The Miller of Old Church Ellen Glasgow CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM The 7-Dq,y Shelf __ - Cornell University Library PS 3513.L34M6 The miller of Old Church / 3 1924 022 445 831 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022445831 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH BY ELLEN GLASGOW NEW YORK HURST & COMPANY PUBLISHERS iUX SI6BTS KESERVED, DKXCDING TEAT OT nAHSLAHQD nnO rOKEIQN LANCnAGCS INCLUDIHO THE SCANDIHAVUN GOFVSICET, 191 1, BY OOSBLEDAY; rAOB tt COUPANY /\77^^ ^3 1^1 Si \) , , ,, unt covtmM life press, gakdeh on, h. t. 51 -^ V to mt 8isteb Caby Glabgow McCormack in loving acknowledgment of help and sympathy through many yeabs CONTENTS BOOK FffiST— JORDAN'S JOURNEY CHAPTEB ^ PAOB I. At Bottom's Ordinary S II. In Which Destixt Wears the Comic Mask . 19 III. In Which Mr. Gat Arrives at His Journey's End 2& IV. The Revercombs 45 V. The Mill B6 VI. Treats of the Ladies' Sphere .... 74 VII. Gat Rushes into a Quarrel and Secures a Kiss 8© VIII. Shows Two Sides of a Quarrel .... 104 IX. In Which Molly Flirts 118. X. The Reverend Orlando Mullen Preaches a Sermon 131 XI. A Flight and an Encounter .... 144! XII. The Dream and the Real 15* XIII. By the Mill-race 171 XIV. Shows the Weakness in Strength . . .185 XV. Shows the Tyranny of Weakness . . .191 XVI. The Coming OF Spring 203 XVII. The Shade;^ op Mb. Jonathan .... 214 XVni. The Shade of Reuben 223 XIX. Treats of Contradictions .... 230 XX. Life's Ironies 242 XXI. In Which Pity Masquerades as Reason . . 2^2 V vi CONTENTS BOOK SECOND-THE CEOSS-ROADS CHAFTEB PJlB& I. In Which Youth Shows A XiTTUs SJESsraSBUt ., 277 n. The Desikb of the Moth 289 m. Abeii Heabs Gossip and Sees a Vision . . 298 IV. His Day op Fkebdom 313 V. The Shaping op Moij.t 319 VI. In Which Heahts Go Astray .... 331 Vn. A New Beginninq to an Old Tbagedt . . 343 Vm. A Grelat Passion m a HttubxiE Place . . - 354 IX. A Meeting in the Pasture .... 364 X. Tangled Threads 372 XI. The Ride to Piping Tree 381 Xn. One of Love's Victims 399 Xm. What Life Teaches 403 XrV. The Turn op the Wheel 414 XV. Gat Discovers Htmset.p 422 XVI. The End . .429 BOOK FIRST JORDAN'S JOURNEY THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH* CHAPTER I AT bottom's ordinary It was past four o'clock on a sunny October day, when a stranger, who had ridden over the "corduroy" road between Applegate and Old Church, dismounted near the cross-roads before the small public house known to its frequenters as Bottom's Ordinary. Stand- ing where the three roads meet at the old turnpike- gate of the county, the square brick building, which had declined through several generations from a chapel into a tavern, had grown at last to resemble ' thesmeared f aceofa clown under a steeple hat which was worn slightly awry. Originally covered with stucco, the walls had peeled year by year until the dull red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of the creeper and of innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. . After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to inyite now the attention of the * The scene of this story is not the place of the same name in Virginia. 3 4 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH wayfarer to the bar beneath. This cheerful room which sprouted, like some grotesque wing, from the right side of the chapel, marked not only a utilitarian triumph in architecture, but served, on market days, to attract a larger congregation of the ,+Tighteous than had ever stood up to sing the Moxology I in the adjoining place of worship. Good and bad prospects were wdighed here, weddings discussed, births and deaths recorded in ever-green memories, and here, also, were reputations demolished and the owners of them hustled with scant ceremony away to perdition. From the open door of the bar on this particular October day, there streamed the ruddy blaze of a fire newly kindled from knots of resinous piiie. Against this pleasant background might be discerned now and then the shapeless silhouette of Betsey Bottom, the innkeeper, a soft and capable soul, who, in attaching William Ming some ten years before, had successfully extinguished his identity without materially impairing her own. Bottom's Ordinary had always been ruled by a woman, and it would continue to be so, please God, however loudly a mere Ming might protest to the con- trary. In the eyes of her neighbours, a female, right or wrong, was always a female, and this obvious fact, ^ beyond and above any natural two-sided jars of wed- lock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs. Ming as a conjugal martyr. Being an amiable body — peaceably disposed to every Mving creature, with the exception of William — she had hastened to the door to reprimand Mm for some trivKil neglect of the grey mule, when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes earlier by the Appl^ate road. As he wa» a £ne looking man of full habit and some thirty years. AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 5 "hep eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor with a bucket of soapsuds. "Thar's nobody on earth out thar but young Mr. Jonathan Gay come back to Jordan's Journey," she said. " I declar I'd know a Gay by his eyes if I war to meet him in so unlikely a place as Kingdom Come. He's talkin' to old Adam Doolittle now,"'" she added, for the information of the maid, who, being of a cu- rious habit of mind, had raised herself on her knees and was craning her neck towa,rd the door, " I can see his lips movin', but he speaks so low I can't make out what he says. " "Lemme git dar a minute. Miss Betsey, I'se got moughty sharp y&iis, I is. " "They're no sharper than mine, I reckon, and I couldn't hear if I stood an' listened forever. It's about the road most likdy, for I see old Adam a-pintin'." For a minute after dismounting the stranger looked dubiously at the mottled face of the tavern. On his head the sunlight shone through the boughs of a giant mulberry tree near the wdl, and beyond this the Virginian forest, brilliant with its autumnal colours of red and copper, stretched to the village of Applegate, some ten or twelve miles to the north. Starting southward from the cross-roads, the^ char- acter of the country underwent so sudden a transfor- mation Uiat itTooked as if man, having contended here unsuccessfully with nature, had signed an ignominious truce beneath the crumbling gateposts of the turnpike. Passing beyond them a few steps out of the forest, one found a low hill, on which the reaped corn stood m « THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH stacks like the weapons of a vanished army, while across the sunken road, the abandoned fields, over- grown with brdomsedge and life-everlasting, spread for several miles between " worm fences " which were half buried in brushwood. To the eyes of the stranger, fresh from the trim landscapes of England,^ there was an aspect of desolation in the neglected roads,\ in the deserted fields, and in the dim grey marshes that showed beyond the low banks of the river. In the effort to shake off the depression this loneli- ness had brought on his spirits, he turned to an an- cient countryman, wearing overalls of blue jeans, who dozed comfortably on the circular bench beneath the mulberry tree. "Is there a nearer way to Jordan's Journey, or must I follow the turnpike?" he asked. "Hey? Young Adam, are you thar, suh?" Yoimg Adam, a dejected looking youth oi \Sit^^ years, with a pair of short-sighted eyes that glanced over his shoulder as if in fear of pursuit, shuffled round the trough of the well, and sat down on the bench at his parent's side. "He wants to know, pa, if thar's a short cut from the ornary over to Jordan's Journey" he repeated. Old Adam, who had sucked patiently at the stem of his pipe during the explanation, withdrew it at the end, and thrust out his lower lip as a child does that has stopped crying before it intended to. "You can take a turn to the right at the blazed pine a half a mile on," he replied, "but thar's the bars to be pulled down an' put up agin." "I jest come along thar, ai;' the bars was down," said young Adam. AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 7 "Well, they hadn't ought to have been," retorted old Adam, indignantly. "Bars is bars whether they be public or private, an' the man that pulls 'em down without puttin' 'em up agin, is a man that you'll find to beloose moraled in other matters." "It's the truth as sure as you speak it, Mr. Doo- little," said a wiry, knocked-kneed farmer, with a hatchet-shaped face, who had sidled up to the group. "It warn't no longer than yesterday that I was sayin' the same words to the new minister, or rector as he tries to get us to call him, about false doctrine an' evil practice. ' The difference between sprinklin' and immersion ain't jest the difference between a few drops on the head an' goin' all under, Mr. Mullen,' I said, 'but 'tis the whole difference between the natur that's bent moral an' the natur that ain't.' It follows as clear an' logical as night follows day — now, I ax you, don't it, Mr. Doolittle — that a man that's gone wrong on immersion can't be trusted to keep his hands off the women?" "I ain't sayin' all that, Solomon Hatch," responded old Adam, in a charitable tone, "seein' that I've never made up my own mind quite clear on those two p'ints — but I do say, be he immersed or sprinkled, that the man who took down them bars without puttin' 'em up ain't a man to be trusted." "'Twarn't a man, 'twas a gal," put in young Adam, "I seed Molly Merry weather goin' toward the low grounds as I come up." "Then it's most likely to have been she," com- mented Solomon, "for she is a light-minded one, as is proper an' becomin' in a child of sin." The stranger looked up with a laugh from the moss- 8 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH grown cattle trough beside which he was standing, and his eyes — of a peculiar dark blue — glanced merrily into the bleared ones of old Adam. "I ain't so blind yet as not to know a^ay when I see one," said the labourer, with a sly chuckle. "If I hadn't closed the eyes of old Mr. Jonathan when he was found dead over yonder by Poplar Spring, I'd as soon as not take my Bible oath that ke'd come young agio an' was ridin' along back to Jordan's Journey." "Do you believe down here that my uncle killed himself?" asked the yaung man, with a furtive dis- pleasure in his voice, as if he alluded to a disagreeable subject ia response to some pressure of doty. " 'Tis as it may be, suh, I can't answer for that. To this day if you get SoloHaon Hatdi or Beisey Bottom, (axin' her pardon for puttin' har last), started on the subject they'll contend till they're blue in the face that 'twas naught done but pure murder. How- ever, I'm too old at my time of life to take up with any opinion that ain't pleasant to think on, an', when all's said an' done, pure mxurder ain't a peaceable, comfortable kind of thing to believe in when thar's only one Justice of the Peace an' he bed-ridden since Christmas. When you ax me to pin my faith on any p 'int, be it for this world or the next,, my first qu^tion consamin' it is whether that particular p'int happens to be pleasant. 'Tis that little small argyment of mine that has confounded Mr. Mullen more than once, ■when he meets me on equal ground outside the pulpit. 'Mebbe 'tis an' mebbe "^tisn't,' as I remarked sociably to him about the matter of eternal damnation, 'but you can't deny, can you, suh, bein' outside the pulpit AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 9 an' bound to speak the truth like the rest of us, that you sleep a long sight eaaig,rjn yo' bed when you say i tft yo'self that mebbe 'tisn't?' " "You see pa's old, an' he won't harbour any belirf at his time of life that don't let him rest com- fortable," remarked young Adam, in an apologetic aside. "It's that weakness of his that keeps him from bein' a thorough goin' good Christian." "That strange young clergyman has stirred us all up about the doctrines," said Solomon Hatch. "He's c^jeoed Old Church agin, an' he works terrible hard to make us feel that we'd rather be sprinkled on the bead than go under all over. A nice-mannered man he is, with a pretty face, an ' some folks hold it to be a pity that we can't change ogr ideas about baptism and become EpiscopaJsTn our hearts, jest to oblige bim. The women have, mostly, bein' an aeeommo- datin' sex in the main, with the exception ©f Mrs. Mallory, the blacksmith's mother', who dedars she'd rather give up eternal damnation any day than im- mersion. " "I ain't goin' so fur as that," rejoined old Adam, "an*^ ma'^over, when it comes to the p'int, Fve never found any oneonnnon comfort in either conviction in time of trouWe. I go to Mr. Mullen's church regu- lar every Sunday, seein' the Baptist one is ten miles off an' the road heavy, but in my Qpinion he's a bit too zealous to turn over the notions of the prophet* an' set up his own. He's at the age when a man knows everything on earth an' generally knows it wrong." "You see pa had been settin' on the anxious bench for forty years," explaiined young Adam, "an' 10 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH when Mr. Mullen came, he took it away from under him, so to speak, while he was still settin' on it." " 'Twas my proper place," said old Adam resent- fully, "when it comes to crops or the weather I am firm fixed enough in my belief, but in matters of religion I hold with the onsartain." "Only his powerful belief in the Devil an' all his works keeps him from bein' a heathen," observed young Adam in awe-stricken pride. "Even Mr. Mullen can't move him, he's so terrible set. " "Well, he ain't my Redeemer, though doubtless he'd be cast down if he was to hear as I'd said so," chuckled the elder. ' ' The over earnest, like the women folk, are better not handled at all or handled techily. I'm near blind as it is, but ain't that the man yonder leadin' his horse out of the Applegate road.''" " 'Taint the rector, but the miller," responded his son. "He's bringin' over Mrs. Bottom's sack of meal on the back of his grey mare. " "Ah, he's one of the folks that's gone over neck an* crop to the Episcopals," said Solomon Hatch. "His folks have been Presbyterians over at Piping T^ee sence the time of Noah, but he recites the Creed now as loud as he used to sing the doxology. I declar his voice boomed out so in my years last Sunday that I was obleeged to put up my hands to keep 'em from splittin'. Have you ever marked, Mr. Doolittle, havin' had the experience of ninety years, that when a man once takes up with a heresy, he shouts a heap louder than them that was born an' baptised in it? It seems as if they can't desert the ancient ways with- out defying 'em as well." "'Tis so, 'tis so," admitted old Adam, wagging his AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 11 head, "but Abel Revercomb was al'ays the sort that could measure nothin' less than a bushel. The pity with big-natured folk is that they plough up a mountain and trip at last over a pea-vine!" From the gloom and brightness of the Applegate road there emerged the large figure of a young man, who led a handsome grey mare by the halter. As he moved against the coloiwed screen of the leaves something of the beauty of the desolate landscape showed in his face — the look of almost autumnal sadness that one finds, occasionally, in the eyes of the imaginative rustic. He wore a pair of sheepskin leggins into which the ends of his corduroy trousers were stuffed slightly below the knees. His head was bare, and from the open neck of his blue flannel shirt, faded from many washings, the muscles in his throat stood out like cords in the red-brown flesh. From his uncovered dark hair to his heavy boots, he was pow- dered with the white dust of his mill, the smell of which floated to the group under the mulberry tree as he passed up the walk to the tavern. "I lay he seed Molly Merry weather comin' up from the low grounds, " remarked Solomon, when the young man had moved out of earshot. "Thar's truth spoken for once, if only by accident," retorted old Adam. "Yonder comes Reuben Merry- weather's wagon now, laden with fodder. Is thar anybody settin' on it, young Adam? My eyes is too po' to malce out." "Molly Merry weather, who else?" responded the younger. The wagon approached slowly, piled high with fod- der and drawn by a pair of old oxen. In the centre 12 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH of the load a girl was sitting, with a pink sunbonnet •on her shoidileTs, and tJbe light imid, which drove in gsists from the river, Uowii^ the bunch of clusteimg brown curls on her ne<^. She was a SBiall vivid crea- ture, with a. snnbunKd colour and chai^eable blue eyes that shone almost ^rerai in the sunlight. " Terr 'ble light minded as you can teH to look at her," said Solomon Hatdi, "she's scrft enough, so my mfe says, whras skk. folks an' children an' animals axe consamed, but she asts as if men war bom without common feelin's of natur an' didn't come inside the Commandments. It's beyond me how a kind-hearted woman can be so omnwciful to an entire sex. " "Had it been otherwise 'twould have been down- right disproof of God's providence and the bond of matrimony," respcmded old Adam. "True, true, Mr. Doolittle," admitted Solomcm, somewhat abashed. "Thar ain't any in these parts as can equal you on the Scriptures, as I've said over an' over agin. It's good ludt for the Almighty that He has got you on His side, so to speak, to help Him con- found His enenii^. " "Thar're two sides to that, I reckon, seein' I con- found not only His enranies, but His sarvents. Sech is the shot an' shell of my logic that the righteous fall before it as fast as the wicked — faster even I might say if I war speakin' particular. Have you marked how sfceery Mr. Mullen has growed about meetin' my eyes over the rail of the pulpit.'' Why, 'twas only yesterday that I brought my guns to bear on the resurrection of the body, an' blowed it to atoms in his presence. 'Now thar's Reuben Merryweatber who buried one leg at Manassas, Mr, Mullen,' I said AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 18 its pleasant an' natchel as if I waxn't about to confound hina, 'an' wh.at I'd like to have made clear an' easy to me, sttk, is what use the Alnadglity is goin' to make of that odd leg on the Day of Jedgmertt? Will he add a new one onto Benben,' I axed,^ 'when, as plaim as logic will have it, it won't be ai resurrection, but a creation, or will he start that leg a-trampin' by itself all the way froia Manassas to, jiiBB the other at Old Church?' The parson had been holdin' pjretty free all the mornin' with nobody daring to contradict him, and a man more taken abaick hy the power of logic my sight never lit on. * %(are me^ Mr. DooMttle,' was all he said, never a word mo'. 'Spare me, Mr. Doolittle.' " "Ah, a tough customer you are," commented Sol- omon, "an' what answer did you make to that, suh?" Old Adam's pipe returned to his mouth, and he puffed slowly a minute. '"Twas a cry for mercy, Solomon^ so I spared him, " he responded. The wagon had reached the well, and without stop- pwng, the large white^and-red oxen moved on into the turnpike. Bending from her high seat, Molly Merry- weatheir smiled at the miller, who made a single stride to- ward her. Then her glance passed to the stranger, and for an instant she held his gaze with a pair of eyes that appeared to reflect bis in shapes setting and colour. In the man's face there showed perplexity, admiration, ironic amusement; in the girl's there was a glimmer of the smile with which she had challenged the ador- ing look of the miller. The flush left the features of young Revercomb, and he turned back, with a scowl on his forehead, while old Adam cackled softly over the stem of his pipe. 14 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Wiles come as natchel to women as wickedness to men, young Adam," he said. "The time to beware of 'em is in yo' youth befo' they've bewitched yo'. "Why, 'tis only since I've turned ninety that I've trusted myself to think upon the sex with freedom." "I'm bewarin'," replied his son, "but when Molly Merryweather widens her eyes and bites her under- lip, it ain't in the natur of man or beast to stand out agin her. Why, if it had been anybody else but- the rector I could have sworn I saw him squeezin' her hand when he let down the bars for her last Sunday. " "It's well knowed that when he goes to upbraid her for makin' eyes at him durin' the 'Have mercy on me,' he takes a mortal long time about the business," responded Solomon, " but, good Lord, 'tain't fur me to wish it different, seein' it only bears out all I've argured about false doctrines an' evil practice. From the sprinklin' of the head thar's but a single step down- ward to the holdin' of hands. " " Well, I'm a weak man like the rest of you, '* rejoined young Adam, "an' though I'm sound on the doctrines — in practice I sometimes backslide. I'm thankful, however, it's the lesser sin an' don't set so heavy on the stomach. " "Ah, it's the light women like Molly Merryweather that draws the eyes of the young," lamented old Adam. "A pretty bit of vanity, is she?" inquired the stran- ger lightly, and fell back the next instant before the vigorous form of the miller, who swung round upon him with the smothered retort, "That's a lie!" The boyish face of the young countryman had paled under his sunburn and he spoke with the suppressed AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 15 passion of a man who is not easily angered and who responds to the pressure of some absorbing emotion. "Lord, Lord, Abel, Mr. Jonathan warn't meanin' no particular disrespect, nor mo' was I," quavered old Adam. "You're too pipin' hot, miller," interposed Solomon. "They warn't meanin' any harm to you nor to the gal either. With half the county courtin' her it ain't to be expected that she'd go as sober as a grey mare, is it.?" "Well, they're wastin' their time," retorted the miller, "for she marries me, thank God, this coming April." Turning away the next instant, he vaulted astride the bare back of the mare, and started at a gallop in the direction of the turnpike. "I'll be blessed if that little gal of Reuben Merry- weather's ain't his religion," commented young Adam. "An' he's of the opinion that he's going to marry her this comin' spring," cackled Solomon. "Well, I could be namin' two or three others of the same mind, if I'd take the trouble. It's all sensible enough to lambaste the women when they don't pick up every virtue that we throw away, but what's to be expected of 'em, I ax, when all the men sence Adam have been praisin' the sober kind of gal while they war runnin' arter the silly? Thar're some among 'em, I reckon, as have reasoned out to themselves that a man's pursuit speaks louder in the years arter all thap hi" praise. Now, thar's a hne, promisin' farmer, 1ik6 the miller gone runnin' loose, mo's the pity. " "A kind heart at bottom," said old Adam, "but 16 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH he's got a deal of larnin' to do befo' he'll rest content to bide along quietly in the same world with human natur. " "Oh, he's like the Revercombs from the beginnin'," protested Solomon, "slow an' peaceable an' silent until you rouse 'em, but when they're once roused, they're roused beyond jGgd or devil. " "Is this young Cain or Abellthe head of the family? " inquired the stranger. "Bless you, no, Mr. Jonathan, he ain't the head — ■ for thar's his broiJier Abner still livin' — but, head or tail, he's the only part that counts, wbea it comes to that. Until the boy grew up an' took hold of thailgs, the Revercombs warn't nothin' mo' than slack fisted, out-at-heel po' white trash, as the niggers say, though the old man, Abel's grandfather, al'ays lays claim to bein' connected with the real Revercombs, hi^er up in the State — However that may be, befo' the war thar warn't no place for sech as them, an' 'tis only since times have changed an' the bottom begun to press up to the top that anybody has heerd of 'em. Abel went to school somehow by hook, or crook an' got a good bit of book lamin', they say, an' then he came back here an' went to tumin' up every stone an' stick on the place. He ploughed an' he sowed an' he reaped till he'd saved up enough to buy that piece of low ground betwixt his house and the grist-mill. Then Ebenezer Timberldce died of the dropsy an' the first thing folks knew, Abd had moved over and turned miller. All the grain that's raised about here now goes to his mill, an' they say he'll be throwin' out the old and puttin' in new-fangled machinery befo' the year is up. He's the foremost AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY 17 man in these parts, suh, unless you war to come to Jordan's Journey to live like yo' uncle. " "To live like my unele," repeated the young man, with an ironic intonation that escaped the ears of old Adam. "But what of the miller's little sweetheart with the short hair and the divine snaile? Whose daughter is she.''" Old Adam's thin lips flattened until a single loos- ened tooth midway of his lower gum wagged impishly hack and forth. His face, sunhumed and frosted like the hardened rind of some winter fruit, revealed the prominent bones of the skull under the sunken flesh. One of his gnaiied old hands, trembling and red, clutched the clay bowl of his pipe; the other, with the callous skin of the palm showing under the bent fingers, rested half open on the leather patch that covered the knee of his overalls. A picture of toilworn age, of the inevitable end of all mortal labour, he had sat for hours in the faint sunshine, smiling with his sunken, babyish mouth at the brood of white turkeys that crowded about the well. "Well, she's Reuben Merry weather's granddaughter, suh," replied Solomon in the place of the elder. "He was overseer at Jordan's Journey, you know, durin' the old gentleman's lifetime, after the. last Jordan died and the place was bought by yo' uncle. Ah, 'twas different, suh, when the Jordans war livin'!" Some furtive malice in his tone caused the stranger to turn sharply upon him. "The girl's mother — who was she?" he asked. "Janet Merry weather, the prettiest gal that ever set foot on these roads. Ah, 'twas a sad story, was 18 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH hers, an' the less said about it, the soonest forgotten. Thar was some folks, the miller among 'em, that dropped dead out with the old minister — that was befo' Mr. Mullen's time — for not wantin' her to be laid in the churchyard. A hard case, doubtless, but a pious man such as I likes to feel sartain that however much he may have fooled along with sinful women in this world, only the most respectable of thar sex will rise around him at the Jedgment. " "And the father?" inquired the stranger, with a sound as if he drew in his breath sharply. "Accordin' to the Law an' the Prophets she hadn't any. That may be goin' agin natur, suh, but 'tis stickin' close to Holy Writ an' the wisdom of God." To this the young man's only response was a sudden angry aversion that showed in his face. Then lifting his horse's head from the trodden grass by the well, he sprang into the saddle, and started, as the miller had done, over the three roads into the turnpike. Remembering as he passed the gate posts that he had spoken no parting word to the group under the mulberry tree, he raised himself in his stirrups, and called back "Good day to you. Many thanks,'* in his pleasant voice. CHAPTER II IN WHICH DESTINY WEARS THE COMIC MASK Putting his horse to a canter, Mr. Jonathan Gay rode through the old gate into the turnpike. His still indignant look was fixed on the heavy wheel- ruts ahead, while his handsome though fleshy figure inclined slightly forward in the saddle after a foreign fashion. Seen close at hand his face, which was impressive at a distance, lost a certain distinction of contour, as though the marks of experience had blurred, rather than accentuated, the original type. The bones of forehead and ' nose still showed classic in outline, but in moulding the mouth and chin nature had not adhered closely to the aristocratic structure beneath. The flesh sagged a little in places; tiie brow was a trifle too heavy, the jaw a trifle too prominent, the lips under the short dark moustache were a trifle too full. Yet in spite of this coarseness of finish, his face was well coloured, attractive, and full of generous, if whimsical, humour. A judge of men would have seen in it proof that Mr. Gay's character consisted less in a body of organized tendencies than in a proces- sion of impulses. White with dust the turnpike crawled straight ahead between blood-red clumps of sumach and bram- ,ble on which the faint sunlight still shone. At in- tervals, where the dripping from over-hanging boughs had worn the road into dangerous hollows, boles of 19 20 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH young saplings had been placed cross-wise in a cor- duroy pattern, and above them clouds of small be- lated butterflies drifted in the wind like blown yellow rose leaves. On the right the thin corn shocks looked as if they were sculptirred in bronze, and amid them there appeared presently the bent figure of a harvester, outlined in dull blue against a sky of burnt orange. From the low grounds beside the river a mist floated up, clinging in fleecy shreds to the short grass that grew in and out of the bare stub- ble. The aspect of melancholy, which was depressing even in the broad glare of noon, became almost in- tolerable imder the waning light of the afterglow. Miles of loneliness stretched on either side of the turn- pike, which trailed, without fork or bend, into the flat distance beyond the great pine at the bars. For the twentieth time since he had left the tavern, Mr. Gay, whose habit it was to appear whimsical when he felt despondent, declared to himself that he'd be damned if the game was worth half what the candle was likely to cost him. Having arrived, with- out notable misadventure, at the age of thirty, he had already reduced experience to a series of episodes and had embraced the casual less as a pastime than as a philosophy. "If the worst comes to the worst — hang it! — I suppose I may hunt a Molly Cotton-tail," he grum- bled, bringing his horse's gait down to an amble. "There ought to be good hounds about, judging from the hang-dog look of the natives. Why in thunder did the old boy want to bury himself and his heirs forever in this god-forsaken land's end, and what in the deuce have mother and Aunt Kesiah done with DESTINY WEARS THE COMIC MASK 21 themselves down here for the last twenty years? Two thousand acres? Damn it! I'd rather have six feet on good English soil! Came to get rid of one woman, did he? — and tumbled into a pretty puddle with another as soon as he got here. By George, it's in the bone amd it is obliged to come out in the blood. A Gray will go on ogling the sex, I suppose, as long as he is able to totter back from the edge of the grave." As he approached the blazed pine, a spot of dark- ness, which he had at first mistaken for a small tree, detached itself from the surrounding shadows, and assumed gradually a human shape. His immediate impression was that the shape was a woman and that she was young. With his next breath he became aware that she was also beautiful. In the fading light her silhouette stood out as distinctly against the mellow background of sky, as did the great pine which marked the almost obliterated path over the fields. Her dress was the ordinary calico one, of some dull purpUsh shade, worn by the wives and daughters of the neighbouring farmers; and on her bare white arm, with its upturned sleeve, she carried a small split basket half filled with persimmons. She was of an almost pure Saxon type — tall, broad-shoUldered,^ deep-bosomed, with a skin the colour of new milk, and soft ashen hair parted smoothly over her ears and coiled in a large, loose knot at the back of her head. As he reached her she smiled faintly and a little brown mole at the corner of, her mouth played charmingly up and down. After the first minute. Gay fouud himself fascinated by this single imper- , feetion in her otherwise flawless features. More than her beauty he felt that it stirred his blood and 22 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH aroused in him the physical tenderness which he associated always with some vague chivalrous impulse. She moved slightly when he dismounted beside her, and a number of small splotches of black circling around her resolved themselves into a bodyguard of little negroes, clad in checked pinafores, with their scant locks wrapped tightly with crimson cotton. "May I let down the bars for you?" he asked, turning to look into her face with a smile, "and do you take your collection of piccaninnies along for protection or for amusement?" "Grandma doesn't like me to go out alone, sir — so many dreadful things happen," she answered gently, with an utter absence of humour. "I can't take anybody who is at work, so I let the little darkies come. Mary Jo is the oldest, and she's only six." "Is your home near here?" "I live at the mill. It's a mile farther on, but there is a short cut." "Then you are related to the miller, Mr. Rever- comb — : that fine looking chap I met at the ordinary?" "He is my uncle. I am Blossom Revercomb," she answered. "Blossom? It's a pretty name." Her gaze dwelt on him calmly for an instant, with the faintest quiver of her full white lids, which ap- peared to weigh heavily on her rather prominent eyeis- of a pale periwinkle blue. "My real name is Keren-happuch," she said 'at last, after a struggle with herself, "grandma bein' a great Scripture reader, chose it when I was born — but they call me Blossom, for short." DESTINY WEARS THE COMIC MASK 23 "And am I permitted, Miss Keren-happuch, to call you Blossom?" Again she hesitated, pondering gravely. "Mary Jo, if you unwrap your hair your mother will whip you," she said suddenly, and went on with- out a perceptible change of tone, "Keren-happuch is an ugly name, and I don't like it — though grandma says we oughtn't to think any of the Bible names ugly, not even Gog. She is quite an authority on Scripture, is grandma, and she can repeat the first chapter in Chronicles backward, which the minister couldn't do when he tried." "I'd like to hear the name that would sound ugly on your lips. Miss Keren-happuch." If the sons of farmers had sought to enchant her ears with similar strains, there was no hint of it in the smiling eyes she lifted to his. The serenity of her look added, he thought, to her resemblance to some pagan goddess — not to Artemis nor to Aphro- dite, but to some creature compounded equally of earth and sky. lo perhaps, or Europa? By Jove he had it at last — the Europa of Veronese! "There'll have to be a big frost before the per- simmons get sweet," she observed in a voice that was remarkably deep and full for a woman. With the faint light on her classic head and her milky skin, he found a delicious piquancy in the remark. Had she gossiped, had she even laughed, the effect would have been disastrous. Europa, he was vaguely aware, would hardly have condescended to coquetry. Her speech, like her glance, would be brief, simple, direct. "Tell me about the people here," he asked after a pause, in which he plucked idly at the red-topped 24 THE MILLER OP OLD CHURCH orchard grass through which they were passing. Be- hind them the six Httle negroes walked primly in single file, Mary Jo in the lead and a chooolate-coteured atom of two toddling at the tail of the procession. From time to time shrill squeak went up from the rear when a startled partridge whirred over the pas- ture or a bare brown foot came down on a toad or a ^aashopper. As she made no reply, he added in a more intimate tone, "I am Jonathan 'Gay, of Jordan's Journey, as I suppose you know." " The old gentleman's nephew? " she «aid, while she drew slightly away from him. "Mary Jo, did you tell Tobias's mammy that he was coming along?" "Nawm, I ain done tole nobody caze dar ain no- body done ax me." "But I said that you were not to bring him with- out letting Mahaly know. You rememiber what a whipping she gave him ihe last time he came!" At this a dismal howl burst from Tobias. "I ain't-a-gwine-ter-git-a-whuppin' ! " "Lawd, Miss Blossom, hit cyam' hut Tobias ez hit ud hut de res' er ub," replied Mary Jo, with iiiie philosophy, "case dar ain but two years er 'im ter whnp." "I ain't-a-gwine-ter-git-a-whuppin'!" sang Tobias m « passionate retrain. "Now that's just it," said Gay, feeling as though he should like to throttle the procession of piccsvoiin- nies. "What I can't understand is why the people about here — those I met at Bottom's Ordinary, for instance, seem to have disliked me even before I came." DESTINY WEARS THE COMIC MASK 25 Without surprise or embarrassment, she changed the basket from her right to her left arm, and this simple movement had the effect of placiug him at a distance, though apparently by accident. "That's because of the old gentleman, I reckon," she answered, "my folks all hated him, I don't know why." "But can you guess? You see I really want to understand. I've been away since I was eight years old and I have only the haziest memories." The question brought them into a sudden intimacy, as if his impulsive appeal to her had established a relation which had not existed the minute before. He liked the look of her strong shoulders, of her deep bosom rising in creamy white to her throat; and the hint of feminine weakness in her mouth, the quiver of her red lower lip when she talked, aroused in him a swift and facile amotion. The melancholy of the landscape, reacting on the dangerous softness of his mood, bent his nature toward her like a flame driven by wind. Around them the red-topped orchard grass faded to pale rose in the twilight, and beyond the crumbling rail fence miles of feathery broomsedge swept to the pines that stood straight and black against the western horizon. Impressions of the hour and the scene, of colour and sound, were blended in the allure- ment which Nature proffered him, for her own ends, through the woman beside him. Not Blossom Rever- comb, but the great Mother beguiled him. The forces that moved in the wind, in the waving broomA sedge, and in the call of the whip-poor-'mll, ] stirred in his pulses as they stirred in the objects/ around him. That fugitive attraction of the body. S6 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH » which Nature has shielded at the cost of finer at tributes, leaped upon him like a presence that hadk waited in earth and sky. Loftier aspirations van- ished before it. Not his philosophy but the accident of a woman's face worked for destiny. "I never knew just how it was," she answered slowly as if weighing her words, "but your uncle wasn't one of our folks, you know. He bought the place the year before the war broke out, and there was always some mystery about him and about the life he led — never speaking to anybody if he could help it, always keeping himself shut up when he could. He hadn't a good name in .these parts, and the house hasn't a good name either, for the darkies say it is ha'nted and that old Mrs. Jordan — *ole Miss* they call her — still comes back out of her grave to rebuke the ha'nt of Mr. Jonathan. There is a path leading from the back porch to the poplar spring where none of them will go for water after nightfall. Uncle Abednego swears that he met his old master there one night when he went down to fill a bucket and that a woman was with him. It all comes, I reckon, of Mr. Jonathan having been found dead at the spring, and you know how the darkies catch onto any silly fancy about the dead walking. I don't believe much in ha'nts myself, though great-grandma has seen many a one in her day, and all the servants at Jordan's Journey declare that the ghost of old Mr. Jonathan will never rest quiet. I've always wondered if your mother and Miss Kesiah were ever frightened by the stories the darkies tell?" For a moment she paused, and then added softly, "It was all so different, they say, when the Jordans were living." DESTINY WEARS THE COMIC MASK 27 Again the phrase which had begun to irritate him! Who were these dead and gone Jordans whose benefi- cent memory still inhabited the house they had built? "I don't think my mother would care for such stories," he replied after a minute. "She has never mentioned them in her letters." "Of course nobody really puts faith in them, but I never pass the spring, if I can help it, after the sun has gone down. It makes me feel so dreadfully creepy." "The root of this gossip, I suppose, lies in the gen- eral dislike of my uncle.?" "Perhaps — I'm not sure," she responded, and he felt that her rustic simplicity possessed a charm above the amenities of culture. "The old clergyman — that was before Mr. Mullen's day — when we all went to the church over at Piping Tree — used to say that the mercy of God would have to exceed his if He was ever going to redeem him. I remember hearing him tell grandma when I was a child that there were a few particulars in which he couldn't answer with certainty for God, and that old Mr. Jonathan Gay was one of 'em. 'God Almighty will have to find His own way in this matter,' he used to declare, 'for I wash my hands of it.' I'm sorry, sir," she finished contritely, "I forgot he was your own blood relation." In the spirit of this contrition, she changed the basket back again to her left arm ; and perceiving his advantage. Gay acted upon it with his accustomed alacrity. "Don't apologize, please, I am glad I have this from your lips — not from a stranger's." 28 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Under the spell of her beauty, he was aware of a pleasurable sensation, as though the pale rose of the orchard grass had gone to his head and coloured his vision. There was a thrill in feeling her large, soft arm brushing his sleeve, in watching the rise and fall of her bosom under her tight calico dress. "I shall always know that we were friends — good friends, from the first," he resumed after a minute. "You are very kind, sir," she answered, "this is my path over the stUe and it is growin' late — Tobias's mother will surely give him a whippin'. I hope you don't mind my havin' gathered these persimmons on your land," she concluded, with an honesty which was relieved from crudeness by her physical dignity, "they are hardly fit to eat because there has been so little frost yet." "Well, I'm sorry for that. Miss Keren-happudi, or shall it be Blossom?" "I like Blossom better," she answered ^yly, lift- ing her scant calico skirt with one hand as she mounted tb£ stile. "Then good night, lovely Blossom," he called gaily while he turned back into the bridle path which led like a frayed white seam over the pasture. CHAPTER m IN WBICa MR. GAT ABBIVES AT HIS JOXnBNET^S KND Broad and law, with the gabled petihnent of the porch showing through boughs of oafcs, and a flight of bats •wheieling over the ivied roof, theiiouse appeared to Gay beyond a slight swell in the meadows. The grove of oaks, changing from darij red to russet, was divided by a short wallc, bordered by clipped box, whidi led to tibe stone steps and to two discoloured marble urns on which broken-nosed Cupids were sporting. As he was about to slip his reins over the back of an iron chair on the lawn, a shriek in a high pitched negro voice pierced his ears from a half shut- tered dormer-window in the east wing. "Fo' de Lawd, hit's de ha'nt er ole marster! Yes- suh — Yessuh, — I'se a-comin' — I'se a-comin'." The next instant the window slammed with a bang, and the sound of flying footsteps echoed through the darkened interior of the house. "Open the door, you fool! I'm not a ghost!" shouted Gay, but the only response came in an hyster- ical babble of moans from the negro quarters some- where in the rear and in the soft whir in his face of a leatherwing bat as it wheeled low in the twilight. There was no smoke in the chimneys, and the square old house, with its hooded roof and its vacant windows, assumed a sinister and inhospitable look against the background of oaks. His mother and. his aunt, he 30 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH concluded, were doubtless away for their winter's shopping, so lifting his horse's head from the grass, he passed between the marble urns and the clipped box, and followed a path, deep in leaves, which led from the west wing of the house to the outside kitchen beyond a paved square at the back. Half intelligible words floated to him as he approached, and from an old pear-tree near the door there was a flutter of wings where a brood of white turkeys settled to roost. Be- yond the bole of the tree a small negro in short skirt-s was "shooin"' a large rooster into the henhouse, but at the muflBed fall of Gay's horse's hoofs on the dead leaves, she turned with a choking sound, and fled to the shelter of the kitchen at her back. "My time's done come, but I ain't-a-gwine ! I ain't-a-gwine!" wailed the chorus within. "Ole marster's done come ter f otch me, but I ain't-a-gwine ! O Lawd, I ain't-a-gwine! O Jesus, I ain't-a-gwine!" "You fools, hold your tongues!" stormed the young man, losing his temper. "Send somebody out here to take my horse or I'll give you something to shout over in earnest." The shrieks trembled high for an instant, and then died out in a despairing moan, while the blanched face of an old servant appeared in the doorway. "Is hit you er yo' ha'nt, Marse Jonathan?^' he inquired humbly. "Come here, you doddering idiot, and take my horse. " But half reassured the negro came a step or two forward, and made a feeble clutch at the reins, which dropped from his grasp when the roosting turkeys stirred uneasily on the bough above. MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END 31 "I'se de butler, marster, en I ain never sot foot in de stable sence de days er ole miss." "Where's my mother.?" "Miss Angela, she's done gone up ter town en Miss Kesiah she's done gone erlong wid 'er." "Is the house closed?" "Naw, suh, hit ain closed, but Miss Molly she's got de keys up yonder at de house er de overseer." "Well, send somebody with a grain of sense out here, and I'll look up Miss Molly." At this the butler vanished promptly into the kitchen, and a minute later a half -grown mulatto boy relieved Gay of his horse, while he pointed to a path through an old apple orchard that led to the cottage of the overseer. As the young man passed under the gnarled boughs to a short flagged walk before the small, whitewashed house in which "Miss Molly" lived, he wondered idly if the lady who kept the keys would prove to be the amazing little person he had seen some hours earlier perched on the load of fodder in the ox- cart. The question was settled almost before it was asked, for a band of lamplight streamed suddenly from the door of the cottage, and in the centre of it appeared the figure of a girl in a white dress, with red stockings showing under her short skirts, and a red ribbon filleting the thick brown curls on her forehead. From her movements he judged that she was mixing a bowl of soft food for the old hound at her feet, and he waited until she had called the dog inside for his supper, before he went forward and spoke her name in his pleasant voice. At the sound she turned with a start, and he saw her 32 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH vivid little faccj with the wonderful eyes, go white for a minute. "So you are Mr. Jonathan? I thought so," she said at last, "but grandfather told me you had sent no word of your coming. " She spoke quickly, with a refinement of accent which puzzled him. until he remembered tie malicious hints Solomon Hatch had let fall at the tavern. That she was, in reahty, of his blood and the child of his uncle, he had not doubted since the moment she had smiled at him from her seat on the oxcart. How much was known, he now wondered. Usui his uncle provided for her? Was his mother — was his Aunt Kesiah — aware of the truth? "She missed my letter, I suppose," he replied. *'Has she been long away?" "Only a week. She is expected home day after to-morrow." "Then I shaU beg you to open the house for me." She had turned back to the old hound, and was bending over to place his bowl of bread and milk on the hearth. A log fire, in which a few pine branches stood out illuminated like boughs of flcme, filled the big stone fireplace, which was crudely whitewashed to resemble the low walls of the room. A kettle hung on an iron crane before the blaze, and the singing of the water made a cheerful noise amid a silence which struck Gay suddenly as hostile. "When the girl raised her head he saw that her face had grown hard and cold, and that the expression of her eyes had changed to one of indignant surprise. The charming coquetry had fled from her look, yet her evident aversion piqued iiim into a half smiling, haU serious interest. He MB,. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END 33 ■wondered if she would marry that fine looking rustic, the miller, and if the riotous Gay blood in her veins would flow placidly in her mother's class? Had she, too, inherited, if not the name, yet the weaknesses of an older race? Was she, like himseU, cursed with swift fancies and swifter disillusionments? How frail she was, and how brilliant ! How innocent and how bitter ! He turned away, ostensibly to examine a print on the wall, and while his back was toward her, he felt that her gaze stabbed him like the thrust of a knife. Wheeling quickly about, he jnet her look, but to his amazement, she continued to stare back at him with the expression of indignant surprise still in her lace. How she hated him and, by Jove, how she could hate! She reminded him of a little wild brown animal as she stood there with her teeth showing between her parted red lips and her eyes flashing defiance. The next minute he found himself asking if she could ever grow gentle — could ever soften enough to allow 'her- self to be stroked? He remembered Solomon Hatch's remark that "she was onmerciful to an entire sex," and in spite of his effort at composure, a laugh sprang to his lips. In the centre of the room a table was laid, and gfusag over to it, she busied herself with the cups and saucers as though she were anxious to put a disagree- able presence out of her thoughts. "May I share your supper? " he asked, and waited^ not without amusement, for her answer. "I'm sorry there isn't any for you at the big house, '*i she answered politely. "If you will sit down, I'll tell Delily to bring in some Tiatterbread." "And you?" 34 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "I'll have mine with grandfather. He's out in the barn giving medicine to the red cow." While she spoke Delily entered with a plate of corn- bread and a pot of coflPee, and a minute later Reuben Merryweather paused on the threshold to shake off a sprinkling of bran from his hair and beard. He Tvas a bent, mild looking old man, with a wooden leg ivhich made a stumping noise when he walked, and a pair of wistful brown eyes, like those of an aged hound that has been worn out by hard service. Past seventy BOW, his youth had been trained to a different civi- lization, and there was a touching gentleness in his face, as if he expressed still the mental attitude of a class which had existed merely as a support or a foil to the order above it. Without spirit to resent, he, with his fellows, had endured the greatest evils of slavery. With the curse of free labour on the land, there had been no incentive for toil, no hire for the labourer. Like an incubus the system had lain over them, stifling all energy, checking all progress, retarding all pros- perity save the prosperity of the great land-owners. Then the 'soil had changed hands, and where the plough had broken the earth, the seeds of a democracy lad germinated and put forth from the very blood of the battlefields. In the upward pressure of class, Jie had seen the stability of custom yield at last to the impetus of an energy that was not racial but individual. Yet from the transition he had remained always a little apart. Reverence had become for him a habit of mind, and he had learned that respect could outlive •even a belief in the thing upon which it was founded. Mr. Jonathan and he had been soldiers together. His old commander still entered his thoughts to the MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END 3S rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon, and st, single sublime action at Malvern Hill had served m the mind of the soldier to spread a legendary glamour over a life which held hardly another incident that was worthy of remembrance. At his entrance Molly melted from her hostile at- titude, and while she hung on the old man's breast* Gay noticed, with surprise, that she was made up of enchanting curves and delicious softness. Her sharpened features grew rounder, and her thin red lips lost their hardness of outline. When she raised her head after a minute, he saw that the light in her eyes adorned and enriched her. By Jove, he had never imagined that she could change and colour like that! "You are late, grandfather," said the girl, "I was coming to look for you with a lantern." "The red cow kept me," answered the old man, adding as he held out his hand to Gay, "So you've come at last, Mr. Jonathan. Your mother will be pleased." "I was sorry to find her absent," replied Gay, "and I was just asking your granddaughter if she would permit me to join you at supper? " "To be sure — to be sure," responded Reuben, witia a cheerfulness which struck Gay as singularly pathetic- "After supper Molly will go over with Patsey and see that you are made comfortable." The old hound, blind and toothless, fawned at his knees, and leaning over, he caressed it with a knotted and trembling hand. "Has Spot had his supper, Molly?" "Yes, grandfather. He can eat only soft bread 36 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH and gravy." At her voice the^ hound groped toward her, and stoofnng, she laid her soft, flushed cheek on his head. "Well, sit down, suhj sit down," said Reuben, speak- ing timidly as if he were not sure he had chosen the right word. "If you'll tell Delily, honey, Mr. Jona- than wiU have his supper." "On condition that you let me share yours, Mr. Merryweather," insisted Gay, in his genial tone. " If yon're going to make company of me, I shall go hungry until to-morrow." From a wooden safe in the corner Molly brought a plate and a cup, and made a place for the young man at tie end of the red-and-white deth on the table. Then she turned away, without speaking, and sat down behind the tin coffeepot, wbick emitted a fra- grant steam. "Gream and sugar?" she inquired presently, meet- ing Ms eyes over the glass lamp which stood midway between them. Gay had been talking to Reuben about the roads — "jolly bad roads," he called them,^" wasn't it possible to make them decentior riding?" Looking up at the girl's question, he answered absently,' "two lumps. Cream? Yes, please, a little," and then continued to stare at her with a vague and impersonal wonder. She washalf savage, of course, with red hands, and bad man- ners and dressed like a boy that had got into skirts for a joke — but, by &eocge, there was soniuething about ber'-iiafe bit into the fancy. Not a beauty like his Europa of the pasture (who was, when it came to that?) — but a fascinaiing httle beggar, with a quality oi sudden surprises that, he could describe by no word MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END 37 except "iridescent." He liked the hi^ arch of her brows; but her nose wasn't good and her lips were too thin except when she smiled. When she smiled! It was her smile, after all, that made her seem a thing of softness and bloom bom to be kissed. Reuben ate his food rapidly, pouring his coffee into the saucer, and drinking it in loud gulps that began presently to make Gay feel decidedly nervous. Once the young man inadvertently glanced toward him, and turning away the instant afterwards, he found the girl's eyes watching him with a defiant and threat- ening look. Her passionate defence of Reuben re- minded Gay of a nesting bird under the eye of the hunter. She did not plead, she dared — actually dared him to criticise the old man even in his thoughts ! That Molly herself was half educated and possessed some smattering of culture, it was easy to see. She was less rustic in her speech than his Europa, and there was the look of breeding, or of blood, in the fine poise of her head, in her small shapely hands, which he remembered were a distinguishing mark of the Gays. "Mr, Mullen came for you in his cart," said Reuben, glancing from one to the other of his hearers with his gentle and humble look. "I told him you must have forgotten as you'd ridden down to the low, grounds." "No, I didn't forget," replied Molly, indifferent apparently to the restraint of Gay's presence, "I did it on purpose." Meeting the young man's amused and enquiring expression, she added defiantly, "There are plenty of girls that are .always ready to go with him and it's because I'm not that he wants me." 38 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "He's not the only one, to judge from what I heard at the ordinary. " She shrugged her shoulders — ' an odd gesture for a rustic coquette — while a frown overshadowed her features. "They're all alike," she retorted scornfully. "K you go over to the mill you'll probably find Abel Hevercomb sulking and brow-beating his mother because I smiled at you this afternoon. And I did it only to plague him!" "Molly's a good girl," said Reuben, rather as if lie expected the assertion to be disputed, "but she was taught to despise folks when she was a baby — wasn't you, pretty?" "Not you — never you, grandfather." The intimate nature of the conversation grated upon Gay not a little. There was something splendidly liarbaric about the girl, and yet the mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleas- I smtly rather than otherwise. His ideal woman — the woman of the early Victorian period — was submissive and clinging. He was perfectly assured that she would have borne her wrongs, and even her mother's wrongs, with humility. Meekness had always seemed to him the becoming mental and facial expression for the sex; and that a woman should resent appeared almost as indelicate as that she should propose. When supper was over, and Reuben had settled to his pipe, with the old hound at his feet, Molly took down a bunch of keys from a nail in the wall, and lit a. lantern with a taper which she selected from a china vase on the mantelpiece. Once outside she walked a little ahead of Gay and the yellow blaze of the lantern MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END S9> flitted like a luminous bird over the flagged walk bordered by gooseberry bushes. Between the stones^' which were hollowed by the tread of generations, nature had embroidered the bare places with delicate patterns of moss. At the kitchen the girl stopped to summon Patsey, the maid, who was discovered roasting an apple at the end of a long string before the logs. "I am going to the big house. Come and make up the bed in the blue room," Gay heard through the door. " Yes'm, Miss Molly, I'se a-comin' in jes a minute.'