallantry to her slender figure. Like most women of mobile features and ardent temperament, her beauty depended so largely upon her mood that Abel had seen her change from positive plainness to amazing loveliness in the space of a minute. Her small round face, with its wonderful eyes, dimpled now over the crimson jacket.
"Abel!" she called softly, and paused with one foot on the log while the water sparkled beneath her. Ten minutes before he had vowed to himself that she had used him badly and he would hold off until she made sufficient amends; but in forming this resolution, he had reckoned without the probable intervention of Molly.
"I thought—as long as I was going by—that I'd stop and speak to you," she said.
He shook his head, unsoftened as yet by her presence. "You didn't treat me fair yesterday, Molly," he answered.
"Oh, I wanted to tell you about that. I quite meant to go with you—only it went out of my head."
"That's a pretty excuse, isn't it, to offer a man?"
"Well, you aren't the only one I've offered it to," she dimpled enchantingly, "the rector had to be satisfied with it as well. He asked me, too, and when I forgot I'd promised you, I said I'd go with him to see old Abigail. Then I forgot that, too," she added with a penitent sigh, "and went down to the low grounds."
"You managed to come up in time to meet Mr. Jonathan at the cross-roads," he commented with bitterness.
A less daring adventurer than Molly would have hesitated at his tone and grown cautious, but a certain blithe indifference to the consequences of her actions was a part of her lawless inheritance from the Gays.
"I think him very good-looking, don't you?" she inquired sweetly.
"Good-looking? I should think not—a fat fop like that."
"Is he fat? I didn't notice it—but, of course, I didn't mean that he was good-looking in your way, Abel."
The small flowerlike shadows trembled across her face, and beneath her feet the waves churned a creamy foam that danced under her like light. His eyes warmed to her, yet he held back, gripped by a passion of jealousy. For the first time he felt that he was brought face to face with a rival who might prove to have the advantage.
"I am coming over!" called Molly suddenly, and a minute later she stood in the square sunshine that entered the mill door.
Had he preserved then his manner of distant courtesy, it is probable that she would have melted, for it was not in her temperament to draw back while her prey showed an inclination for flight. But it was his nature to warm too readily and to cool too late, a habit of constitution which causes, usually, a tragedy in matters of sex.
"You oughtn't to treat me so, Molly!" he exclaimed reproachfully, and made a step toward her.
"I couldn't help forgetting, could I? It was your place to remind me."
Thrust, to his surprise, upon the defensive he reached for her hand, which was withdrawn after it had lain an instant in his.
"Well, it was my fault, then," he said with a generosity that did him small service. "The next time I'll remind you every minute."
She smiled radiantly as he looked at her, and he felt that her indiscretions, her lack of constancy, her unkindness even, were but the sportive and innocent freaks of a child. In his rustic sincerity he was forever at the point of condemning her and forever relenting before the appealing sweetness of her look. He told himself twenty times a day that she flirted outrageously with him, though he still refused to admit that in her heart she was to blame for her flirting. A broad and charitable distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that she did. It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of which she was still unconscious.
"Molly," he burst out almost fiercely, "will you marry me?"
The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her forehead.
"I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she answered, "but that if I ever did—-"
"Then you'd marry me."
"Well, if I were obliged to marrysomebody, I'd rather marry you than anybody else."
"So you do like me a little?"
"Yes, I suppose I like you a little—but all men are the same—mother used always to tell me so."
Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of his paradise. He remembered her as a passionate frail creature, with accusing eyes that had never lost the expression with which they had met and passed through some hour of despair and disillusionment.
"But how could she judge, Molly? How could she judge?" he pleaded "She was ill, she wasn't herself, you must know it. All men are not alike. Didn't I fight her battles more than once, when you were a child?"
