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' likeJedgment 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.
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'sJourney. 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.
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 AuntKesiah 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 beforeI knew you—but, by Jove, if I were free I'd make you think twice aboutme."
"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 theBible. 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.
"I said I wondered if it were the miller," repeated Gay a little impatiently. Like his mother he found Kesiah's attacks of inattention very trying—and if she were to get deaf the only position she had ever filled with credit would be necessarily closed to her. What on earth did she have to occupy her anyway if not other people's affairs?
"I can hardly believe that," she answered. "Of course he's a very admirable young man, but it's out of the question that Molly should worry her mind about him after he has gone and married another woman."
Her logic seemed rather feeble to Gay, but as he had told himself often before, Kesiah never could argue.
"I hear the fellow's come out quite surprisingly. Mr. Chamberlayne tells me he is speaking now around the neighbourhood, and he has a pretty command of rough and ready oratory."
"I suppose that is why Molly is so anxious to hear him. She has ordered her horse to ride over to a meeting at Piping Tree this afternoon."
"What?" He stared in amazement.
"Young Revercomb is going to speak at an open air meeting of some kind—political, I imagine—and Molly is going to hear him."
His answer was a low whistle. "At what time?" he asked presently.
"She ordered her horse at three—the very hottest part of the day."
"Well, she'll probably have sunstroke," Gay replied, "but at any rate,I'll not let her have it alone."
A look of surprise came into Molly's face when she found Gay waiting for her, but it passed quickly, and she allowed him to mount her without a word of protest or inquiry. She had been a good rider ever since the days when she galloped bareback on Reuben's plough horses to the pasture, and Gay's eyes warmed to her as she rode ahead of him down the circular drive, checkered with sunlight. Yet in spite of her prettiness, which he had never dignified by the name of beauty, he knew that it was no superficial accident of colour or of feature that had first caught his fancy and finally ripened his casual interest into love. The charm was deeper still, and resulted from something far subtler than the attraction of her girlish freshness—from something vivid yet soft in her look, which seemed to burn always with a tempered warmth. For need of a better word he called this something her "soul," though he knew that he meant, in reality, certain latent possibilities of passion which appeared at moments to pervade not only her sensitive features, but her whole body with a flamelike glow and mobility. While he watched her he remembered his meeting with Blossom, and the marriage to which in some perfectly inexplicable manner it had led him, but it was not in his power, even if he had willed it, to conjure up the violence of past emotions as he could summon back the outlines of the landscape which had served as their objective background.
"Molly," he said, riding closer to her as they passed into the turnpike, "I wish I knew why we are going on this wild goose chase after the miller?"
"I'm not going after him—it's only that I want to hear him speak. I don't see why that should surprise you."
"I didn't know that you were interested in politics?"
"I'm not—in politics."
"In the miller then?"
"Why shouldn't I be interested in him? I've known him all my life."
"The fact remains that you're in a different position now and can't afford a free rein to your sportive fancies."
"He'd be the last to admit what you say about position—if you mean class. He doesn't believe in any such thing, nor do I."
"Money, my dear, is the only solid barrier—but he's got a wife, anyway."
"Judy and I are friends. That's another reason for my wanting to hear him."
"But to ride six miles at three o'clock on a scorching day to listen to a stump speech by a rustic agitator, seems to me a bit ridiculous."
"There was no reason for your coming, Jonathan. I didn't ask you."
"I accept the reproof, and I am silent—but I can't resist returning it by telling you that you need a man's strong hand as much as any woman I ever saw."
"I don't need yours anyway."
"By Jove, that's just whose, my pretty. You needn't think that because I haven't made you love me, I couldn't."
"I doubt it very much—but you may think so if you choose."
"Suppose I were to dress in corduroy and run a grist mill."
Her laugh came readily.
"You're too fat!"
"Another thrust like that, and I'll gallop off and leave you."
His face was bent toward hers, and it was only the quick change in her expression, and the restive start of her horse, that made him swerve suddenly aside and glance at the blazed pine they were passing. Leaning against the tree, with her arms resting on the bars, and her body as still as if it were chiselled out of stone, Blossom Revercomb was watching them over a row of tall tiger lilies. Her features were drawn and pallid, as if from sharp physical pain, and a blight had spread over her beauty, like the decay of a flower that feeds a canker at its heart.
With an exclamation of alarm, Molly turned her horse's head in the direction of the pine, but with a hasty yet courteous gesture, Gay rode quickly ahead of her, and leaning from his saddle spoke a few words in an undertone. The next instant Blossom had fled and the two were riding on again down the turnpike.
"She looked so unhappy, Jonathan. I wonder what was the matter?"
