The Miller Of Old Church Part 45

"You're a goose, Molly, and I've half a mind to shake you soundly,"

he said. "Since there's no other way to cure you of this foolish infatuation, I'll take you down to Old Church to-morrow and let you see with your own eyes. You've forgotten how things look there, that's my opinion."

"Oh, Jonathan," she said, and grew dangerously sweet, while all her soft flus.h.i.+ng body leaned toward him. "You are a perfect dear, aren't you?"

"I rather think I am, since you put the question. Molly, will you kiss me?"

She drew back at once, a little deprecating, because she was honestly sorry, since he was so silly as to want to kiss her, that she couldn't oblige him. For her own part, she felt, she wouldn't have cared, but she remembered Abel's anger because of the kiss by the brook, and the thought hardened her heart. It was foolish of men to make so much importance of kisses.

"I'm sorry, but I can't. Don't ask me, Jonathan--all the same you are a darling!"

Then before he could detain her, she had slipped away from him through Kesiah's door, which she closed after her.

"Aunt Kesiah," he heard her exclaim joyously, "Jonathan is going to take me to Old Church to spend to-morrow!"

Kesiah, in an ugly grey dressing-gown, tied at the waist with a black cord, was drying Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator. At Molly's entrance, she turned, and said warningly, "Patsey is rubbing Angela after her bath. What was that about Old Church, dear?"

"Jonathan has promised to take me down there to-morrow."

"To spend the day? Well, I suppose we may trust you with him." From her manner one might have inferred that the idea of not trusting anybody with Jonathan would have been a joke.

She went on calmly shaking out Mrs. Gay's sheets before the radiator, as if the conversation were over, while behind her on the pale green wall, her shadow loomed distinct, grotesque, and s.e.xless. But Molly was in the mood when the need to talk--to let oneself go--is so great that the choice of a listener is little more than an accident. She had discovered at last--discovered in that illuminating moment in Applegate--the meaning of the homesickness, of the restlessness, of the despondency of the last few months. Before she could understand what Abel had meant to her, she had been obliged to draw away from him, to measure him from a distance, to put the lucid revealing silence between them. It was like looking at a mountain, when one must fall back to the right angle of view, must gain the proper perspective, before one can judge of the s.p.a.ce it fills on the horizon. What she needed was merely to see Abel in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he towered above them. Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and the intoxication of magic was upon her. She had pa.s.sed within the Enchanter's circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes.

"Aunt Kesiah," she asked suddenly, and her voice thrilled, "were you ever in love?"

Kesiah looked up from the sheets with the expression of a person who has been interrupted in the serious business of life by the fluttering of a humming-bird. It required an effort for her to recede from the comfortable habit of thought she had attained to the point of view from which the aspirations of the soul had appeared of more importance than the satisfactions of the body. Only for a few weeks in the spring did she relapse periodically into such a condition of mind.

"Never," she answered.

"Did you never feel that you cared about anybody--in that way?"

"Never."

It was incredible! It was appalling! But it really had happened! Love, which filled the world, was not the beginning and the end, as it ought to be, of every mortal existence. Subtract it from the universe and there was nothing left but a void, yet in this void, life seemed to move and feed and have its being just as if it were really alive. People indeed--even women--would go on, like Kesiah, for almost sixty years, and not share, for an instant, the divine impulse of creation. They could exist quite comfortably on three meals a day without ever suspecting the terrible emptiness that there was inside of them.

They could even wring a stale satisfaction out of this imitation existence--this play of make-believe being alive. And around them all the time there was the wonder and the glory of the universe!

Then Kesiah turned suddenly from the radiator, and there was an expression in her face which reminded Molly of the old lady with the bonnet trimmed with artificial purple wistaria she had seen on the train--an expression of useless knowledge and regret, as though she realized that she had missed the essential thing and that it was life, after all, that had been to blame for it. For a minute only the look lasted, for Kesiah's was a closed soul, and the smallest revelation of herself was like the agony of travail.

"If you don't mind, dear, will you carry these sheets to Patsey for Angela's bed," she said.

At the time Gay had been only half in earnest when he promised to take Molly to Old Church, and he presented himself at breakfast next morning with the unspoken hope in his heart that she had changed her mind during the night. When she met him with her hat on, he inquired facetiously if she contemplated a journey, and proceeded to make light of her response that the carriage was ordered to take them to the station.

"But we'll starve if we go there," he urged, "the servants are scattered, and the luncheon I got last time was a subject for bad language."

"I'll cook you one, Jonathan. I can cook beautifully," she said.

The idea amused him. After all they could easily get back to dinner.

"I wonder if you know that you are a nuisance, Molly?" he asked, smiling, and she saw that she had won. Winning was just as easy with Jonathan as it had been with Reuben or with Abel.

It was a brilliant day, in the midst of a brief spell of Indian summer. When they left the train and drove along the corduroy road from Applegate, the forest on either side of them was gorgeous in gold and copper. Straight ahead, at the end of the long vista, they could see a bit of cloudless sky beyond the low outlines of a field; and both sky and field were wrapped in a faint purplish haze. The few belated yellow b.u.t.terflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift pensively in the autumnal stillness.

