"Is it because he is going away or would you have felt this just as much if he had stayed?" he asked, after a minute in which he had watched her with humorous compassion.
Raising herself at the question, she pushed the damp hair from her forehead, and sat facing him on the edge of the platform.
"I could have borne it—if—if I might have had his sermons every Sunday to help me," she answered, and there was no consciousness of shame, hardly any recognition of her abasement, in her tone. Like all helpless victims of great emotions, she had ceased to be merely an individual and had become the vehicle of some impersonal destructive force in nature. It was not Judy, but the passion within her that was speaking through her lips.
"But what good would they have done you? You would have been miserable still."
"At—at least I should have seen him, an'—an' been strengthened in my religion—-"
The grotesque, the pitiless horror of it struck him for an instant. That she was half distraught and wholly morbid, he saw from her look, and the sight awakened that indomitable pity which had served always as a medium for the biting irony of life.
"To save my soul I can't see what satisfaction you would have got out of that," he remarked.
"I did—I did. They helped me to be spiritual minded," wailed Judy with the incoherence of complete despair. If her infatuation was ridiculous, it occurred to Abel that her courage, at least, was sublime. From a distance and with brighter hair, she might even have been mistaken for a tragic example of immortal passion. The lover in his blood pitied her, but the Calvinist refused to take her seriously.
"Well, if I were you, I'd go in and lie down," he said feeling that it was, after all, the best advice he could offer her. "You're sick, that's what's the matter with you, and a cup of tea will do you more good than hugging that old mill-stone. I know you can't help it, Judy," he added in response to a gesture of protestation, "you were born that way, and none of us, I reckon, can help the way we're born." And since it is easier for a man to change his creed than his inheritance, he spoke in the tone of stern fatalism in which Sarah, glancing about her at life, was accustomed to say to herself, "It's like that, an' thar wouldn't be any justice in it except for original sin."
Judy struggled blindly to her feet, and still he did not touch her. In spite of his quiet words there was a taste of bitterness on his lips, as though his magnanimity had turned to wormwood while he was speaking. After all, he told himself in a swift revulsion of feeling, Judy was his wife and she had made him ridiculous.
"I know it's hard on you," she said, pausing on the threshold in the vain hope, he could see, that some word would be uttered which would explain things or at least make them bearable. None was spoken, and her foot was on the single step that led to the path, when there came the sound of a horse running wildly up the road through the cornlands, and the next instant the young roan passed them, dragging Mr. Mullen's shattered rig in the direction of the turnpike.
"Let me get there, Judy," said Abel, pushing her out of his way, "something has happened!"
But his words came too late. At sight of the empty gig, she uttered a single despairing shriek, and started at a run down the bank, and over the mill-stream. Midway of the log, she stumbled shrieked again, and fell heavily to the stream below, from which Abel caught her up as if she were a child, and carried her to the opposite side, and across the rocky road to the house. As she lay on Sarah's bed, with Blossom working over her, she began to scream anew, half unconsciously, in the voice of frenzied terror with which she had cried out at the sound of the running horse. Her face was grey, but around her mouth there was a blue circle that made it look like the sunken mouth of an old woman, and her eyes—in which that stark terror was still visible, as though it had been rendered indelible by the violence of the shock that had called it into being—seemed looking through the figures around her, with the intense yet unseeing gaze with which one might look through shadows in search of an object one does not find.
"Get the doctor at once, Abel," said Blossom, "Grandma says something has happened to bring on Judy's time. Had you two been quarrelling?"
"Good God, no. Mr. Mullen's horse ran away with him and Judy saw it before I could catch her. I don't know yet whether he is dead or alive."
"I saw him running bareheaded through the cornfield just as you brought Judy in, and I wondered what was the matter. He was going after his horse, I suppose."
"Well, he's done enough harm for one day. I'm off to Piping Tree for Dr.Fairley."
But two hours later, when he returned, with the physician on horseback at his side, Mr. Mullen's driving, like most earnest yet ignorant endeavours, had already resulted in disaster. All night they worked over Judy, who continued to stare through them, as though they were but shadows which prevented her from seeing the object for which she was looking. Then at sunrise, having brought a still-born child into the world, she turned her face to the wall and passed out of it in search of the adventure that she had missed.
Judy was laid away amid the low green ridges in the churchyard, where the drowsy hum of the threshing in a wheatfield across the road, was the only reminder of the serious business of life. And immediately, as if the beneficent green had enveloped her memory, her weaknesses were effaced and her virtues were exalted in the minds of the living. Their judgment was softened by a vague feeling of awe, but they were not troubled, while they stood in a solemn and curious row around her grave, by any sense of the pathetic futility of individual suffering in the midst of a universe that creates and destroys in swarms. The mystery aroused no wonder in their thoughts, for the blindness of habit, which passes generally for the vision of faith, had paralyzed in youth their groping spiritual impulses.
On the following Sunday, before leaving for fresher fields, Mr. Mullen preached a sermon which established him forever in the hearts of his congregation, and in the course of it, he alluded tenderly to "the exalted Christian woman who has been recently removed from among us to a brighter sphere." It was, on the whole as Mrs. Gay observed afterwards, "his most remarkable effort"; and even Sarah Revercomb, who had heard that her daughter-in-law was to be mentioned in the pulpit, and had attended from the same spiritual pride with which she had read the funeral notice in the Applegate papers, admitted on her way home that she "wished poor Judy could have heard him." In spite of the young woman's removal to a sphere which Mr. Mullen had described as "brighter," she had become from the instant of her decease, "poor Judy" in Sarah's thoughts as well as on her lips.
