"What is it, granny? Will you try a bite of buckwheat?" inquired Sarah solicitously. She had never failed in her duty to her husband"s parents, and this virtue also, she was inclined to use as a weapon of offense to her children.
"Give it to him--he"s got teeth left to chaw on," whimpered grandmother, and her old chest heaved with bitterness because grandfather, who was three years the elder, still retained two jaw teeth on one side of his mouth.
A yellow-and-white cat, after vainly purring against grandmother"s stool, had jumped on the window-sill in pursuit of a belated wasp, and Sarah, rushing to the rescue of her flowers, cuffed the animal soundly and placed her in grandfather"s lap. He was a lover of cats--a harmless fancy which was a source of unceasing annoyance to his wife.
"Abel, I wish you"d mend that leak in the smokehouse after breakfast,"
remarked Sarah, in an aggressive tone that meant battle. "Two shingles are gone an" thare four more that want patchin"."
"I can"t, I"ve got work to do at the mill," replied Abel, as he rose from his chair. "Solomon Hatch sent me his corn to grind and he"s coming over to get the sacks."
"Well, I reckon I"m worth as much as Solomon Hatch, a little pasty faced critter like that," rejoined Sarah.
"Why can"t Archie do it? What is he good for?"
"I"m going hunting with Jim Halloween," returned Archie sullenly, "he"s got some young dogs he wants to break in to rabbit running."
"I might have known thar warn"t n.o.body to do what I ask "em," observed Sarah in the voice and manner of a martyr. "It"s rabbits or girls, one or the other, and if it ain"t an old hare it"s some light-moraled critter like Molly Merryweather."
Abel"s face had changed to a dull red and his eyes blazed.
"Say anything against Molly, mother, an" I"ll never speak to you again!"
he cried out angrily.
"Thar, thar, ma, you an" Abel are too pepper tongued to get into a quarrel," remarked Abner, the silent, who seldom spoke except for the promotion of peace. "I"ll mend the roof for you whenever you want it."
"I reckon I"ve got as much right to use my tongue as anybody else has,"
retorted Sarah, indignant because a solution had been found and her grievance was annulled. "If a girl ain"t a fast one that gets as good as engaged to half the young men in the county, then I"d like to know who is, that"s all?"
Then, as Abel called sharply to his fox-hound puppy and flung himself from the room, she turned away and went to sprinkle her calla lilies.
There was an agony in her breast, though she would have bitten out her tongue sooner than have confessed it. Her strength lay in the fact that never in her life had she admitted even to herself, that she had been in the wrong.
CHAPTER V
THE MILL
Outside, a high wind was driving the fallen leaves in swirls and eddies, and as Abel crossed the road to the mill, he smelt the sharp autumn scent of the rotting mould under the trees. Frost still sparkled on the bright green gra.s.ses that had overgrown the sides of the mill-race, and the poplar log over the stream was as wet as though the dancing shallows had skimmed it. Over the motionless wheel the sycamore shed its broad yellow leaves into the brook, where they fluttered downward with a noise that was like the wind in the tree-tops.
Inserting a key into the rusty lock, which was much too large for it, Abel opened the door, and counted Solomon Hatch"s sacks of grist, which stood in a row beside a raised platform where an old mill-stone was lying. Other sacks belonging to other farmers were arranged in an orderly group in one corner, and his eye pa.s.sed to them in a businesslike apprais.e.m.e.nt of their contents. According to an established custom of toll, the eighth part of the grain belonged to the miller; and this had enabled him to send his own meal to the city markets, where there was an increasing demand for the coa.r.s.e, water-ground sort. Some day he purposed to turn out the old worn-out machinery and supply its place with modern inventions, but as yet this ambition was remote, and the mill, worked after the process of an earlier century, had raised his position to one of comparative comfort and respectability. He was known to be a man of character and ambition. Already his name had been mentioned as a possible future representative of the labouring cla.s.ses in the Virginia a.s.sembly. "There is no better proof of the grit that is in the plain people than the rise of Abel Revercomb out of Abner, his father," some one had said of him. And from the day when he had picked his first blackberries for old Mr. Jonathan and tied his earnings in a stocking foot as the beginning of a fund for schooling, the story of his life had been one of struggle and of endurance. Transition had been the part of the generation before him. In him the democratic impulse was no longer fitful and uncertain, but had expanded into a stable and indestructible purpose.
Before starting the wheel, which he did by thrusting his arm through the window and lifting the gate on the mill-race, Abel took up a broom, made of sedges bound crudely together, and swept the smooth bare floor, which was polished like that of a ballroom by the sacks of meal that had been dragged back and forth over the boards. From the rafters above, long pale cobwebs were blown gently in the draught between the door and window, and when the mill had started, the whole building reverberated to the slow revolutions of the wheel outside.
The miller had poured Solomon Hatch"s grist into the hopper, and was about to turn the wooden crank at the side, when a shadow fell over the threshold, and Archie Revercomb appeared, with a gun on his shoulder and several fox-hounds at his heels.
