"We wanted to give you a little reminder of us on your birthday, Molly," she said, taking up an amethyst cross on a slender chain from the table beside her, "and Jonathan thought you would like a trinket to wear with your white dresses."
"I was right, wasn't I, cousin?" asked Gay, with his genial smile.
Mrs. Gay flushed slightly at the word, while Reuben cast a grateful glance at him over the untasted glass of wine in his hand.
Without drawing a step nearer, Molly stood there in the centre of the room, nervously twisting her handkerchief in and out of her fingers. She was physically cramped by her surroundings, and the reproachful gentleness in Mrs. Gay's face embarrassed her only less than did the intimate pleasantry of Jonathan's tone. Every detail of the library—the richness and heaviness of the furniture, the insipid fixed smiles in the family portrait, the costly fragility of the china ornaments—all these seemed to unite in some occult power which overthrew her self-possession and paralyzed her emotions.
Pitying her shyness, Gay took the chain from his mother's hand, and, slipping it around Molly's neck, fastened it under the bunch of curls at the back. Then he patted her encouragingly on the shoulder, while he spoke directly to Reuben.
"It looks well on her don't you think, Mr. Merryweather," he inquired.
"Yes, it's a pretty gift an' she's much obliged to all of you," replied Reuben, with the natural dignity which never deserted him. "She's a good girl, Molly is," he added simply. "For all her quick words an' ways thar ain't a better girl livin'."
"We are very sure of that," said Mr. Chamberlayne, speaking in Gay's place. "She is a kinswoman any of us may be proud of owning." And going a step nearer to her, he began explaining her father's wishes in the shortest words at his command.
They were all kind—all honestly anxious to do their duty in aiding the atonement of old Jonathan. Their faces, their voices, their gestures, revealed an almost painful effort to make her appear at ease. Yet in spite of their irreproachable intentions, each one of them was perfectly aware that the visit was very far from being a success. They admired her sincerely, but with the exception of Gay, who was bothered by few moral prejudices, they were one and all nervously constrained in manner. To Mr. Chamberlayne she represented merely an attractive object of charity; to Kesiah she appeared as an encroaching member of the inferior order; to Mrs. Gay she embodied the tragic disillusionment of her life. In time they would either forget these first impressions or grow accustomed to them; but while she stood there, awkward and blushing, in the middle of the library, where old Jonathan had worked out his repentance, even the lawyer found his legal eloquence tripping confusedly on his tongue, and turned at last in sheer desperation to stare with a sensation of relief at the frowning countenance of Kesiah. When, after a hesitating word of thanks, the girl held out her hand to Reuben, and they went away arm in arm, as they had come, a helpless glance passed from Jonathan to Mrs. Gay and from Mrs. Gay into vacancy.
"Like most eccentric bequests made in moments of great moral purpose, it was, of course, a mistake," said the lawyer. "Had Jonathan known the character of the miller, he would certainly have had no objection to Molly's choice—if she has, indeed, a serious fancy for the young man, which I doubt. But in his day, we must remember, the Revercombs had given little promise of either intelligence or industry except in the mother. Granting this," he added thoughtfully, "it might be possible to have the conditions set aside, but not without laying bare a scandal which would cause great pain to sensitive natures—-"
He glanced sympathetically at Mrs. Gay, who responded almost unconsciously to the emotional suggestion of his ideal of her.
"Oh, never that! I could not bear that!" she exclaimed.
"The whole trouble comes of the insane way people arrange the future," remarked Jonathan with irritation. "He actually believed, I dare say, that he was assuring the girl's happiness by that ridiculous document. But for mother I'd fight the thing in the courts and then give Molly her share outright and let her marry the miller."
The lawyer shook his head slowly, with his eyes on Mrs. Gay. "Before all else we must consider your mother," he answered.
For the first time Kesiah spoke. "I am quite willing to take the girl when Reuben dies," she said, "but why in the world did he put in that foolish clause about her living with Jonathan and myself?"
Without looking at her Mr. Chamberlayne answered almost sharply. "The whole truth of the matter is that there was a still more absurd idea in his mind, dear lady," he replied. "I may as well let you know it now since I combated it uselessly in my last interview with him. At the bottom of his heart Jonathan remained incorrigibly romantic until his death, and he clung desperately to the hope that if Molly received the education he intended her to have, her beauty and her charm, which seemed to him very remarkable, might win his nephew's affections, if she were thrown in his way. That in short, is the secret meaning of this extraordinary document."
The uncomfortable silence was broken by a laugh as Gay rose to his feet. "Well, of all the ridiculous ideas!" he exclaimed in the sincerity of his amusement.
Arm in arm Reuben and Molly walked slowly home through the orchard. Neither spoke until the old man called to Spot at his doorstep, and then Molly noticed that his breath came with a whistling sound that was unlike his natural voice.
"Are you tired, grandfather? What is the matter?"
"It's my chest, daughter. Let me sit down a while an' it will pass. Who is that yonder on the bench?"
"Old Mr. Doolittle. Wait here a minute before you speak to him."
It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers. In the apple orchard the young grass was powdered with gold, and the long grey shadows of the trees barred the ground like the sketchy outlines in a impressionist painting.
On a bench at one end of the porch old Adam was sitting, and at sight of them, he rose, and stood waiting with his pipe in his hand.
"As 'twas sech a fine day an' thar warn't any work on hand for a man of my years, I thought I'd walk over an' pay my respects to you," he said. "I've heard that 'twas yo' granddaughter's birthday an' that she's like to change her name befo' it's time for another."
"Well, I'm glad to see you, old Adam," replied Reuben, sinking into a chair while he invited his visitor to another. "I've gone kind of faint, honey," he added, "an' I reckon we'd both like a sip of blackberry wine if you've got it handy. Miss Kesiah gave me something to drink, but my throat was so stiff I couldn't swallow it."
The blackberry wine was kept in a large stone crock in the cellar, and while she filled the glasses, Molly heard the voice of old Adam droning on above the chirping of the birds in the orchard.
"I've been settin' here steddyin' them weeds out thar over-runnin' everything," he was saying, "an' it does appear to a considerin' body that the Lord might have made 'em good grass an' grain with precious little trouble to Himself an' a mortal lot of satisfaction to the po' farmers."
"He knows best. He knows best," responded Reuben.