To Abel her death had brought a shock which was not so much a sense of personal regret, as an intensified expression of the pity he had felt for her while she lived. The huddled figure against the mill-stone had acquired a new significance in the act of dying. A dignity which had never been hers in life, enfolded her when she lay with the accusing and hostile look in her face fading slowly into an expression of peace. With the noble inconsistency of a generous heart, he began to regard Judy dead with a tenderness he had never been able to feel for Judy living. The less she demanded of him, the more he was ready to give her.
"I declar' it does look as if Abel was mournin'," remarked BetseyBottom to Sarah on a September afternoon several months later. "Itain't suprisin' in his case seein' he jest married her to get even withMolly."
"I don't believe myself in settin' round an' nursin' grief," responded Sarah, "a proper show of respect is well an' good, but nobody can expect a hearty, able bodied man to keep his thoughts turned on the departed. With women, now, it's different, for thar's precious little satisfaction some women get out of thar husbands till they start to wearin' weeds for 'em."
"You've worn weeds steady now, ain't you, Mrs. Revercomb?"
Sarah set her mouth tightly. "They were too costly to lay away," she replied, and the words were as real a eulogy of her husband as she had ever uttered.
"It's a pity Abel lost Molly Merryweather," said Betsey. "Is thar any likelihood of thar comin' together again? Or is it true—as the rumour keeps up—that she is goin' to marry Mr. Jonathan befo' many months?"
"It ain't likely she'll throw away all that good money once she's got used to it," said Sarah. "For my part, I don't hold with the folks that blamed her for her choice. Thar ain't many husbands that would be worthy of thar hire, an' how was she to find out, till she tried, if Abel was one of those few or not?"
"He al'ays seemed to me almost too promisin' for his good looks, Mrs. Revercomb. I'm mighty partial to looks in a man, thar ain't no use my denyin' it."
"Well, I ain't," said Sarah, "they're no mo' than dross an' cobwebs in my sight, but we're made different an' thar's no sense arguin' about tastes—though I must say for me that I could never understand how a modest woman like you could confess to takin' pleasure in the sight of a handsome man."
"Well, immodest or not, I hold to it," replied Betsey in as amiable a manner as if there had been no reflection upon her refinement. "Abel stands a good chance for the legislature now, don't he?"
"I ain't a friend to that, for I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em, and thar ain't nothin' that takes the place of cleanness with me." In her heart she felt for Betsey something of the contempt which the stoic in all ranks of life feels for the epicurean.
At supper that night Sarah repeated this conversation, and to her astonishment, not Abel, but Blossom, went pitiably white and flinched back sharply as if fearing a second fall of the lash.
"I don't believe it! Mr. Jonathan will never marry Molly. There's no truth in it!" she cried.
Over the coffee-pot which she has holding, Sarah stared at her in perplexity. "Why, whatever has come over you, Blossom?" she asked.
"You haven't been yo'self for a considerable spell, daughter," said Abner, turning to her with a pathetic, anxious expression on his great hairy face. "Do you feel sick or mopin'?"
He looked at Blossom as a man looks at the only thing he loves in life when he sees that thing suffering beneath his eyes and cannot divine the cause. The veins grew large and stood out on his forehead, and the big knotted hand that was carrying his cup to his lips, trembled in the air and then sank slowly back to the table. His usually dull and indifferent gaze became suddenly piercing as if it were charged with electricity.
"It's nothing, father," said Blossom, pressing her hand to her bosom, as though she were choking for breath, "and it's all silly talk, I know, about Molly."
"What does it matter to you if it's true?" demanded Sarah tartly, but Blossom, driven from the room by a spasm of coughing, had already disappeared.
It was a close September night, and as Abel crossed the road to look for a young heifer in the meadow the heavy scent of the Jamestown weeds seemed to float downward beneath the oppressive weight of the atmosphere. The sawing of the katydids came to him out of the surrounding darkness, through which a light, gliding like a gigantic glow-worm along the earth, revealed presently the figure of Jonathan Gay, mounted on horseback and swinging a lantern from his saddle.
"A dark night, Revercomb."
"Yes, there'll be rain before morning."
"Well, it won't do any harm. The country needs it. I'm glad to hear, by the way, that you are going into politics. You're a capital speaker. I heard you last summer at Piping Tree."
He rode on, and Abel forgot the meeting until, on his way back from the meadow, he ran against Blossom, who was coming rather wildly from the direction in which Jonathan had vanished.
"What has upset you so, Blossom? You are like a ghost. Did you meet Mr.Jonathan?"
"No, why should I meet Mr. Jonathan? What do you mean?"