"I know, I know," she answered gratefully, "and I love you for it. That's why I don't mind telling you what I've never told a single one of the others. I haven't any heart, Abel, that's the truth. It's all play to me, and I like the game sometimes and sometimes I hate it. Yet, whether I like it or hate it, I always go on because I can't help it. Your mother once said I had a devil that drives me on and perhaps she was right—it may be that devil that drives me on and won't let me stop even when I'm tired, and it all bores me. The rector thinks that I'll marry him and turn pious and take to Dorcas societies, and Jim Halloween thinks I'll marry him and grow thrifty and take to turkey raising—and you believe in the bottom of your heart that in the end I'll fall into your arms and find happiness with your mother. But you're wrong—all—all—and I shan't do any of the things you expect of me. I am going to stay here as long as grandfather lives, so I can take care of him, and then I'll run off somewhere to the city and trim hats for a living. When I was at school in Applegate I trimmed hats for all of the pupils."
"Oh, Molly, Molly, I'll not give you up! Some day you'll see things differently."
"Never—never. Now, I've warned you and it isn't my fault if you keep on after this."
"But you do like me a little, haven't you said so?"
Her frown deepened.
"Yes, I do like you—a little."
"Then I'll keep on hoping, anyhow."
Her smile came back, but this time it had grown mocking.
"No, you mustn't hope," she answered, "at least," she corrected provokingly, "you mustn't hope—too hard."
"I'll hope as hard as the devil, darling—and, Molly, if you marry me, you know, you won't have to live with my mother."
"I like that, even though I'm not going to marry you."
"Come here," he drew her toward the door, "and I'll show you where our house will stand. Do you see that green rise of ground over the meadow?"
"Yes, I see it," her tone was gentler.
"I've chosen that site for a home," he went on, "and I'm saving a good strip of pine—you can see it over there against the horizon. I've half a mind to take down my axe and cut down the biggest of the trees this afternoon!"
If his ardour touched her there was no sign of it in the movement with which she withdrew herself from his grasp.
"You'd better finish your grinding. There isn't the least bit of a hurry," she returned with a smile.
"If you'll go with me, Molly, you may take your choice and I'll cut the tree down for you."
"But I can't, Abel, because I've promised Mr. Mullen to visit his mother."
The glow faded from his eyes and a look like that of an animal under the lash took its place.
"Come with me, not with him, Molly, you owe me that much," he entreated.
"But he's such a good man, and he preaches such beautiful sermons."
"He does—I know he does, but I love you a thousand times better."
"Oh, he loves me because I am pretty and hard to win—just as you do," she retorted. "If I lost my hair or my teeth how many of you, do you think, would care for me to-morrow?"
"I should—before God I'd love you just as I do now," he answered with passion.
A half mocking, half tender sound broke from her lips.
"Then why don't you—every one of you, fall head over ears in love withJudy Hatch?" she inquired.
"I don't because I loved you first, and I can't change, however badly you treat me. I'm sometimes tempted to think, Molly, that mother is right, and you are possessed of a devil."
"Your mother is a hard woman, and I pity the wife you bring home to her."
The softness had gone out of her voice at the mention of Sarah's name, and she had grown defiant and reckless.
"I don't think you are just to my mother, Molly," he said after a moment, "she has a kind heart at bottom, and when she nags at you it is most often for your good."
"I suppose it was for my mother's good that she kept her from going to church and made the old minister preach a sermon against her?"
"That's an old story—you were only a month old. Can't you forget it?"
"I'll never forget it—not even at the Day of Judgment. I don't care howI'm punished."
Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The inheritance she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every phrase, in every gesture.
"It isn't you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it's something in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.
"If I'd known you were going to preach, I shouldn't have stopped to speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I'd rather hear Mr. Mullen."
He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap of the mill.
For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For God's sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I find in being spiteful when you won't strike back?"
"I'll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever."
"I wouldn't have said it if I'd known you'd take it so quietly."
"Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the hopper?"
"I shouldn't have cared—it would have been better than your expression at this minute. It's all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with Judy Hatch, as I told you to."
"Don't worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can't help despising a man just as soon as he happens to love you."
"I wonder if that's true?" she said a little sadly, turning away fromhim until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow,"I've seen men like that as soon as they were sure of their wives, andI've hated them for it."
"What I can't understand," he pursued, not without bitterness, "is why in thunder a man or a woman who isn't married should put up with it for an instant?"
At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where he bent over the meal trough.
"The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except grandfather," she said, "but I hate love-making. When I see that look in a man's face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike out and kill. My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose."
