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The Miller Of Old Church

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow · English · Gutenberg #18286 · 656,281 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Miller Of Old Church

Author: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow


        
Release date: April 30, 2006 [eBook #18286]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18286

Credits: Produced by Doug Levy


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ***




Produced by Doug Levy






THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH

by Ellen Glasgow

     To my sister Cary Glasgow McCormack
     In loving acknowledgment of help
     and sympathy through the years

CONTENTS

     BOOK FIRST

     JORDAN'S JOURNEY


     Chapter

     I.     At Bottom's Ordinary
     II.    In Which Destiny Wears the Comic Mask
     III.   In Which Mr. Gay Arrives at His Journey's End
     IV.    The Revercombs
     V.     The Mill
     VI.    Treats of the Ladies' Sphere
     VII.   Gay Rushes Into a Quarrel and Secures a Kiss
     VIII.  Shows Two Sides of a Quarrel
     IX.    In Which Molly Flirts
     X.     The Reverend Orlando Mullen Preaches a Sermon
     XI.    A Flight and an Encounter
     XII.   The Dream and the Real
     XIII.  By the Mill-race
     XIV.   Shows the Weakness in Strength
     XV.    Shows the Tyranny of Weakness
     XVI.   The Coming of Spring
     XVII.  The Shade of Mr. Jonathan
     XVIII. The Shade of Reuben
     XIX.   Treats of Contradictions
     XX.    Life's Ironies
     XXI.   In Which Pity Masquerades as Reason


     BOOK SECOND

     THE CROSS-ROADS


     Chapter

     I.    In which Youth Shows a Little Seasoned
     II.   The Desire of the Moth
     III   Abel Hears Gossip and Sees a Vision
     IV.   His Day of Freedom
     V.    The Shaping of Molly
     VI.   In Which Hearts Go Astray
     VII.  A New Beginning to an Old Tragedy
     VIII. A Great Passion in a Humble Place
     IX.   A Meeting in the Pasture
     X.    Tangled Threads
     XI.   The Ride to Piping Tree
     XII.  One of Love's Victims
     XIII. What Life Teaches
     XIV.  The Turn of the Wheel
     XV.   Gay Discovers Himself
     XVI.  The End

     Author's Note:  The scene of this story is not the
     place of the same name in Virginia.



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. Standing 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 the smeared face of a 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 creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After
pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have
swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of
the 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 righteous than had ever stood up
to sing the doxology in the adjoining place of worship. Good and bad
prospects were weighed 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
pine. 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 contrary. 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 wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs.
Ming as a conjugal martyr. Being an amiable body--peaceably disposed to
every living creature, with the exception of William--she had hastened
to the door to reprimand him for some trivial neglect of the grey mule,
when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes
earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full
habit and some thirty years, her 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 curious habit of mind, had raised herself on her knees
and was craning her neck toward 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 years, 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 likely, 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 well, 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 character of the country
underwent so sudden a transformation that it looked 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 in stacks like weapons of a vanished army, while
across the sunken road, the abandoned fields, overgrown with broomsedge
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 loneliness had brought
on his spirits, he turned to an ancient 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?"

Young Adam, a dejected looking youth of fifty 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, an' the bars was down," said young Adam.

"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 be
loose moraled in other matters."

"It's the truth as sure as you speak it, Mr. Doolittle," 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 drips
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
Merryweather goin' toward the low grounds as I come up."

"Then it's most likely to have been she," commented 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-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 Gay 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 the Poplar Spring, I'd as
soon as not take my Bible oath that he'd come young agin an' was ridin'
along back to Jordan's Journey."

"Do you believe down here that my uncle killed himself?" asked the young
man, with a furtive displeasure in his voice, as if he alluded to a
disagreeable subject in response to some pressure of duty.

"'Tis as it may be, suh, I can't answer for that. To this day if you get
Solomon Hatch or Betsey Bottom, (axin' her pardon for puttin' her last),
started on the subject they'll contend till they're blue in the face
that 'twas naught done but pure murder. However, 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 murder 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 question
consarnin' 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 an' bound to speak the truth like the rest of us,
that you sleep a long sight easier in yo' bed when you say to yo'self
that mebbe 'tisn't?'"

"You see pa's old, an' he won't harbour any belief at his time of
life that don't let him rest comfortable," 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 opened Old Church agin, an' he
works terrible hard to make us feel that we'd rather be sprinkled on the
head 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 our ideas
about baptism and become Episcopals in our hearts, jest to oblige him.
The women have, mostly, bein' an accommodatin' sex in the main, with the
exception of Mrs. Mallory, the blacksmith's mother, who declars she'd
rather give up eternal damnation any day than immersion."

"I ain't goin' so fur as that," rejoined old Adam, "an' mo'over, when
it comes to the p'int, I've never found any uncommon comfort in either
conviction in time of trouble. I go to Mr. Mullen's church regular every
Sunday, seein' the Baptist one is ten miles off an' the road heavy, but
in my opinion he's a bit too zealous to turn over the notions of the
prophets 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,"
explained young Adam, "an' 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 resentfully, "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 Tree 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 ears 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 without defying 'em as
well."

"'Tis so, 'tis so," admitted old Adam, wagging his 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 coloured 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 powdered 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 Merryweather 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 Merryweather's wagon now, laden with fodder. Is
thar anybody settin' on it, young Adam? My eyes is too po' to make out."

"Molly Merryweather, who else?" responded the younger.

The wagon approached slowly, piled high with fodder and drawn by a pair
of old oxen. In the centre of the load a girl was sitting, with a pink
sunbonnet on her shoulders, and the light wind, which drove in gusts
from the river, blowing the bunch of clustering brown curls on her neck.
She was a small vivid creature, with a sunburned colour and changeable
blue eyes that shone almost green in the sunlight.

"Terr'ble light minded as you can tell to look at her," said Solomon
Hatch, "she's soft enough, so my wife says, where sick folks an'
children an' animals are consarned, but she acts as if men war
born 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
unmerciful to an entire sex."

"Had it been otherwise 'twould have been downright disproof of God's
providence and the bond of matrimony," responded old Adam.

"True, true, Mr. Doolittle," admitted Solomon, 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 luck for the Almighty that He has got
you on His side, so to speak, to help Him confound His enemies."

"Thar're two sides to that, I reckon, seein' I confound not only His
enemies, 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 skeery 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
Merryweather who buried one leg at Manassas, Mr. Mullen,' I said as
pleasant an' natchel as if I warn't about to confound him, 'an' what I'd
like to have made clear an' easy to me, suh, is what use the Almighty is
goin' to make of that odd leg on the Day of Jedgment? Will he add a
new one onto Reuben,' I axed, 'when, as plain as logic will have it,
it won't be a resurrection, but a creation, or will he start that leg
a-trampin' by itself all the way from Manassas to jine the other at Old
Church?' The parson had been holdin' pretty free all the mornin' with
nobody daring to contradict him, and a man more taken aback by the power
of logic my sight never lit on. 'Spare me, Mr. Doolittle,' was all he
said, never a word mo'. 'Spare me, Mr. Doolittle.'"

"Ah, a tough customer you are," commented Solomon, "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 stopping, the large
white-and-red oxen moved on into the turnpike. Bending from her high
seat, Molly Merryweather smiled at the miller, who made a single stride
toward 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 his in
shape, 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 adoring 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.

"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 underlip, 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 downward 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 stranger 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 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,
not 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 Merryweather'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 was 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, than his praise. Now, thar's a fine, promisin' farmer, like the
miller gone runnin' loose, mo's the pity."

"A kind heart at bottom," said old Adam, "but 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 God or devil."

"Is this young Cain or Abel the head of the family?" inquired the
stranger.

"Bless you, no, Mr. Jonathan, he ain't the head--for thar's his brother
Abner still livin'--but, head or tail, he's the only part that counts,
when it comes to that. Until the boy grew up an' took hold of things,
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, higher
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 larnin', they
say, an' then he came back here an' went to turnin' 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 Timberlake died of the dropsy an' the
first thing folks knew, Abel 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 man in these parts, suh, unless you war to
come to Jordan's Journey to live like yo' uncle."

"To live like my uncle," 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 smile? Whose
daughter is she?"

Old Adam's thin lips flattened until a single loosened tooth midway of
his lower gum wagged impishly back and forth. His face, sunburned
and frosted like the hardened rind of some winter fruit, revealed the
prominent bones of the skull under the sunken flesh. One of his gnarled
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 Merryweather'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 Merryweather, the prettiest gal that ever set foot on these
roads. Ah, 'twas a sad story, was 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 wheelruts 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; the 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
procession of impulses.