Without replying she turned from him and ran into the house, while following her more soberly, he asked himself carelessly what could have happened to disturb her. "I wonder if she is frettin' about the rector?" he thought, and his utter inability to understand, or even to recognize the contradictions in the nature of women oppressed his mind. "First, she wanted Mr. Mullen and he didn't want her, then he wanted her and she didn't want him, and now when he's evidently left off caring again, she appears to be grievin' herself sick about him. I wonder if it's always like that—everybody wanting the person that wants somebody else? And yet I know I loved Molly a hundred times more, if that were possible, when I believed she cared for me." He remembered the December afternoon so many years ago, when she had run away from the school in Applegate, and he had found her breasting a heavy snow storm on the road to Jordan's Journey. Against the darkness he saw her so vividly, as she looked with the snow powdering her hair and her eyes shining happily up at him when she nestled for warmth against his arm, that for a minute he could hardly believe that it was eight years ago and not yesterday.
Several weeks later, on a hazy October morning, when the air was sharp with the scent of cider presses and burning brushwood, he met Molly returning from the cross-roads, in the short path over the pasture.
"I thought you had gone," he said, and held out his hand.
"Not yet. Mrs. Gay wants to stay through October."
In her hand she held a bunch of golden-rod, and behind her the field in which she had gathered it, flamed royally in the sunlight.
"Did you know that I rode to Piping Tree to hear you speak one day inJune?" she asked suddenly.
"I didn't know it, but it was nice of you."
His renunciation had conferred a dignity upon him which had in it something of the quiet and the breadth of the Southern landscape. She knew while she looked at him that he had accepted her decision once for all—that he still accepted it in spite of the ensuing logic of events which had refuted its finality. The choice had been offered her between love and the world, and she had chosen the world—chosen in the heat of youth, in the thirst for experience. She had not loved enough. Her love had been slight, young, yielding too easily to the impact of other desires. There had been no illusion to shelter it. She had never, she remembered now, had any illusions—all had been of the substance and the fibre of reality. Then, with the lucidity of vision through which she had always seen and weighed the values of her emotions, she realized that if she had the choice to make over again, she could not make it differently. At the time flight from love was as necessary to her growth as the return to love was necessary to her happiness to-day. She saw clearly that her return was, after all, the result of her flight. If she had not chosen the world, she would never have known how little the world signified in comparison with simpler things. Life was all of a single piece; it was impossible to pull it apart and say "without this it would have been better"—since nothing in it was unrelated to the rest, nothing in it existed by itself and independent of the events that preceded it and came after it. Born as she had been out of sin, and the tragic expiation of sin, she had learned more quickly than other women, as though the spectre of the unhappy Janet stood always at her side to help her to a deeper understanding and a sincerer pity. She knew now that if she loved Abel, it was because all other interests and emotions had faded like the perishable bloom on the meadow before the solid, the fundamental fact of her need of him.
"Do you still get books from the library in Applegate?" she asked because she could think of nothing to say that sounded less trivial.
"Sometimes, and second hand ones from a dealer I've found there. One corner of the mill is given up to them."
Again there was silence, and then she said impulsively in her old childlike way.
"Abel, have you ever forgiven me?"
"There was nothing to forgive. You see, I've learned, Molly."
"What you've learned is that I wasn't worth loving, I suppose?"
He laughed softly. "The truth is, I never knew how much you were worth till I gave you up," he answered.
"It was the same way with me—that's life, perhaps."
"That sounded like my mother. You're too young to have learned what it means."
"I don't believe I was ever young—I seem to have known about the sadness of life from my cradle. That was why I wanted so passionately some of its gaiety. I remember I used to think that Paris meant gaiety, but when we went there I couldn't get over my surprise because of all the ragged people and the poor, miserable horses. They spoiled it to me."
"The secret is not to look, isn't it?" he asked.
"Yes. Jonathan never looked. It all depends, he used to tell me—upon which set of facts I chose to regard—and he calls it philosophical not to regard any but pleasant ones."
"Perhaps he's right, but isn't it, after all, a question of the way he's made?"
"Everything is; grandfather used to say that was why he was never able to judge people. Life was woven of many colours, like Joseph's coat, he once told me, and we could make dyes run, but we couldn't wash them entirely out. He couldn't make himself resentful when he tried—not even with—with Mr. Jonathan."
"Have you ever forgiven him, Molly?"
"I've sometimes thought that he was sorry at the end—but how could that undo the way he treated my mother? Being sorry when you're dying doesn't help things you've hurt in life—but, then, grandfather would have said, I suppose, that it was life, not Mr. Jonathan, that was to blame. And I can see, too, in a way, that we sometimes do things we don't want to do—that we don't even mean to do—that we regret ever afterwards—just because life drives us to do them—" For a minute she hesitated, and then added bravely, "I learned that by taking Mr. Jonathan's money."
"But you were right," he answered.
"To have the choice between love and money, and to choose—money?"
"You're putting it harshly. It wasn't money you chose—it was the world or Old Church—Jordan's Journey or the grist mill."
For a moment the throbbing of her heart stifled her. Then she found her voice.
"If I had the choice now I'd choose Old Church and the grist mill," she said.
There was a short silence, and while it lasted she waited trembling, her hand outstretched, her mouth quivering for his kisses. She remembered how eagerly his lips had turned to hers in the past as one who thirsted for water.
But when he spoke again it was in the same quiet voice.
"Would you, Molly!" he answered gently, and that was all. It was not a question, but an acceptance. He made no movement toward her. His eyes did not search her face.
They turned and walked slowly across the pasture over the life-everlasting, which diffused under their feet a haunting and ghostly fragrance. Myriads of grasshoppers chanted in the warm sunshine, and a roving scent of wood-smoke drifted to them from a clearing across the road. It was the season of the year when the earth wears its richest and its most ephemeral splendour; when its bloom is so poignantly lovely that it seems as if a breath would destroy it, and the curves of hill and field melt like shadows into the faint purple haze on the horizon.
