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The Miller Of Old Church, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Book 2. The Cross-Roads - Chapter 13. What Life Teaches |
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_ BOOK II. THE CROSS-ROADS CHAPTER XIII. WHAT LIFE TEACHES Judy was laid away amid the low green ridges in the churchyard, where the drowsy hum of the threshing in a wheatfield across the road, was the only reminder of the serious business of life. And immediately, as if the beneficent green had enveloped her memory, her weaknesses were effaced and her virtues were exalted in the minds of the living. Their judgment was softened by a vague feeling of awe, but they were not troubled, while they stood in a solemn and curious row around her grave, by any sense of the pathetic futility of individual suffering in the midst of a universe that creates and destroys in swarms. The mystery aroused no wonder in their thoughts, for the blindness of habit, which passes generally for the vision of faith, had paralyzed in youth their groping spiritual impulses. On the following Sunday, before leaving for fresher fields, Mr. Mullen preached a sermon which established him forever in the hearts of his congregation, and in the course of it, he alluded tenderly to "the exalted Christian woman who has been recently removed from among us to a brighter sphere." It was, on the whole as Mrs. Gay observed afterwards, "his most remarkable effort"; and even Sarah Revercomb, who had heard that her daughter-in-law was to be mentioned in the pulpit, and had attended from the same spiritual pride with which she had read the funeral notice in the Applegate papers, admitted on her way home that she "wished poor Judy could have heard him." In spite of the young woman's removal to a sphere which Mr. Mullen had described as "brighter," she had become from the instant of her decease, "poor Judy" in Sarah's thoughts as well as on her lips. To Abel her death had brought a shock which was not so much a sense of personal regret, as an intensified expression of the pity he had felt for her while she lived. The huddled figure against the mill-stone had acquired a new significance in the act of dying. A dignity which had never been hers in life, enfolded her when she lay with the accusing and hostile look in her face fading slowly into an expression of peace. With the noble inconsistency of a generous heart, he began to regard Judy dead with a tenderness he had never been able to feel for Judy living. The less she demanded of him, the more he was ready to give her. "I declar' it does look as if Abel was mournin'," remarked Betsey Bottom to Sarah on a September afternoon several months later. "It ain't suprisin' in his case seein' he jest married her to get even with Molly." "I don't believe myself in settin' round an' nursin' grief," responded Sarah, "a proper show of respect is well an' good, but nobody can expect a hearty, able bodied man to keep his thoughts turned on the departed. With women, now, it's different, for thar's precious little satisfaction some women get out of thar husbands till they start to wearin' weeds for 'em." "You've worn weeds steady now, ain't you, Mrs. Revercomb?" Sarah set her mouth tightly. "They were too costly to lay away," she replied, and the words were as real a eulogy of her husband as she had ever uttered. "It's a pity Abel lost Molly Merryweather," said Betsey. "Is thar any likelihood of thar comin' together again? Or is it true--as the rumour keeps up--that she is goin' to marry Mr. Jonathan befo' many months?" "It ain't likely she'll throw away all that good money once she's got used to it," said Sarah. "For my part, I don't hold with the folks that blamed her for her choice. Thar ain't many husbands that would be worthy of thar hire, an' how was she to find out, till she tried, if Abel was one of those few or not?" "He al'ays seemed to me almost too promisin' for his good looks, Mrs. Revercomb. I'm mighty partial to looks in a man, thar ain't no use my denyin' it." "Well, I ain't," said Sarah, "they're no mo' than dross an' cobwebs in my sight, but we're made different an' thar's no sense arguin' about tastes--though I must say for me that I could never understand how a modest woman like you could confess to takin' pleasure in the sight of a handsome man." "Well, immodest or not, I hold to it," replied Betsey in as amiable a manner as if there had been no reflection upon her refinement. "Abel stands a good chance for the legislature now, don't he?" "I ain't a friend to that, for I never saw the man yet that came out of politics as clean as he went into 'em, and thar ain't nothin' that takes the place of cleanness with me." In her heart she felt for Betsey something of the contempt which the stoic in all ranks of life feels for the epicurean. At supper that night Sarah repeated this conversation, and to her astonishment, not Abel, but Blossom, went pitiably white and flinched back sharply as if fearing a second fall of the lash. "I don't believe it! Mr. Jonathan will never marry Molly. There's