"That"s her way, you know. You can"t make her over. She pretends he doesn"t know his Scripture and when he comes to see Blossom, she asks him all sorts of ridiculous questions just to embarra.s.s him. Yesterday she told him she couldn"t call to mind the difference in cubits between the length and the breadth of Solomon"s temple, and would he please save her the trouble of going to the Bible to find out?"
"Does she want him to stop coming?" inquired Judy, breathlessly.
"I don"t know what she wants, but I wish Blossom would marry him, don"t you?"
"Don"t I?" she repeated, and her basket of spools fell to the floor, where they scattered on the square rag carpet of log-cabin pattern. As they were gathering them up, their heads touched by accident, and he kissed her gravely. For a moment she thought, while she gazed into his brilliant eyes, "Abel is really very handsome, after all." Then folding her work carefully, she stuck her needle through the darn and placed the basket on a shelf between a bible with gilt clasps and a wreath of pressed flowers under a gla.s.s case. "He couldn"t have got anybody to fill in those holes better," she said to herself, and the reflection was not without a balm for her aching heart.
At dawn next morning Abel pa.s.sed again, driving in the direction of the Applegate road. The day was breaking clear and still, and over the autumnal pageantry in the abandoned fields, innumerable silver cobwebs shone iridescent in the sunrise. Squirrels were already awake, busily harvesting, and here and there a rabbit bobbed up from beneath a shelter of sa.s.safras. Overhead the leaves on a giant chestnut tree hung as heavily as though they were cut out of copper, and beyond a sharp twist in the corduroy road, a branch of sweet gum curved like a bent flame on the edge of the twilight dimness of the forest. The scarlet of the leaves reminded him of the colour of Molly"s jacket, and immediately the voice somewhere in his brain repeated, "They say it will end in marriage." The words awoke in him a violent and unreasonable resentment.
He could think of his own marriage quite calmly, as something that did not bear directly upon his ideal of Molly; but the conception of her as Gay"s wife, struck a blow at the image he had enskied and then schooled himself into worshipping from a distance. He was willing to relinquish her as too fair and flitting for mortal embraces, but the thought that another man should possess that elusive loveliness was like the thrust of hot iron into his wound. That Molly loved Gay he could not believe.
That she was willing to marry him without loving him, was a suggestion which appeared to him little short of an insult. True, he did not love Judy to whom he was to be married to-morrow, but that was a case so entirely and utterly different that there could be no comparison! He was doing it because he was sorry for Judy and it was the only way he could help her. Besides, had not Molly urged such a step upon him repeatedly as the fulfillment of his obvious destiny?
The reasons were all there. He had them labelled and a.s.sorted in his mind, ready for instant reference should they be required. Sleepless nights had gone to the preparation of them, and yet--and yet--in his heart he knew, beyond contradiction, that he was wedding Judy because his pity had once made a fool of him. He had acted from the loftiest motives when he had asked her to marry him, and twenty-four hours later he would have given ten years of his life to have been able to eliminate those lofty motives from his character. To go back on her was, of course, out of the question. In the history of Old Church no man--with the exception of two drunkards and old Mr. Jonathan Gay--had ever gone back on a woman. With girls it was different, since they, being sentimentally above the p.r.o.neness to error as well as practically below the liability for maintenance, might play fast and loose wherever their fleeting fancy alighted. But in the case of his unhappy s.e.x an honourable inclination once yielded to, was established forever. His sacrifice was sanctioned by custom. There was no escape since it was tradition that held him by the throat.
His business in Applegate, which included a careful matching of Judy"s braid, took up the entire morning; and it was dinner time before he turned back to the little inn, known as Raleigh"s Tavern, at which the farmers usually stopped for meals. Here, after washing his hands in a basin on the back porch, he hastily smoothed his hair, and pa.s.sed into the small paved court in front of the tavern. As he approached the doorway, the figure of a young woman in a black dress, which he felt instinctively did not "belong" to Applegate, came down the short steps, and paused an instant to caress a large dog that was lying in the sunshine near the entrance. The next minute, while he fell back, hat in hand, behind a pile of boxes in the yard, he heard his name called in a familiar voice, and lifting his eyes found himself face to face with Molly.
"Abel, aren"t you going to speak to me?" she asked, and moving a step toward him, held out both hands with an impulsive gesture.