"If I could change it all now—could take you out of the life that suits you and bring you back to the mill—I wouldn't do it. I like to think I'm decent enough not even to want to do it," he said.
They had reached the fence that separated Gay's pasture from his, and stopping, he held out his hand with a smile.
"I hear you're to marry Jonathan Gay," he added, "and whether or not you do, God bless you."
"But I'm not, Abel!" she cried passionately as he turned away.
He did not look back, and when he had passed out of hearing, she repeated her words with a passionate repudiation of the thing he had suggested, "I'm not, Abel!—I'm not!"
Tears blinded her eyes as she crossed the pasture, and when she brushed them away, she could see nothing distinctly except the single pointed maple that lifted its fiery torch above the spectral procession of the aspens in the graveyard. She had passed under the trees at the Poplar Spring, and was deep in the witch-hazel boughs which made a screen for the Haunt's Walk, when beyond a sudden twist in the path, she saw ahead of her the figures of Blossom Revercomb and Jonathan Gay. At first they showed merely in dim outlines standing a little apart, with the sunlit branch of a sweet gum tree dropping between them. Then as Molly went forward over the velvety carpet of leaves, she saw the girl make a swift and appealing movement of her arms.
"Oh, Jonathan, if you only would! I can't bear it any longer!" she cried, with her hands on his shoulders.
He drew away, kindly, almost caressingly. He was in hunting clothes, and the barrel of his gun, Molly saw, came between him and Blossom, gently pressing her off.
"You don't understand, Blossom, I've told you a hundred times it is out of the question," he answered.
Then looking up his eyes met Molly's, and he stood silent without defence or explanation, before her.
"What is impossible, Jonathan? Can I help you?" she asked impulsively, and going quickly to Blossom's side she drew the girl's weeping face to her breast. "You're in trouble, darling—tell me, tell Molly about it," she said.
As they clung together in a passion of despair and of pity—the one appealing by sheer helplessness, the other giving succour out of an abundant self-reliance—Gay became conscious that he was witnessing the secret wonder of Molly's nature. The relation of woman to man was dwarfed suddenly by an understanding of the relation of woman to woman. Deeper than the dependence of sex, simpler, more natural, closer to the earth, as though it still drew its strength from the soil, he realized that the need of woman for woman was not written in the songs nor in the histories of men, but in the neglected and frustrated lives which the songs and the histories of men had ignored.
"Tell me, Blossom—tell Molly," said the soft voice again.
"Molly!" he said sharply, and as she looked at him over Blossom's prostrate head, he met a light of anger that seemed, while it lasted, to illumine her features.
"Blossom and I were married nearly two years ago," he said.
"Nearly two years ago?" she repeated. "Why have we never known it?"
"I had to think of my mother," he replied almost doggedly. Then driven by a rush of anger against Blossom because she was to blame for it all—because he had ever seen her, because he had ever desired her, because he had ever committed the supreme folly of marrying her, and, most of all, because she had, in her indiscretion, betrayed him to Molly—he added with the cruelty which is possible sometimes to generous and kindly natures—"It was a mistake, of course. I am ready to do anything in my power for her happiness, but it wouldn't be for her happiness for us to start living together."
Blossom raised her face from Molly's bosom, and the strong sunlight shining through the coloured leaves, showed the blanched look of her skin and the fine lines chiselled by tears around her eyes. Encircling her mouth, which Gay had once described as looking "as though it would melt if you kissed it," there was now a heavy blue shadow which detracted from the beauty of her still red and voluptuous lips. In many ways she was finer, larger, nobler than when he had first met her—for experience, which had blighted her physical loveliness, appeared, also, to have increased the dignity and quietness of her soul. Had Gay been able to see her soul it would probably have moved him, for he was easily stirred by the thing that was beneath the eyes. But it was impossible to present a woman's soul to him as a concrete image.
"I don't want to live with him—I don't want anything from him," responded Blossom, with pride. "I don't want anything from him ever again," she repeated, and putting Molly's arms away from her, she turned and moved slowly down the Haunt's Walk toward the Poplar Spring.
"I couldn't help loving you, could I, Molly?" he asked in a low voice.
Her face was pale and stern when she answered.
"And you couldn't help loving Blossom last year, I suppose?"
"If I could have helped, do you think I should have done it? You don't understand such things, Molly."
"No, I don't understand them. When love has to cloak cruelty and faithlessness, I can't see that it's any better than the thing it excuses."
"But all love isn't alike. I don't love you in the least as I lovedBlossom. That was a mere impulse, and incident."
"But how was Blossom to know that? and how am I?"
"One can't explain it to a woman. They're not made of flesh and blood as men are."
"They've had to drill their flesh and blood," she replied, stern rather than scornful.
"I might have known you'd be hard, Molly."
When she spoke again her voice had softened.
"Jonathan, it's no use thinking of me—go back to Blossom," she said.
"Not thinking of you won't make me go back to Blossom. When that sort of thing is over, it is over once for all."
"Even if that is true you mustn't think of me—because I belong—every bit of me—to Abel."
He stared at her for a moment in silence. "Then it's true," he said at last under his breath.
