Her laugh came readily.
"You"re too fat!"
"Another thrust like that, and I"ll gallop off and leave you."
His face was bent toward hers, and it was only the quick change in her expression, and the restive start of her horse, that made him swerve suddenly aside and glance at the blazed pine they were pa.s.sing. Leaning against the tree, with her arms resting on the bars, and her body as still as if it were chiselled out of stone, Blossom Revercomb was watching them over a row of tall tiger lilies. Her features were drawn and pallid, as if from sharp physical pain, and a blight had spread over her beauty, like the decay of a flower that feeds a canker at its heart.
With an exclamation of alarm, Molly turned her horse"s head in the direction of the pine, but with a hasty yet courteous gesture, Gay rode quickly ahead of her, and leaning from his saddle spoke a few words in an undertone. The next instant Blossom had fled and the two were riding on again down the turnpike.
"She looked so unhappy, Jonathan. I wonder what was the matter?"
"She was tired, probably." He despised himself for the evasion, for his character was naturally an open one, and he heartily disliked all subterfuge. Yet he implied the falsehood even while he hated the necessity which forced him to it. So all his life he had done the things that he condemned, condemning himself because he did them. For more than a year now he had lived above a continuous undercurrent of subterfuge--he had lied to Blossom, he had deceived his mother, he had wilfully encouraged Molly to believe a falsehood--and yet all the time, he was conscious that his nature preferred the honourable and the candid course. His intentions were still honest, but long ago in his boyhood, when he had first committed himself to impulse, he had prepared the way for his subsequent failures. To-day, with a weakened will, with an ever increasing sensitiveness of his nervous system, he knew that he should go on desiring the good while he compromised with the pleasanter aspect of evil.
"She wouldn"t speak to me," said Molly, "I can"t understand it. What did you say to her?"
"I asked her if she were ill and if we could do anything for her."
"I can"t get over her look. I wish I had jumped down and run after her, but she went off so quickly."
So intense was the sunshine that it appeared to burn into the white streak of the road, where the dust floated like some smoke on the breathless air. From the scorched hedges of sumach and bramble, a chorus of gra.s.shoppers was cheerfully giving praise to a universe that ignored it.
As Molly rode silently at Gay"s side, it seemed to her that Blossom"s startled face looked back at her from the long, hot road, from the waste of broomsedge, from the cloudless sky, so bright that it hurt her eyes.
It was always there wherever she turned: she could not escape it. A sense of suffocation in the midst of s.p.a.ce choked back the words she would have spoken, and she felt that the burning dust, which hung low over the road, had drifted into her brain and obscured her thoughts as it obscured the objects around her. When, after pa.s.sing the ordinary, they turned into the Applegate road, the heavy shade brought a sensation of relief, and the face which had seemed to start out of the blanched fields, faded slowly away from her.
As she entered the little village of Piping Tree, her desire to hear Abel"s speech left her as suddenly as it had come, and she began to wish that she had not permitted herself to follow her impulse, or that at the last moment she had forbidden Gay to accompany her. In place of the cool determination of an hour ago, a confusing hesitancy, a baffling shyness, had taken possession of her, weakening her resolution. She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly into a diverging road in spite of the pull of the bit.
"I don"t believe I"ll stay, after all, Jonathan," she said weakly. "It"s so hot and I don"t really want to hear him."
"But we"re here now, Molly, and he"s already begun." Against the feminine instinct to fight the battle and then yield the victory, he opposed the male determination to exact the reward in return for the trouble. "It"s over there in the picnic grounds by the court-house," he pursued. "Come on. We needn"t dismount if you don"t feel like it--but I"ve a curiosity to know what he"s talking about."
Her fuss, of course, he told himself, had been foolish, but after she had made the fuss, he had no intention of returning without hearing the miller. Abel"s ambition as an orator bored him a little, for in his cla.s.s the generations ahead of him had depleted the racial supply of political material. The nuisance of politics had been spared him, he would have said, because the control of the State was pa.s.sing from the higher to the lower cla.s.ses. To his habit of intellectual cynicism, the miller"s raw enthusiasm for what Gay called the practically untenable and ideally heroic doctrine of equality, offered a spectacle for honest and tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Oh, come on," he urged again after a moment, "we"ll stop by the fence under that cherry-tree and n.o.body will see us."
As he spoke he turned his horse toward the paling fence, while Molly hesitated, hung back, regretted bitterly that she had come, and then slowly followed. In the cherry-tree, which was laden with red cherries a little over ripe, birds were quarrelling, and for a minute she could not separate the sound of Abel"s voice from the confusion around her. Then his figure, standing under a stunted cedar on a small raised platform, which was used for school celebrations or out-of-door concerts, appeared to gather to itself all that was magnetic and alive in the atmosphere.
Of the whole crowd, including Gay, the speaker in his blue shirt, with his head thrown back enkindled from the fire of his enthusiasm, seemed the one masculine and dominating intelligence. To Molly he represented neither orator nor reformer, but a compelling force which she felt rather than heard. What he said she was hardly aware of--for it was emotion not thought that he aroused in her.
"That"s good!" said Jonathan quietly at her side, and glancing at him she realized that Gay was regarding merely a picturesque embodiment of the economic upheaval of society. Judging the scene from Gay"s standpoint, she saw that it was, after all, only the ordinary political gathering of a thinly settled community. The words, she knew now, were familiar. It was the personality of the speaker which charged them with freshness, with inspiration. What was it but the old plea for social regeneration through political purity--an appeal to put the dream of the idealist into the actual working of the State, since it is only through the brain of the dreamer that a fact may be born into the world.