"She was tired, probably." He despised himself for the evasion, for his character was naturally an open one, and he heartily disliked all subterfuge. Yet he implied the falsehood even while he hated the necessity which forced him to it. So all his life he had done the things that he condemned, condemning himself because he did them. For more than a year now he had lived above a continuous undercurrent of subterfuge—he had lied to Blossom, he had deceived his mother, he had wilfully encouraged Molly to believe a falsehood—and yet all the time, he was conscious that his nature preferred the honourable and the candid course. His intentions were still honest, but long ago in his boyhood, when he had first committed himself to impulse, he had prepared the way for his subsequent failures. To-day, with a weakened will, with an ever increasing sensitiveness of his nervous system, he knew that he should go on desiring the good while he compromised with the pleasanter aspect of evil.
"She wouldn't speak to me," said Molly, "I can't understand it. What did you say to her?"
"I asked her if she were ill and if we could do anything for her."
"I can't get over her look. I wish I had jumped down and run after her, but she went off so quickly."
So intense was the sunshine that it appeared to burn into the white streak of the road, where the dust floated like some smoke on the breathless air. From the scorched hedges of sumach and bramble, a chorus of grasshoppers was cheerfully giving praise to a universe that ignored it.
As Molly rode silently at Gay's side, it seemed to her that Blossom's startled face looked back at her from the long, hot road, from the waste of broomsedge, from the cloudless sky, so bright that it hurt her eyes. It was always there wherever she turned: she could not escape it. A sense of suffocation in the midst of space choked back the words she would have spoken, and she felt that the burning dust, which hung low over the road, had drifted into her brain and obscured her thoughts as it obscured the objects around her. When, after passing the ordinary, they turned into the Applegate road, the heavy shade brought a sensation of relief, and the face which had seemed to start out of the blanched fields, faded slowly away from her.
As she entered the little village of Piping Tree, her desire to hear Abel's speech left her as suddenly as it had come, and she began to wish that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her. In place of the cool determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness, had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution. She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly into a diverging road in spite of the pull of the bit.
"I don't believe I'll stay, after all, Jonathan," she said weakly. "It's so hot and I don't really want to hear him."
"But we're here now, Molly, and he's already begun." Against the feminine instinct to fight the battle and then yield the victory, he opposed the male determination to exact the reward in return for the trouble. "It's over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house," he pursued. "Come on. We needn't dismount if you don't feel like it—but I've a curiosity to know what he's talking about."
Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing the miller. Abel's ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his class the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of political material. The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he would have said, because the control of the State was passing from the higher to the lower classes. To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the miller's raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest and tolerant amusement.
"Oh, come on," he urged again after a moment, "we'll stop by the fence under that cherry-tree and nobody will see us."
As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then slowly followed. In the cherry-tree, which was laden with red cherries a little over ripe, birds were quarrelling, and for a minute she could not separate the sound of Abel's voice from the confusion around her. Then his figure, standing under a stunted cedar on a small raised platform, which was used for school celebrations or out-of-door concerts, appeared to gather to itself all that was magnetic and alive in the atmosphere. Of the whole crowd, including Gay, the speaker in his blue shirt, with his head thrown back enkindled from the fire of his enthusiasm, seemed the one masculine and dominating intelligence. To Molly he represented neither orator nor reformer, but a compelling force which she felt rather than heard. What he said she was hardly aware of—for it was emotion not thought that he aroused in her.
"That's good!" said Jonathan quietly at her side, and glancing at him she realized that Gay was regarding merely a picturesque embodiment of the economic upheaval of society. Judging the scene from Gay's standpoint, she saw that it was, after all, only the ordinary political gathering of a thinly settled community. The words, she knew now, were familiar. It was the personality of the speaker which charged them with freshness, with inspiration. What was it but the old plea for social regeneration through political purity—an appeal to put the dream of the idealist into the actual working of the State, since it is only through the brain of the dreamer that a fact may be born into the world.
"He can speak all right," observed Gay carelessly, "there's no doubt about that."
"I'd like to go, if you don't mind," answered Molly, and turning she rode softly away from the picnic grounds through the scattered hamlet, too small to be called a village. An old man, killing slugs in a potato field, stared after them with his long stemmed corn-cob pipe hanging loosely between his lips. Then when they had disappeared, he shook his head twice very solemnly, spat on the ground, and went on patiently murdering slugs.
"'Tis that fly-up-the-creek miller as they've come arter," he muttered. "Things warn't so in my day, so they oughtn't to be so now. I ain't got no use for anything that ain't never been befo'."