* "And bring plenty of lightwood. He will probably want a fire." With this she appeared again on the outside, crossed the paved square to the house, and selecting a large- key, unlocked the door, which grated on its hinges as Gay pushed it open. Following her into the hall, he stood back while she lit a row of tallow candles, im old silver sconces, which extended up the broad mahog- any staircase to the upper landing. One by one aa she applied the taper, the candles flashed out in a misty circle, and then rising in a clear flame, shone on her upraised hand and on the brilliant red of her lips and cheeks. "That is your mother's room," she said, pointing to a closed door, "and this is yours. Patsey will make a fire." "It's rather gloomy, isn't it?" "Shall I bring you wine? I have the key to the cellar." "Brandy, if you please. The place feels as if it had been shut up for a century." 40 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "It was your uncle's room. Do you mind sleeping here? It's the easiest to get ready." ; "Not witib a fire — and I may have a lamp, I sup- pose? " At his question Patsey appeared wiiJi an armful of resinous pine, and a few minutes later, a cheerful blaze was chasing the shadows up the great brick chimney. When Molly returned with the brandy. Gay was lean- ing against the mantelpiece idly burning a bunch of dried cat-tails hfe had taken from a blue-and-white china vase. "It's a ^oomy old business, isn't it?" he observed, gtaincing f rom the high canopied bed with its hangings of faded damask to an engraving of the Marriage of Pocahontas between the dormer-window& "If tttere are ghosts about, I suppose I'd bettear prepare to face them." "Only in the west wing, the darkies say, but I think they are bats. As for those in the haunt's walk, I never believed in them. Patsey^ is bringing your lamp, and here is the bzandy. Can I da anytiiing dseforyou?" "Only tell me," he burst out, "why in thunder the whole couniy hates me?" She laughed shortly. "I can't tell you — wait and find' out." Her audacity half angered j half paralyzed him. "What a vixen you are!" he observed presently wi^h grudging respect. The crimson flooded her face, and he watched her teeth gleam dangerously, as if she were bracing her- self for a retort. The impulse to torment her was strong in him, and he yielded to it much as a boy MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END 41 miglit have teased a small captive animal of the woods. "With such a temper you ought to have been an ugly woman," he said, "but you're so pretty I'm strongly inclined to kiss you." "If you do, I'll strike you," she gasped. The virgin in her showed fierce and passionate, not shy and fleeting. That she was by instinct savagely pure, he could tell by the look of her. "I believe it so perfectly that I've no intention of trying," he rejoined. " I'm not half so pretty as my mother was," she said after a pause. Her loyalty to the unfortunate Janet touched him to sympathy. "Don't quarrel with me, Molly," he pleaded, "for I mean to be friends with you. " As he uttered the words, he was conscious of a pleasant feeUng of self-approbation while his nature vibrated to the lofty impulse. This sensation was so gratifyifig while it lasted that his manner assumed a certain austerity as of one who had determined to be virtuous at any cost. MoraUy he was on stilts for the moment, and the sense of elevation was as navel as it was insecure. "I know you are a good girl, Molly," he observed staidly, "that is why I am so anxious to be your friend." "Is there nothing more that I can do for you?" she inquired, with frigid reserve, as she took up the lantern. "Yes, one thing — you can shake hands." The expression of indignant surprise appeared again in her face^ and she fell. back a, step, shaking her head stubbornly as she. did so. 42 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "I'd rather not — if you don't mind," she answered. "But if I do mind — and I do." "Still I'd rather not." "Do you really dislike me so much? What have I done to deserve it?" "I don't like men even when I pretend to." "Do you dislike me as much as you dislike the miller?" "More." "Or the rector?" "Oh, far more. You are a Gay," "Yes, I am a Gay," he might have retorted, " and you, my pretty savage, are very much a Gay, also." Swinging the lantern in her hand, she moved to the door, as if she were anxious to put an end to a conver- sation which had become suddenly too intimate. On the threshold she looked back, and remarked in a pre- cise, authoritative voice: "There are blankets in the bottom drawer if you find you haven't covering enough." "I shall remember — there are blankets in the bottom drawer." "Patsey will bring hot water at eight and Uncle Abednego will give you breakfast in the dining-room." "Then I'm not to have it with you?" "With me? Oh, I live with grandfather. I never come to the big house except when Mrs. Gay is in town." "Do you see nothing, then, of my mother when she is at home?" "Sometimes I help her to make raspberry vinegar or preserves. If you hear a noise in the night it is MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END 43 only the acorns dropping on the roof. There are so many oaks. Good night, Mr. Jonathan." "Good night," he returned, "I wish you'd shake hands," — but she had vanished. The room was cosy and warm now — and flinging himself into a chair with deep arms that stood on the hearth, he lit his cigar and sipped drowsily the glass of brandy she had left on a silver tray on the table. The ceiling was ridiculously high — what a waste of good bricks and mortar ! — the room was ridiculously large! On the smooth white walls reddish shadows moved in a fantastic procession, and from the big chintz-covered lounge the monstrous blue poppies leaped out into the firelight. The high canopy over the bed was dralped with prim folds of damask, and the coverlet was of some quaint crocheted work that hung in fringed ends to the floor. Here again from the threadbare velvet carpet the blue poppiea stared back at him. An acorn dropped on the roof, and in spite of Molly's warning, he started and glanced toward the window, where a frosted pattern of ivy showed like a delicate lacework on the small greenish panes. Another dropped; then another. Gradually he began to listen for the sound and to miss it when there came a long silence. One might easily imagine it to be the tapping of ghostly fingers — of the fingers of pretty Janet Merry weather — some quarter of a century earlier. Her daughter was hardly more than twenty now, he supposed, and he wondered how long the mad idyllic period had lasted before her birth.? Turning to the books on the table, he opened one and a yellowed frag- ment of paper fluttered to the floor at his feet. When 44 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH fae stooi>ed after it, he saw that there was a single word on it traced faintly in his unde's hand : "To-morrow." And then, being a person whose imagination dealt only with the obvious, he undressed, blew out the ^fat, and fell peacefully asleep to the dropping of acorns. CHAPTER IV THE REVEECOMBS On the morning after the meeting at Bottom's Ordinary, Abel Revercomb came out on the porch of the little house in which he lived, and looked across the steep rocky road to the mill-race which, ran above a silver stream known as Sycamore Creek. The grist-mill, a primitive log building, worked after ancient methods, had stood for a hundred years or more beside a crooked sycamore tree, which grew mid- way of the stream and shaded the wheel and the shingled roof from the blue sky above. The oJd wooden race, on which the young green mosses shone like a coating of fresh paint on a faded surface, ran for a short distance over the brook, where the broad yellow leaves drifted down to the deep pond below. Across the slippery poplar log, which divided the mill from the road and the house occupied by the miller, there was a stretch of good corn land, where the corn stood in shocks after the harvest, and beyond this the feathery bloom of the broomsedge ran on to the luminous band of marshes on the far horizon. From the open doar< before which the miller was staioding, there came the clatter of breakfast dishes, and the sound of a Scripture text quoted in the voiee of his mother. Above his head several strings oi 45 46 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH red pepper hung drying, and these rustled in the wind with a grating noise that seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen. "The Lord said that, an' I reckon He knew His own mind when He was speakin' it," remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot. "I declare there's mother at it again," observed Abel to himself with a frown — for it was Sarah's fate that an excess of virtue should have wrought all the evil of a positive vice. From the days of her infancy, when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her pastor had marveUed, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations in a manner which had rendered unen- diu-able the lives around her. Her parents had suc- cumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the quality of their moral fibre. AH her life she had laboured to make people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed and resentful family. " Yo' buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don't come along in, Abel," she called now from the kitchen. "You've been lookin' kind of sallow these last days, so I've got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur, laid right by yo' plate." " For heaven's sake, take it away," he retorted irritably. "I don't need it." "I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the feelin'," rejoined Sarah" grimly, "an' if you know what's good for you, you'll come and swallow it right down." "I'll be hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without THE REVERCOMBS 47 moving, and his tone implied that the ceaseless nag- ging had got at last on his nerves. He was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick, dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a vio- lence of nature which his firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny. A certain tenacity — a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the final hint to his character, and re- vealed that temperamental intolerance of others which constitutes the strength as. well_ as the weakness of the rustic~who ha? risen out of his class. An opinion once embraced acquireffTEe"authdrity"of a revelation; a passion once yielded to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined, he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial submission_v?lu^^ was embodied in Heuben Merryweather. ^Vaditionilad bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his liberated intelligence — of a passionate desireto test to the fullest the certainty of that mberatigBu^ As the elder had suffered beneath the weight of the es- tablished order, so the younger showed the disturbmg effects of^a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in^etbnomic conditions rather than from the ! more gradual evolution of class. When political respon- .sibility was thrust on the plainer people instead of sought by them, it was but natural that the process of adjustment should appear rough rather than smooth. The land which had belonged to the few became after 48 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH the war within reach of the many. At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the shadow of the old names — the old "customs"^ This mole-like blindness of the poorer Ifrhiteg^ persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the awakening was possible only after the newer generation had come to its growth. To them the past autiiority was but a shadow; the past reverence but a delusion. When the black labourer worked, not freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by magic. To rise under lie old system had been so impossible that Abel's ancestors had got out of the habit of trying. The beneficent charity of the great landowners had extinguished the small incentive thstt might have remained — and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single er stood for a long while, watching the meal pour from the valve. A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes, but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp. "Why do they keep at me about her? " he asked passionately. "Is it true that she is only playing with me as she plays with the others?" — but the pain was too keen, and turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; and as the bit of colour drew nearer amid the stubble, he recognized the jacket of crimson wool that the girl wore as a wrap on chill autumn mornings. On her head there was a small knitted cap matching the jacket, and this, resting on her riotous brown curls, lent a touch of' boyish gallantry to her slender figure. Like most women ol THE MILL 61 mobile features and ardent temperament, her beauty depended so largely upon her mood that Abel had seen her change from positive plainness to amazing loveliness in the space of a minute. Her small round face, with its wonderful eyes, dimpled now over the crimson jacket. "Abel!" she called softly, and paused with one foot on the log while the water sparkled beneath her. Ten minutes before he had vowed to himself that she had used him badly and he would hold off until she made suflBcient amends; but in forming this reso- lution, he had reckoned without the probable inter- vention of Molly. "I thought — as long as I was going by — that I'd stop and speak to you," she said. He shook his head, unsoftened as yet by her presence. "You didn't treat me fair yesterday, Molly," he answered. "Oh, T wanted to tell you about that. I quite meant to go with you — only it went out of my head." "That's a pretty excuse, isn't it, to offer a man?" "Well, you aren't the only one I've offered it to," she dimpled enchantingly, "the rector had to be satisfied with it as well. He asked me, too, and when I forgot I'd promised you, I said I'd go with him to see old Abigail. Then I forgot that, too," she added with a penitent sigh, "and went down to the low grounds." "You managed to come up in time to meet Mr. Jonathan at the cross-roads," he commented with bitterness. A less daring adventurer than Molly would have hesitated at his tone and grown cautious, but a certain 62 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH blithe indifference to the consequences of her actions was a part of her lawless inheritance from the Gays. "I think him very good-looking, don't you?" she inquired sweetly. "Good-looking? I should think not — a fat fop like that." "Is he fat? I didn't notice it — but| of course, I didn't mean that he was good-looking in your way, Abel." The small flowa-like shadows trembled across her face, and beneath her feet the waves churned a creamy foam that danced under her like light. His eyes warmed to her, yet he held back, gripped by a passion of jealousy. For the first time he felt that he was brought face to face with a rival who might prove to have the advantage. "I am coming over!" called Molly suddenly, and a minute later she stood in the square of sunshine that entered the mill door. Had he preserved then his manner of distant cour- tesy, it is probable that she would have melted, for it was not .in her temperament to draw back while her prey showed an inclination for flight. But it was his nature to warm too reacMly and to cool too late, a habit of eonstitu'don which causes, usually, a tragedy in matters of sex. "You oughtn't to treat me so, Molly!" he exclaimed reproachfully, and made a step toward her. "I couldn't help forgetting, could I? It was your place to remind me." Thrust, to his surprise, upon the defensive, he reached for her hand, which was withdrawn after it had laiQ an instant in his. THE MILL 6S^ "Well, it was my fault, then," iie said with a gen- erosity that did him small fserviee. "The ^next time I'll remind you every minute." She smiled radiantly as he looked at her, and he felt that her indiscretions, her lack of constancy, her imkmdness even, were but tie sportive and innocent freaks of a child. Tn his rustic sincerity he was for- ever at the point of condemning her and fca^ever tc- lenting before the aippeaimg sweetness of her lo@k> He told himself twenty times a day that she flirted outrageously with him, though he still peffused ta admit that in her heart she was to blame for her flirting. A broad and charitable distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that she did. It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of which she was still unconscious. "Molly," he burst out almost fiercedy, "will you marry me.''" The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frowQ contracted her forehead. "I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she answered, "but that if I ever did " "Then you'd marry me." "Well, if I were oMigfed to marry 'sormhody, I'd rather maiiy yoiuliiaai anybody else." "So you do like me a little.''" "Yes, I suppose I like you a little — but all men are the same — mother used always to tell me so." Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates. 64 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH of his paradise. He remembered her as a passionate frail creature, with accusing eyes that had never lost the expression with which they had met and passed through some hour of despair and disillusion- ment. "But how could she judge, Molly.? How could she judge?" he pleaded. "She was ill, she wasn't herself, you must know it. All men are not alike. Didn't I fight her battles more than once, when you were a child?" "I know, I know," she answered gratefully, "and I love you for it. That's why I don't mind telling you what I've never told a single one of the others. I haven't any heart, Abel, that's the truth. It's all play to me, and I like the game sometimes and some- times I hate it. Yet, whether I like it or hate it, I always go on because I can't help it. Your mother once said I had a devil inside of me and perhaps she was right — it may be that devil that drives me on and won't let me stop even when I'm tired, and it all bores me. The rector thinks that I'll marry him and turn pious and take to Dorcas societies, and Jim Halloween thinks I'll marry him and grow thrifty and take to turkey raising — and you believe in the bottom of your heart that in the end I'll fall into your arms and find happiness with your mother. But you're all wrong — all — all — and I shan't do any of the things you expect of me. I am going to stay here as long as grandfather lives, so I can take care of him, and then I'll run off somewhere to the city and trim hats for a living. When I was at school in Applegate I trimmed bats for all of the pupils." THE MILL 65 "Oh, Molly, Molly, I'll not give you up! Some day you'll see things differently." "Never — never. Now, I've warned you and it isn't my fault if you keep on after this." "But you do like me a little, haven't you said so?" Her frown deepened. "Yes, I do like you — a little." "Then I'll keep on hoping, anyhow," Her smile came back, but this time it had grown mocking. "No, you mustn't hope," she answered, "at least," she corrected provokingly, "you mustn't hope — too hard. " "I'll hope as hard as the devil, darling — and, Molly, if you marry me, you know, you won't have to live with my mother." "I like that, even though I'm not going to marry you." "Come here," he drew her toward the door, "and I'll show you where our house will stand. Do you see that green rise of ground over the meadow?" "Yes, I see it," her tone was gentler. "I've chosen that site for a home," he went on, "and I'm saving a good strip of pine — you can see it over there against the horizon. I've half a mind to take down my axe and cut down the biggest of the trees this afternoon!" If his ardour touched her there was no sign of it in the movement with which she withdrew herself from his grasp. "You'd better finish your grinding. There isn't the least bit of a hurry," she returned with a smile. 66 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "If you'll go with me, Molly, you may talce your choice and I'll cut the tree down for you." "But I can't, Abel, because I've promised Mr. Mullen to visit his mother." The glow faded from his eyes and a look like that of an animal under the lash took its place. "Come with me, not with him, Molly, you owe me that much," he entreated. "But he's such a good man, and he preaches such beautiful sermons.". "He does — I know he does, but I love you a thou- sand times better." "Oh, he loves me because I am pretty and hard to win — just as you do," she retorted. "If I lost my hair or my teeth how many of you, do you think, would care for me to-morrow? " "I should — before God I'd love you just as I do now," he answered with passion. A half mocking, half tender sound broke from, her lips. "Then why don't you — every one of you, fall head over ears in love with Judy Hatch?" she in- quired. "I don't because I loved you first, and I can't change, however badly you treat me. I'm sometimes tempted to think, Molly, that mother is right, and you are possessed of a devil." "Your mother is a hard woman, and I pity the wife you bring hom.e to her." The softness had gone out of her voice at the men- tion of Sarah's name, and she had: grown defiant and reckless. "I don't think you are just to my mother, Molly,'* THE MILL 67 he said after a moment, "she has a kind heart at bottom, and when she nags at you it is most often for yonr good." "I suppose it was for my mother's good that she kept her from going to church and made the old min- ister preach a sermon against her?" "That's an old story — you were only a month old. Can't you forget it.?" "I'll never forget it — not even at the Day of Judg- ment. I don't care how I'm punished." Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and un- reasonable, reduced him to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her kinship not to Reuben Merry weather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The in- heritance she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every phrase, in every gesture. "It isn't you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it's something in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him. "If I'd known you were going to preach, I shouldn't have stopped to speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I'd rather hear Mr. Mullen." €8 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ' He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap of the mill. For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For God's sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I find in being spiteful when you won't strike back?" "I'll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever." "I wouldn't have said it if I'd known you'd take it so quietly." "Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the hopper?" "I shouldn't have cared — it would have been better than your expression at this minute. It's all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with Judy Hatch, as I told you to." "Don't worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can't help despising a man just as soon as he happens to love you." "I wonder if that's true?" she said a little sadly, turning away from him until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow, "I've seen men like that as soon as they were sure of their wives, and I've hated them for it." "What I can't understand," he pursued, not with- out bitterness, "is why in thunder a man or a woman who isn't married should put up with it for an instant?" At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where he bent over the meal trough. THE MILL eg "The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except grandfather," she said, "but I hate love-making. When I see that look in a man's face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike out and kill. My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose." "I know it isn't yovu- fault, Molly, and yet, and yet—" She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife. "I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel," she said. A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate self-reproach why she had yielded to pity.? She had felt sorry for Abel, and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her. "Only I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so rough and fierce that he frightened me. I suppose most girls like that kind of thing, but I don't, and I shan't, if I live to be a hundred. I've got no belief in it — I've got no belief in anything, that is the trouble. I'm twisted out of shape, hke the crooked sycamore by the mill-race." A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came the rumble of approaching wheels 70 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH itt the turnpike. As she climbed the low rail fence which divided the com-kjids from the highway, she met the old family carriage from^^ Jordan's Journey returning with the two ladies on the rear seat. The younger, a stiU pretty woman of fifty years, with shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner's physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle patronage, if she would ride with the driver? "Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it's only a quarter of a mile and I don't mind the walk." "We've brought an overcoat — Kesiah and I — a good thick one, for your grandfather. It worried us last winter that he went so Ughtly clad during the snowstorms." Molly's face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure. "Oh, thank you, thank you!" she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant politeness. "I've been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates to spend money on himself." Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conver- sation, with the scowling look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay's salts. She was one of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end for which woman was formed. As her very right to existence lay in her possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the frustration of it by circumstances, had deprived her^ almost from the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for beings THE MILL 71 Her small, short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in having permitted herself to be born. "Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly," said Mrs. Gay, in a flutter of emotion. "Have you had a glimpse of him yet?" The girl nodded. "He took supper at o\ir house the night he got here." "It was such a surprise. Was he looking .well?" "Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you know." "Ah, I forgot. Are you sure you won't get in, child.'' Well, drive on, Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage." Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plod- ding obstinately after the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust tiiat floated after the wheels. CHAPTER VI TREATS or THE LADIEs' SPHERE As THE carriage rolled up the drive, there was a flutter of servants between the white columns, and Abednego, the old butler, pushed aside the pink-tur- baned maids and came down to assist his mistress to alight. "Take the bird cage, Abednego, I've bought a new canary," said Mrs. Gay, "Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas. " She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this help- lessness was expressed in every lovely line of her figure. The most casual observer would have dis- cerned that she dominated not by force, but by senti- ment, that she had surrendered all rights in oirder to grasp more effectively at all privileges. She was clinging and small and delicate, and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united in an irresist- ible appeal to the emotions. "Where is Jonathan.?" she asked, "I hoped he would welcome me." "So I do, dearest mother — so I do," replied the young man, running hurriedly down the steps and slipping his arm about her. "You came a minute or two earlier than I expected you, or I should have met you in the drive. " Half supporting, half carrying her, he led the way 72 TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE 73 into the house and placed her on a sofa in the long drawing-room. " I am afraid the journey has been too much for you, " he said tenderly. "Shall I tell Abednego to bring you a glass of wine. " "Kesiah will mix me an egg and a spoonful of sherry, dear, she knows just how much is good for me. " Kesiah, still grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister. In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in little hard, flat curls, as though an arti- ficial ugliness were less reprehensible in her sight than an artificial beauty. In the midst of the long room flooded with sun- shine, the little lady reclined on her couch and sipped gently from the glass Kesiah had handed her. The tapestried furniture was all in soft rose, a little faded from age, and above the high white wainscoting on the plastered walls, this same delicate colour was re- flected in the rich brocaded gowns in the family por- traits. In the air there was the faint sweet scent of cedar logs that burned on the old andirons. "So you came all the way home to see your poor useless mother," murmured Mrs. Gay, shielding her cheek from the firelight with a peacock hand-screen. "I wanted to see for myself how you stand it down here — and, by Jove, it's worse even than I imagined ! 74 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH How the deuce have you managed to drag out twenty years in a wilderness like this among a tribe of bar- barians? " "It is a great comfort to me, dear, to think that I came here on your uncle's account and that I am only following his wishes in making the pla<« Hiy home. He loved the perfect quiet and restfnlness of it." "-Quiet! With that population of roosters making tie dawn hideous! I'd choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard. " "You aren't used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are trying. " "Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?" "One doesn't have amusement when one is a hope- less invalid; one has only medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or two in tiie summer. I can't walk, of course, because of my heart, and as there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise — (poor dear mother used to say that the difference be- tween the liver of a lady and that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the other did) — but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health supers when she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temp>er and walked a mile or two in the road, but when «he retijmed I was in such a state of nervousness that «he promised me never to leave the lawn a;gain imless a •gentleman was with her." TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE 75 ''"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissiag her hand. Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violetsv drooped over him above the peacock feathers she waved gently before her. "Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too/' she observed, "and I sometimes think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart. " "But she doesn't feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at her. " "She isn't so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to be born a woman. When she was young she had a< perfect mania for drawing, and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter — I can't recall his name though I am sure it began with S — saw one of her sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but of course it was out of the question that a Virginia lady should go off by herself and paint perfectly nude people in a foreign city. There was a dreadful scene, I remem- ber, and Kesiah even wrote to Uncle William Bur- well and asked him to come down and win mother over. He came immediately, for he was the kind- est soul, but, of course, after he understood, he de- cided against it. Why on earth should a girl want to go streaking across the water to study art, he asked, when she had a home she could stay in and men folk who could look after her ? They both / 76 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH told her she made herself ridiculous when she talked of ambition, and as they wouldn't promise her a penny to live on, she was obliged in the end to give up the idea. She nursed mother very faithfully, I must say, as long as she lived, never leaving her a minute night or day for the last year of her illness. Don't mis- judge poor Kesiah, Jonathan, she has a good heart at bottom, though she has always been a little soured on account of her disappointment." "Oh, she was cut out for an old maid, one can see that," rejoined Gay, only half interested in the history of his aunt, for he seldom exerted his imagination except under pressure of his desires, "and, by the way, mother, what kind of man was my Uncle Jonathan?" "The dearest creature, my son, heaven alone knows what his loss meant to me! Such consideration! Stxch generosity ! Such delicacy ! He and Kesiah never got on well, and this was the greatest distress to me. " "Did you ever hear any queer stories about him? Was he — well — ah, wild, would you say? " "Wild? Jonathan, I am surprised at you! Why, during the twenty years that I knew him he never let fall so much as a single indelicate word in my presence. " " I don't mean that exactly — but what about his relations with the women around here?" She flinched as if his words had struck her a blow, "Dear Jonathan, your poor uncle would never have asked such a question. " Above the mantel there was an oil portrait of the elder Jonathan at the age of three, painted astride the back of an animal that disported the shape of a lion under the outward covering of a lamb. TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE 77 "Ah, that's just it," commented Gay, while his inquiring look hung on the picture. After a minute j'of uncertainty, his curiosity triumphed over his discretion, and he put, in an apologetic tone, an equally indelicate question. " What about old Reuben Merryweather's grainddaughter? Has she been pro- vided for?" For an instant Mrs. Gay looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with silver. Those eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, "Oh, be careful, I am so sensitive. Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not hurt me. Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever entered." The quaint peacock screen, brought from China by old Jonathan, cast a shadow on her cheek, which was flushed to the colour of a faded rose leaf. "Yes, the girl is an orphan, it is very sad," she replied, and her tone added, "but what can I do about it? I am a woman and should know nothing of such matters!" "Was she mentioned in my uncle's will, do you remember?" His handsome, well-coloured face had taken a sud- den firmness of outline, and even the sagging flesh of his chin appeared to harden with the resolve of the moment. Across his forehead, under the fine dark hair which had worn thin on the temples, three frown- ing wrinkles leaped out as if in response to some in- ward pressure. "There was something — I can't remember just what it was — Mr. Chamberlayne will tell you about 78 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH it when he comes down to-morrow to talk over business with Kesiah. They keep all such things away from me out of consideration for my heart. But I've never doubted for an instant that your uncle did everything that was just and generous in the matter. He sent the girl to a good school in Applegate, I remem- ber, and there was a bequest of some sort, I believe — something that she comes into on her twenty-first birthday." " She isn't twenty-one then, is she.? " "I don't know, Jonathan, I really can't remember." "Perhaps Aunt Kesiah can tell me something about her?" "Oh, she can and she will — but Kesiah is so vio- lent in all her opinions! I had to ask her never to mention Brother Jonathaai's name to me because she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about him." She leaned back wearily as if the Conversation had exhausted her, while the peacock firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white fur rug at her feet. "If you'll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I'll go upstairs for a rest, " she said gently, yet with a veiled reproach. "The journey tired me, but I forgot it in the pleasure of seeing you. " All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom, and between them, with several solicitious maids in attendance, they carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace. An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozmg, she went, for the first time TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE 79 since her return, into her own bedroom, and stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the habit of those about her to forget her existence j except when she was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such omissions, she had ceased, even in her thoughts, to pass judgment upon them. In her youth she had rebelled fi^ercely — rebelled against nature, against the imiverse, against the fundamental injustice that divided her sister's lot from her own.. GiCTierations of ancestors had bred in her the belief that woman existed only to win love or to bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, aU combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these — some external shaping of clay — had unfitted her for the piirpose for whidi she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any self- expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither away in the hot- house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from, which she had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate teadrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. Tlie power of revolt was the gift of youith. Middle-age could put forth: only a feeble and ineffectual resistance 80 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH — words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's advancement — a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her — yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read coimt- less novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman who grasped success- fully the right to live, was as lavishly endowed as her elder sister who had petitioned merely for the privi- lege to love. The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been — a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism con- spired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as she — but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and with abun- dant braids of hair. A false front riot only extinguished sentiment — it put an end to rebellion. "Miss Kesiah, dar's Marse Reuben in de hall en he sez he'd be moughty glad ef'n you'd step down en speak a wud wid 'im. " "In a moment, Abednego. I must take off my things." Withdrawing the short jet-headed pins from her bon- net with a hiuried movement, she stabbed them into the bard round pincushion on her bureau, and after throw- TOEATS OP THE LADIES' SPHERE 81 ing a knitted cape over her shoulders, went down the wide staircase to where Reuben awaited her in the hall. As she walked she groped slightly and peered ahead of her with her nervous, short-sighted gaze. At the foot of the staircase, the old man was stand- ing in a patient attitude, resting upon his wooden leg, which was slightly in advance of his sound one. His fine bearded face might have been the face of a scholar, except for its roughened skin and the wistful, dog- like look in the eyes. In response to Kesiah's greeting, he explained that he had come at once to acknowledge the gift of the overcoat and to "pay his respects." "I am glad you like it," she answered, and because her heart was swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making herself ridiculous prevented her always from making herself understood. "It will be very useful to me, ma'am, when I am out of doors in bad weather," he replied, wondering if he had offended her by his visit. "We got it for that purpose," and becoming more embarrassed, she added hastily, "How is the red cow, Mr. Merryweather?" "She mends slowly, ma'am. I am givin' her bran mash twice a day and keepin' her in the barn. Have you noticed the hogs? They're a fine lot this year and we'll get some good hams at the killin'. " "No, I hadn't looked at them, but I've been struck with the corn you've brought up recently from the low grounds." For a minute or two they discussed the crops, both 82 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH painfully ill at ease and uncertain whether to keep up the conversation or to let it trail off into silence. Then at the first laboured pause, Reuben repeated his message to Mrs. Gay and stamped slowly out of the back door into the arms of Jonathan, who was about to enter, "Halloo! So it's you!" exclaimed the young man in the genial tone which seemed at once to dispel Kesiah's embarrassment. "I've wanted to talk wiii you for two day's, but I shan't detain you now for I happen to know that your granddaughter is hunting for you already. I'll come tip to-morrow and chat awhile in the bam. " Reuben bowed and passed on, a little flattered by the other's intimate tone, while Gray followed Kesiah into the drawing-room, and put a question to her which had perplexed him since the night of his arrival. "Aunt Xesiah, was old Reuben Merry weather on friendly terms with my uncle.''" She started and looked at him with a nervous twitching of her eyelids. "I think so, Jonathan, at least they appeared to be. Old Reuben was bom on the place when the Jor- dans still lived here, and I am sure your unde felt that it would be unjust to remove him. Then they fought through the war together and were both danger- oudy wounded in the same charge. " He gazed at her a moment in silence, narrowing his intense blue eyes which were so like the eyes of Reu- ben's granddaughter. "Did my uncle show any particular interest in the girl?" he inquired, and added a little bitterly. TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE 83 "It's Bot fair ta me tkat I shouldni't know just where I am standing. " " Yes» he did show a particular interest in her and was anxious that she should be educated above her station. She was even sent off to a boaxdingrsehool in Applegate, but she ran away during the middle of the second session and came home. Her grand- father was ill with pneumonia, and she is sincerely devoted to him, I believe." " Was there any mention of her in Uncle Jonathan's will?" "None whatever. He left instruetions with Mr. Chamberlaynci however, which are to be made known next April on Molly's twenty-first birthday. It is all rathfflr mysterious, but we only know that he owned considerable property in the far West, which he left away from us and in trust to hfe lawyer. I suppose he thought your mother would not be aKve when the girl came of age; for the doctors had agreed that she had only a few years to Kve at the utmost." '*\^at in the devil did my poor mother have to do with it?" She hesitated an instant, positively scowling in her perplexity. " Only that I think — I believe your Uncle Jona- than would have married the girl's mother — Janet Merry weather — but ias your mother's, influence. " "How in the deuce I You mean he feared the effect on her?" "He broke it to her once — his intention, I mean — and for several days afterwards we quite despaired of her life. It was then that she made him promise — 84 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH he was quite distracted with remorse for he adored Angela — that he would never allude to it again while she was alive. We thought then that it would be only for a short while, but she has outlived him ten years in spite of her heart disease. One can never rely on doctors, you know. " "But what became of the girl — of Janet Merry- weather, I mean?" "That was the sad part, though it happened so long ago — twenty years — that people have almost forgot- ten. It seems that your uncle had been desperate about her for a time — before Angela came to live with him — and Janet had counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind — perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her char- acteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns in the neighbourhood. " "Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but, I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation to Janet Merry- weather and to his brother's widow?" "There was a difference, of course. Janet Merry- weather could hardly have had Angela's sensitive feel- ings — or at least it's a comfort to think that, even if it happens not to be true. Before the war one hardly ever heard of that class, mother used to say, it was so humble and unpresuming — but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has overrun everything and most of the land about here has passed into its possession. " TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE 85 She checked herself breatlilessly, surprised and in- dignant that she should have expressed her feelings so openly. "Yes, I dare say," returned Jonathan — "The miller Revercomb is a good example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of — a kind of new plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes. Less than half a century produced him, but he's here to stay, of that I am positive. After all, why shouldn't he, when we get down to the question? He — or the stock he represents, of course — is al- ready getting hold of the soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as politically, I suppose. We can't hold on, the rest of us — we're losing grip — and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wher- ever it comes from. " " Ah, it's just that — pluck — but put the miller in the crucible and you'll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-ofiice — she was one of the real Carters, you know — would hardly bend her head. " "Perhaps you're right," he answered, and laughed shortly under his breath, "but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics of that little fire- brand, Molly Merryweather?" CHAPTER VII GAY RT7SHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in his uncle's old room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the grave- yard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled into a frosty stillness at daybreak. "By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay, with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves more of a nuisance." Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion, he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather.as he had thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt, somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a hole." "One 86 GAY SECURES A KISS 87 can't aeknoiwkdge the girl, I suppose, thou^, for the matter of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgmentjbut a c(mdemnation." With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as a partridge,, rising with a gentle whir from the red-toppedi orchard, grass in front of him, skimmed hghtly iato the golden pathway the sun made through the mist.> At the same instant a shot raog out close beside him, and the bind dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung fromi hia shoulder, and at his heel- a pack of fox-hounds followed with muzzles: held close to the moisli ground. For a minute Gay's angry astonishment kept him rooted to the spot. Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the ancient Virginian acceptajuce of the bird as the right of the hunter, but a lawless irfringement of his newly acquired sense of possession. "You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "sa you're not only shootiogmy partridges, but you're actuaUy shooting them before my eyes." "What's that?" asked Archie, only haU under- standing the words, "were you after that bird yourself, then?" " Well, rather, my friend^ and I'E trouble you at the same time to hand over that string on your shoulder." "Hand them over? Well, I like that! Why,. I shot tkem." "But yon shot, them on my land, didn't you?" "What in the devil do you mean by that? My 88 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH folks have shot over these fields before yours were ever heard of about here. A bird doesn't happen to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your pasture." "Do you mean to tell me that you don't respect a man's right to his game?" "A man's game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon. This land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we're not going to keep oflE of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he's got a better right to it." The v ?sumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original poaching had done. To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of his own game by a hand- some barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of humour, if it had not enraged him. "All the same I give you fair warning," he retorted, "that the next time I find you trespassing on my land, I'll have the law after you." "The law — bosh! Do you think I'm afraid of it?" Somewhere at the back of Gay's brain, a curtain was drawn, and he saw as clearly as if it were painted in water colour, an English landscape and a poacher, who had been caught with a stolen rabbit, humbly pulling the scant locks on his forehead. Well, this was one of the joys of democracy, doubtless, and he was in for the rest of them. These people had got the upper hand certainly, as Aunt Kesiah had complained. "If you think I'll tamely submit to open robbery by such insolent rascals as you, you're mistaken, young man," he returned. GAY SECURES A KISS 89 The next instant he sprang aside and knocked up Archie's gun, which had been levelled at him. The boy's face was white under his sunburn, and the feathers on the partridges that hung from his shoulder trembled as though a strong wind were blowing. "Rascal, indeed!" he stammered, and spat on the ground after his words in the effort to get rid of the taste of them, "as if the whole county doesn't know that you're another blackguard like your uncle before you. Ask any decent woman in the neighbourhood if she would have been seen in his company!" His rage choked him suddenly, and before he could speak again the other struck him full in the mouth. " Take that and hold your tongue, you young savage !" said Gay, breathing hard as he drew back his arm. Then as he stooped for his gun, which he had laid down, a shot passed over his head and whizzed lightly across the meadow. "The next time I'll take better aim!" called Archie» turning away. "I'll shoot as straight as the man who gave your uncle his deserts down at Poplar Spring!'