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The Miller Of Old Church, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Book 2. The Cross-Roads - Chapter 6. In Which Hearts Go Astray |
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_ BOOK II. THE CROSS-ROADS CHAPTER VI. IN WHICH HEARTS GO ASTRAY She was enchantingly pretty, there was no doubt of that, thought Gay as he watched her at dinner. He had rarely seen a face so radiant in expression, and she had lost, he noticed, the touch of provincialism in her voice and manner. To-night, for the first time, he felt that there was a fawn-like shyness about her, as if her soul had flown startled before his approach. Of her meeting with Abel in Applegate he knew nothing, and while he discerned instinctively the softness and the richness of her mood, it was but reasonable that he should attribute it to a different and, as it happened, to a mistaken cause. He liked that faint shadow of her lashes on her vivid cheeks, and while he drank his coffee and cracked his nuts, he told himself, half humorously, that the ideal love, after all, was a perpetual virgin in perpetual flight. As he rose from the table, he remembered Blossom, and the pile of her half-read letters in his travelling bag. "She's a dear good girl, and just because I've got myself into a mess, I've no idea of behaving like a cad to her," he thought. That was downstairs in the hotel dining-room, and an hour later, when he faced Molly alone in the little sitting-room, he repeated the phrase to himself with an additional emphasis--for when the woman before him in flesh and blood looked up at him with entreating eyes, like a child begging a favour, the woman in his memory faded quickly into remoteness. "What's the matter, little girl?" he asked. "Oh, Jonathan, I must go back to Old Church--to-morrow!" she said. "Why in thunder do you want to do that?" "There's something I must see about. I can't wait. I never can wait when I want anything." "So I have observed. This something is so important, by the way, that you haven't thought of it for six months?" "Well, I've thought of it--sometimes," she admitted. "Can't you tell me what it is, Molly?" She shook her head. Her face was pink and her eyes shone; whatever it was, it had obviously enriched her beauty. "Tell me, little girl," he repeated and leaned closer. There had always been something comfortable and warm in his nearness to her, and under the influence of it, she felt tempted to cry out, "I want to go back to find out if Abel still loves me! I am an idiot, I know, but I feel that I shall die if I discover that he has got over caring. This suspense is more than I can bear, yet I never knew until I felt it, how much he means to me." This was what she wanted to say, but instead of uttering it, she merely murmured: "I can't, Jonathan, you would never understand." Her whole being was vibrant to-night with the desire for love, yet, in spite of his wide experience with the passion, she knew that he would not comprehend what she meant by the word. It wasn't his kind of love in the least that she wanted; it differed from his as the light of the sun differs from the blaze of a prairie fire. "It's just a feeling," she added, helplessly. "You don't have feelings, I suppose?" "Don't I?" he echoed. "Oh, Molly, if you only knew how many!" "While they last--but they don't last, you know, they have their seasons. That's the curse of them, or the charm. If they only lasted earth would be paradise or hell, wouldn't it?" But generalizations had no further attraction for her. Her mind was one great wonder, and she felt that she could hardly keep alive until she could stand face to face with Abel and read the truth in his eyes. "All the same I want to go," she repeated obstinately. Suspicion seized him, and his mouth grew a little hard under his short moustache. "Molly," he asked, "have you been thinking again about the miller?" "How absurd! What put that into your head?" she retorted indignantly. The idea, innocent as it was, appeared to incense her. What a little firebrand she looked, and how hot her eyes glowed when she was angry! "Well, I'm glad you haven't--because, you know, really it wouldn't do," he answered. "What wouldn't do?" "Your marrying a Revercomb--it wouldn't do in the least." "Why wouldn't it?" "You can see that for yourself, can't you? You've come entirely out of that life and you couldn't go back to it." "I don't see why I couldn't if I wanted to?" she threw out at him with sudden violence. Clearly, as his mother had said, she was lacking in reverence, yet he couldn't agree that she would never become exactly a lady. Not with that high-bred poise of the head and those small, exquisite hands! "Well, in the first place, I don't believe you'd ever want to," he said calmly, "and in the second place, if you ever did such a thing, my little weather-vane, you'd regret it in ten minutes." "If I did it, I don't believe I'd ever regret it," was her amazing rejoinder. Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge. "You're talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd be sorry before you got up to the altar." "I'm not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but I don't' believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it." "You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle down to raising chickens for a living?" "I like raising chickens." "And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would sacrifice--for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you please?" "I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself, as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the same everywhere." "The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any difference?" "No difference that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and never mentioned anything but stocks. If I've got to hear about a single subject I'd rather it would be crops than stocks--they seem more human, somehow." "By Jove!" he exclaimed, under his breath, "what's got into you to-night, Molly? I honestly believe you've begun to idealize the miller now you've been away from him. He's a handsome fellow; you don't see his physical match in a day, I'm willing to admit, but if you went back again you'd be surprised to find how--well, how rustic he would appear to you." The colour rushed to her face, and her eyes burned hot under the sudden droop of her lashes. "He's better than any one I've seen anywhere," she replied, "he's bigger, he's stronger, he's kinder. I'm not good enough to marry him, and I know it." For an instant he looked at her in the pained surprise of one who had never indulged in verbal excesses. Then he said, coldly; "So you're working yourself into a sentiment over young Revercomb. My dear child, if you only knew how unspeakably silly it is. Nothing could be more absurd than to throw away an income of ten thousand dollars a year in order to marry a poor man." The idea of her committing such folly was intensely distressing to him. His judgment was now in the ascendant, and like most men, while under the cool and firm control of the rational part of his nature, he was incapable of recalling with any sympathy the times when he had followed the lead of those qualities which rise superior to reason. "I don't care how poor he is," said Molly passionately, for her rational part was plainly not in the ascendant. "Nobody ever thought about his being so poor until your uncle left me all that horrid money. He was honestly born and I wasn't, yet he didn't care. He was big and splendid and I was little and mean, that was the matter!" "By George, you're in love with him!" he exclaimed, and beneath the coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang. Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have strangled speedily in the beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had, he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had grown strong enough to overleap them. While he stood there, with his angry gaze on her flushing and paling beauty, he had the helpless sensation of a man who returns at sunrise to find a forest fire raging where he had left a few sticks smouldering at midnight. "I'm not in love with anybody--you've no right to say so," she returned, "but I'll not have him abused. It's not true, it's not just, it's not generous." This was too much for his forbearance, though he told himself that, after all, there was no "getting at" Molly from the surface, and that this outburst might conceal a fancy for himself quite as well as for the miller. The last idea, while it tantalized him, was not without a pleasant sting for his senses. "You're a goose, Molly, and I've half a mind to shake you soundly," he said. "Since there's no other way to cure you of this foolish infatuation, I'll take you down to Old Church to-morrow and let you see with your own eyes. You've forgotten how things look there, that's my opinion." "Oh, Jonathan," she said, and grew dangerously sweet, while all her soft flushing body leaned toward 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 sexless. 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 space it fills on the horizon. What she needed was merely to see Abel in relation to other things in her life, to learn how immeasurably he towered above them. Her blood rushed through her veins with a burning sweetness, and while she stood there watching Kesiah, the wonder and the intoxication of magic was upon her. She had passed within the Enchanter's circle, and her soul was dancing to the music of flutes. "Aunt Kesiah," she asked suddenly, 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 butterflies, floating over the moist places in the road, seemed to drift pensively in the autumnal stillness. On the long drive hardly a word was spoken, for 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." _ |
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