"I haven"t any cousin but you, Molly. Don"t you think you can agree to take me?"
She shook her head, and he saw, or imagined he saw, the shadow of her indignant surprise darken her features.
"I"ve never thought of you as my cousin," she answered.
"But I am, Molly."
"I don"t think of you so," she retorted. Again, as in the case of Kesiah"s advances, she was refusing to const.i.tute a law by her acknowledgment.
"Don"t you think if you tried very hard you might begin to?"
"Why should I try?"
"Well, suppose we say just because I want you to."
"That wouldn"t help me. I can"t feel that it would make any difference."
"What I want, you mean?"
"Yes, what you want."
"Aren"t you a shade more tolerant of my existence than you were at first?"
"I suppose so, but I"ve never thought about it--any more than I"ve thought of this ten thousand a year. It"s all outside of my life, but grandfather"s in it."
"Don"t you ever feel that you"d like to get outside of it yourself? The world"s a big place."
For the first time she appeared attentive to his words.
"I"ve often wondered what it was like--especially the cities--New York, Paris, London. Paris is the best, isn"t it?"
"Yes, Paris is the best to me. Have you ever thought that you"d like to wear pretty gowns and drive through a green park in the spring--filled with other carriages in which are wonderful women?"
"But I"d feel so miserable and countrified," she answered. "Are they any happier than I am--those wonderful women?"
"Perhaps not so happy--there"s a green-eyed dragon gnawing at the hearts of most of them, and you, my nut-brown beauty, have never felt his fangs."
"I"d like to see them," she said after a minute, and moved slowly onward.
"Some day you may. Look here, Molly," he burst out impulsively, "I"m not going to be sentimental about you. I haven"t the least idea of making love to you--I"ve had enough of that sort of rot, G.o.d knows--but I do like you tremendously, and I want to stand to you as a big brother. I never had a sister, you know," he added.
Something earnest and tender in his voice touched her generosity, which overflowed so easily.
"And I never had a brother," she rejoined.
"Then, that"s where I"ll come in, little cousin," he answered gently, and drawing her to him, kissed her cheek with a caress which surprised him by its unlikeness to the ordinary manifestations of love.
His hand was still on her shoulder, when he felt her start back from his grasp, and, turning quickly in the direction of her glance, he saw the miller looking at them from the thicket on the opposite side of the brook. The anger in Abel"s face had distorted his handsome features until they appeared swollen as if from drink, and for a single instant Gay imagined that it was indeed whisky and not pa.s.sion that had wrought so brutal a change in him.
"So you"ve made a fool of me, too, Molly?" he said when he had swung over the stream and stood facing her.
"You"re all wrong, Revercomb," began Gay, and stopped the next instant, because Molly"s hand had shot out to silence him.
"Will you be quiet?" she flung at him impatiently; and then fixing her eyes on Abel, she waited silently for him to finish his speech. That her lover"s fiery temper had aroused her own, Gay realized as soon as he turned to her. Her face was pale, but her eyes blazed and never had he felt so strongly the tie of blood that united them as he did while she stood there waiting for Abel"s accusations with a gesture which appeared to fling them back in disdain.
"I might have known "twas all fool"s play with you--I might have known you had flirted too much to settle down to an honest love," said Abel, breathing hard between his word as if each one were torn from him with a physical wrench at his heart. In losing his self-possession he had lost his judgment as well, and, grasping something of his love from the sincerity of his emotion, Gay made another ineffectual effort to present the situation in a fairer light.
"If you would only listen, my good fellow--if you would only let me explain things---" he began.
"Will you be quiet?" said Molly a second time, and then facing him pa.s.sionately she threw him a gesture of dismissal. "If you want to please me, you will go."
"And leave you alone with him?"
She laughed. "Do you think I"m afraid of an angry man, or that I"ve never seen one before?"
With that he obeyed her, turning from time to time on his way over the meadow to make sure that she did not need his support. In spite of the utter unreasonableness of the affair, in some unaccountable way his sympathies were on the side of the miller. The fellow was a boor, of course, but, by Jove! he was a magnificent boor. It had been long since Gay had seen such an outburst of primitive feeling--long since he had come so close to the good red earth on which we walk and of which we are made.
"You"re out of your head, Abel," said Molly--Gay turned away from them--and the tone in which she spoke was hardly calculated to bring him back to the place he had deserted. "You will say things you"ll regret, but I"ll never forgive."
"I"m sick of your eternal forgiveness," he retorted. "I"ve been forgiven every time you got into a temper, and I suppose I"ll be forgiven next every time you are kissed." The "rousing" which had threatened every Revercomb was upon him at last.
"Well, as a matter of fact it is time enough for you to forgive me when I ask you to," she returned.
"You needn"t ask. It"s too much this time, and I"ll be d.a.m.ned before I will do it."
Bending over a grey skeleton of last year"s golden-rod, she caressed it gently, without breaking its ghostly bloom. Years afterward, when she had forgotten every word he uttered, she could still see that dried spray of golden-rod growing against the April sky--she could still hear a bluebird that sang three short notes and stopped in the willows. In the quiet air their anger seemed to rush together as she had sometimes thought their love had rushed to a meeting.
"You have neither the right to forgive me nor to judge me," she said.
"Do you think I care what a man imagines of me who believes a thing against me as easily as you do. If you went on your knees to me now I should never explain--and if I chose to kiss every man in the county,"
she concluded in an outburst of pa.s.sion, "you have nothing to do with it!"
"Explain? How can a girl explain a man"s kissing her, except by saying she let him do it?"
"I did let him do it," she gasped.
For an instant they gazed at each other in an anger more violent in its manifestation than their love had been. An observer, noticing them for the first time, would have concluded that they had hated each other for years, not that they had been lovers only a few minutes before. Nature, having wearied of her play, was destroying her playthings.
"I would marry no man on earth who wouldn"t believe me in spite of that--and everything else," she said.
"Do you expect a man to believe you in spite of his eyes?"
"Eyes, ears--everything! Do you think I"d have turned on you like that before I had heard you?"
A sob, not of pity, but of rage, burst from her lips, and the sound sobered him more completely than her accusations had done. Her temper he could withstand, but that little childish sob, bitten back almost before it escaped, brought him again on his knees to her.
"I can"t understand--oh, Molly, don"t you see I am in torment?" he cried.
But the veil of softness was gone now, and the cruelty that is bound up in some inexplicable way in all violent emotion--even in the emotion of love--showed itself on the surface.