no truth in it!" she cried. Over the coffee-pot which she has holding, Sarah stared at her in perplexity. "Why, whatever has come over you, Blossom?" she asked. "You haven't been yo'self for a considerable spell, daughter," said Abner, turning to her with a pathetic, anxious expression on his great hairy face. "Do you feel sick or mopin'?" He looked at Blossom as a man looks at the only thing he loves in life when he sees that thing suffering beneath his eyes and cannot divine the cause. The veins grew large and stood out on his forehead, and the big knotted hand that was carrying his cup to his lips, trembled in the air and then sank slowly back to the table. His usually dull and indifferent gaze became suddenly piercing as if it were charged with electricity. "It's nothing, father," said Blossom, pressing her hand to her bosom, as though she were choking for breath, "and it's all silly talk, I know, about Molly." "What does it matter to you if it's true?" demanded Sarah tartly, but Blossom, driven from the room by a spasm of coughing, had already disappeared. It was a close September night, and as Abel crossed the road to look for a young heifer in the meadow the heavy scent of the Jamestown weeds seemed to float downward beneath the oppressive weight of the atmosphere. The sawing of the katydids came to him out of the surrounding darkness, through which a light, gliding like a gigantic glow-worm along the earth, revealed presently the figure of Jonathan Gay, mounted on horseback and swinging a lantern from his saddle. "A dark night, Revercomb." "Yes, there'll be rain before morning." "Well, it won't do any harm. The country needs it. I'm glad to hear, by the way, that you are going into politics. You're a capital speaker. I heard you last summer at Piping Tree." He rode on, and Abel forgot the meeting until, on his way back from the meadow, he ran against Blossom, who was coming rather wildly from the direction in which Jonathan had vanished. "What has upset you so, Blossom? You are like a ghost. Did you meet Mr. Jonathan?" "No, why should I meet Mr. Jonathan? What do you mean?" Without replying she turned from him and ran into the house, while following her more soberly, he asked himself carelessly what could have happened to disturb her. "I wonder if she is frettin' about the rector?" he thought, and his utter inability to understand, or even to recognize the contradictions in the nature of women oppressed his mind. "First, she wanted Mr. Mullen and he didn't want her, then he wanted her and she didn't want him, and now when he's evidently left off caring again, she appears to be grievin' herself sick about him. I wonder if it's always like that--everybody wanting the person that wants somebody else? And yet I know I loved Molly a hundred times more, if that were possible, when I believed she cared for me." He remembered the December afternoon so many years ago, when she had run away from the school in Applegate, and he had found her breasting a heavy snow storm on the road to Jordan's Journey. Against the darkness he saw her so vividly, as she looked with the snow powdering her hair and her eyes shining happily up at him when she nestled for warmth against his arm, that for a minute he could hardly believe that it was eight years ago and not yesterday. Several weeks later, on a hazy October morning, when the air was sharp with the scent of cider presses and burning brushwood, he met Molly returning from the cross-roads, in the short path over the pasture. "I thought you had gone," he said, and held out his hand. "Not yet. Mrs. Gay wants to stay through October." In her hand she held a bunch of golden-rod, and behind her the field in which she had gathered it, flamed royally in the sunlight. "Did you know that I rode to Piping Tree to hear you speak one day in June?" she asked suddenly. "I didn't know it, but it was nice of you." His renunciation had conferred a dignity upon him which had in it something of the quiet and the breadth of the Southern landscape. She knew while she looked at him that he had accepted her decision once for all--that he still accepted it in spite of the ensuing logic of events which had refuted its finality. The choice had been offered her between love and the world, and she had chosen the world--chosen in the heat of youth, in the thirst for experience. She had not loved enough. Her love had been slight, young, yielding too easily to the impact of other desires. There had been no illusion to shelter it. She had never, she remembered now, had any illusions--all had been of the substance and the fibre of reality. Then, with the lucidity of vision through which she had always seen and weighed the values of her emotions, she realized that if she had the choice to make over again, she could not make it differently. At the time flight from love was as necessary to her growth as the return to love was necessary to her happiness to-day. She saw clearly that her return was, after all, the result of her flight. If she had not chosen the world, she would never have known how little the world signified