On the long drive hardly a word was spoken, for Gay was occupied with the cigar he had not had time to smoke after breakfast, and Molly was thinking that but for Reuben's death, she would never have accepted Mr.

Jonathan's legacy and parted from Abel.

"All this happened because I went along the Haunt's Walk and not across the east meadow that April afternoon," she thought, "but for that, Jonathan would not have kissed me and Abel and I should not have quarrelled." It was such a little thing--only the eighth of a mile which had decided her future. She might just as easily have turned aside if she had only suspected. But life was like that--you never suspected until things had happened, and the little decisions, made in the midst of your ignorance, committed you to your destiny.

The horses came out of the wood, plodding over the sandy soil, which marked the beginning of the open country. Across the fields toward Bottom's Ordinary, scattered groups of people were walking in twos and threes, showing like disfiguring patches in the midst of the golden rod and the life-everlasting. Old Adam, hobbling up the path, while the horses stopped to drink at the well, touched his hat as he steadied himself with the aid of his big knotted stick.

"It's a fine sight to see you back among us," he said. "If you'd come a couple of hours earlier you'd have been in time for the wedding?"

"What wedding?" asked Gay in a clear voice, but moved by some intuitive knowledge of what the answer would be, he did not look at Molly.

"Why, Solomon Hatch's daughter, Judy, to be sure. She's just married the miller." For a minute he stopped, coughed, spat and then added: "Mr.

Mullen tied 'em up tight all by heart, without so much as glancin' at the book. Ah, that young parson may have his faults, an' be unsound on the doctrine of baptism, but he can lay on matrimony with as pious an air as if he was conductin' a funeral."

He fell back as Gay nodded pleasantly, and the wheels grated over the rocky ground by the well. With a slow flick on the long whip, the carriage crossed the three roads and rolled rapidly into the turnpike.

And while she gazed straight ahead into the flat distance, Molly was thinking, "All this has happened because I went down the Haunt's Walk that April afternoon and not over the east meadow."

CHAPTER VII

A NEW BEGINNING TO AN OLD TRAGEDY

The wedding was over. Mr. Mullen had read the service in his melodious voice, gazing straight over the Prayer-book as though he saw a vision in the sunbeam above Judy's head. On that solitary occasion his soul, which revolted from what he described in secret as the "Methodistical low church atmosphere" of his parish, had adorned the simple word with the facial solemnity that accompanies an elaborate ritual.

From the front pew, Sarah Revercomb, in full widow's weeds, had glared stonily at the Reverend Orlando, as if she suspected him of some sinister intention to tamper with the ceremony. At her side, Solomon Hatch's little pointed beard might have been seen rising and falling as it followed the rhythmic sound of the clergyman's voice. When the service was over, and the congregation filed out into the leaf-strewn paths of the churchyard, it was generally decided that Mr. Mullen's delivery had never been surpa.s.sed in the memory of the several denominations.

"'Twas when he came to makin' Abel say 'with all my worldly goods' that he looked his grandest," commented old Adam, as he started for Solomon's cottage between Sarah and Mrs. Hatch. "But, them are solemn words an'

he was wise to give a man pause for thought. Thar ain't a mo' inspirin'

sentence in the whole Prayer-book than that."

"Well, marriage ain't all promisin'," observed Sarah, "thar's a deal to it besides, an' they're both likely to find it out befo' they're much older."

Old Adam, who never contradicted a woman unless he was married to her, agreed to this with some unintelligible mutters through his toothless gums, while Mrs. Hatch remarked with effusive amiability that "it's a sad sight to see a daughter go, even though she's a stepchild. It's a comfort to think," she added immediately, "that Judy's got a G.o.d-fearin', pious husband an' one with no nonsense about him for all his good looks."

"I ain't so sure about the nonsense," retorted Sarah, "Abel's got to be managed like all men folk, an' he ain't so different from the rest of 'em, unless it is that he's mo' set."

She harboured a carefully concealed opinion that Abel was "stooping" to marry Judy, for the Hatches were particularly thriftless and had never succeeded in paying a long standing mortgage. Besides, they were in the habit of using their parlour commonly on week days, and Mrs. Hatch had once been seen at church in a calico dress--though, it was true, she had slipped out of the side door before the service was over. Added to these things, Sarah had observed of late that Judy showed an inclination to s.h.i.+rk her duties, and had a dangerous habit of "mooning" while she was at the wash tub.

"Well, I like a man that's set, myself," rejoined Mrs. Hatch, as effusive as ever. "I used to say thar never was anybody so set as my first husband till I got my second."

"I ain't had so wide an experience as you," replied Sarah, as if she were condescending to an acknowledged lapse in virtue. "Thar's a difference between marryin' for the sake of matrimony, which is right an' proper accordin' to Scripture, an' marryin' for the sake of a man, which is a sign of weakness in a woman."

"You ain't a friend to the feelin's of natur, ma'am," remarked old Adam, with respect.