"He can speak all right," observed Gay carelessly, "there"s no doubt about that."
"I"d like to go, if you don"t mind," answered Molly, and turning she rode softly away from the picnic grounds through the scattered hamlet, too small to be called a village. An old man, killing slugs in a potato field, stared after them with his long stemmed corn-cob pipe hanging loosely between his lips. Then when they had disappeared, he shook his head twice very solemnly, spat on the ground, and went on patiently murdering slugs.
""Tis that fly-up-the-creek miller as they"ve come arter," he muttered.
"Things warn"t so in my day, so they oughtn"t to be so now. I ain"t got no use for anything that ain"t never been befo"."
And in different language, the same thought was stirring in Gay"s mind.
"It"s all stuff and nonsense, these hifaluting radical theories. There"s never been a fairer distribution of property and there"s never going to be."
They rode in silence under the flowering locust-trees in the single street, and then, crossing the gra.s.sy common, cantered between two ripening fields of oats, and turned into the leafy freshness of the Applegate road. The sun was high, but the long, still shadows had begun to slant from the west, and the silence was brooding in a mellow light over the distance.
"I don"t know what we"re coming to," said Gay at last, when they had ridden a mile or two without speaking. What he really meant, though he did not say it, was, "I don"t know why in the devil"s name you keep thinking about that fellow?"
Though his own emotions were superior to reason, he was vaguely irritated because Molly had allowed hers, even in a small matter, to a.s.sert such a supremacy. He was accustomed to speak carelessly of woman as "an emotional being," yet this did not prevent his feeling an indignant surprise when woman, as occasionally happened, ill.u.s.trated the truth of his inherited generalization. A lover of the unconventional for himself, he was almost as strong a hater of it for the women who were related to him. It would have annoyed him excessively to see Kesiah make herself conspicuous in any way, or deviate by a hair"s breadth from the accepted standard of her s.e.x. And now Molly, with whom he had fallen in love, had actually flushed and paled under his eyes at the sight of young Revercomb! In some subtle manner she seemed to have stooped in his estimation--to have lowered herself from the high and narrow pedestal upon which he had placed her! Yet so contradictory are the pa.s.sions, that he felt he loved her the more, if possible, because of the angry soreness at his heart.
Turning in the direction of Applegate, they continued their ride at a canter, and the afternoon was over when they pa.s.sed the cross-roads again on their homeward way. A thin mist floated like thistledown from the marshes, which were so distant that they were visible only as a pinkish edge to the horizon. Large noisy insects, with iridescent wings, hovered around the purple, heavy scented tubes of the Jamestown weeds by the roadside, and the turnpike, glimmering like a white band through the purple dusk, was spangled with fireflies. Gay was talking as they approached the blazed pine, which stood out sinister and black against the afterglow, and it was only when Molly cried out sharply that he saw Blossom"s face looking at them again over the tiger lilies.
"Why, what in the deuce!" he exclaimed, not in anger, but in amazement.
"Blossom, wait for me!" called Molly, and would have slipped to the ground had not Gay reached out and held her in the saddle.
Then the figure of Blossom, which had waited there evidently since their first pa.s.sing, vanished like an apparition into the grey twilight.
The pallid face floated from them through the grape-scented mist, and Molly"s call brought no answer except the cry of a whip-poor-will from the thicket.
CHAPTER XII
ONE OF LOVE"S VICTIMS
A week later Jim Halloween stopped with a bit of news at Bottom"s Ordinary, where old Adam Doolittle dozed under the mulberry tree in a rush chair which had been brought over in his son"s oxcart.
"Have you all heard that our Mr. Mullen has accepted a call to larger fields?" he inquired, "an" that Judy Revercomb has gone clean daft because he"s going to leave us?"
"She didn"t have far to go," observed Mrs. Bottom.
"Well, you"d never have known it to look at her," commented young Adam, "but "tis a true sayin" that you can"t tell the quality of the meat by the colour of the feathers."
"You"d better be speakin" particular, suh, an" not general," retorted old Adam, who was in a querulous mood as the result of too abrupt an awakening from his nap. "What you ain"t known it doesn"t follow other folks ain"t, does it? Human natur is generally made with a streak of foolishness an" a streak of sense, just as fat an" lean runs in a piece of bacon. That"s what I say, an" I reckon I ought to know, bein" turned ninety."
"All the same thar"s some folks that ain"t streaked at all, but a solid lump of silliness like Judy Hatch," returned his son.
This was too much for the patience of the patriarchial spirit, and old Adam began to shake as though he were suddenly smitten with palsy.
"What do you mean by contradictin" me, suh? Didn"t I bring you into the world?" he demanded.
A reproachful shake of the head pa.s.sed round the group.
"You oughtn"t to contradict him, young Adam. Ain"t he yo" pa?" said Mrs.
Bottom, rebukingly.
"I warn"t contradictin", I was talkin"," replied young Adam, abashed by the evident disapprobation that surrounded him.
"Well, don"t talk, suh, until you can talk sense," rejoined his father.
"When a talker has turned ninety an" can meet me on equal ground, I"ll consent to argue with him."