"Hold on!"
"I beg you pardon, sir."
"I mean that I am overcome. I am mentally prostrated before such perfections. Blossom, you are in love with him."
"Oh, no, sir; but I do like to watch him in the pulpit. He gesticulates so beautifully."
"And now--speak truth and spare not--how do I compare with him?"
"Oh, Mr. Jonathan, you are so different!"
"Do you imply that I am ugly, Blossom?"
"Why, no--not ugly. Indeed I didn"t mean that."
"But I"m not so handsome as Reverend Orlando?--now, confess it."
She blushed, and he thought her confusion the most charming he had ever seen.
"Well, perhaps you aren"t quite so--so handsome; but there"s something about you, sir," she added eagerly, "that reminds me of him."
"By Jove! You don"t mean it!"
"I can"t tell just what it is, but it is something. You both look as though you"d lived in a city and had learned to wear your Sunday clothes without remembering that they are your Sunday clothes. Of course, your hair doesn"t curl like his," she added honestly, "and I doubt if you"d look nearly so well in the pulpit."
"I"m very sure I shouldn"t, but Blossom---"
"What, Mr. Jonathan?"
"Do you think you will ever like me as well as you like Mr. Mullen?"
His gay and intimate smile awaited her answer, and in the pause, he stretched out his hand and laid it on her large round arm a little above the elbow. The flush deepened in her face, and he felt a slight trembling under his fingers like the breast of a frightened bird.
"Blossom," he repeated, half mocking, half tender, "do you think you will ever like me better than you like Mr. Mullen?"
At this her rustic pride came suddenly between them, and withdrawing her arm from his clasp, she stepped out of the bridle path into the wet orchard gra.s.s that surrounded them.
"I"ve known him so much longer," she replied.
"And if you know me longer will you like me better, Blossom?"
Then as she still drew back, he pressed nearer, and spoke her name again in a whisper.
"Blossom--Blossom, are you afraid of me? Do you think I would hurt you?"
The gentleness in his voice stayed her flight for an instant, and in that instant, as she looked up at him, he stooped quickly and kissed her mouth.
"What a d.a.m.ned a.s.s I"ve made of myself," he thought savagely, when she broke from him and fled over the mill brook into the Revercombs" pasture beyond. She did not look back, but sped as straight as a frightened hare to the covert; and by this brilliant, though unconscious coquetry, she had wrested the victory from him at the moment when it had appeared to fall too easily into his hands.
"Well, it"s all right now. I"ll take better care in the future," he thought, his self-reproach extinguished by the a.s.surance that, after all, he had done nothing that justified the intrusion of his conscience.
"By Jove, she"s a beauty--but she"s not my kind all the same," he added as he strolled leisurely homeward--for like many persons whose moral standard exceeds immeasurably their ordinary rule of conduct, he cherished somewhere in an obscure corner of his brain an image of perfection closely related to the type which he found least alluring in reality. Humanly tolerant of those masculine weaknesses he shared, he had erected mentally a pinnacle of virtue upon which he exacted that a frailer being should maintain an equilibrium. A pretty woman, it was true, might go at a merry pace provided she was not related to him, but he required that both his mother and his aunt should be above suspicion.
In earlier days he had had several affairs of sentiment with ladies to whom he declined to bow if he happened to be walking with a member of his family; and this fine discrimination was characteristic of him, for it proved that he was capable of losing his heart in a direction where he would refuse to lift his hat.
At the late breakfast to which he returned, he found Mr. Chamberlayne, who had ridden over from Applegate to consult with Kesiah. In appearance the lawyer belonged to what is called "the old school," and his manner produced an effect of ostentation which was foreign to his character as a Christian and a gentleman. His eyebrows, which were still dark and thick, hung prominently over his small, sparkling eyes behind gold rimmed spectacles, while a lock of silver hair was brushed across his forehead with the romantic wave which was fashionable in the period when Lord Byron was the favorite poet. Kindness and something more--something that was almost a touching innocence, looked from his face. "It is a good world--I"ve always found it to be a good world, and if I"ve ever heard anything against it, I"ve refused to believe it," his look seemed to say.
All through breakfast he rambled on after his amiable habit--praising the food, praising the flowers, praising the country, praising the universe. The only creature or object he omitted to praise was Kesiah--for in his heart he regarded it as an outrage on the part of Providence that a woman should have been created quite so ugly. While he talked he kept his eyes turned away from her, gazing abstractedly through the window or at a portrait of Mrs. Gay, painted in the first year of her marriage, which hung over the sideboard. In the mental world which he inhabited all women were fair and fragile and endowed with a quality which he was accustomed to describe as "solace." When occasionally, as in the case of Kesiah, one was thrust upon his notice, to whom by no stretch of the imagination these graces could be attributed, he disposed of the situation by the simple device of gazing above her head. In his long and intimate acquaintance, he had never looked Kesiah in the face, and he never intended to. He was perfectly aware that if he were for an instant to forget himself so far as to contemplate her features, he should immediately lose all patience with her. No woman, he felt, had the right to affront so openly a man"s ideal of what the s.e.x should be. When he spoke of her behind her back it was with indignant sympathy as "poor Miss Kesiah," or "that poor good soul Kesiah Blount"--for in spite of a natural bent for logic, and more than forty years of sedulous attendance upon the law, he harboured at the bottom of his heart an unreasonable conviction that Kesiah"s plainness was, somehow, the result of her not having chosen to be pretty.