"Well, I used to think that way befo' I'd looked into the matter," rejoined the other, "but the deeper I get, the less reason I see to be sartain sure. 'Tis the fashion for parsons, an' for some people outside of the pulpit, to jump to conclusions, an' the one they've jumped the farthest to get at, is that things are all as they ought to be. If you ain't possessed of the gift of logic it takes with you, but if you are possessed of it, it don't. Now, I tell you that if a farmer was to try to run his farm on the wasteful scale on which this world is conducted, thar wouldn't be one among us as would trust him with next season's crops. 'Tis sech a terrible waste that it makes a frugal mind sick to see it."
"Let's be thankful that it isn't any worse. He might have made it so," replied Reuben, shocked by his neighbour's irreverence, yet too modest to dispute it with authority.
"Now, if that's logic I don't know what logic is, though I was born with the gift of it," retorted old Adam. "When twenty seeds rot in the ground an' one happens up, thar're some folks as would praise the Lord for the one and say nothin' about the twenty. These same folks are forever drawin' picturs of wild things hoppin' an' skippin' in the woods, as if they ever had time to hop an' skip when they're obleeged to keep one eye on the fox an' the hawk an' t'other on the gun of the hunter. Yet to hear Mr. Mullen talk in the pulpit, you'd think that natur was all hoppin' an' skippin'."
"You're a wicked unbeliever," said Reuben, mildly sorrowful, "an' you ought to go home and pray over your thankless doubts."
"I'm as I was made," rejoined the other. "I didn't ax to be born an' I've had to work powerful hard for my keep." Taking the glass of blackberry wine from Molly's hand, he smacked his lips over it with lingering enjoyment.
"Do you feel better, grandfather?" inquired the girl, in the pause.
"The wine does me good, honey, but thar's a queer gone feelin' inside of me. I'm twenty years younger than you, old Adam, but you've got mo' youth left in you than I have."
"'Tis my powerful belief in the Lord," chuckled the elder, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and placing the glass on the end of the bench. "No, no, Reuben, when it comes to that I ain't any quarrel with folks for lookin' al'ays at the pleasant side, but what staggers me is why they should take it as a merit to themselves when 'tis nothin' less than a weakness of natur. A man might jest as well pride himself that he can't see out of but one eye or hear out of but one ear as that he can't see nothin' but good when evil is so mixed up into it. Thar ain't all of us born with the gift of logic, but even when we ain't we might set silent an' listen to them that is."
A south wind, rising beyond the river, blew over the orchard, and the barred shadows swung back and forth on the grass.
"'Tis the eye of sense we see with," remarked Reuben quietly.
"Eh, an' 'tis the eye of sense you're weak in," responded old Adam. "I knew a blind man once that had a pictur of the world in his mind jest as smooth an' pretty as the views you see on the backs of calendars—with all the stink-weeds an' the barren places left out of it—an' he used to talk to us seein' ones for all the earth as if he were better acquainted with natur than we were."
"I ain't larned an' I never pretended to be," said Reuben, piously, "but the Lord has used me well in His time an' I'm thankful to Him."
"Now that's monstrous odd," commented the ancient cynic, "for lookin' at it from the outside, I'd say He'd used you about as bad as is His habit in general."
He rose from the bench, and dusted the seat of his blue overalls, while he gazed sentimentally over the blossoming orchard. "'Tis the seventeenth of April, so we may git ahead with plantin'," he remarked. "Ah, well, it's a fine early spring an' puts me in mind of seventy years ago when I was courtin'. Thar ain't many men, I reckon, that can enjoy lookin' back on a courtin' seventy years after it is over. 'Tis surprisin' how some things sweeten with age, an' memory is one of 'em."
Reuben merely nodded after him as he went, for he had grown too tired to answer. A curious stillness—half happiness, half indifference—was stealing over him, and he watched as in a dream, the blue figure of old Adam hobble over the sun-flecked path through the orchard. A few minutes later Molly flitted after the elder, and Reuben's eyes followed her with the cheerful look with which he had faced seventy years of life. On a rush mat in the sunshine the old hound flicked his long black ear at a fly of which he was dreaming, and from a bower of ivy in the eaves there came the twitter of sparrows. Beyond the orchard, the wind, blowing from the marshes, chased the thin, sketchy shadows over the lawn at Jordan's Journey.
While he sat there Reuben began to think, and as always, his thoughts were humble and without self-consciousness. As he looked under the gnarled boughs of the orchard, he seemed to see his whole life stretching before him—seventy years—all just the same except that with each he appeared a little older, a little humbler, a little less expectant that some miracle might happen and change the future. At the end of that long vista, he saw himself young and strong, and filled with a great hope for something—he hardly knew what—that would make things different. He had gone on, still hoping, year by year, and now at the end, he was an old, bent, crippled man, and the miracle had never happened. Nothing had ever made things different, and the great hope had died in him at last as the twenty seeds of which old Adam had spoken had died in the earth. He remembered all the things he had wanted that he had never had—all the other things he had not wanted that had made up his life. Never had a hope of his been fulfilled, never had an event fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him the blessing for which he had prayed. Nothing in all his seventy years had been just what he had wanted—not just what he would have chosen if the choice had been granted him—yet the sight of the birds in the apple trees stirred something in his heart to-day that was less an individual note of rejoicing than a share in the undivided movement of life which was pulsing around him. Nothing that had ever happened to him as Reuben Merryweather would he care to live over; but he was glad at the end that he had been a part of the spring and had not missed seeing the little green leaves break out in the orchard.
And then while he sat there, half dreaming and half awake, the stillness grew suddenly full of the singing of blue birds. Spring blossomed radiantly beneath his eyes, and the faint green and gold of the meadows blazed forth in a pageant of colour.
"I'm glad I didn't miss it," he thought. "That's the most that can be said, I reckon—I'm glad I didn't miss it."
The old hound, dreaming of flies, flapped his long ears in the sunshine, and a robin, hopping warily toward a plate of seed-cakes on the arm of Reuben's chair, winged back for a minute before he alighted suspiciously on the railing. Then, being an old and a wise bird, he advanced again, holding his head slightly sideways and regarding the sleeping man with a pair of bright, inquisitive eyes. Reassured at last by the silence, he uttered a soft, throaty note, and flew straight to the arm of the chair in which Reuben was sitting. With his glance roving from the quiet man to the quiet dog, he made a few tentative flutters toward the plate of cake. Then, gathering courage from the adventure, he hopped deliberately into the centre of the plate and began pecking greedily at the scattered crumbs.