"I know it isn't you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet—-"
She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife.
"I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel," she said.
A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate self-reproach why she had yielded to pity? She had felt sorry for Abel, and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her. "Only I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so rough and fierce that he frightened me. I suppose most girls like that kind of thing, but I don't, and I shan't, if I live to be a hundred. I've got no belief in it—I've got no belief in anything, that is the trouble. I'm twisted out of shape, like the crooked sycamore by the mill-race."
A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike. As she climbed the low rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the old family carriage from Jordan's Journey returning with the two ladies on the rear seat. The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner's physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle patronage, if she would ride with the driver?
"Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it's only a quarter of a mile and I don't mind the walk."
"We've brought an overcoat—Kesiah and I—a good thick one, for your grandfather. It worried us last winter that he went so lightly clad during the snow storms."
Molly's face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure.
"Oh, thank you, thank you!" she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant politeness. "I've been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates to spend money on himself."
Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conversation, with the scowling look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay's salts. She was one of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end for which woman was formed. As her very right to existence lay in her possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the frustration of it by circumstances, had deprived her, almost from the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for being. Her small, short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in having permitted herself to be born.
"Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly," said Mrs. Gay, in a flutter of emotion. "Have you had a glimpse of him yet?"
The girl nodded. "He took supper at our house the night he got here."
"It was such a surprise. Was he looking well?"
"Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you know."
"Ah, I forgot. Are you sure you won't get in, child? Well, drive on,Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage."
Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plodding obstinately after the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust that floated after the wheels.
As the carriage rolled up the drive, there was a flutter of servants between the white columns, and Abednego, the old butler, pushed aside the pink-turbaned maids and came down to assist his mistress to alight.
"Take the bird cage, Abednego, I've bought a new canary," said Mrs. Gay."Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas."
She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this helplessness was expressed in every lovely line of her figure. The most casual observer would have discerned that she had surrendered all rights in order to grasp more effectively at all the privileges. She was clinging and small and delicate and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united in an irresistible appeal to emotions.
"Where is Jonathan?" she asked, "I hoped he would welcome me."
"So I do, dearest mother—so I do," replied the young man, running hurriedly down the steps and then slipping his arm about her. "You came a minute or two earlier than I expected you, or I should have met you in the drive."
Half supporting, half carrying her, he led the way into the house and placed her on a sofa in the long drawing-room.
"I am afraid the journey has been too much for you," he said tenderly."Shall I tell Abednego to bring you a glass of wine."
"Kesiah will mix me an egg and a spoonful of sherry, dear, she knows just how much is good for me."
Kesiah, still grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister. In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in little hard, flat curls, as though an artificial ugliness were less reprehensible in her sight than an artificial beauty.
In the midst of the long room flooded with sunshine, the little lady reclined on her couch and sipped gently from the glass Kesiah had handed her. The tapestried furniture was all in soft rose, a little faded from age, and above the high white wainscoting on the plastered walls, this same delicate colour was reflected in the rich brocaded gowns in the family portraits. In the air there was the faint sweet scent of cedar logs that burned on the old andirons.
"So you came all the way home to see your poor useless mother," murmured Mrs. Gay, shielding her cheek from the firelight with a peacock hand-screen.
"I wanted to see for myself how you stand it down here—and, by Jove, it's worse even than I imagined! How the deuce have you managed to drag out twenty years in a wilderness like this among a tribe of barbarians?"
"It is a great comfort to me, dear, to think that I came here on your uncle's account and that I am only following his wishes in making the place my home. He loved the perfect quiet and restfulness of it."
"Quiet! With that population of roosters making the dawn hideous! I'd choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard."
"You aren't used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are trying."
"Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?"
"One doesn't have amusement when one is a hopeless invalid; one has only medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or two in the summer. I can't walk of course, because of my heart, and as there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise—(poor dear mother used to say that the difference between the liver of a lady and that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the other did)—but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health suffers when she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temper and walked a mile or two on the road, but when she returned I was in such a state of nervousness that she promised me never to leave the lawn again unless a gentleman was with her."
"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissing her hand.
Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violets, drooped over him above the peacock feathers she waved gently before her.
"Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too," she observed, "and I sometimes think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart."
"But she doesn't feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at her."
"She isn't so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to be born a woman. When she was young she had a perfect mania for drawing, and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter—I can't recall his name though I am sure it began with S—saw one of her sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but of course it was out of the question that a Virginia lady should go off by herself and paint perfectly nude people in a foreign city. There was a dreadful scene, I remember, and Kesiah even wrote to Uncle William Burwell and asked him to come down and win mother over. He came immediately, for he was the kindest soul, but, of course after he understood, he decided against it. Why on earth should a girl want to go streaking across the water to study art, he asked, when she had a home she could stay in and men folk who could look after her? They both told her she made herself ridiculous when she talked of ambition, and as they wouldn't promise her a penny to live on, she was obliged in the end to give up the idea. She nursed mother very faithfully, I must say, as long as she lived, never leaving her a minute night or day for the last year of her illness. Don't misjudge poor Kesiah, Jonathan, she has a good heart at bottom, though she has always been a little soured on account of her disappointment."
"Oh, she was cut out for an old maid, one can see that," rejoined Gay, only half interested in the history of his aunt, for he seldom exerted his imagination except under pressure of his desires, "and, by the way, mother, what kind of man was my Uncle Jonathan?"
"The dearest creature, my son, heaven alone knows what his loss meant to me! Such consideration! Such generosity! Such delicacy! He and Kesiah never got on well, and this was the greatest distress to me."
"Did you ever hear any queer stories about him? Was he—well—ah, wild, would you say?"
"Wild? Jonathan, I am surprised at you! Why, during the twenty years that I knew him he never let fall so much as a single indelicate word in my presence."
"I don't mean that exactly—but what about his relations with the women around here?"
She flinched as if his words had struck her a blow.
"Dear Jonathan, your poor uncle would never have asked such a question."
Above the mantel there was an oil portrait of the elder Jonathan at the age of three, painted astride the back of an animal that disported the shape of a lion under the outward covering of a lamb.
"Ah, that's just it," commented Gay, while his inquiring look hung on the picture. After a minute of uncertainty, his curiosity triumphed over his discretion and he put, in an apologetic tone, an equally indelicate question. "What about old Reuben Merryweather's granddaughter? Has she been provided for?"
For an instant Mrs. Gay looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with sliver. Those eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, "Oh, be careful, I am so sensitive. Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not hurt me. Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever entered." The quaint peacock screen, brought from China by old Jonathan, cast a shadow on her cheek, which was flushed to the colour of a faded rose leaf.
"Yes, the girl is an orphan, it is very sad," she replied, and her tone added, "but what can I do about it? I am a woman and should know nothing of such matters!"
"Was she mentioned in my uncles's will, do you remember?"
His handsome, well-coloured face had taken a sudden firmness of outline, and even the sagging flesh of his chin appeared to harden with the resolve of the moment. Across his forehead, under the fine dark hair which had worn thin on the temples, three frowning wrinkles leaped out as if in response to some inward pressure.
"There was something—I can't remember just what it was—Mr. Chamberlayne will tell you about it when he comes down to-morrow to talk over business with Kesiah. They keep all such things away from me out of consideration for my heart. But I've never doubted for an instant that your uncle did everything that was just and generous in the matter. He sent the girl to a good school in Applegate, I remember, and there was a bequest of some sort, I believe—something that she comes into on her twenty-first birthday."
"She isn't twenty-one then, is she?"
"I don't know, Jonathan, I really can't remember."
"Perhaps Aunt Kesiah can tell me something about her?"
"Oh, she can and she will—but Kesiah is so violent in all her opinions! I had to ask her never to mention Brother Jonathan's name to me because she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about him."
She leaned back wearily as if the conversation had exhausted her, while the peacock firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white fur rug at her feet.
"If you'll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I'll go upstairs for a rest," she said gently, yet with a veiled reproach. "The journey tired me, but I forgot it in the pleasure of seeing you."
All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom, and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.
An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing, she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon them. In her youth she had rebelled fiercely—rebelled against nature, against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her sister's lot from her own. Generations existed only to win love or to bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these—some external shaping of clay—had unfitted her for the purpose for which she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance—words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's advancement—a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her—yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been—a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as she—but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished sentiment—it put an end to rebellion.