"You"ll have to get Abner to help you dress that mill-rock, Abel," he said, "I"m off for the morning. That"s a good pup of yours, but he"s old enough to begin learning."
With the inherited idleness of the Revercombs, he combined the headstrong impulses and dogged obstinacy of his mother"s stock, yet because of his personal charm, these faults were not only tolerated but even admired by his family.
"You"re always off in the mornings when there"s work to be done,"
replied Abel, "but for heaven"s sake, bring home a string of hares to put ma into a better humour. She whets her tongue on me and I"ll be hanged if it"s right."
"She never used to do it till you went over to Mr. Mullen"s church and fell in love with Molly Merryweather. Great Scott, I"m glad I don"t stand in either of your shoes when it comes to that. Life"s too short to pay for your religion or your sweetheart every day you live."
"It would have been the same anyway--she"s put out with me about nothing. I had a right to go to Old Church if I wanted to, and what on earth has she got against Mr. Mullen anyway, except that he couldn"t recite the first chapter in Chronicles? What kind of religion does that take I"d like to know?"
The meal poured softly out of the valve into the trough beneath, and lifting a wooden scoop he bent over and scattered the pile in the centre. A white dust had settled on his hair and clothes, and this accentuated the glow in his face and gave to his whole appearance a picturesque and slightly theatrical cast.
"If it hadn"t been Molly, it would have been some one else," he added impulsively. "Ma would be sure to hate any woman she thought I"d fallen in love with. It"s born in her to be contrary just as it is in that hopvine out yonder that you can"t train up straight."
"All the same, if I were going through fire and water for a girl, I"d be pretty sure to choose one that would make it worth my while at the end.
I wouldn"t put up with all that hectoring for the sake of anybody that was as sweet to half a dozen other fellows as she was to me."
Abel"s face darkened threateningly under his silvered hair.
"If you are trying to hint anything against Molly, you"d as well stop in the beginning," he said. "It isn"t right--I"ll be hanged if it is!--that every man in the county should be down on a little thing like that, no bigger than a child. It wasn"t her fault, was it, if her father played false with her mother?"
"Oh, I"m not blaming her, am I? As far as that goes all the women like her well enough, and so do all the dogs and the children. The trouble seems to be, doesn"t it, merely that the men like her too much? She"s got a way with her, there"s no question about that."
"Why in thunder do you want to blacken her character?"
"I wasn"t blackenin" her character. I merely meant that she was a flirt, and you know that as well as I do--better, I shouldn"t wonder."
"It"s the way she was brought up. Her mother was crazy for ten years before she died, and she taught Molly all that foolishness about the meanness of men."
"Oh, well, it"s all right," said Archie carelessly, "only look out that you don"t go too near the fire and get scorched."
Whistling to the hounds that were nosing among some empty barrels in a dark corner, he shouldered his gun more firmly and went off to his hunt.
After he had gone, the miller stood for a long while, watching the meal pour from the valve. A bit of chaff had settled on his lashes, but without moving his hand to brush it away, he shook his head once or twice with the gesture of an animal that is stung by a wasp. "Why do they keep at me about her?" he asked pa.s.sionately. "Is it true that she is only playing with me as she plays with the others?"--but the pain was too keen, and turning away with a sigh, he rested his elbows on the sill of the window and looked out at the moving wheel under the gauzy shadows. The sound of the water as it rushed through the mill-race into the buckets and then fell from the buckets into the whirlpool beneath, was loud in his ears while his quick glance, pa.s.sing over the drifting yellow leaves of the sycamore, discerned a spot of vivid red in the cornlands beyond. The throbbing of his pulses rather than the a.s.surance of his eyes told him that Molly was approaching; and as the bit of colour drew nearer amid the stubble, he recognized the jacket of crimson wool that the girl wore as a wrap on chill autumn mornings. On her head there was a small knitted cap matching the jacket, and this resting on her riotous brown curls, lent a touch of boyish gallantry to her slender figure. Like most women of mobile features and ardent temperament, her beauty depended so largely upon her mood that Abel had seen her change from positive plainness to amazing loveliness in the s.p.a.ce of a minute.
Her small round face, with its wonderful eyes, dimpled now over the crimson jacket.
"Abel!" she called softly, and paused with one foot on the log while the water sparkled beneath her. Ten minutes before he had vowed to himself that she had used him badly and he would hold off until she made sufficient amends; but in forming this resolution, he had reckoned without the probable intervention of Molly.
"I thought--as long as I was going by--that I"d stop and speak to you,"
she said.
He shook his head, unsoftened as yet by her presence. "You didn"t treat me fair yesterday, Molly," he answered.
"Oh, I wanted to tell you about that. I quite meant to go with you--only it went out of my head."
"That"s a pretty excuse, isn"t it, to offer a man?"
"Well, you aren"t the only one I"ve offered it to," she dimpled enchantingly, "the rector had to be satisfied with it as well. He asked me, too, and when I forgot I"d promised you, I said I"d go with him to see old Abigail. Then I forgot that, too," she added with a penitent sigh, "and went down to the low grounds."
"You managed to come up in time to meet Mr. Jonathan at the cross-roads," he commented with bitterness.