As Molly passed down the Haunt's Walk, it seemed to her, also, that the spring had suddenly blossomed. A moment before she had not known that the path she trod was changing to emerald, that the meadows were spangled with wild-flowers, that the old oaks on the lawn were blushing in rose and silver. For weeks these miracles had happened around her, and she had not noticed. As oblivious to them as old Adam Doolittle was, she had remembered only that her birthday came on the seventeenth of April, when, except for some luckless mishap, the promise of the spring was assured.
A red-winged blackbird darted like a flame across the path in front of her, and following it into the open, she found Kesiah gathering wild azalea on the edge of the thicket.
At the girl's approach, the elder woman rose from her stooping posture, and came forward, wearing a frown, which, after the first minute, Molly saw was directed at the sunlight, not at herself. Kesiah's long, sallow face under the hard little curls of her false front, had never appeared more grotesque than it did in the midst of the delicate spring landscape. Every fragile blossom, every young leaf, every blade of grass, flung an insult at her as she stood there frowning fiercely at the sunbeams. Yet only five minutes before she had suffered a sharp recrudescence of soul—of that longing for happiness which is a part of the resurrection of the spring, and which may survive not only the knowledge of its own fruitlessness, but a belief in the existence of the very happiness for which it longs. All the unlived romance in her heart had come to life with the young green around her. Middle-age had not deadened, it had merely dulled her. For the pang of desire is not, after all, the divine prerogative of youth, nor has it even a conscious relation to the possibility of fulfilment. Her soul looked out of her eyes while she gazed over the azalea in her hand—yet, in spite of the songs of the poets, the soul in her eyes did not make them beautiful.
"I came down with Jonathan, Molly," she said. "You will doubtless find him at the brook." For an instant she hesitated in confusion and then added hurriedly, "We were speaking about you."
"Were you?" asked Molly a little awkwardly, for Kesiah always embarrassed her.
"We were both saying how much we admired your devotion to your grandfather. One rarely finds such attachment in the young to the old."
"I have always loved him better than anybody except mother."
"I am sure you have, and it speaks very well for both of you. We are all much interested in you, Molly."
"It's kind of you to think about me," answered Molly, and her voice was constrained as it had been when she spoke in the library at Jordan's Journey.
"We feel a great concern for your future," said Kesiah. "Whatever we can do to help you, we shall do very gladly. I always felt a peculiar pity and sympathy for your mother." Her voice choked, for it was, perhaps, as spontaneous an expression of her emotions as she had ever permitted herself.
"Thank you, ma'am," replied Molly simply, and the title of respect to which Reuben had trained her dropped unconsciously from her lips. She honestly liked Kesiah, though, in common with the rest of her little world, she had fallen into the habit of regarding her as a person whom it was hardly worth one's while to consider. Mrs. Gay had so completely effaced her sister that the rough edges of Kesiah's character were hardly visible beneath the little lady's enveloping charm.
"It is natural that you should have felt bitterly toward your father," began the older woman again in a trembling voice, "but I hope you realize that the thought of his wrong to you and your mother saddened his last hours."
To her surprise Molly received the remark almost passionately.
"How could that give me back my mother's ruined life?" she demanded.
"I know, dear, but the fact remains that he was your father—-"
"Oh, I don't care in the least about the fact," retorted Molly, with her pretty rustic attempt at a shrug, which implied, in this case, that the government of nature, like that of society, rested solely on the consent of the governed. What was clear to Kesiah was that this rebellion against the injustice of the universe, as well as against the expiation of Mr. Jonathan, was the outcome of a strong, though undisciplined, moral passion within her. In her way, Molly was as stern a moralist as Sarah Revercomb, but she derived her convictions from no academic system of ethics. Kesiah had heard of her as a coquette; now she realized that beneath the coqueteries there was a will of iron.
"You must come to us, some day, dear, and let us do what we can to make you happy," she said. "It would be a pity for all that money to go to the conversion of the Chinese, who are doubtless quite happy as they are."
"I wonder why he chose the Chinese?" replied the girl. "They seem so far away, and there's poor little Mrs. Meadows at Piping Tree who is starving for bread."
"He was always like that—and so is my sister Angela—the thing that wasn't in sight was the thing he agonized over." She did not confess that she had detected a similar weakness in herself, and that, seen the world over, it is the indubitable mark of the sentimentalist.
Analysis of Mr. Jonathan's character, however, failed to interest his daughter. She smiled sweetly, but indifferently, and made a movement to pass on into the meadow. Then, looking into Kesiah's face, she said in a warmer voice: "If ever you want my help about your store room, Miss Kesiah, just send for me. When you're ready to change the brine on your pickles, I'll come down and do it."
"Thank you, Molly," answered the other; "you're a nice light hand for such things."
In some almost imperceptible manner she felt that the girl had rebuffed her. The conversation had been pleasant enough, yet Kesiah had meant to show in it that she considered Molly's position changed since the evening before; and it was this very suggestion that the girl had tossed lightly aside—tossed without rudeness or malice, but with a firmness, a finality, which appeared to settle the question forever. The acknowledged daughter of Mr. Jonathan Gay was determined that she should continue to be known merely as the granddaughter of his overseer. Kesiah's overtures, had been—well, not exactly repulsed, but certainly ignored; her advice had melted to thin air as soon as it was spoken. As Molly flitted from her over the young weeds in the meadow, the older woman stood looking after her with a heaviness, like the weight of unshed tears, in her eyes. Not the girl's future, but her own, appeared to her barren of interest, robbed even of hope. The spirit that combats, she saw, had never been hers—nor had the courage that prevails. For this reason fate had been hard to her—because she had never yielded to pressure—because she had stepped by habit rather than choice into the vacant place. She was a good woman—her heart assured her of this—she had done her duty no matter what it cost her—and she had possessed, moreover, a fund of common sense which had aided her not a little in doing it. It was this common sense that told her now that facts were, after all, more important than dreams—that the putting up of pickles was a more useful work in the world than the regretting of possibilities—that the sordid realities were not less closely woven into the structure of existence than were the romantic illusions. She told herself these things, yet in spite of her words she saw her future stretching away, like her past, amid a multitude of small duties for which she had neither inclination nor talent. One thing after another, all just alike, day after day, month after month, year after year. Nothing ahead of her, and, looking back, nothing behind her that she would care to stop and remember. "That's life," she said softly to herself and went on her way, while Molly, glancing back, beheld her only as a blot on the sunshine.
"Poor Miss Kesiah," the girl thought before she forgot her. "I wonder if she's ever really lived?"
Then the wonder fled from her mind, for, as a shadow fell over her path, she looked up, startled, into the eyes of Gay, who had burst suddenly out of the willows. His face was flushed and he appeared a trifle annoyed. As he stopped before her, he cut sharply at the weeds with a small whip he carried.
