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 pa.s.sionately 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 gra.s.shoppers 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, G.o.d bless you."
"But I"m not, Abel!" she cried pa.s.sionately as he turned away.
He did not look back, and when he had pa.s.sed out of hearing, she repeated her words with a pa.s.sionate repudiation of the thing he had suggested, "I"m not, Abel!--I"m not!"
CHAPTER XIV
THE TURN OF THE WHEEL
Tears blinded her eyes as she crossed the pasture, and when she brushed them away, she could see nothing distinctly except the single pointed maple that lifted its fiery torch above the spectral procession of the aspens in the graveyard. She had pa.s.sed under the trees at the Poplar Spring, and was deep in the witch-hazel boughs which made a screen for the Haunt"s Walk, when beyond a sudden twist in the path, she saw ahead of her the figures of Blossom Revercomb and Jonathan Gay. At first they showed merely in dim outlines standing a little apart, with the sunlit branch of a sweet gum tree dropping between them. Then as Molly went forward over the velvety carpet of leaves, she saw the girl make a swift and appealing movement of her arms.
"Oh, Jonathan, if you only would! I can"t bear it any longer!" she cried, with her hands on his shoulders.
He drew away, kindly, almost caressingly. He was in hunting clothes, and the barrel of his gun, Molly saw, came between him and Blossom, gently pressing her off.
"You don"t understand, Blossom, I"ve told you a hundred times it is out of the question," he answered.
Then looking up his eyes met Molly"s, and he stood silent without defence or explanation, before her.
"What is impossible, Jonathan? Can I help you?" she asked impulsively, and going quickly to Blossom"s side she drew the girl"s weeping face to her breast. "You"re in trouble, darling--tell me, tell Molly about it,"
she said.
As they clung together in a pa.s.sion of despair and of pity--the one appealing by sheer helplessness, the other giving succour out of an abundant self-reliance--Gay became conscious that he was witnessing the secret wonder of Molly"s nature. The relation of woman to man was dwarfed suddenly by an understanding of the relation of woman to woman.