White with dust the turnpike crawled straight ahead between blood-red
clumps of sumach and bramble on which the faint sunlight still shone. At
intervals, where the dripping from over-hanging boughs had worn the
road into dangerous hollows, boles of young saplings had been placed
cross-wise in a corduroy pattern, and above them clouds of small belated
butterflies drifted in the wind like blown yellow rose leaves. On the
right the thin corn shocks looked as if they were sculptured 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 stubble. The aspect of
melancholy, which was depressing even in the broad glare of noon, became
almost intolerable under the waning light of the afterglow. Miles of
loneliness stretched on either side of the turnpike, 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, without 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 grumbled, 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 themselves down here for the last
twenty years? Two thousand acres? Damn it! I'd rather have six feet
on the 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 and it is obliged to come out in the blood.
A Gay 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 darkness, 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
the 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
purplish 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
found himself fascinated by this single imperfection in her otherwise
flawless features. More than her beauty he felt that it stirred his
blood and 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 the 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. Revercomb--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 and instant, with the faintest quiver
of her full white lids, which appeared to weigh heavily on her rather
prominent eyes 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."

"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 without 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 Aphrodite, but to some creature
compounded equally of earth and sky. Io perhaps, or Europa? By Jove he
had it at last--the Europa of Veronese!

"There'll have to be a big frost before the persimmons 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 orchard grass through which they were
passing. Behind them the six little negroes walked primly in single
file, Mary Jo in the lead and a chocolate-coloured atom of two toddling
at the tail of the procession. From time to time shrill squeaks went up
from the rear when a startled partridge whirred over the pasture or a
bare brown foot came down on a toad or a grasshopper.

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 said, 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 nobody done ax me."

"But I said that you were not to bring him without letting Mahaly know.
You remember what a whipping she gave him the 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 cyarn' hut Tobias ez hit ud hut de res'er us,"
replied Mary Jo, with fine philosophy, "case dar ain but two years er
'im ter whup."

"I ain't-a-gwine-ter-git-a-whuppin'!" sang Tobias in a passionate
refrain.

"Now that's just it," said Gay, feeling as though he should like to
throttle the procession of piccaninnies. "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."

Without surprise or embarrassment, she changed the basket from her right
to her left arm, and this simple movement had the effect of placing 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 quiver of her red
lower lip when she talked, aroused in him a swift and facile emotion.
The melancholy of the landscape, reacting on the dangerous softness of
his mood, bent his nature toward her like a flame driven by the 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 allurement which Nature proffered him, for
her own ends, through the woman beside him. Not Blossom Revercomb, but
the great Mother beguiled him. The forces that moved in the wind, in the
waving broomsedge, and in the call of the whip-poor-will, stirred in
his pulses as they stirred in the objects around him. That fugitive
attraction of the body, which Nature has shielded at the cost of finer
attributes, leaped upon him like a presence that had waited in earth and
sky. Loftier aspirations vanished 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 called 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 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."

Again the phrase which had begun to irritate him! Who were these dead
and gone Jordans whose beneficent 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 general 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."

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 stile
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-happuch, or shall it be Blossom?"

"I like Blossom better," she answered shyly, lifting her scant calico
skirt with one hand as she mounted the 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 III


IN WHICH MR. GAY ARRIVES AT HIS JOURNEY'S END


Broad and low, with the gabled pediment of the porch showing through
boughs of oaks, and a flight of bats wheeling over the ivied roof, the
house appeared to Gay beyond a slight swell in the meadows. The grove
of oaks, changing from dark red to russet, was divided by a short
walk, bordered by clipped box, which led to the 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 shuttered dormer-window in the east wing.

"Fo' de Lawd, hit's de ha'nt er ole marster! Yessuh--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 hysterical babble of moans from the negro quarters
somewhere 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 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. Beyond the bole of the tree a small negro in short skirts was
"shooin'" a large rooster into the henhouse, but at the muffled 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 fotch 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.

"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 vivid little face,
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 sent no word of your coming."

She spoke quickly, with a refinement of accent which puzzled him until
he remembered the malicious hints Solomon Hatch had let fall at the
tavern. That she was, in reality, 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. Had 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 shall 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 flame, 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 him into a half smiling,
half serious interest. He 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 himself, 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 met her look, but to his
amazement, she continued to stare back at him with the expression of
indignant surprise still in her face. 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 herself
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 going over to it, she
busied herself with the cups and saucers as though she were anxious to
put a disagreeable 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," she answered
politely. "If you will sit down, I'll tell Delily to bring in some
batter bread."

"And you?"

"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 cornbread and a pot of
coffee, and a minute later Reuben Merryweather paused on the threshold
to shake off a sprinkling of bran from his hair and beard. He was a
bent, mild looking old man, with a wooden leg which 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 now,
his youth had been trained to a different civilization, 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 prosperity 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 had
germinated and put forth from the very blood of the battlefields. In the
upward pressure of class, he 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 rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon,
and a single sublime action at Malvern Hill had served in 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 attitude, 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, with 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 and gravy." At her voice
the hound groped toward her, and stooping, she laid her soft, flushed
cheek on his head.

"Well, sit down, suh, sit down," said Reuben, speaking timidly as if
he were not sure he had chosen the right word. "If you'll tell Delily,
honey, Mr. Jonathan will have his supper."

"On condition that you let me share yours, Mr. Merryweather," insisted
Gay, in his genial tone. "If you'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 the end of the red-and-white cloth on
the table. Then she turned away, without speaking, and sat down behind
the tin coffeepot, which emitted a fragrant steam.

"Cream and sugar?" she inquired presently, meeting his 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 decent for 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 was half savage, of course, with red
hands, and bad manners and dressed like a boy that had got into skirts
for a joke--but, by George, there was something about her that bit into
the fancy. Not a beauty like his Europa of the pasture (who was, when
it came to that?)--but a fascinating little beggar, with a quality of
sudden surprises that he could describe by no word except "iridescent."
He liked the high 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 born
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 threatening look. Her passionate defence
of Reuben reminded 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."

"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. "If you go over to the
mill you'll probably find Abel Revercomb 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 he 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 barbaric about the girl, and yet the
mixture of her childishness and her cynicism affected him unpleasantly
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 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, in old silver sconces, which
extended up the broad mahogany staircase to the upper landing. One by
one as 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."

"It was your uncle's room. Do you mind sleeping here? It's the easiest
to get ready."

"Not with a fire--and I may have a lamp, I suppose?"

At his question Patsey appeared with 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 leaning
against the mantelpiece idly burning a bunch of dried cat-tails he had
taken from a blue-and-white china vase.

"It's a gloomy old business, isn't it?" he observed, glancing from the
high canopied bed with its hangings of faded damask to an engraving of
the Marriage of Pocahontas between the dormer-windows. "If there are
ghosts about, I suppose I'd better 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 brandy. Can I do anything else for you?"

"Only tell me," he burst out, "why in thunder the whole county hates
me?"

She laughed shortly. "I can't tell you--wait and find out."

Here audacity half angered, half paralyzed him.

"What a vixen you are!" he observed presently with grudging respect.

The crimson flooded her face, and he watched her teeth gleam
dangerously, as if she were bracing herself for a retort. The impulse to
torment her was strong in him, and he yielded to it much as a boy might
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 feeling of
self-approbation while his nature vibrated to the lofty impulse. This
sensation was so gratifying while it lasted that his manner assumed a
certain austerity as one who had determined to be virtuous at any cost.
Morally he was on stilts for the moment, and the sense of elevation was
as novel 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.

"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 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 conversation which had become suddenly too
intimate. On the threshold she looked back, and remarked in a precise,
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 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 of the
firelight. The high canopy over the bed was draped 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 poppies 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
Merryweather--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 fragment of paper fluttered to the
floor at his feet. When he stooped after it, he saw that there was a
single word on it traced faintly in his uncle's hand: "To-morrow."

And then, being a person whose imagination dealt with the obvious,
he undressed, blew out the light, and fell peacefully asleep to the
dropping of acorns.



CHAPTER IV


THE REVERCOMBS


On the morning after the meeting at Bottom's Ordinary, Abel Revercomb
came out on the porch of the little house in which he lived, and looked
across the steep rocky road to the mill-race which ran above a silver
stream known as Sycamore Creek. The grist-mill, a primitive log
building, worked after ancient methods, had stood for a hundred years
or more beside a crooked sycamore tree, which grew mid-way of the stream
and shaded the wheel and the shingled roof from the blue sky above. The
old wooden race, on which the young green mosses shone like a coating of
fresh paint on a faded surface, ran for a short distance over the brook,
where the broad yellow leaves drifted down to the deep pond below.
Across the slippery poplar log, which divided the mill from the road and
the house occupied by the miller, there was a stretch of good corn land,
where the corn stood in shocks after the harvest, and beyond this the
feathery bloom of the broomsedge ran to the luminous band of marshes on
the far horizon.

From the open door before which the miller was standing, there came the
clatter of breakfast dishes and the sound of Scripture text quoted in
the voice of his mother. Above his head several strings of red pepper
hung drying, and these rustled in the wind with a grating noise that
seemed an accompaniment to the speaker in the kitchen.

"The Lord said that, an' I reckon He knew His own mind when He was
speakin' it," remarked Sarah Revercomb as she put down the coffeepot.