"Don't, please," she said; "I hate to see people cut off the heads of innocent things."
"It is rather beastly," her returned, his face clearing. "Did you come out to find me, cousin?"
"Why should I, Mr. Jonathan?"
"You don't soften the blow—but why 'Mr. Jonathan'?"
"I thought it was your name."
"It's not my name to you—I say, Molly, do you mind my telling you that you're a brick?"
"Oh, no, not if you feel like it."
"I do feel like it tremendously."
"Then I don't mind in the least," and to prove it she smiled radiantly into his face. Her smile was the one really beautiful thing about Molly, but as far as her immediate purpose went it served her as successfully as a host.
"By George, I like your devotion to the old chap!" he exclaimed. "I hope a girl will stick by me as squarely when I am beginning to totter."
"Have you ever been as good to one?" she asked quite seriously, and wondered why he laughed.
"Well, I doubt if I ever have, but I'd like very much to begin."
"You're not a grandfather, Mr. Jonathan."
"No, I'm not a grandfather—but, when I come to think of it, I'm a cousin."
She accepted this with composure. "Are you?" she inquired indifferently after a minute.
While she spoke he asked himself if she were really dull, or if she had already learned to fence with her exrustic weapons? Her face was brimming with expression, but, as he reminded himself, one never could tell.
"I haven't any cousin but you, Molly. Don't you think you can agree to take me?"
She shook her head, and he saw, or imagined he saw, the shadow of her indignant surprise darken her features.
"I've never thought of you as my cousin," she answered.
"But I am, Molly."
"I don't think of you so," she retorted. Again, as in the case of Kesiah's advances, she was refusing to constitute a law by her acknowledgment.
"Don't you think if you tried very hard you might begin to?"
"Why should I try?"
"Well, suppose we say just because I want you to."
"That wouldn't help me. I can't feel that it would make any difference."
"What I want, you mean?"
"Yes, what you want."
"Aren't you a shade more tolerant of my existence than you were at first?"
"I suppose so, but I've never thought about it—any more than I've thought of this ten thousand a year. It's all outside of my life, but grandfather's in it."
"Don't you ever feel that you'd like to get outside of it yourself? The world's a big place."
For the first time she appeared attentive to his words.
"I've often wondered what it was like—especially the cities—New York,Paris, London. Paris is the best, isn't it?"
"Yes, Paris is the best to me. Have you ever thought that you'd like to wear pretty gowns and drive through a green park in the spring—filled with other carriages in which are wonderful women?"
"But I'd feel so miserable and countrified," she answered. "Are they any happier than I am—those wonderful women?"
"Perhaps not so happy—there's a green-eyed dragon gnawing at the hearts of most of them, and you, my nut-brown beauty, have never felt his fangs."
"I'd like to see them," she said after a minute, and moved slowly onward.
"Some day you may. Look here, Molly," he burst out impulsively, "I'm not going to be sentimental about you. I haven't the least idea of making love to you—I've had enough of that sort of rot, God knows—but I do like you tremendously, and I want to stand to you as a big brother. I never had a sister, you know," he added.
Something earnest and tender in his voice touched her generosity, which overflowed so easily.
"And I never had a brother," she rejoined.
"Then, that's where I'll come in, little cousin," he answered gently, and drawing her to him, kissed her cheek with a caress which surprised him by its unlikeness to the ordinary manifestations of love.
His hand was still on her shoulder, when he felt her start back from his grasp, and, turning quickly in the direction of her glance, he saw the miller looking at them from the thicket on the opposite side of the brook. The anger in Abel's face had distorted his handsome features until they appeared swollen as if from drink, and for a single instant Gay imagined that it was indeed whisky and not passion that had wrought so brutal a change in him.
"So you've made a fool of me, too, Molly?" he said when he had swung over the stream and stood facing her.
"You're all wrong, Revercomb," began Gay, and stopped the next instant, because Molly's hand had shot out to silence him.
"Will you be quiet?" she flung at him impatiently; and then fixing her eyes on Abel, she waited silently for him to finish his speech. That her lover's fiery temper had aroused her own, Gay realized as soon as he turned to her. Her face was pale, but her eyes blazed and never had he felt so strongly the tie of blood that united them as he did while she stood there waiting for Abel's accusations with a gesture which appeared to fling them back in disdain.
"I might have known 'twas all fool's play with you—I might have known you had flirted too much to settle down to an honest love," said Abel, breathing hard between his word as if each one were torn from him with a physical wrench at his heart. In losing his self-possession he had lost his judgment as well, and, grasping something of his love from the sincerity of his emotion, Gay made another ineffectual effort to present the situation in a fairer light.
"If you would only listen, my good fellow—if you would only let me explain things—-" he began.
"Will you be quiet?" said Molly a second time, and then facing him passionately she threw him a gesture of dismissal. "If you want to please me, you will go."
"And leave you alone with him?"
She laughed. "Do you think I'm afraid of an angry man, or that I've never seen one before?"
With that he obeyed her, turning from time to time on his way over the meadow to make sure that she did not need his support. In spite of the utter unreasonableness of the affair, in some unaccountable way his sympathies were on the side of the miller. The fellow was a boor, of course, but, by Jove! he was a magnificent boor. It had been long since Gay had seen such an outburst of primitive feeling—long since he had come so close to the good red earth on which we walk and of which we are made.
"You're out of your head, Abel," said Molly—Gay turned away from them—and the tone in which she spoke was hardly calculated to bring him back to the place he had deserted. "You will say things you'll regret, but I'll never forgive."
"I'm sick of your eternal forgiveness," he retorted. "I've been forgiven every time you got into a temper, and I suppose I'll be forgiven next every time you are kissed." The "rousing" which had threatened every Revercomb was upon him at last.
"Well, as a matter of fact it is time enough for you to forgive me whenI ask you to," she returned.
"You needn't ask. It's too much this time, and I'll be damned before I will do it."
Bending over a grey skeleton of last year's golden-rod, she caressed it gently, without breaking its ghostly bloom. Years afterward, when she had forgotten every word he uttered, she could still see that dried spray of golden-rod growing against the April sky—she could still hear a bluebird that sang three short notes and stopped in the willows. In the quiet air their anger seemed to rush together as she had sometimes thought their love had rushed to a meeting.
"You have neither the right to forgive me nor to judge me," she said. "Do you think I care what a man imagines of me who believes a thing against me as easily as you do. If you went on your knees to me now I should never explain—and if I chose to kiss every man in the county," she concluded in an outburst of passion, "you have nothing to do with it!"