And in different language, the same thought was stirring in Gay's mind. "It's all stuff and nonsense, these hifaluting radical theories. There's never been a fairer distribution of property and there's never going to be."
They rode in silence under the flowering locust-trees in the single street, and then, crossing the grassy common, cantered between two ripening fields of oats, and turned into the leafy freshness of the Applegate road. The sun was high, but the long, still shadows had begun to slant from the west, and the silence was brooding in a mellow light over the distance.
"I don't know what we're coming to," said Gay at last, when they had ridden a mile or two without speaking. What he really meant, though he did not say it, was, "I don't know why in the devil's name you keep thinking about that fellow?"
Though his own emotions were superior to reason, he was vaguely irritated because Molly had allowed hers, even in a small matter, to assert such a supremacy. He was accustomed to speak carelessly of woman as "an emotional being," yet this did not prevent his feeling an indignant surprise when woman, as occasionally happened, illustrated the truth of his inherited generalization. A lover of the unconventional for himself, he was almost as strong a hater of it for the women who were related to him. It would have annoyed him excessively to see Kesiah make herself conspicuous in any way, or deviate by a hair's breadth from the accepted standard of her sex. And now Molly, with whom he had fallen in love, had actually flushed and paled under his eyes at the sight of young Revercomb! In some subtle manner she seemed to have stooped in his estimation—to have lowered herself from the high and narrow pedestal upon which he had placed her! Yet so contradictory are the passions, that he felt he loved her the more, if possible, because of the angry soreness at his heart.
Turning in the direction of Applegate, they continued their ride at a canter, and the afternoon was over when they passed the cross-roads again on their homeward way. A thin mist floated like thistledown from the marshes, which were so distant that they were visible only as a pinkish edge to the horizon. Large noisy insects, with iridescent wings, hovered around the purple, heavy scented tubes of the Jamestown weeds by the roadside, and the turnpike, glimmering like a white band through the purple dusk, was spangled with fireflies. Gay was talking as they approached the blazed pine, which stood out sinister and black against the afterglow, and it was only when Molly cried out sharply that he saw Blossom's face looking at them again over the tiger lilies.
"Why, what in the deuce!" he exclaimed, not in anger, but in amazement.
"Blossom, wait for me!" called Molly, and would have slipped to the ground had not Gay reached out and held her in the saddle.
Then the figure of Blossom, which had waited there evidently since their first passing, vanished like an apparition into the grey twilight. The pallid face floated from them through the grape-scented mist, and Molly's call brought no answer except the cry of a whip-poor-will from the thicket.
A week later Jim Halloween stopped with a bit of news at Bottom's Ordinary, where old Adam Doolittle dozed under the mulberry tree in a rush chair which had been brought over in his son's oxcart.
"Have you all heard that our Mr. Mullen has accepted a call to larger fields?" he inquired, "an' that Judy Revercomb has gone clean daft because he's going to leave us?"
"She didn't have far to go," observed Mrs. Bottom.
"Well, you'd never have known it to look at her," commented young Adam, "but 'tis a true sayin' that you can't tell the quality of the meat by the colour of the feathers."
"You'd better be speakin' particular, suh, an' not general," retorted old Adam, who was in a querulous mood as the result of too abrupt an awakening from his nap. "What you ain't known it doesn't follow other folks ain't, does it? Human natur is generally made with a streak of foolishness an' a streak of sense, just as fat an' lean runs in a piece of bacon. That's what I say, an' I reckon I ought to know, bein' turned ninety."
"All the same thar's some folks that ain't streaked at all, but a solid lump of silliness like Judy Hatch," returned his son.
This was too much for the patience of the patriarchial spirit, and oldAdam began to shake as though he were suddenly smitten with palsy.
"What do you mean by contradictin' me, suh? Didn't I bring you into the world?" he demanded.
A reproachful shake of the head passed round the group.
"You oughtn't to contradict him, young Adam. Ain't he yo' pa?" said Mrs.Bottom, rebukingly.
"I warn't contradictin', I was talkin'," replied young Adam, abashed by the evident disapprobation that surrounded him.
"Well, don't talk, suh, until you can talk sense," rejoined his father. "When a talker has turned ninety an' can meet me on equal ground, I'll consent to argue with him."
His lower lip protruded threateningly from his toothless gums, while two tears of anger rolled slowly out of his eyes and over his veined and roughened cheeks to the crescent shaped hollow of his chin. So deeply rooted in his mind was the conviction that his ninety years furnished an unanswerable argument for the truth of his opinions, that the assurance of experience had conferred upon him something of that manner of superhuman authority with which the assurance of inexperience had endowed Mr. Mullen.
