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The Miller Of Old Church, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Book 2. The Cross-Roads - Chapter 8. A Great Passion In A Humble Place |
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_ BOOK II. THE CROSS-ROADS CHAPTER VIII. A GREAT PASSION IN A HUMBLE PLACE Time does not stand still even for the unhappily married. A man may have wedded the wrong woman, but he comes down to his breakfast and goes about his work as punctually as if he had wedded the right one. To Abel, with the thought of Molly throbbing like a fever in his brain, it was still possible to grind his grist and to subtract carefully the eighth part as a toll--while Judy, hushed in day dreams, went on making butter in a habit of absent-minded tranquillity. Life seldom deals in cataclysmic situations--at least on the surface. Living side by side in a married intimacy for months, Abel and Judy were still strangers to each other. Their bodies touched while their souls were crucified at an immeasurable distance. To Sarah, who embraced Christian theology while she practised religiously the doctrine of the physical basis of life, there had seemed no cause for disturbance, until Judy entered the kitchen on a stormy evening in June, and turned a pair of inflamed eyes on the face of her mother-in-law. The young woman wore her wedding dress, now nearly seven months old, and clasped in her hand a neatly bound prayer-book which had been the gift of the Reverend Orlando. For more than six months she had suffered silently under Sarah's eyes, which saw only outward and visible afflictions. Now, at the first sign of quivering flesh, the older woman was at once on the alert. "Whar you goin', Judy?" she inquired. "You ain't thinkin' about traipsin' out of doors on a night like this, are you?" "Archie promised to take me to the Bible class, an' he hasn't come back," replied Judy, while her face worked convulsively. "I've waited for him since half past seven." "If that don't beat all!" exclaimed Sarah. "Why, it's thunderin' like Jedgment Day. Can't you hear it?" "But I promised Mr. Mullen I wouldn't let anything prevent me," returned Judy, growing sullen. "Archie said he'd be back here without fail, an' I know he's stayed to supper over at the Halloweens'." "Isn't it foolish to wear your best hat out in the rain?" asked Blossom, not without surprise, for her sister-in-law had developed into something of a slattern. "I reckon hats are made to be worn," retorted Judy. As a rule her temper was placid enough, but Archie's defection, after she had given him her best neck-tie for the purpose of binding him to his promise, had overstrained the tension of her nerves. "Where's Abner? He used to go regular." "He's gone upstairs so tired that he can barely hist his foot," replied Sarah. "You'd better let that Bible class alone this evening, Judy. Yo' salvation ain't dependin' on it, I reckon." But in Judy's colourless body there dwelt, unknown to Nature, which has no sense of the ridiculous, the soul of a Cleopatra. At the moment she would cheerfully have died of an asp sooner than relinquish the study of Exodus under the eyes of the rector. In the arid stretch of her existence a great passion had flamed, and like most great passions, it was ruthless, destroying, and utterly selfish. She had made butter all day with the hope of that Bible class in her mind, and she was determined that, whatever it cost the Revercombs, she should have her reward this evening in the commendation of the young clergyman. That mere thunder and lightning should keep her from his side appeared to her little less than absurd. She knew that he had received a call within the week, and she would have walked unshod over burning ploughshares in order to hear him say that he had declined it. "I've got to go," she insisted stubbornly. "If there isn't anybody to go with me, I'll go alone." "Why, if you're so bent on it I'll take you myself," said Abel, looking up from the barrel of his gun, which he was cleaning. His manner to Judy was invariably kind and even solicitous, to a degree which caused Sarah to tell herself at times that "it wasn't natural an' wasn't goin' to last." As long as men would behave themselves quietly, and go about their business with the unfailing regularity of the orthodox, she preferred, on the whole, that they should avoid any unusual demonstration of virtue. An extreme of conduct whether good or bad made her uneasy. She didn't like, as she put it in her mind, "anything out of the way." Once when Abel, nettled by some whim of Judy's, had retorted with a slight show of annoyance, his mother had experienced a positive