in comparison with simpler things. Life was all of a single piece; it was impossible to pull it apart and say "without this it would have been better"--since nothing in it was unrelated to the rest, nothing in it existed by itself and independent of the events that preceded it and came after it. Born as she had been out of sin, and the tragic expiation of sin, she had learned more quickly than other women, as though the spectre of the unhappy Janet stood always at her side to help her to a deeper understanding and a sincerer pity. She knew now that if she loved Abel, it was because all other interests and emotions had faded like the perishable bloom on the meadow before the solid, the fundamental fact of her need of him. "Do you still get books from the library in Applegate?" she asked because she could think of nothing to say that sounded less trivial. "Sometimes, and second hand ones from a dealer I've found there. One corner of the mill is given up to them." Again there was silence, and then she said impulsively in her old childlike way. "Abel, have you ever forgiven me?" "There was nothing to forgive. You see, I've learned, Molly." "What you've learned is that I wasn't worth loving, I suppose?" He laughed softly. "The truth is, I never knew how much you were worth till I gave you up," he answered. "It was the same way with me--that's life, perhaps." "That sounded like my mother. You're too young to have learned what it means." "I don't believe I was ever young--I seem to have known about the sadness of life from my cradle. That was why I wanted so passionately some of its gaiety. I remember I used to think that Paris meant gaiety, but when we went there I couldn't get over my surprise because of all the ragged people and the poor, miserable horses. They spoiled it to me." "The secret is not to look, isn't it?" he asked. "Yes. Jonathan never looked. It all depends, he used to tell me--upon which set of facts I chose to regard--and he calls it philosophical not to regard any but pleasant ones." "Perhaps he's right, but isn't it, after all, a question of the way he's made?" "Everything is; grandfather used to say that was why he was never able to judge people. Life was woven of many colours, like Joseph's coat, he once told me, and we could make dyes run, but we couldn't wash them entirely out. He couldn't make himself resentful when he tried--not even with--with Mr. Jonathan." "Have you ever forgiven him, Molly?" "I've sometimes thought that he was sorry at the end--but how could that undo the way he treated my mother? Being sorry when you're dying doesn't help things you've hurt in life--but, then, grandfather would have said, I suppose, that it was life, not Mr. Jonathan, that was to blame. And I can see, too, in a way, that we sometimes do things we don't want to do--that we don't even mean to do--that we regret ever afterwards--just because life drives us to do them--" For a minute she hesitated, and then added bravely, "I learned that by taking Mr. Jonathan's money." "But you were right," he answered. "To have the choice between love and money, and to choose--money?" "You're putting it harshly. It wasn't money you chose--it was the world or Old Church--Jordan's Journey or the grist mill." For a moment the throbbing of her heart stifled her. Then she found her voice. "If I had the choice now I'd choose Old Church and the grist mill," she said. There was a short silence, and while it lasted she waited trembling, her hand outstretched, her mouth quivering for his kisses. She remembered how eagerly his lips had turned to hers in the past as one who thirsted for water. But when he spoke again it was in the same quiet voice. "Would you, Molly!" he answered gently, and that was all. It was not a question, but an acceptance. He made no movement toward her. His eyes did not search her face. They turned and walked slowly across the pasture over the life-everlasting, which diffused under their feet a haunting and ghostly fragrance. Myriads of grasshoppers chanted in the warm sunshine, and a roving scent of wood-smoke drifted to them from a clearing across the road. It was the season of the year when the earth wears its richest and its most ephemeral splendour; when its bloom is so poignantly lovely that it seems as if a breath would destroy it, and the curves of hill and field melt like shadows into the faint purple haze on the horizon. "If I could change it all now--could take you out of the life that suits you and bring you back to the mill--I wouldn't do it. I like to think I'm decent enough not even to want to do it," he said. They had reached the fence that separated Gay's pasture from his, and stopping, he held out his hand with a smile. "I hear you're to marry Jonathan Gay," he added, "and whether or not you do, God bless you." "But I'm not, Abel!" she cried passionately as he turned away. He did not look back, and when he had passed out of hearing, she repeated her words with a passionate repudiation of the thing he had suggested, "I'm not, Abel!--I'm not!" _ |
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