"I for one was al'ays against Abel's marrying," interposed Betsey with a placable air. "I knew she'd be a drag on him, an' now that he's goin' into politics with sech good chances, the mo's the pity. I've told him so time and agin when he stopped at the or'nary."
At this point the appearance of Solomon Hatch caused her to explain hurriedly, "We were jest speakin' of Abel an' his chances for the Legislature. You've got a mighty good son-in-law, Solomon."
"Yes," said Solomon, sourly, "yes, but Judy's a fool."
The confession had burst from an overburdened soul, for like Gay he could tolerate no divergence from the straight line of duty, no variation from the traditional type, in any woman who was related to him. Men would be men, he was aware, but if any phrase so original as "women will be women" had been propounded to him, he would probably have retorted with philosophic cynicism, that "he did not see the necessity." His vision was enclosed in a circle beyond which he could not penetrate even if he had desire to, and the conspicuous fact within this circle at the moment was that Judy had made a fool of herself—that she had actually burst out crying in church when Mr. Mullen had announced his acceptance of a distant call! He was sorry for Abel, because Judy was his wife, but, since it is human nature to exaggerate the personal element, he was far sorrier for himself because she was his daughter.
"Yes, Judy's a fool," he repeated angrily, and there was a bitter comfort in the knowledge that he had first put into words the thought that had engaged every mind at the ordinary.
"Oh, she's young yet, an' she'll outgrow it," observed Betsey as sincerely as she had made the opposite remark some minutes before. "A soft heart is mo' to be pitied than blamed, an' it'll soon harden into shape now she's settled down to matrimony."
"I ain't never seen a female with an ounce of good hard sense except you, Mrs. Bottom," replied Solomon. "Thar's a contrariness in the rest of 'em that makes 'em tryin' companions to a rational critter like man, with a firm grip on his heart. To think of gittin' a husband like Abel Revercomb—the risin' man in the county—an' then to turn aside from the comforts of life on o'count of nothin' mo' than a feelin'."
"Well, it ain't as if she'd taken a fancy to a plain, ordinary kind of man," remarked Betsey. "Thar's somethin' mo' elevatin' about a parson, an' doubtless it's difficult to come down from a pulpit to common earth when you've once lifted yo' eyes to it. Thar warn't no shame about her cryin' out like that in church. They ought to have broke it to her mo' gently."
"I warn't thar," said old Adam, "but how did Abel conduct himself?"
"Oh, he just got up an' led her out sort of gently, while she was cryin' an' sobbin' so loud that it drowned what Mr. Mullen was sayin'," replied Betsey.
"Thar ain't a better husband in the county," said Solomon, "accordin' to a man's way of lookin' at it, but it seems a woman is never satisfied."
"I'm glad I never married," remarked young Adam, "for I might have got one of the foolish sort seein' as they're so plentiful."
"Well, I never axed much bein' so unattractive to the sex," observed Jim Halloween, "an' as long as a woman was handsome, with a full figger, an' sweet tempered an' thrifty an' a good cook, with a sure hand for pastry, an' al'ays tidy, with her hair curlin' naturally, an' neat an' fresh without carin' about dress, I'd have been easy to please with just the things any man might have a right to expect."
"It's the way with life that those that ax little usually get less," commented old Adam, "I ain't sayin' it's all as it ought to be, but by the time the meek inherit the earth thar'll be precious little left on it except the leavin's of the proud."
"Thar ain't any way of cultivatin' a proud natur when you're born meek, is thar?" inquired his son.
"None that I ever heerd of unless it be to marry a meeker wife. Thar's something in marriage that works contrariwise, an' even a worm of a man will begin to try to trample if he marries a worm of a woman. Who's that ridin' over the three roads, young Adam?"
"It's Abel Revercomb. Come in an' pass the time of day with us, Abel."
But the miller merely shouted back that he had ridden to Piping Tree for a bottle of medicine, and went on at a gallop. Then he passed from the turnpike into the sunken road that led to the mill, and the cloud of dust kicked up by his mare drifted after him into the distance.
In spite of the scene in church, Abel had felt no resentment against Judy. He knew that she had made herself ridiculous in the eyes of the congregation, and that people were pitying him on account of her hopeless infatuation for the young clergyman, but because he was indifferent to her in his heart, he was able to look at the situation from an impersonal point of view, and to realize something of what she had suffered. When Solomon had railed at her after the service, Abel had stopped him in indignation.
"If you can't speak civilly to my wife, you can leave my house," he said sharply.
"Good God, man! Don't you know she's making a laughin' stock of you?"
"That's a lie!" Abel had replied curtly, and Solomon, with the craven spirit of all natural despots, had muttered beneath his breath that he "reckoned, after all, it must have been a sudden attack of sickness."