"I declare there's mother at it again," observed Abel to himself with
a frown--for it was Sarah's fate that an excess of virtue should have
wrought all the evil of a positive vice. From the days of her infancy,
when she had displayed in the cradle a power of self-denial at which her
pastor had marvelled, she had continued to sacrifice her inclinations
in a manner which had rendered unendurable the lives around her. Her
parents had succumbed to it; her husband had died of it; her children
had resigned themselves to it or rebelled against it according to the
quality of their moral fibre. All her life she had laboured to make
people happy, and the result of this exalted determination was a cowed
and resentful family.

"Yo' buckwheat cakes will be stone cold if you don't come along in,
Abel," she called now from the kitchen. "You've been lookin' kind of
sallow these last days, so I've got a spoonful of molasses and sulphur
laid right by yo' plate."

"For heaven's sake, take it away," he retorted irritably. "I don't need
it."

"I reckon I can tell by the look of you better than you can by the
feelin'," rejoined Sarah grimly, "an' if you know what's good for you,
you'll come and swallow it right down."

"I'll be hanged if I do!" exclaimed Abel without moving, and his tone
implied that the ceaseless nagging had got at last on his nerves. He
was a robust, well-built, red-brown young fellow, who smelt always of
freshly ground meal, as though his body, from long usage, had grown to
exhale the cleanly odour of the trade he followed. His hair was thick,
dark and powdered usually with mill-dust. His eyes, of a clear bright
hazel, deep-set and piercing, expressed a violence of nature which his
firm, thin-lipped mouth, bare of beard or moustache, appeared to deny.
A certain tenacity--a suggestion of stubbornness in the jaw, gave the
final hint to his character, and revealed that temperamental intolerance
of others of the rustic who has risen out of his class. An opinion once
embraced acquired the authority of a revelation; a passion once yielded
to was transformed into a principle. Impulsive, generous, undisciplined,
he represented, after all, but the reaction from the spirit of racial
submission which was embodied in Reuben Merryweather. Tradition
had bound Reuben in thongs of steel; Abel was conscious only of his
liberated intelligence--of a passionate desire to test to the fullest
the certainty of that liberation. As the elder had suffered beneath the
weight of the established order, so the younger showed the disturbing
effects of a freedom which had resulted from a too rapid change in
economic conditions rather than from the more gradual evolution of
class. When political responsibility was thrust on the plainer people
instead of sought by them, it was but natural that the process of
adjustment should appear rough rather than smooth. The land which had
belonged to the few became after the war within reach of the many.
At first the lower classes had held back, paralyzed by the burden of
slavery. The soil, impoverished, wasted, untilled, rested under the
shadow of the old names--the old customs. This mole-like blindness of
the poorer whites persisted still for a quarter of a century; and the
awakening was possible only after the newer authority was but a shadow;
the past reverence but a delusion. When the black labourer worked, not
freely, but for hire, the wages of the white labourer went up as by
magic. To rise under the old system had been so impossible that Abel's
ancestors had got out of the habit of trying. The beneficent charity of
the great landowners had exhausted the small incentive that might have
remained--and to give had been so much the prerogative of a single
class, that to receive had become a part of the privileges of another.
In that pleasant idyllic period the one act which went unhonoured and
unrewarded was the act of toil. So in the odour of shiftlessness Abel's
father had died; so after ninety years his grandparents still sat by the
hearth to which his mother had called him.

The house, an oblong frame building, newly shingled, was set back from
the road in a straggling orchard of pear-trees, which bore a hard
green fruit too sour to be used except in the form of preserves. Small
shanties, including a woodhouse, a henhouse, and a smokehouse for drying
bacon and hams, flanked the kitchen garden at the rear, while in front a
short, gravelled path, bordered by portulaca, led to the paling gate at
the branch road which ran into the turnpike a mile or so farther on. In
Abel's dreams another house was already rising in the fair green meadow
beyond the mill-race. He had consecrated a strip of giant pine to this
purpose, and often, while he lingered in the door of his mill, he felt
himself battling against the desire to take down his axe and strike his
first blow toward the building of Molly's home. His mother might nag
at him about Molly now, but let them be married, he told himself, with
sanguine masculine assurance, and both women would reconcile themselves
to a situation that neither could amend. Before the immediate ache of
his longing for the girl, all other considerations evaporated to thin
air. He would rather be unhappy with her, he thought passionately, than
give her up!

"Abel, if you don't stop mopin' out thar an' come along in, I'll clear
off the dishes!" called his mother again in her rasping voice
which sounded as if she were choking in a perpetual spasm of moral
indignation.

Jerking his shoulders slightly in an unspoken protest, Abel turned
and entered the kitchen, where Sarah Revercomb--tall, spare and
commanding--was preparing two bowls of mush for the aged people, who
could eat only soft food and complained bitterly while eating that. She
was a woman of some sixty years, with a stern handsome face under harsh
bands of yellowish gray hair, and a mouth that sank in at one corner
where her upper teeth had been drawn. Her figure was erect and flat as a
lath, and this flatness was accentuated by the extreme scantiness of
her drab calico dress. In her youth she had been beautiful in a hard,
obvious fashion, and her eyes would have been still fine except for
their bitter and hostile expression.

At the table there were Abner Revercomb, some ten or twelve years
older than Abel, and Archie, the youngest child, whom Sarah adored and
bullied. Blossom was busy about something in the cupboard, and on either
side of the stove the old people sat with their small, suspicious eyes
fixed on the pan of mush which Sarah was dividing with a large wooden
spoon into two equal portions. Each feared that the other would receive
the larger share, and each watched anxiously to see into which bowl the
last spoonful would fall. For a week they had not spoken. Their old age
was racked by a sharp and furious jealousy, which was quite exclusive
and not less exacting than their earlier passion of love.

With a finishing swirl of the big wooden spoon, the last drops of mush
fell into grandfather's bowl, while a sly and injured look appeared
instantly on the face of his wife. She was not hungry, but it annoyed
her unspeakably that she should not be given the larger portion of food.
Her rheumatism was severer than her husband's, and it seemed to her that
this alone should have entitled her to the greater share of attention.
There was a fierce contempt in her manner when she alluded to his age
or to his infirmities, for although he was three years her elder, he was
still chirpy and cheerful, with many summers, as she said resentfully,
left in him yet.

"Breakfast is ready, grannies," remarked Sarah, who had allowed her
coffee to grow cold while she looked after the others; "are you ready to
eat?"

Grandmother's sly little eyes slanted over her hooked nose in the
direction of the two bowls which her daughter-in-law was about to
sprinkle with sugar. An idea entered her old head which made her chuckle
with pleasure, and when her mush had been covered, she croaked out
suddenly that she would take her breakfast unsweetened. "I'm too bad to
take sugar--give that to him--he has a stomach to stand it," she said.
Though her mouth watered for sweets, by this trick she had outwitted
grandfather, and she felt that it was better than sugar.

The kitchen was a large, comfortable room, with strings of red peppers
hanging from the ceiling, and boards of sliced apples drying on upturned
flour barrels near the door. The bright homespun carpet left a strip of
bare plank by the stove, and on this stood two hampers of black walnuts
ready for storing. A few coloured prints, culled from garden magazines,
were tacked on the wall, and these, without exception, represented
blossoms of a miraculous splendour and size. In Sarah's straitened
and intolerant soul a single passion had budded and expanded into
fulfillment. Stern to all mortal things, to flowers alone she softened
and grew gentle. From the front steps to the back, the kitchen
was filled with them. Boxes, upturned flour barrels, corners of
china-shelves and window-sills, showed bowers of luxuriant leaf and
blossom. Her calla lilies had long been famous in the county; they
had taken first prizes at innumerable fairs, and whenever there was a
wedding or a funeral in the neighbourhood, the tall green stalks were
clipped bare of bloom. Many were the dead hands that had been laid in
the earth clasping her lilies. This thought had been for years the chief
solace in her life, and she was accustomed to refer to it in the heat
of religious debates, as though it offered infallible proof of her
contention. After calla lilies, fuchias and tuberoses did best in her
hands, and she had nursed rare night blooming cereus for seven years
in the hope that it would arrive at perfection the following June. Her
marriage had been a disappointment to her, for her husband, a pleasant,
good-looking fellow, had turned out an idler; her children, with the
exception of Archie, the youngest, had never filled the vacancy in her
life; but in her devotion to flowers there was something of the ecstasy
and all of the self-abandonment she had missed in her human relations.

As he sat down at the table, the miller nodded carelessly to his
brothers, who, having finished their bacon and cornbread, were waiting
patiently until the buckwheat cakes should be ready. The coloured
servant was never allowed to cook because, as Sarah said, "she could not
abide niggers' ways," and Blossom, standing before the stove, with her
apron held up to shield her face, was turning the deliciously browning
cakes with a tin cake lifter.

