"Well, I"m learning," he answered, still smiling.
"And you are happy?"
He made a gesture of a.s.sent, while he looked over her head at the b.u.t.terfly--which had found its mate and was soaring heavenward in a flight of ecstasy. The same loyalty which had prevented his touching her hand when they met, rebelled now against an implied reflection on Judy.
"I am glad," she said, "you deserve it."
She had given her eyes to him almost unconsciously, and their look was like a cord which drew them slowly to each other. His pulses hammered in his ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees, and saw the b.u.t.terflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only the present, crowned, radiant, and sweet to the senses as the garlands of wild grape around which the golden bees hung in a cloud. For an instant only the vision held him; then the rush of desire faded slowly, and some unconquerable instinct, of which he had been almost unconscious, a.s.serted its supremacy in his brain. The ghosts of dead ancestors who had adhered to law at the cost of happiness; the iron skeleton of an outgrown and yet indelibly implanted creed; the tenacity of the racial structure against which his individual impulses had rebelled--these things, or one of these things, proved in the end stronger than the appeal of his pa.s.sion. He longed with all his strength to hold her in his arms--every nerve in his body ached for her--yet he knew that because of this unconquerable instinct he was powerless to follow his longing.
"I don"t think I deserve much, Molly," he said quietly.
She hesitated still, looking away from him in the direction of her path, which led over the meadow.
"Abel, be good to Judy," she said, without turning.
"I will, Molly, I promise you."
He moved a step toward the turnpike, stopped, and looked back.
"I can"t do much for you, Molly," he said, "but if you ever need anybody to die for you, remember I"m ready."
"I"ll remember," she answered, with a smile, but her eyes were misty when she pa.s.sed the blazed pine and turned into the little path.
CHAPTER X
TANGLED THREADS
In front of Molly, the path, deep in silvery orchard gra.s.s, wound through the pasture to the witch-hazel thicket at Jordan"s Journey; and when she entered the shelter of the trees, Gay came, whistling, toward her from the direction of the Poplar Spring. He walked rapidly, and his face wore an anxious and hara.s.sed expression, for he was making the unpleasant discovery that even stolen sweets may become cloying to a surfeited palate. His pa.s.sion had run its inevitable course of desire, fulfilment, and exhaustion. So closely had it followed the changing seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed in the Haunt"s Walk. The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn. He was conscious of a distinct relief because the torment of his earlier love for Blossom was over. There was no regret in his mind for the poignant sweetness of the days before he had married her--for the restlessness, the expectancy, the hushed waitings, the enervating suspense--nor even for those brief hours of fulfilment, when that same haunting suspense had seemed to add the sharpest edge to his enjoyment. He did not suffer to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never compensated for the pang of it. Her failures now merely made his manufactured excuses the easier. Once, when she had not been able to come, he had experienced a revulsion of feeling; like the sudden lifting of a long strain of anxiety. She still pressed for an acknowledgment of their marriage, while his refusal was still based on a very real solicitude for his mother. Only in the last six months had his feeling for Molly entered into the situation; but like all swift and unguarded emotions, it absorbed the colour in his thoughts, while it left both the past and the future in the cover of darkness.
"I wish you wouldn"t wander off alone like this, Molly," he began as he joined her.
"Oh, it"s perfectly safe, Jonathan--everybody knows me for miles around."
"But it would make mother nervous if she were to hear of it. She has never allowed Aunt Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself."
"Poor Aunt Kesiah," said Molly softly.
He glanced at her sharply. "Why do you say that?" he asked, "she has always seemed to me to have everything she wanted. If she hadn"t had mother to occupy her time, what under heaven would have become of her?"
"I wonder?" she returned; "but has it ever occurred to you that Aunt Kesiah and I are not exactly alike, Jonathan?"
"Well, rather. What are you driving at?"
Her answering smile, instead of softening the effect of her words, appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated Kesiah"s generation from her own. The edge of sweetness to her look tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced. This quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever seen whose infinite variety he could not exhaust. The mere recollection of the others wearied him. Almost imperceptibly he was beginning to feel a distaste for the side of life which had once offered so rich an allurement to his senses. The idea that this might be love, after all, had occurred to him more than once during the past six months, and he met the suggestion with the invariable cynical retort that "he hadn"t it in him." Yet only ten minutes before, he had watched Molly coming to him over the jewelled landscape, and the heavens had opened. Once more the unattainable had appeared to him wrapped in the myriad-coloured veil of his young illusions.
"Molly," he said almost in spite of himself, "what would have happened to us if we had met five or six years ago?"
"Nothing, probably."
"Well, I"m not so sure--not if you like me half as well as I like you.
You understand, don"t you, that I got myself tied up--entangled before I knew you--but, by Jove, if I were free I"d make you think twice about me."
"There"s no use talking about what might have been, is there?"
The hint of his "entanglement," she had accepted quite simply as a veiled allusion to an incident in his life abroad. Her interest in it would have been keener had she been less indifferent to him as a lover, but while she walked by his side, smiling in response to his words, she was thinking breathlessly, like one hushed in suspense, "If Abel had only been like that a year ago, I should not have left him." That the qualities she had always missed in the miller had developed only through the loss of her, she refused to admit. A swift, an almost miraculous change had pa.s.sed over her, and all the warm blood in her body seemed to rush back to her heart, giving it the abundance of life. The world appeared to her in a clearer and fresher light, as though a perpetual dawn were hanging above it; and this light shone into the secret chambers of her mind as well as over the meadows and into the shadowy places of the Haunt"s Walk. "Yes, if he had been like that I should never have left him and all this would not have happened," she thought again; "and if I had been like this would he ever have quarrelled with me?" she asked herself the instant afterwards.
And Gay, walking at her side, but separated by a mental universe, was thinking resentfully, "The deuce of it is that it might just as well never have happened! If I"d only been a little less of a fool--If I"d only not walked my horse across the pasture that October afternoon--If I"d only had sense enough to see what was coming--If I"d only--oh, hang it!"
"I"d be a better man to-day if I"d known you sooner, Molly," he said presently. "A man couldn"t tire of you because you"re never the same thing two days in succession."
"Doesn"t a man tire of change?"
"I don"t--it"s the most blessed thing in life. I wonder why you"ve given up flirting?"
"Perhaps because there isn"t anybody to flirt with."
"I like that. Am I not continually at your service?"
"But I don"t like your kind of flirting, somehow."
"What you want, I suppose, is a perpetual supply of Mullens. Have you seen him, by the way?"
"He called on Aunt Angela this morning and read a chapter from the Bible. I heard it all the way downstairs on the porch."
"And the miller?"
She was walking beside a clump of lilies, and the colour of the flowers flamed in her face.
"I saw him for a few minutes this morning."
"How has his marriage turned out?"
"I haven"t heard. Like all the others, I suppose."
"Well he"s as fine a looking animal as one often encounters. His wife is that thin, drawn out, anaemic girl I saw at Piping Tree, isn"t she? Such men always seem to marry such women."
"I never thought Judy unattractive. She"s really interesting if you take the trouble to dig deep enough."
"I suppose Revercomb dug, but it isn"t as a rule a man"s habit to go around with a spade when he"s in want of a wife."
With an impetuous movement, he bent closer to her:
"Look here, Molly, don"t you think you might kiss me?"