"It has always been true—ever since anything was true."
"But you didn't always know it."
"I had to grow to it. I believe I have been growing to it forever.Everything has helped me to it—even my mistakes."
She spoke quite simply. Her earnestness was so large that it had swept away her shyness and her self-consciousness, as a strong wind sweeps away the smoke over the autumn meadows. And yet this very earnestness, this passionate sincerity, added but another fold to the luminous evil of mystery in which she was enveloped. He could not understand her when she tried to tear the veil away and the terrible clearness of her soul blinded his sight. Therein lay her charm for him—he could never reach her, could never possess her even should she seek to approach him. Behind the mystery of darkness which he might penetrate, there was still the mystery of light.
"If you really care about him like that I don't see why you gave him up and went away from him," he said helplessly. "You wanted to go. Nobody urged you. It was your own choice."
"Yes, that's what you could never understand. I wasn't really going away from him when I went. I was going to him. It was a long and a roundabout road, but it was safer."
"You mean it brought you back in the end?"
"It not only brought me back, it showed me things by the way. It made me understand about you and Blossom."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and was silent. The pang of his loss was swallowed up in the amplitude of his wonder.
"Are you going to marry him, Molly?" he asked when the silence had become unbearable.
"If he wants me. I'm not quite sure that he wants me. I know he loves me," she added, "but that isn't just the same."
He did not answer, and they stood looking beyond the thick foliage in the Haunt's Walk, to the meadows, over which a golden haze shimmered as though it were filled with the beating of invisible wings.
"Molly," he said suddenly. "Shall I go after Blossom?"
"Oh, if you would, dear Jonathan," she answered.
Without a word, he turned from her and walked rapidly down the pathBlossom had followed.
When he had disappeared, Molly went up the walk to the Italian garden, and then ascending the front steps passed into the drawing room, where Kesiah and Mrs. Gay sat in the glow of a cedar fire, reading a new life of Lord Byron.
Kesiah's voice, droning monotonously like the loud hum of bees, rose above the faint crackling of the logs, on which Mrs. Gay had fixed her soft, unfathomable eyes, while she reconstructed, after the habit of her imagination, certain magnificent adventures in the poet's life.
"Have you seen Jonathan, Molly?" asked Kesiah, laying aside her book while Mrs. Gay wiped her eyes.
"Yes, I left him in the Haunt's Walk."
"He has not seemed well of late," said Mrs. Gay softly, "I am trying to persuade him to leave us and go back to Europe."
"He is anxious about your health and doesn't like to go so far away from you," replied Molly, sitting on an ottoman beside her chair.
Taking her hand, Mrs. Gay caressed it while she answered.
"I can never think of myself when Jonathan's happiness is to be considered." Then dropping her voice still lower, she added tenderly, "You are a great comfort to me, dear, a very great comfort."
What she meant, and Molly grasped her meaning as distinctly as if she had put it into words, was that she was comforted, she was reassured by the girl's obvious indifference to Jonathan's passion. Like many persons of sentimental turn of mind, she found no great difficulty in reconciling a visionary romanticism with a very practical regard for the more substantial values of life.
"I should never allow the question of my health to interfere with Jonathan's plans," she repeated, while her expression grew angelic in the light of her sacrificial fervour.
"I don't think he wants to go," retorted Kesiah rather snappily, and opening the book again she began to read.
For an hour her voice droned steadily in the firelight, while Molly, with her head against Mrs. Gay's knee, looked through the casement window to where the October roses bloomed and dropped in the squares of the Italian garden. Then at the sound of hurried footsteps on the walk outside, the girl rose from the ottoman and went out, closing the door after her. In the hall the blanched face of Uncle Abednego confronted her like the face of a spectre.
"I ain't a-gwine ter tell Miss Angela—I ain't a-gwine ter tell MissAngela," he moaned, "Marse Jonathan, he's been shot down yonder at PoplarSpring des like Ole Marster!"
As Gay passed rapidly down the Haunt's Walk a rustle in the witch-hazel bushes accompanied him, stopping instantly when he stopped, and beginning again when he moved, as though something, crouching there, listened in breathless suspense for the fall of his footsteps. At the Poplar Spring the sound grew so distinct that he hastened in the direction of it, calling in an impatient voice, "Blossom! Are you there, Blossom?" The words were still on his lips, when a thick grape-vine parted in front of him, and the bearded immobile face of Abner Revercomb looked out at him, with hatred in his eyes.
"Damn you!" said a voice almost in a whisper. The next instant a shot rang out, and Gay stumbled forward as though he had tripped over the underbrush, while his gun, slipping from his shoulder, discharged its load into the air. His first confused impression was that he had knocked against a poplar bough which had stuck him sharply in the side. Then, as a small drift of smoke floated toward him, he thought in surprise, "I'm shot. By Jove, that's what it means—I'm shot." At the instant, underlying every other sensation or idea, there was an ironic wonder that anybody should have hated him enough to shoot him. But while the wonder was still engrossing him—in that same instant, which seemed to cover an eternity, when the shot rang in his ears, something happened in his brain, and he staggered through the curtain of grape-vine and sank down as though falling asleep on the bed of life-everlasting. "It's ridiculous that anybody should want to shoot me," he thought, while the little round yellow sun dwindled smaller and smaller until a black cloud obscured it.