"Ain't they done yet, daughter?" asked Abner in his amiable drawling
voice. He was a silent, brooding man, heavily built, with a coarse
reddish beard, stained with tobacco juice, which hung over his chest.
Since the death of his wife, Blossom's mother, some fifteen years
before, he had become more gloomy, more silent, more obstinately
unapproachable. He was one who appeared to dwell always in the shadow of
a great grief, and this made him generally respected by his neighbours
though he was seldom sought. People said of him that he was "a solid
man and trustworthy," but they kept out of his way unless there was road
mending or a sale of timber to be arranged.

Blossom tossed the buckwheat cakes into a plate and brought them to her
father, who helped himself with his knife. When she passed them to Abel,
who was feeding his favorite hound puppy, Moses, with bacon, he shook
his head and drew back.

"Give them to mother, Blossom, she never eats a bite of breakfast," he
said. He was the only one of Sarah's sons who ever considered her, but
she was apt to regard this as a sign of weakness and to resent it with
contumely.

"I ain't hungry," she replied grimly, "an' I reckon I'd rather you'd say
less about my comfort, Abel, and do mo'. Buckwheat cakes don't come well
from a son that flies into his mother's face on the matter of eternal
damnation."

Without replying, Abel helped himself to the cakes she had refused and
reached for the jug of molasses. Sarah was in one of her nagging moods,
he knew, and she disturbed him but little. The delight and the desire of
first love was upon him, and he was thinking rapturously of the big pine
that would go to the building of Molly's house.

Grandmother, who wanted syrup, began to cry softly because she must eat
her tasteless mush. "He's got the stomach to stand it," she repeated
bitterly, while her tears fell into her bowl.

"What is it, granny? Will you try a bite of buckwheat?" inquired Sarah
solicitously. She had never failed in her duty to her husband's parents,
and this virtue also, she was inclined to use as a weapon of offense to
her children.

"Give it to him--he's got teeth left to chaw on," whimpered grandmother,
and her old chest heaved with bitterness because grandfather, who was
three years the elder, still retained two jaw teeth on one side of his
mouth.

A yellow-and-white cat, after vainly purring against grandmother's
stool, had jumped on the window-sill in pursuit of a belated wasp, and
Sarah, rushing to the rescue of her flowers, cuffed the animal soundly
and placed her in grandfather's lap. He was a lover of cats--a harmless
fancy which was a source of unceasing annoyance to his wife.

"Abel, I wish you'd mend that leak in the smokehouse after breakfast,"
remarked Sarah, in an aggressive tone that meant battle. "Two shingles
are gone an' thare four more that want patchin'."

"I can't, I've got work to do at the mill," replied Abel, as he rose
from his chair. "Solomon Hatch sent me his corn to grind and he's coming
over to get the sacks."

"Well, I reckon I'm worth as much as Solomon Hatch, a little pasty faced
critter like that," rejoined Sarah.

"Why can't Archie do it? What is he good for?"

"I'm going hunting with Jim Halloween," returned Archie sullenly, "he's
got some young dogs he wants to break in to rabbit running."

"I might have known thar warn't nobody to do what I ask 'em," observed
Sarah in the voice and manner of a martyr. "It's rabbits or girls,
one or the other, and if it ain't an old hare it's some light-moraled
critter like Molly Merryweather."

Abel's face had changed to a dull red and his eyes blazed.

"Say anything against Molly, mother, an' I'll never speak to you again!"
he cried out angrily.

"Thar, thar, ma, you an' Abel are too pepper tongued to get into a
quarrel," remarked Abner, the silent, who seldom spoke except for the
promotion of peace. "I'll mend the roof for you whenever you want it."

"I reckon I've got as much right to use my tongue as anybody else has,"
retorted Sarah, indignant because a solution had been found and her
grievance was annulled. "If a girl ain't a fast one that gets as good as
engaged to half the young men in the county, then I'd like to know who
is, that's all?"

Then, as Abel called sharply to his fox-hound puppy and flung himself
from the room, she turned away and went to sprinkle her calla lilies.
There was an agony in her breast, though she would have bitten out her
tongue sooner than have confessed it. Her strength lay in the fact that
never in her life had she admitted even to herself, that she had been in
the wrong.



CHAPTER V


THE MILL


Outside, a high wind was driving the fallen leaves in swirls and eddies,
and as Abel crossed the road to the mill, he smelt the sharp autumn
scent of the rotting mould under the trees. Frost still sparkled on the
bright green grasses that had overgrown the sides of the mill-race, and
the poplar log over the stream was as wet as though the dancing shallows
had skimmed it. Over the motionless wheel the sycamore shed its broad
yellow leaves into the brook, where they fluttered downward with a noise
that was like the wind in the tree-tops.

Inserting a key into the rusty lock, which was much too large for it,
Abel opened the door, and counted Solomon Hatch's sacks of grist, which
stood in a row beside a raised platform where an old mill-stone was
lying. Other sacks belonging to other farmers were arranged in
an orderly group in one corner, and his eye passed to them in a
businesslike appraisement of their contents. According to an established
custom of toll, the eighth part of the grain belonged to the miller;
and this had enabled him to send his own meal to the city markets, where
there was an increasing demand for the coarse, water-ground sort. Some
day he purposed to turn out the old worn-out machinery and supply its
place with modern inventions, but as yet this ambition was remote, and
the mill, worked after the process of an earlier century, had raised his
position to one of comparative comfort and respectability. He was
known to be a man of character and ambition. Already his name had been
mentioned as a possible future representative of the labouring classes
in the Virginia assembly. "There is no better proof of the grit that is
in the plain people than the rise of Abel Revercomb out of Abner, his
father," some one had said of him. And from the day when he had picked
his first blackberries for old Mr. Jonathan and tied his earnings in a
stocking foot as the beginning of a fund for schooling, the story of his
life had been one of struggle and of endurance. Transition had been the
part of the generation before him. In him the democratic impulse was
no longer fitful and uncertain, but had expanded into a stable and
indestructible purpose.

Before starting the wheel, which he did by thrusting his arm through the
window and lifting the gate on the mill-race, Abel took up a broom, made
of sedges bound crudely together, and swept the smooth bare floor, which
was polished like that of a ballroom by the sacks of meal that had been
dragged back and forth over the boards. From the rafters above, long
pale cobwebs were blown gently in the draught between the door and
window, and when the mill had started, the whole building reverberated
to the slow revolutions of the wheel outside.

The miller had poured Solomon Hatch's grist into the hopper, and was
about to turn the wooden crank at the side, when a shadow fell over the
threshold, and Archie Revercomb appeared, with a gun on his shoulder and
several fox-hounds at his heels.

"You'll have to get Abner to help you dress that mill-rock, Abel," he
said, "I'm off for the morning. That's a good pup of yours, but he's old
enough to begin learning."

With the inherited idleness of the Revercombs, he combined the
headstrong impulses and dogged obstinacy of his mother's stock, yet
because of his personal charm, these faults were not only tolerated but
even admired by his family.

"You're always off in the mornings when there's work to be done,"
replied Abel, "but for heaven's sake, bring home a string of hares to
put ma into a better humour. She whets her tongue on me and I'll be
hanged if it's right."

"She never used to do it till you went over to Mr. Mullen's church and
fell in love with Molly Merryweather. Great Scott, I'm glad I don't
stand in either of your shoes when it comes to that. Life's too short to
pay for your religion or your sweetheart every day you live."

"It would have been the same anyway--she's put out with me about
nothing. I had a right to go to Old Church if I wanted to, and what on
earth has she got against Mr. Mullen anyway, except that he couldn't
recite the first chapter in Chronicles? What kind of religion does that
take I'd like to know?"

The meal poured softly out of the valve into the trough beneath, and
lifting a wooden scoop he bent over and scattered the pile in the
centre. A white dust had settled on his hair and clothes, and this
accentuated the glow in his face and gave to his whole appearance a
picturesque and slightly theatrical cast.

"If it hadn't been Molly, it would have been some one else," he added
impulsively. "Ma would be sure to hate any woman she thought I'd fallen
in love with. It's born in her to be contrary just as it is in that
hopvine out yonder that you can't train up straight."

"All the same, if I were going through fire and water for a girl, I'd be
pretty sure to choose one that would make it worth my while at the end.
I wouldn't put up with all that hectoring for the sake of anybody that
was as sweet to half a dozen other fellows as she was to me."

Abel's face darkened threateningly under his silvered hair.

"If you are trying to hint anything against Molly, you'd as well stop in
the beginning," he said. "It isn't right--I'll be hanged if it is!--that
every man in the county should be down on a little thing like that, no
bigger than a child. It wasn't her fault, was it, if her father played
false with her mother?"

"Oh, I'm not blaming her, am I? As far as that goes all the women like
her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children. The trouble
seems to be, doesn't it, merely that the men like her too much? She's
got a way with her, there's no question about that."

"Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?"

"I wasn't blackenin' her character. I merely meant that she was a flirt,
and you know that as well as I do--better, I shouldn't wonder."