As his hand met hers, he withdrew it quickly as though he were stung by the touch of her soft fingers. Every nerve in his body leaped suddenly to life, and the moment was so vivid while he faced her, that he felt half convinced that all the long months since their parting had dissolved in shadows. The border line between the dream and actuality was obliterated. It seemed to him not only impossible, but absurd that he should ever have believed himself engaged to Judy Hatch--that he should be going to marry her to-morrow! All that side of his life had no closer relation to his real self than it had to the self of old Adam Doolittle. While he had planned it he had been a corpse not a living man, but at the sound of Molly"s voice, at the clasp of her fingers, at the touching, expectant brightness in her eyes, the resurrection had happened. Judy was a corpse preparing to wed a corpse that had become alive--and the mating of death with life was abhorrent to him in his illumination.
"We are on our way to Richmond," explained Molly, very gently, "and we are waiting to change trains. Oh, Abel, I have wanted so much to see you!"
It was the old Molly, in truth--Molly in her softest, in her most dangerous, in her divinest mood. While he gazed at her he could make no answer because an emotion that was half self-reproach, half furious longing, choked back his words, and had he opened his lips it would have been to utter some foolish inarticulate arraignment of destiny. In the confusion of his senses, he did not notice that she had altered, but the next day he remembered that her face looked smaller and more delicate, like a tinted egg-sh.e.l.l he had once seen, and that her eyes in consequence were wondrously, were almost startlingly, large. All that he was conscious of when he turned and rushed from her after that one look, was that the old agony of his loss had resurged afresh in his heart.
CHAPTER IV
HIS DAY OF FREEDOM
He crossed the courtyard, and turned mechanically into a street which led in the opposite direction from the road to Old Church. A crowd of men, gathered in the doorway of the post-office, called to him to join them, and he answered in a voice that sounded remote and cheerful in his own ears.
"If you want to whip the bosses in these parts there"s a man for you,"
he heard one of them remark, and knew that they were discussing his political chances. Quickening his steps, he walked rapidly to the end of the street, pa.s.sed the scattered negro hovels, surrounded by blighted sunflowers, and turned into a road which ran between fields of dusty stubble into a stretch of brown and desolate country.
Suddenly, as though a screw had loosened in his brain, he felt his pa.s.sion slip the control of his will and beat down, one by one, the orderly procession of reasons that had risen against it. A sense of exhilaration, of joy so fierce that it was akin to pain, took possession of him. "I won"t go back!" he said defiantly, "I won"t go back!" And with the words his longing for Molly was swallowed up in the tumultuous consciousness of his release. It was as if he had burst his bonds by a single effort of strength, and was stretching his cramped limbs in the open. The idea of escape from captivity was so strong, that he looked neither to right or left of him, but kept his gaze fixed on the road straight ahead, as a man does who saves his energy for the final break from his pursuers. At the moment he would have bartered his soul in exchange for the unholy, the nameless rapture of the vagabond and the gipsy, of all the neglected and the despised of civilization. Duty, love, ambition--all these were nothing beside the perfect, the incommunicable pa.s.sion of the open road!
It is a mood that comes once to every man--to some men more frequently--a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited by civilization cry out for the strong meat of the jungle--for the scent of the raw, dark earth and for the gleam of the yellow moonlight on the wet, rustling leaves.
This longing may come but once in adolescence, or many times until the frost of age has withered the senses. It may come amid the showery warmth and the roving fragrance of an April day, or beside the shining, brown, leaf-strewn brooks of November. But let it come to a man when it will, and that man renounces, in spite of himself, his little leaden G.o.ds of prosperity, and in his heart, beneath the woven garment of custom, he exchanges his birthright of respectability for a mess of Romany pottage. Under the luminous sweep and rush of this vision, Abel laughed suddenly at the thought of his marriage to Judy. Obstacles which had appeared insurmountable at sunrise, showed now as unsubstantial and evanescent as shadows.
"I won"t go back!" he repeated exultantly, "I won"t go back!"
"You"re talkin" to yo"self, mister," said a voice at his side, and looking down he saw a small barefooted boy, in overalls, with a bag of striped purple calico hanging from one shoulder.
"You"ve been talkin" to yo"self all along the road," the boy repeated with zest.
"Have I? What are you up to?"
"I"ve been chinquapinin". Ma, she thinks I"m at school, but I ain"t."
He looked up wickedly, bubbling over with the shameless joys of truancy.
"Thar"s a lot of chinquapin bushes over yonder in Cobblestone"s wood an"
they"re chock full of nuts."
"And they"re in your bag now, I suppose?"
"I"ve got a peck of "em, an" I"m goin" to make me a chain as long as--that. It"ll be a watch chain, an" I"ve made a watch out of a walnut.
It can"t keep time, of course," he added, ""cep"n for that it"s really a sho" nough watch." His small freckled face, overhung by a mat of carroty hair, was wreathed in a contagious, an intoxicating smile--the smile of one who has bought happiness at the price of duty, and whose enjoyment is sweetened by the secret knowledge that he has successfully eluded the Stern Daughter of the Voice of G.o.d. Instinctively, Abel was aware that the savour was not in the chinquapins, but in the disobedience, and his heart warmed to the boy with the freckled face.