A minute, or an hour afterwards, he opened his eyes with a start, and lay staring up at the sky, where a flock of swallows drifted like smoke in the cloudless blue. He had awakened to an odd sensation of floating downward on a current that was too strong for him; and though he knew that the idea was absurd, it was impossible for him to put it out of his mind, for when he made an effort to do so, he felt that he was slipping again into oblivion. For a time he let himself drift helplessly like a leaf on the stream. Then seized by a sudden terror of the gulf beyond, he tried to stop, to hold back, to catch at something—at anything—that would check the swiftness of his descent, that would silence the rushing sound of the river about him. But in spite of his struggles, this current—which seemed sometimes to flow from a wound in his side, and sometimes to be only the watery rustle of the aspens in the graveyard—this imaginary yet pitiless current, bore him always farther away from the thing to which he was clinging—from this thing he could not let go because it was himself—because it had separated and distinguished him from all other persons and objects in the universe. "I've always believed I was one person," he thought, "but I am a multitude. There are at least a million of me—and any one of them might have crowded out all the others if he'd got a chance." A swift and joyous surprise held him for a moment, as though he were conscious for the first time of dormant possibilities in himself which he had never suspected. "Why didn't I know this before?" he asked, like one who stumbles by accident upon some simple and yet illuminating fact of nature. "All this has been in me all the time, but nobody told me. I might just as well have been any of these other selves as the one I am." The noise of the river began in his head again, but it no longer frightened him.
"It's only the hum of bees in the meadow," he said after a minute, "and yet it fills the universe as if it were the sound of a battle. And now I've forgotten what I was thinking about. It was very important, but I shall never remember it." He closed his eyes, while the ghostly fragrance of the life-everlasting on which he was lying rose in a cloud to envelop him. Something brushed his face like the touch of wings, and looking up he saw that it was a golden leaf which had fallen from a bough of the great poplar above him. He had never seen anything in his life so bright as that golden bough that hung over him, and when he gazed through it, he saw that the sky was bluer than he had ever imagined that it could be, and that everything at which he looked had not only this quality of intense, of penetrating brightness, but appeared transparent, with a luminous transparency which seemed a veil spread over something that was shining beyond it. "I wonder if I'm dead?" he thought irritably, "or is it only delirium? And if I am dead, it really doesn't matter—an idiot could see through anything so thin as this."
Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind. He remembered feeling the same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a long curve he was approaching. And it seemed to him now as then, that a trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him—that he was in the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight. It was a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath.
And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-assorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the face of Kesiah, wearing her deprecation expression, which said, "It isn't really my fault that I couldn't change things"; and then the faces of women he had seen but once, or passed in the street and remembered; and in the midst of these crowding faces, the scarred and ravaged face of an old crossing-sweeper on a windy corner in Paris. . . . "I wish they'd leave me alone," he thought, with the helplessness of delirium, "I wish they'd keep away and leave me alone." He wanted to drive these hallucinations from his brain, and to recapture the exhilarating sense of discovery he had lost the minute before, but because he sought it, in some unimaginable way, it continued to elude him. The loud hum of bees in the Indian summer confused him, and he thought impatiently that if it would only cease for an instant, his mind might clear again, and he might think things out—that he might even remember the important things he had forgotten. "Abner Revercomb shot me," he said aloud. "I don't know much. I don't know whether I am alive or dead. All I am certain of is that it doesn't matter in the least—that it's too small a fact to make any fuss about. It's all so small—the blamed thing isn't any more important than those bees humming out there in the meadow. And I might as well have developed into any one of my other selves. What were all those seeds of possibilities for if they never came to anything? Why, I might have been a hero—it was in me all the time—I might even have been a god."
Then for the first time he became aware of his body as of something outside of himself—something that had been tacked on to him. He felt all at once that his feet were as heavy as logs—that they were benumbed, that they had fallen asleep, and were filled with the sharp pricking of thorns. Yet he had no control over them; he could not move them, could hardly even think of them as belonging to himself. This sensation of numbness began slowly to crawl upward like some gigantic insect. He knew it would reach his knees and then pass on to his waist, but the knowledge gave him no power to prevent its coming, and when he tried to will his hand to move, it refused to obey the action of his brain.
"I'm really out of my head," he thought, and the next instant, "or, it's all a dream, and I've been only a dream from the beginning."
A century afterwards, he opened his eyes and saw a face bending over him, which seemed as if it were of gossamer, so vague and shadowy it looked beside the images of his delirium. An excited and eager humming was in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was the voices of human beings or the loud music of the bees in the meadow. From his waist down he could feel nothing, not even the crawling of the gigantic insect, but the rest of his body was a single throbbing pain, a pain so intense that it seemed to drag him back from the gulf of darkness into which he was drifting.
"Can you hear?" asked a voice from out the hum of sound, speaking in the clear, high tone one uses to a deaf man.
Another voice, he was not sure whether it was his own or a stranger's—repeated from a distance, "Can I hear?"
"Did you see who shot you?" said the voice.
And the second voice repeated after it: "Did I see who shot me?"
"Was it Abner Revercomb?" asked the first voice.
He knew then what they meant, and suddenly he began to think lucidly and rapidly like a person under the mental pressure of strong excitement or of alcohol. Everything showed distinctly to him, and he saw with this wonderful distinctness, that it made no difference whether it was Abner Revercomb or one of his own multitude of selves that had shot him. It made no difference—nothing mattered except to regain the ineffable sense of approaching discovery which he had lost.