* Whistling to his dogs, he ran on for a short distance j then vaulting the rail fence, he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream which flowed down from the mill. While he watched him the anger in Gay's face faded slowly into disgust. "Now I've stirred up a hornet's nest," he thought, annoyed by his impetuosity. "Who, I wonder, was the fellow, and what a fool — what a tremendous fool I have been!" With his love of ease, of comfort, of popularity, the situation appeared to him to be almost intolerable^ 90 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH The whole swarm would be at his head now, he sup- posed; for instead of silencing the angry buzzing around his uncle's memory, he had probably raised a tumult which would deafen his own ears before it was over. Here, as in other hours and scenes, his resolve had acted less as a restraint than as a spur which had impelled him to the opposite extreme of conduct. Still rebuking his impulsiveness, he shouldered his gun again, and followed slowly in the direction Archie had taken. The half bared willows by the brook distilled sparkling drops as the small red sun rose higher over the meadows, and it was against the shimmering background of foliage, that the figure of Blossom Revercomb appeared suddenly out of the mist. Her scant skirts were lifted from the cobwebs on the grass, and her mouth was parted while she called softly after a cow that had strayed down to the willows. "You, sir!" she exclaimed, and blushed enchantingly under the pearly dew that covered her face. "One of otu: cows broke pasture in the night and we think she must have crossed the creek and got over on your side of the meadow. She's a wonderful jumper. We'll have to be hobbling her soon, I reckon." "Do you milk?" he asked, charmed by the mental picture of so noble a dairymaid. "Except when grandma is well enough. You can't leave it to the darkies because they are such terrible slatterns. Put a cow in their hands and she's sure to go dry before three months are over." She looked up at him, while the little brown mole played hide and seek with a dimple. GAY SECURES A KISS 91 "Have you ever been told that you are beautiful. Miss Keren-happuch?" he inquired with a laugh. Her pale eyes, like frosted periwinkles, dropped softly beneath his gaze. "How can you think so, sir, when you have [seen so many city ladies?" "I've seen many, but not one so lovely as you are this morning witli the frost on your cheeks." "I'm not dressed. I just slip on any old thing to go milking." "It's not the dress, that doesn't matter — though I can imagine you in trailing purple velvet with a trimming of sable." An illumination shone in her face, as if her soul had suddenly blossomed. "Purple velvet, and what else did you say, sir?'* she questioned. "Sable — fur, you know, the richest, softest, queenliest fur there is." "I'd Uke to see it," she rejoined. "Well, it couldn't improve you! — remember always that the fewer fine clothes you have on the better. Tell me. Blossom," he added, touching her shoulder, "have you many lovers?" She shook her head. "There are so few about here that any woman would look at." "I've been told that there's an engaging young rector." "Mr. Mullen — well, so he is — and he preaches the most beautiful sermons. But he fancies Molly Merryweather, they say, like all the others, though he won't be likely to marry anybody from around here, I suppose." 92 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Her drawling Southern tongue lent a charm, he felt, to her naive disclosures. "Like all the others?" he repeated smiling. "Do you mean to tell me that Reuben's piquant little granddaughter is a greater belle in the neighbourhood than you are?" "She has a way with them," said Blossom sweetly. ' 'I don't know what it is and I am sure she is a good, kind girl — but I sometimes think men like her be- cause she is so contrary. My Uncle Abel has almost lost his head about her, yet she plays fast and loose with him in the crudest fashion." "Oh, well, she'll burn her fingers some day, at her own fire, and then she'll be sorry." "I don't want her to be sorry, but I do wish she'd try just a little to be kind — one day she promises to nuirry Abel and the next you'd think she'd taken a liking to Jim Halloween." "Perhaps she has a secret sentiment for the rector?" he suggested, to pique her. "But I don't believe he will marry anybody around here," she insisted, while the coloiu: flooded her face. The discovery that she had once cherished — that she still cherished, perhaps, a regard for the young clergyman, added a zest to the adventure, while it freed his passion from the single restraint of which he had been aware. It was not in his nature to encourage a chivalrous desire to protect a woman who had betrayed, however innocently, a sentiment for another man. When the Reverend Mr. Mullen inadvertently introduced an emotional triangle, he had changed the situation from one of mere sentimental dalliance into direct pursuit. By some law of reflex action. GAY SECURES A KISS 93 known only to the male mind at such instants, the first sign that she was not to be won threw him into the mental attitude of the chase. "Are the fascinations of your Mr. Mullen confined to the pulpit?" he inquired after a moment, "or does he wear them for the benefit of the heterodox when he walks abroad?" "Oh, he's not my Mr. Mullen, sir," she hastened to explain though her words trailed off into a sound that was suspiciously like a sigh. "Molly Merry weather's Mr. Mullen, then?" "I don't think he cares for Molly — not in that way." "Are you quite as sure that Molly doesn't care for him in that way?" "She couldn't or she wouldn't be so cruel. Then she never goes to lectures or Bible classes or mission societies. She is the only girl in the congregation who never makes him anything to wear. Don't you think," she asked anxiously, "that if she really cared about him she would have done some of these things?" "From my observation of ladies and clergymen," replied Gay seriously, "I should think that she would most likely have done all of them." She appeared relieved, he thought, by the warmth of his protestation. Actually Mr. Mullen had con- tributed a decided piquancy to the episode. "I'm afraid. Blossom," he said after a moment, "that I am beginning to be a little jealous of the Reverend Mullen. By the way, what is the Christian name of the paragon?" "Orlando, sir." "Ye Gods! The horror grows! Describe him to 94 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH me, but paint him mildly if you wish me to sur- Vive it. For a minute she thought very hard, as though patiently striving to invoke a mental image. "He's a little taller than you, but not quite — not quite so broad." "Thank you, you have put it mildly." "He has the most beautiful curly hair — real chestnut — that grows in two peaks high on his fore- head. His eyes are grey and his mouth is small, with the most perfect teeth. He doesn't wear any mous- tache, you see, to hide them, and they flash a great deal when he preaches " "Hold on!" "I beg your pardon, sir." "I mean that I am overcome. I am mentally prostrated before such perfections. Blossom, you are in love with him." "Oh, no, sir; but I do like to watch him in the pulpit. He gesticulates so beautifully." "And now — speak truth and spare not — how do I compare with him? " "Oh, Mr. Jonathan, you are so different!" "Do you imply that I am ugly, Blossom?" " Why, no — not ugly. Indeed I didn't mean that." "But I'm not so handsome as the Reverend Orlando? — now, confess it." She blushed, and he thought her confusion the most charming he had ever seen. "Well, perhaps you aren't quite so — so handsome; but there's something about you, sir," she added eagerly, "that reminds me of him." "By Jove! You don't mean it!" GAY SECURES A KISS 95 "I can't tell just what it is, but it is something. You both look as though jrou'd lived in a city and had learned to wear your Sunday clothes without re- membering that they are your Sunday clothes. Of course, your hair doesn't curl like his," she added honestly, "and I doubt if you'd look nearly so well in the pulpit." "I'm very sure I shouldn't, but Blossom " "What, Mr. Jonathan?" "Do you think you will ever like me as well as you like Mr. Mullen?" His gay and intimate smile awaited her answer, and in the pause, he stretched out his hand and laid it on her large round arm a little above the elbow. The flush deepened in her face, and he felt a slight trembling under his fingers like the breast of a frightened bird. "Blossom," he repeated, half mocking, half tender, "do you think you will ever like me better than you like Mr. Mullen?" At this her rustic pride came suddenly between them, and withdrawing her arm from his clasp, she stepped out of the bridle path into the wet orchard grass that surrounded them. "I've known him so much longer," she replied. "And if you know me longer will you like me better. Blossom?" Then as she still drew back, he pressed nearer, and spoke her name again in a whisper. "Blossom — Blossom, are you afraid of me? Do you think I would hurt you?" The gentleness in his voice stayed her flight for an instant, and in that instant, as she looked up at him, he stooped quickly and kissed her mouth. 96 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "What a damned ass I've made of myself," he thought savagely, when she broke from him and fled over the mill brook into the Revercombs' pasture beyond. She did not look back, but sped as straight as a frightened hare to the covert; and by this brilliant, though unconscious coquetry, she had wrested the victory from him at the moment when it had appeared to fall too easily into his hands. "Well, it's all right now. I'll take better care in the future," he thought, his self-reproach extinguished by the assurance that, after all, he had done nothing that justified the intrusion of his conscience. "By Jove, she's a beauty — but she's not my kind all the same," he added as he strolled leisurely homeward — for like many persons whose moral standard exceeds immeasurably their ordinary rule of conduct, he cherished somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain an image of perfection closely related to the type which he found least alluring in reality. Humanly tolerant of those masculine weaknesses he shared, he had erected mentally a pinnacle of virtue upon which he exacted that a frailer being should maintain an equilibrium. A pretty woman, it was true, might go at a merry pace provided she was not related to him, but he required that both his mother and his aunt should be above suspicion. In earlier days he had had several affairs of sentiment with ladies to whom he declined to bow if he happened to be walking with a member of his family; and this fine discrimi- nation was characteristic of him, for it proved that he was capable of losing his heart in a direction where he would refuse to lift his hat. At the late breakfast to which he returned, he GAY SECURES A KISS 97 found Mr. Chamberlayne, who had ridden over from Applegate to consult with Kesiah. In appearance the lawyer belonged to what is called "the old school," and his manner produced an effect of ostentation which was foreign to his character as a Christian and a gentleman. His eyebrows, which were still dark and thick, hung prominently over his small, sparkling eyes behind gold rimmed spectacles, while a lock of silver hair was brushed across his forehead with the romantic wave which was fashionable in the period when Lord Byron was the favourite poet. Kindness and something more — something that was almost a touching innocence, looked from his face. "It is a good world — I've always found it to be a good world, and if I've ever heard anything against it, I've refused to believe it," his look seemed to say. All through breakfast he rambled on after his amiable habit — praising the food, praising the flowers, praising the country, praising the universe. The only creature or object he omitted to praise was Kesiah — for in his heart he regarded it as an outrage on the part of Providence that a woman should have been created quite so ugly. While he talked he kept his eyes turned away from her, gazing abstractedly through the window or at a portrait of Mrs. Gay, painted in the first year of her marriage, which hung over the sideboard. In the mental world which he inhabited all women were fair and fragile and endowed with a qual- ity which he was accustomed to describe as "solace." When occasionally, as in the case of Kesiah, one was thrust upon his notice, to whom by no stretch of the imagination these graces could be attributed, he dis- posed of the situation by the simple device of gazing m THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH above her head. In his long and intimate acquaint- ance, he had never looked Kesiah in the face, and he never intended to. He was perfectly aware that if he were for an instant to forget himself so far as to •contemplate her features, he should immediately lose all patience with her. No woman, he felt, had the right to affront so openly a man's ideal of what the «ex should be. When he spoke of her behind her back it was with indignant sympathy as "poor Miss Kesiah," or "that poor good soul Kesiah Blount" — for in spite of a natural bent for logic, and more than forty years of sedulous attendance upon the law, he har- boured at the bottom of his heart an unreasonable -conviction that Kesiah's plainness was, somehow, the xesult of her not having chosen to be pretty. "Any sport, Jonathan.?" he inquired cheerfully, while he buttered his waflBes. "If I scared up one Molly Cotton-tail out of the briars I did at least £fty." "No, I didn't get a shot," replied Gay, "but I met a poacher on my land who appeared to have been more successful. There seems to be absolutely no respect for a man's property rights in this part of the country. The fellow actually had the impudence to jstop and bandy words with me." "Well, you mustn't be too hard on him. His ancestors, doubtless, shot over your fields for genera- tions, and he'd probably look upon an attempt to enforce the game laws as an infringement of his privileges." "Do you mean that the landowner is utterly un- protected?" "By no means — go slow — go slow — you might GAY SECURES A KISS 99 search the round globe, I believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbom-s. But they've always been taught, you see,, to regard the bird in the air as belonging to the man with the gun. On these large estates game was so plentiful in the old days and pot-hunters, as they call them, so few, that it didn't pay a man to watch out for his interest. Now that the birds are getting scarce, the majority of farmers in the State are having their lands posted, but your uncle was too little of a sportsman to concern himself in the matter." "Well, I knocked a tooth out of the fellow, so the whole county will be after me like a pack of hounds, I suppose. I wonder who he was, by the way — young, good looking, rather a bully?" "The description fits a Revercomb. As they are your next neighbours it was probably the miller or his brother." "I know the miller, and it wasn't he — but when I come to think of it, the youngster had that same rustic look to him. By Jove, I am sorry it was a Revercomb," he added under his breath. A frown had settled on the face of the old gentleman, and he poured the syrup over his buckwheat cakes with the manner of a man who is about to argue a case for the defence when his natural sympathies are with the prosecution. "They are an irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave 100 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH the sentence in his mind unspoken while they remained in her presence. A Kttle later, when the two men were smoking in tie library, Gay brought the conversation back again to the point at which the lawyer had so hastily dropped it. "Am I likely, then, to have trouble with the Rev- ercombs?" he asked, with a disturbing memory of Blossom's flaxen head under the hooded shawl. "It's not improbable that the family will take up the matter. These country folk are fearful partisans, you see. However, it may lead to nothing worse than the miller's refusing to grind your corn or forbidding you to use the bridle path over his pasture." "Had my uncle any friction in that quarter when he lived here?" Mr. Chamberlayne's cigar had gone out while he talked, and striking a match on a little silver box, he watched the thin blue flame abstractedly an instant before he answered. "Were you ever told," he inquired, "that there was some talk of arresting Abner Revercomb before the coroner's jury agreed on a verdict?" "Abner? He's the eldest of the brothers, isn't he? No, I hadn't heard of it." "It was only the man's reputation for uprightness, I believe, that prevented the arrest. The Rever- combs are a remarkable family for their station in life, and they derive their ability entirely from their mother, who was one of the Hawtreys. They belong to the new order — to the order that is rapidly forg- ing to the surface and pushing us dilapidated aristo- crats out of the way. These people have learned a GAY SECURES A KISS 101 lot in the last few years, and they are learning most of all that the accumulation of wealth is the real secret of dominance. When they get control of the money, they'll begin to strive after culture, and acquire a smattering of education instead. It's astonishing, perhaps, but the -fact remains that a reputable, hard- working farmer like our friend the miller, with his primitive little last century grist-mill, has probably greater influence in the State to-day than you have, for all your two thousand acres. He has intelligence enough to go to the legislature and make a fair showing, if he wants to, and I don't believe that either of us could stand in the race a minute against him." "Well, he's welcome to the doubtful honour! But the thing that puzzles me is why in thunder his brother Abner should have wanted to shoot my uncle?" "It seems — "the lawyer hesitated, coughed and glanced nervously at the door as if he feared the intru- sion of Kesiah — "it seems he was a lover — was en- gaged in fact to Janet Merry weather before — before she attracted your uncle's attention. Later the engage- ment was broken, and he married a cousin in a fit of temper, it was said at the time. There was always ill blood after this, it appeared, and on the morning of your uncle's death Abner was seen crossing the pasture from Poplar Spring with his gun on his shoulder." "It's an ugly story all round," remarked Gay quietly, "and I wish to heaven that I were out of it. How has my poor mother stood it?" "She has known very little about it," Mr. Chamber- layne answered, while his jutting eyebrows twitched nervously as he turned away. " Your mother, my dear 102 THE MILLER OP OLD CHURCH boy, is one of those particularly angelic characters from whose presence even the thought of evil is banished. You have only to look into her face to discern how pure and spotless she has kept her soul. My old friend Jonathan was very devoted to her. She represented, indeed, the spiritual influence in his life, and there was no one on earth whose respect or affection he valued so highly. It was his considera- tion for her alone that prevented him from making a most unfortunate marriage." "The girl died insane, didn't she?" "It was a distressing — a most distressing case; but we must remember, in rendering our verdict, that if Janet Merryweather had upheld the principles of her sex, it would never have happened." "We'll rest it there, then — but what of her daughter.'' The child could hardly have been accessory before the fact, I suppose?" An expression of suffering patience came into the old gentleman's face, and he averted his gaze as he bad done before the looming countenance of Kesiah. "Your uncle rarely spoke to me of her," he answered, "but I have reason to know that her existence was a constant source of distress to him. He was most anxious both to protect your mother and to provide generously for the future of Janet's daughter." "Yet I understand that there was no mention of her in his will." "This omission was entirely on your mother's ac- count. The considerable property — representing a third of his entire estate — which was left in trust to me for a secret purpose, will go, of course, to the girl. In the last ten years this property has practically GAY SECURES A KISS 103 doubled in value, and Molly will take possession of the income from it when she reaches her twenty-first birthday. The one condition is that at Reuben's death she shall live with your aunt." "Ah," said Jonathan, "I begin to see." "At the time, of course, he believed that your mother would survive him only a few months, and his eflPorts to shield her from any painful discoveries extended even after his death. His wish was that the girl should be well educated and prepared for any change in her circumstances — but unfortunately she has proved to be rather a wilful young person, and it has been impossible entirely to fulfil his intentions with regard to her. Ah, he wasn't wise always, poor Jonathan, but I never doubted that he meant well at bottom, however things may have appeared. His anxiety in the case of your mother was very beautiful, and if his plans seem to have miscarried, we must lay the blame after all, on the quality of his judgment, not of his heart." "And the girl will be twenty-one next April, I am told.?" -fs "Her birthday is the seventeenth, exactly ten years from the date of Jonathan's death." CHAPTER VIII SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL At dusk that evening the miller, who had spent the day in Applegate, stopped at Bottom's Ordinary on his way home, and received a garbled accoimt of the quarrel from the farmers gathered about the hospitable hearth in the public room. The genius of personality had enabled Betsey Bottom to hold open doors to the traveller long after the wayside tavern in Virginia had passed from the road and the one certain fact relating to the chance comer was that he never came. By combining a store with a public house, she managed still to defy the progress of time as well as the absence of guests. "Thank the Lord) I've never been one to give in to changes!" it was her habit to exclaim. The room was full of tobacco smoke when Abel entered, and as he paused, in order to distinguish the row of silhouettes nodding against the ruddy square of the fireplace, Adam Doolittle's quavering voice floated to him from a seat in the warmest corner. The old man was now turning ninety, and he had had, on the whole, a fortunate life, though he would have indignantly repudiated the idea. He was a fair type of the rustic of the past generation — slow of move- ment, keen of wit, racy of speech. "What's this here tale about Mr. Jonathan 104 SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL 105 knockin' Archie down an' settin' on him, Abel?" he inquired. "Ain't you got yo' hand in yet, seein' as you've been spiKn' for a fight for the last fortnight?" "I hadn't heard of it," replied Abel, his face flush- ing. "What in hell did he knock Archie down for?" "Jest for shoo tin' a few birds — for nothin' on earth but shootin' a few birds that might as well have been flying' about on yo' land as on his, if thar minds had been set over toward you." "Do you mean that Mr. Jonathan got into a quarrel with him for hunting on his land? Why, we shot over those fields for a hundred years before the first damned Gay ever came here." "So we have — so we have, but it seems we ain't a-goin' to do so any longer if Mr. Jonathan can find a way to prevent it. Archie was down here jest a minute or two arter you went by this momin', an' he was swearin' like thunder, with a busted lip an' a black eye." A smarting sensation passed over Abel, as though the change to the warm room after the cold outside were stinging his flesh. "Well, I wish I had been there," he retorted, "some- body else would have been knocked down and sat on if that had happened." "Ah, so I said — so I said," chuckled old Adam. "Thar ain't many men with sech a hearty stomach for trouble, I was jest sayin' to Solomon." Bending over the fire, he lifted a live ember between two small sticks, and placing it in the callous palm of his hand, blew softly on it an instant before he lighted his pipe. "What goes against my way of thinkin'," remarked 106 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Betsey Bottom, wiping a glass of cider on her checked apron before she handed it to Abel, "is that so peace- able lookin' a gentleman as Mr. Jonathan should begin to start a fuss jest as soon as he lands in the midst of us. Them plump, soft-eyed males is generally inclined to mildness whether they be men or cattle." " 'Taint nothin' on earth but those foreign whims he's brought back an' is tryin' to set workin' down here," said Solomon Hatch. "If we don't get our backs up agin 'em in time, we'll find presently we don't even dare to walk straight along the turnpike when we see him comin'. A few birds, indeed! — did anybody ever hear tell of sech doin's? 'Warn't them birds in the air?' I ax, 'an' don't the air belong to Archie the same as to him.'''" "It's because he's rich an' we're po', that he's got a right to lay claim to it," muttered William Ming, a weakly obstinate person, to whose character a glass of cider contributed the only strength. "You'd better hold yo' tongue, suh," retorted his wife, "it ain't yo' air anyway, is it?" "I reckon it's as much mine a^ it's Mr. Jona- than's," rejoined William, who, having taken a double portion, had waxed argumentative. "An' what I reason is that birds as is in the air ain't anybody's except the man's that can bring 'em down with a gun." "That's mo' than you could do," replied his wife, "an' be that whether or no, it's time you were thinkin' about beddin' the grey mule, an' she ain't in the air, anyhow. If I was you, Abel," she con- tinued in a softer tone, "I wouldn't let 'em make me so riled about Mr. Jonathan till I'd looked deep in the matter. It may be that he ain't acquainted SHOWS TWO SroES OF A QUARREL 107 with the custom of the neighbourhood, an' was actin' arter some foolish foreign laws he was used to." "I'll give him warning all the same," said Abel savagely, "that if I ever catch him on my land I'll serve him in the fashion that he served Archie." "You don't lose nothin' by goin' slow," returned Solomon. "Old Adam there is a born fire eater, too, but he knows how to set back when thar's trouble brewin'." "I ain't never set back mo' than was respectable in a man of ninety," croaked old Adam indignantly, while he prodded the ashes in his corncob pipe with his stubby forefinger. "'Tis my j'ints, not my sperits that have grown feeble." "Oh, we all know that you were a gay dog an' a wamin' to the righteous when you were young," re- joined Solomon, in an apologetic manner, "an' it must be a deal of satisfaction to be able to look back on a sinful past when you've grown old and repented. I've been a pious, God-fearing soul from my birth, as you all know, friends, but sad to relate, I ain't found the soKd comfort in a Kfe of virtue that I'd hoped for, an' that's the truth." "The trouble with it, Solomon," replied old Adam, pushing a log back on the andirons with his rough, thick soled boot to which shreds of maniu'e were clinging, "the trouble with it is that good or bad porridge, it all leaves the same taste in the mouth arter you've once swallowed it. I've had my pleasant trespasses in the past, but when I look backward on 'em now, to save my life, I can't remember anything about 'em but some small painful mishap that al'ays went along with 'em an' sp'iled the pleasure. Thar was 108 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH the evening I dressed up in my best clothes an' ran oflf to Applegate to take a yellow haired circus lady, in pink skirts, out to supper. It ought to have been a fine, glorious bit of wickedness to remember, but the truth was that I'd put on a new pair of boots, an' one of 'em pinched so in the toes that I couldn't think of another thing the whole blessed evening. 'Tis al'ays that way in my experience of life — when you glance back or glance befo' 'tis pleasant enough to the eye, but at the moment while you're livin' it thar's al'ays the damn shoe that pinches." "Ah, you're right, you're right, Mr. Doolittle," remarked William Ming, who had lingered in the door- way to follow the conversation. "It's life, that's what it is," commented Solomon, heaving a sigh that burst a button hole in his blue shirt. "An' what's mo' than life, it's marriage. When I see the way some men wear themselves out with wantin' little specks of women, I say to myself over an' over agin, 'Ah, if they only knew that thar ain't nothin' in it except the wantin.' " "Not another thing — not another blessed mite of a thing," agreed William, who had imbibed secretly again behind the back of his wife. "I've known a man to throw himself into the river from sheer love befo' marriage," said Solomon, "an' two weeks arter the woman had taken him, to fall out with her because she'd put too much shortenin' in his pie-crust." "It's all love befo' marriage an' all shortenin' arter- wards," observed Betsey Bottom, with scorn. "I've al'ays noticed in this world that the less men folks have to say for themselves the better case they make of SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL 109 it. When they've spent all thar time sence Adam tryin' to throw dust in the eyes of women,it would be better manners if they'd stop twittin' 'em because they'd succeeded." "True, true, you never spoke a truer word, ma'am, in my acquaintance with you," responded Solomon, with what hasty gallantry he could summon. "I was thinkin' them very things to myself when you men- tioned 'em. Not that anybody could throw dust in yo' eyes, even if he tried to." "Well, it would take mo'n a man to do that, I reckon," she replied, amiably enough, "I saw through 'em early, an' when you've once seen through 'em it's surprisin' how soon the foolishness of men begins to look like any other foolishness on earth." She was listened to with respectful and flattering attention by her guests, who leaned forward with pipes in hand and vacant, admiring eyes on her still comely features. It was a matter of gossip that she had refused half the county, and that her reason for marrying William had been that he wasn't "set," and would be easy to manage. The event had proved the prophecy, and to all appearance it was a perfectly successful mating. Abel was the first to move under her gaze, and rising from his chair by the fire, he took up his hat, and made his way slowly through the group, which parted grudgingly, and closed quickly together. "Take a night to sleep on yo' temper, Abel," called Solomon after him, "and git a good breakfast inside of you befo' you start out to do anything rash. Well, I must be gittin' along, folks, sad as it seems to me. It's strange to think, now ain't it — that when Nannie 110 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH was married to Tom Middlesex an' livin' six miles over yonder at Piping Tree, I couldn't have got over that road too fast on my way to her." "Yoii'd still feel like that, friend, if she were still married to Tom Middlesex," quavered old Adam. " ' Tis the woman we oughtn't to think on that draws us with a hair." "Now that's a case in p'int," replied Solomon, nodding after the vanishing figure of Abel. "All his wits fl'^e in his eyes, as you can tell jest to look at him — aai for sech a little hop-o'-my-thumb female that don't reach nigh up to his shoulder." "I can't see any particular good looks in the gal, myself," remarked Mrs. Bottom, "but then, when it's b'iled down to the p'int, it ain't her, but his own wishes he's chasin'." "Did you mark the way she veered from him to Mr. Jonathan the other day?" inquired William Ming, "she's the sort that would flirt with a scare- crow if thar warn't anything else goin'." "The truth is that her eyes are bigger than her morals, an' I said it the first time I ever seed her," rejoined old Adam. "My taste, even when I was young, never ran to women that was mo' eyes than figger." Still discoursing, they stumbled out into the dusk, through which Abel's large figure loomed ahead of them. "A man that's bom to trouble, an' that of the fightin' kind — as the sparks fly upward," added the elder. As the miller drove out of the wood, the rustle of the leaves under his wheels changed from the soft SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUAEREL 111 murmurs in the moist Hollows to the crisp crackle in the open places. In the west Venus hung silver white over the new moon, and below the star and the crescent a single pine tree stood as clearly defined as if it were pasted on a grey background of sky. Half a mile farther on, where his road narrowed abruptly, a voice hallooed to him as he approached, and driving nearer he discerned dimly a man's figure standing beside a horse that had gone lame. "Halloo, there.'' Have you a light? My horse has got a stone or cast a shoe, I can't make out which it is." Reaching for the lantern under his seat, Abel alighted, and after calling "Whoa!" to his mare, walked a few steps forward to the stationary horse and rider in the dusk ahead. As the light shone on the man and he recognized Jonathan Gay, he hesi- tated an instant, as though uncertain whether to advance or retreat. "If I'd known 'twas you," he observed gruffly, "I shouldn't have been so quick about getting down out of my gig." "Thank you, all the same," rephed Gay in his pleas- ant voice. "It doesn't seem to be a stone, after all," he added. "I'm rather afraid he got a sprain when he stumbled into a hole a yard or two back." Kneeling in the road, Abel lifted the horse's foot, and felt for the injury with a practised hand. "Needs a bandage," he said at last curtly. "I happen to have a bottle of liniment in the gig." The light gUded like a winged insect over the strip of corduroy road, and a minute later the pungent odour of the liniment floated to Gay's nostrils. 112 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Give me anything you have for a compress," re- marked the miller, dropping again on his knees. "Pick a few of those Jimson weeds by the fence and lend me your handkerchief — or a couple of them wotild be still better. There, now, that's the best I can do," he added after a moment. "Lead him slowly and be sure to look where you're going." "I will, thank you — but can you find your way without the lantern?" "Hannah can travel the road in the dark and so can I for that matter. You needn't thank me, by the way. I wouldn't have troubled about you, but I've a liking for horses." "A jolly good thing it was for me that you came up at the instant. I say, Revercomb, I'm sorry it was your brother I got into a row with this morning." "Oh, that's another score. We haven't settled it yet," retorted the miller, as he stepped into his gig. "You've warned us off your land, so I'll trouble you to keep to the turnpike and avoid the bridle path that crosses my pasture." Before Gay could reply, the other had whistled to his mare and was spinning over the flat road into the star-spangled distance. When the miller reached home and entered the kitchen, his mother's first words related to the plight of Archie, who sat sullenly nursing his bruised mouth in one corner. "If you've got any of the Hawtrey blood in yo* veins you'll take sides with the po' boy," she said. "Thar's Abner settin' over thar so everlastin' mealy mouthed that he won't say nothin' mo' to the p'int than that he knew all the time it would happen." SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL 113 "Well, that's enough, ain't it?" growled Abner; "I did know it would happen sure enough from the out- set." "Thar ain't any rodsin' him," observed Sarah, with scorn. "I declar, I believe pa over thar has got mo' sperit in him even if he does live mostly on cornmeal mush." "Plenty of sperit in me — plenty of sperit," chirped grandfather, alert as an aged sparrow that still con- trives to hop stiflBy in the sunshine. "Oh, yes, he's sperit left in him, though he's three years older than I am," remarked grandmother, with bitterness. "He ain't wo' out with work and with child bearin' befo' he was ninety. He ain't bald, he ain't toothless," she concluded passionately, as if each of grandfather's blessings were an additional insult to her. "He can still eat hard food when he wants it." "For pity's sake, be quiet, ma, "commanded Sarah sternly, at which the old woman broke into sobs. "Yes, I must be quiet, but he can still talk," she moaned. "Tell me about it, Archie," said Abel, drawing off his overcoat and sitting down to his supper. "I passed Jonathan Gay in the road and he asked me to bind up his horse's sprain." "He'd be damned befo' I'd bind up a sprain for him!" burst out Archie, with violence. "Met me with a string of partridges this morning and jumped on me, blast him, as if he'd caught me in the act of steal- ing. I'd like to know if we hadn't hunted on that land before he or his rotten old uncle were ever thought of?" 114 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Ah, those were merry days, those were!" piped grandfather. "Used to go huntin' myself when I was yoimg, with Mr. Jordan, an' brought home any day as many fine birds as I could carry. Trained his dogs for him, too." "Thar was al'ays time for him to go huntin'," whimpered grandmother. "What are you goin' to do about it, Abel.?" asked Sarah, turning upon him with the smoking skillet held out in her hand. At the question Blossom Revercomb, who was seated at work under the lamp, raised her head and waited with an anxious, expectant look for the answer. She was embroidering a pair of velvet slippers for Mr. Mullen — a task begun with passion and now ending in weariness. While she listened for Abel's response, her long embroidery needle remained suspended over the toe of the slipper, where it gleamed in the lamp light. "I don't know," replied Abel, and Blossom drew a repressed sigh of relief; "I've just ordered him to keep clear of our land, if that's what you're hintin' at." "If you had the sperit of yo' grandpa you'd have knocked him down in the road," said Sarah angrily. "Yes, yes, I'd have knocked him down in the road," chimed in the old man, with the eagerness of a child. "You can't knock a man down when he asks to borrow yom* lantern," returned Abel, doggedly, on the defensive. "Oh, you caJi't, can't you?" jcCTed Sarah. "AH you'Te good for, I reckon, is to shuck corn or peel potatoes!" SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL 115 For a minute Abel stared at her in silence. "I declare, mother, I don't believe you're any better than a heathen," he remarked sadly at last. "Well, I'm not the kind of Christian you are, any- way," retorted Sarah, "I'd like to know whar you'll find anything in Scripture about not knockin' a man down because he asks you for a lantern. I thought I knew my Bible — but I reckon you are better ac- quainted with it — you an' yo' Mr. Mullen." "Of course, you know your Bible. ; I wasn't meanin' that." "Then if readin' yo' Bible ain't bein' a Christian, I suppose it's havin' curly hair, an' gittin' up in the pulpit an' mincin'. Who are those slippers for, Keren-happuch.'' " "Mr. Mullen, grandma." "Well, if I was goin' to embroider slippers for a minister," taunted Sarah, "I'd take care to choose one that could repeat his Scripture when he was called on." "Ah, 'tis the age, not the man," lamented grand- father, " 'tis an age of small larnin' an' weak-kneed an' mealy mouthed into the bargain. Why, they're actually afeared to handle hell-fire in the pulpit any longer, an' the texts they spout are that tame an' tasteless that 'tis like dosin' you with flaxseed tea when you're needin' tar-water. 'Twas different when I was young an' in my vigour," he went on eagerly, undisturbed by the fact that nobody paid the slightest attention to what he was saying, "for sech was the power and logic of Parson Claymore's sermons that he could convict you of the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost even when you hadn't committed it. A mo' blame- 116 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH less soul never lived than my father, yet I remember one Sunday when parson fixed his eye upon him an' rolled out his stirrin' text 'Thou art the man,' he was so taken by surprise an' suddenness that he just nodded back at the pulpit an' answered, 'Yes, parson, I am, if you'll excuse me.'" "It's a pity thar ain't mo' like Parson Claymore now," remarked Sarah, who had stopped to listen to the concluding words of the anecdote. "Thar ain't vim enough in this generation of preachers to skeer a rabbit." Her profile, with its sparse wave of hair from the forehead, was repeated in grotesque exaggeration on the wall at her back. The iron will in her lent a certain metallic hardness to her features, and her shadow resembled in outline the head on some ancient coin that had lain buried for centuries. Intrenched behind an impregnable self-esteem, she had never conceded a point, never admitted a failure, never accepted a compromise. "It ain't no wonder that a new comer thinks he can knock you down an' set on you for shootin' a few birds," she added, after a moment. "He'll find out I ain't done with him yet," growled Archie, and rising from his seat, he took down his gun and began polishing the barrel with an old yarn stocking of Sarah's. The long needle missed the hole at which Blossom had pointed it, and she looked up with a sullen droop to her mouth. "I reckon Mr. Gay has just as good a right to his things as we have to ours," she said. " Right ! Who wants his right? " flared Archie, turn- SHOWS TWO SIDES OF A QUARREL 117 ing upon her. "You'll say next, I reckon, that he had a right to split my upper lip open if he wanted to." "From the way grandma carries on anybody would think that was what she wanted," persisted Blossom, adhering stubbornly to her point, "she sounds as if she were mad because people ain't everlastingly fighting." "You needn't think I don't see what you're aimin' at, Keren-happuch," rejoined Sarah, who used this name only in moments of anger, "you're tryin' to make me think a grown man can't do anything better than get up in the pulpit an' mouth texts so soft that a babe couldn't cut its teeth on 'em. You've had notions in yo' head about Orlando Mullen ever since he came here, an' you ain't fooled me about 'em." "Thar, thar, don't you begin pesterin' Blossom," interposed Abner, aroused at last from his apathy. "Notions about Mr. Mullen!" repeated Blossom, and though there was a hot flush in her face, her tone was almost one of relief. CHAPTER IX IN WHICH MOLLT FLIRTS On a November morning several weeks later, when the boughs of trees showed almost bare against the sky, Molly Merryweather walked down to Bottom's store to buy a bottle of cough syrup for Reuben, who had a cold. Over the counter Mrs. Bottom, as she was still called from an hereditary fespect for the house rather than for the husband, delivered a good-natured rebuke while she wrapped the bottle in coarse brown paper. The store, which smelt of dry-goods and ginger snaps, was a small square room jutting abruptly out of the bar, from which it derived both its warmth and its dignity. "Even men folks have got the sperit of worms and will turn at last, " she remarked in her cheerful voice, which sounded as if it issued from the feather bed she vaguely resembled. "Let them turn — I can do without them very well, " replied Molly, tossing her head. "Ah, you're young yet, my dear, an' thar's a long road ahead of you. But wait till you've turned forty an' you'll find that the man you throwed over at twenty will come handy, if for nothin' mo' than to fill a gap in the chimney. I ain't standin' up for 'em, mind you, an' I can't remember that I ever heard anything particular to thar credit as a sex — but 118 MOLLY FLIRTS 119 po' things as we allow 'em to be, thar don't seem but one way to git along without wantin' 'em, an' that is to have 'em. It's sartain sure, however, that they fill a good deal mo' of yo' thought when they ain't around than when they are. Why, look at William, now ^— the first time he axed me to marry him, I thought to myself, 'you're slue-footed an' slack-kneed an' addle-headed, an' I wouldn't marry you for a million!' — but the last time, twenty years later, I kept sayin' 'you're still slue-footed an' slack-kneed an' addle-headed an' I'll marry you whether or no.' Twenty years may not change a man for the better, but it does a powerful lot toward persuadin' a woman to put up with the worst!" "Well, best or worst, I've seen enough of marriage, Mrs. Bottom, to know that I shouldn't like it." "I ain't denyin' it might be improved on without hurtin' it — but a single woman's a terrible lonesome body, Molly." "I'm not lonely, while I have grandfather." "He's old an' he ain't got many years ahead of him." "If I lose him I'll go to Applegate and trim hats for a living." "It's a shame, Molly, with the po' miller splittin' his heart over you. " "He'll mend it. They're like that, all of them." "But Mr. Mullen? Ain't he different now, bein' a parson?" "No, he's just the same, and besides he'd always think he'd stooped to marry me. " "Then take Jim Halloween. With three good able- bodied lovers at yo' beck an' call, it's a downright shame to die an old maid jest from pure contrariness. 120 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH It's better arter all, to eat dough that don't rise than to go hungry." A step sounded on the platform outside and a lank, good-looking countryman glanced cautiously in through the crack in the door. Observing Molly, he spat a wad of tobacco over the hitching rail by the steps, and stopped to smooth his straw-coloured hair with the palm of his hand before crossing the thresh- old. ^ "Thar's Jim Halloween now jest as we were speakin' of him," whispered Betsey Bottom, with a nudge at Molly's shoulder. , "Well, if that don't beat all," drawled the young man, in an embarrassed rapture, as he entered. "I was gettin' my horse shod over thar at Tim Mal- lory's, an' I thought to myself that I'd jest drop over an' say 'howdy' to Mrs. Bottom. " "Oh, I reckon you caught a glimpse of red through the door," chuckled Betsey, who was possessed of the belief that it was her Christian duty to further any match, good or bad, that came under her eye. "I must be going, so don't hurry your visit," re- plied Molly, laughing. "Mrs. Hatch has been in bed for a week and I'm on my way to see Judy. " "I'U walk a bit of the road with you if you ain't any serious objection," remarked the lover, preparing to accompany her. "Oh, no, none in the world," she replied demurely, "you may carry my cough syrup." "It ain't for yourself, I hope?" he inquired, with a look of alarm. "No, for grandfather. He caught cold staying in the barn with the red cow. " MOLLY FLIRTS 121 "Well, I'm gkd 'taint for you — I don't like a weak-chested woman." She looked up smiling as they passed the store into the sunken road which led in the direction of Solomon Hatch's cottage. "I did see a speck of red through the crack," he confessed after a minute, as if he were unburdening his conscience of a crime. "You mean you saw my cap or jacket — or maybe my gloves?" " It was yo' cap, an' so I came in. I hope you have no particular objection?" His face had flushed to a violent crimson and in his throat his Adam's apple worked rapidly up and down between the high points of his collar. "I mean," he stammered presently, "that I wouldn't have gone in if I hadn't seen that bit of red through the do'. I suppose I had better tell you, that I've been thinking a great deal about you in the evening when my day's work is over. " "I'm glad I don't interfere with your farming." "That would be a pity, wouldn't it? Do you ever think of me, I wonder, at the same time?" he inquired sentimentally. "I can't tell because I don't know just what that time is, you see." "Well, along after supper generally — particularly if ma has made buckwheat cakes an' I've eaten a hearty meal an' feel kind of cosy an' comfortable when I set down by the fire an' there's nothin' special to do. " "But you see I don't like buckwheat cakes, and I've always something 'special' to do at that hour." "Ah, you don't mean it, do you — about not liking buckwheat cakes? As for the rest, bein' a woman. 122 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH I reckon you would have the washin' up to attend to just at that time. I don't like a woman that sets around idle after supper — an' I'm glad you're one to be brisk an' busy about the house, though I'm sorry you ain't over partial to buckwheat. May I inquire, if you don't object to tellin' me, what is yo' favourite food.?" " It's hard to say — I have so many — bread and jam, I believe. " "I hope you don't think I'm too pressin' on the subject, but ma has always said that there wasn't any better bond for matrimony than the same taste in food. Do you think she's right? " "I shouldn't wonder. She's had experience any- way. " "Yes, that's jest what I tell her — she's had expe- rience an' she ought to know. Pa and she never had a word durin' the thirty years of their marriage, an' she always said she ruled him not with the tongue, but with the fryin' pan. I don't reckon there's a better cook than ma in this part of the country, do you.'" "I'm quite sure there isn't. She has given up her life to it." "To be sure she has — every minute of it, like the woman whose price is above rubies that Mr. Mullen is so fond of preachin' about." For a moment he considered the fact as though impressed anew by its importance. "I'm glad you feel that way, because ma has always stuck out that you had the makin' of a mighty fine cook in you. " "Has she? That was nice of her, wasn't it?" "Well, she wouldn't have said so if she hadn't thought it. It ain't her way to say pleasant things MOLLY FLIRTS 123 when she can help it. You must judge her by her work not by her talk, pa used to say of her. " "She's the kind that doesn't mind taking trouble for you, I know that about her, " replied Molly, gravely. " You're right about that, an' you're the same way, I am sure. I've watched you pretty closely with your grandfather. " "Yes, I believe I am — with grandfather." " 'Twill be the same way when you marry, I was sayin' as much to ma only yesterday. 