The Laughing Mill and Other Stories Part 4

"I did not ask you to give it up," she returned, waywardly. Then she relented, and said, "Well, you may teach me about loving, if you want to. Only, afterwards, you must let me love anyone I please!"

Gloam looked upon her for several moments, his black eyes lingering over every line of her face and figure. "You belong to me," he repeated at last. "If you left me for another, I should wish that your pearl-sh.e.l.ls had drawn you down----"

Before he could finish uttering the thought that was in his heart, the words were drowned in a throbbing yell as of demoniac laughter. The evil spirit of the wheel, after biding its time so long in silence, had seemingly leapt exultingly into life at the first premonition of meditated wrong. Swanhilda shuddered, and hid her face in her hands.

David thrust his head out of the mill-room window, and saw Gloam make a gesture of rage and defiance.

"Aha!" he muttered to himself, "so the children's games are over, are they? Can it be the devil's game that my beloved brother thinks of beginning now?"

Another year pa.s.sed, and again a man and a woman were sitting together on the bench beside the mill. It was night, and a few stars twinkled between the rifts of cloud overhead. The gorge was so dark that the mill-stream gurgled past invisibly, save where occasionally a rising eddy caught the dim starlight. The tall wheel, motionless now, and only discernible as a blacker imprint on the darkness, lurked like a secret enemy in ambush. The man's arm was clasped round the woman's waist; her head rested on his shoulder, and her soft fingers were playing with the pearl-sh.e.l.l necklace that encircled her neck. They spoke together in whispers, as though fearful of being overheard.

"You silly little goose!" the man said; "a few months ago nothing would make you happy but learning what love was; and now you have found out you must ever be whimpering and paling. Why, what are you afraid of?"

"You know I am happy in loving you, David," was the tremulous answer; "but must lovers always hide their love, and pretend before others that they do not feel it? When I first dreamed of love, it seemed to me like the blue sky and the sunshine, and the songs of birds; but our love is secret and silent, like the night."

"Pooh! nonsense, and so much the better! Our love is n.o.body's business but our own, my la.s.s. You wouldn't have Gloam find it out, would you, and part us? What! have you forgotten the fit he was in at my teaching you English a year ago? He wants you all to himself, the old miser! You weren't happier with him than you have been with me, were you?"

"Oh, David," whispered the girl, clinging to him, "that was so different! I was happy, then, like a wave on the beach in summer. I had no deep thoughts, and my heart never beat as you make it beat, and my breath never came in long sighs as it does often now. Gloam used to say that he had brought me back from death to life; but it was not so.

I lived first when I loved you. And the old happiness was not real happiness, for there was no sadness in it; it never made me cry, as this does."

He drew her to him with a little laugh. "When you've lived a little more and got used to it, you'll stop sighing and crying, and be as bright and saucy as you were with Gloam. But you won't want to tell him ... eh?"

She hid her face on his shoulder. "Oh no, no, no; I could not; I should feel ashamed. But why do I feel ashamed, David? Is not loving right?"

"Right? to be sure it is. Nothing more so! And the pleasantest kind of right, too, to my thinking. Eh, little one?"

"David, I have heard--are not people who love each other married--at least sometimes? and after that they are not afraid, or sad, or ashamed?"

A smile hovered on David's handsome lips. "Married, yes, stupid people get married. Timid folks, who are afraid to manage their own affairs, and can't be easy till they've called in the parson to help them out.

They're the folks that don't love each other right down hard, as you and I do. They're suspicious, and afraid of being left in the lurch; so they stand up in a church and tie themselves together by a troublesome knot they call marriage. No, no; we've nothing to do with that; we're much better off as it is."

"But my father and mother were married, and they were not suspicious,"

ventured Swanhilda again, after a pause.

"Oh, ay, they were married," a.s.sented David; adding, half to himself, "and if they were alive, too, and anxious to fill a son-in-law's pockets, I'd open mine, and gladly. But my father and mother were not married," he resumed to Swanhilda, with another smile, "so you see we've a good example either way."

She made no reply, but lifted her head from his shoulder and sat twisting the necklace between her restless fingers, her eyes fixed absently on the darkness. The clasps of the necklace came unawares apart, and it slipped from her bosom to the ground. She uttered a little cry, and stood up with her hands clasped, all of a tremble.

"I have lost it!" she said. "David, some harm is coming to me!"

"Nonsense! here it is, as good as ever." He picked it up as he spoke, and drawing her down beside him, fastened it again round her neck, and then kissed her face and lips. "There, there, you're all right. Did you think it was dropped in the mill-race?"

"Some harm is coming," she repeated. "It has never fallen from me since my mother put it on my shoulders, and said it would keep me from being hurt or drowned, but that I must never part from it. But I trust you, oh, my love! I trust you. Something seems wrong somehow; I have given you all myself...."

"Lean close up to me, little one; rest that soft little cheek of yours against mine, and have done with crying now, or I'll think you mean to melt all away and leave me; and what would I do then?"

She turned and clasped her arms around him with a kind of fierceness.

"I leave you, David? Oh--ha, ha, ha! Oh, but you must never leave me, my love--love--love! Oh, what should I do if you were to leave me?"