"Was it Abner Revercomb?" said the first voice more loudly.
He was conscious now of himself and of his surroundings, and there was no uncertainty, no hesitation in his answer.
"It was an accident. I shot myself," he said, and after a moment he added angrily, "Why should anybody shoot me? It would be ridiculous."
It was there again—the unexplored, the incalculable vastness. If they would only leave him alone he might recover it before it eluded him.
In the middle of the afternoon Molly went into the spare room in the west wing, and stopped beside the high white bed on which Gay was lying, with the sheet turned down from his face. In death his features wore a look of tranquil brightness, of arrested energy, as if he had paused suddenly for a brief space, and meant to rise and go on again about the absorbing business of living. The windows were open, and through the closed shutters floated a pale greenish light and the sound of dead leaves rustling softly in the garden.
She had hardly entered before the door opened noiselessly again, and Kesiah came in bringing some white roses in a basket. Drawing a little away, Molly watched her while she arranged the flowers with light and guarded movements, as if she were afraid of disturbing the sleeper. Of what was she thinking? the girl wondered. Was she grieving for her lost youth, with its crushed possibilities of happiness, or for the rich young life before her, which had left its look of arrested energy still clinging to the deserted features? Was she saddened by the tragic mystery of Death or by the more poignant, the more inscrutable mystery of Life? Did she mourn all the things that had not been that did not matter, or all the things that had been that mattered even less?
Lifting her eyes from Kesiah's face, she fixed them on a small old picture of the elder Jonathan, which hung under a rusty sword above the bed. For the first time there came to her an impulse of compassion for the man who was her father. Perhaps he, also, had suffered because life had driven him to do the things that he hated—perhaps he, also, had had his secret chamber in which his spirit was crucified? With the thought something in her heart, which was like a lump of ice, melted suddenly, and she felt at peace. "Because I've lived," she said softly to herself, "I can understand."
And on the opposite side of the bed, between the long white curtains, Kesiah was thinking, "Because I've never lived, but have stood apart and watched life, I can understand."
Turning away presently, Molly went to the door, where she stood waiting until the elder woman joined her.
"Is Mr. Chamberlayne still with Aunt Angela?" she asked.
"Yes. He was on his way to visit her when Cephus met him near the cross-roads." For an instant she paused to catch her breath, and then added softly, "Angela is bearing it beautifully."
Stooping over, she picked up a few scattered rose leaves from the threshold and dropped them into the empty basket before she followed Molly down the hall of the west wing to the lattice door, which opened on the side-garden. Here the rustling of dead leaves grew louder, and faint scents of decay and mould were wafted through the evanescent beauty of the Indian summer.
While they stood there, Mr. Chamberlayne came down the staircase, wiping his eyes, which were very red, on his white silk handkerchief.
"She bears it beautifully, just as we might have expected," he said "I have seldom witnessed such fortitude, such saintly resignation to what she feels to be the will of God."
Molly's eyes left his face and turned to the purple and gold of the meadows, where webs of silver thistledown were floating over the path she had trodden only a few hours ago. Nothing had changed in the landscape—the same fugitive bloom was on the fields, the same shadows were on the hillside, the same amber light was on the turnpike. She thought of many things in that instant, but beneath them all, like an undercurrent, ran the knowledge that Mrs. Gay was "bearing it beautifully" behind her closed shutters. When her mind went back to the past, she remembered the elder Jonathan, who had perished in the fine silken mesh of the influence he was powerless to break. After this came the memory of the day when Janet Merryweather had flung herself on the mercy of the gentle heart, and had found it iron. And then she thought of the son, who had drifted into deceit and subterfuge because he was not strong enough to make war on a thing so helpless. He, also, had died because he dared not throw off that remorseless tyranny of weakness. Without that soft yet indomitable influence, he would never have lied in the beginning, would never have covered his faithlessness with the hypocrisy of duty.
"You have been a great comfort to her, Mr. Chamberlayne," said Kesiah, breaking the silence at last.
A low sound, half a sob, half a sigh, escaped the lawyer's lips. "A spirit like hers needs no other prop than her Creator," he replied.
"It is when one expects her to break down that she shows her wonderful fortitude," added Kesiah.
"Her consolation now is the thought that she never considered either her health or her happiness where her son was concerned," pursued the old man. "She clings pathetically to the memory that she urged him to return to Europe, and that he chose to remain a few weeks for the pleasure of hunting. Not a breath stains the purity of her utter selflessness. To witness such spiritual beauty is a divine inspiration."
For the last few hours, ever since a messenger had met him, half way on the Applegate road, with the news of Jonathan's death, he had laboured philosophically to reconcile such a tragedy with his preconceived belief that he inhabited the best of all possible worlds. Only when suffering obtruded brutally into his immediate surroundings, was it necessary for him to set about resolving the problem of existence—for, like most hereditary optimists, he did not borrow trouble from his neighbours. A famine or an earthquake at a little distance appeared to him a puerile obstacle to put forward against his belief in the perfection of the planetary scheme; but when his eyes rested upon the martyred saintliness of Mrs. Gay's expression, he was conscious that his optimism tottered for an instant, and was almost overthrown. That a just and tender Deity should inflict pain upon so lovely a being was incomprehensible to his chivalrous spirit.