'She'd be jest as savin' an' thrifty as you,' I said, 'if she got the right man to marry her' — I mean, of course, if the right man got you to marry him, — but 'tis all the same in the end." Again he paused, cleared his throat, and swallowed convulsively, "I've sometimes felt that I might be the right man. Miss Molly," he said. "O Mr. Halloween!" "Why, I thought you knew I felt so from the way you looked at me. " "But I can't help the way I look, can I?" "Well, I've told you now, so it ain't a secret. I've thought about askin' you for more than a year — ever since you smiled at me one Sunday in church while Mr. Mullen was preachin'." "Did I? I've quite forgotten it!" "I suppose you have, seein' you smile so frequent. But that put the idea in my head anyway an' I've cared a terrible lot about marryin' you ever since. " "But I'm not the kind of person, at all. I'm not saving, I'm not thrifty. " "I hope you're wrong — but even if you're not, well, I want you terrible hard jest the same. You see 124 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH I can always keep an eye on the expenses, " he hastened to add, and made a desperate chiteh at her hand. The red worsted mitten came off in his grasp, and he stood eyeing it ruefully while he wait«l for her answer. "I've determined never, never to marry," she repUed. His chest heaved- "I knew yoirfelt that way about the others, but I thought somehow I was different, " he rejoined. "No, it's not the man, but marriage that I don't like," she responded, shaking her head. "It's aU work an' no play wherever I've seen it." "It's terrible for a woman to feel like that, an* goes against God an' nature," he answered. "Have you ever tried prayia' over it.? " "No, I've never tried that, because you see, I don't really mind it very much. Please give me my glove now, here is Judy's cottage. '* "But promise me first that you'll tiy prayin' over yom- state of mind, sua' that I may go on hopin' that you will change it? " Turning with her hand still outstretched for the glove, she glanced rt^uishly from his face to the shut- tered window of the Hatch cottage. "Oh, I don't mind your hoping," she answered, composing her expression to demureness, "if only you won't hope — very hard." Then, leaving him overwhelmed by his «notioiis» she tripped up the narrow walk, b<»d»ed by stunted rose-bushes, to the crumbling porch of Solomon's house. At the door a bright new gig, with red wheels, caught her eye, and before the mischievous dimples MOLLY FLIRTS 125 had jBed from her cheek, she ran into the arms of the Reverend Orlando Mullen. Her confusion brought a beautiful colour into his cheeks, while, in a chivalrous effort to shield her from further embarrassment, he turned his eyes to the face of Judy Hatch, which was lifted at his side hke the rapt countenance of one of the wan-featured, adoring saints of a Fra Angelico painting. No one — not even the nurse of his infancy — had ever imputed a fault either to his character or -to his deportment; for he had come into the world endowed with an infallible instinct for the commonplace. In any profession he would have won success as a shining hght of mediocrity, since the ruhng motive of his conduct was less the ambition to excel than the moral inability to be peculiar. His mind was small and solemn, and he had worn three straight and unyielding wrinkles across his forehead in his earnest endeavour to prevent people from acting, and especially from thinking, lightly. This sedulous devotion to the public morals kept him not only a trifle spare in figure, but lent an habitual manner of divine authority to his most trivial utterance. His head, seen from the rear, was a little flat, but this, fortunately, did not show in the pulpit — where at the age of twenty-four his eloquence en- raptured his congregation. "I postponed my visit to Applegate until to-mor^ row," he said, when he had given her what he thought was sufficient time to recover her composure. "If you are returning shortly, perhaps I may have the pleasure of drivmg you in my gig. I have just come to inquire after Mrs. Hatch." "It would be kind of you, for I am a Kttle tired," 126 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH responded Molly. "I came to speak to Judy, and then I am to stop at the mill to borrow a pattern from Blos- som Revercomb. Are you going that way, I wonder?" "I shall make it my way," he replied gallantly, *'as soon as you are ready. Don't hurry, I beg of you. It is gratifying to me to find that you have so soon taken my advice and devoted a portion of your days to visiting the sick and the afficted. " With her back discreetly turned upon Judy, she looked up at him for a moment, and something in her •eyes rendered unnecessary the words that fell slowly and softly from her hps. "You give such good advice, Mr. Mullen." A boyish eagerness showed in his face, breaking through the professional austerity of his manner. "I hope you've advised Judy this morning," she added before he could answer. "To the best of my ability," he replied gravely. "And now, as I have said before, there is no hurry, but if you are quite ready, I should suggest our start- ing." "Just a word or two with Judy," she answered, and when the words were spoken in the doorway she laid her hand in the rector's and mounted, with iis scrupulous assistance, over the red wheel to the shining black seat of the gig, which smelt of leather and varnish. After he had taken his place beside her he tucked in the laprobe carefully at the corners, rearranged the position of his overcoat at her back, and suggested that she should put the bottle of cough syrup in the bottom of the vehicle. Like all his attentions, this solicitude about the cough syrup had an air that was at once amorous and MOLLY FLIRTS 127 ministerial, a manner of implying, "Observe how I take possession of you always to your advantage." "Are you quite comfortable?" he asked when they had rolled between the sttmted rose-bushes into the turnpike. "Oh, perfectly, you are always so thoughtful, Mr. Mullen." "I think I am right in ranking though tfulness — or consideration, I should have said — among the virtues." "Indeed you are; as soon as I found that you had not gone to Applegate as you intended to, I said to myself that, of course, some act of kindness, had detained you." His large, very round grey eyes grew soft as he looked at her. "You have expressed it beautifully, as 'an act of kindness,'" he returned, "since you yourself were the cause of my postponing my visit." "I — oh, you can't mean it? What have I done?" "Nothing. Don't alarm yourself — absolutely nothing. Three months ago when I spoke to you of marriage, you entreated me to allow you a little time in which to accustom yourself to my proposal. That time of probation, which has been, I hope, equally trying to us both, has ended to-day. " "But I don't think I really love you, Mr. Mullen." " I trust your eyes rather than your words — and your eyes have told me, all unconsciously to your- self, your secret." "Well, I do love your sermons, but " "My sermons are myself. There is nothing in my life, I trust, that Belies my preaching. " 128 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "I know how good you are, but honestly and truly, I don't want to marry anybody. " His smile hardened slowly on his face Kke an im- pression on metal that cools into solidity. From the beginning he had conducted his courtship, as he had conducted his sacred office, with the manner of a gentleman and the infallibility of an apostle. Doubt of his perfect fitness for either vocation had never en- tered his head. Had it done so he would probably have dismissed it as one of the insidious suggestions of the lower man — for the lower man was a creature who habitually disagreed with his opinions and whom his soul abhorred. As he sat beside her, clerical, well-groomed, with his look of small yet solemn intelligence, she wondered seriously if he would, in spite of all opposition, have his way with her at last and pattern her to his liking? "I am not in the least what you think me, Mr. Mullen — I don't know just how to say it " "There is but one thing you need know, dearest, and that is that you love me. As our greatest poet has expressed it 'To know no more is woman's happiest knowledge.' " "But I can't feel that you really — really care for me. How can you?" With a tender gesture, he laid his free hand on hers while he looked into her downcast face. "You allude, I suppose, to the sad fact of your birth," he replied gently, "but after you have become my wife, you will, of course need no name but mine." "I'm so sorry, Mr. Mullen, but really I didn't mean you to think — Oh, there's the mill and Abel looking out of the window. Please, please don't MOLLY FLIRTS 129 sit so close to me, and look as if we were discussing your sick parishioners. " He obeyed her instantly, quite as circumspect as she in his regard for the proprieties. "You are excited now, Molly dear, but you will not forbid my hoping that you will accept my pro- posal, " he remarked persuasively as the gig drew up to the Revercombs' gate. "Well, yes, if you'll let me get down now, you may hope, if you wish to. " Alighting over the wheel before he could draw oflf his glove and assist her, she hurried, under Abel's eyes, to the porch, where Blossom Revercomb stood gazing happily in the direction of Jordan's Journey: CHAPTER X THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN PREACHES A SERMON On THE following Sunday, a mild autumn morning, Mr. Mullen preached one of his most impressive sermons from the text, "She looleeth well to the ways of her hoiisehold, and eaieth not the bread of idleness. " Woman, he said in the course of it, was created to look after the ways of her household in order that man might go out into the world and make a career. No womanly woman cared to make a career. What the womanly woman desired was to remain an Incentive, an Ideal, an Inspiration. If the womanly woman possessed a talent, she did not use it — for this would unsex h^T — she sacrificed it in herself in order that she might return it to the race through her sons. Self-sacrifice — to use a worn metaphor — self-sacrifice was the breath of the nostrils of the womanly woman. It was for her power of self-sacrifice that men loved her and made an Ideal of her. Whatever else woman gave up, she must always retain her power of self- sacrifice if she expected the heart of her husband to rejoice in her. The home was founded on sacrifice, and woman was the pillar and the ornament of the home. There was her sphere, her purpose, her mis- sion. All things outside of that sphere belonged to 130 THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN 131 man, except the privilege of ministering to the sick and the afflicted in other households. He leaned forward in the old pulpit, his shapely, well-kept hand hanging over the edge in one of his most characteristic gestures; and the autumn sunlight, falling ihrough the plain glass windows, shone on his fresh, earnest face, and on his chestnut hair, with glints of gold in it, which grew in high peaks from his temples. Immediately below him, in a front pew, sat his, mother, a dried little old woman, with beady black eyes and a pointed chin, which jutted out from between the stiff taffeta strings of her poke bonnet. She gazed upward, clasping her Prayer-book in her black woollen gloves, which were darned in the fingers; and though she appeared to listen attentively to the sermon, she was wondering all the time if the coloured servant at home would remember to baste the roast pig she had left in the oven. To-day was the Rever- end Orlando's birthday, and the speckled pig she had fattened through the summer, lay now, with an appte in his mouth, on the trencher. She had invited Molly to dine with them rather against her wishes, fot she harboured a secret fear that the girl was trying to marry the rector. Besides, as she said to herself, with her eyes on Orlando's hand, how on earth could he do full justice to the pig if there was a pretty par- ishioner to distract his attention? In the pew next to Mrs. Mullen sat old Adam Doo- little, his hand behind his left ear, his withered old lips moving as if he were repeating the words of the sermon. From time to time he shook his head as though he disagreed with a sentence, ^and then his lips worked more rapidly, and an obstinate, argument- 132 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ative look appeared in his face. Mentally he was conducting a theological dispute with the preacher in which the younger man suffered always a crushing rhetorical defeat. Behind him sat the miller and Blossom Revercomb, who threw an occasional anxious glance at the empty seat beside Mrs. Gay and Kesiah; and behind them Judy Hatch raised her plain, enrapt- ured face to the pulpit, where the rector had shaken out an immaculately ironed handkerchief and wiped his brow. She knew who had ironed that handker- chief on Wednesday, which was Mrs. Mullen's washing day, and her heart rejoiced as she remembered the care with which she had folded the creases. It made no difference, said Mr. Mullen, replacing the handkerchief somewhere im^der his white surplice, whether a woman was ugly or beautiful, since they possessed Scriptural authority for the statement that beauty was vain, and no God-fearing man would rank loveliness of face or form above the capacity for self-sacrifice and the unfailing attendance upon the sick and the afflicted in any parish. Beauty, indeed, was but too often a snare for the unwary — temptresses, he had been told, were usually beautiful persons. Molly's lips trembled into a smile, and her eyes were wide and bright as she met those of the preacher. For an instant he looked at her, gentle, admonishing, reproachful — then his gaze passed over Judy's ser- aphic features to the face of an old grey horse that stared wonderingly in through the souih window. Along the whitewashed plank fence of the churchr yard, other horses were waiting patiently for the serv- ice to end, and from several side saddles, of an an- cient pattern, hung flopping alpaca riding skirts, which THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN 18S the farmer's wives or daughters had worn over their best gowns to church. A few locust trees shed their renaaining small yellow leaves on the sunken graves» which were surrounded by crumbling wooden en- closures. Here and there, farther off, a flat tomb- stone was still visible in the tall grass; and over the dust of old Jonathan Gay a high marble cross, select- ed by his brother's widow, bore the words, unstained by the dripping trees, and innocent of satire: "Here lieth in the hope of a joyful resurrection " At the end of the service there was a rustle either of relief or disappointment, and the congregation filed slowly through the south doors, where the old grey horse stood resigned and expectant amid the obliter- ated graves. Mrs. Gay, who had lingered in the walk to speak to Mr. Mullen, raised her plaintive violet eyes to his face when he appeared. "You are always so comforting. I don't know hoW to thank you for helping me," she murmured, and added impulsively to the little old woman at his side, "Oh, what a blessing such a son must be to you!" "Orlando's never given me a moment's worry in his life, ma'am I — not even when he was teething," replied Mrs. Mullen, who looked sharper and more withered than ever in the broad dayhght. "If you'll believe me, he wasn't more than six months old when I said to his father that I could tell by the look of him he was intended for the ministry. Such sweetness, such self-control even as an infant." "How happy he must make you! And then, to have the privilege of hearing his beautiful sermons! But you'll lose him some day, as I was just saying to Kesiah. It won't be long before some fortunate woman 134 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH takes him away from you. We can only hope she will be worthy of the ideal he has of her." - , "Ah, that's just it, Mrs. Gay, I sometimes tell jnyself there isn't a woman in the world that's fit for iim." She spoke as fast as she could, eager to dilate on the subject of the embarrassed Orlando's virtues, flattered in her motherly old heart by the praise of his sermons, and yet, all the time, while her peaked chin worked excitedly, thinking about the roasted young pig that waited for her to attend to the gar- nishing. The delay was short; Orlando silenced her at last by a gentle admonitory pressure of her elbow, and the two ladies drove oflP in their carriage, while Molly walked sedately out of the churchyard between the clergy- man and his mother. The girl was pleasantly aware that the eyes of the miller and of Jim Halloween fol- lowed her disapprovingly as she went; and she thought with complacency that she had never looked better than she did in her white felt hat with its upturned brim held back by cherry-coloured ribbon. It was all very well for the rector to say that beauty was of less importance than visiting the sick, but the fact re- mained that Judy Hatch visited the sick more zeal- otisly than she — and yet he was very far, indeed, from falling in love with Judy Hatch! The contra- diction between man and his ideal of himself was em- bodied before her under a clerical waistcoat. "I believe," remarked the Reverend Orlando, thrusting his short chin as far as possible over his collar, which buttoned at the back, "I believe that the elder Doolittle nourishes some private grudge THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN 135 against me. He has a most annoying habit of shaking his head at me during the sermon as though he dis- agreed with my remarks. " "The man must be an infidel," observed Mrs. Mullen, with asperity, as she moved on in front of him. "He doesn't know half the time what he is doing," said Molly, "you know he passed his ninetieth birth- day last summer." "But surely you cannot mean that you consider age an excuse for either incivility or irreligion," re- joined her lover, pushing aside an impertinent carrot flower that had shed its pollen on his long coat, while he regarded his mother's back with the expression of indignant suspicion he unconsciously assumed on the rare occasions when his opinions were disputed. "Age should mellow, should soften, should sweeten." "I suppose it should, but very often it doesn't,'* retorted Molly, a trifle tartly, for the sermon had bored her and she looked forward with dread to the dinner. At her words Mrs. Mullen, who was walking a little ahead, with her skirts held up to avoid the yellow stain of the late golden-rod, glanced sharply back, as she had done in church when old Adam had coughed at the wrong time and spoiled the full efiFect of a period. "One reason that Orlando is so helpful to people is that he always sees so clearly just what they ought to be," she observed. "I don't believe there's a man in the ministry or out, who has a higher ideal of woman and her duty. " "But do women ever live up to his ideal of them?'* "It isn't his fault if they don't. All he can do is to point it out to them earnestly and without ceasing.** 136 THE MILLER OF OLD CHmCH ' They had reached the rectory gate, whCTe she hes- itated an instant with her hand on the latbh, and her head bent toward the house in a surprised and listening attitude. "I declare, Orlando, if I didn't go off and leave that cat locked up in the parlour!" she exclaimed in horror as she hiurried away. ^ "Yes," observed Mr. Mullen in his tenderest and most ministerial manner, "my ideal is a high one, and when I look into your face, I see reflected all the virtues I would have you reach. I see you the perfect woman, sharing my sorrows, easing my afflictions " Intoxicated by his imagination, he turned toward her as though he beheld the living embodiment of his doquence. For a minute Molly smiled up at him; then, "I wonder if your mother really locked the cat in the parlour, " she rejoined demurely. After the birthday dinner, at which Mrs. Mullen talked ceaselessly of Orlando's excellencies, while she reserved the choicest piece of meat and the fattest dumphng for his plate, Molly tied her cherry-coloured strings under her chin, and started home, with a basket of apple tarts for Reuben on her arm. At the cross- roads Mr. Mullen left her to return to an afternoon Sunday school^ and she was about to stop at the ordinary to ask WiUiam to see her safely over the pasture, when Abel Revercomb, looking a trifle awk- ward in his Sunday clothes, came out of the house and held out his hand for the basket. "I thought you'd be coming home this way after dinner," he said, turning his head stiffly because his high, starched collar hurt his throat when he moved. His hair was brushed fiat on hi& head as was his THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN 137 habit on Sundays, and he wore a vivid purple tie, which he had bought on his last journey to Applegate. He had never looked worse, nor had he ever felt quite so confident of the entire correctness of his appearance. As Molly made no reply, but merely fell into step at his side, he inquired, after a moment's pause, "How did you enjoy the sermon?" ' 'Oh, I don't like to be preached at, and I'm sorry for Mr. Mullen's wife if he expects her to ease everybody's pains in the parish. He looked very handsome in church," she added, "didn't you think so?" "I didn't notice," he answered ruefully, "I never pay any attention to the way a man looks, in churdi or out of it. " "Well, I do — and even Judy Hatch does. She asked me the other day whom I thought the handsom- est man in the neighbourhood, and I'm sure she ex- pected me to say Mr. Mullen. " She dimpled, and his arm went out impulsively toward her. "But you didn't, Molly?" he returned. "Why, of course not — did you imagine that I should? I said I thought Mr. Jonathan Gay was the best Ipoking." His arm fell to his side, and for a minute or two he walked on in silence. "I wish I didn't love you, Molly," he burst out at last. "I sometimes almost believe that you're one of the temptresses Mr. Mullen preached against this morning. I've tried again and again to tear you out of my heart, but it is useless. " "Yes, it's useless, Abel," she answered, melting to dimples. 138 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "I tell myself," he went on passionately, "that you're not worth it — that you're perfectly heartless — that you're only a flirt — that other men have held your hands, kissed your lips even " "And after telling yourself those dreadful truths, what happens?" she inquired with interest. "What happens? Well, I go to work and don't think of you for at least three hours. Then, when I am dead tired I stop for a minute to rest, and as soon as my eyes fall on a bit of green grass, or a flower growing by the road, or the blue sky, there you are again, popping in between them with your big eyes and your red mouth that was made for kisses. I forget how heartless and light you are, and remember only the times you've crept up to me and put your hand on my arm and said, 'Abel, I'm sorry.' Most of all I remember the one time you kissed me,Molly. " "Don't, Abel," she said quickly, and her voice broke and died in her throat. As he drew close to her, she walked faster until her steps changed into a run. "If you only knew me as I am, you wouldn't care so, Abel, " she threw back at him. "I don't believe you know yourself as you are, Molly," he answered. "It's not you that leads men on to make love to you and then throws them over — as you have thrown me — as you will throw Mr. Mullen." His tone grew suddenly stern. "You don't love Mr. Mullen, and you know it," he added. " If you love any man on earth to-day, you love me. " At his first change from tenderness to accusation, her face hardened and her voice returned to her control. "What right have you to judge me, Abel Rever- THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN 139 comb?" she asked angrily. "I've had one sermon preached at me to-day, and I'll not listen to another. " "You know I'm not preaching at you, Molly, but I'm a man of flesh and blood, not of straw. How can I have patience?" "I never asked you to have patience, did I?" "No, and I don't believe you want it. If I'd catch hold of you and shake you, you'd probably like me better. " "It's just as well that you don't try it to see how I'll take it." "Oh, I shan't try it. I'll go on still believing in you against yourself, like the born fool I am. " "You may believe in me or not just as you please — but it isn't my fault if you won't go off and marry Judy Hatch, as I have begged you to. She's every- thing on earth that Mr. Mullen preached about to-day in his sermon. " "Hang Judy Hatch! You are bent on starting a quarrel with me, that is the trouble. As soon as you mentioned Jonathan Gay I knew what you were in for." "As if I couldn't say a man was good looking with- out putting you into a rage. " "I'm not in a rage, but I hate a flirt. Every sen- sible man does. " "Judy Hatch isn't a flirt." "Leave Judy Hatch out of it — though I've more than half a mind to walk off and ask her to marry me. " "That's just what I've advised you to do for the last six months, isn't it?" "Ah, no, you haven't, Molly, no, you haven't — and you'd be just as sorry as I the minute after I had 140 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH done it. You've got some small foolish childish no-, tions in your head about hating men — but you're much nearer loving me than hating me at this moment, and that's why you're afraid!" "I'm not afraid — how dare you say so?" "Oh, my pretty, Jhow foolish we are, both of us! I'd work my fingers to the bone for you, Molly, I'd lie down and let your little feet waUc over me if they wanted to — I'd shed my life's blood for you, day by day, if it could help you. " "Every one of you say this in the beginning, but it isn't true in the end," she answered. "Not true — not true.? Prove it. Why do you think I've struggled and raised myself except to keep equal with you? Why did I go to school and teach myself and make money enough to take classes in Ap- plegate? Just for you. All those winter afternoons when I drove over there to learn things, I was thinking of you. Do you remember that when you were at school in Applegate, you'd tell me the names of the books you read so that I might get them?" "Don't," she cried fiercely, "don't tell me those things, for I'll never beKeve them — even if they are true, I'll never believe them ! I'm all hard and bitter inside, there's no softness in me. If I went on my knees and prayed to love, I couldn't do it. Oh, Abel, there isn't any love in my heart!" "Do you remember when you kissed me?" "No, I have forgotten." "It was only three weeks ago." "\es. that was three weeks ago." The light died slowly out of his eyes as he looked at her. THE KEVEBEND ORLANDO MULLEN 141 "When you speak like that I begin to wonder if any good can ever come to us," he returned^ "I've gone on breaking my heart over you ever since you were a little girl in short dresses, and I can't remember that I've ever had anything but misery from you in my life. It's damnable the things I've stood and yet I've always forgotten them afterwards, and re- membered only the times you were soft and gentle and had ceased to be shrewish. Nobody on earth can be softer than you, Molly, when you want to, and it's your softness, after all, that has held me in spite of your treatment. Why, your mouth was like a flower when I kissed you, and parted ajid clung to me " "I wish you wouldn't talk about it. I hate to hear such things after they are over. " "Such things!" He stood flicking hopelessly with a small branch he carried at the carrot flowers in the field. "If you will tell me honestly that you were playing with me, Molly, I'll give you up this minute," he said. The colour was high in her face and she did not look at him. "I was playing with you, and I told you so the day afterwards, " she replied. "Yes, but you didn't mean it. I can't go any further because this is Mr. Jonathan's land. " His eyes had in them the hurt reproachful look of a wounded dog's, and his Voice trembled a httle, "I meant always — always to lead you on until I could hurt you — as I did with the others — and then throw you over." "And now that you can hurt me, you throw me over?" he asked. 142 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Without speaking, she held out her hand for the basket, which he was about to fling from him. "Then I'll never forgive you, Molly, so help me God," he added harshly; and turning away fron^ her, struck out across the pasture in the direction of the mill. For a moment she stood looking after him, her lips parted, her eyes wide and bright as if she were asking a question. "I am hard — hard and cruel," she thought as she went slowly up the witch-hazel path that led by the Poplar Spring, "but I wonder — oh, I wonder if I treat Abel worst because I like him best?" CHAPTER XI A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER When Abel had flung himself over the fence, he snatched the collar from his neck and threw it away from him into the high grass of the meadow. The act was symbolical not only of his revolt from the power of love, but, in a larger measure, of his rebellion against the t yranny of conven tion. Henceforth his Sunday clothes might hang in the closet, for he would never again bend his neck to the starched yoke of custom. Everything had been for Molly, and he was done with Molly forever. Her smiles or her frowns, her softness or her cruelty, would make no difference to him in the future — for had not Molly openly implied that she preferred Mr. Mullen? So this was the end of it all — the end of his ambition, of his struggle to raise himself, of his battle for a little learning that she might not be ashamed. Lifting his head he could see dimly the one great pine that towered on the hill over its fellows, and he resolved, in the bitterness of his defeat, that he would sell the -whole wood to-morrow in Applegate. He tried to think clearly — to tell himself that he had never believed in her — that he had always known she would throw him over at the last — but the agony in his lieart rose in his throat, and he felt that he was stifling in the open air of the pasture. Hisnaturej^^rge, 143 ' 144 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH impulsive, scornful of small complexities, wassta^ped bare of the veneer of culture by which its simplicity had been overlaid. At the instant he was closer to the soil beneath his feet than to ,the civilization of his race. As he neared the brook, which divided his pasture from the fields belonging to Jordan's Journey, the sound of angry voices came to his ears, and through the bared twigs of the wiUows, he saw Archie and Jonathan Gay standing a little apart, while the boy made threatening gestures with a small switch he carried. "I've told him he was not to come on our land and he's laughed in my face!" cried Archie, turning to his brother. "I'm not laughing, I merely said that the restriction was absurd," replied Jonathan in a friendly tone. "Why, this pasture of yours juts in between my field and the road, and I'm obliged to cross it. I told you before I was awfully sorry about that quarrel when I first came, but as long as you leave my birds alone, you may walk over my land all day if you like and I shan't care a copper." "Damn your birds! I don't take a blow from any .aan without paying him back," retorted Archie. "Hold your tongue, Archie," said Abel sternly. "It's my farm, I reckon, and I can manage it. I'm sorry, Mr. Jonathan," he added, "that you started the trouble, but we aren't people to sit down tamely and take a thrashing from you just because you happen to own Jordan's Journey. I'll stand by Archie be- cause he's right, though if he were not right, I'd still stand by him because he's my brother. The best we A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 145 can do is to keep clear of each other. We don't go on your place and you'd just as well take care to keep ofif ours." A frown contracted Gay's brow, while he glanced anxiously over his shoulder at the crooked path which led in the direction of the mill. "Do you mean to say that you object to my taking a stroll through your meadows?" he asked. "Why on earth do you want to stroll over here when you've got two thousand acres on every other blessed side of you.?" When the other's reply came there was a curious hesitation about it. "Well, a man has his fancies, you know. I've taken a liking to this path through the willows." "All the same I warn you that if you keep it up, you'll very likely run into trduble. If Archie sets the dogs on you, I'll be obliged to stand by him." Without waiting for a response, he put his hand on the boy's shoulder, and pushed him over the brook into the path on the opposite side. To his surprise Blossom, dressed as though for church, appeared there at the instant. "Why, where in thunder are you going?" he de- manded, releasing Archie, who staggered back at the sudden withdrawal of the powerful grasp. He had always known that his niece was a handsome girl, but the bloom, the softness of her beauty came to him while he stood there, as vividly as if for the first time. "I — I — have you seen grandma's cat? " she returned after the breathless suspense of a minute. "No, I don't think you'll find her down there. 146 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Archie and Mr. Jonathan have quarreled loud enough to frighten her away." "Quarreled again!" she said. "Oh, why have they quarreled again?" "He must keep ofif our place," replied Archie, angrily. "I warned him I'll set the dogs on him the next time I find him on this side the fence ! " "How — how can yoif be so uncivilized?" she re- turned, and there were tears in her eyes. "Uncivihzed or not, he'll find he can't split my lip open for nothing," growled Archie, hke a sullen child. "You'd as well come back with us," said Abel, "the cat isn't down there — I'd take a look in the mill." She turned her face away, stooping to pluck the withered frond of a fern that grew in the path. When she looked up at him again all the bloom and radiance had flown. "Yes, I'll come back with you," she answered, and falling into step between them, walked languidly up the hill to the kitchen garden at the top. In his own misery Abel was hardly aware of her, and he heard as from a distance, Archie's muttered threats against Gay, and Blossom's palpitating responses. When they reached the house, Sarah's yellow and white cat squeezed herseK through the door and came purring toward them. . * ' Why, the cat's got back ! ' ' exclaimed Archie. "It must have been in the store-room all the time," returned Blossom quickly. "I forgot to look there. Now, I must go and pour out the buttermilk for dinner before grandma scolds me." She turned away, glanced back an instant later to A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 147 make sure that they had entered the house, and then gathering up her Sunday skirt of blue Henrietta cloth, started in a rapid run back along the path to the wil- lows. When she reached a sheltered nook, formed by a lattice of boughs, she found Gay walking impa- tiently back and forth, with his hands in his pockets and the anxious frown still on his forehead. At sight of her, his face cleared and he held out his arms. "My beauty! — I'd just given you up. Five minutes more by my watch, and I should have gone." "I met Abel and Archie as I was coming and they made me go back with them," she answered, placing her hand on her bosom, which rose and fell with her fluttering breath. It was characteristic of their different temperaments that, although he had seen her every day for three weeks, he still met her with outstretched arms, which she still evaded. Since that first stolen kiss, she had held off from him, alluring yet unapproachable, and this gentle, but obstinate, resistance had inflamed him to a point which he ad- mitted, in the cold grey mornings before he had break- fasted, to have become positively dangerous. Ar- dently susceptible to beauty, the freedom of his life had bred in him an almost equal worship of the unat- tainable. If that first kiss had stirred his fancy, her subsequent repulse had established her influence. The stubborn virtue, which was a part of the inherited fibre of her race, had achieved a result not unworthy of the most finished coquette. Against his desire for possession there battled the instinctive chastity that was woven into the structure of Sarah Revercomb's granddaughter. Hardly less violent than the natural impulse against which it warred, it gave Blossom an 148 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH advantage, which the obvious weakness of her heart had helped to increase. It was as though she yearned toward him while she resisted — as though she feared him most in the moment that she repulsed him. "Good God! how beautifid you are and how cold!" he exclaimed. "I am not cold. How can you say so when you know it isn't true?" "I've been waiting here an hour, half dead with impatience, and you won't so much as let me touch you for a reward." "I can't — you oughtn't to ask me, Mr. Jonathan." " Could a single kiss hurt you.'* I kissed you once." "It's — it's because you kissed me once that you mustn't kiss me again." "You mean you didn't like it?" *'What makes you so unkind? You know it isn't that." "Then why do you refuse?" He was in an irritable humour, and this irritation showed in his face, in his movements, in the short, abrupt sound of his words. "I can't let you do it because — because I didn't know what it was like until that first time," she pro- tested, while two large tears rolled from her eyes. Softened by her confusion, his genial smile shone on her for an instant before the gloom returned to his features. The last few weeks had preyed on his nerves until he told himself that he could no longer control the working of his emotions. The solitude, the emp- tiness of his days, the restraint put upon him by his invalid mother — all these engendered a condition of mind in which any transient fancy might develop into a winged f m-y of impulse. There were times when A PLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 149 his desire for Blossom's beauty appeared to fill the desolate space, and he hungered and thirsted for her actual presence at his side. In the excitement of a 'great city, he would probably have forgotten her in a month after their first meeting. Here, in this monoto- nous country, there was nothing for him but to brood over each trivial detail until her figure stood out in his imagination edged by the artificial light he had created around it. Her beauty, which would have been noticeable even in a crowd, became goddess-hke against the low horizon in. the midst oi the November colours. "If you only knew how I suffer from you, darling," he said, "I haven't slept for nights because you re- fused to kiss me." "I — I haven't slept either/' she faltered. "Because of me. Blossom?" "I begin to think and it makes me so unhappy." "Oh, damn it! Do you love me. Blossom?" "What difference does it make whether I do or not?" "It makes all the difference under Heaven! Would you like to love me. Blossom?" "I oughtn't to let myself think of it, and I don't when I can help it." "But can you hdp it? Tell me, can you help it?" Turning away from hha, she cast a startled glance under the willows in the direction of the house. "I must be going back. They will miss me." "Don't you think I shall miss you. Beauty?" "Idon'tlqiow. I haven't thought." "If you knew how miserable I'll be after you have left me, you'd kiss me once before you go." 150 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Don't ask me, I can't — I really can't, Mr. Jona- than." "Hang Mr. Jonathan and all that appertains to him! What's to become of me, condemned to this solitude, if you refuse to be kind to me.'' By Jove, if it wasn't for my mother, I'd ask you to marry me!" "I don't want to marry you," she responded haught- ily, and completed her triumph. Something stronger than passion — that something compounded partly of moral fibre, partly of a phlegmatic temperament, guided her at the critical moment. His words had been casual, but her reception of them charged them with seriousness almost before he was aware. A passing impulse was crystallized by the coldness of her manner into a permanent desire. "If I were free to do it, I'd make you want to," he said. She moved from him, walking rapidly into the deeper shelter of the willows. The autumn sunlight, shining through the leafless boughs, cast a delicate netting of shadows over the brilliant fairness of her body. He saw the rose of her cheek melting into the warm white- ness of her throat, which was encircled by two deli- ciously infantile creases of flesh. To look at her led almost inevitably to the desire to touch her. "Are you going without a word to me. Blossom?" "I don't know what to say — you never seem to believe me." "You know well enough what I want you to say — but you're frozen all through, that's what's the mat- ter." "Good-bye, Mr. Jonathan." "At what hour to-morrow. Blossom?" A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 151 She shook her head, softly obstinate. "I mustn't meet you again. If grandma — or any of the others found out they would never forgive me — they are so stern and straight. I've gone too far already, and besides " "Besides what?" "You make me feel wicked and underhand," "Do you mean that you can walk off like this and never see me again?" Tears came to her eyes. "You oughtn't to put it like that!" "But that's just what it means. Now, darling, do you think you can do it?" "I won't think — but I'll have to do it." His nervous irritability became suddenly violent, and the muscles of his face contracted as if from a spasm of physical pain. "Confound it all! Why shouldn't I marry you. Blossom?" he burst out. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and you look every inch a lady. If it wasn't for my mother I'd pick you up to-day and carry you off to Washington." "Your mother would never give in. There's no use talking about it." "It isn't her giving in, but her health. You see, she has heart disease, and any sudden shock brings on one of these terrible attacks that may kill her. She bears everything like an angel — I never heard a complaint from her in my life — not even when she was suffering tortures — but the doctors say now that another failure of her heart would be fatal." "I know," she admitted softly, "they said that twenty years ago, didn't they?" 152 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Well, she's been on her back almost all the time during those twenty years. It's wonderful what she's borne — her angehc patience. And, of course, her hopes all hang on me now. She's got nobody else," "But I thought Miss Kesiah was so devoted to her." "Oh, she is — she is, but Aunt Kesiah has never really understood her. Just to look at them, you can tell how different they are. That's how it is. Blossom — I'm tied, you see — tied hand and foot." "Yes, I see," she rejoined. "Your uncle was tied, too. I've heard that- he used to say — tied with a silk string, he called it." "You wouldn't have me murder my mother, would you?" he demanded irritably, kicking at the twisted root of a willow. "Good-bye, Mr. Jonathan," she responded quietly, and started toward the house. "Wait a minute, — oh. Blossom, come back!" he entreated — but without pausing she ran quickly up the crooked path under the netting of shadows. "So that's the end," said Gay angrily. "By Jove, I'm well out of it," and went home to dinner. "I won't see her again," he thought as he entered the house, and the next instant, when he ascended the staircase, "I never saw such a mouth in my life. It looks as if it would melt if you kissed it " The dinner, which was pompously served by Abed- nego and a younger butler, seemed to him tasteless and stale, and he complained querulously of a bit of cork he found in his wine glass. His mother, supported by cushions in her chair at the head of the table, to which he had brought her in his arms, lamented his A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 15S lack of appetite, and inquired tenderly if he were suffering? For the first time in his life he discovered that he was extinguishing, with difficulty, a snioul- dering resentment against her. Kesiah's ugliness became a positive affront to him, and he felt as bit- terly toward her as though she had purposely designed her appearance in order to annoy him. The wine she drank showed immediately in her face, and he determined to tell his mother privately that she must forbid her sister to drink anything but water. By the dim gilt framed mirror above the mantel he discovered that his own features were flushed, also, but a red face was not, he felt, a cause of compimction to one of his sex. "You haven't eaten your mutton, dear," said Mrs. Gay anxiously. "I ordered it especially because you like it. Are you feeling unwell?" "I'm not hxmgry," he replied, rather crossly. "This place gets on my nerves, and will end by driving me mad." "I suppose you'd better go away," she returned, plaintively wounded. "I wouldn't be so selfish as to want to keep you by me if you are imhappy." "I don't want to leave you, mother — but, I ought to get back to the stock market. It's no good idling around — I don't think I was cut out for a farmer." "Try this sherry. Your uncle brought it from Spain,, and it was buried during the war." He filled his glass, drained it quickly, and with an effort recovered his temper. "Yes, I'd better go," he repeated, and knew while he spoke that he could not leave as long as the thought of Blossom tornlented him. Swift half visions of her 154 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH loveliness — of certain delectable details of her face or figure flitted always before him. He saw her eyes, like frosted periwinkles under their warm white lids, which appeared too heavy to open wide; the little brown mole that played up and down when she laughed ; and the soft, babyish creases that encircled her throat. £ach of these memories set his heart to a quicker beating and caused a warm sensation, like the caress of a burning sun, to pass over his body. "The Revercombs over at the mill are kicking up a row, mother," he said suddenly, again filling his wine glass and again putting it down empty, "have they any sort of standing in the county, do you sup- pose?" "I've heard they call themselves connections of the Revercombs higher in the State, dear — but I don't know and I've never come into contact with any of the country people about here. Kesiah may be able to tell you." Until then neither of them had alluded to Kesiah, whom they accepted by ignoring much as if she had been one of the familiar pieces of furniture, at which they never glanced because they were so firmly con- vinced that it stood in its place. She had eaten her dinner with the relish of a person to whom food, taken at regular hoiu"s three times a day, has become the prime consolation in life; and when the question was put to her, she was obliged to ask them to repeat it because she had been thoughtfully regarding a dish of baked tomatoes and wondering if a single yielding to temptation would increase a tendency to the gout that had lately developed. "What do you know of the Revercombs, Kesiah? A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 155 Are they in any degree above the common people about here?" "The miller is a rather extraordinary character, I believe," she answered, lifting the spoon out of the dish of tomatoes as it was handed to her, and then shaking her head with a sigh and letting it fall. " Mr. Chamberlayne says he is quite well educated, but the rest of them, of course, are very primitive and plain. They have always been strait-laced and honest and I hear that the mother — she came from Piping Tree and was one of the Hawtreys — is violently opposed to her son's marriage with Molly Merryweather. There is a daughter, also, who is said to be beautiful though rather dull." "Yes, I've seen the girl," observed Mrs. Gay, "heavy and blond, isn't she? The mother, I should say, is decidedly the character of the family. She has rather terrible convictions, and once a great many years ago, she came over here — forced her way into my sick-room to rebuke me about the behaviour of the servants or something. Your Uncle Jonathan was obliged to lead her out and pacify her — she was quite upset, I remember. By the way, Kesiah," she pursued, "haven't I heard that Mr. Mullen is atten- tive to the daughter? It seems a pity, for he is quite a superior young man — his sermons are really re- markable, and he might easily have done better." "Oh, that was when he first came here, Angela, be- fore he met Molly Merryweather. It's singular the fascination that girl possesses for the men around here." Gay laughed shortly. "Well, it's a primitive folk, isn't it?" he said, "and gets on the nerves after a while." 156 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Through the afternoon he was restless and out of humour, tormented less by the memory of Blossom's face than by the little brown mole on her cheek. He resolved a dozen times a day that he would not see her, and in the very act of resolving, he would begin to devise means of waylaying her as she went down to the store or passed to and from the pasture. A certain sex hatred, which is closely allied to the mere physical fact of love, asserted itself at times, and he raged hotly against her coldness, her indifference, against the very remoteness that attracted him. Then he would soften to her, and with the softening there came always the longing not only to see, but to touch her — to breathe her breath, to lay his hand on her throat. The next day he went to the willow copse, but she did not come. On the one following, he took down his gun and started out to shoot partridges, but when the hour of the meeting came, he found himself wan- dering over the fields near the Revercombs* pasture, with his eye on the little path down which she had come that rimy October morning. The third after- noon, when he had watched for her in a fury of dis- appointment, he ordered his horse and went for a gallop down the sunken road to the mill . At the first turn, where the woods opened into a burned out clearing, he came suddenly upon her, and the hunger at his heart gave place to a delicious sense of fulfilment. "Blossom, how can you torture me so?" he ex- claimed when he had dismounted at her side and flung his arm about her. She drew slowly away, submissive even in her avoid- ance. A FLIGHT AND AN ENCOUNTER 157 "I did not mean to torture you — I'm sorry," she answered humbly. ' "It's come to this!" he burst out, "that I can't stand it another week without losing my senses. I've thought till I'm distracted. Blossom, will you marry me?" "O Mr. Jonathan!" she gasped while her breast fluttered like a bird's. "Not openly, of course — there's my mother to think of — but I'll take you to Washington — we'll find a way somehow. Can't you arrange to go to Applegate for a day or two, or let your people think you have?" "I can — yes — " she responded in the same troubled tone. "I've a school friend living there, and I some- times spend several days with her." "Then go on Saturday — no, let's see — this is Tuesday. Can you go on Friday, darling?" "Perhaps. I can't tell — I think so — I must see." As he drew her forward, she bent toward him, still softly, still humbly, and an instant later, his arms were about her and his lips pressed hers. CHAPTER Xn THE DREAM AND THE REAL The following Friday Abel drove Blossom in his gig to the house of her school friend in Applegate, where she was to remain for a week. On his way home he stopped at the store for a bottle of harness oil, and catching the red glow of the fire beyond the threshold of the public room, he went in for a moment to ask old Adam Doolittle about a supply of hominy meal he had ready for him at the mill. As the ancient man crouched over the fire, with his bent hands out- stretched and his few silvery hairs rising in the warmth, his profile showed with the exaggeration of a twelfth century grotesque, the features so distorted by the quivering shadows that his beaked nose appeared to rest in the crescent-shaped silhouette of his chin. His mouth was open, and from time to time he shook his head and muttered to himself in an undertone — a habit he had fallen into during the monotonous stretches of Mr. Mullen's sermons. Across from him sat Jim Halloween, and in the middle of the hearth, Solomon Hatch stood wiping the frost from his face with a red cotton handkerchief. "It's time you were thinkin' about goin' home, I reckon, old Adam," remarked Mrs. Bottom. "You've had yo ' two full glasses of cider an ' it ain't proper for a man of yo' years to be knockin ' around arter dark. This or'nary is goin' to be kept decent as long as I keep it." 158 THE DREAM AND THE REAL 15» "To be sure, to be sure," replied old Adam, nodding^ cheerfully at the fire, "I ain't all I once was except in the matter of corn-shuckin' — an ' a cold-snap like this goes clean to the bones when they ain't covered." "Did you carry any of yo' winesaps into Applegate, Abel?" inquired Jim Halloween. "I'm savin' mine till Christmas, when the prices will take a jump." "No, I only drove Blossom over. She's to spend a few days in town." "Mr. Jonathan's gone oflF, too, I see," observed Solomon. "He went by at the top of his speed while I was haulin' timber this mornin'. Thar's bad blood still betwixt you an ' him, ain't thar, Abel ? " "Oh, I'm not seekin' a quarrel. The trouble is in Archie's hands an' he'll have to keep it there." "Well, he's a fine shape of a man," declared Betsey Bottom. "Some women try to make out that they ain't got an eye for the shape as long as the sense is all square and solid — but I ain't never been one of 'em. Sense is all right in its place, no doubt, but thar're times when a fine figger is mo' convincin* than any argyment that ever was uttered." "It's a thing that beats me," pondered Solomon Hatch, "why a sensible woman should care how a man is made on the outside so long as the proper stuffin' is inside of him. With a man now, of course, it is different, seein' as natur made 'em with a sharp eye for beauty in the opposite sex, an' they're all for natur an' al'ays have been. But I'll be blest if I can understand it in women." "Well, I've noticed that they have a particular likin' for the worthless over the hardworkin' sort,'* 160 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH remarked old Adam, "an' when it comes to that, I've known a woman to git clear set against, a man on o'count of nothin' bigger than a chaw of tobaccy." "It's the way of the sex," said Solomon Hatch. "When I was courtin' my wife I was obleeged to prom- ise her I'd give up the habit befo' she'd keep company with me." "An' you began agin, I low, after the ceremony was spoken." "To be sure — 'twas a courtin' promise, not a real one." "It happened the same in my case, some sixty years or mo' ago," said old Adam. "Thar was two of us arter Minnie — for the matter of that, it never en- tered my head to court her tiU I saw that Jacob Hal- loween — yo' grandpa, Jim — had begun to, git soft on her. It's safer to trust another man's jedgment than yo' own I said to myself, an' I started into the race. Well, Jacob was the pious, churchgoin' sort that she liked — but he would chaw in season an ' out of it — thar was some as said he chawed even when he was sleepin' — an' a woman so out an' out with tobaccy you never set eyes on. Sez she to me, 'Adam, you will give up the weed for me, won't you?* An' sez I, 'Why, to be sartin sure, I will,' meanin', of course, while I was courtin'. Then she answered, 'WeU, he's a Christian an' a churchgoer an' you ain't, but if he was the Angel Gabriel himself, Adam, an' was a chawer, I wouldn't marry him. The men may make their habits, Adam,' she said, 'but it takes the women to break 'em.' Lord! Lord! durin' that court- in' season my mouth would water so for a wad of THE DREAM AND THE REAL 161 tobaccy that I'd think my tongue was goin' to ketch fire." "I shouldn't like to have stood in yo' shoes when you began agin," remarked Betsey Bottom. "Oh, she lamed, she larned," chuckled the elder, knocking the ashes out of his pipe on the hearth and then treading them under his boot. "'Tis amazin' what a deal of larnin' women have to do arter they're married." "If they'd done it befo' thar's precious few of 'em that would ever set foot into the estate!" retorted Betsey. "Thar ain't many men that are worth the havin' when you git close up to 'em. Every inch of distance betwixt em' is an inch added to thar at- tractions." "Now, I've noticed that in my own case," observed Jim Halloween sadly, "no woman yet has ever let me come within kissin' distance — the nearer I git, ! the further an' further they edges away. It*s the '< curse of my luck, I reckon, for it seems as if I never open my mouth to propose that I don't put my foot in it." "You may comfort yo'self with the thbught that it runs in yo' family," rejoined old Adam. "'Tis a contrariness of natur for which you're not to be held accountable. I remember yo' grandpa, that same Jacob, tellin' me once that he never sot out to make love that his tongue didn't take a twist un- beknownst to him, an' to his surprise, thar'd roll oflf 'turnips' an' 'carrots' instid of terms of endear- ment. Now, with me 'twas quite opposite, for my tongue was al'ays quicker than my heart in the matter of courtin'. It used to go click! click! quite without 162 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH my willin' it whenever my eyes lit on a pretty woman." "Ah, you were a gay young bird, but it's over now," commented Solomon. "I ain't regrettin' it since I've lived long enough to repent of it," responded the ancient sinner. "What worries me," said young Adam, pursuing his habitual train of despondency, "is that toy life is just one long repentance with naught in it worth re- pentin' of. 