"It's the way she was brought up. Her mother was crazy for ten years
before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the
meanness of men."

"Oh, well, it's all right," said Archie carelessly, "only look out that
you don't go too near the fire and get scorched."

Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a
dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.

After he had gone, the miller stood for a long while, watching the
meal pour from the valve. A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes,
but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once
or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp. "Why do
they keep at me about her?" he asked passionately. "Is it true that she
is only playing with me as she plays with the others?"--but the pain was
too keen, and turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the
sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy
shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into
the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath,
was loud in his ears while his quick glance, passing over the drifting
yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the
cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the assurance
of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; and as the bit of
colour drew nearer amid the stubble, he recognized the jacket of crimson
wool that the girl wore as a wrap on chill autumn mornings. On her head
there was a small knitted cap matching the jacket, and this resting on
her riotous brown curls, lent a touch of boyish gallantry to her slender
figure. Like most women of mobile features and ardent temperament, her
beauty depended so largely upon her mood that Abel had seen her change
from positive plainness to amazing loveliness in the space of a minute.
Her small round face, with its wonderful eyes, dimpled now over the
crimson jacket.

"Abel!" she called softly, and paused with one foot on the log while the
water sparkled beneath her. Ten minutes before he had vowed to himself
that she had used him badly and he would hold off until she made
sufficient amends; but in forming this resolution, he had reckoned
without the probable intervention of Molly.

"I thought--as long as I was going by--that I'd stop and speak to you,"
she said.

He shook his head, unsoftened as yet by her presence. "You didn't treat
me fair yesterday, Molly," he answered.

"Oh, I wanted to tell you about that. I quite meant to go with you--only
it went out of my head."

"That's a pretty excuse, isn't it, to offer a man?"

"Well, you aren't the only one I've offered it to," she dimpled
enchantingly, "the rector had to be satisfied with it as well. He asked
me, too, and when I forgot I'd promised you, I said I'd go with him to
see old Abigail. Then I forgot that, too," she added with a penitent
sigh, "and went down to the low grounds."

"You managed to come up in time to meet Mr. Jonathan at the
cross-roads," he commented with bitterness.

A less daring adventurer than Molly would have hesitated at his tone and
grown cautious, but a certain blithe indifference to the consequences of
her actions was a part of her lawless inheritance from the Gays.

"I think him very good-looking, don't you?" she inquired sweetly.

"Good-looking? I should think not--a fat fop like that."

"Is he fat? I didn't notice it--but, of course, I didn't mean that he
was good-looking in your way, Abel."

The small flowerlike shadows trembled across her face, and beneath her
feet the waves churned a creamy foam that danced under her like light.
His eyes warmed to her, yet he held back, gripped by a passion of
jealousy. For the first time he felt that he was brought face to face
with a rival who might prove to have the advantage.

"I am coming over!" called Molly suddenly, and a minute later she stood
in the square sunshine that entered the mill door.

Had he preserved then his manner of distant courtesy, it is probable
that she would have melted, for it was not in her temperament to draw
back while her prey showed an inclination for flight. But it was his
nature to warm too readily and to cool too late, a habit of constitution
which causes, usually, a tragedy in matters of sex.

"You oughtn't to treat me so, Molly!" he exclaimed reproachfully, and
made a step toward her.

"I couldn't help forgetting, could I? It was your place to remind me."

Thrust, to his surprise, upon the defensive he reached for her hand,
which was withdrawn after it had lain an instant in his.

"Well, it was my fault, then," he said with a generosity that did him
small service. "The next time I'll remind you every minute."

She smiled radiantly as he looked at her, and he felt that her
indiscretions, her lack of constancy, her unkindness even, were but the
sportive and innocent freaks of a child. In his rustic sincerity he was
forever at the point of condemning her and forever relenting before the
appealing sweetness of her look. He told himself twenty times a day that
she flirted outrageously with him, though he still refused to admit that
in her heart she was to blame for her flirting. A broad and charitable
distinction divided always the thing that she was from the thing that
she did. It was as if his love discerned in her a quality of soul of
which she was still unconscious.

"Molly," he burst out almost fiercely, "will you marry me?"

The smile was still in her eyes, but a slight frown contracted her
forehead.

"I've told you a hundred times that I shall never marry anybody," she
answered, "but that if I ever did---"

"Then you'd marry me."

"Well, if I were obliged to marry _somebody_, I'd rather marry you than
anybody else."

"So you do like me a little?"

"Yes, I suppose I like you a little--but all men are the same--mother
used always to tell me so."

Poor distraught Janet Merryweather! There were times when he was seized
with a fierce impatience of her, for it seemed to him that her ghost
stood, like the angel with the drawn sword, before the closed gates of
his paradise. He remembered her as a passionate frail creature, with
accusing eyes that had never lost the expression with which they had met
and passed through some hour of despair and disillusionment.

"But how could she judge, Molly? How could she judge?" he pleaded "She
was ill, she wasn't herself, you must know it. All men are not alike.
Didn't I fight her battles more than once, when you were a child?"

"I know, I know," she answered gratefully, "and I love you for it.
That's why I don't mind telling you what I've never told a single one of
the others. I haven't any heart, Abel, that's the truth. It's all play
to me, and I like the game sometimes and sometimes I hate it. Yet,
whether I like it or hate it, I always go on because I can't help it.
Your mother once said I had a devil that drives me on and perhaps she
was right--it may be that devil that drives me on and won't let me stop
even when I'm tired, and it all bores me. The rector thinks that I'll
marry him and turn pious and take to Dorcas societies, and Jim Halloween
thinks I'll marry him and grow thrifty and take to turkey raising--and
you believe in the bottom of your heart that in the end I'll fall
into your arms and find happiness with your mother. But you're
wrong--all--all--and I shan't do any of the things you expect of me. I
am going to stay here as long as grandfather lives, so I can take care
of him, and then I'll run off somewhere to the city and trim hats for a
living. When I was at school in Applegate I trimmed hats for all of the
pupils."

"Oh, Molly, Molly, I'll not give you up! Some day you'll see things
differently."

"Never--never. Now, I've warned you and it isn't my fault if you keep on
after this."

"But you do like me a little, haven't you said so?"

Her frown deepened.

"Yes, I do like you--a little."

"Then I'll keep on hoping, anyhow."

Her smile came back, but this time it had grown mocking.

"No, you mustn't hope," she answered, "at least," she corrected
provokingly, "you mustn't hope--too hard."

"I'll hope as hard as the devil, darling--and, Molly, if you marry me,
you know, you won't have to live with my mother."

"I like that, even though I'm not going to marry you."

"Come here," he drew her toward the door, "and I'll show you where our
house will stand. Do you see that green rise of ground over the meadow?"

"Yes, I see it," her tone was gentler.

"I've chosen that site for a home," he went on, "and I'm saving a good
strip of pine--you can see it over there against the horizon. I've half
a mind to take down my axe and cut down the biggest of the trees this
afternoon!"

If his ardour touched her there was no sign of it in the movement with
which she withdrew herself from his grasp.

"You'd better finish your grinding. There isn't the least bit of a
hurry," she returned with a smile.

"If you'll go with me, Molly, you may take your choice and I'll cut the
tree down for you."

"But I can't, Abel, because I've promised Mr. Mullen to visit his
mother."

The glow faded from his eyes and a look like that of an animal under the
lash took its place.

"Come with me, not with him, Molly, you owe me that much," he entreated.

"But he's such a good man, and he preaches such beautiful sermons."

"He does--I know he does, but I love you a thousand times better."

"Oh, he loves me because I am pretty and hard to win--just as you do,"
she retorted. "If I lost my hair or my teeth how many of you, do you
think, would care for me to-morrow?"

"I should--before God I'd love you just as I do now," he answered with
passion.

A half mocking, half tender sound broke from her lips.

"Then why don't you--every one of you, fall head over ears in love with
Judy Hatch?" she inquired.

"I don't because I loved you first, and I can't change, however badly
you treat me. I'm sometimes tempted to think, Molly, that mother is
right, and you are possessed of a devil."

"Your mother is a hard woman, and I pity the wife you bring home to
her."

The softness had gone out of her voice at the mention of Sarah's name,
and she had grown defiant and reckless.

"I don't think you are just to my mother, Molly," he said after a
moment, "she has a kind heart at bottom, and when she nags at you it is
most often for your good."

"I suppose it was for my mother's good that she kept her from going to
church and made the old minister preach a sermon against her?"

"That's an old story--you were only a month old. Can't you forget it?"

"I'll never forget it--not even at the Day of Judgment. I don't care how
I'm punished."

Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him
to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While
she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told
himself that despite her passionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of
the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her
impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her
kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities
against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The inheritance
she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While
she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every
phrase, in every gesture.

"It isn't you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it's something
in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very
strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to
them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.

"If I'd known you were going to preach, I shouldn't have stopped to
speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I'd rather hear Mr. Mullen."

