The Miller Of Old Church Part 25

"I didn't think you'd be so cruel--when---"

"When? Remember I've stopped playing, Molly."

"When you know I'm simply dying for you," she responded.

He smiled at her without moving. "Then answer my question, and there's no drawing back this time remember."

"The question you asked me? Repeat it, please."

"I've said it three times already, and that's enough."

"Must I put it into words? Oh Abel, can't you see it?"

Lifting her chin, he laughed softly as he stooped and kissed her.

"I've seen it several times before, darling. Now I want it put into words--just plain ones."

"Then, Mr. Abel Revercomb," she returned demurely, "I should like very much to marry you, if you have no objection."

The next instant her mockery fled, and in one of those spells of sadness, which seemed so alien to her, and yet so much a part of her, she clung to him, sobbing.

"Abel, I love you so, be good to me," she entreated.

"Good to you!" he exclaimed, crushing her to him.

"Oh, those dreadful days since we quarrelled!"

"Why did you do it, darling, since you suffered as well as I?"

"I can't tell--there's something in me like that, I don't know what it is--but we'll quarrel again after this, I suppose."

"Then we deserve to be punished and I hope we shall be."

"How will that help? It's just life and we can't make it different."

She drew gently away from him, while a clairvoyance wiser than her years saddened her features. "I wonder if love ever lasts?" she whispered half to herself.

But there was no room in his more practical mind for the question. "Ours will, sweetheart--how can you doubt it? Haven't I loved you for the last ten years, not counting the odd days?"

"And in all those years you kissed me once, while in the last five minutes you've kissed me--how many times? You are wasteful, Abel."

"And you're a dreadful little witch--not a woman."

"I suppose I am, and a nice girl wouldn't talk like this. I'm not the wife you're wanting, Abel."

"The first and last and only one, my darling."

"Judy Hatch would suit you better if she wasn't in love with the rector."

"Confound Judy Hatch! I'll stop your mouth with kisses if you mention her again."

At this she clung to him, laughing and crying in a sudden pa.s.sion of fear.

"Hold me fast, Abel, and don't let me go, whatever happens," she said.

When he had parted from her at the fence which divided his land from Gay's near the Poplar Spring, he watched her little figure climb the Haunt's Walk and then disappear into the leafless shrubbery at the back of the house. While he looked after her it seemed to him that the wan November day grew radiant with colour, and that spring blossomed suddenly, out of season, upon the landscape. His hour was upon him when he turned and retraced his steps over the silver brook and up the gradual slope, where the sun shone on the bare soil and revealed each separate clod of earth as if it were seen under a microscope. All nature was at one with him. He felt the flowing of his blood so joyously that he wondered why the sap did not rise and mount upward in the trees.

In the yard Sarah was directing a negro boy, who was spreading a second layer of manure over her more delicate plants. As Abel closed the gate, she looked up, and the expression of his face held her eyes while he came toward her.

"What has happened, Abel? You look like Moses when he came down from the mountain."

"It was all wrong--what I told you last night, mother. Molly is going to marry me."

"You mean she's gone an' changed her mind jest as you'd begun to git along without her. I declar', I don't know what has got into you to show so little sperit. If you were the man I took you to be, you'd up an' let her see quick enough that you don't ax twice in the same quarter."

"Oh, all that's over now--she's going to marry me."

"You needn't shout so. I ain't deaf. Samson, sprinkle another spadeful of manure on that bridal-wreath bush over thar by the porch."

"Won't you say you're pleased?"

"I ain't pleased, Abel, an' I ain't going to lie about it. When I git down on my knees to-night, I'll pray harder than I ever prayed in my life that you'll come to yo' senses an' see what a laughing-stock that gal has made of you."

"Then I wish I hadn't told you."

"Well, I'd have knowed it anyhow--it's burstin' out of you. Where're you goin' now? The time's gittin' on toward dinner."

"For my axe. I want to cut a little timber."

"What on earth are you goin' to cut timber at this hour for?"

"Oh, I feel like it, that's all. I want to try my strength."

Going into the kitchen, he came out a minute later with his axe on his shoulder. As he crossed the log over the mill-stream, the spotted fox-hound puppy waddled after him, and several startled rabbits peered out from a clump of sa.s.safras by the "worm" fence. Over the fence went Abel, and under it, on his fat little belly, went Moses, the puppy. In the meadow the life-everlasting shed a fragrant pollen in the sunshine, and a few crippled gra.s.shoppers deluded themselves into the belief that the summer still lingered. Once the puppy tripped over a love-vine, and getting his front paws painfully entangled yelped sharply for a.s.sistance. Picking him up, Abel carried him in his arms to the pine wood, where he place him on a bed of needles in a hollow.

Through the slender boles of the trees, the sunlight fell in bars on the carpet of pine-cones. The scent of the living forest was in his nostrils, and when he threw back his head, it seemed to him that the blue sky was resting upon the tree-tops. Taking off his coat, he felt the edge of his blade, while he leaned against the great pine he had marked out for sacrifice. In the midst of the wood he saw the walls of his house rising--saw the sun on the threshold--the smoke mount from the chimney. The dream in his brain was the dream of the race in its beginning--for he saw the home and in the centre of the home he saw a woman and in the arms of the woman he saw a child. Though the man would change, the dream was indestructible, and would flow on from the future into the future. The end it served was not individual, but racial--for it belonged not to the soul of the lover, but to the integral structure of life.

Moving suddenly, as if in response to a joyous impulse, he drew away from the tree, and lifting his axe swung it out into the sunlight. For an instant there was silence. Then a shiver shook the pine from its roots upward, the boughs rocked in the blue sky, and a bird flying out of them sailed slowly into the west.

CHAPTER XIV

SHOWS THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH

When Abel had gone, Sarah folded her grey woollen shawl over her bosom, and ordered the boy with the wheelbarrow to return to the barnyard. Left alone her eyes followed her son's figure as it divided the broomsedge in the meadow, but from the indifference of her look she might have gazed on the pine tree toward which he was moving. A little later, when her glance pa.s.sed to the roof of the mill there was no perceptible change in her expression; and she observed dispa.s.sionately that the shingles which caught the drippings from the sycamore were beginning to rot. While she stood there she was in the throes of one of the bitterest sorrows of her life; yet there was no hint of it either in her quiet face or in the rigid spareness of her figure. Her sons had resisted her at times, but until to-day not one of them had rebelled openly against her authority in the matter of marriage. Years ago, in the period of Abner's reaction from a blighted romance, she had chosen, without compunction, a mild-mannered, tame-spirited maiden for his wife. Without compunction, when the wedding was over, she had proceeded, from the best possible motives, to torment the tame-spirited maiden into her grave.

"He's layin' up misery for himself and for all concerned," she said aloud, after a moment, "a girl like that with no name and precious little religion--an idle, vain, silly hussy, with a cropped head!"