'Tain't for lack of ch'ice I've never tasted, but for lack of opportunity." "Well, thar's some that even sinners can't suffer,"' commented his father, "You are short of words, miller." "I was thinlcin'," replied Abel roughly, draining his glass, and rising to his feet while he drew on his sheepskin gloves, "that when the thought of a woman once gets into the brain it's worse than a maggot." "The best way is to get her," retorted Solomon, *'but that ain't so easy a matter as it looks, unless you are a parson. Was thar ever a parson, Mr. Doo- little, that couldn't get married as often as he'd take the notion?" "Thar may be sech, but I've never seed him an' never heard on him," responded old Adam. "'Tis kind of professional work with 'em an' they've got the advantage of the rest of us bein' so used to pulpit speakin'." "I suppose our Mr. Mullen might have whomsoever he'd set his eyes on," pursued Solomon. "Without a doubt he might. If all else failed him he'd but to ax her in his pulpit gowri an' his prayin' voice, an' thar'd be no gainsayin' him for a female. THE DREAM AND THE REAL 163 Let him boom out 'Dearly Beloved,' as he does in church an' ten chances to one shfe'd answer 'Amen' just out of the habit. I'm a bold man, suh, an' I've al'ays been, but I ain't one to stand up ag'inst a preacher when thar's a woman in the race." Wrapping his blue knitted comforter about his throat, Abel nodded good-humoredly to the group, and went out to his gig, which he had left under a shed in the yard. As he removed the blanket from his mare, his mind dwelt stubbornly on the remarks old Adam had let fall concerning clergymen and women. He had already convinced himself that the Reverend Mr. Mullen was the object of Molly's preference, and his nature was big enough to rejoice that she should have chosen so good a man. At least, if this were true, Jonathan Gay would not be his rival. It was the season of the year when the sunny days gave place to frosty nights, and all the changes of the autumn — the reddening of the fruit, the ripening of the nuts, the falling of the leaves — appeared to occur in the hours between sunset and sunrise. A thin and watery moon shed a spectral light over the mead- ows, which seemed to float midway between the ashen band of the road and the jagged tops of the pines on the horizon. There was no wind, and the few re- maining leaves on the trees looked as if they were cut out of velvet. The proihise of a hoar-frost was in the air — and a silver veil lay already over the distance. When he had turned into the branch road that led from the turnpike to the mill, a gig passed him, driven rapidly, and Reubefi Merryweather called "good-night," in his friendly voice. An instant later a spot of white in the road caught Abel's glance. 164 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH and alighting, he picked up a knitted scarf, which he recognized even' in the moonlight as one that Molly had worn. Looking back he saw that the other gig had stopped at the turnpike, and as he hastened toward it with the scarf in his hand, he was rewarded by a flash of bright eyes from a muffled figure at Reu- ben's side. "I found this in the road," he said, "you must have dropped it." " Yes, it fell out — thank you," she answered, and it seemed to him that her hand lingered an instant in his before it was withdrawn and buried beneath the rugs. The pressure remained with him, and a little later as he drove over the frosted roads, he could still feel, as in a dream, the soft, clinging touch of her fingers. Essentially an idealist, his character was the result of a veneering of insuflicient culture on a groundwork of raw impulse. People and objects appeared to him less through forms of thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of relation be- cause he saw them under different conditions from those liiat hold sway over this planet. The world he moved in was peopled by a race of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible standard; and this mixture of rustic ignorance and religious fer- vour had endowed him with a power of sacrifice in large matters, while it rendered him intolerant of smaller weaknesses. It was characteristic of the man that he should have arranged for Molly in his thoughts, and at the cost of great suffering to himself, a happiness that was suited to the ideal figure rather than to the living woman. THE DREAM AND THE REAL 165 When he entered the kitchen, after putting the mare into her stall, the familiar room, wiih its comfortable warmth, dragged him back into a reality in which the dominating spirit was Sarah Revercomb. Even his aching heart seemed to recognize her authority, and to obtrude itself with a sense of embarrassment into surroundings where all mental maladies were outlawed. She was on her knees busily sorting a pile of sweet potatoes, which she suspected of having been frost- bitten; and by sheer force of character, she managed to convince the despairing lover that a frost-bitten potato was a more substantial fact than a broken heart. "I declar' if the last one of 'em ain't specked! I knew 'twould be so when they was left out thar in the smoke-house that cold spell. Abel, all those sweet potatoes you left out in the smoke-house have been nipped." "Well, I don't care a hang!" retorted Abel, as he unwrapped his muffler. "If it isn't one thing, it's another. You're enough to drive a sober man to drink." "If you don't care, I'd like to know who ougtt to," responded Sarah, whose principal weapon in an argu- ment was the fact that she was always the injured person. "It seems that 'twas all yo' fault since you put 'em thar." "You'd better give him some supper — he looks almost played out," observed Abner from a corner of the hearth, where he sat smoking with his head hanging on his chest. Though she might harrow her son's soul, Sarah was incapable of denying him food, so rising from her 166 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH knees, she unpinned her skirt, and brought him coflfee and broiled herring from the stove where they had been keeping hot. "Where's Archie?" asked Abel, while she plied him with corn muffins. " Courtin', I reckon, though he'd best be down yon- der in the swamp settin' those old hare traps. I never saw sech courtin' as you all's anyhow," she con- cluded. "It don't seem to lead nowhar, nor to end in nothin' except itself. That's what this here ever- lastin ' education has done for you, Abel — if you hadn't had those books to give you something to think about, you'd have been married an ' settled a long time bef o ' now. Yo' grandpa over thar was steddyin' about raisin' a family before he was twenty." On either side of the stove, grandfather and grand- mother nodded like an ancient Punch and Judy who were at peace only when they slept. Grandfather's pipe had gone out in his hand, and from grandmother's lap a ball of crimson yarn had rolled on the rag carpet before the fire. Twenty years ago she had begun knitting an enormous coverlet in bright coloured squares, and it was still unfinished, though the strips, packed away in camphor, filled a chest in Sarah's store closet. "You wouldn't like any girl I'd marry," he retorted with a feeble attempt at mirth. "If I tried to put your advice into practice there'd be trouble as sure as shot." "No, thar wouldn't — not if I picked her out," she returned. "Great Scott! Won't you let me choose my own wife even?" he exclaimed, with a laugh in which there THE DREAM AND THE REAL 167 was an ironic humour. The soft pressure of Molly's fingers was still on his hand, and he saw her face look- ing up at him, gentle and beseeching, as she had looked when she oflPered her lips to his kiss. Above the yearning of his heart there rose now the decision of his judgment — and this had surrendered her to Mr. Mullen! Some rigid strain of morality, inherited from Sarah and therefore continually at war with her, caused him to torture himself into a mental recogni- tion that her choice was for the best. "That man never walked that had sense enough to pick out a wife," rejoined Sarah. "To think of a great hulkin' fellow like you losin' yo' sense over a half mad will-o'-the-wisp that don't even come of decent people. If she hadn't had eyes as big as sau- cers, do you reckon you'd ever have turned twice to look at her?" "For God's sake don't talk about her — she's not going to marry me," he responded, and the admission of the truth he had so often repeated in his own mind caused a pang of disbelief. "I'd like to know why she ain't?" snorted Sarah indignantly, "does she think she's goin' to get a better catch in this neighbourhood?" "Oh, it's all one. She doesn't want to, that is enough." "Well, she's a fool if she doesn't want to, an' I'll say it to her face. If thar's a better lookin ' man around here, I'd like to see him, or a better worker. What have the Merryweathers to be so set up about, I'd like to know? And that gal without even a father to her name that she can call her own!" "You mustn't — I won't stand it any longer." 168 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Well, it's for yo' good, I reckon. If yo' own mother can't take yo' side, I'd like to know who's goin' to do it?" "I don't want anybody to take my side. She's got a right not to marry me." "I ain't sayin' she ain't, an' it's a mighty good thing for you that she's sech a plum fool as not to want to. 'Twould be the worst news I'd ever heard if she'd been minded to have you. I'd move heaven an' earth to keep you from marryin' her, an' if the good Lord has done it instead of me, I'm thankful enough to Him for His trouble." Rising from the table, Abel pushed his untasted food aside with a gesture of loathing. A week ago he had been interested in the minor details of life; to-night he felt that they bored him profoundly. "If you knew what you were saying you'd hold your tongue," he retorted angrily. "Ain't you goin' to eat yo' supper?" inquired Sarah anxiously, "that herrin' is real nice and brown." "I don't want anything. I'm not hungry." "Mebbe you'd like one of the brandied peaches I'm savin' for Christmas?" "No, I'm dead beat. I'll go up to sleep pretty soon." "Do you want a fire? I can lay one in a minute." He shook his head, not impatiently, but as one to whom brandied peaches and wood fires are matters of complete indifference. "I've got to see about something in the stable first. Then I'll go to bed." Taking down a lantern from a nail by the door, he went out, as was his nightly habit, to look at his grey mare Hannah. When he came in again and stumbled THE DREAM AND THE REAL 169 up the narrow staircase to his room, he found that Sarah had been before him and kindled a blaze from resinous pine on the two bricks in the fireplace. At the sound of his step, she entered with an armfid of pine boughs, which she tossed to the flames. "I reckon the cracklin' will make you feel mo* comfortable," she observed. "Thar ain't anything like a lightwood fire to drive away the misery." "It does sound friendly," he responded. For a moment she hesitated, groping apparently for some topic of conversation which would divert his mind from the one subject that engrossed him. "Archie's just come in," she remarked at last, "an' he walked up with old Uncle Toby, who said he'd seen a ha'nt in the dusk over at Poplar Spring. I don't see how Mrs. Gay an' Miss Kesiah can endure to live thar." "Oh, they're just darkies' tales — nobody believes in them any more than in conjuring and witches." "That's true, I reckon, but I shouldn't like to Hve over thar all the same. They say old Mr. Jonathan comes out of his grave and walks whenever one of 'em is to be biu-ied or married." "Nobody's dead that I've heard of, and I don't suppose either Mr. Jonathan or Miss Kesiah are thinking of getting married." "Weil, I s'pose so — but I'm mighty glad he ain't taken the notion to walk around here. I don't be- lieve in ha'nts, but I ain't got no use for 'em." She went out, closing the door after her; and drop- ping into a chair by the fire, he buried his face in his hands, while he vowed in his heart that he would stop thinking of Molly. CHAPTER Xin BY THE MILL-RACE A WARM, though hazy, sun followed the sharp night, and only the blackened and damaged plants in the yard bore witness to the frost, which had melted to the semblance of rain on the grass. On the dappled boughs of the sycamore by the mill-race several bronze leaves hung limp and motionless, as if they were at- tached by silken threads to the stems, and the coating of moss on the revolving wheel shone like green enamel on a groimdwork of ebony. The white mist, which had wrapped the landscape at dawn, still lay in the hollows of the pasture, from which it floated up as the day advanced to dissolve in shining moisture upon the hillside. There was a keen autumn tang in the air — a mingling of rotting leaves, of crushed wine- saps, of drying sassafras. As Abel passed from the house to the mill, his gaze rested on a golden hickory tree near the road, where a grey squirrel sported merrily under the branches. Like most of his neigh- bours, he had drawn his weather predictions from the habits of wild creatures, and had decided that it would be an open winter because the squirrels had left the larger part of the nuts ungarnered. At the door of the mill, as he turned the big rusty key in the lock, he told himself doggedly that since he was not to have Molly, the only sensible thing was to surrender the thought of her. While he started a 170 BY THE MILL-RACE 171 blaze in the stove, and swept the floor with the broom- sedge broom he kept for the purpose, he forced his mind to duell on the sacks of grist that stood ready for grind ng. The fox-hound puppy, Moses, had followed him f jom the house, and sat now suspiciously watching a robin that hopped warily in the band of sunlight over the threshold. The robin was in search of a few grains of buckwheat which had dropped from a meas- ure, and the puppy had determined that, although he was unable to eat the buckwheat himself, he would endeavour to prevent the robin from doing so. So in- tent was he upon this resolve, that he forgot to bark at an old negro, who drove up presently in an ancient gig, the harness of which was tied on a decrepit mule with pieces of rope. The negro had left some corn to be ground, and as he took his sack of meal from the miller, he let fall a few lamentations on the general forlorn state of human natiu-e. "Dish yer livin' is moughty hard, marster, but I reckon we'se all got ter come ter hit." "Well, you manage to raise a little good corn any- way, so you ought to be thankful instead of com- plaining." "Dar ain' nuttin' 'tall ter be thankful fur in dat, suh, case de Lawd He ain' had no mo' ter do wid dat ar co'n den ole Marse Hawtrey way over yonder at Pipin' Tree. I jes' ris dat ar co'n wid my own han* right down de road at my font do', an' po'd de water on hit outer de pump at my back un. I'se monst'ous glad ter praise de Lawd fur what He done done, but I ain' gwine ter gin 'im credit fur de wuk er my own fis' en foot." "Are you going by Jordan's Journey, uncle? I'd 172 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH like to send Reuben Merrjrvreather's buckwheat to him." "Naw, boss, I ain't a-gwine by dar, caze dat ar Jerdan's Jerney aia got a good name ter my years. I ain't a-feared er ha'nts by daylight, but I'se monst- 'ous feared er badness day er nightime, en hit sutney do pear ter me like de badness er ole Marse Jonathan done got in de a'r er dat- ar Jerdan's Jerney. Hit's ha'nted by badness, dat's what 'tis, en dar ain nobody cep'n Gawd A'moughty Hisse'f dat kin lay badness." He went out, stooping under the weight of his bag, and picking up a grey turkey's wing from the ledge, Abel began brushing out the valve of the mUl, in which the meal had grown heavy from dampness. "The truth is, Moses," he remarked, "you are a fool to want what you can't have in this life." The puppy looked up at him inquiringly, its long ears flapping about its soft foolish face. "But I reckon we're all fools, when it comes to that." When the grinding was over for the day, he shut down the mill, and calling Moses to heel, went out on the old mill-race, where the upper gate was locked by a crude wooden spar known as the "key." He was standing under the sycamore, with this implement in his hand, when he discerned the figure of Molly approaching slowly amid the feathery white pollen which lay in patches of delicate bloom over the sorrel waste of the broomsedge. Without moving he waited imtil she had crossed the log and stood looking up at him from the near side of the stream. "Abel, are you still angry with me?" she asked, smiling. Dropping the key into the lock, he walked slowly BY THE MILL-RACE 173 to the end of the mill-race, and descended the short steps to the hillside. "No, I'm not angry — p,t least I don't think I am — but I've taken your advice and given you up. " "But, Abel " "I suppose you meant to take Mr. Mullen all the time that you were making a fool of me. He's a better man for you, probably, than I am. " "Do you really think that.?" she asked in a tone of sm^prise. "Would you like to see me married to him?" He hesitated an instant and then answered: "I honestly believe that it is the best thing for you to do. " Instead of producing the effect he had foreseen, his advice brought a luminous moisture to her eyes. "I suppose you think it would do me good to be preached to three times a day I*" she rejoined. "Well, I believe it wouldn't hurt you, Molly," he responded with a smile. His attitude of renouncement drew her suddenly nearer. "It wasn't about Mr. Mullen that I came to talk to you — there is something else. " "Surely you aren't thinking of Jim Halloween?" "No, no, it isn't a man. Why do you seem to think that the beginning and middle and end of my existence is a man? There are times when I find even a turkey more interesting." "It is about a turkey, then, that you have come to see me?" "Oh, no, it's a man, after all, but not a lover — he's Mr. Chamberlayne, the lawyer, from Applegat& Yesterday when he was spending, the day at the big house, he came over to see me. " 174 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Had he never seen you before?" "Of course, when I was Uttle — and later he took me to school in Applegate. I was to stay there until I was twenty-one you know, but I ran away the second year because grandfather fell ill with pneumonia and there was no one to look after him. You remem- ber that, don't you?" "Yes, I remember. I picked you up on the road and brought you home in my gig. There was a heavy snow storm. " "It seems that I was meant to be educated as a lady. Old Mr. Jonathan left a letter about it. " "He did? — damn him! Why didn't he save him- self the trouble by acting decently in the begiiming? " "That was because of Mrs. Gay — he had prom- ised her, when he thought she was dying, some dreadful thing. And after that he was afraid — afraid of her all his life. Isn't it terrible that such a saintly person should have caused so much sin?" "But what was she to him that he should have been such a coward about her?" "Oh, he loved her more than anything on earth — for he loved my mother only a little while. When Mrs. Gay first came to live with him, she was so beautiful and so delicate, that she looked as if a wind would blow her away — so soft that she could smother a person like a mass of feathers. He felt after that that he had entangled himself, and it w^s only at the last when he was dying that he had any remorse. With all his wickedness there was a terrible kind of religion in him — like a rock that is buried under the earth — and he wanted to save his soul alive before he passed on to judgment. As if that BY THE MILI^RACE 175 did any good — or he could make amends either to me or to God. " "I rather hope he was as unsuccessful in the last case as in the first. But, tell me, Molly, how does it affect you?" "Not at all — not at all — if he has left me money, I shall not touch it. He wasn't thinking of mother, but of his own soul at the end, and can you tell me that God would wipe out all his dreadful past just because of one instant's fear? " Her passion, so unlike the meekness of Janet Merryweather, made him look at her wonderingly, and yet with a sympathy that kept him dumb. It took the spirit of a Gay to match a Gay, he thought, not without bitterness. "But why does Mr. Chamberlayne come to you now?" he asked, when he had regained his voice. "It is Mrs. Gay — it has always been Mrs. Gay ever since Mr. Jonathan first saw her. She smothered his soul with her softness, and wound him about her little finger when she appeared all the time too weak to lift her hand. That's just what men think women ought to be — just the kind Mr. Mullen preaches about in his sermons — the kind that rules without your knowing it. But if she'd been bold and bad instead of soft and good, she couldn't have done half the harm!" "And Miss Kesiah?" he asked, "had she nothing to do with it?" "She? Oh, her sister has drained her — there isn't an ounce of red blood left in her veins. Mr. Jonathan never liked her because she is homely, and she had no influence over him. Mrs. Gay ruled him. " 176 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "I always thought her so lovely and gentle," he said regretfully, "she seems to me so much more womanly than Miss Kesiah. " "I suppose she is as far as her face goes, and that's what people judge by. If you part your hair and look a certain way nothing that you can do will keep them from thinking you an angel. When I smile at Mr. Mullen in church it convinces him that I like visiting the sick. " "How can you laugh at him, Molly, if you are going to marry him?" "Have you positively decided," she inquired, "that I am going to marry him.''" "Wasn't that what you meant when you threw me over.? " She shook her head, "No, it wasn't what I meant — but since you've made up your mind, I suppose there's no use for me to say a word.'' " "On the whole I don't think there is — for your words are not honest ones. " "Then why do you judge me by them, Abel?" she asked very softly. "Because a man must judge by something and I can't look into your heart. But if I'm not to be your lover," he added, "I'll not be your plaything. It's now or never." "Why, Abel!" she exclaimed in mock astonishment. "It's the last time I shall ever ask you — Molly, will you marry me?" "You've forgotten poor Mr. Mullen." "Hang Mr. Mullen! I shall ask you just three times, and the third will be the last — Now, Molly will you marry me? That's the second. " BY THE MILIr-RACE 177 "But it's so sudden, Abel." "If ten years can't prepare you, ten minutes will be no better. Here goes the third and last, Molly ■ " "Abel, how can you be so silly.'*" "That's not an answer — will you " "Do you mean if I don't promise now, I'll never have the chance again?" "I've told you — listen " "Oh, wait a minute. Please, go slowly." "—Marry me.?" "Abel, I don't believe you love me!" she said, and began to sob. "Answer me and I'll show you." "I didn't think you'd be so cruel — when " "When? Remember I've stopped playing, Molly." "When you know I'm simply dying for you," she responded. He smiled at her without moving. "Then answer my question, and there's no drawing back this time remember." "The question you asked me? Repeat it, please." "I've said it three times already, and that's enough." "Must I put it into words? Oh Abel, can't you see it?" Lifting her chin, he laughed softly as he stooped and kissed her. "I've seen it several times before, darling. Now I want it put into words — just plain ones." "Then, Mr. Abel Revercomb," she returned de- murely, "I should like very much to marry you, if you have no objection." The next instant her mockery fled, and in one of those spells of sadness, which seemed so alien to her, and yet so much a part of her, she clung to him, sobbing. 178 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Abel, I love you so, be good to me," she entreated. "Good to you!" he exclaimed, crushing her to him. "Oh, those dreadful days since we quarrelled!" "Why did you do it, darling, since you suffered as well as I?" "I can't tell — there's something in me like that, I don't know what it is — but we'll quarrel again after this, I suppose." "Then we deserve to be punished and I hope we shall be." "How will that help.? It's just life and we can't make it different." She drew gently away from him, while a clairvoyance wiser than her years saddened her features. "I wonder if love ever lasts?" she whis- pered half to herself. But there was no room in his more practical mind for the question. "Ours will, sweetheart — how can you doubt it? Haven't I loved you for the last ten years, not counting the odd days?" "And in all those years you kissed me once, while in the last five minutes you've kissed me — how many times? You are wasteful, Abel." "And you're a dreadful little witch — not a woman." "I suppose I am, and a nice girl wouldn't talk like this. I'm not the wife you're wanting, Abel." "The first and last and only one, my darling." "Judy Hatch would suit you better if she wasn't in love with the rector." "Confound Judy Hatch! I'll stop your mouth with kisses if you mention her again." At this she clung to him, laughing and crying in a sudden passion of fear. BY THE MILI^RACE 179 "Hold me fast, Abel, and don't let me go, whatever happens," she said. When he had parted from her at the fence which di- vided his land from Gay's near the Poplar Spring, he watched her little figure climb the Haunt's Walk and then disappear into the leafless shrubbery at the back of the house. While he looked after her it seemed to him that the wan November day grew radiant with colour, and that spring blossomed suddenly, out of season, upon the landscape. His hour was upon him when he turned and retraced his steps over the silver brook and up the gradual slope, where the sun shone on the bare soil and revealed each separate clod of earth as if it were seen under a microscope. All nature was at one with him. He felt the flowing of his blood so joyously that he wondered why the sap did not rise and mount upward in the trees. In the yard Sarah was directing a negro boy, who vas spreading a second layer of manure over her more delicate plants. As Abel closed the gate, she looked up, and the expression of his face held her eyes while he came toward her. "What has happened, Abel? You look like Moses when he came down from the mountain." "It was all wrong — what I told you last night, mother. Molly is goiiig to marry me." "You mean she's gone an' changed her mind jest as you'd begun to git along without her. I declar', I don't know what has got into j'ou to show so little sperit. If you were the man I took you to be, you'd up an' let her see quick enough that you don't ax twice in the same quarter." "Oh, all that's over now — she's going to marry me." 180 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "You needn't shout so. I ain't deaf. Samson, sprinkle another spadeful of manure on that bridal- wreath bush over thar by the poreh." "Won't you say you're pleased?" "I ain't pleased, Abel, an' I ain't going to lie about it. When I git down on my knees to-night, I'U pray harder than I ever prayed in my life that you'll come to yo' senses an' see what a laughing-stock that gal has made of you." "Then I wish I hadn't told you." "WeU, I'd have knowed it anyhow — it's burstin' out of you. Where're you goin' now? The time's gittin' on toward dinner." "For my axe. I want to cut a little timber." "What on earth are you goin' to cut timber at this hour for?" "Oh, I feel like it, that's all. I want to try my strength." Going into the kitchen, he came out a minute later with his axe on his shoulder. As he crossed the log over the mill-stream, the spotted fox-hound puppy waddled after him, and several startled rabbits peered out from a clump of sassafras by the "worm" fence. Over the fence went Abel, and under it, on his fat little belly, went Moses, the puppy. In the meadow the life-everlasting shed a fragrant pollen in the sun- shine, and a few crippled grasshoppers deluded them- selves into the belief that the summer still lingered. Once the puppy tripped over a love-vine, and getting his front paws painfully entangled yelped sharply for assistance. Picking him up, Abel carried him in his arms to the pine wood, where he placed him on a bed of needles in a hollow. BY THE MILD-RACE 181 Through the slender boles of the trees, the sunlight fell in bars on the carpet of pine-cones. The scent of the living forest was in his nostrils, and when he threw back his head, it seemed to him that the blue sky was resting upon the tree-tops. Taking oflf his coat, he felt the edge of his. blade, while he leaned against the great pine he had marked out for sacrifice. In the midst of the wood he saw the walls of his house rising — saw the sun on the threshold — the smoke mount from the chimney. The dream in his brain was the dream of the race in its beginning — for he saw the home and in the centre of the home he saw a woman and in the arms of the woman he saw a child. Though the man would change, the dream was indestructible, and would flow on from the future into the future. The end it served was not individual, but racial — for it belonged not to the soul of the lover, but to the integral structure of life. Moving suddenly, as if in response to a joyous impulse, he drew away from the tree, and lifting his axe swung it out into the sunlight. For an instant th^e was silence. Then a shiver shook the pine from its roots upward, the boughs rocked in the blue sky, and a bird flying out of them sailed slowly into the west. CHAPTER XIV SHOWS THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH When Abel had gone, Sarah folded her grey woollen shawl over her bosom, and ordered the boy with the wheelbarrow to return to the barnyard. Left alone her eyes followed her son's figure as it divided the broomsedge in the meadow, but from the indiflference of her look she might have gazed on the pine tree toward which he was moving. A little later, when her glance passed to the roof of the mill there was no perceptible change in her expression; and she observed dispassionately that the shingles which caught the drippings from the sycamore were be- ginning to rot. While she stood there she was in the throes of one of the bitterest sorrows of her life; yet there was no hint of it either in her quiet face or in the rigid spareness of her figure. Her sons had resisted her at times, but until to-day not one of them had rebelled openly against her authority in the matter of marriage. Years ago, in the period of Abner's re- action from a blighted romance, she had chosen, without compunction, a mild-mannered, tame-spirited maiden for his wife. Without compunction, when the wedding was over, she had proceeded, from the best possible motives, to torment the tame-spirited maiden into her grave. "He's layin' up misery for himself and for all con- cerned," she said aloud, after a moment, "a girl like 182 THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH 183 that with no name and precious httle religion — an idle, vain, silly hussy, with a cropped head!" A small coloured servant, in a girl's pinafore and a boy's breeches, came to the door, and whispered that the old people were demanding a snack of bread and molasses. "Tell 'em it ain't the day for sweets an' they ain't goin' to have any," replied Sarah sternly. "Thar's a meat dinner to-day. an' I've made 'em a good soup out of the bones. You know, pa an' ma, that you ain't goin' to have meat an' molasses the same day," she remarked as she entered the kitchen. "If I didn't watch you every minute, you'd make yo'selve* sick with overeatin'." "I reckon you're right, Sary," piped grandfather in angry tones, "but I ain't so sure I wouldn't rather have the sickness than the watchin'. It's hard on a man of my years an' experience that he shouldn't be allowed to project with his own stomach." "You'd have been dead long ago but for me, an' you ought to be ashamed of yo'self for talkin' such foolishness. As if I hadn't wo' myself out with waitin' on you, an' no blood relation." "No blood relation!" chimed in grandmother mali- ciously, "no blood relation!" "Well, you hurry up an' get ready for dinner, for I'm goin' out afterwards." "Whar on earth are you goin', Sary? It ain't Sunday." "It don't matter to you whar I'm goin' — you jest set right up an' eat yo' soup." When she had poured the contents of the pot into the two earthenware ■ bowls, she crumbled a piece of bread into each, and gave the dinner into the trembling 184 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH hands which were stretched out eagerly to receive it. Then taking the red-and- white cloth from the cupboard, she set the table for five, and brought the dish of tur- nips and boiled beef from the stove. Every detail was as carefully attended to as if her thoughts were not on the hillside with Abel, but she herself could not eat so much as a mouthful. A -hard lump rose in her throat and prevented her swallowing. The men did not appear, so leaving their dinner in the stove, she went upstairs and put on her black poke bonnet and the alpaca mantle trimmed with bugles which she wore on Sundays and on the occasional visits to her neighbours. As it was her custom never to call without bearing tribute in the form of fruit or preserves, she placed a jar of red currant jelly into a little basket, and started for her walk, holding it tightly in her black worsted gloves. She knew that if Molly divined her purpose she would hardly accept the gift, but the force of habit was too strong for her, and she felt that she could not start out to make a visit with empty hands. Her chief anxiety was to be gone before Abel should return, and for this reason she left the house by the back door, and chose the small, descending path that led through the willows to Jordan's Journey. As she neared the brook a bow of blue ribbon hanging on a branch caught her eye, and she recognized a bit of the trimming from Blossom's Sunday dress. Releas- ing it from the tree, she put it into her pocket, with the resolve that she would reprove her granddaughter for wearing her best clothes in such unsuitable places. Then her thoughts returned to the immediate object of her visit, and she told herself sternly that she would THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH 185 let Molly Merryweather know her opinion of her while there was yet time for the girl to withdraw from the marriage. That she was wronging her son by exerting such despotic authority was the last thought that would have occurred to her. A higher morality than that of ordinary mortals had guided her in the past, and she followed it now. When she reached the rail fence, she found some difficulty in climbing it, since her legs had grown rheumatic with the cold weather; but by letting the basket down first on a forked stick, she managed to ease herself gently over to the opposite side. Here she rested, while she carefully brushed away the dried pollen from the golden-rod, which was staining her dress. Then regaining hex strength after a minute, she pushed on under the oak trees, where the moist, dead leaves made a soft, velvety sound, to the apple orchard and the sunken flagged walk that led to the overseer's cottage. In the sunshine on the porch Reuben Merryweather was sitting; and at sight of his visitor, he rose, with a look of humble surprise, and invited her into the house. His manner toward her was but a smaller expression of his mental attitude to the universe. That he possessed any natural rights as an individual had never occurred to him; and the humility with which he existed gave place only to the mild astonish- ment which filled him at any recognition of that existence by man or Providence. "Walk in an' sit down, ma'am," he said hospitably leading the way into the little sitting-room, where the old hound dozed on the rug. "Molly's jest gone down to the spring-house, but she'll be back in a minute.'* 186 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Reuben Merryweather — " began Sarah, and then she stopped, "you ain't lookin' over sprightly," she said after a pause. "I've got a weak chest, an' the cold settles on it." "Did you ever try mutton suet laid over it on a piece of red flannel? 'Tis the best cure I know of." "Molly makes me a plaster for it at night." The ieeling that he had engrossed the conversation for his selfish ends led him to remark after a minute, "You have changed but little, Sarah, a brave woman you are." "Not so brave, Reuben, but I'm a believer an' that Iielps me. I'd have broken down under the burden often enough if my faith hadn't supported me. You've had yo' troubles, too, Reuben, an' worse ones." "It's true, it's true," said the old man, coughing behind his hand, "to see my po' gal suffer so was worst — but however bad things seemed to us on top, I've al'ays beheved thar was a hidden meanin' in 'em that our eyes couldn't see." "Ah, you were al'ays a soft natured man, Reuben, too soft natured for yo' own good, I used to think." "'Twas that tiiat stood against me with you, Sarah, when we were young. Do you remember the time you refused to drive back with me from that picnic at Falling Creek because I wouldn't give Jacob Bum- pass a hiding about something.? That was a bitter pill to me, an' I've never forgot it." Sarah had flushed a little, and her stern face ap- peared to have grown ten years younger. "To think that you ain't forgot all that old foolishness, Reuben! " "Well, thar's been time enough an' trouble enough, no doubt," he answered, "but seein' you lookin' so like yo' old self put me in mind of it." THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH 187 "Lord, Reuben, I ain't thought of all that for forty years!" "No mo' have I, Sarah, except when I see you on Sundays sittin' across the church from me. You were a beauty in yo' day, though some folks use to think that that little fair thing, Mary Hilliard, was better lookin'. To me 'twas Uke settin' a dairy maid beside a queen." "Even my husband thought Mary Hilliard, was prettier," said Sarah, and her tone showed that this tribute to her youthful vanity had touched her heart. "Well, I never did. You were al'ays too good for me an' I never begrudged you to Abner. He was a better man." For an instant she looked at him steadily, while living honesty struggled in her bosom against loyalty to the dead. "No, Reuben, Abner was not a better man," she said presently, as if the words were thrust out of her by a chastening conscience. "My pride kept me up after I had married him; but he was born shiftless an'' he died shiftless. He never did a day's work in his life that I didn't drive him to. His children have never known how it was, for I've al'ays made 'em think he was a hard worker an' painstakin' to keep back his laziness from croppin' out in 'em, if I could." "You've brought 'em up well. That's a fine son of yours that coines courtin' my gal, Sarah. I've hoped she'd fancy him for the sake of old times." "I never thought of yo' recollectin' that feelin', Reuben. It makes me feel almost young again, an' I that old an' wo' out. I've had a hard life — thar's 188 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH no disputin' it, marriage is mostly puttin' up with things, I reckon, when it ain't makin' believe. " "Thar's mighty few that gits the one that's meant for 'em," said Reuben, "that's sure enough. If we did we'd stop movin' forward, I suppose, an' begin to balk. I haven't much life now, except in Molly, an' it's the things that please or hurt her that I feel the most. She's got a warm heart an' a hot temper like you used to have, Sarah, an' the world ain't easy generally to yo' sort." For a time Sarah was silent, her hands in their black woollen gloves gripping the handle of the basket. "WeU, I must be goin', Reuben," she said presently, rising from her chair. "I'm sorry about yo' chest, an' I jest stepped over to bring you this glass of currant jeUy I made last summer. It goes well with meat when yo' appetite ain't hearty. " She held out her hand, shook his with a hurried and awkward movement, and went out of the front door and down the flagged walk as Molly's steps were heard in the kitchen at the back. "Sarah Revercomb has been here, honey," said Reuben. "She brought me over this glass of currant jelly, and said she was sorry to miss you. " "Why, what could she have meant?" asked Molly. " She hates me and she knows I've never Hked her. " "Like most folks it ain't Sarah but the way you take her that matters. We've all got the split some- whar in our shell if you jest know how to find it. I reckon she's given in about Abel an' came over to show it. " " I'm glad she brought you the jelly, and perhaps she is getting softer with age, " rejoined Molly, still puzzled. THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH 189 "Don't worry, honey, she's a good woman at bottom, but mortal slow of larnin', and thar's a lot of Sarah in that boy of hers. " "I suppose there is, grandfather, for all their fierce quarrelhng. They have the kind of love that will die for you and yet will not so much as suffer you to live. That's the way Mrs. Revercomb loves, and it's the way Abel is loving me now. " "Let him larn, pretty, let him larn. He'll be worth twice as much at fifty as he is to-day, an' so will you for that matter. They're fools that say love is for the young, Molly, don't you believe 'em. " Sarah, meanwhile, passed slowly down the flagged walk under the gnarled old apple trees in the orchard. A few heavy-winged insects, awaking from the frost of the night, droned over the piles of crushed wine- saps, and she heard the sound as though it came to her across a distance of forty years. They were not easy years; she was worn by their hardness, crippled by their poverty, embittered by their sorrows. "I've had a hard life," she thought. "I've had a hard life, an' it warn't fair." For the first time it occurred to her that the Providence she had served had not used her honourably in return. "Even Abner al'ays thought that Mary Hilliard was the prettiest," she added, after a minute. As she crossed the lawn at Jordan's Journey, Uncle Abednego, the butler, appeared at the back door, and detained her with an excited wave of the hand. "Lawd A'moughty, dar's bad times yer. Miss Sary!" he cried, "Miss Angela she's been mos' dead fur goin' on two hours, en we all's done sont Cephus on de bay horse arter Marse Jonathan!" CHAPTER XV SHOWS THE TTKANNT OF WEAKNESS Three days later the bay horse returned at a gallop with Jonathan Gay in the saddle. At the head of the steps Kesiah was standing, and she answered the young man's anxious questions with a manner which she tried to make as sympathetic as the occasion required. This effort to adjust her features into harmony with her feelings had brought her brows together in a forbidding scowl and exaggerated the iiarsh lines between mouth and chin. "Am I in time.''" he asked in a trembling voice, and his hand reached out to her for support. "The immediate danger is over, Jonathan," she answered, while she led him into the library and closed the door softly behind them. "For hours we •despaired of her recovery, but the doctors say now that if there is no other shock, she may live on for months. " "I got your note last night in Washington," he xeturned. " It was forwarded by mail from Applegate. Is the doctor still with her?" "No, he has just gone. The rector is there now. \ She finds him a great comfort. " "It was so sudden. Aunt Kesiah — she appeared well when I left her. What caused the attack? " " A talk she had had with Mr. Chamberlayne. It seems he thought it best to prepare her for the fact that your Uncle Jonathan left a good deal of his SHOWS THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS 191 property — it amounts to an income of about ten thousand a year, I believe, to Reuben Merryweather's granddaughter when she comes of age. Of course it wasn't the money — Angela never gave that a thought — but the admission that the girl was hia illegitimate daughter that struck so heavy a blow. " "But surely she must have suspected " " She has never suspected anything in her life. It is a part of her sweetness, you know, that she never faces an unpleasant fact until it is literally thrust on her notice. As long as your uncle was so devoted to her and so considerate, she thought it a kind of disloyalty to inquire as to the rest of his life. Once I remember,, twenty years ago, when that poor distraught creature came to me — I went straight to Angela and tried to get her to use her influence with your uncle for the girl's sake. But at the first hint, she locked herself in her room and refused to let me come near her. Then it was that I had that terrible quarrel with Mr. Gay, and he hardly spoke to me again as long as he lived. I be- lieve, though, he would have married Janet after my talk with him except for Angela's illness, which was brought on by the shock of hearing him speak of his intention. '* She sighed wonderingly, her anxious frown deepening^ between her eyebrows. "They both seemed to think that in some way I was to blame for the whole thing, " she added, "and your uncle never forgave me. It's, the same way now. Mr. Chamberlayne spoke quite angrily to me when he saw the effect of his interview. He appeared to think that lought to have prevented it." "Could it have been kept from her, do you suppose? '* "That looked impossible, and, of course, he broke it to her very gently. He also, you know, has all his 192 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH life had a sentiment about Angela, and that, I think is why he never married. He told me once that she came nearer than any woman he had ever seen to representing every man's ideal. " "What I can't understand is why she should have been so upset by the discovery?" " Well, she was very fond of your uncle, and she has cherished quite romantically the memory of his affec- tion, for her. I think — for that is Angela's way — that he means much more to her dead than he did living — and this, she says, has blackened his image. " "But even then it seems incomprehensible that it should have made her really so ill. " "Oh, you don't know her yet, Jonathan. I remem- ber your uncle used to say that she was more like a flower than a woman, and he was always starting alarms about her health. We lived in a continual panic about her for several years, and it was her weakness, as much as her beauty, that gave her her tremendous power over him. He was like wax in her hands, though of course he never suspected it. " The tread of Mr. Mullen was heard softly on the staircase, and he entered with his hand outstretched from the starched cuff that showed beneath the sleeve of his black broadcloth coat. Pausing on the rug, he glanced from Kesiah to Jonathan with a grave and capable look, as though he wished them to understand that, having settled everything with perfect satis- faction in the mind of Mrs. Gay, he was now ready to perform a similar office for the rest of the household. "I am thankful to say that I left your dear mother resting peacefully," he observed in a whisper. "You must have had a distressing journey, Mr. Gay? " THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS 193 "I was very much alarmed," replied Gay, with a nervous gesture as if he were pushing aside a disagree- able responsibility. "The note took three days to find me, and I didn't know until I got here whether she was alive or dead. " "It is easy to understand your feelings," returned the rector, still whispering though Gay had spoken in his natural voice. " Such a mother as yours deserves the most careful cherishing that you can give her. To know her has been an inspiration, and I am never tired of repeating that her presence in the parish, and occasional attendance at church, are privileges for which we should not forget to be thankful. It is not possible, I believe, for any woman to approach more closely the perfect example of her sex. " "Perhaps I had better go up to her at once. We are deeply grateful to you, Mr. Mullen, for your sympathy. " "Who would not have felt?" rejoined the other, and taking up his hat from the table, he went out, still treading softly as though he were walking upon some- thing he feared to hurt. "Poor mother! It's wonderful the way she has with people! " exclaimed Gay, turning to Kesiah. "She's always had it with men — there's something so appealing about her. You'll be very careful what you say to her, Jonathan. " "Oh, I'll not confess my sins, if that's what you mean, " he responded as he ascended the staircase. The room was fragrant with burning cedar, and from the dormer-windows, latticed by boughs, a band of sunlight stretched over the carpet to the high white bed in which his mother was lying. Her plain- 194 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH tive blue eyes, which clung to him when he entered, appeared to say; "Yes, see how they have hurt me — A poor frail creature. " Above her forehead her hair, which was going grey, broke into a mist, and spread in soft, pale strands over the pillow. Never had her helpless sweetness appealed so strongly to his emotions, as when she laid her hand on his arm and said in an apologetic whisper: "Dear boy, how I hated to bring you back." "As if I wouldn't have come from the end of the "world, dearest mother, " he answered. He had fallen on his knees by her bed, but when iCesiah brought him a chair, he rose and settled him- self more comfortably. "I wanted you, dear, but if you knew how I dreaded to become a drag on you. Men must be free, I know — never let me interfere with your freedom — I feel such a helpless, burdensome creature;" "If you could only see how young and lovely you look even when you are ill, you would never fear becoming a burden. In spite of your grey hairs, you might pass for a girl at this minute. " "You wicked flatterer! — but, oh, Jonathan, I've had a blow!" i "I understand. It must have been rough. " "And to think how I had always idealized him! — liow I had believed in His love for me and cherished his memory! To discover that even at the last — on his deathbed — he was thinking of that woman!" She wept gently, wiping her eyes with a resigned and suflfering gesture on the handkerchief Kesiah had handed her. "I feel as if my whole universe had crumbled, " she said. THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS 195 "But it was no affront to you, mother — it all happened before he saw you, and was only an episode. Those things don't bite into a man's life, you know," "Of course, I knew there had been something, but I thought he had forgotten it — that he was faithful to his love for me — his spirit worship, he called it. Then to find out so long after his death — when his memory had become a part of my religion — that he had turned back at the end. " "It wasn't turning away from you, it was merely an atonement. Your influence was visible even there." "I am sorry for the child, of course," she said sadly, after weeping a little — "who knows but she may have inherited her mother's character?" "The doctor said you were to be quiet, Angela," remarked Kesiah, who had stood at the foot of the bed in the attitude of a Spartan. "Jonathan, if you begin to excite her, you'd better go. " "Oh, my boy, my darling boy," sobbed Mrs. Gay, with her head on his shoulder, "I have but one com- fort and that is the thought that you are so different — that you will never shatter my faith in you. If you only knew how thankful I am to feel that you are free from 'these dreadful weaknesses of other men." Cowed by her helplessness, he looked down on her with shining eyes. "Remember the poor devil loved you, mother, and be merciful to his memory, " he replied, touched, for the first time, by the thought of his uncle. "I shall try, Jonathan, I shall try, though the very thought of evil is a distress to me," she replied, with a saintly look. "As for the girl, I have only the tenderest pity for the unfortunate creature. " 196 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "That's like you, mother." • ' Kesiah says that she has behaved very well. Didn't you say so, Kesiah?" "Yes, Mr. Chamberlayne told me that she appeared perfectly indiflferent when he spoke to her. She even remarked, I believe, that she didn't see that it concerned her. " "Well, she's spirit enough. Now stop talking, mother, I am going. " "God bless you, my darling boy — you have never failed me. " Instead of appeasing his conscience, the remark completed his descent into the state of disenchant- ment he had been approaching for hours. The shock of his mother's illness, coming after three days of marriage, had been too much for his unstable equi- librium, and he felt smothered by an oppression which, in some strange way, seemed closing upon him from without. It was in the air — in the faded cretonne of the room, in the grey flashes of the swallows from the eaves of the house, in the leafless boughs etched delicately against the orange light of the sky. Like most adventurers of the emotions, he was given to swift despondencies as well as to vivid elations, and the tyranny of a mood was usually as absolute as it was brief. The fact was there while it lasted like the physical sensation of hunger or of gratification. When it departed he seldom spurred his imagination to the pursuit of it. "So it's over," he said under his breath, as he looked through the lacework of ivy on the small green- sh panes to the desolate November fields, "and I've oeen a damn fool for the asking ! " THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS 197 At the end of the week Blossom returned to the mill, and on the afternoon of her arrival, Gay met her in the willow copse by the brook. To the casual observer there would have appeared no perceptible change in his manner, but a closer student of the hearts of lovers might have drawn an inference from the fact that he allowed her to wait five minutes for him at the place of meeting. True, as he explained passionately, his mother had asked for him just as he was leaving the house, and it was clearly impossible that he should refuse his mother ! That he was still ardent for Blossom's embraces was evident to her glance, but the affair was settled, the mystery solved, and there was no longer need that he should torment himself. That the love of his kind is usually a torment or nothing had not, at this stage, occurred to either of the lovers. He was feeling strongly that, having conducted himself in so honourable a manner there was nothing more to be expected of him; while she assured her heart that when his love had proved capable of so gallant a sacrifice, it had established the fact of its immortality. The truth was that the fire still burned, though the obstacles, which had supplied fuel to the flames, were consumed, and a pleasant warmth rather than a destroying blaze was the result. Had Gay sounded the depths of his nature, which he seldom did, he would have discovered that for him passion was a kind of restlessness translated into emotion. When the restlessness was appeased, the desire in which it had revealed itself slowly evaporated. "How is your mother?" was Blossom's first eager question, " oh, I do hope she is better ! " "Better, yes, but we're still awfully anxious, the 198 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH least shock may kill her — Aunt Kesiah and I are walking on pins and needles. How are you. Beauty? Did you enjoy your visit?" He kissed her lips, and she clung to him with the first expression of weakness she had ever shown. "How could I when it ended like that?" "Well, you're married anyway — that ought to satisfy you. What does it feel like?" "I can't believe it — and I haven't even any ring." "Oh, the ring! If you'd had it, you'd have dropped it about somewhere and let out the secret." "I wish it had been in church and before a clergy ^ man. " "Are you trying to make me jealous again of the Reverend Orlando? I'm an old married man now, and it is hopeless." "Do you really feel married, Jonathan?" "The deuce I don't! If I^did I'd be galloping down the turnpike. " "I wonder why you did it?" she questioned a little wistfully, "you take it so lightly. " "I could only take it lightly after I'd done it — that's why, darling." "If I could believe in it I shouldn't mind the secrecy," she said, "but I feel so wicked and under- hand that I hardly dare hold up my head before the folks at home. Jonathan, when do you think we may come out and confess?" For a moment he did not answer, and she watched the frown gather slowly between his eyebrows. "There, there. Blossom, don't begin that already," le responded irritably, "we can't make it public as long as my mother lives — that's out of the ques- THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS 19» tion. Do you think I could love you if I felt you had forced me to murder her? Heaven knows I've done enough — I've married you fair and square, and yott ought to be satisfied. " "I am satisfied," she replied on the point of tears, "but, oh, Jonathan, I'm not happy." "Then it's your own fault," he answered, still annoyed with her. "You've had everything your own way, and just because I get in trouble and come to you for sympathy, you begin to nag. For God's sake, don't become a nagging woman. Blossom. A man hates her worse than poison. " "O Jonathan!" she cried out sharply, placing her hand on her breast as though he had stabbed her. "Of course, I'm only warning you. Your great charm is poise — I never saw a woman who had so much of it. That's what a man wants in a wife, too. Va- garies are all right in a girl, but when he marries, he wants something solid and sensible. " "Then you do love me, Jonathan? " "Don't be a goose," he rejoined — for it was a question to which he had never in his life returned a direct answer. "Of course, I know you do ox you wouldn't have married me — but I wish you'd tell me so — just ia words — sometimes. " "If I told you so, you'd have no curiosity left, and that would be bad for you. Come, kiss me, sweet- heart, that's better than talking. " She kissed him obediently, as mildly complaisant as she had once been coldly aloof. Though the allurement of the remote had deserted her, she still possessed, in his eyes, the attraction of the beautiful. 