"Explain? How can a girl explain a man's kissing her, except by saying she let him do it?"
"I did let him do it," she gasped.
For an instant they gazed at each other in an anger more violent in its manifestation than their love had been. An observer, noticing them for the first time, would have concluded that they had hated each other for years, not that they had been lovers only a few minutes before. Nature, having wearied of her play, was destroying her playthings.
"I would marry no man on earth who wouldn't believe me in spite of that—and everything else," she said.
"Do you expect a man to believe you in spite of his eyes?"
"Eyes, ears—everything! Do you think I'd have turned on you like that before I had heard you?"
A sob, not of pity, but of rage, burst from her lips, and the sound sobered him more completely than her accusations had done. Her temper he could withstand, but that little childish sob, bitten back almost before it escaped, brought him again on his knees to her.
"I can't understand—oh, Molly, don't you see I am in torment?" he cried.
But the veil of softness was gone now, and the cruelty that is bound up in some inexplicable way in all violent emotion—even in the emotion of love—showed itself on the surface.
"Then stay there, for you've made it for yourself," she answered, and turned away from him. As his voice called her again, she broke into a run, flying before him over the green meadow until she reached the lawn of Jordan's Journey, and his pursuit ended. Then, hurrying through the orchard and up the flagged walk, she ascended the steps, and bent over Reuben in his chair.
"Grandfather, I am back. Are you asleep?"
The robin that had flown from the railing at her approach swung on the bough of an apple-tree and regarded her with attention.
"Grandfather," she said again, touching him, "oh, grandfather, wake up!"
When he came down to breakfast next morning, Abel heard of Reuben's death from his mother.
"Well, you can't tell who's goin' to be the next," she concluded grimly, as she poured the coffee.
In spite of her austere manner and her philosophical platitude, Sarah was more moved in her heart than she had dared to confess. From the moment that she had heard of Reuben's death—when she had gone over with some of her mourning to offer Molly—she had ceased to think of him as an old man, and her mind had dwelt upon him as one who had been ruthlessly cut off in his prime—as he might have been had the end come some thirty or forty years before. Memory, that great miracle worker, had contrived to produce this illusion; and all Sarah's hard common sense could not prevent her feeling an indignant pity because Reuben's possibilities of happiness had been unfulfilled. Trouble after trouble and never anything to make up for them, and then to go this way while he was resting! "It's like that," she thought bitterly to herself, alluding to life. "It's like that!" And it seemed to her suddenly that the whole of existence was but a continual demonstration of the strong religious dogmas on which her house of faith had been reared. When you looked around you, she thought, with triumph, there wasn't any explanation of the seeming injustice except original sin. There was a strange comfort in this conviction, as though it represented the single reality to which she could cling amid the mutable deceptions of life. "Thar wouldn't be any sense in it if 'twarn't for that," she would sometimes say to herself, as one who draws strength from a secret source of refreshment.
In Abel the news of Reuben's death awoke a different emotion, and his first thought was of Molly. He longed to comfort her in his arms, and the memory of the quarrel of yesterday and even of the kiss that led to it seemed to increase rather than diminish this longing.
Rising from his untasted breakfast, he hurriedly swallowed a cup of coffee and took up his hat.
"I am going to see Molly, mother; would you like to send a message?"
Blossom, who was gazing out of the window with her eyes full of dreams, turned at his words.
"Give her my love, Abel," she said.
"Tell her he was a good man and had fewer sins to his account than most of us," added Sarah.
"Did you know, Abel, that old Mr. Jonathan left her ten thousand dollars a year as long as she lives with the Gays?" asked Blossom, coming over to where he stood.
He stared at her in amazement. "Where on earth did you hear that?" he asked.
A flush reddened her face.
"Somebody told me. I forget just who it was," she replied.
"When did it happen? How long have you known it?"
But she was on her guard now, wrapped in that soft, pale reticence which was the spiritual aspect of her beauty.
"It may have been only one of the darkies' stories. I didn't pay much attention to it," she answered, and busied herself about the geraniums in the window.
"Oh, you can't put any faith in the darkies' tales," rejoined Abel, and after leaving a message with his mother for a farmer with whom he had an appointment, he hastened out of the house and over the fields in the direction of Reuben Merryweather's cottage. Here, where he had expected to find Molly, Kesiah met him, with some long black things over her arm, and a frown of anxious sympathy on her face.
"The child is broken-hearted," she said with dignity, for a funeral was one of the few occasions upon which she felt that she appeared to advantage. "I don't think she can see you—but I'll go in and ask, if you wish it."
She went in, returning a minute later, with the black things still over her arm, and a deeper frown on her forehead.
"No—I'm sorry, but she doesn't wish to see any one. You know, the old hound died the same night, and that has added to her sorrow."
"Perhaps if I come back later?"
"Perhaps; I am not sure. As soon as the funeral is over she will come to us. You have heard, I suppose, of the change in—in her circumstances?"
"Then it is true? I heard it, but I didn't believe it."
Molly had fled suddenly into remoteness—not Reuben's death, but Mr. Jonathan's "provision," had swept her away from him. Like other mortals in other crises of experience, she was aware of a helpless, a rebellious, realization of the power, not of fate, but of money. No other accident of fortune could have detached her so completely from the surroundings in which he had known her. Though he told himself that to think of wealth as a thing to separate them was to show a sordid brutality of soul, he revolted the next instant from the idea that his love should demand so great a sacrifice. Like the majority of men who have risen to comparative comfort out of bitter poverty, he had at the same time a profound contempt and an inordinate respect for the tangible fact of money—a contempt for the mere value of the dollar and a respect for the ability to take stands of which that mystic figure was the symbol. Sarah's hard common sense, overlaid as it was by an embroidery of sentiments and emotions, still constituted the basic quality in his character, and Sarah would have been the last woman in the world to think lightly of renouncing—or of inviting another to renounce—an income of ten thousand dollars a year.Hemight dream that love would bring happiness, but she was reasonably assured that money would bring comfort. Between the dream and the assurance there would have been, in Sarah's mind at least, small room left for choice. He had known few women, and for one dreadful minute he asked himself, passionately, if Molly and his mother could be alike?
Unconsciously to himself his voice when he spoke again had lost its ring of conviction.
"Perhaps I may see her later?" he repeated.
"The funeral will be to-morrow. You will be there?"