sensation of relief, while she said to herself with a kind of triumph that "the old Adam was thar still." "You've got that hackin' cough, Abel an' you oughtn't to go out in this storm," remarked Sarah, with an uneasiness she could not conceal. "Oh, it won't hurt me. I'm a pine knot. Are you ready, Judy?" "It's such a little way," said Judy, still sullen under her mother-in-law's disapproval. When Abel coughed once, while he was getting into his rubber coat, she glanced at him angrily. Why couldn't he have waited at least until he got out of doors? Instead of gratitude she bore him a dull resentment for having married her, and when she looked back on her hard life in her father's house, she beheld it through that rosy veil of idealism in which the imaginative temperament envelops the past or the future at the cost of the present. Then she had had time, at least, to dream and to dawdle! During the seven months of her marriage, she had learned that for the brooding soul there is no anodyne so soothing as neglect, no comfort so grateful as freedom to be unhappy. When the door closed behind them Sarah looked at Blossom with an eloquent expression. "Well, I never!" she exclaimed, and wrung the dough from her hands into the tray over which she was standing. "Well I never!" "I don't believe it's right for Abel to give in to Judy as he does," said Blossom. "I never saw a Revercomb that warn't a fool about something," answered Sarah. "It don't matter so much what 'tis about, but it's obliged to be about something." Blossom sighed and bent lower over the seam she was running. She had long since ceased to draw any consolation from her secret marriage, and her wedding ring (bought weeks after the ceremony by Gay) caused her pain rather than pleasure when it pressed into her bosom, where it hung suspended by a blue ribbon from her neck. Her strong Saxon instinct for chastity--for the integrity of feminine virtue--sometimes awoke in her, and then she would think exultingly, "At least I am married!" But even this amazing triumph of morality--of the spirit of Sarah Revercomb over the spirit of the elder Jonathan Gay--showed pallid and bloodless beside the evanescent passion to which she had been sacrificed. Destiny, working through her temperament, had marked her for victory, but it had been only one of those brief victories which herald defeats. The forces of law and order--the sound racial instincts which make for the preservation of society--these had won in the event, though they had been, after all, powerless to change the ultimate issue. The spirit of old Jonathan, as well as the spirit of Sarah, was immortal. The racial battle between the soldier of fortune and the militant Calvinist was not yet fought to a finish. "I believe Abel would give Judy the clothes on his back if he thought she wanted them," said Blossom, in the effort to turn her musings away from her own troubles. "It ain't natural," rejoined Sarah stubbornly. "It's a man's natur to be mean about money matters whar his wife is concerned, an' when he begins to be different it's a sign that thar's a screw loose somewhar inside of him. My Abner was sech a spendthrift that he'd throw away a day's market prices down at the or'nary, but he used to expect the money from a parcel of turkeys to keep me in clothes and medicines and doctor's bills, to say nothin' of household linen an' groceries for the whole year round." Blossom sighed softly, "I don't suppose there ever was a man who could see that a woman needed anything except presents now and then," she said, "unless it's Abel. Do you know, grandma, I sometimes think he's so kind to Judy because he knows he doesn't love her." "Well, I reckon, if thar's got to be a choice between love and kindness, I'd hold on to kindness," retorted Sarah. It was ten o'clock before Abel and Judy returned, and from the hurried and agitated manner of their entrance, it was plain that the Bible class had not altogether appeased Judy's temper. "She's worn out, that's the matter," explained Abel, while they stopped to dry themselves in the kitchen. "You go straight upstairs to bed, Judy," said Sarah, "an' I'll send you up a cup of gruel by Abel. You oughtn't to have gone streakin' out in this rain, an' it's natural that it should have upset you." "It wasn't the rain," replied Judy, and the instant afterwards, she burst into tears and ran out of the room before they could stop her. "I declar', I never saw anybody carry on so in my life," observed Sarah. Abel glanced at her with a perplexed and anxious frown on his brow. "You ought to be patient with her condition," he said. His own patience was inexhaustible, and its root, as Blossom