"Has any one told her about Blossom?" asked Molly.
Kesiah shook her head. "Mr. Chamberlayne feels that it would be cruel. She knows so little about Jonathan's affairs that we may be able to keep his marriage from her knowledge if she leaves Jordan's Journey a few days after the funeral."
"In spite of it all I know that Jonathan hated lies," said Molly almost fiercely.
"Our first thought must be to spare her," answered the lawyer. "It was her son's endeavour always, just as it was my poor old friend Jonathan's. If you will come with me into the library," he added to Kesiah, "we will take a few minutes to look over the papers I have arranged."
They moved away, walking side by side with halting steps, as though they were crushed by age, and yet were trying to the last to keep up an appearance of activity. For a minute Molly gazed after them. Then her eyes wandered to the light that shimmered over the meadows, and descending the stone steps into the side-garden, she walked slowly through the miniature maze, where the paths were buried deep in wine-coloured leaves which had drifted from the half bared trees on the lawn. Abel was coming, she knew, and she waited for him in a stillness that seemed akin to that softly breathing plant life around her. It was the hour for which she had hungered for weeks, yet now that it had come, she could hardly recognize it for the thing she had wanted. A sudden blight had fallen over her, as though she had brought the presence of death with her out of that still chamber. Every sound was hushed into silence, every object appeared as unsubstantial as a shadow. Beyond the lawn, over the jewelled meadows, she could see the white spire of Old Church rising above the coloured foliage in the churchyard, and beyond it, the flat ashen turnpike, which had led hundreds of adventurous feet toward the great world they were seeking. She remembered that the sight of the turnpike had once made her restless; now it brought her only a promise of peace.
Turning at the sound of a step on the dead leaves, she saw that Abel had entered the garden, and was approaching her along one of the winding paths. When he reached her, he spoke quickly without taking her outstretched hand. The sun was in his eyes and he lowered them to the over-blown roses in a square of box.
"I came over earlier," he said, "but I couldn't see any one except Mr.Chamberlayne."
"He told me you would come back. That was why I waited."
For a moment he seemed to struggle for breath. Then he said quickly.
"Molly, do you believe it was an accident?"
She started and her hands shook.
"He said so at the end—otherwise—how—how could it have happened?"
"Yes, how could it have happened?" he repeated, and added after a pause,"He was a fine fellow. I always liked him."
Her tears choked her, and when she had recovered her voice, she put a question or two about Blossom—delaying, through some instinct of flight, the moment for which she had so passionately longed.
"It was all so unnecessary," she said, "that is the worst of it. It might just as easily not have happened."
"I wish I could be of some use," he answered. "Perhaps Mr. Chamberlayne has thought of something he would like me to do?"
"He is in the library. Uncle Abednego will show you."
He put out his hand, "Then good-bye, Molly," he said gently.
But at the first touch of his fingers the spell was broken, and the mystery of life, not of death, rushed over her like waves of light. She knew now that she was alive—that the indestructible desire for happiness was still in her heart. The meaning of life did not matter while the exquisite, the burning sense of its sweetness remained.
"Abel," she said with a sob, half of joy, half of sorrow, "if I go on my knees, will you forgive me?"
He had turned away, but at her voice, he stopped and looked back with the sunlight in his eyes.
"There isn't any forgiveness in love, Molly," he answered.
"Then—oh, then if I go on my knees will you love me?"
He smiled, and even his smile, she saw, had lost its boyish brightness and grown sadder.
"I'd like to see you on your knees, if I might pick you up," he said, "but, Molly, I can't. You've everything to lose and I've nothing on God's earth to give you except myself."
"But if that's all I want?"
"It isn't, darling. You may think so, but it isn't and you'd find it out. You see all this time since I've lost you, I've been learning to give you up. It's a poor love that isn't big enough to give up when the chance comes to it."
"If—if you give me up, I'll let everything go," she said passionately."I'll not take a penny of that money. I'll stay at Old Church and livewith Betsey Bottom and raise chickens. If you give me up I'll die,Abel," she finished with a sob.
At the sound of her sob, he laughed softly, and his laugh, unlike his smile, was a laugh of happiness.
"If you go to live with Betsey Bottom I'll come and get you," he answered, "but Molly, Molly, how you've tortured me. You deserve a worse punishment than raising chickens."
"That will be happiness."
"Suppose I insist that you shall draw the water and chop the wood? My beauty, your submission is adorable if it would only last!"
"Abel, how can you?"
"I can and I will, sweetheart. I might even make a miller's wife of you if it was likely that I'd ever do anything but worship you and keep you wrapped in silk. Are you very much in love at last, Molly?"
The sound of his low laugh was in her blood, and while she leaned toward him, she melted utterly, drawing him with the light of her face, with the quivering breath between her parted lips. To his eyes she was all womanhood in surrender, yet he held back still, as a man who has learned the evanescence of joy, holds back when he sees his happiness within his grasp.
"It's too late except for one thing, Molly," he said. "If it isn't everything you're offering me—if you are keeping back a particle of yourself—body or soul—it is too late. I won't take anything from you unless I take everything—unless your whole happiness as well as mine is in your giving."
Then before the look in her face, he held out his arms and stood waiting.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Miller Of Old Church, by Ellen Glasgow