"Yes, I'll be there," he replied; and then because there was nothing further for him to say, he bowed over his hat, and went down the flagged walk to the orchard, where the bluebirds were still singing. His misery appeared to him colossal—of a size that overshadowed not only the spring landscape, but life itself. He tried to remember a time when he was happy, but this was beyond the stretch of his imagination at the moment, and it seemed to him that he had plodded on year after year with a leaden weight oppressing his heart.
"I might have known it would be like this," he was thinking. "First, I wanted the mill, so I'd lie awake at night about it, and then when I got it all the machinery was worn out. It's always that way and always will be, I reckon." And it appeared to him that this terrible law of incompleteness lay like a blight over the over the whole field of human endeavour. He saw Molly, fair and fitting as she had been yesterday after the quarrel, and he told himself passionately that he wanted her too much ever to win her. On the ground by the brook he saw the spray of last year's golden-rod, and the sight brought her back to him with a vividness that set his pulses drumming. In his heart he cursed Mr. Jonathan's atonement more fervently than he had ever cursed his sin.
The next day he went to Reuben's funeral, with his mother and Blossom at his side, walking slowly across the moist fields, in which the vivid green of the spring showed like patches of velvet on a garment of dingy cloth. In front of him his mother moved stiffly in her widow's weeds, which she still wore on occasions of ceremony, and in spite of her sincere sorrow for Reuben she cast a sharp eye more than once on the hem of her alpaca skirt, which showed a brown stain where she had allowed it to drag in a forgetful moment. Only Archie was absent, but that was merely because he had driven over to bring one of the Halloween girls in Abel's gig. Sarah had heard him whistling in the stable at daybreak, and looking out of the window a little later she had seen him oiling the wheels of the vehicle. It had been decided at supper the evening before that the family as a unit should pay its respects to Reuben. From Sarah, comforting herself behind her widow's weeds with the doctrine of original sin, to Archie, eager to give his sweetheart a drive, one and all had been moved by a genuine impulse to dignify as far as lay in their power the ceremonial of decay. Even Abner, the silent, had remarked that he'd "never heard a word said against Reuben Merryweather in his life." And now at the end of that life the neighbours had gathered amid the ridges of green graves in the churchyard to bear witness to the removal of a good man from a place in which he had been honoured.
During the service Abel kept his eyes on Molly, who came leaning on Gay's arm, and wearing what appeared to him a stifling amount of fashionable mourning. He was too ignorant in such matters to discern that the fashion was one of an earlier date, or that the mourning had been hastily gathered from cedar chests by Kesiah. The impression he seized and carried away was one of elegance and remoteness; and the little lonely figure in the midst of the green ridges bore no relation in his mind to the girl in the red jacket, who had responded so ardently to his kiss. The sunlight falling in flecks through the network of locust boughs deepened the sense of unreality with which he watched her.
"It's a good service as such ready-made things go," observed Sarah as they went homeward, "but it seems to me that a man as upright as Reuben was is entitled to a sermon bein' preached about him when he's laid in his grave. What's the difference between the good man and the bad, if you're goin' to say the same words over the one and the other? I ain't a friend to flattery, but it can't hurt a man to have a few compliments paid him in the churchyard, and when all's said an' done, 'lookin' for the general Resurrection' can't be construed into a personal compliment to Reuben."
"When a man has been as pious as that he hasn't any use for compliments, livin' or dead," rejoined Abner.
"Well, I ain't contendin'," replied his mother. "The Lord knows thar ain't any of his kind left, the mo' 's the pity! Things have changed sence Reuben an' I was young, an' the very language Abel an' Blossom speak is different from ours. I reckon if old Mr. Jonathan was to ride along these roads to-day thar wouldn't be anybody, unless it was a nigger, to open the gate for him."
"You bet there wouldn't!" exclaimed Abel with fervour.
Abner, walking at Sarah's side, wore the unnerved and anxious expression of a man who is conscious that he is wearing his Sunday suit when it has grown too small to contain him. His agony was so evident that Blossom, observing it in the midst of her sentimental disturbances, remarked affectionately that he looked as if he "were tired to death."
"I've got the church fidgets in my legs," he said. "I reckon I'll get into my everyday suit an' finish that piece of ploughin'. Are you goin' back to the mill, Abel?"
"No, I've shut down for the day," Abel replied. The funeral had turned his mind into its Sunday habit of thought and he was determined that his present state of misery should extend reverently until the evening. From some instinct, which he did not attempt to explain, it appeared more respectful to Reuben to sit idle for the rest of the day than to follow Abner's example and go out and finish his work.
The next morning he decided to write Molly a letter, and as the ordinary paper his mother kept at the house seemed unsuitable for delivery at Jordan's Journey, he walked down to the store to purchase a few sheets from Mrs. Bottoms.
"Nothing common and cheap," he said, "but the very best you have in the store—such as they use in the city."
Suspecting his purpose, she produced at once a turquoise coloured box, from which she extracted an envelope that was ornamented on the flap with a white dove holding a true lover's knot in his beak.
"This is the very thing you're lookin' for," she observed, in the tone of one who is conscious of being an authority in that sphere to which God has called her, "the latest style in Applegate."
Picking up the envelope he held it doubtfully toward the light in the doorway.
"Are you sure it isn't a little—a little loud?" he inquired wistfully.
"Loud? Dear me, to think of you callin' a dove an' a blue ribbon bow loud! Ain't that jest like a man? They can't be expected to have taste in sech matters. No, it ain't loud!" she replied with more direct condescension. "It's the latest thing from Applegate—the girls are all crazy about it—jest the little artistic trifle that catches a woman's eye."
In the end, under the sting of her rebuke, though but half convinced, he concluded the purchase and went out, bearing the box of ornamented paper under his arm. An hour later, after the letter was written, misgivings besieged him anew, and he stood holding the envelope at arm's length, while he frowned dubiously at the emblematic dove on the flap.
"It doesn't look just right to me," he said under his breath, "but Mrs.Bottom ought to know, and I reckon she does."
The letter went, and the next afternoon he followed it in person to Jordan's Journey. Gay was coming down the walk when he reached the lawn, and after a moment's hesitation they stopped to exchange a few remarks about the weather.
"There's something I want to explain to you, Revercomb," said Jonathan, wheeling back abruptly after they had parted. "Molly has become a member of our household, you see; so my relation to her is really that of a cousin. She's a staunch little soul—I've a tremendous admiration for her—but there has never been the slightest sentiment between us, you understand."
"Yes, I understand," replied Abel, and fell silent.