had suspected, lay in his remorseful indifference. With Molly he had not been patient, but he had loved her. "Don't talk to me about patience," rejoined Sarah, "haven't I had nine an' lost six?" She was entirely without the sentiment which her son felt regarding the physical function of motherhood, for like the majority of sentiments, it had worn thin when it had been stretched over a continual repetition of facts. To Abel the mystery was still shrouded in a veil of sympathy, and was hardly to be thought of without tenderness. But his solicitude merely nettled Sarah. Nobody had ever "carried on" over her when she had had her nine. "Have you said anything sharp to her to-day, mother?" he inquired suspiciously, after a minute. "You know I ain't, Abel. She left a dirty glass in the dairy an' I never so much as mentioned it. Did Mr. Mullen complain of her leavin' off mission work?" "Why, of course not. He talked to us only a few minutes and he seemed absent-minded. He's had a good call somewhere in the North, and he told us that he had prayed over it unceasingly and he believed that the Lord was directing him to larger fields." "Did Judy hear that?" "Yes, he told us both." Sarah was stirring the gruel, and she appeared so absorbed in her task that the remark she let fall a minute later bore presumably no relation to the conversation. "I sometimes think men ain't got any mo' sense than an unborn babe!" she observed. Taking the cup from her hands, Abel went up the little staircase to the bedroom, where Judy stood before the bureau, with a long black-headed hat pin in her hand. She had evidently not begun to undress, for her hat was still on her head, and under the heavy shadow of the brim her eyes looked back at her husband with an accusing and hostile expression. "Drink this, Judy, while it is hot," he said kindly, placing the cup on the bureau. "I don't want it," she answered, and her voice sounded as if she were ready to burst again into tears. "Are you sick?" "No." "I'm going to sleep in the attic. Call me if you want anything." Without replying she took off her hat and placed it on the top shelf in the wardrobe. Had he beaten her she felt that she could almost have loved him, but the primitive sex instinct in her was outraged by his gentleness. "Has anybody hurt your feelings?" asked Abel, turning suddenly on his way to the door. "No." "Then, for God's sake, what is it?" he demanded, at his wit's end. "You look as if you'd lost the last friend you had on earth." At this she broke into hard dry sobs which rattled in her throat before they escaped. A spasm of self-pity worked convulsively in her bosom, and, turning away, she buried her face in her arms, while the long, agonized tremors shook her slender figure. Looking at her, he remembered bitterly that he had married Judy in order to make her happy. By the sacrifice of his own inclinations he had achieved this disastrous result. If he had tried to do evil instead of good, he could hardly have wrought more irreparable mischief--and with the thought, pity, which had led him astray, winged off, like an ironic sprite, and left his heart empty of comfort. "God knows I am sorry for you, Judy," he said in the effort to reinforce his compassion. But Judy, though she was avid of sympathy, did not crave an expression of it from her husband--for her temperament was of the morbid kind that is happiest when it is most miserable. Her heart had fed upon the sustenance of her brain until the abnormal enlargement of that single organ had prepared her for inevitable suffering at the hands of men--if not from actual unkindness, yet from an amiable neglect which could cut even more deeply. She turned in the direction of sentiment as instinctively as a plant turns toward light, and the Reverend Orlando Mullen had had predecessors in her affections who had been hardly so much as aware of her existence. As Abel went out of the door, her accusing eyes followed him while she thought, with sentimental regret, of the many things she had given up when she married--of Mrs. Mullen's ironing day, of the rector's darning, of the red flannel petticoats she had no longer time to make for the Hottentots. It was over one of these flannel petticoats that Mr. Mullen had first turned to her with his earnest and sympathetic look, as though he were probing her soul. At the moment she had felt that his casual words held a hidden meaning, and to this day, though she had pondered them in sleepless nights ever since, she was still undecided. "I don't believe he knew how much I cared," she said, as she started mechanically to take out her hairpins. _ |
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