200 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH If the excitement of the chase was ended, the pleasure of the capture was still amply sufficient to make up the difference. He laughed softly as he kissed her, enjoying her freshness, her surrender, her adoration, which she no longer attempted to hide. When he parted from her several hours afterwards, he had almost recovered the casual gaiety which had become his habit of mind. Life was too short either to wonder or to regret, he had once remarked, and a certain easy fatalism had softened so far the pricks of a disturbing conscience. The walk from the pasture to the house led through a tangle of shrubbery called by the negroes, the Haunt's Walk, and as he pushed the leafless boughs out of his way, a flitting glimpse of red caught his eye beyond a turn in the path. An instant later, Molly passed him on her way to the spring or to the meadows beyond. "Good day, Mr. Jonathan," she said, while her lips curved and she looked up at him with her arch and brilliant smile. "Good day to yourself, cousin," he responded gaily, "what is your hurry?" As he made a movement to detain her, she slipped past him, and a minute afterwards her laugh floated back. "Oh, there's a reason!" she called over her shoulder. A sudden thought appeared to strike him at her words, and turning quickly in the path, he looked after her until she disappeared down the winding path amid the tangle of shrubbery. "Jove, she is amazingly pretty!" he said at last under his breath. CHAPTER XVI THE COMING OP SPRING The winter began in a long rain and ended in a heavy snow which lay for a week over the country. In the chill mornings while she dressed, Molly watched the blue-black shadows of the crows skimming over the white ground, and there was always a dumb anxiety . at her heart as she looked after them. On Christmas Eve there had been a dance at Piping Tree, and because she had danced twice with Gay (who had ridden over in obedience to a whim), Abel had parted from her in anger. For the first time she had felt the white heat of his jealousy, and it had aroused rebellion, not acquiescence, in her heart. Jonathan Gay was nothing to her (though he called her his cousin) — he had openly shown his preference for Blossom — but she insisted passionately that she was free and would dance with whomsoever she pleased. To Abel's demand that she should give up "round dances" entirely, she had returned a defiant and mocking laugh. They had parted in an outburst of temper, to rush wildly together a few days later who. 1 they met by chance in the turnpike. "You love him, but you don't love him enough, honey," said Reuben, patting her head. "You love yourself still better than him." "Three months ago he hardly dared hope for me — he would have kissed the dust under my feet — and 201 202 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH now he flies into fits of jealousy because I dance with another man." " 'Tis human natur to go by leaps an' starts in love, Molly." "It's a foolish way, grandfather." "Well, I ain't claimin' that we're over- wise, but that's al'ays life ready to teach us." When the snow thawed, spring appeared so sud- denly that it looked as if it had lain there all winter ia a green and gold powder over the meadows. Flashes of blue, like bits of fallen sky, showed from the rail fences; and the notes of robins fluted up from the budding willows beside the brook. On the hill behind Reuben Merryweather's cottage the peach-trees bloomed, and red-bud and dogwood filled the grey woods with clouds of, delicate colour. Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also, with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of men and women. As the weeks passed,' that inextinguishable hope, which mounts always with the rising sap, looked from their faces. On the morning of her birthday, a warm April day, Molly smiled at herself in the mirror, and because the dimples became her, wondered how she could manage to keep on smiling forever. Blushing and paling she tried a ribbon on her hair, threw it aside, and picked up another. "I am thankful for many things," she was thinking, "and most of all I am thankful that I am pretty. I suppose it's better to be good like Judy Hatch, but I'd rather be pretty." She was at the age when the forces of character still lie dormant, and an accident may determine the THE COMING OF SPRING 203 direction of their future development. It is the age when it is possible for fortune to make a dare-devil of a philosopher, a sceptic of a worshipper, a cynic of a sentimentalist. When she went down the flagged walk a little later to meet Abel by the blazed pine as she had promised, she was still smiling to herself and to the blue birds that sang joyously in the blossoming trees in the orchard. At the end of the walk her smile vanished for she came face to face with Jim Halloween, who carried a new-born lamb in his arms. "Many happy returns of the day," he began, with emotion. "I thought a present like this would be the most acceptable I could bring to you — an' ma agreed with me when I asked l^er advice." "It's very good of you — and how darling it is! I'll take it back and make it comfortable before I start out." Taking the lamb into her arms, she hid her face in its wool while they returned to the house. "It ain't so young as it looks, an' will begin to be peart enough befo' long," he remarked. "Something useful as well as ornamental, was what I had in my mind to bring you. 'Thar's nothin' mo' suitable all round for the purpose than a lamb,' was what I said to ma. ' 'She can make a pet of it at first, an' then when it gets too big to pet, she can turn it into mut- ton.' " "But I wouldn't — I'd never let it be killed — the little darling!" "Now, that's foolishness, I reckon," he returned admiringly, "but thar's something downright takin' in foolishness as long as a woman is pretty. I don't 204 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH mind it, an' I don't reckon ma would unless it turned to wastefulness. Is thar' any hope you've changed yo' mind since the last time I spoke about marriage?" "No, I haven't changed, Mr. Halloween." He sighed not passionately, but with a resigned and sentimental regret, "Well, in that case, it's a pity I've wasted so much time wantin' you, I reckon," he rejoined. "It ain't sensible to want what you can't have, an' I've always tried to be sensible, seein' I'm a farmer. If I hadn't set my fancy on you I'd have waited on Blossom Rever- comb as likely as not." They had reached the house, and she did not reply until she had entered the living-room and placed the lamb in a basket. Coming out again, she took up the thread of the conversation as she closed the door behind her. "I wonder all of you don't turn your eyes on Blossom," she observed. "Yes, she's handsome enough, but stiff-mouthed and set like all the rest of the Revercombs. I shouldn't like to marry a Revercomb, when it comes to that." "Shouldn't you?" she asked and laughed merrily. "They say down at Bottoms," he went on, "that she's gone moonstruck about Mr. Jonathan, an' young Adam DooUttle swears he saw them walkin* together on the other side of old orchard hiU." "I thought she was too sensible a girl for that." "They're none of 'em too sensible. I'm the only man I ever saw who never had a woman moonstruck about him — an' it makes me feel kind of lonesome to hear the others talk. It's a painful experience, I reckon, but it must be a fruitful source of conversation THE COMING OF SPRING 205 with a man's wife, if he ever marries. Has it ever struck you," he inquired, "that the chief thing lackin' in marriage is conversation?" "I don't know — I've never thought about it." "Now, I have often an' over again, ma bein' sech a silent person to live with. It's the silence that stands between Blossom Revercomb an' me — an' her brother Abel is another glum one of the same sort, isn't he.''" "Do you think so? I hadn't noticed it." "An' you seein' so much of him! Well, all folks don't observe things as sharply as I do — 'twas a way I was born with. But I passed him at the fork as I came up, an' he was standin' just as solemn an' silent while Mr. Chamberlayne, over from Apple- gate, was askin' him questions." "What questions? Did you hear them?" "Oh, about his mother an' the prospects of the grist-mill. The lawyer went on afterwards to the big' house to do business with Mr. Jonathan." They had reached the point in the road where a bridle path from the mill ran into it; and in the centre of the field, which was woven in faint spring colours like an unfinished tapestry, Molly descried the figure of Abel moving rapidly toward her. Dismissing her companion, she ran forward with her warm blood suffusing her face. "Abel," she said, "tell me that you are happy," and lifted her mouth for his kiss. "Something in the spring makes me wild for you, Molly. I can't live without you another year, and hear the blue birds and see the green burst out so sudden. There is a terrible loneliness in the spring, darling." "But I'm here, Abel." 206 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Yes, you're here, but you aren't near enough, for I'm never sure of you. That's the cause of it — shall I ever be sure of you even after we are married? You've got different blood in you, Molly — blood that doesn't run quiet, — and it makes me afraid. Do you know I've been to look at the pines this morn- ing, and I am all one big ache to begin on the house." "But you're happy — say you're happy." "How can I be happy, when I'm wanting you with every drop of my blood and yet never certain that I shall have you. The devil has a lot to do with it, I reckon — for there are times when I am half blind with jealousy and doubt of you. Did you ever kiss a man before me, MoUy.''" She laughed, moved by an instinct to torment him. "You wouldn't have asked me that three months ago, and you wouldn't have cared." "It's different now. I've got a right to know." "You'll never know anything because you have the 'right' to," she returned impatiently. "I hate the word — how silly you are, Abel." "If you'd call me mad you'd come nearer to it, I reckon. It's the way of the Hawtreys — we've al- ways gone neck and crop over the fences without giving a thought to the damage we've done by the way. My mother went like that at reUgion — she's gone over so hard to religion that she hasn't left a piece of her for common humanity. All the world is divided for her between religion and damnation. I believe she thinks the very eggs in the hen-house are predestined to be saved or damned. And with me it's the same, only it isn't religion, but you. It's all you to me, Molly, even the spring." THE COMING OF SPRING 207 "You're so wholehearted, and I'm so light- minded. You ought to have loved a staid, sober woman. I was born passionate and changeful just as you were born passionate and steady." "Don't, Molly, if you only knew how you hurt me when you talk like that. You've flown into my heart like a little blue bird into a cage, and there you'll beat and flutter, but you can't get out. Some day you'll rest there quiet, sweetheart." "Don't call it a cage, and never, never try to hold me or I'll fly away." "Yet you love me, Molly?" She threw her arms about his neck, rising on tip- toie while she kissed his mouth. "I love you — and yet in my heart I don't really believe in love," she answered. "I shouldn't be surprised to wake up any morning and find that I had dreamed it." "It makes me want to curse those that put your mind but of joint when you were little and innocent." "I don't believe I was ever little and innocent — I was born out of bitterness." "Then I'll cure you, darling. I'll love you so hard that you'll forget all the terrible things you knew as a child. " She shook her head, gaily and yet with a touch of scorn for his assurance. "You may try with all your strength, but when a sapling has been bent crooked you can't pull it straight." "But you aren't crooked, Molly," he answered, kissing her throat above her open blouse. She glowed at his kiss, and for one instant, it seemed to them that their spirits touched as closely as their 208 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH bodies, while the longing and the rapture of spring drew them together. "You're mine now, Molly — I've got you close," he said as he held her. At his words the rosy waves upon which they had floated broke suddenly on the earth, and turning slowly they walked hand in hand out of the field into the txirnpike. A strange shyness had fallen over them, for when Molly tried to meet his eyes, she found that her lashes trembled and fell; — yet this shyness was as delicious as the ecstasy from which it had come. But Nature seldom suffers such high moments to pass before they have been paid for in physical values. As the lovers passed into the turnpike, there came the soimd of a horse at a trot, and a minute later Jona- than Gay rode toward them, leaning slightly over the neck of his bay. Seeing them, he lifted his hat and brought down his horse to a walk, as if prompted by a sudden desire to look closer in MoUy's face. Her rapture evidently became her, for after his first casual glance, he turned again quickly and smiled into her eyes. Her look met his with the frankness of a child's and taken unawares — pleased, too, that he should so openly admire her — she smiled back again with the glow of her secret happiness enriching her beauty. In a moment Gay had passed on, and turning to Abel, she saw that a frown darkened his features. "He had no right to look at you like that, and you oughtn't to have smiled back, Molly," he said sternly. Her nature leaped instantly to arms. "I suppose I've a right to my smiles," she retorted defiantly. "No you haven't — not now. An engaged woman ought to be proper and sober — anybody will tell you THE COMING OF SPRING 209 so — ask Mr. Mullen. A girl may flirt a little and nobody thinks any harm of it, but it's different after- wards, and you know it." "I know nothing of the kind, and I refuse to be preached to. I might as well marry Mr. Mullen." The taunt, though it was uttered half in jest, ap- peared to torment him beyond endurance. "How can you talk to me like this, after what you said five minutes ago?" he demanded. His tone approached, unfortunately, the ministerial, and as he spoke, her anger flamed over her as hotly as her happiness had done a few moments earlier. "That was five minutes ago," she retorted with passion. Stopping in the road, he caught her arms and held them to her sides, while the thunder cloud blackened his forehead. Two playthings of Nature, swept alternately by the calm and the storm of elemental forces, they faced each other in the midst of mating birds and insects that were as free as they. "Do you mean that you've changed, and in five minutes?" he asked. "I've always told you I could change in three," she retorted. "I don't believe it — you are behaving foolishly." "And you are wise, I suppose — preaching and prating to me as if you stood in the pulpit. When you were begging me so humbly for a kind word, I might have known that as soon as you got the kind word, you'd begin to want to manage me body and soul — that's a man all over." "I merely said that an engaged woman ought not to smile too free at other men — and that you ought 210 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH not to even more than others, because there is some- thing so inviting about you. Mr. Mullen would say the same thing from the pulpit — and what one man can say in the pulpit, I reckon, another may repeat in the road." "No, Jie mayn't — not if he wants to marry me." "If I promise not to say a word more about it, will you get over yoiu- temper? " "If you keep your promise, but how am I to know that you won't burst out again the next time I look at a man?" "Only try to look at them a little differently, Molly, not quite so wide-eyed and red-lipped — but primmer and with lowered lashes, just a bit contemptuous, as if you were thinking *you might as well be a stick or a stone for all the thought I am giving you.'" The mental picture appeared to afford him satisfac- tion, for he resumed after a moment. "I believe if you'd practise it a while before the glass you could do it — you are so clever." "Why on earth should I make myself ugly just to please you?" "It wouldn't be making yourself ugly — I can't endure an ugly woman. All I want you to be is sober." "Then what made you fall in love with me? It certainly was not for soberness." He shook his head hopelessly, puzzled for the first time by the too obvious contradiction between the ideal' and the actual — between the phantom of a man's imagination and the woman who enthralls his heart. "To save my life I couldn't tell you why I did," he replied. "It does seem a bit foolish to fall in love with THE COMING OF SPRING 211 a woman as she is and then try to make her over into something different." "Judy Hatch was the person God intended for you, I'm sure of it." "Well, I'm not, and if I were I'd go ahead and defeat his intentions as I'm doubtless doing this minute. Let's make up now, so you'd as well stop talking silliness." "It's you that talks silliness, not I — as if I were going through life lowering my lashes and looking contemptuous! But you're your mother all over again. I've heard her say a dozen times that a girl who is born homely ought to get down on her knees and thank the Lord for protecting her from temptation." "You never heard me say it, did you.''" "No, but I shall yet if I live long enough — and all because of your ridiculous jealousy." The humour of this struck him, and he remarked rather grimly: "Good God, Molly, what a vixen you are!" Then he broke into a laugh, and catching her to him, stopped her mouth with kisses. "Well, we're in it," he said, "and we can't get out, so there's no use fighting about it." CHAPTER XVII THE SHADE OF MR. JONATHAN Old Reuben, seated in his chair on the porch, watched Molly come up the flagged walk over the bright green edgings of moss. Her eyes, which were like wells of happiness, smiled at him beneath the blossoming apple boughs. Already she had forgotten the quarrel and remembered only the bliss of the reconciliation. "I've had visitors while you were out, honey," said the old man as she bent to kiss him. "Mr. Cham- berlayne and Mr. Jonathan came up and sat a bit with me." "Was it on business, grandfather?" "'Twas on yo' business, Molly, an' it eased my mind considerable about what's to become of you when I'm dead an' gone. It seems old Mr. Jonathan arranged it all befo' he died, an' they've only been waitin' till you came of age to let you into the secret. He left enough money in the lawyer's hands to make you a rich woman if you follow his wishes." "Did they tell you his wishes.?" she asked, turning from Reuben to Spot as the blind dog fawned toward her. "He wants you to live with Miss Kesiah and Mr. Jonathan when I'm taken away from you, honey, an' you're to lose all but a few hundred if you ever marry and leave 'em. Old Mr. Jonathan had sharp eyes, an* Hi THE SHADE OF MR. JONATHAN 21S he saw I had begun to fail fast befo' he died. It's an amazin' thing to think that even after all the moral- ity is wrung out of human natur thar'U still be a few drops of goodness left sometimes at the bottom of it." "And if I don't do as he wished? What will come of it, then, grandfather.?" "Then the bulk goes to help some po' heathens over yonder in China to the Gospel. He was a strange man, was old Mr. Jonathan. Thar warn't never any seein' through him, livin' or dead." "Why did he ever come here in the beginning? He wasn't one of our people." "The wind blew him this way, pretty, an' he was never one to keep goin' against the wind. When the last Jordan died childless an' the place was put up to be sold, Mr. Jonathan read about it somewhar, an' it looked to him as if all he had to do was to come down here an' bury himself alive to git rid of tempta- tion. But the only way to win against temptation is to stand square an' grapple with it in the spot whar it finds you, an' he came to know this, po' sinner, befo' he was done with it." "He was a good soldier, wasn't he?" asked Molly. "So good a soldier that he could fight as well on one side as on t'other, an' 'twas only an accident that sent him into the army with me instead of against me. I remember his telling me once when I met him after a battle that 'twas the smell of blood, not the cause, that made him a fighter. Thar's many a man like that on both sides in every war, I reckon." "I wonder how you can be so patient when you think of him!" she said passionately as he stopped. "You'll understand better when you're past 214 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH seventy," he answered gently. "Thar's a softness like a sort of green grass that springs up an' covers you when you begin to git old an' worn out. I've got it an' Spot's got it — you can tell by the way he won't trouble to git mad with the chickens that come peckin' around him. As soon as it's safely spread over you, you begin to see that the last thing to jedge anybody by is what you've known of the outside of 'em." " I can't feel about him as you do, but I don't mind takin' his money as long as you share it," returned the girl in a softer voice. " It's a pile of money such as you've never heard of, Molly. Mr. Chamberlayne says thar'U be an income of goin' on ten thousand dollars a year by the time you're a little older." "Ten thousand dollars a year just for you an' me!" she exclaimed, startled. "Thar warn't so much when 'twas left, but it's been doublin' on itself all the while you were waitin'." "We could go everywhere an' see everything, grandfather." "It ain't for me, pretty. Mr. Jonathan knew you wouldn't come into it till I was well on my way to the end of things." Kneeling at his sidie, she caught his hands and clung to him, sobbing. "Don't talk of dying! I can't bear to think of your leaving me!" His trembling and knotted hands gathered her to him. "The young an' the old see two diflFerent sides of death, darlin'. When you're young an' full of spirit, it looks powerful dark an' lonely to yo' eyes. THE SHADE OF MR. JONATHAN 215 but when you're gittin' along an' yo' bones ain't quite so steady as they once were, an' thar seem to be mo' faces you're acquainted with on the other side than on this one — then what you've been so terrible afeared of don't look much harder to you than settlin' down to a comfortable rest. I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it. The Lord always ap- pears a heap nearer to the dead, somehow, than He does to the livin', and I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled." "You've seen so many die that you've grown used to it," said Molly through her tears. For a moment he gazed wistfully at the apple boughs, while his face darkened, as if he were watching a pro- cession of shadows. In his seventy years he had gained a spiritual insight which penetrated the visible body ol things in search of the truth beneath the ever- changing appearance. There are a few blameless yet suffering beings on whom nature has conferred a simple wisdom of the heart which contains a prof ounder understanding of life than the wisdom of the mind can grasp — ^and Reuben was one of these. Sorrow had sweetened in his soul UBtil it had turned at last into sympathy. "I've seen 'em come an' go like the flakes of light out yonder in the orchard," he answered almost in a whisper. "Young an' old, glad an' sorry, I've seen 'em go — an' never one among 'em but showed in thar face when 'twas over that 'twas the best thing had ever happened. It's hard for me now to separate the livin' from the dead, unless it be that the dead are gittin' closer all the time an' the livin' further away." 216 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "And you're never afraid,, grandfather?" "Well, when it comes to that, honey, I reckon if I can trust the Lord in the light, I can trust him in the darkness. I ain't as good a Christian as my ma was — she could beat Sarah Revercomb when it came to sayin' the Bible backwards — but I've yet to see the spot of natur, either human or clay, whar we couldn't find the Lord at work if we was to dig deep enough." He stopped at sight of a small figure running under the apple trees, and a minute later Patsey, the Gays' maid, reached the flagged walk, and panted out a request that Miss Molly should come to the house for a birthday present which awaited her there. "Won't you go with me, grandfather?" asked the girl, turning to Reuben. "I ain't at home thar, Molly," answered the old man. "It's well enough to preach equality an' what not when you're walking on the opposite side of the road, as Abel would say, but it don't ring true while yo' feet are slippin' an' slidin' over a parlour floor." "Then I shan't go without you. Where you aren't welconpie is a place I can stay away from." "Thar, thar, honey, don't be runnin' arter Abel's notions till you find out whar they're leadin' you. Things are better as they are or the Lord wouldn't have made 'em so, an' He ain't goin' to step a bit faster or slower on o' count of our ragin'. Some folks were meant to be on top an' some at bottom, for t'otherwise God Almighty wouldn't have put 'em thar. Abel is like Sarah, only his generation is different." "Do you really think he's like his mother?" asked Molly a little wistfully. "As haw is like haw. They*re both bent on doin* THE SHADE OF MR. JONATHAN ' 217 the Lord's job over again an' doin' it better, an' thar manner of goin' to work would be to melt up human natur an' pour it all into the same pattern. It ain't never entered Sarah's head that you can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's mighty apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody." "All the same I shan't go a step without you," persisted the girl. "Then find my stick an' straighten my collar. Or had I better put on my Sunday black?" "No, I like you as you are — only let me smooth your hair a little. Run ahead, Patsey, and say we're both coming." Slipping her arm in bis, she led him through the orchard, where the bluebirds were fluting blissfully in the apple-trees. To the heart of each spring was calling — but to Molly it meant promise and to Reuben remembrance. Though the bluebirds sang only one song, they brought to the old man and to the girl a different music. "I've sometimes thought Mr. Mullen better suited to you than Abel, Molly," said Reuben presently, uttering an idea that had come to him more than once. "If you'd been inclined to fancy him, I don't believe either Mrs. Gay or Miss Kesiah could have found any fault with him." "But you know I couldn't care for him, grand- father," protested Molly impatiently. "He is like one 218 THE MILLER OF OIZ> CHURCH of Mrs. Bottom's air plants that grow without any roots." " Well, he's young yet an' his soul struts a trifle, but wait till he's turned fifty an' he'll begin to be as good a Christian as he is a parson. It's a good mould, but he congealed a bit too stiff when he was poured into it." They reached the grape arbour as he finished, and a minute later Abednego led them into the library, where Kesiah placed Reuben in a comfortable chair and hastened to bring him a glass of wine from the sideboard. At Molly's entrance. Gay and Mr. Chamberlayne came forward to shake hands with her, while Mrs. Gay looked up from her invalid's couch and murmured her name in a gentle, reproachful voice. The pale blue circles around the little lady's eyes and faintly smiling mouth were the only signs of the blighting experience through which she had passed. As she turned her angelic gaze on old Jona- than's daughter there was not an instant's doubt in the minds of those about her that she would accept the blow with the suffering sweetness that ehhanced»her beauty. "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 Reu- ben 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 THE SHADE OF MR. JONATHAN 219 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 Jona- than'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 par- alyzed 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, Merry- weather.''" 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. Chamber- layne, 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 heg&n 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 incite of their irreproachable intentions, each one of them was perfectly aware that the visit was very far from being «20 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH 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 disillu- sionment 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 f o;md his legal eloquence tripping confusedly on his tongue, and turned at last in sheer desperation to stare with a sensa- tion 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," saidjthe 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 con- ditions set aside, but not without laying bare a scandal which would cause great pain to sensitive inatures " He glanced sympathetically at Mrs. Gay, who re- THE SHADE OF MR. JONATHAN 221 sponded almost unconsciously to the emotional sug- gestion 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 inter- jview 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. CHAPTER XVin THE SHADE OF REUBEN Arm in arm Reuben and Molly walked slowly home througli 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 ex- haled 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 an impressionist painting. On a bench at one end of the poreh old Adam was sitting, and at sight of them, he rose, and stood wait- ing with his pipe in his hand. "As 'twas sech a fine day nn' thar wam'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 likely to change her name befo' it's time for another." "Well, I'm glad to see you, old Adam," replied 222 THE SHADE OF REUBEN 223 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 Hke a sip of black- berry 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 CTock 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 pre- cious 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. "lis 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 ter- rible waste that it makes a &ugal 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 224 THE MnXER OF OLD CHURCH 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 an' 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 linger- ing 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 THE SHADE OF REUBEN 225 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 faith we see with," remarked Reuben quietly. "Eh, an' 'tis the eye of sense you're weak in," re- sponded 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 226 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH 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 sm-prisin' 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 still- ness — 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 hoimd 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 ceaseless 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 ex- cept 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 THE SHADE OF REUBEN 227 miracle had never happened. Nothing had erer 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 fulfiiled, never had an event fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him lie 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 bote 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 dreaniing 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 228 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH 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. Reassiu-ed 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. CHAPTER XIX TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS 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 229 230 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH frowning fiercely at the sunbeams. Yet only five minutes before she had suffered a sharp recrudes- cence 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 fruit- lessness, 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 duUed 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 TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS 2S1 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 govern- ment 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 232 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH undisciplined, moral passion within her. In her way, Molly was as stern a moralist as Sarah Rever- comb, but she derived her convictions from no aca- demic system of ethics. Kesiah had heard of her las a coquette; now she realized that beneath the \coquetries there was a will of iron. "You must come to us, someday, 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, whojare 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 net 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 TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS 233 show in it that she considered Molly's position changed since the evening before; and it was this very sug- gestion 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 withstood it — because she had always yielded to pressure — be- cause 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 possibiUties — 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 884 THE MILLER OP OLD CHURCH future stretching away, like her past, amid a multi- tude of small duties for which she had neither in- clination 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 in 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," he retiu-ned, 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, Jona- than'?" "I thought it was yoiu" name." "It's not my name to you — I say, Molly, do you mind my teUing 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 TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS ; 235 far as her immediate purpose went it served her as suecessfully 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?" 236 THE MILLER OF OLD CHUBCH "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 ail 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 some of them, and you, my nut-brown beauty, have never felt his fangs." "I'd like to see thein," 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 TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS 237 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 look- ing 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 iniagined 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, arid 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. 238 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "I might have known ^twas all fool'€ play with you — I might have known you had flirted too much to settle down to an honest love," said Abel, breath- ing hard between his words 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 un- reasonableness 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 retoxted. TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS 239 "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 when I 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 for- gotten 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," sne 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 240 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH 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, biu-st 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, huriring through the orchard and up the flagged walk, she ascended the steps, and bent over Reuben in his chair. "Grandfather, I am back. Axe 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!" CHAPTER XX life's ironies 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 feehng 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 demonstra- tion 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 ex- 241 4!42 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH planation 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 to 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?" LIFE'S IRONIES 243 But she was on her guard nowj^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, retiurning 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 in the 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 drcumstaiuces?" "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, he was aware of a help- 244 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH less, 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 surround- ings in which he had known her. Though he told him- self that to think of wealth as a thing to separate them was to show a sordid brutality of soul, he re- volted 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 em- broidery 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. He might dream that love would bring happiness, but she was reasonably assured that money would bring com- fort. 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, pas- sionately, 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 LIFE'S IRONIES 245 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 over- shadowed 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 ma- chinery 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 whole field of human endeavour. He saw Molly, fair and fitting as she had been yester- day 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 fer- vently 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 show:ed 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 S46 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH wkere 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 win- dow a little later she had seen him oiling the wheels of the vehicle. It had been decided at supper the '«vemng before that iJie family as a unit should pay its respects to Reuben. From Sarah, comforting her- self 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 im^pulse 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 Merry- weather 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 re- moval 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 mourn- ing. 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. LIFE'S IRONIES 247 "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 Resurrec- tion' can't be construed into a personal compliment to B.euben." "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. Jona- than was to ride along these roads to-d!^'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 senti- mental 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 248 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH that piece of plougliin'. 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. Bottom. "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 ©f 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. LIFE'S ffiONIES 249 No, it ain't loud!" she replied with more direct con- descension. "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 dubi- ously 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. 269 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "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 if I 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 un- pruned 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 be- fore 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 LIFE'S IRONIES 251 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 awk- ward 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 cer- tain quickness of observation had kept her mind- ful 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 circum- stances, 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. Eesiah had shown her the external differences in "things," while Gay had opened her eyes to the external differ- ences that niight count in men. Until she knew Gay she had believed that the cultivation of one's appear- ance was a matter that concerned women alone. Now, when moved by some unfortimate 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 Jon- 252 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH athan 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 rememberpd 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 crude- ness of Abel. Already the difference between the two men was irritating her, yet she was still uncon- scious as to 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 re- minded 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, LIFE'S'IRONIES 253 I'm not thrifty, I'm not anything your wife ought to be." "You're all I'm wanting, anyway, Molly," he re- plied 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 grand- father 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, you 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 uie? 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 254 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH 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 mocking- bird 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 enter- tained the masculine conviction that the precedent in some way constituted an argument. "And a sensible marriage it was!" retorted Molly LIFE'S IRONIES «55 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." 256 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "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 triumpi over the desire to improve what he had won. Bui once surrendered, the very strength and singleness o: 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 to 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 lo the sky, while she looked after his figure. "Poor Abel," she added after a moment, "he will never get over it." LIFE'S IRONIES 257 Then, while the sigh of compassion was still on hea 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 il uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. The nexl 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 weep- ing 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 hiding down there in the willows?" Judy Hatch it was, and at sight of Abel she had sprang 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 wee- ing, 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 to- gether — 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. 258 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "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 aflSnity 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 an- swered, 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 al- ways 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. LIFE'S IRONIES 26» virtuous girl — just the sort of girl a man would want for his wife." "I try to be good and I don't see why I shoidd 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 the Reverend Orlando rising in serene detachment before her. For a moment he gazed down at her without speak- ing. 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. CHAPTER XXI m WHICH PITT MASQUERADES AS SEASON As AbeIi crossed the poplar log lie said to himself, "I shaU not think of Her again"; when he reached the end of the willows he said, "I must not think of Her again"; and at the beginning of the kitchen garden, he changed this to, "I will not think of Her again." The scent of hyacinths, which floated from a row blooming on either side of the white paling gate, whip- ped his senses into revolt, and he quickened his steps in a vain effort to escape from the tormenting fra- grance. Yet even while he fled from his pain he knew in his heart that he did not desire the strength to turn and renounce it — that to banish the image of Molly from his thoughts was to drive the bloom from the meadow, the perfume from the air, the sunlight from the orchard. Spring became as desolate as winter when it was robbed of the thought of her. By the house a late pear-tree was in blossom, and the sunshine, falling obliquely across it, awoke a white fire in its branches, as if piles of new fallen snow had warmed suddenly to a reflected flame. Beneath it Sarah Revercomb was sowing portulaca seeds in a rockery she had made over a decaying stump. Her back was strained with bending, but not once had she stopped to gaze at the glorified pear-tree overhead. All her life she had distinguished carefully between the aristocracy and the common herd of 260 PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON 261 blossoms, and not all the magic gilding of the spring sunshine could delude her into regarding the useful product of a fruit-tree as a flower. " I don't see why you want to go wearin ' yo ' Sunday clothes every day, Abel," she observed as he was about to pass her. "Why shouldn't I?" he retorted with the defiance of despair. Something in his voice caused the woman who had borne him to raise herself from h6r stooping posture, and stare at him with an amazed and incredulous ex- pression, as if she were asking herself when and where she could have given him birth. In her mental vision, which saw only one thing at a time, but saw that thing with great distinctness, the idea of love slowly pre- sented itself as the cause of such a reversal of the natural order as a Sunday suit on week days. Her conceptions of life were derived so closely from facts, or from a logic as inexorable as facts, that she was conscious of a baffled and exasperated sensation when she was confronted by anything intangible which would not, as she put it in her own mind, "get out of her way." It was natural enough, she knew, that a material ob- ject or condition should possess the power to block one's progress or even to change the normal current of one's existence. Such things had happened a dozen times at least in her limited experience. But when a mere emotion assumed the importance and the reality of a solid body, she was seized by the indig- nant astonishment with which a mathematician might regard the differential calculus if it ceased suddenly to behave as he expected it to do. She had always controlled her own feelings with severity, and it was «62 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH beyond the power of her imagination to conceive a possible excuse — unless it was a disordered liver — for another person's inability to do the same. Be- sides, as she had often asked herself, what was the use of not controlling your feelings when you came to think about it? "Thar ain't a bit of use in yo' goin' on this way over that girl, Abel," she said presently, as an anno- tation to his last remark, "you'd better jest start along about yo ' work, an ' put her right straight out of yo' mind. I al'ays knew thar warn't a particle of sense in it." There was sound reason in her advice, and he did not attempt to dispute it. The unfortunate part was, however, that in the very soundness of her reason lay its point of offence. Philosophy was dealing again in her high handed fashion with emotion, and emotion, in its turn, was treating philosophy with an absence of that respectful consideration to which she was en- titled. Abel knew quite as well as Sarah that there wasn't "a particle of sense" in his thinking of Molly; but the possession of this knowledge did not interfere in the least with either the intensity or the persistence of his thought of her. His mind seemed to have as much control over the passion that raged in his heart as an admonishing apostle of peace has over a mob that is headed toward destruction. At the moment he felt that the last straw — the one burden more that he could not bear — was to be told to follow what he admitted to be the only clear and rational course. Turning away from her without a reply, he rushed through the open gate and across the road and the poplar log into the friendly shelter of his mill. PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON 26S "What he needs is to wear himself out and to settle down into a sort of quiet despair," thought Sarah as she looked after him. Then lifting her trowel, she returned with a sigh to the sowing of portulaca seeds in her rockery. In the twilight of the mill, where he was hunted through the door by the scent of flowers, he went over to the shelf of books in a corner, and taking down the volumes one by one, turned their leaves with a trembling and eager hand, as though he were seeking some thought so strong, so steadying, that once having secured it, the rush of his passion would beat in vain against its impregnable barrier. But the books, like Sarah, treated life in the grand manner and with the fine detachment of philosophy. He could get no as- sistance from them, because they only told him that he would be better and happier if he acted always as a rational being, and this did not help him. They told him, also, in what seemed a burst of unanimity, , that human nature would be better and happier if it were not human nature, but something else. Some: of the writers believed that this result might be atr- tained by making many laws and some of them were of the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that were already made. All admitted that the world was very badly off and that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it — but the trouble was that each writer's remedy was differ- ent from every other writer's, and yet each 'writer's was the imperative, the essential one. There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human nature would be better and happier if it were different. But poor human nature, having known 264 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on, just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be. "There's no help for me here," said Abel, and moving away from the shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with httle round green- ish balls of flowers. On the hot agony iu his heart the languorous Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch. Beneath the throb of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his immediate suffering. For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of its presence. Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discus- sion of pohtics. At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech was over, he told him- self that at last he had found something that might take the place of love in his life. The game of politics showed itself to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion. A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream- haunted face and the patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the following Friday. Though the old clergyman had spent half a century in a futile endeavour to persuade every man to love his neighbour as himself, and thereby save society the worry and the expense of its criminal code, he still hoped on with PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON 265 the divine far-sighted hope of the visionary — hoped not because he saw anything particularly encouraging in his immediate outlook, but because it was his nature to hope and he would probably have continued to do so had Pate been so unjust as to consign him to an Inferno. He was one of those in whom goodness is a natural instinct, and whose existence, even in a more or less inglorious obsciu"ity, leavens the entire lump of humanity. Mr. Mullen, who regarded him with the active suspicion with which he viewed all living ex- amples of Christian charity, spoke of him condescend- ingly as a "man of impracticable ideas" — a phrase which introduced his index prohibitory of opinions. But the old clergyman, having attained a serviceable sense of humour, as well as a heavenly fortitude, went on quietly doing good after the fashion in which he was made. In his impracticable way he had solved the problem of life by an indiscriminate applica- tion of the Golden Rule. This solution had appeared to him so simple and yet so complete, that he had spent fifty years, with but moderate success, in per- suading others to adopt it. At the end he was not what Mr. Mullen would have called a "shining light," in the Church, yet his bread cast upon the waters had returned to him in quantities, which, though small and moist, were sufficient, with stringent economy, to keep body and soul together. One of these quanti- ties he discerned now in the eager young countryman, whose face accompanied him through a trying day, and helped to brighten his self-sacrificing labours. To Abel, driving home some hours later in his gig, the old clergyman was present less as a mental image, than as a vague yet impelling influence for good. The 266 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH impression was still in his thoughts, when he overtook Judy Hatch a mile or two before reaching the cross- roads, and stopped to ask her to drive with him as far as her cottage. At sight of her wan and haggard face, he felt again that impulse of pity, which seemed while it lasted to appease the violence of his suffering. "I haven't seen you to speak to for a long time," he observed, as she mounted over the wheel to her place at his side. "Not since that day by the brook," she answered, and he flinched as if a raw wound had been touched. Though she did not look at him, he was conscious, through some subtle undercurrent of feeling, that her spirit was drenched with the young summer, with the pulsing life of the June forest and the scent of wild grape and honeysuckle which filled the air. Her face was lifted to the fluted leaves of a sycamore, from which the song of a thrush rippled like running water, and there was the rapt and holy look in her eyes which gave her, if he had only known it, a like- ness to one of the minor saints in a primitive Italian painting. So little, however, did her passion use her body as its medium that, after glancing casually at her parted lips, he decided that she was probably counting the eggs she had set to hatch in her hen-house, and hesitated to interrupt the absorbing business of her calculations. Mentally, he regarded her with the ungrudging respect which a man of any sort instinc- tively yields to a woman who obviously disdains to ensnare his judgment in the mesh of his senses. The palpitations of her spirit were communicated to him in so elusive a process, that, even while he felt the stir of his pulses, he was not aware, that it was due in any PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON 267 measure to the woman at his side. If she had been, pretty — if she had been even attractively plain — it would hardly have occurred to him that her intense and breathless expression was associated with the hatching of chickens; but, like other philosophers of whom he had never heard, it was impossible for him to dis- tinguish the qualities of the thing-in-itself from tlie qualities of the phenomenon beneath his eyes. Had he winnowed his superficial impressions the under- lying thought would probably have been: "No woman with a bosom as flat as that can have any nonsense about her." From the first moment of their meeting he had never doubted that it was this lack of "non- sense" which had attracted him. He liked her evident indifference to his opinion of her, and he liked, too, her listless silence, when she sat, with clasped hands, gazing straight ahead through the shadowy colonnade of the woods. Not once had her troubled look wan- dered from the moist dead leaves on the ground, to the misty edges of the forest, where small wild flowei-s thronged in a pale procession of pipsissewa, ladies' tresses, and Enchanter's nightshade. "Did you know that the Gays are in Europe.''" asked Judy, turning her eyes on his face for the first time. His heart gave a throb and was quiet. "No, I hadn't heard it," he replied in an arid voice. "They say it's more than likely Molly will marry Mr. Jonathan. He's waitin' on her." Reaching for the whip, Abel touched the mare lightly on her glossy flank. After that single pang his suffering had left him — for six weeks of sleepless nights and tormented days had exhausted his endurance 268 THE MILLER OF OLD CHUBCH and reduced him to a condition of emotional lassitude. In his brief reaction from spiritual revolt into a state of apathetic submission, he approached his mother's permanent austerity of mind as closely as he was ever likely to do in the whole of his experience. The mere possibility of a fresh awakening of feeKng filled him with aversion. At the moment he had as profound a distrust as Sarah of the immaterial elements; and looking ahead, he saw his futiu-e stretching before him as firm and flat as the turnpike which he was approach- ing. Delight and despair were equally distasteful to him. He shrank as instinctively from the thought of love as a man shrinks from re-opening an old woimd which is still sensitive to the touch, though it has ceased to ache. And so prone is human nature to affirm its inherent belief in the eternity of the present, that he was assured, not only that this was the- most de- sirable point of view he had ever reached, but that it was entirely out of the question that he should ever travel beyond it to another. Forgetting the many times when he had revolted from advice merely be- cause it was "sensible," he began calmly to arrange his life in accordance with that law of practical ex- pediency against which a month ago he had so hotly rebelled. As they drove out of the woods, and turned into the sunken road beyond the ordinary which led in the direction of Solomon Hatch's farm, he withdrew his gaze from the head of his mare and looked atten- tively at his companion. "I hope you are having an easier time, Judy," he said. Her eyes brimmed. "You are the only person who cares about that, Abel." PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON 269 "Why shouldn't I care? You are the best and the cleverest girl I know," he returned. Her gratitude fanned his sympathy, which was be- ginning to smoulder, and he felt again the pleasant sense of being in the position of the benefactor rather than of the benefited. His eyes rested without shrinking on her sallow face, with the faint bluish tinge to the eyelids, and on her scant drab coloured hair, which was combed smoothly back from her forehead — and while he looked his pity clothed itself in the softer and gentler aspect of reason. "She ought to be happy," he thought. "It's a shame they should lead her such a life! It's a shame some good man doesn't fall in love with her and marry her. She's really not so plain, after all. I've seen many women who were worse looking than she is." Unknown to him, an illusion was gradually shedding colour and warmth on his vision of her. Mentally, he had en- dowed her with all the sober and saner virtues to which his present mood was committed — though he had, in reality, no better reason for so doing than the fact that she evidently esteemed him and that she was deserving of pity. The discordant forces of passion no longer disturbed the calm and orderly processes of his mind, and he told himself that he saw clearly, because he saw stark images of facts, stripped not only of the glamour of light and shade, but even of the body of flesh and blood. Life spread before him like a geometrical figure, constructed of [perfect circles and absolutely conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics. That these perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly unthinlcable. Because his nature 270 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH was now quiescent it was impossible for him to conr ceive of it in motion. And all the while, in that silence, which seemed so harmless while it was, in reality, so dangerous, the repressed yet violent force in Judy wrought on his mood in which bare sense and bare thought were unprotected by any covering of the love which had clothed them as far back as he could remember. That breathless, palpitating appeal for happiness — an appeal which is as separate from beauty as the body of flesh is separate from the garment it wears — was drawing him slowly yet inevitably toward the woman at his side. Her silence — charged as it was with the intoxicating spirit of June — had served the purpose of life as neither words nor gestures could have done. It had reconciled him to her presence in the very moment that made him conscious of the strength of his pity. Presently, as they drove through the burned out clearing, she spoke again. "I wonder why you are always so good to me, Abel?" He liked the honest sound of the words, and he did nor know that before uttering them she had debated in her heart whether it was worth while to marry Abel since she could not marry Mr. Mullen. Marriage, having few illusions for her, possessed, perhaps for that reason, the greater practical value. She was unhappy with her stepmother in a negative way, but so impervious had she become to casual annoy- ances, that she hardly weighed the disadvantages of her home against the probable relinquishjnent of Mrs. Mullen's washing day after her marriage to Abel. PITY MASQUERADES AS REASON 271 Her soul was crushed like a trapped creature in the iron grip of a hopeless passion, and her insensibility to the lesser troubles of life was but the insensibility of such a creature to the stings of the insects swarming around its head. The outcome of her drive with Abel aroused only a dull curiosity in her mind. Some years ago, in the days before Mr. Mullen, she would probably have fallen a helpless victim to the miller had his eyes wandered for an instant in her direction. But those days and that probability were now over forever. Unfortunately, however, it is not given to a man to look into the soul of a woman except through the inscrutable veil of his own personality. Had Abel pierced that purple calico dress and witnessed the pathetic struggle in Judy's bosom, his next words would hardly have been uttered. "I wish I could do something to make you happier, Judy," She looked at him with mysterious, brooding eyes, and he was conscious again of the attraction, as subtile and as penetrating as a perfume, which she exhaled in the stillness, and which vanished as soon as she broke the quivering intensity of the silence. That this attraction was merely the unconscious vibration of her passion for another man, which shed its essence in solitude as naturally as a flower sheds its scent, did not occur to him. Without his newly awakened pity it could not have moved him. With it he felt that he was powerless to resist its appeal. " Why shouldn't I be good to you, Judy?" he re- peated. Tears overflowed her eyes at his words. Looking At her, he saw her not as she was, but as he desired 272 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH that she should be; and this desire, he knew, sprang from his loneliness and from his need of giving sym- pathy to some one outside of himself. The illusion that surrounded her bore no resemblance to the illusion of love — yet it was akin to it in the swiftness and the completeness with which it was born. If any one had told him an hour ago that he was on the verge of marriage to Judy, he would have scoffed at the idea — he who was the heartbroken lover of Molly! Yet this sudden protecting pity was so strong that he found himself playing with the thought of marriage, as one plays in lofty moments with the idea of a not altogether unpleasant self-abnegation. He did not love Judyi but he was conscious of an overwhelming desire to make Judy happy — and like all desires which are conceived in a fog of uncertainty, its ulti- mate form depended less upon himself than it did upon the outward pressure of circumstances. "I sometimes think it's more than anybody can stand to go on living as I do," said Judy, breaking the silence, "to slave an' slave an' never to get so much as a word of thanks for it." For a moment he said nothing. Then turning he looked hard into her humid eyes, and what he saw there made him. bend over and take her hand. "Do you think I could make you happier, Judy?" he asked. BOOK SECOND THE CROSS-ROADS CHAPTER I IN WHICH YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED Some six months after Abel's parting from Molly, he might have been seen crossing the lawn at Jordan's Journey on a windy November morning, and even to a superficial observer it would have been evident that certain subtle modifications had been at work in his soul. Disappointed love had achieved this result with a thoroughness which victorious love could not have surpassed. Because he had lost Molly, he had resolved, in his returning sanity, that he would make of himself the man who might have won Molly had she known him in his complete- ness. And in the act of resolving, his character had begun to ripen into the mellowness of maturity. The day was bleak, and something of this external bleakness was reflected in the look which he raised to the ivy draped dormer-windows in the hooded roof. Small greyish clouds were scudding low above the western horizon, and the sorrel waste of broomsedge was rolling high as a sea. The birds, as they skimmed over this billowy expanse, appeared blown, despite their efforts, on the wind that swept in gusts out of the west. On the lawn at Jordan's Journey the fallen leaves were dancing madly like a carnival in rough carousal. Watching them it was easy to imagine that they found some frenzied joy in this dance of death — the end to which they had moved in 276 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH from the young green of the bud through the opulent abundance of the summer. The air was alive with their sighing. They rustled softly under foot as Abel walked up the drive, and then, whipped by a strong gust, fled in purple and wine-coloured multitudes to the shelter of the box hedges, or, rising in flight above the naked boughs, beat against the closed shutters before they came to rest against the square brick chimneys on the roof. Beneath the trees a solitary old negro was spreading manure over the grass, hauling it in a wheelbarrow from a pile somewhere in the barnyard. Back and forth he passed, scattering the fine manure from his spade until the wheelbarrow was empty, when he replenished it in the barnyard and returned to his sprinkling. All the while he smoked steadily a long corncob pipe, and to watch him at his task, was to receive an impression that the hauling of manure was suflScient to fill one's life with dignity and contentment. The work appeared no longer a menial employment, but a sober and serious share of the great problem of production. "That's the way I intend to go about the work of my mill," thought Abel, as he watched him. "When you do it like that it really makes very little difference what you are doing. It all comes to good. " A minute before his thoughts had been on the new roller mill he had recently bought and was now working in his primitive little building, which he had slightly remod- elled. The next thing to go, he supposed, would be the old wooden wheel, with its brilliant enamel of moss, and within five years he hoped to complete the reconstruction of his machinery on lines that were YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED 277 scientific rather than picturesque. His water power was good, and by the time he could afford an entire modern equipment, he would probably have all the grain at his door that he was ready to handle. Then he began to wonder, as he had often done of late, if the work of the farm and the mill might be left safely to Abner and Archie when he went up to Richmond to the General Assembly, in the event of his future election? Already he had achieved a modest local fame as a speaker — for his voice expressed the gradual political awakening of his class. Though he was in advance of his age, it was evident, even to the drowsy-eyed, that he was moving in the direction whither lagging progress was boimd. In the last eighteen months he had devoured the books of the political economists, and he had sucked in theories of social philosophy as a child sucks in milk. That the business of the politician is not to reshape theories, but to readjust conditions he was ready to admit, yet impelled by a strong religious conviction, by a belief in the deter- mining power of a practical Christianity, he was sharing the slowly expanding dream of his century — the dream of a poverty enriched by knowledge, of a social regeneration that would follow an enlif^t- ened and instructed proletariat. Ripples from the thought waves of the world had reached him in the dusty corners of his mill at Old Church. Since no man thinketh to himself, he could no more have escaped the mental impulsion of his time than he could have arrested his embryonic development from the inverte- brate to the vertebrate. His mind being open, ideas had entered, and having entered, they had proceeded iinmedi9.tely to take active possession. He was serv- 278 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ing a distant Utopia of industrial democracy as ar- dently as a lover serves his mistress. As for his actual mistress, she had become not only visionary, but enskied. Some months ago, while his wound was still fresh, he had not suffered his thoughts to dwell on her because of the violence of the pain. Pride as well as common sense, he had told himself during the first weeks of his loss, demanded that he should banish her image from his mind. Though he had never, even in his first anger, called her "a light woman, " he had come perilously near the feeling that she had grazed the skirts of impropriety with a reck- lessness which no sober minded son of Sarah Rever- comb could countenance for a minute. His very success as a miller depended upon an integrity of character which permitted no compromise with the fundamental moralities. Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until hej^ea^es.^ thirty that human nature is made up notof simples, but of compounds. What Abel h^^ never divined was that Molly, like himsejf,^^ght approach the angelic in one mood and fa^ short of the merely human in another — that /«ie, also, was capable of moments of sublimation /and of hours of recusancy. There were the ashes at a poet in her soul as in his, and to contain the ashes of a poet one must have been first the crucible for pu-ifying flames. ago that he had condemned her, and since then the sM)tle modifications had worked in his habit of thought. \As the soreness passed from his heart, he had nursed the~sQar much as a crusader might have cherished a wound mrt-ef-lhe Holy Wars. From the actual conditions of life in whidhThe hsi3~~~~~--" YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED 279 loved her, he now beheld her caught up into the zone of ideal and impossible beauty. Through the outer covering of her flesh he could see her soul shine, as the stars shone through the web of purple twilight on the marshes. From his earlier craving for possession, his love had grown, through frustration and disap- pointment, into a simpler passion for service. "Well, one has to find out things," he said to him- self on this November morning, while he watched the old negro at his work. Some red leaves whirled into his face, and the wind, lifting the dark hair from his forehead, showed three heavy furrows between his knitted brows. He appeared a little older, a little braver, a little wiser, yet there was about him still the look of superb physical vitality which had been the result of a youth spent in the open fields. "Howdy, Uncle Boaz," he said to the old negro, who approached with his wheelbarrow. "Your folks have all gone away for good, haven't they?" "Hit looks dat ar way, marster, hit sutney do look dat ar way." "Well, you keep good grass here all the same." "Dar ain' but one way ter do hit, suh, en dat's ter dung hit," replied Uncle Boaz, and he remarked a minute afterwards, as he put down the lowered handles of the wheelbarrow, and stood prodding the ashes in his pipe, "I'se gwinter vote fur you, Marse Abel, I sholy is " "Thank you. Uncle Boaz!" "En I'se got a sack er co'n I'd be moughty bleeged ter git ground up fur hominy meal " With a laugh Abel passed on through the side-garden, and entered the leafless shrubbery that bordered the 280 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Haunt's Walk. The old negro had disturbed his dream, which had been of Molly in her red stockings, with the red ribbon binding her curls. Then he thought of Spot, the aged hound -^ "That dog must have lived to be seventeen years old," he said aloud in the effort to smother the sharp pang at his heart, "I remember how fond old Reuben was of him even as a puppy. He would never let liim run hares with anybody except himself." It was seventeen years ago that Spot was a puppy and he a boy — and now the one was dust with old Reuben, and the other had settled down so effectually that he was going to marry Judy in a fortnight. At least Judy was a good woman — nobody had ever said a word against her — and she would make him a good wife. That, after all, was what a farmer must think of — a good, saving wife, without any foolishness about her, who would be thrifty and lend a hand at his work when he needed it. All the rest was nonsense when once a man married. Dreams were all very well in their way, but realities and not dreams, after all, were things he must live with. Looking ahead he saw his future stretching smooth and firm, like the flat white turnpike that dragged its solid length into the distance. On that road there was no place for the absurdity of red stockings! And so, in the absence of all elation, only the grim sense of duty in the doing soothed him as he made his way to Solomon Hatch's cottage. i On the back porch he found Judy deftly taking butter out of the churn, and he watched her while she worked the soft lumps with a wooden paddle in a large yellow bowl. Though he would have been the last to suspect it^ — for passion like temptation YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED 281 appeared to him to beset the beautiful alone — Judy, in her homely way, was also a crucible, and the little earthern pot of her body was near to bursting at the moment from the violence of the flames within. She had just seen a black coated figure in a red gig spin by on the road, and for one blissful minute, she had permitted herself a flight of fancy, in which she was the bride, not of Abel Revercomb, but of Orlando Mullen. To sit in that red wheeled gig, touching the sleeve of his black coat! To stitch the frayed seams in his silk . waistcoat ! To iron his surplices as only she could iron when the divine fury seized her! To visit his poor and his afflicted! To lift her swooning gaze every Sunday, with a sense of possession, to that pulpit! For a minute only the rapture lasted, and all the time, she went on placidly making butter in the large yellow bowl. She was in the mood to commit sublime follies and magnificent indiscretions. For the sake of a drive in that red wheeled gig she would have foresworn Abel at the altar.. For the ecstasy of ironing those surplices she would have remained a spinster forever. "That's nice butter, Judy," remarked her lover, and believed that he had paid her a tribute peculiarly suited to the complexion of her soul. His gaze followed the drab sweep of her hair, which was combed straight back from her forehead. Her eyes were looking heavenward while she worked, yet they caught no beam, no colour from her celestial visions. Small hectic splotches burned in the centre of her cheeks, and her thin lips were pressed tightly together as though she bit back a cry. Some- times she would remain dumb for an hour in his pres- 282 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ence, while her thoughts soared like birds in the blue region of dreams. She indulged her imagination in grotesque but intoxicating reveries, in which she passed nobly and with honour through a series of thrillingly romantic adventuress; and, in fact, only ten minutes before Abel's arrival, she had beheld herself and the young clergyman undergoing a rapturous, if slightly unreal, martyrdom, as missionaries to the Chinese. Her dreams dropped suddenly, with broken wings, in their flight, for her stepmother, a small sickly woman, with a twisted smile, looked out through the dining- room window, and remarked facetiously: "You all don't look much like a co'tin couple to my eyes. " "I've been admiring her butter," replied Abel, who was always unduly regardful of his English in the presence of Mrs. Hatch. "She's a good hand at butter when she chooses to he, but she has her ups and downs like the rest of us. " "All of us have them, I suppose," he rejoined, and Mrs. Hatch drew in her head. "I never imagined that you got put out, Judy," he said, forgetting the tears that had led him to his sacrifice; "you always seem so quiet and sober." She glanced up, for there was a sound of wheels on the road, and Mr. Mullen drove by again, sitting very erect, and uncovering, with a graceful bend, to some one who was visible at the front. Her face flushed suddenly to the colour of brickdust, and she felt that the confusion in her soul must fiU the universe with noise. Quiet and sober, indeed, if he could only have ieard it! YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED 283 But Abel was busy with his own problems, while his gaze followed Mr. Mullen's vanishing back, which had, even from a distance, a look of slight yet earnest endeavour. He still liked the young rector for his sincerity and his uprightness, but he had found, on the whole, that he could approach his God more com- fortably when the straight and narrow shadow of the clergyman did not come between. "Aren't you going to pat it any more?" he asked presently, returning to his consideration of the butter. Picking up a square linen cloth, Judy dipped it into a basin of brine, and, after wringing it out, carefully folded it over the yellow bowl. "All the buttermilk is out of it," she answered, and thought of the unfinished pair of purple slippers laid away in tissue paper upstairs in her bureau drawer. As a married woman could she, with virtue, continue to embroider slippers in pansies for her rector.'' These had been laid aside on the day of her engagement to Abel, but she yearned now to riot in purple shades with her needle. While she listened with a detached mind to Abel's practical plans for the future, her only interest in the details lay in the fact that they would, in a measure, insure the possibility of a yearly offering of slippers. And while they looked into each other's pyes, neither suspected for a moment the existence of a secret chamber in the other's soul. All appeared plain and simple on the surface, and Judy, as well as Abel, was honestly of the opinion that she under- stood perfectly the situation and that the passionate refusal of her heart was the only element that threatened the conventional security of appearances. She was in the morbid condition of mind when the 284 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH capacity for feeling seems concentrated on a single centre of pain. Her soul revolved in a circle, and outside of its narrow orbit there was only the arid flatness which surrounds any moment of vivid expe' rience. The velvet slippers, which might have been worn by the young clergyman, possessed a vital and romantic interest in her thoughts, but the mill and the machinery of which Abel was speaking showed to her merely as sordid and mechanical details of existence. Looking at her suddenly, he realized that she had heard nothing of what he was saying. If he had looked deeper still he would have seen the tragedy of her lonely little soul spinning the web of its perish- ing illusion. Of all the martyrdoms allotted to love's victims, she was enduring the bitterest, which is the martyrdom of frustration. Yet because she appeared dull and undesirable on the surface, he had declined, with the rest of Old Church, to regard her emotions any less casually than he regarded her complexion. "Well, I ought to be a proud man to have you, Judy," he remarked, and rose to his feet. "I hope neither of us will ever regret it," she re- turned. "Not if I can help it, " he said, and, putting his arm around her, he drew her to him and kissed her lips. It was the second time he had kissed her, and on the jfirst occasion she had burst into hysterical weeping. He did not know that it was the only caress she had ever received, and that she had wept because it had fallen so far short of what her imagination had deluded her into expecting. Now, though she had herself well in hand and gave no visible sign of her disappoint- ment, there was a fierce, though unspoken, protest YOUTH SHOWS A LITTLE SEASONED 285 in her heart. "To think that after all the nights I've lain awake an' wondered what 'twas like, it should turn out to be so terrible flat," she said bitterly to herself. "It's just a fortnight off now, Judy," he remarked gently, if not tenderly. "I hope your mother will get on with me, Abel." "She sets great store by you now. You're pious, and she likes that even though you do go to the Epis- copal church. I heard her say yesterday that it was a rare thing to see a girl find as much comfort in her religion as you do." "You'll never want to come between me and my church work, will you, Abel? I do- most of the For- eign Mission work, you know, an' I teach in Sunday school and I visit the sick every Friday." "Come between? Why, it makes me proud of you! When I asked Mr. Mullen about marrying us, he said : 'She's been as good as a right hand to me ever since I came here, Revercomb.'" "Tell me over again. What were his words exactly?" " 'She's been as good as a right hand to me, Rever- comb,' that was what he said, and he added, 'She's the salt of the earth, that's the only way to describe her.' And now, goodbye, Judy, I must be going back to work." Without glancing round, he went at his rapid stride down the narrow walk to the whitewashed gate, which hung loose on broken hinges. In the road he came face to face with Jonathan Gay, who was riding leisurely in the direction of Jordan's Journey. "How are you, Revercomb? All well?" "Yes, all well, thank you." ,«86 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Turning in his tracks, he gazed thoughtfully after the rider for a moment. "I wonder why he came out of his way instead of (keeping to the turnpike?" he thought, and a minute later, "that's the third time he's come back since the family left Jordan's Journey. " CHAPTER II THE DESIRE OP THE MOTH At the gate before the Revercombs' house Blossom was standing in a dress of vivid blue. "Are you going to a party?" Abel inquired as he reached her, and she answered impatiently: "I promised to wear this dress over to Judy's, so that she could see how it is trimmed." "Does she want a blue one?" he asked. It seemed to him little short of ludicrous that Judy should buy a new dress because she was going to be married to him; but in the presence of a custom so firmly en- trenched behind the traditions of respectability, he knew that protest would be useless. Judy would deck out her unromantic person in wedding finery because finery was customary on such occasions. "Of course we couldn't dress just alike, Ab^l,'* replied Blossom. His question had seemed foolish to her and her usual soft solemnity was ruflBed by a passing irritation. "Judy's frock will be green, but she wants bretelles like these on it." "Bretelles?" he repeated as incredulously as if he had possessed any but the vaguest idea of the article the word described. "Why didn't she wait until she was married, and then I'd have bought them for her," he added. "Of course she wants her wedding clothes — all girls do," said Blossom, invoking tradition. "Are 287 «88 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH you coming in now. We're having dinner a little «arlier." She turned and moved slowly up the walk, while he followed, caressing the head of Moses, his spotted hound. From the kitchen he could hear Sa,rah Revercomb scolding the small negro, Mary Jo, whom she was training to wait on the table. On one side of the hearth grandmother sat very alert, waiting for her bowl of soup, into which Mary Jo was crum- bling soft bits of bread, while across from her grand- father chuckled to himself over a recollection which he did not divulge. At Abel's entrance, the old man stopped chuckling and inquired in an interested tone, "Did you buy that ar steer, Abel.?" "Not yet, I'm to think it over and let Jim Bumpass know." "Thar never was sech a man for steers," remarked grandmother, contemptuously. "Here he's still axin' about steers when he can't hist himself out of his cheer. If I were you, Abel, I'd tell him he'd better be steddyin' about everlastin' damnation instead of steers. Steers ain't goin' to haul him out of hell fire if he once gits down into it." "Well, you can tell her, Abel," retorted grandfather, "that it's time enough to holler 'hell-fire!' when you begin to burn." Mary Jo prevented a rejomder by appearing with a napkin, which she tied under his wife's chin, and a little later the old woman could be heard drinking greedily her bowl of soup. She lived for food, yet, like most passions which have become exaggerated by concentration out of all proportion to the fact THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH 289 upon which they depend, the moment of fulfilment seemed always brief and unsatisfactory after the intensity of anticipation. To-day the trouble was that there were no carrots in the soup, and this omis- sion reduced her to tears because it had blighted the hopes of her entire morning. "An' I'd been hankerin' arter them carrots ever since breakfast," she whimpered. "Don't cry, ma, I'll mash you up some nice ones for supper. That'll be something to look forward to," said Sarali, who might have won an immortal crown had such trophies been awarded to the patience of daughters-in-law. "So you didn't buy that steer, Abel?" "No, I didn't buy it." "Have you seen Judy to-day?" "I stopped there on my way home. She was mak- ing butter, and we talked about buying an extra cow or two and letting Blossom and her send some to market." "Well, it beats me!" observed Sarah, but whether her discomfiture was due to Judy's butter or to Abel's love making, she did not explain. On the whole the staidness of the courtship was pleasing to her. Her sense of decorum was flattered by it, for she had as little tolerance of the softer virtoues as of the softer vices. It had been years since she had felt so indul- gent toward her second son; yet in spite of the grati- fication his dejection afforded her, she was, as she had just confessed, utterly and entirely "beat." His period of common sense — of perfect and com- plete sobriety — had lasted for half a year, but she was too shrewd a woman to be deceived by the mere «90 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH external calmness of appearances. She had had, more- over, a long experience with males of the Revercomb stock, and she knew that it was when their blood flowed quietest that there was the greatest danger of an ultimate "rousing." All her life she had lived in dread of this menace to respectability — to that strict observance of the letter of the social law for which the Hawtreys had stood for generations. On several occasions she had seen a Revercomb really "roused," and when this transformation was once achieved, not all the gravity of all the Hawtreys could withstand the force of it. And this terrible potential energy in her husband's stock would assert itself, she knew, after a period of tranquillity. She hadn't been married to a Revercomb for nothing, she had once remarked. If anything could have put her into a cheerful hu- mour, it would have been the depressed and solemn manner with which Abel went about the preparations for his marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of human happiness — as something which must be paid for, either literally in its pound of flesh, or in a corre- sponding measure of the materials of salvation. "I declar' things are goin' on so smooth that some- thing must be gettin' ready to happen," she said anxiously to herself at least twenty times a day — for she had observed life, and in her opinion, the ob- servation had verified the rigid principles of her religion. Do what you would the doctrines of original THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH 291 sin and predestination kept cropping up under the surface of existence. And so — "It looks all right on top, but you never can tell," was the habitual attitude of her mind. When dinner was over, Abel went out to the mill, with Moses, the hound, trotting at his heels. The high wind was still blowing, and while he stood by the mill-race, the boughs of the sycamore rocked back and forth over his head with a creaking noise. At each swing of the branches a crowd of broad yellow leaves was torn from the stems and chased over the moving wheel to the open meadow beyond. With the key of the mill in his hand, Abel stopped to gaze over the green knoll where he had once planned to build his house. Beyond it he saw the strip of pines, and he knew that the tallest of the trees had fallen uselessly beneath his axe. The great trunk still lay there, fast rotting to dust on the carpet of pine cones. He had never sold it for timber. He would never use it for the rafters of his home. As he looked back now all that past life of his ap- peared to him fair and desirable. He remembered the early morning risings in his boyhood, and it seemed to him that he had enjoyed every one of them to its fullest — that it was only the present that showed stale and unprofitable in his eyes. A rosy haze obscured all that was harsh and unlovely in the past, and he thought of himself as always eager and en- thusiastic then, as always finding happiness in the incidents that befell him. The year when he had gone away, and worked in a factory in order to educate himself, was revealed as a period of dehghtf ul promise, of wonderful opportunity. In remembering his love 292 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH for Molly, he forgot the quarrels, the jealousies, the heartburnings, and recalled only the exquisite instant of their first lover's kiss. Then, he told himself that even while he had enjoyed his life, it had cheated him, and he would not live it over again if he could. Turning presently in the other direction, he discerned a patch of vivid blue in the pasture, and knew that it was Blossom crossing the fields to Solomon Hatch's. "She's gone a good piece out of her road," he thought, and then, "I wonder why she doesn't marry .? She might have anybody about here if she wasn't so particular." The vivid blue spot in the midst of the russet and brown landscape held his gaze for a moment; then calling Moses to his side, he unlocked the door of the mill and began counting the sacks of grist. Outside, in the high wind, which made walking difficult. Blossom moved in the direction of the willow copse. Gay had promised to meet her, but she knew, from the experience of the last few months, that he would neither hasten his luncheon nor smoke a cigar the less in order to do so. As she pressed on the wind sang in her ears. She heard it like the sound of rush- ing wings in the broomsedge, and when it died down, she waited for it to rise again with a silken murmur in the red-topped orchard grass. She could tell from the sound whether the gust was still in the field of broom- sedge or had swept on to the pasture. In spite of her blue dress, in spite of the flush in her cheeks and the luminous softness in her eyes, the joy in her bosom fluttered on crippled wings. Gay was kind, he was gentle, he was even solicitous on the rare occasions when she saw him; but somehow — in some way, it was different from the ideal marriage of which THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH 29» she had dreamed. If he was kind, he was also casual. She had hoped once that love would fill her life, and now, to her despair, it looked as if it might be poured into a. tea-cup. She had imagined that it would move mountains, and the most ordinary detail of living was sufficient to thrust it out of sight. When she reached the brook, she saw Gay coming slowly along the Haunt's Walk, to the spring. As he walked, he blew little clouds of smoke into ihe air, and she' thought, as he approached her, that the smell of his cigar was unlike the cigar of any other man she knew — that it possessed, in itself, a quality that was exciting and romantic. This trait in his personality — a disturbing suggestion of the atmosphere of a richer world — had fascinated her from the beginning, and after eighteen months of repeated disappointments, it still held her, though she struggled now in its power like a hare in a trap. "So you're here!" he exclaimed as he reached her. Then, after a swift glance over the fields, he drew her into the shelter of the trees, and holding his cigar in his left hand, kissed her lips. Closing her eyes, she leaned against him, while the scent of the tobacco intoxicated her with its train of happier associations. "You're looking all right, though yonr letters have been rather jumpy. My dear girl, when you pounce on me like that you frighten me out of my wits. You really mustn't, you know." "O Jonathan!" she gasped, and clung to him. "Why, I had to manufacture some excuse on the instant for coming down. I couldn't tell what fool- ishness you'd be capable of if I didn't." 294 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH His tone was half caressing, yet beneath it there was a serious annoyance, which killed the suffering joy in her heart. She was slowly learning that it is not safe to remind the man of pleasure of his obligations, since he is attracted chiefly by his opportunities. "The time was when you wanted to come just as much as I," she said. "Don't I still.? Haven't I proved it by telling a tremendous lie and rushing down here on the first train? Come, now, kiss me like a good girl and look cheerful. You've got to make up, you know, for all the trouble you've put me to." She kissed him obediently, yielding to his casual embraces with a docility that would have charmed him had his passion been in its beginning instead of its decline. "You're glad now you came, aren't you?" she asked presently, pleading to be reassured. "Oh, yes, of course, I like it, but you mustn't write to me that way again." Putting his arm closer about her, he pressed her to his side, and they sat in silence while the wind whistled in the tree-tops above them. From their shelter they could see the empty chimneys of Jordan's Journey, and a blurred and attenuated figure on the lawn, which was that of the old negro, who passed back and forth spreading manure. Some swallows with slate grey wings were flying over the roof, and they appeared from a distance to whirl as helplessly as the dead leaves. "You do love me as much as ever, don't you, Jonathan?" she asked suddenly. He frowned, staring at the moving figure of the old THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH 295 negro. Again she had blundered, for he was disin- clined by temperament to do or say the thing that was expected of him. "Why, of course I do," he answered after a pause. Slie sighed and nestled against him, while his hand which had been on her shoulder, slipped to her waist. Her heart had turned to lead in her breast, and, like Judy, she could have wept because the reality of love was different from her virgin dreams. CHAPTER m ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION Two nights before the wediling a corn shucking was held in the barn at Bottom's Ordinary — a usually successful form of entertainment, by which the strenuous labours of a score of able-bodied men were secured at the cost of a keg of cider and a kettle of squirrel stew. In the centre of the bam, which was dimly lighted by a row of smoky, strong-smelling kerosene-oil lanterns, suspended on pegs from the wall, there was a huge wooden bin, into which the golden ears were tossed, as they were stripped of the husks, by a circle of guests, ranging in years from old Adam at the head to the youngest son of Tim Mallory, an inquisitive urchin of nine, who made himself useful by passing the diminishing pitcher of cider. It was a frosty night, and the faces of the huskers showed very red above the knitted woollen comforters which wrapped their throats. Before each man there was a small pile of corn, still in the blade, and this was replen- ished when it began to dwindle by a band of workers in the moonlight beyond the open windows. In his ef- fort to keep warm somebody had started a hymn, which was vigorously accompanied by a beating of numbed feet on the scattered husks on the floor. Above the volume of sound old Adam's quavering falsetto could be heard piping on like a cracked and discordant flute. 296 ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION 297 "O-ver thar, 0-ver thar, Th-ar's a la-nd of pure de-light. O-ver th-ar, We will la-y our bur-den do-wn. An' re-ceive our gol-den cro-wn. In that la-nd of pure de-light O-ver th-ar." "That's a cold hynm, an' unsuitable to the weather, " remarked Tim Mallory at the end of the verse. "If you ask me, I'd say. thar was mo' immediate comfort in singin' about the redness of hdl-fire, an' how mortal close we're comin' to it." "We don't want no impiousness at this here shuckin', Tim," observed William Ming, who occupied the position of host in Betsey's absence about the more important matter of supper. "You fill up with cider an' go at that thar pile befo' you." "Then pass it on," replied Mallory, reaching for the jug of cider, which travelled in a regular orbit from old Adam's right hand round the circle to the neighbour on his left, who chanced to be Solomon Hatch. "Speakin' of impiousness," remarked that sour- faced little man, "have you all heard the tales about Reuben Merryweather's gal sence she's had her wind- fall.'' Why, to see the way she trails her skirts, you'd think she was the real child of her father." Then rushing hurriedly to generalization at Abel's entrance, he added in a louder tone — "Ah, it's a sad pass for things to come to, an' the beginnin' of the end of public morality, when a gal that's born of a mischance can come to act as if a man was responsible for her. It ain't nothin' mo' nor less than flyin' in the face of 298 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH the law, which reads different, an' if it keeps up, the women folks will be settin' up the same rights as men to all the instincts of natur." Old Adam — the pride and wonder of the neigh- bourhood because he could still walk his half mile with the help of his son and still drink his share of cider with the help of nobody — bent over the heap of corn before him, and selecting an ear, divested it of the husks with a twirling, sleight-of-hand move- ment. "They're losing virtue fast enough," he observed, throwing the naked ear into the bin and reaching for another. "Why, when I was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty." "Ah, the times have changed now!" sighed Solomon Hatch, "but thar's one thing sho' to my mind, an' that is, that if a woman thinks she's goin' to attract men by pryin' an' peekin' into immorality an' settin' it straight ag'in, she's gone clean out of her head. Thar's got to be indecency in the world because thar al'ays has been. But a man sets a heap mo' sto' by his wife if she ain't too inquirin' upon the subject." "True, true, Solomon," said old Adam, "I for one was al'ays set against teachin' women to read for fear they'd come to know things. Thar's a deal of evil that gits into print, an' if you ain't acquainted with yo' letters thar's less temptation to' nose arter it. Reuben Merryweather would have his daughter Janet taught, though I urged strongly against it — holdin' that she could learn about sins an' immoralities ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION 299 even in Holy Writ. Who knows if she'd ever have gone wrong if she hadn't learned to read printed words?" "Well, I'm glad print is too difficult for me," ob- served young Adam. "The pains I take to spell out the words would stand greatly in the way of my en- j'yin' any immorality if I was to stumble across it. What part of Scripture, pa, is it that deals with sech doin's?" "They crop up powerful thick in Kings, son, but I've found 'em when I looked sharp in Leviticus." "If you are goin' to talk free, men, you can go to yo' own homes to do it," remarked Betsey, who was accustomed to appear at unexpected moments in order to impress them with the necessity of earning their supper. "This ain't no place for loose speakin'," she added, solemnly eyeing young Adam, who, having a weak memory, was striving to fix the names of £ings and Leviticus in his mind by repeating them slowly to himself. "Axin' yo' pardon, Mrs. Bottom, we didn't know a lady was in hearin' or we'd never have made so bold," said old Adam. "Stop workin' yo' lips, son, an' hand Mrs. Bottom a cheer." "What's all this talk anyway about Molly Merry- weather an' Mr. Jonathan?" she demanded. "Abel, iave you heard anything about it?" , The men glanced at each other with uneasy eyes, while they worked nervously at the shucking, for the question had been in the air from the moment of Abel's entrance, though none of them had been bold enough to speak it aloud. And now a woman, with charac- teristic feminine recklessness, had uttered the thought SOO THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH which had been revolving in each mind for ten minutes — yet nothing had happened! Old Adam, pausing i^for the first time in his work, glanced with ungrudging respect at the short, lumpy figure in the black calico dress. Her face was still comely, and there was the mild mulishness in her ex- pression that is seen in the countenances of many amiable yet obstinate persons. "No, I haven't heard," replied Abel, and he added a moment later, "What do tiey say?" "Well, Mr. Halloween had it from a man in Apple- gate who had it from a man in Petersburg who had it from a man in Richmond." "Had what?" "That Mr. Jonathan had been waitin' on her steady for some months, an' 'twas mo' likely than not to end in marriage. She's a good girl, is Molly. I ain't got no use for a woman that don't stand up for her sex in the face of men." "True, true," admitted her hearers solemnly, one after another, for none among them had ever dared to defy the source of so many benefactions. "Thar're some that thinks morals ain't meant for any but women," she pursued, "but I ain't one of 'em, as William Ming can testify, that holds to that view. Viciousness is viciousness whether it be male or female, and Mr. MuUen himself in the pulpit couldn't convince me that it don't take two to make an impropriety." "True, true," they repeated, belying themselves under coercion in the accents of the chorus in a Greek drama. "'Tis true, ma'am, as you speak it." "Thar were some mean enough to side against the ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION, 301 po' innocent from the hour of her birth," she continued oracularly, while she looked severely at Solomon, who nodded in response, "an' these same folks have been preachin' over her an' pintin' at her ever sence she lamed to crawl out of the cradle. But thar never was a kinder heart or a quidier hand in trouble than Molly's, an' if she did play fast and loose with the men, was it any worse, I'd like to know, than they deserve?" "Thar's truth in what you say, ma'am, thar's a deal of truth in it," they agreed, nodding dejected craven heads over their pipes. Like all born poli- ticians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort. "Well, I'm roastin' a young possum along with the squirrel stew, so you'd better work up an appetite," she said in a mollified tone at the end of her lecture, as though she were desirous of infusing a more ardent spirit into them before her departure. When the barn door closed behind her, a sigh of relief, half stifled through fear of detection, passed rotmd the group. "Thar goes a woman in a thousand," observed old Adam, edging nearer the bin. "In a million — let's make it a million," urged Solomon Hatch. "If they were all like that the world would be different, Mr. Doolittle," remarked Jim Halloween. "Ah, yes, it would be different," agreed old Adam, and he sighed again. "Thar'd be strict walkin' among us, 1 reckon," said his son. 302 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "An' a chalk line the same as we draw for the sex," added Solomon Hatch. "Sin would be scarce then an' life earnest," re- marked William Ming, who had alluded to Betsey in the most distant terms ever since he had married her. "We'd abide by the letter like the women, not by the spirit.as we do," reflected Solomon. They sighed for the third time more heavily, and the dried husks on the floor around the bin rattled as though a strong wind had entered. "But she's one in a million, Mr. Doolittle," pro- tested Solomon, after a pause, and his tone had grown cheerful. "Yes, I reckon it's a million. Thar ain't mo' than one in a million of that rare sort," responded old Adam, falling to work with a zest. "Was that ar young possum she spoke of the one yo' dawg Bess treed day befo' yesterday, William?" inquired Jim Halloween, whose hopes were centred upon the reward of his labours. "Naw! that was an old im," replied William. "But thar never was a better possum dawg than that Bess of ours. I declar, she's got so much sense that she'll tree anything that grins at her, whether it's nigger or possum. Ain't that so, old gal?" he inquired of the spotted hound on a bed of husks at his side. "It wan't no longer than last week that she kept that Kttle nigger of Uncle Boaz's up a persimmon tree for mo'n an hour." "Thar's some niggers that look so much like pos- sums when they git up in persimmon branches that it takes a sharp eye to tell the difference," observed Tim Mallory. ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION 308 "Well, I'm partial to possum," remarked old Adam, ** When all's said, thar ain't a better meat to the taste as long as it's plump an' juicy. Will you hand on that jug of cider, Tim? It's wonderful the way com shuckin' manages to parch the throat an' whet the appetite." The miller, who had declined Betsey's feast of possum, went out as soon as he had finished his pipe, and turned into the sunken road that led to Solomon Hatch's. In the little "best room," which was opened only for "courtings" or funerals, he found Judy seated under a dim lamp with a basket of darning in her lap. "I was over at Mrs. Mullen's this morning," she explained, "an' she told me her eyesight was failing, so I offered to do her darnin'." Slipping a small round gourd into the toe of a man's black sock, she examined it attentively, with her needle poised in the lamplight. Then bending her head slightly sideways, she surveyed her stitches from another angle, while she smoothed the darn with short caressing strokes over the gourd. He thought how capable and helpful she was, and from the cheerful energy with which she plied her needle, he judged that it gave her pleasure merely to be of use. What he did not suspect was that her wedding garments had been thrust aside as of less importance than Mrs. Mullen's basket of darning. She was just the girl for a farmer's wife, he told himself as he watched her — plain and sensible, the kind that woulfl. nrake a good mother and a good manager. And all the time a voice in the back of his brain was repeating distinctly. "They say it will end in a marriage — they say it will end in a 804 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH marriage." But this voice seemed to come from a distance, and to have no connection either with his thoughts or with his life. It was independent of his will, and while it was speaJdng, he went on calmly- thinking of Judy's children and of how well and properly she would bring them up. "I went over again to look at the steer to-day," he said, after a moment. "There's a Jersey cow, too, I think of buying." She nodded, pausing in her work, yet keeping her gaze fixed on the point of her needle. If he had looked at her darning, he would have seen that it was woven of exquisite and elaborate stitches — such stitches as went into ecclesiastical embroideries in the Middle Ages. "They're the best kind for butter," she observed, and carefully ran her needle crosswise in and out of the threads. Conversation was always desultory between them, and when it flagged, as it did now, they could sit for hours in \ke composed and unembarrassed silence of persons who meet upon the firm basis of mutual assistance in practical matters. Their relation was founded upon the simple law of racial continuance, which is as indifferent to the individual as it is to the abstract apotheosis of passion. "I'm going to Applegate to-morrow to order a new mill-stone," he said at last, when he rose. "Is there anytiiing you would like me to get for you?" She reflected a moment. "I need a quarter of a yard of braid to finish the green dress I am making. Could you match it?" ,^ "I'll try if you'll give me a sample." ABLE HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION 305 Laying her work aside for the first time, she hunted amid a number of coloured spools in her basket, and brought to light a bit of silver braid, which she handed to him. "Was Mr. Mullen at your house to-day, Abel?" ^e asked suddenly, turning her face from the lamp. "Yes, he comes to see Blossom now, but she doesn't appear to care for him. I thought she did once, didn't you?" "Yes, I thought she did, but that was when he was in love with Molly, wasn't it?" For an instant he gazed at the bit of braid, as though his soul were intent upon unravelling the intricate pattern. " I wonder whether it is that we get a thing when we stop wanting it or that we merely stop wanting it when we get it?" he demanded passionately of fate. But Judy had no mind for dubious philosophies. The thing she wanted she knew she should never get and she knew as well that, in all hkelihood, she should never stop wanting it. Only a passionate soul in a commonplace body could have squandered itself with such superb prodigality. "I don't know," she answered wearily, "I've never noticed much either what people get or what they want." "Well, Blossom wanted Mr. Mullen once and now he wants Blossom. I wish mother didn't have so poor an opinion of him." She flushed and looked up quickly, for in her heart she felt that she hated Sarah Revercomb. A disgust for her coming marriage swept over her. Then she 306 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH told herself stubbornly that everybody married sooner or later, and that anyway her stepmother would never forgive her if she broke off with Abel. "She doesn't even go to his church. I don't see what right she has to find fault with him," she said. "That's her way, you know. You can't make her over. She pretends he doesn't know his Scripture, and when he comes to see Blossom, she asks him all sorts of ridiculous questions just to embarrass him. Yesterday she told him she couldn't call to mind the difference in cubits between the length and the breadth of Solomon's temple, and would he please save her the trouble of going to the Bible to find out.''" "Does she want him to stop coming?" inquired Judy, breathlessly. "I don't know what she wants, but I wish Blossom would marry him, don't you? " "Don't I?" she repeated, and her basket of spools fell to the floor, where they scattered on the square rag carpet of log-cabin pattern. As they were gather- ing them up, their heads touched by accident, and he kissed her gravely. For a moment she thought, while she gazed into his brilliant eyes, "Abel is really very handsome, after all." Then folding her work carefully, she stuck her needle through the darn and placed the basket on a sheU between a Bible with gilt clasps and a wreath of pressed flowers under a glass case. "He couldn't have got anybody to fill in those holes better," she said to herself, and the reflection was not without a balm for her aching heart. At dawn next morning Abel passed again, driving in the direction of the Applegate road. The day was break- ing clear and still, and over the autumnal pageantry ABEL HEARS GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION 307 in the abandoned fields, innumerable silver cobwebs shone iridescent in the sunrise. Squirrels were already awake, busily harvesting, and here and there a rabbit bobbed up from beneath a shelter of sassafras. Over- head the leaves on a giant chestnut tree hung as heavily as though they were cut out of copper, and beyond a sharp twist in the corduroy road, a branch of sweet gum curved like a bent flame on the edge Df the twi- light dimness of the forest. The scarlet of the leaves reminded him of the colour of Molly's jacket, and immediately the voice somewhere in his brain repeated, "They say it will end in a marriage." The words awoke in him a violent and unreasonable resentment. He could think of his own marriage quite calmly, as something that did not bear directly upon his ideal of Molly; but the conception of her as Gay's wife, struck a blow at the image he had enskied and then schooled himself into worshipping from a distance. He was willing to relinquish her as too fair and flitting for mortal embraces, but the thought that another man should possess that elusive loveliness was like the thrust of hot iron into his wound. That Molly loved Gay he could not believe. That she was willing to marry him without loving him, was a sugges- tion which appeared to him little short of an insult. True, he did not love Judy to whom he was to be married to-morrow, but that was a case so entirely and utterly diflFerent that there could be no comparison! He was doing it because he was sorry for Judy and it was the only way he could help her. Besides, had not Molly urged such a step upon him repeatedly as the fulfilment of his obvious destiny? The reasons were all there. He had them labelled 308 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH and assorted in his mind, ready for instant reference should they be required. Sleepless nights had gone to the preparation of them, and yet — and yet — in his heart he knew, beyond contradiction, that he was wedding Judy because his pity had once made a fool of him. He had acted from the loftiest motives when he had asked her to marry him, and twenty-four hours later he would have given ten years of his life to have been able to eliminate those lofty motives from his character. To go back on her was, of course, out of the question. In the history of Old Church no man — with the exception of two drunkards and old Mr. Jonathan Gay — had ever gone back on a woman. With girls it was different, since they, being senti- mentally above the proneness to error as well as practically below the liability for maintenance, might play fast and loose wherever their fleeting fancy alighted. But in the case of his unhappy sex, an honourable inclination once yielded to, was established for- ever. His sacrifice was sanctioned by custom. There was no escape since it was tradition that held him by the throat. His business in Applegate, which included a careful matching of Judy's braid, took up the entire morn- ing; and it was dinner time before he turned back to the little inn, known as Raleigh's Tavern, at which the farmers usually stopped for meals. Here, after washing his hands in a basin on the back porch, he hastily smoothed his hair, and passed into the small paved court in front of the tavern. As he approached the doorway, the figure of a young woman in a black dress, which he felt instinctively did not "belong" to Applegate, came down the short steps, and paused ABEL HEAES GOSSIP AND SEES A VISION 309 an instant to caress a large dog that was lying in the sunshine near the entrance. The next minute, while he fell back, hat in hand, behind a pile of boxes in the yard, he heard his name called in a familiar voice, and lifting his eyes found himseH face to face with Molly. "Abel, aren't you going to speak to me.'*" she asked, and moving a step toward him, held out both hands with an impulsive gesture. As his hand met hers, he withdrew it quickly as though he were stimg by the touch of her soft fingers. Every nerve in his body leaped suddenly to life, and the moment was so vivid while he faced her, that he felt half convinced that all the long months since their parting had dissolved in shadows. The border- line between the dream and the actuality was obliter- ated. It seemed to him not only impossible, but absurd that he should ever have believed himself engaged to Judy Hatch — that he should be going to marry her to-morrow! All that side of his life had no closer relation to his real self than it had to the self of old Adam Doolittle. While he had planned it he had been a corpse not a living man, but at the sound of Molly's voice, at the clasp of her fingers, at the touching, expectant brightness in her eyes, the res- urrection had happened. Judy was a corpse pre- paring to wed a corpse that had become alive — and the mating of death with life was abhorrent to him in his illumination. "We are on our way to Richmond," explained Molly, very gently, "and we are waiting to change trains. I Oh, Abel, I have wanted so much to see you!" It was the old Molly, in truth — Molly in her softest. 310 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH in her most dangerous, in her divinest mood. While he gazed at her he could make no answer because an emotion that' was half self-reproach, half furious longing, choked back his words, and had he opened his lips it would have been to utter some foolish inarticu- late arraignment of destiny. In the confusion of his senses he did not notice that she had altered, but the next day he remembered that her face looked smaller and more delicate, like a tinted egg-shell he had once seen, and that her eyes in consequence were won- drously, were almost startlingly, large. All that he was conscious of when he turned and rushed from her after that one look, was that the old agony of his loss had resurged afresh in his heart. CHAPTER IV HIS DAY OF FREEDOM He crossed the courtyard, and turned mechanicalJy into a street which led in the opposite direction from the road to Old Church. A crowd of men, gathered in the doorway of the post-oflSce, called to him to join them, and he answered in a voice that sounded remote and cheerful in his own ears. "If you want to whip the bosses in these parts there's the man for you," he heard one of them re- mark, and knew that they were discussing his political chances. Quickening his steps, he walked rapidly to the end of the street, passed the scattered negro hovels, surrounded by blighted sunflowers, and turned into a road which ran between fields of dusty stubble into a stretch of brown and desolate country. Suddenly, as though a screw had loosened in his brain, he felt his passion slip the control of his will and beat down, one by one, the orderly procession of reasons that had risen against it. A sense of exhilar- ation, of joy so fierce that it was akin to pain, took possession of him. "I won't go back!" he said de- fiantly, "I won't go back!" And with the words his longing for Molly was swallowed up in the tumultuous consciousness of his release. It was as if he had burst his bonds by a single effort of strength, and was stretch- ing his cramped limbs in the open. The idea of 311 S12 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH escape from captivity was so strong, that he looked neither to right nor to left of him, but kept his gaze fixed on the road straight ahead, as a man does who saves his energy for the final break from his pursuers. At the moment he would have bartered his soul in exchange for the unholy, the nanaeless rapture of the vagabond and the gipsy, of all the neglected and the despised of civilization. Duty, love, ambition — aU these were as nothing beside the perfect, the incommunicable passion of the open road! It is a mood that comes once to every man — to some men more frequently — a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited by civilization cry out for the strong meat of the jungle — for the scent of the raw, dark earth and for the gleam of the yellow moonlight on the wet, rustling leaves. This longing may come biit once in adolescence, or many times until the frost of age has withered the senses. It may come amid the showery warmth and the rov- ing fragrance of an April day, or beside the shining, brown, leaf-strewn brooks of November. But let it come to a man when it will, and that man renoimces, in spite of himself, his little leaden gods of prosperity, and in his heart, beneath the woven garment of cus- tom, he exchanges his birthright of respectability for a mess of Romany pottage. Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy. Obstacles which had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and evanescent as shadows. HIS DAY OF FREEDOM S13 "I won't go back!" he repeated exultantly, "I won't go back!" / "You're talkin' to yo'self, mister," said a voice at his side, and looking down he saw a small bare- footed boy, in overalls, with a bag of striped purple calico hanging from one shoulder. "You've been talkin' to yo'self all along the road,'* the boy repeated with zest. "Havel? "What are you up to?" "I've been chinquapinin'. Ma, she thinks I'm at school, but I ain't." He looked up wickedly, bubbling over with the shameless joys of truancy. "Thar's a lot of chinquapin bushes over yonder in Cobblestone's wood an' they're chock full of nuts." "And they're in your bag now, I suppose?" "I've got a peck of 'em, an' I'm goin' to make me a dbain as long as — that. It'll be a watch chain, an' I've made a watch out of a walnut. It can't keep time, of course," he added, "'cep'n for that it's really a sho' nough watch." His small freckled face, overhung by a mat of carroty hair, was wreathed in a contagious, an intoxicating smile — the smile of one who has bought happiness at the price of duty, and whose enjoyment is sweetened by the secret knowledge that he has successfully eluded the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God. Instinctively, Abel was aware that the savour was not in the chinquapins, but in the disobedience, and his heart warmed to the boy with the freckled face. "Are you going home now?" he asked. "You bet I ain't. I've got my snack ma fixed for me." He unrolled a brown paper package and re- vealed two thick slices of bread with a fishing ho(^ 314 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH stack in one corner. "Thar's apple-butter between 'em," he added, rolling his tongue, and a minute later, "Ma'd whip me jest the same, an' I'd ruther be whipped for a whole day than for a half. Besides," le burst out as though the mental image convulsed iim with delight, "if I went home I'd have to help Jier tote the water for the washin', " "But what are you going to do with yourself?" "I'm goin' huntin' with a gravel shooter, an' I'm ^oin' fishin' with a willow pole, an' I'm goin' to find all the old hare traps, an' I'm goin' to see 'em make hog's meat over at Bryarly's, an' Fm goin' to the cider pressin' down here at Cobblestone's. She ain't goin to ketch me till I've had my day!" he concluded witJi a whoop of ecstasy. Startled by the sound, a rabbit sprang up from a clump of sassafras, and the boy was •over the fence, on a rush of happy bare feet, in pursuit of it. The road curved abruptly into a short wood, filled with dwarfed holly trees, which were sown thickly with a shower of scarlet berries — and while Abel walked through it, his visions thronged beside him like the painted and artificial troupe of a carnival. He saw Molly coming to him, separating him from Judy, surrendering her warm flesh and blood to his arms. "I won't go back J" he said, still defiantly, "I'll love Molly if I pay for it to the last day I live." With a terrible exultation he felt that he was willing to pay for it — to pay any price, even the price of iis honour. His passion rushed like a flame through his blood, scorching, blackening, devouring. Beyond the wood, the winding ash-eoloured road dipped into a hollow, and when he reached the brow HIS DAY OF FREEDOM 315 of the low hill ahead, a west wind, which had risen suddenly from the river, caught up with his footsteps and raced on like a wjld thing at his side. He could hear it sighing plaintively in the bared trees he had left, or driving the hurtled leaves like a flock of fright- ened partridges over the sumach and sassafras, and then lashing itself into a frenzy as it chased over a level of broomsedge. Always it sang of freedom — of the savage desire and thirst for freedom — of the ineffable, the supreme ecstasy of freedom! And always while he listened to it, while he felt the dead leaves stinging his flesh, he told himself passionately that he " would not go hack — that he would not marry to-morrow!" For hours he stalked with the wind. Then, turning out of the road, he flung himself down on the broom- sedge and lay for other hours gazing over the autumn landscape to the softly luminous band on the far horizon. Somewhere in a darkened corner of his brain there was the resolve that he would not return until, like the freckled faced, barefooted boy, he had "had his day." At nine o'clock that night he entered an inn in the town of Briarwood, twenty miles north of Applegate, and sitting down at one of the tables, ordered some- thing to eat. His limbs ached, not from the walk in the wind, but from the passion that had whipped his body like a destroying fire. He felt still the burning throb of the sore that it had left. Apart from this dull agony he could feel nothing — he could desire nothing — he could remember nothing. Every- thing was over except the instinct that told him that he was empty and must be fed. While he sat there, with his aching forehead bowed 316 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH in his hands, there came a light touch on his shoulder, and looking up he saw the Reverend Orlando Mullen, standing at his side like an embodiment of all the things from which he had fled. For an instant he could only stare blindly back at him. Then some- thing which had opened in his soul, closed softly, as if it were a shell of custom, and he knew that he was again a prisoner. With the sight of that con- ventional figure, the scattered instincts of habit and of respectability — of all the qualities for which the race stood and against which the individual had re- belled — all these rallied anew to the battlefield from which they had been routed by his insurgent emotions. "I suppose you're waiting, like myself, Mr. Rever- comb, for the nine-forty-five train?" "Yes, I'm waiting for the train." "Business brought you so far away?" "Yes, business brought me." lifting his glass of beer, he drained it slowly under Mr. Mullen's friendly and curious eyes. " It looks as if we should have a perfect day for the wedding," remarked the rector, after a pause. "Like you, I was called off on an urgent matter, but, fortunately, it only means losing a little sleep." Then the whistle of the train blew, and ten minutes later, Abel followed the young clergyman into the single coach and sat down in a vacant seat at his side. It was two o'clock when at last he drove into the back gate at the mill, and unhitching his mare, turned her out into the pasture. As he crossed the road to the house, he lifted his eyes mechanically to the sky, and saw that the stars shone soft and near as if they were watching over a night of love. CHAPTER V THE SHAPING OP MOLLY Leaning back in the uncomfortable plush-covered chair in the train to Richmond, Molly watched the flat landscape glide past, while she thought a little wistfully of the morning she had made this same trip dressed in one of Mrs. Gay's gowns. On her knees Mrs. Gay's canary, extinguished beneath the black silk cover to his cage, uttered from time to time a feeble pipe of inquiry, and on the rack above her head Mrs. Gay's tea basket rattled loudly in a sudden lurch of the train. Since the hour in which she had left the overseer's cottage and moved into the "big house" at Jordan's Journey, the appealing little lady had been the dominant influence in her life — an influence so soft and yet so overpowering that she had at times a sensation of being smothered in scented swansdown. For several months after leaving Old Church her education had absorbed her energies, and she had found time merely to gasp occasionally in the oppressive sweetness of the atmosphere which Mrs. Gay's personality diffused. Everything was strange then, and her desire for strangeness, for un- familiar impressions, had amounted to a passion. She had been very anxious, too, very much afraid lest she should make a mistake. When she had entered the hotel dining-room in New York she had felt as if she were walking on ploughed ground* 317 318 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH and the red velvet carpet had seemed to rise and sink under her feet. That first night had been exquisite torture to her, and so, she surmised through some intuitive understanding, had it been to Kesiah. For weeks after that time of embarrassment, she had watched herself carefully — watched every instant — and in the end she had triumphed. With her grow- ing ease, her old impulsiveness had returned to her, and with the wonderful adaptability of the Southern woman, she had soon ceased to feel a sense of discom- fort in her changed surroundings. The instinct of class she had never had, and this lack of Social rever- ence had helped her not a little in her ascent of the ladder. It is difficult to suffer from a distinction which one does not admit — and her perfect uncon- sciousness of inferiority to Mrs. Gay had placed her, without her being aware of it, in the position of an -equal. With her hands clasped on the cage of the canary, she gazed thoughtfully at Kesiah, who was sitting a little in front of her, with her eyeglasses on her nose and the daily paper opened before her. Gay was to meet them in Richmond, and as Molly remembered this now, she realized that her feeling about their meeting had changed during the last feW hours. She liked Gay — she responded to his physical charm, "to that indefinable air of adventure which hangs sometimes about men who have lived hard without wasting their surplus vitality — but in spite of the strong attraction he possessed for her, she knew that in her heart she had never thoroughly beheved in him. Unconsciously to herself she had measured his stature l)y Abel's, and he had come short of her standard. THE SHAPING OF MOLLY Sll> "Molly," asked Mrs. Gay, turning her head suddenly, "did you write Joaathan to expect us by this train?" "Yes, Aunt Angela, he knows we are coming. Shall I lower the shade? Is the sunlight too strong for you?" "No, thank you, dear. Where is Dicky?" "I have him here on my knees. Does your head ache?" "A little," murmured Mrs. Gay in a tone of resigned sweetness, and the conversation was over. At the sound of Molly's voice an old lady, travelling South with a trained nurse, turned in her chair, and looked at the girl as she might have looked at a fruit for which she longed, but which she had been for- bidden to touch. Her face, under an elaborate bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria, was withered and crossed with lines, and her poor old hands were so knotted from gout that she cotdd hardly lift the tea-cup from the small table which had been fastened in front of her. Yet for one instant^ as she gazed on Molly's girlish freshness, her youtb stirred feebly somewhere in the dregs of her memory, and her eyes grew deprecating and piteous, as thou^ her soul were saying, "I know I have missed it, but it isn't my fault " The tea-cup trembled in her hand, and her old lip» fumbled pathetically for her bit of toast, while across, from her, with only the narrow aisle of the car between, youth incarnate sat weaving its separate dream of a luiiverse. " Yes, two hours earlier," ran Molly's thoughts, *'I looked forward to the meeting with Jonathan, and now. 320 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH in so short a time, I have grown almost to dread it." ,She tried to think of his pleasant, well-coloured face, of his whimsical, caressing smile, but in the niche where his image should have stood, she saw Abel in his country clothes, with his red-brown throat rising out of his blue shirt and his brilUant eyes under the dark hair on his forehead. Then suddenly memory played her a ridiculous trick, for she remembered that his hair grew in a close clipped circular wave, like the hair which has been bound by a fillet on the head of a child. "I wonder why he wouldn't speak to me.''" she thought, with a pang. "I wonder if he has really got over caring?" She had always thought of Abel as a possession more absolutely her own than even Mr. Jonathan's provision. When she had said so passionately that she wanted to be free, she had not meant that at any minute she chose, Abel would not be ready and willing to fly back into bondage. That Abel, after all these years, should actually have ceased to care for her — should have refused even to speak to her! It was absiu-d — it was vindictive — it was unchristian! She had half a mind to get Mr. Mullen to talk to him. Then her heart throbbed when she remembered the touch of his hand, the look in his eyes, the thirst of his lips seeking hers. That was only six months ago — such a very little while — and now he had rushed away from the sight of her! She thought of their parting, when she had said that she wanted to see the world, and he had offered at once to release her. Since then she had seen the world until she was tired of it. At times she had been terribly homesick for Old Church, and she had never THE SHAPING OF MOLLY 821 been happy except when Gay had taken her to see pictures or into wonderful parks. Always the thought had laiu hidden in her mind that some day, when she could stand it no longer, she would go back and wear her red jacket and run free in the fields with Abel again. Her very selfishness had seemed natural to her because Abel had always been there, like the air and the sky and the broomsedge; he was a part of the scene, and she found it impossible to detach him from his surroundings. At the station in Richmond, Gay met them, and for the first few minutes his mother absorbed his atten- tion. Molly had not seen him for six weeks, and she noticed that he had grown fleshier and that this lent an additional heaviness to his shaven chiii. Even his charming smile could not disguise the slight coarse- ness of feature, with which he was beginning already to pay for his pleasures. By the time he was forty, he would be quite stout and "lumpy," she thought. There was much excitement about collecting Mrs. Gay's packages, and the drive to the hotel was filled with anxious inquiries from Kesiah, who was always nervous and fussy when she travelled. "Molly, did you see my umbrella put in?" "Yes, Aunt Eesiah, it is here in the corner by Jonathan." "I forgot to notice Angela's medicine case. Did you see that it wasn't overlooked?" "Yes, Patsey has it." Then came a solicitous exhibition of filial affection on the part of Gay, and at last, to Molly's relief, they arrived at the new, brilliantly lighted hotel, and were led through stifling corridors, carpeted in red, to their 322 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH rooms on the second floor in the front of the building. As she passed over the velvet carpets, Molly had again the sensation that she was walking over ploughed ground; and when she had escaped from Mrs. Gay's sitting-room, on the pretext of dressing for dinner, she threw open the window, and leaned out of the close atmosphere into the freshness of the November even- ing. This was what she had once looked upon as pleasure — or at least as exciting amusement — to move continually from one hot and overfurnished hotel to another, to fuss about missing packages^ to ^ee crowds of strange faces passing before her, all fat and overfed and all, somehow, looking exactly alike. A wave of homesickness for the white roads and the golden broomsedge of Old Church swept over her. She wanted the open fields, and more than all, far more than all, she wanted Abel! It was her fault — she had made her choice — no one else was to blame for it. And, then, though she had made her choice and no one else was to blame for it, she felt that she almost hated old Mr. Jonathan, as she still called him in her thoughts, because he had left her his money. At the bottom of her heart, there was the perfectly unreasonable sus- picion that he had arranged the whole thing out of spite. In the sitting-room, meanwhile, which Kesiah's bedroom separated from Molly's, Mrs. Gay was lying on a couch beside a table on which stood a cut- glass bowl of purple orchids sent to her by her son. She was looking a little pale, but this pallor was not unbecoming since it enhanced the expression of appeal^ THE SHAPING OF MOLLY S23 ing melancholy in her eyes. To look at her was to recognize that life had crushed her, and yet that her soul exhaled an intenser sweetness in the midst of its suflfering. Jonathan had just gone down to buy the evening papers; in the next room she could hear Kesiah at the impacking; so she was left for a moment alone with her imagination. The fatigue of the trip had affected her nerves, and she sank, while she lay there in her travelling gown, which she had not yet removed, into one of those spells of spiritual discontent which followed inevitably any unusual physical discomfort. She thought, not resentfully but sadly, that Kesiah managed to grow even more obstinate with years, that Jonathan must have tired of her or he would never have forgotten the list of medicines she had seM him, that Molly took Kesiah awa,y from the sick- room entirely too often. From these reflections she drifted naturally into an emotion of self pity, and the thought occurred to her, as it did invariably in such hours of depression, that her world had never been large enough for the full exercise and apprecia- tion of her highest qualities. If she had only lived in a richer century amid more congenial surround- ings! Who could tell what her usefulness might have been bad not destiny continually thwarted her aspirations? Before the idea of this thwarted use- fulness, which was always vaguely associated with the moral regeneration of distinguished historic sinners of the opposite sex, like Lord Byron or Alfred de Musset, she began to feel that she had been not only neglected, but wasted in the atmosphere in which she had been placed. 324 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH Jonathan's entrance, with the evening papers in his hand, ^roke the thread of her reverie, and as he sat down in a chair by her side, she wondered if he had inherited her "nature" and if he, also, cherished in his soul the same spiritual yeai-nings? Her wonder was, however, entirely unnecessary, for Jonathan had very little imagination, and would never have wasted his time yearning over a sinner whom he had never seen. "I stopped a minute to get into my evening clothes," he said, in the cheerful voice of one who is a stranger to aspirations of soul. "I thought Molly would be dressed by this time. She is usually so quick." "Yes, she is usually very quick," replied Mrs. Gay gently, while she gathered all the forces of her character, which were slightly disorganized by her recent indulgence in pensive musings, to do battle against an idea which she had striven repeatedly «f late to banish from her thoughts. "I wish, dear Jonathan," she added, "that you would speak a few words to Molly. You have such influence with her, and I am sure I don't wonder." "I'll speak them with pleasure, mother. Just drop me a hint as to what they are to be about." "She's a sweet, unselfish girl, we all know that, but there are times, dear, especially when strangers are present, when she appears a little — well, a little crude — you know what I mean? " "I fancy I know, but I don't see just what we are to do about it. You might as well attempt to reshape Molly's nose as her character. Let's admit that both might be improved and then give up the job. She's THE SHAPING OF MOLLY 325 got charm — there's no doubt of that. I believe even if she were plain she'd be almost as attractive. Why, I've seen her when she was very nearly plain sometimes, and she hasn't been a whit less fascinating than when she's looking her prettiest. It's the infinite variety and all that, you know. Her soul does it, I suppose." "Yes, she must have charm," replied Mrs. Gay, ignoring what he had said about "soul" because she felt a vague dislike to hearing a word applied indis- criminately to others which had become, as it were, associated with herself. "I can't analyze it, however, for she hasn't a single really perfect feature except her eyes." "But such eyes! In the sunlight they are nearer the colour of a humming-bird's wing than anything I know of." "I suppose they are rather unusual, but, after all a fine pair of eyes can't make exactly a — well, a lady, Jonathan." "The deuce! " he ejaculated, and then added quickly, "What has she done now, mother?" One of Mrs. Gay's first principles of diplomacy was that an unpleasant fact treated as non-existent, was deprived in a measure of its power for evil. By the application of this principle, she had extinguished her brother-in-law's passion for Janet Merryweather, and she hoped that it would prove equally effective in blighting her son's incipient fancy for Molly. She looked upon Jonathan's infatuation as a mere sinis- ter shadow as yet, but she was shrewd enough to suspect that the shadow would be converted into ' substance at the first hint of her recognition that it S26 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH was impending. Indirect influence alone remained to her, and she surmised that her ultimate triumph would depend upon the perfection of her indirectness. When it came to the game of strat^y, Jonathan, being of an open nature, was no match for his mother. He was inclined by temperament to accept things at their face value — particularly women — and not to worry about them unless they interfered with his appetite. When he lost his desire for his meals, then he began, somewhat to his surprise, to consider them seriously. ^'Of course I feel just as you do about it," remarked Mrs. Gay, after a weighty silence. "I'm fond of her and I see her good points — but there's some- thing about her — I suppose it's the strain of Merryweather blood, or the fact of her being born in such unfortunate circumstances — " Her manner grew severer. "But — whatever the cause, it shows itself in a kind of social defiance that would al- ways keep her from being just — oh, well, you know " "She's bright enough, mother, she's quick enough, and she's pretty enough, isn't she?" "She would be, Jonathan, if her defiance did not come from pure wilfulness. But she says and does the most unconventional things simply for the pleasure of shockiHg people. It isn't that she doesn't know, it's that she doesn't care." "But slue'U get to care — all women do, if you give them time." His tone imphed that the whole sex was comprised in an elementary branch of psychology which he had mastered with the help of a few simple rules of analogy. THE SHAPING OF MOLLY S2T "Well, she may, dear, but I doubt it. She is as. absolutely without class instinct as an anarchist, I believe. When she lived in the overseer's cottage she never looked up and now that she has come out of it, she never looks down. We've told her repeatedly that she mustn't talk to strangers about that part of her life, but it isn't the least bit of use. Only a few days ago I heard her telling Judge Grayson that nobody appeared to do any 'courting' in New York." To her amazement he burst into a laugh. "By Jove, I suppose she misses it," he returned, "but what about that fellbw she picked up in the North who hung around her last summer?" "Oh^ there have been plenty of them hanging about her. Molly is the kind, you know, that will have lovers wherever you put her." There was a faint condescension in her voice, for she herself preferred adorers to lovers, "But she hasn't seemed to care about them," he said, "I believe she has grown tired of flirting." "I'm sure she doesn't flirt with them, and I think it's all because she is pining for somebody she left at Old Church — the miller or the rector or somebody we've never even heard of." "What's that.?" he started a little, and she saw at once that, although she had used her most delicate weapon, he had flinched from the first touch of the blade. " I'm positive she hadn't a real fancy for anybody down there," he added, as he relapsed into his attitude of indifference. "I know she says so, Jonathan, but there are other ways of telling." 328 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Oh, there's no truth in that — it's all nonsense," lie said irritably. Then a door creaked in the hall, there was a rustle of silken skirts on the carpet, and Molly, having dried her tears, came in, pliant, blushing, and eager to please them both. CHAPTER VI IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his ap- proach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her half-read letters in his travelling bag. "She's a dear good girl, and just because I've got myself into a mess, I've no idea of behaving like a cad to her, " he thought. That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to himself with an additional emphasis — for when the woman before him in flesh and blood looked up at him with entreat- 329 330 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ing eyes, like a child begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness. "What's the matter, little girl?" he asked. " Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church — to-morrow!" she said- "Why in thunder do you want to do that?" "There's sonselMng I must see about. I can't wait. I never can wait when I want anything. " "So I Jhave observed. This something is so impor- tant, by the way, that you liaven't thought of it for six months?" "Well, I've thought of it — sometimes," she ad- mitted. "Can't you tell me what it is, Molly? " She shook her head. Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it was, it had obviously enriched her beauty. "Tell me, little girl," he repeated and leaned closer. There had always been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, aaid under the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, "I want to go back to find out if Abel still loves me! I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring. This suspense is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he means to me. " This was what she wanted to say, but instead of uttering it, she merely murmured : "I can't, Jonathan, you would never understand." Her whole being was vibrant to-night with the desire for love, yet, in spite of his wide experience with the passion, she knew that he would not comprehend what she meant by the word. It wasn't his kind of love HEARTS GO ASTRAY 331 in the least that she wanted; it differed from his as the light of the sun differs from the blaze of a prairie fire. "It's just a feeling," she added, helplessly. "You don't have feelings, I suppose?" "Don't I?" he echoed. "Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!" "But they don't bother you — they don't keep you awake at night?" ■ "While they last — but they don't last, you know, they have their seasons. That's the curse of them, or the charm. If they only lasted earth would be paradise or hell, wouldn't it?" But generalizations had no further attraction for her. Her mind was one great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes. "All the same I want to go," she repeated obsti- nately. Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short moustache. "Molly," he asked, "have you heea thinking again about the miller?" "How absurd! What put that into your head?" she retorted indignantly. The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her. What a little firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry ! "Well, I'm glad you haven't — because, you know, really it wouldn't do," he answered. "What wouldn't do?" "Your marrying a Revercomb — it wouldn't do in the least." 332 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Why wouldn't it?" "You can see that for yourself, can't you? You've come entirely out of that life and you couldn't go back to it." "I don't see why I couldn't if I wanted to?" she threw out at hini with sudden violence. Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he couldn't agree that she would never become exactly a lady. Not with that high- bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands ! "Well, in the&st place, I don't believe you'd ever want to," he said calmly, "and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my little weather-vane, you'd regret it in ten minutes." "If I did it, I don't believe I'd ever regret it, " was her amazing rejoinder. Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge. "You're talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd be sorry before you got up to the altar." "I'm not going back there to marry him," she per- sisted stubbornly, "but I don't believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it. "You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thou- sand dollars a year and settle down to raising chickens for a living?" "I like raising chickens." "And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you v^ould sacrifice — for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you please?" "I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking. HEARTS GO ASTRAY 333 he told himself, as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the same -everywhere." "The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any difference?" "No difference that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and never mentioned anything but stocks. If I've got to hear about a single subject I'd rather it would be crops than stocks — they seem more human, somehow." "By Jove!" he exclaimed, under his breath, "what's got into you to-night, Molly? I honestly believe you've begun to idealize the miller now you've been so long away from him. He's a handsome fellow; you don't see his physical match in a day, I'm willing to admit, but if you went back again you'd be sur- prised to find how — well, how rustic he would appear to you." The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden droop of her lashes. "He's better than any one I've seen anywhere," she replied, "he's bigger, he's stronger, he's kinder. I'm not good enough to marry him, and I know it." For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had never indulged in verbal excesses. Thrai he said, coldly; "So you're working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb. My dear child, if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is. Nothing could be more absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in order to marry a poor man." The idea of her committing S34 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH such folly was intensely distressing to him. His judgment was now in the ascendant, and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise superior to reason.' "I don't care how poor he is," said Molly passion- ately, for her rational part was plainly jiot in the as- cendant. "Nobody ever thought about his being so poor until your uncle left me all that horrid money. He was honestly born and I wasn't, yet he didn't care. He was big and splendid and I was little and mean, that was the matter!" "By George, you'rein love with him!" he exdaimed, and beneath the coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang. Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have stran- gled speedily in the beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had, he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had grown strong enough to overleap them. While he stood there, with his angry gaze on her flushing and paling beauty, he had the helpless sensation of a man who returns at sunrise to find a forest fire raging where he had left a few sticks smouldering at midnight. "I'm not in love with anybody — you've no right to say so," she returned, "but I'll not have him abused. It's not true, it's not just, it's not generous." This was too much for his forbearance, though he told himself that, after all, there was no "getting at" Molly from the surface, and that this outburst might conceal a fancy for himself quite as well as HEARTS GO ASTRAY 335 for the miller. The last idea, while it tantalized him, was not without a pleasant sting for his senses. "You're a goose, Molly, and I've half a mind to shake you soundly," he said. "Since there's no other way to cure you of this foolish infatuation, I'll take you down to Old Church to-morrow and let you see with your own eyes. You've forgotten how things look there, that's my opinion." "Oh, Jonathan," she said, and grew dangerously sweet, while all her soft flushing body leaned toward Mm. "You are a perfect dear, aren't you?" "I rather think I am, since you put the question. Molly, will you kiss me?" She drew back at once, a little deprecating, because she was honestly sorry, since he was so silly as to want to kiss her, that she couldn't oblige him. For her own part, she felt, she wouldn't have cared, but she remembered Abel's anger because of the kiss by the brook, and the thought hardened her heart. It was foolish of men to make so much importance of kisses. "I'm sorry, but I can't. Don't ask me, Jonathan — all the same you are a darling!" Then before he could detain her, she had slipped away from him through Kesiah's door, which she closed after her. "Aunt Kesiah," he heard her exclaim joyously, ■"Jonathan is going to take me to Old Church to spend to-morrow!" Kesiah, in an ugly grey dressing-gown, tied at the waist with a black cord, was drying Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator. At Molly's entrance, she turned, and said warningly, "Patsey is rubbing Angela after her bath. What was that about Old Church, dear ?" 336 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Jonathan has promised to take me down there to-morrow." "To spend the day? Well, I suppose we may trust you with him." From her manner one might have inferred that the idea of not trusting anybody with Jonathan would have been a joke. She went on calmly shaking out Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator, as if the conversation were over, while behind her on the pale green wall, her shadow loomed distinct, grotesque^ and sexless. But Molly was in the mood when the need to talk — to let one- self go — is so great that the choice of a listener is little more than an accident. She had discovered at last — discovered in that illuminating moment in Applegate — ^the meaning of the homesickness, of the restlessness, of the despondency of the last few months. Before she could understand what Abel had meant to her, she had been obliged to draw away from him, to measure him from a distance, to put the lucid revealing silence between them. It was like looking at a mountain, when one must fall back to the right angle of view, must gain the proper perspective, before one can judge of the space it fills on the horizon. What she needed was merely to see Abel in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he towered above them. Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and the intoxica- tion of magic was upon her. She had passed within the Enchanter's circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes. "Aunt Kesiah," she asked suddenly j'and her voice thrilled, "were you ever in love?" HEARTS GO ASTRAY 337 Kesiah looked up from the sheets with the expres- sion of a person who has been interrupted in the serious business of life by the flutterings of a humming-bird. It required an eflPort for her to recede from the com- fortable habit of thought she had attained to the point of view from which the aspirations of the soul had appeared of more importance than the satisfactions of the body. Only for a few weeks in the spring did she relapse periodically into such a condition of mind. "Never," she answered. "Did you never feel that you cared.about anybody — in that way?" "Never." "You didn't have the least bit of a romance when you were young.''" "Never." It was incredible! It was appalling! But it really had happened! Love, which filled the world, was not the beginning and the end, as it ought to be, of every mortal existence. Subtract it from the universe and there w^s nothing left but a void, yet in this void, life seemed to move and feed and have its being just as if it were really alive. People indeed — even women — could go on, like Eesiah, for almost sixty years, and not share, for an instant, the divine impulse of creation. They could exist quite comfort- ably on three meals a day without ever suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them. ' They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation existence — this play of make-believe being alive. And around them all the time there was the wonder and the glory of the universe! Then Eesiah turned suddenly from the radiator. 838 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH and there was an es^ivession in her face which reminded Molly of the old lady with the bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria she had seen on the train — an expression of tiseless knowledge and regret, as though she realised that she had missed the essential thing and that it was life, after all, that had been to blame for it. For a minute only the look lasted, for Kesiah's was a closed soul, and the smallest rcTeiation of Jierself was like the agony of travail. "If you don't mind, dear, will you carry these sheets to Patsey for Angela's bed," she said, At the time Gay had been only half in earnest when he promised to take Molly to Old Church, and he presented himself at breakfast next morning with the unspoken hope in his heart that she had changed her mind during the night. When she met him with her hat on, he inquired facetiously if she contemplated a journey, and proceeded to make light of her response that the carriage was ordered to take them to the sta- tion. "But A^e'll starve if we go Aere," he urged, "the servants are scattered, and the luncheon I got last time was a subject for bad language." "I'll cook you one, Jonathan. I can cook beau- tifully," she said. The idea amused him. After all they could easily get back to dinner. "I wonder if you know that you are a nuisance, MoUy?" he asked, smiling, and she saw that she had won. Winning was just as easy with Jonathan as it had been with Reubeai or with Abd. It was a brilliant day, in the midst of a brief spell of Indian summer. When they left the train and drove HEARTS GO ASTRAY 339 along the coirduroy road from Appliegate, the lorest on either side of them was gorgeous in gold and copper. Straight ahead, at the end of the long vista, they could see a bit of cloudless sky beyond the low outlines of a field; and both sky and field were wrapped in a faint purplish haze. The few belated yellow butterflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift pensively in the autumnal stillness. On the long drive hardly a word was spoken^ for Ctay was occupied with the cigar he had not had time to smoke after breakfast, and Molly was thinking that but for Reuben's death, she would never have accepted Mr. Jonathan's legacy and parted from Abel. "All this has happened because I went along the Haunt's Walk- and not across the east meadow that April afternoon," she thought, "but for that, Jon- athan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have quarrelled." It was such a Kttle thii^ — only the eighth of a mile which had decided her future: She might just as easily have turned aside if she had only subjected. But life was like that — you never suspected until things had happened, and the little decisions, made in the midst of your ignorance, com- mitted you to your destiny. The horses came out of the wood, plodding over the sandy soil, which marked the beginning of the open country. Across the fields toward Bottom's Ordinary, scattered groups of people were walking in twos and threes, showing like disfiguring patches in the midst of the golden rod and the life-everlasting. Old Adam, hobbling up the path, while the horses stopped to drink at the well, touched his hat as he steadied him- self with the aid of his big knotted stick. S40 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "It's a fine sight to see you back among us," he said. "If you'd come a couple of hours earlier you'd have been in time for the wedding." "What wedding?" asked Gay in a clear voice, but moved by some intuitive knowledge of what the an- swer would be, he did not look at Molly. "Why, Solomon Hatch's daughter, Judy, to be sure. She's jest married the miller." For a minute he stopped, coughed, spat and then added: "Mr. Mullen tied 'em up tight all by heart, without so much as glancin' at the book. Ah, that young parson may have his faults, an' be unsound on the doctrine of baptism, but he can lay on matrimony with as pious an air as if he was conductin' a funeral." He fell back as Gay nodded pleasantly, and the wheels grated over the rocky ground by the well. With a slow flick of the long whip, the carriage crossed the three roads and rolled rapidly into the turnpike. And while she gazed straight ahead into the flat distance, Molly was thinking, "All this has happened because I went down the Haunt's Walk that April afternoon and not over the east meadow." CHAPTER Vn A NEW BEGINNING TO AN OLD TRAGEDY The wedding was over. Mr. Mullen had read the service in his melodious "voice, gazing straight over the Prayer-book as thougt, he saw a yision in the sun- beam above Judy's head. On, that solitary occasion his soul, which revolted from what he described in secret as the " Methodistical low church atmosphere" of his parish, had adorned the simple words with the facial solemnity that accompanies an elaborate ritual. From the front pew, Sarah Revercomb, in full widow's weeds, had glared stonily at the Reverend Orlando, as if she suspected him of some sinister intention to tamper with the ceremony. At her side, Solomon Hatches Uttle pointed beard might have been seen rising and falling as it followed the rhythmic sound of the clergyman's voice. When the service was over, and the congregation filed out ijito the leaf-strewn paths of the churchyard, it was generally decided that Mr. Mullen's delivery had never been surpassed in the memory of the several denominations. " 'Twas when he came to makin' Abel say 'with all my worldly goods' that he looked his grandest," commented old Adam, as he started for Solomon's cottage between Sarah and Mrs. Hatch. "But, them are solemn words an' he was wise to give a man pause for thought. Thar ain't a mo' inspirin' sentence in the whole Prayer-book than that J' S41 S42 THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH "Well, marriage ain't all promisin', " observed Sarah, "thar's a deal to it besides, an' they're both likely to find it out befo' they're much older." Old Adam, who never contradicted a woman unless he was married to her, agreed to this with some unin- telligible mutterings through his toothless gums, while Mrs. Hatch remarked with effusive amiability that "it's a sad sight to see a daughter go, even though she's a stepchild. It's a comfort to think," she added immediately, "that Judy's got a