There was a certain magnanimity, he recognized, in Gay's effort to put things right even while he must have preferred in his heart to have them remain in the wrong. As Molly's cousin it was hardly probable that he should care to hasten her marriage to a country miller.
"Well, I wanted you to know, that was all," said Gay in a friendly tone."You'll find Molly in the side-garden, so I wouldn't trouble to knock ifI were you."
He went on, swinging with an easy stride between the hedges of box, while Abel, passing the right wing in obedience to the directions, found Molly walking up and down in a small grassy path, which was sprinkled with snowdrops. The "side-garden" was a ruined, over-grown square, planted in miniature box, which the elder Gay had laid out after one of his visits to Italy. Now, with its dwindling maze and its unpruned rose-bushes, it resembled a picture which has been blotted out until the original intention of the artist is no longer discernible. Yet the place was exquisite still. Spring had passed over it with her magical touch, and she had decorated the spot she could no longer restore. The scent of box filled the air, and little new green leaves had put out on the dusky windings of the maze.
As Abel approached, Molly was moving slowly away from him, her long black skirt, which had been made to fit Mrs. Gay, trailing over the snowdrops in the path. When she turned at the end of the walk, there was the faintest hesitancy in her manner before she came forward with a smile and an outstretched hand. In some subtle way she had changed—he felt it before she reached him—before she uttered a word. He had never seen her in a long dress until to-day; and in putting on Mrs. Gay's gown she seemed to have clothed herself in that lady's appealing and pensive manner. The black skirt, flowing between them on the grass, divided them more completely than the memory of their quarrel. He was chilled because it made her appear reserved and distant; she was embarrassed because she had not yet learned to walk in a train, and while it pleased and flattered her with a sense of dignity, it also caused her to feel awkward and unnatural in her movements, as if she were not "playing up" successfully to the part that had been assigned her. She had learned a good deal in three days, and she was still a little confused by the endeavour to understand all of her lessons. Sincere as her sorrow was for Reuben, her youth and a certain quickness of observation had kept her mindful of every change through which she had passed, of every detail which distinguished life at the "big house" from life in the overseer's cottage. She had learned, for instance, the necessity, in such circumstances, of eating as if it were an utterly indifferent matter, and yet of coming to one's meals dressed as elaborately as if one were on one's way to church. Kesiah had taught her much; but from Gay, with his abundant kindliness, his self-possession, his good clothes, she had learned incomparably more. Kesiah had shown her the external differences in "things," while Gay had opened her eyes to the external differences that might count in men. Until she knew Gay she had believed that the cultivation of one's appearance was a matter that concerned women alone. Now, when moved by some unfortunate impulse of respect for her mourning, Abel showed himself before her in his Sunday clothes, she was conscious of a shock which she would never have felt in the old days in the overseer's cottage. In his working dress, with his fine throat bared by his blue shirt, there was a splendid vitality about her lover beside which Jonathan appeared flabby and over-weighted with flesh. But dressed in imitation of the work of Gay's London tailor, the miller lost the distinction which nature had given him without acquiring the one conferred by society.
"You got my letter, Molly?" he asked—and the question was unfortunate, for it reminded her not only of the letter, but of Gay's innocent jest about the dove on the envelope. She had been ashamed at the instant, and she was ashamed now when she remembered it, for there is nothing so contagious as an active regard for the petty social values of life. In three days she had not only begun to lose her own crudeness—she had attained to a certain small criticism of the crudeness of Abel. Already the difference between the two men was irritating her, yet she was still unconscious as to the the exact particular in which this difference lay. Her vision had perceived the broad distinction of class, though it was untrained as yet to detect minute variations of manner. She knew instinctively that Gay looked a man of the world and Abel a rustic, but this did not shake in the least the knowledge that it was Abel, not Gay, whom she loved.
"Yes, I got your letter," she answered, and then she added very softly:"Abel, I've always known I was not good enough for you."
Her tone, not her words, checked his advance, and he stood staring at her in perplexity. It was this expression of dumb questioning which had so often reminded her of the look in the eyes of Reuben's hound, and as she met it now, she flinched a little from the thought of the pain she was inflicting.
"I'm not good and faithful, Abel; I'm not patient, I'm not thrifty, I'm not anything your wife ought to be."
"You're all I'm wanting, anyway, Molly," he replied quietly, but without moving toward her.
"I feel—I am quite sure we could not be happy together," she went on, hurriedly, as if in fear that he might interrupt her before she had finished.
"Do you mean that you want to be free?" he asked after a minute.
"I don't know, but I don't want to marry anybody. All the feeling I had went out of me when grandfather died—I've been benumbed ever since—and I don't want to feel ever again, that's the worst of it."
"Is this because of the quarrel?"
"Oh, know—you know, I was always like this. I'm a thing of freedom—I can't be caged, and so we'd go on quarrelling and kissing, kissing and quarrelling, until I went out of my mind. You'd want to make me over and I'd want to make you over, like two foolish children fighting at play."
It was true what she had said, and he realized it, even though he protested against it. She was a thing of freedom as much as one of the swallows that flashed by in the sunlight.
"And you don't want to marry me? You want to be free—to be rich?"
"It isn't the money—but I don't want to marry."
"Have you ever loved me, I wonder?" he asked a little bitterly.
For an instant she hesitated, trying in some fierce self-reproach to be honest. "I thought so once, and I suppose I'll think so again," she answered. "The truth is I've loved you some days, and some days I haven't. I've never believed much in it, you know—I wasn't that kind of woman. It always meant so much less to me than to others."
It was true again, he admitted it. She had never been—and he had always known it—"that kind of woman." She had safely mocked at sex only because she had never felt its significance. From the depths of his misery, he told himself, while he faced her, that she would be perfect if she were only a little different—if she were only "that kind of woman." She possessed a thousand virtues, he was aware; she was generous, honourable according to her lights, loyal, brave, charitable, and unselfish. But it is the woman of a single virtue, not a thousand, that a man exalts.
"Yes, I suppose it always meant less to you than to others," he repeated dully.
"It wasn't my fault—why do you blame me?" she responded quickly. "Men hold a woman to blame when she doesn't love, however ill they may use her as soon as she does it. Oh, I know you're not that sort—you needn't explain it. You are different, and this is why I am half loving you even now. Last night when I awoke and heard a mockingbird in the cedars, I told myself that I could never be happy away from you. But when the light came, I wanted to see the world, and I forgot you. I'm only twenty-one. I'm too young to tie myself down forever."
"My mother married when she was sixteen," he replied, partly because he could think of nothing else to say at the moment, partly because he honestly entertained the masculine conviction that the precedent in some way constituted an argument.