He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry
light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she
had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap
of the mill.

For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For
God's sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I
find in being spiteful when you won't strike back?"

"I'll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever."

"I wouldn't have said it if I'd known you'd take it so quietly."

"Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the
hopper?"

"I shouldn't have cared--it would have been better than your expression
at this minute. It's all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with
Judy Hatch, as I told you to."

"Don't worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the
patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can't help despising a
man just as soon as he happens to love you."

"I wonder if that's true?" she said a little sadly, turning away 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 without bitterness, "is why
in thunder a man or a woman who isn't married should put up with it for
an instant?"

At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where
he bent over the meal trough.

"The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except
grandfather," she said, "but I hate love-making. When I see that look
in a man's face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike
out and kill. My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it
in with her milk, I suppose."

"I know it isn't you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet---"

She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his
obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck,
rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his
hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A
sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a
knife.

"I shouldn't mind your kissing me just once, if you'd like to, Abel,"
she said.

A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was
returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with passionate
self-reproach why she had yielded to pity? She had felt sorry for Abel,
and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her. "Only
I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so
rough and fierce that he frightened me. I suppose most girls like that
kind of thing, but I don't, and I shan't, if I live to be a hundred.
I've got no belief in it--I've got no belief in anything, that is the
trouble. I'm twisted out of shape, like the crooked sycamore by the
mill-race."

A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came
the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike. As she climbed the low
rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the
old family carriage from Jordan's Journey returning with the two ladies
on the rear seat. The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with
shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner's
physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle
patronage, if she would ride with the driver?

"Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it's only a quarter of a mile and I don't mind the
walk."

"We've brought an overcoat--Kesiah and I--a good thick one, for your
grandfather. It worried us last winter that he went so lightly clad
during the snow storms."

Molly's face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure.

"Oh, thank you, thank you!" she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant
politeness. "I've been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates
to spend money on himself."

Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conversation, with the scowling
look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in
the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay's salts. She was one
of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no
allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end
for which woman was formed. As her very right to existence lay in her
possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the
frustration of it by circumstances, had deprived her, almost from
the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for being. Her small,
short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than
obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in
the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in
having permitted herself to be born.

"Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly," said Mrs. Gay, in a
flutter of emotion. "Have you had a glimpse of him yet?"

The girl nodded. "He took supper at our house the night he got here."

"It was such a surprise. Was he looking well?"

"Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you
know."

"Ah, I forgot. Are you sure you won't get in, child? Well, drive on,
Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage."

Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plodding obstinately after
the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust that floated
after the wheels.



CHAPTER VI


TREATS OF 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-turbaned maids and came down to assist his mistress to alight.

"Take the bird cage, Abednego, I've bought a new canary," said Mrs. Gay.
"Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas."

She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this helplessness was
expressed in every lovely line of her figure. The most casual observer
would have discerned that she had surrendered all rights in order to
grasp more effectively at all the privileges. She was clinging and small
and delicate and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united
in an irresistible appeal to emotions.

"Where is Jonathan?" she asked, "I hoped he would welcome me."

"So I do, dearest mother--so I do," replied the young man, running
hurriedly down the steps and then slipping his arm about her. "You came
a minute or two earlier than I expected you, or I should have met you in
the drive."

Half supporting, half carrying her, he led the way into the house and
placed her on a sofa in the long drawing-room.

"I am afraid the journey has been too much for you," he said tenderly.
"Shall I tell Abednego to bring you a glass of wine."

"Kesiah will mix me an egg and a spoonful of sherry, dear, she knows
just how much is good for me."

Kesiah, still grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room
and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister.
In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted
saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity
against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features
wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural
kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in
little hard, flat curls, as though an artificial ugliness were less
reprehensible in her sight than an artificial beauty.

In the midst of the long room flooded with sunshine, the little lady
reclined on her couch and sipped gently from the glass Kesiah had handed
her. The tapestried furniture was all in soft rose, a little faded from
age, and above the high white wainscoting on the plastered walls, this
same delicate colour was reflected in the rich brocaded gowns in the
family portraits. In the air there was the faint sweet scent of cedar
logs that burned on the old andirons.

"So you came all the way home to see your poor useless mother,"
murmured Mrs. Gay, shielding her cheek from the firelight with a peacock
hand-screen.

"I wanted to see for myself how you stand it down here--and, by Jove,
it's worse even than I imagined! How the deuce have you managed to drag
out twenty years in a wilderness like this among a tribe of barbarians?"

"It is a great comfort to me, dear, to think that I came here on your
uncle's account and that I am only following his wishes in making the
place my home. He loved the perfect quiet and restfulness of it."

"Quiet! With that population of roosters making the dawn hideous! I'd
choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard."

"You aren't used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are
trying."

"Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?"

"One doesn't have amusement when one is a hopeless invalid; one has only
medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or
two in the summer. I can't walk of course, because of my heart, and as
there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that
it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into
quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise--(poor dear
mother used to say that the difference between the liver of a lady and
that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the
other did)--but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very
eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health suffers when
she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temper
and walked a mile or two on the road, but when she returned I was in
such a state of nervousness that she promised me never to leave the lawn
again unless a gentleman was with her."

"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so
little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissing her hand.

Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violets, drooped over him above
the peacock feathers she waved gently before her.

"Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too," she observed, "and I sometimes
think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart."

"But she doesn't feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at
her."

"She isn't so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are
responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she
would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to
be born a woman. When she was young she had a perfect mania for drawing,
and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter--I
can't recall his name though I am sure it began with S--saw one of her
sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to
study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but of course it was out of
the question that a Virginia lady should go off by herself and paint
perfectly nude people in a foreign city. There was a dreadful scene, I
remember, and Kesiah even wrote to Uncle William Burwell and asked him
to come down and win mother over. He came immediately, for he was the
kindest soul, but, of course after he understood, he decided against
it. Why on earth should a girl want to go streaking across the water to
study art, he asked, when she had a home she could stay in and men folk
who could look after her? They both told her she made herself ridiculous
when she talked of ambition, and as they wouldn't promise her a penny
to live on, she was obliged in the end to give up the idea. She nursed
mother very faithfully, I must say, as long as she lived, never leaving
her a minute night or day for the last year of her illness. Don't
misjudge poor Kesiah, Jonathan, she has a good heart at bottom, though
she has always been a little soured on account of her disappointment."

"Oh, she was cut out for an old maid, one can see that," rejoined Gay,
only half interested in the history of his aunt, for he seldom exerted
his imagination except under pressure of his desires, "and, by the way,
mother, what kind of man was my Uncle Jonathan?"

"The dearest creature, my son, heaven alone knows what his loss meant
to me! Such consideration! Such generosity! Such delicacy! He and Kesiah
never got on well, and this was the greatest distress to me."

"Did you ever hear any queer stories about him? Was he--well--ah, wild,
would you say?"

"Wild? Jonathan, I am surprised at you! Why, during the twenty years
that I knew him he never let fall so much as a single indelicate word in
my presence."

"I don't mean that exactly--but what about his relations with the women
around here?"

She flinched as if his words had struck her a blow.

"Dear Jonathan, your poor uncle would never have asked such a question."

Above the mantel there was an oil portrait of the elder Jonathan at the
age of three, painted astride the back of an animal that disported the
shape of a lion under the outward covering of a lamb.

"Ah, that's just it," commented Gay, while his inquiring look hung on
the picture. After a minute of uncertainty, his curiosity triumphed over
his discretion and he put, in an apologetic tone, an equally indelicate
question. "What about old Reuben Merryweather's granddaughter? Has she
been provided for?"

For an instant Mrs. Gay looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes
under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with sliver. Those
eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, "Oh, be careful,
I am so sensitive. Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not
hurt me. Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always
lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever entered." The quaint
peacock screen, brought from China by old Jonathan, cast a shadow on her
cheek, which was flushed to the colour of a faded rose leaf.

"Yes, the girl is an orphan, it is very sad," she replied, and her tone
added, "but what can I do about it? I am a woman and should know nothing
of such matters!"

"Was she mentioned in my uncles's will, do you remember?"

His handsome, well-coloured face had taken a sudden firmness of outline,
and even the sagging flesh of his chin appeared to harden with the
resolve of the moment. Across his forehead, under the fine dark hair
which had worn thin on the temples, three frowning wrinkles leaped out
as if in response to some inward pressure.

"There was something--I can't remember just what it was--Mr.
Chamberlayne will tell you about it when he comes down to-morrow to talk
over business with Kesiah. They keep all such things away from me out of
consideration for my heart. But I've never doubted for an instant that
your uncle did everything that was just and generous in the matter. He
sent the girl to a good school in Applegate, I remember, and there was
a bequest of some sort, I believe--something that she comes into on her
twenty-first birthday."

"She isn't twenty-one then, is she?"

"I don't know, Jonathan, I really can't remember."

"Perhaps Aunt Kesiah can tell me something about her?"