"Any sport, Jonathan?" he inquired cheerfully, while he b.u.t.tered his waffles. "If I scared up one Molly Cotton-tail out of the briars I did at least fifty."
"No, I didn"t get a shot," replied Gay, "but I met a poacher on my land who appeared to have been more successful. There seems to be absolutely no respect for a man"s property rights in this part of the country. The fellow actually had the impudence to stop and bandy words with me."
"Well, you mustn"t be too hard on him. His ancestors, doubtless, shot over your fields for generations, and he"d probably look upon an attempt to enforce the game laws as an infringement of his privileges."
"Do you mean that the landowner is utterly unprotected?"
"By no means--go slow--go slow--you might search the round globe, I believe for a more honest or a more peaceable set of neighbours. But they"ve always been taught, you see, to regard the bird in the air as belonging to the man with the gun. On these large estates game was so plentiful in the old days and pot-hunters, as they call them, so few, that it didn"t pay a man to watch out for his interest. Now that the birds are getting scarce, the majority of farmers in the State are having their lands posted, but your uncle was too little of a sportsman to concern himself in the matter."
"Well, I knocked a tooth out of the fellow, so the whole county will be after me like a pack of hounds, I suppose. I wonder who he was, by the way--young, good looking, rather a bully?"
"The description fits a Revercomb. As they are your next neighbours it was probably the miller or his brother."
"I know the miller, and it wasn"t he--but when I come to think of it, the youngster had that same rustic look to him. By Jove, I am sorry it was a Revercomb," he added under his breath.
A frown had settled on the face of the old gentleman, and he poured the syrup over his buckwheat cakes with the manner of a man who is about to argue a case for the defence when his natural sympathies are with the prosecution.
"They are an irascible family from the mother down," he observed, "and I"m sorry you"ve got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while they remained in her presence.
A little later, when the two men were smoking in the library, Gay brought the conversation back again to the point at which the lawyer had so hastily dropped it.
"Am I likely, then, to have trouble with the Revercombs?" he asked, with a disturbing memory of Blossom"s flaxen head under the hooded shawl.
"It"s not improbable that the family will take up the matter. These country folk are fearful partisans, you see. However, it may lead to nothing worse than the miller"s refusing to grind your corn or forbidding you to use the bridle path over his pasture."
"Had my uncle any friction in that quarter when he lived here?"
Mr. Chamberlayne"s cigar had gone out while he talked, and striking a match on a silver box, he watched the thin blue flame abstractedly an instant before he answered.
"Were you ever told," he inquired, "that there was some talk of arresting Abner Revercomb before the coroner"s jury agreed on a verdict?"
"Abner? He"s the eldest of the brothers, isn"t he? No, I hadn"t heard of it."
"It was only the man"s reputation for uprightness, I believe, that prevented the arrest. The Revercombs are a remarkable family for their station in life, and they derive their ability entirely from their mother, who was one of the Hawtreys. They belong to the new order--to the order that is rapidly forging to the surface and pushing us dilapidated aristocrats out of the way. These people have learned a lot in the last few years, and they are learning most of all that the acc.u.mulation of wealth is the real secret of dominance. When they get control of the money, they"ll begin to strive after culture, and acquire a smattering of education instead. It"s astonishing, perhaps, but the fact remains that a reputable, hard-working farmer like our friend the miller, with his primitive little last century grist-mill, has probably greater influence in the State to-day than you have, for all your two thousand acres. He has intelligence enough to go to the Legislature and make a fair showing, if he wants to, and I don"t" believe that either of us could stand in the race a minute against him."
"Well, he"s welcome to the doubtful honour! But the thing that puzzles me is why in thunder his brother Abner should have wanted to shoot my uncle?"
"It seems--" the lawyer hesitated, coughed and glanced nervously at the door as if he feared the intrusion of Kesiah--"it seems he was a lover--was engaged in fact to Janet Merryweather before--before she attracted your uncle"s attention. Later the engagement was broken, and he married a cousin in a fit of temper, it was said at the time. There was always ill blood after this, it appeared, and on the morning of your uncle"s death Abner was seen crossing the pasture from Poplar Spring with his gun on his shoulder."
"It"s an ugly story all round," remarked Gay quietly, "and I wish to heaven that I were out of it. How has my poor mother stood it?"