Of the attack and its nature Abel had said no word after this even to Judy. During that embarrassed walk out of the church, while she clung sobbing hysterically to his arm, he had resolved once for all that, even though her behaviour cost him his ambition, he would never stoop to reproach her. What right, indeed, had he to reproach her when he loved Molly quite as madly, if not so openly, as she loved the rector? It was as if he looked on Judy's suffering through his own, and was therefore endowed with a quality of understanding which his ordinary perceptions would never have given him.
When he came in sight of the mill, the flash of red wheels caught his eyes, and he distinguished Mr. Mullen's gig in the road in front of the door. Having seen Judy as he rode by on his round of visits, the rector had stopped for a moment to inquire if she had entirely recovered her health.
"I was much concerned about her illness in church yesterday," he remarked, turning to the miller.
"I didn't know she was up," replied Abel, observing the inflamed and swollen state of her features, which had apparently escaped the notice of Mr. Mullen. "Oughtn't you to have stayed in bed, Judy?" he asked kindly.
"Oh, no, I'd rather be about," responded Judy hurriedly. "I came over from the house with a message for you when I saw Mr. Mullen passin'."
"I am trying a young horse of Jim Halloween's," said the clergyman, "my bay has gone lame, and Jim offered me this one for the day. Badly broken and needs a firm bit. I'm inclined to believe that he has never been put between shafts before, for I had quite a sharp tussle with him about passing that threshing machine in Bumpass's field."
"Oh, that roans all right if you don't fret him," replied Abel, who had a poor opinion of the rector's horsemanship. "Stop jerking at his mouth, and give him his head."
But the Reverend Orlando, having drifted naturally into the habit of thinking that he had been placed here to offer, not to receive, instruction, appeared a little restive under the other's directions.
"I flatter myself that I possess the understanding of horses," he replied. "I've never had a disagreement with Harry, though I've driven him every day since I've been here."
"All the same I'd keep a steady hand if I were going by that threshing machine up the road," rejoined Abel who magnanimously refrained from adding that he had assisted at the purchase of Harry, and that horse had been fourteen, if a day, when he passed into the clergyman's keeping.
A healthful glow suffused Mr. Mullen's cheeks, while he struggled valiantly to conceal his annoyance. He was very young, and in spite of his early elevation to a position of spiritual leadership, he remained after all merely an ordinary mortal. So he stiffened perceptibly on the shiny seat of his gig, and gave a sharp pull at the reins, which wrenched the head of the young roan away from a clump of sassafras.
"It is better for every man to follow his own ideas, don't you think, Mr. Revercomb?" he replied, advocating in his resentment a principle which he would have been the first to rap soundly had it been advanced by one of his parishioners. "I mean, of course, in the matter of driving."
"When do you go?" asked Judy suddenly, and turned her face away because she could not trust herself to meet his beautiful, earnest eyes.
"Within a fortnight. It is important that I should assume my new responsibilities immediately."
"And you won't come back ever again?" The meadows swam in a blur before her eyes, and she thought of the purple velvet slippers which would never be finished.
He was a kind-hearted young man, who wished well to all the world, and especially to those of his congregation who had profited spiritually by his sermons. If he had suspected the existence of Judy's passion, it would undoubtedly have distressed him—but he did not suspect it, owing to a natural obliquity of vision, which kept him looking away from the world as it is in the direction of a mental image of the world as he imagined it. So, with an amiable word or two of regret that Providence had arranged his removal to wider fields, he drove on, sitting very erect and sawing earnestly at the mouth of the young horse.
"He's a first-rate parson, but a darn fool of a horseman," observed Abel, with the disgust of a good driver for a poor one. "You'd better go in and lie down, Judy, you look like a ghost."
"I don't want to lie down—I wish I were dead," replied Judy, choking back her hysterical sobs. Then turning suddenly into the mill, she sank against the old mill-stone on the wooden platform and burst into a fit of wild and agonized weeping. Her hand, when he touched it, was as cold as clay and as unresponsive to his.
"Judy," he said and his voice was wonderfully gentle, "does it really mean so much to you? Are you honestly grieving like this about Mr. Mullen?"
If he had only known it his gentleness to her was the thing for which at times she almost hated him. The woman in her was very primitive—a creature that harked back to the raw sensations of the jungle—and nothing less than sheer brutality on Abel's part could free her from the charm of the young clergyman's unconscious cruelty.
She looked up at him with accusing eyes, which said, "I don't care who knows that I love him," as plainly as did her huddled and trembling figure, clinging pathetically to the old mill-stone, as though it were some crudely symbolic Rock of Ages which she embraced.