"Miss Kesiah, dar's Marse Reuben in de hall en he sez he'd be moughty glad ef'n you'd step down en speak a wud wid 'im."
"In a moment, Abednego. I must take off my things."
Withdrawing the short jet-headed pins from her bonnet with a hurried movement, she stabbed them into the hard round pincushion on her bureau, and after throwing a knitted cape over her shoulders, went down the wide staircase to where Reuben awaited her in the hall. As she walked she groped slightly and peered ahead of her with her nervous, short-sighted gaze.
At the foot of the staircase, the old man was standing in a patient attitude, resting upon his wooden leg, which was slightly in advance of his sound one. His fine bearded face might have been the face of a scholar, except for its roughened skin and the wistful, dog-like look in the eyes.
In response to Kesiah's greeting, he explained that he had come at once to acknowledge the gift of the overcoat and to "pay his respects."
"I am glad you like it," she answered, and because her heart was swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making herself ridiculous prevented her always from making herself understood.
"It will be very useful to me, ma'am, when I am out of doors in bad weather," he replied, wondering if he had offended her by his visit.
"We got it for that purpose," and becoming more embarrassed, she added hastily, "How is the red cow, Mr. Merryweather?"
"She mends slowly, ma'am. I am givin' her bran mash twice a day and keepin' her in the barn. Have you noticed the hogs? They're a fine lot this year and we'll get some good hams at the killin'."
"No, I hadn't looked at them, but I've been struck with the corn you've brought up recently from the low grounds."
For a minute or two they discussed the crops, both painfully ill at ease and uncertain whether to keep up the conversation or to let it trail off into silence. Then at the first laboured pause, Reuben repeated his message to Mrs. Gay and stamped slowly out of the back door into the arms of Jonathan, who was about to enter.
"Halloo! So it's you!" exclaimed the young man in the genial tone which seemed at once to dispel Kesiah's embarrassment. "I've wanted to talk with you for two days, but I shan't detain you now for I happen to know that your granddaughter is hunting for you already. I'll come up to-morrow and chat awhile in the barn."
Reuben bowed and passed on, a little flattered by the other's intimate tone, while Gay followed Kesiah into the drawing-room, and put a question to her which had perplexed him since the night of his arrival.
"Aunt Kesiah, was old Reuben Merryweather on friendly terms with my uncle?"
She started and looked at him with a nervous twitching of her eyelids.
"I think so, Jonathan, at least they appeared to be. Old Reuben was born on the place when the Jordans still lived here, and I am sure your uncle felt that it would be unjust to remove him. Then they fought through the war together and were both dangerously wounded in the same charge."
He gazed at her a moment in silence, narrowing his intense blue eyes which were so like the eyes of Reuben's granddaughter.
"Did my uncle show any particular interest in the girl?" he inquired, and added a little bitterly, "It's not fair to me that I shouldn't know just where I am standing."
"Yes, he did show a particular interest in her and was anxious that she should be educated above her station. She was even sent off to a boarding-school in Applegate, but she ran away during the middle of the second session and came home. Her grandfather was ill with pneumonia, and she is sincerely devoted to him, I believe."
"Was there any mention of her in Uncle Jonathan's will?"
"None whatever. He left instructions with Mr. Chamberlayne, however, which are to be made known next April on Molly's twenty-first birthday. It is all rather mysterious, but we only know that he owned considerable property in the far West, which he left away from us and in trust to his lawyer. I suppose he thought your mother would not be alive when the girl came of age; for the doctors had agreed that she had only a few years to live at the utmost."
"What in the devil did my poor mother have to do with it?"
She hesitated an instant, positively scowling in her perplexity.
"Only that I think—I believe your Uncle Jonathan would have married the girl's mother—Janet Merryweather—but for your mother's influence."
"How in the deuce! You mean he feared the effect on her?"
"He broke it to her once—his intention, I mean—and for several days afterwards we quite despaired of her life. It was then that she made him promise—he was quite distracted with remorse for he adored Angela—that he would never allude to it again while she was alive. We thought then that it would be only for a short while, but she has outlived him ten years in spite of her heart disease. One can never rely on doctors, you know."