"Hush, girl; hush! you'll rouse the house, laughing and crying in the same minute! Don't you know I won't leave you? There--hush! You'll wake Gloam else."

"He loved me, too; he wouldn't leave me; but he thought I wasn't old enough--not old enough, ha, ha!... David, does G.o.d know about us?"

"Not enough to trouble Him much, I expect," said the young man, with a short laugh. "If anything knows about us, it's the old wheel there, waiting like a black devil to carry us off. Come, we must creep back to the house."

They rose, Swanhilda stood before him, her sweet sad face glimmering shadowy pale through the darkness. "Say, 'I love you, Swanhilda, and I will never leave you!'" she whispered.

He hesitated, laughed, stroked her hair, and stooping, gazed deep into her eyes, as on the day when they first met. Did his heart falter for a moment, realising how utterly she was his own? "You trusted me just now," said he; "are you getting suspicious again?"

"No; but I am afraid--always afraid now. When you are not with me, I am afraid of everyone I meet; I think they will see our secret in my eyes.

When I lie alone at night I am afraid to pray to G.o.d, as I used to do.

What is it? Why do I feel so? It must be that we have done some wrong.

My poor love! have I made you do any wrong? I would rather be dead."

"Little darling--no! You couldn't do wrong if you tried. There is no wrong--I swear there isn't. Listen, now in your ear: I love you, Swanhilda, and I will never leave you! Satisfied now?"

Low as the words were whispered, they were heard beyond the stars, and stamped themselves upon the eternal records. But their only palpable witness was the mill wheel. A log of wood, carried over the fall, came forcibly in contact with the low-impending rim. It swung the heavy structure partly round upon its axle. And straightway, upon the hollow night, echoed a faint yet appalling sound as of jeering laughter. Slowly it died away, and silence closed in once more, like darkness after a midnight lightning flash. But it vibrated still in the startled hearts of the man and the woman, who crept so stealthily back to the house, and vanished in the blackness of the doorway, and it revisited their unquiet dreams.

IX.

Summer and winter came and went, and were followed by a gloomy and dismal spring. The late-lying snow was dissolved by heavy rains so that the mill stream was swollen beyond precedent, and rolled thundering through the gorge with the force of a full-grown cataract. But the mill was idle, and the wheel stood still. None came for flour now, nor to bring grist; for many a week all work had been foregone.

Yet the house was not deserted. An elderly woman, with a forbidding face that had once been handsome, moved to and fro behind the windows; and a man, bent and feeble, with strangely-grizzled hair, sat motionless for hours at a time in his study-chair. Sometimes, in his loneliness, he would set his teeth edge to edge, and clench his thin hands desperately, and utter an inarticulate sound of menace. But at a certain hour of the evening he would arise and walk with noiseless steps to the door of a darkened chamber. There he would pause and lean and listen. Presently from within would be heard the shrill, petulant crying of an infant, and anon the voice of its young mother, sad and tender, soothing and pathetic: "Baby, baby, don't cry; hush, hush, hush! father will come to us soon; he will come, he will come! he loves us and will never leave us; hush, hush, hush!"

At these sounds the pallid visage of the man would quiver and darken, and he would press his clenched hands upon his breast. Returning at length to his study, he got upon his knees and stretched his arms upwards.

"G.o.d--G.o.d of evil or of good, whichever you are--give my enemy into my power! Let my curse work upon him till it destroy him: let my eyes see him perish! He has robbed me of my love, and my hope, and my salvation; he has defiled and dishonoured that which was mine; he has made my life a desert and an abomination! Yet I would live, and suffer all this and more, if he might perish by my curse, body and soul, for ever! Grant me this, G.o.d or Devil, and after do with me what you will!"

Such was his prayer. But he never entered the darkened chamber where the child and its young mother lay; he never looked upon them or spoke to them, nor did his heart forgive them. He could not forgive till he had had revenge. Since that hour in which he had first learnt the truth, and with hysteric fury had sprung at the seducer's throat, his soul had been empoisoned against them and all the world. He was possessed by that devil to which he prayed, and good was evil to him.

One day he was standing in a kind of stupor at his window staring out at the black mill-wheel, which was now the only object in the world with which he felt himself in sympathy. There came a knock at the door, and Jael, the housekeeper, entered. Since the calamity which had befallen, her manner towards Gloam had undergone a change. She had before exercised a kind of authority over him, such as a compact and unsympathetic nature easily acquires over one of wider culture but more sensitive than itself. But Gloam had become more terrible in his desolation than a less naturally gentle man would have been; and Jael feared him. She felt that he might murder her; and minded her steps, lest in some sudden paroxysm he should leap out upon her.

She advanced a little way into the room, and stopped. He did not turn, or show that he was aware of her presence. After a few moments she said:

"Master, he is coming back; David's coming home again, sir. He's going to make it all right with Swanhilda--he means to marry her!"

Gloam did not stir; but as Jael watched him narrowly, she fancied that his limbs and body slowly stiffened, until they became quite rigid; only his head had a slight shivering motion. The woman shrank back a step, with a feeling of alarm.

It seemed a long while before Gloam spoke, and the same slight, involuntary shiver pervaded his voice. He still kept his face carefully averted.

"David coming back?"

"Yes, sir; I had a message from him this morning."

"To ... marry her!"