"Oh, she can and she will--but Kesiah is so violent in all her opinions!
I had to ask her never to mention Brother Jonathan's name to me because
she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about
him."

She leaned back wearily as if the conversation had exhausted her, while
the peacock firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white
fur rug at her feet.

"If you'll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I'll go upstairs for a rest," she said
gently, yet with a veiled reproach. "The journey tired me, but I forgot
it in the pleasure of seeing you."

All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom,
and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they
carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of
resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.

An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing,
she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and
stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to
light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the
habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she
was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such
omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon
them. In her youth she had rebelled fiercely--rebelled against nature,
against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her
sister's lot from her own. Generations existed only to win love or to
bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop
the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these--some
external shaping of clay--had unfitted her for the purpose for which
she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any
self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was
an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither
away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck
for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but
her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she
had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her
mother's death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she
had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot
in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer
needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of
youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual
resistance--words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times
she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment
against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon
as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the
chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's
advancement--a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her--yet she had
taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read
countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but
beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman
who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister
who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine
could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the
new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who
desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been--a
tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to
ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as
she--but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and
with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished
sentiment--it put an end to rebellion.

"Miss Kesiah, dar's Marse Reuben in de hall en he sez he'd be moughty
glad ef'n you'd step down en speak a wud wid 'im."

"In a moment, Abednego. I must take off my things."

Withdrawing the short jet-headed pins from her bonnet with a hurried
movement, she stabbed them into the hard round pincushion on her bureau,
and after throwing a knitted cape over her shoulders, went down the wide
staircase to where Reuben awaited her in the hall. As she walked she
groped slightly and peered ahead of her with her nervous, short-sighted
gaze.

At the foot of the staircase, the old man was standing in a patient
attitude, resting upon his wooden leg, which was slightly in advance
of his sound one. His fine bearded face might have been the face of a
scholar, except for its roughened skin and the wistful, dog-like look in
the eyes.

In response to Kesiah's greeting, he explained that he had come at once
to acknowledge the gift of the overcoat and to "pay his respects."

"I am glad you like it," she answered, and because her heart was
swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the
anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making
herself ridiculous prevented her always from making herself understood.

"It will be very useful to me, ma'am, when I am out of doors in bad
weather," he replied, wondering if he had offended her by his visit.

"We got it for that purpose," and becoming more embarrassed, she added
hastily, "How is the red cow, Mr. Merryweather?"

"She mends slowly, ma'am. I am givin' her bran mash twice a day and
keepin' her in the barn. Have you noticed the hogs? They're a fine lot
this year and we'll get some good hams at the killin'."

"No, I hadn't looked at them, but I've been struck with the corn you've
brought up recently from the low grounds."

For a minute or two they discussed the crops, both painfully ill at ease
and uncertain whether to keep up the conversation or to let it trail
off into silence. Then at the first laboured pause, Reuben repeated his
message to Mrs. Gay and stamped slowly out of the back door into the
arms of Jonathan, who was about to enter.

"Halloo! So it's you!" exclaimed the young man in the genial tone which
seemed at once to dispel Kesiah's embarrassment. "I've wanted to talk
with you for two days, but I shan't detain you now for I happen to
know that your granddaughter is hunting for you already. I'll come up
to-morrow and chat awhile in the barn."

Reuben bowed and passed on, a little flattered by the other's intimate
tone, while Gay followed Kesiah into the drawing-room, and put a
question to her which had perplexed him since the night of his arrival.

"Aunt Kesiah, was old Reuben Merryweather on friendly terms with my
uncle?"

She started and looked at him with a nervous twitching of her eyelids.

"I think so, Jonathan, at least they appeared to be. Old Reuben was born
on the place when the Jordans still lived here, and I am sure your uncle
felt that it would be unjust to remove him. Then they fought through the
war together and were both dangerously wounded in the same charge."

He gazed at her a moment in silence, narrowing his intense blue eyes
which were so like the eyes of Reuben's granddaughter.

"Did my uncle show any particular interest in the girl?" he inquired,
and added a little bitterly, "It's not fair to me that I shouldn't know
just where I am standing."

"Yes, he did show a particular interest in her and was anxious that
she should be educated above her station. She was even sent off to a
boarding-school in Applegate, but she ran away during the middle of the
second session and came home. Her grandfather was ill with pneumonia,
and she is sincerely devoted to him, I believe."

"Was there any mention of her in Uncle Jonathan's will?"

"None whatever. He left instructions with Mr. Chamberlayne, however,
which are to be made known next April on Molly's twenty-first birthday.
It is all rather mysterious, but we only know that he owned considerable
property in the far West, which he left away from us and in trust to
his lawyer. I suppose he thought your mother would not be alive when
the girl came of age; for the doctors had agreed that she had only a few
years to live at the utmost."

"What in the devil did my poor mother have to do with it?"

She hesitated an instant, positively scowling in her perplexity.

"Only that I think--I believe your Uncle Jonathan would have married the
girl's mother--Janet Merryweather--but for your mother's influence."

"How in the deuce! You mean he feared the effect on her?"

"He broke it to her once--his intention, I mean--and for several days
afterwards we quite despaired of her life. It was then that she made him
promise--he was quite distracted with remorse for he adored Angela--that
he would never allude to it again while she was alive. We thought then
that it would be only for a short while, but she has outlived him ten
years in spite of her heart disease. One can never rely on doctors, you
know."

"But what became of the girl--of Janet Merryweather, I mean?"

"That was the sad part, though it happened so long ago--twenty
years--that people have almost forgotten. It seems that your uncle had
been desperate about her for a time--before Angela came to live with
him--and Janet counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and
marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite
out of her mind--perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals
in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many
of her characteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm
of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns in the
neighbourhood."

"Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but,
I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation to
Janet Merryweather and to his brother's widow?"

"There was a difference, of course. Janet Merryweather could hardly have
had Angela's sensitive feelings--or at least it's a comfort to think
that, even if it happens not to be true. Before the war one hardly
ever heard of that class, mother used to say, it was so humble and
unpresuming--but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has
overrun everything and most of the land about here has passed into its
possession."

She checked herself breathlessly, surprised and indignant that she
should have expressed her feelings so openly.

"Yes, I dare say," returned Jonathan--"The miller Revercomb is a good
example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of--a kind of new
plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes. Less than half
a century produced him, but he's here to stay, of that I am positive.
After all, why shouldn't he, when we get down to the question? He--or
the stock he represents, of course--is already getting hold of the
soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as
politically, I suppose. We can't hold on, the rest of us--we're losing
grip--and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes
from."

"Ah, it's just that--pluck--but put the miller in the crucible
and you'll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in
prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the
surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed
by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office--she was
one of the real Carters, you know--would hardly bend her head."

"Perhaps you're right," he answered, and laughed shortly under his
breath, "but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics
of that little firebrand, Molly Merryweather?"



CHAPTER VII


GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS


At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in
his uncle's room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on
his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the
haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October
morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the
graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung
over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on
the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they
had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled
into a frosty stillness at daybreak.

"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay,
with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had
been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves
more of a nuisance."

Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion,
he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had
thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt,
somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with
his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a
hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter
of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but
a condemnation."

With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as
a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass
in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made
through the mist. At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him,
and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly
across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung
from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with
muzzles held close to the moist ground.

For a minute Gay's angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot.
Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the
habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the
ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but
a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.

"You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "so you're not only shooting
my partridges, but you're actually shooting them before my eyes."

"What's that?" asked Archie, only half understanding the words, "were
you after that bird yourself then?"

"Well, rather, my friend, and I'll trouble you at the same time to hand
over that string on your shoulder."

"Hand them over? Well, I like that! Why, I shot them."

"But you shot them on my land didn't you?"

"What in the devil do you mean by that? My folks have shot over these
fields before yours were ever heard of about here. A bird doesn't happen
to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your
pasture."

"Do you mean to tell me that you don't respect a man's right to his
game?"

"A man's game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon. This
land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we're not going to
keep off of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he's got a
better right to it."

The assumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original
poaching had done. To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of
his own game by a handsome barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in
the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of
humour, if it had not enraged him.

"All the same I give you fair warning," he retorted, "that the next 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
clearly as if it were painted in water colour, an English landscape and
a poacher, who had been caught with a stolen rabbit, humbly pulling
the scant locks on his forehead. Well, this was one of the joys of
democracy, doubtless, and he was in for the rest of them. These people
had got the upper hand certainly, as Aunt Kesiah had complained.

"If you think I'll tamely submit to open robbery by such insolent
rascals as you, you're mistaken, young man," he returned.

The next instant he sprang aside and knocked up Archie's gun, which had
been levelled at him. The boy's face was white under his sunburn, and
the feathers on the partridges that hung from his shoulder trembled as
though a strong wind were blowing.