"But what became of the girl—of Janet Merryweather, I mean?"
"That was the sad part, though it happened so long ago—twenty years—that people have almost forgotten. It seems that your uncle had been desperate about her for a time—before Angela came to live with him—and Janet counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind—perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her characteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns in the neighbourhood."
"Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but,I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation toJanet Merryweather and to his brother's widow?"
"There was a difference, of course. Janet Merryweather could hardly have had Angela's sensitive feelings—or at least it's a comfort to think that, even if it happens not to be true. Before the war one hardly ever heard of that class, mother used to say, it was so humble and unpresuming—but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has overrun everything and most of the land about here has passed into its possession."
She checked herself breathlessly, surprised and indignant that she should have expressed her feelings so openly.
"Yes, I dare say," returned Jonathan—"The miller Revercomb is a good example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of—a kind of new plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes. Less than half a century produced him, but he's here to stay, of that I am positive. After all, why shouldn't he, when we get down to the question? He—or the stock he represents, of course—is already getting hold of the soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as politically, I suppose. We can't hold on, the rest of us—we're losing grip—and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes from."
"Ah, it's just that—pluck—but put the miller in the crucible and you'll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office—she was one of the real Carters, you know—would hardly bend her head."
"Perhaps you're right," he answered, and laughed shortly under his breath, "but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics of that little firebrand, Molly Merryweather?"
At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in his uncle's room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled into a frosty stillness at daybreak.
"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay, with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves more of a nuisance."
Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion, he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt, somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but a condemnation."
With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made through the mist. At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him, and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with muzzles held close to the moist ground.
For a minute Gay's angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot. Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.
"You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "so you're not only shooting my partridges, but you're actually shooting them before my eyes."
"What's that?" asked Archie, only half understanding the words, "were you after that bird yourself then?"
"Well, rather, my friend, and I'll trouble you at the same time to hand over that string on your shoulder."
"Hand them over? Well, I like that! Why, I shot them."
"But you shot them on my land didn't you?"
"What in the devil do you mean by that? My folks have shot over these fields before yours were ever heard of about here. A bird doesn't happen to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your pasture."
"Do you mean to tell me that you don't respect a man's right to his game?"
"A man's game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon. This land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we're not going to keep off of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he's got a better right to it."
The assumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original poaching had done. To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of his own game by a handsome barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of humour, if it had not enraged him.
"All the same I give you fair warning," he retorted, "that the next timeI find you trespassing on my land, I'll have the law after you."
"The law—bosh! Do you think I'm afraid of it?"
Somewhere at the back of Gay's brain, a curtain was drawn, and he saw clearly as if it were painted in water colour, an English landscape and a poacher, who had been caught with a stolen rabbit, humbly pulling the scant locks on his forehead. Well, this was one of the joys of democracy, doubtless, and he was in for the rest of them. These people had got the upper hand certainly, as Aunt Kesiah had complained.
"If you think I'll tamely submit to open robbery by such insolent rascals as you, you're mistaken, young man," he returned.
The next instant he sprang aside and knocked up Archie's gun, which had been levelled at him. The boy's face was white under his sunburn, and the feathers on the partridges that hung from his shoulder trembled as though a strong wind were blowing.
"Rascal, indeed!" he stammered, and spat on the ground after his words in the effort to get rid of the taste of them, "as if the whole county doesn't know that you're another blackguard like your uncle before you. Ask any decent woman in the neighbourhood if she would have been seen in his company!"
His rage choked him suddenly, and before he could speak again the other struck him full in the mouth.
"Take that and hold your tongue, you young savage!"
Then as he stooped for his gun, which he had laid down, a shot passed over his head and whizzed lightly across the meadow.
"The next time I'll take better aim!" called Archie, turning away. "I'll shoot as straight as the man who gave your uncle his deserts down at Poplar Spring!"
Whistling to his dogs, he ran on for a short distance; then vaulting the rail fence he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream which flowed down from the mill.
While he watched him the anger in Gay's face faded slowly into disgust.