"Are you going home now?" he asked.
"You bet I ain"t. I"ve got my snack ma fixed for me." He unrolled a brown paper package and revealed two thin slices of bread with a fishing hook stuck in one corner. "Thar"s apple-b.u.t.ter between "em," he added, rolling his tongue, and a minute later, "Ma"d whip me jest the same, an" I"d ruther be whipped for a whole day than for a half. Besides," he burst out as though the mental image convulsed him with delight, "if I went home I"d have to help her tote the water for the washin"."
"But what are you going to do with yourself?"
"I"m goin" huntin" with a gravel shooter, an" I"m goin" fishin" with a willow pole, an" I"m goin" to find all the old hare traps, an" I"m goin"
to see "em make hog"s meat over at Bryarly"s an" I"m goin" to the cider pressin" down here at Cobblestone"s. She ain"t goin" to ketch me till I"ve had my day!" he concluded with a whoop of ecstasy. Startled by the sound, a rabbit sprang from a clump of sa.s.safras, and the boy was over the fence, on a rush of happy bare feet, in pursuit of it.
The road curved abruptly into a short wood, filled with dwarfed holly trees, which were sown thickly with a shower of scarlet berries--and while Abel walked through it, his visions thronged beside him like the painted and artificial troupe of a carnival. He saw Molly coming to him, separating him from Judy, surrendering her warm flesh and blood to his arms. "I won"t go back!" he said, still defiantly, "I"ll love Molly if I pay for it to the last day I live." With a terrible exultation he felt that he was willing to pay for it--to pay any price, even the price of his honour. His pa.s.sion rushed like flame through his blood, scorching, blackening, devouring.
Beyond the wood, the winding ash-coloured road dipped into a hollow, and when he reached the brow of the low hill ahead, a west wind, which had risen suddenly from the river, caught up with his footsteps and raced on like a wild thing at his side. He could hear it sighing plaintively in the bared trees he had left, or driving the hurtled leaves like a flock of frightened partridges over the sumach and sa.s.safras, and then lashing itself into a frenzy as it chased over a level of broomsedge. Always it sang of freedom--of the savage desire and thirst for freedom--of the ineffable, the supreme ecstasy of freedom! And always while he listened to it, while he felt the dead leaves stinging his flesh, he told himself pa.s.sionately that he "would not go back--that he would not marry to-morrow!"
For hours he stalked with the wind. Then, turning out of the road, he flung himself down on the broomsedge and lay for other hours gazing over the autumn landscape to the softly luminous band on the far horizon.
Somewhere in a darkened corner of his brain there was the resolve that he would not return until, like the freckled faced, barefooted boy, he had "had his day."
At nine o"clock that night he entered an inn in the town of Briarwood, twenty miles north of Applegate, and sitting down at one of the tables, ordered something to eat. His limbs ached, not from the walk in the wind, but from the pa.s.sion that had whipped his body like a destroying fire. He felt still the burning throb of the sore that it had left.
Apart from this dull agony he could feel nothing--he could desire nothing--he could remember nothing. Everything was over except the instinct that told him that he was empty and must be fed.
While he sat there, with his aching forehead bowed in his hands, there came a light touch on his shoulder, and looking up he saw the Reverend Orlando Mullen, standing at his side like an embodiment of all the things from which he had fled. For an instant he could only stare blindly back at him. Then something which had opened in his soul, closed softly, as if it were a sh.e.l.l of custom, and he knew that he was again a prisoner. With the sight of that conventional figure, the scattered instincts of habit and of respectability--of all the qualities for which the race stood and against which the individual had rebelled--all these rallied anew to the battlefield from which they had been routed by his insurgent emotions.
"I suppose you"re waiting, like myself, for the nine-forty-five train?"
"Yes, I"m waiting for the train."
"Business brought you so far away?"
"Yes, business brought me." Lifting his gla.s.s of beer, he drained it slowly under Mr. Mullen"s friendly and curious eyes.
"It looks as if we should have a perfect day for the wedding," remarked the rector, after a pause. "Like you, I was called off on an urgent matter, but fortunately, it only means losing a little sleep."
Then the whistle of the train blew, and ten minutes later, Abel followed the young clergyman into the single coach and sat down in a vacant seat at his side.
It was two o"clock when at last he drove into the back gate at the mill, and unhitching his mare, turned her out into the pasture. As he crossed the road to the house, he lifted his eyes mechanically to the sky, and saw that the stars shone soft and near as if they were watching over a night of love.
CHAPTER V