"Rascal, indeed!" he stammered, and spat on the ground after his words
in the effort to get rid of the taste of them, "as if the whole county
doesn't know that you're another blackguard like your uncle before you.
Ask any decent woman in the neighbourhood if she would have been seen in
his company!"

His rage choked him suddenly, and before he could speak again the other
struck him full in the mouth.

"Take that and hold your tongue, you young savage!"

Then as he stooped for his gun, which he had laid down, a shot passed
over his head and whizzed lightly across the meadow.

"The next time I'll take better aim!" called Archie, turning away. "I'll
shoot as straight as the man who gave your uncle his deserts down at
Poplar Spring!"

Whistling to his dogs, he ran on for a short distance; then vaulting the
rail fence he disappeared into the tangle of willows beside the stream
which flowed down from the mill.

While he watched him the anger in Gay's face faded slowly into disgust.

"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. The whole swarm would be at his head
now, he supposed; 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 our 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.

"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 with 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 like 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."

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 because she is so contrary. My Uncle Abel has almost lost his
head about her, yet she plays fast and loose with him in the cruelest
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 marry 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 colour 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, 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 Merryweather'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 contributed 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 me, but paint him mildly if
you wish me to survive 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 forehead. His eyes are grey and his mouth is small,
with the most perfect teeth. He doesn't wear any moustache, you see, to
hide them, and they flash a great deal when he preaches---"

"Hold on!"

"I beg you 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 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!"

"I can't tell just what it is, but it is something. You both look as
though you'd lived in a city and had learned to wear your Sunday clothes
without remembering 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.

"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 discrimination 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 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 favorite 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 quality 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 disposed of the situation by the simple device of gazing
above her head. In his long and intimate acquaintance, 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 sex 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 harboured at the
bottom of his heart an unreasonable conviction that Kesiah's plainness
was, somehow, the result of her not having chosen to be pretty.

"Any sport, Jonathan?" he inquired cheerfully, while he buttered his
waffles. "If I scared up one Molly Cotton-tail out of the briars I did
at least fifty."

"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 stop and bandy words with me."

"Well, you mustn't be too hard on him. His ancestors, doubtless, shot
over your fields for generations, 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 unprotected?"

"By no means--go slow--go slow--you might search the round globe, I
believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbours. 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 the sentence in his mind unspoken while they
remained in her presence.

A little later, when the two men were smoking in the 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 Revercombs?" 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 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 Revercombs 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 forging to the surface and pushing us
dilapidated aristocrats out of the way. These people have learned a
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 intrusion of Kesiah--"it seems he was a
lover--was engaged in fact to Janet Merryweather before--before she
attracted your uncle's attention. Later the engagement 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. Chamberlayne answered, while
his jutting eyebrows twitched nervously as he turned away. "Your mother,
my dear 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 consideration 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 had 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 account. 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 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 efforts 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?"

"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
account 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 movement, keen of wit, racy of speech.

"What's this here tale about Mr. Jonathan knockin' Archie down an'
settin' on him, Abel?" he inquired. "Ain't you got yo' hand in yet,
seein' as you've been spilin' for a fight for the last fortnight?"

"I hadn't heard of it," replied Abel, his face flushing. "What in hell
did he knock Archie down for?"

"Jest for shooting' 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 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 mornin', 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, "somebody 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 Betsey Bottom, wiping
a glass of cider on her checked apron before she handed it to Abel, "is
that so peaceable 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 a 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 as it's Mr. Jonathan'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 continued 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 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 your were a gay dog an' a warnin' to the righteous
when you were young," rejoined 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 solid comfort in a life 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 manure
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 the evening I dressed up in my best clothes an' ran off 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 linin' 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 doorway 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 know 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' arterwards," 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
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 mentioned '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 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."

"You'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 are in his eyes, as you can tell
jest to look at him--an' 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
scarecrow 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 born 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 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 hesitated 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," replied Gay in his pleasant 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 glided 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.

"Give me anything you have for a compress," remarked 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 would 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
passes 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."

"Well, that's enough, ain't it?" growled Abner; "I did know it would
happen sure enough from the outset."

"Thar ain't any rousin' 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 contrives to hop stiffly 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 stealing.
I'd like to know if we hadn't hunted on that land before he or his
rotten old uncle were ever thought of?"

"Ah, those were merry days, those were!" piped grandfather. "Used to go
huntin' myself when I was young, 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 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 with 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 your lantern,"
returned Abel, doggedly, on the defensive.

"Oh, you can't, can't you?" jeered Sarah. "All you're good for, I
reckon, is to shuck corn or peel potatoes!"

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, anyway," 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 acquainted 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 grandfather, "'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 and 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' blameless 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 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, turning 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 the 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 and 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 MOLLY 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 respect for the house rather than for the husband, delivered
a 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 po'
things as we allow 'em to be, thar don't seem but one way to git along
without '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 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 just from pure
contrariness. 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 threshold.

"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
Mallory'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," replied Molly, laughing.
"Mrs. Hatch has been in bed for a week and I'm on my way to see Judy."

"I'll 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."

"Well, I'm glad '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, 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 anyway."

"Yes, that's jest what I tell her--she's had experience 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 when she can help it. You must judge her by
her work not by her talk, pa used to say."

"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 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 just the same. You see I can always keep an eye on the expenses,"
he hastened to add, and made a desperate clutch at her hand.

The red worsted mitten came off in his grasp, and he stood eyeing it
ruefully while he waited for her answer.

"I've determined never, never to marry," she replied.

His chest heaved. "I knew you felt that way about the other's 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 all 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 prayin' 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 try prayin' over your state of mind,
an' that I may go on hopin' that you will change it?"

Turning with her hand still outstretched for the glove, she glanced
roguishly from his face to the shuttered 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 emotions, she tripped up the
narrow walk, bordered 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 had fled 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 like
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
light of mediocrity, since the ruling 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 enraptured his congregation.

"I postponed my visit to Applegate until to-morrow," 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 driving you in my gig. I have just come to inquire after
Mrs. Hatch."

"It would be kind of you, for I am a little tired," responded Molly.
"I came to speak to Judy, and then I am to stop at the mill to borrow a
pattern from Blossom 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 afflicted."

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 lips.

"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 starting."

"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 his 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 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
stunted rose-bushes into the turnpike.

"Oh, perfectly, you are always so thoughtful, Mr. Mullen."

"I think I am right in ranking thoughtfulness--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 yourself, 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."

"I know how good you are, but honestly and truly, I don't want to marry
anybody."

His smile hardened slowly on his face like an impression 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 entered 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 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 proposal," 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 off 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 looketh well to the
ways of her household, and eateth 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 her--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 mission. All things outside of that sphere belonged to 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 through the plain glass windows, shone on 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 Reverend Orlando's birthday, and the speckled pig she had
fattened throughout the summer, lay now, with an apple in his mouth, on
the trencher. She had invited Molly to dine with them rather against
her wishes, for 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 parishioner to distract his attention?

In the pew next to Mrs. Mullen sat old Adam Doolittle, 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, argumentative 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, enraptured face to the pulpit, where the rector had
shaken out an immaculately ironed handkerchief and wiped his brow.
She knew who had ironed that handkerchief 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 under 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 seraphic
features to the face of an old grey horse that stared wonderingly in
through the south window. Along the whitewashed plank fence of the
church-yard, other horses were waiting patiently for the service to
end, and from several side saddles, of an ancient pattern, hung flopping
alpaca riding skirts, which the farmer's wives or daughters had worn
over their best gowns to church. A few locust trees shed their remaining
small yellow leaves on the sunken graves, which were surrounded by
crumbling wooden enclosures. Here and there, farther off, a flat
tombstone was still visible in the tall grass; and over the dust of old
Jonathan Gay a high marble cross, selected 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
obliterated 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--not even
when he was teething," replied Mrs. Mullen, who looked sharper and more
withered than ever in the broad daylight. "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 takes him
away from you. We can only hope she will be worthy of the ideal he has
for her."

"Ah, that's just it, Mrs. Gay, I sometimes tell myself there isn't a
woman in the world that's fit for him."

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 garnishing.

The delay was short; Orlando silenced her at last by a gentle admonitory
pressure of her elbow, and the two ladies drove off in their carriage,
while Molly walked sedately out of the churchyard between the clergyman
and his mother. The girl was pleasantly aware that the eyes of the
miller and of Jim Halloween followed 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
remained that Judy Hatch visited the sick more zealously than she--and
yet he was very far, indeed, from falling in love with Judy Hatch! The
contradiction between man and his ideal of himself was embodied 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 against me. He
has a most annoying habit of shaking his head at me during the sermon as
though he disagreed 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 birthday last summer."

"But surely you cannot mean that you consider age an excuse for
either incivility or irreligion," rejoined 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 golden-rod, glanced
sharply back, as she had done in church when old Adam had coughed at the
wrong time and spoiled the full effect 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."

They had reached the rectory gate, where she hesitated an instant with
her hand on the latch, 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
hurried 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 eloquenc

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