"And a sensible marriage it was!" retorted Molly with scorn. "She's had a hard enough lot and you know it." In her earnestness she had almost assumed the position of Sarah's champion.
"Yes, I reckon it is," he returned, wounded to the quick. "I've no right to ask you to exchange what they offer you for a life like my mother's."
Fulness of emotion lent dignity to his words, but if he had shown indifference instead of tenderness, it would probably have served him better. She was so sure of Abel—so ready to accept as a matter of course the fact that she could rely on him.
"So you want it to be all over between us?" he asked.
"I don't want to be tied—I don't think I ought to be." Her tone was firm, but she plucked nervously at a bit of crape on the sleeve of Mrs. Gay's gown.
"Perhaps you're right," he replied quietly. He had spoken in a stiff and constrained manner, with little show of his suffering, yet all the while he felt that a band of iron was fastened across his brain, and the physical effect of this pressure was almost unendurable. He wanted to ease his swollen heart by some passionate outburst, but an obstinate instinct, which was beyond his control, prevented his making a ridiculous display of his emotion. The desire to curse aloud, to hurl defiant things at a personal deity, was battling within him, but instead of yielding to it he merely repeated:
"I reckon you're right—it wouldn't be fair to you in the end."
"I hope you haven't any hard feeling toward me," she said presently, sweetly commonplace.
"Oh no, I haven't any hard feeling. Good-bye, Molly."
"Good-bye, Abel."
Turning away from her, he walked rapidly back along the short grassy path over the snowdrops. As she watched him, a lump rose in her throat, and she asked herself what would happen if she were to call after him, and when he looked round, run straight into his arms? She wanted to run into his arms, but her knowledge of herself told her that once there she would not want to stay. The sense of bondage would follow—on his part the man's effort to dominate; on hers the woman's struggle for the integrity of personality. As long as he did not possess her she knew that emotion would remain paramount over judgment—that the longing to win her would triumph over the desire to improve what he had won. But once surrendered, the very strength and singleness of his love would bring her to cage. The swallow flights and the freedom of the sky would be over, and she would either beat her wings hopelessly against the bars, or learn to eat from his hand, to sing presently at his whistle. Had passion urged her, this hesitancy would have been impossible. Then she would either have seen none of these things, or, having seen them, she would have dared greatly. She was too cool, too clear-sighted, perhaps, for a heroine of romance. The single virtue that has fed vampire-like on the blood of the others, the abject attitude of the heart, the moral chicanery of sex—she would have none of these things.
"I am very fond of him, but I want to live—to live," she said, raising her arms with a free movement to the sky, while she looked after his figure. "Poor Abel," she added after a moment, "he will never get over it."
Then, while the sigh of compassion was still on her lips, she was arrested by a scene which occurred in the sunny meadow. From the brook a woman's form had risen like a startled rabbit at Abel's approach, wavering against the background of willows, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. The next instant, as though in obedience to some mental change, it came quickly forward and faced the miller with an upward movement of the hands to shelter a weeping face.
"I believe—I really believe it is Judy Hatch," said Molly to herself, and there was a faint displeasure in her voice. "I wonder what she is doing in the willows?"
Judy Hatch it was, and at sight of Abel she had sprung up in terror from the edge of the brook, poised for flight like a wild thing before the gun of the hunter. He saw that her eyes were red and swollen from weeping, her face puckered and distorted. The pain in his own heart was so acute that for a moment he felt a sensation of relief in finding that he was not alone in his agony—that the universal portion of suffering had not been allotted entirely to himself, as he had imagined. Had she smiled, he would have brushed past her in silence, but because of her agitated and despairing look, he called her name, and when she turned toward him in bewilderment, held out his hand. It was a small accident that brought them together—nothing more than the fact that she had stooped to bathe her eyes in the stream before going on to the turnpike.
"Don't go, Judy; you're in trouble, I see, and so am I," he said with bitterness.
"Oh, Mr. Revercomb!" she blurted out. "I didn't want anybody to catch me in such a pass!"
"I'm not anybody, Judy; I'm a poor devil that was born without sense enough to plough his furrow straight."
She was a plain woman, but a pretty one would have sent him off in a panic over the meadow. He had had his lesson from a pretty woman, and the immediate effect of it was to foster the delusion that there was a mysterious affinity between ugliness and virtue.
"Tell me what it is, Judy. Can I help you?" he said kindly.
"It's nothin'. I am always in trouble," she answered, sobbing outright behind her sunbonnet. "Between pa and my stepmother, there isn't a spot on earth I can rest in."
She looked at him and he knew immediately, from her look, that neither Solomon Hatch nor his second wife was responsible for Judy's unhappiness. For a mocking instant it occurred to him that she might have cherished a secret and perfectly hopeless passion for himself. That she might be cherishing this passion for another, he did not consider at the moment—though the truth was that her divinity inhabited not a mill, but a church, and was, therefore, she felt, trebly unapproachable. But her worship was increased by this very hopelessness, this elevation. It pleased her that the object of her adoration should bend always above her—that in her dreams he should preach a perpetual sermon and wear an imperishable surplice.
"Well, I'm sorry for you," said Abel; "I'm sorry for you." And indeed he was. "You're a good, pious, virtuous girl—just the sort of a girl a man would want for his wife."
"I try to be good and I don't see why I should be so—so unhappy," sobbed Judy. "There ain't a better hand for raisin' chickens and flowers and young lambs in the county."
Again she looked up at him through her tears, and the fool that lies at the bottom of all generous hearts rose instantly to her bait. As he had once been the sport of his desire, so he was to become now the sport of his pity.
"Any man ought to be proud to have you for his wife, Judy," he said.
"Ought they, Abel?" she replied passionately, with the vision of theReverend Orlando rising in serene detachment before her.
For a moment he gazed down at her without speaking. It was pleasant to feel pity; it was more than pleasant to receive gratitude in return. On the raw wound in his heart something that was almost like a cooling balm had been poured.
"God knows I'm sorry for you, Judy," he repeated; "we're both in the same boat, so I ought to be. Come to me if I can ever help you, and you'll find you may count on my word."
"I—I'll remember, Abel," she answered tearfully, but her thoughts were of a certain pair of purple velvet slippers, begun in rivalry of Blossom's black ones, which she was embroidering in pansies.
As he turned away from her into the crowd of silver willows beside the brook, she stood looking after him with the abstracted gaze of one who dwells not in the world of objects, but in the exalted realm of visions.