"Your mother is a hard woman, and I pity the wife you bring home to her."
The softness had gone out of her voice at the mention of Sarah"s name, and she had grown defiant and reckless.
"I don"t think you are just to my mother, Molly," he said after a moment, "she has a kind heart at bottom, and when she nags at you it is most often for your good."
"I suppose it was for my mother"s good that she kept her from going to church and made the old minister preach a sermon against her?"
"That"s an old story--you were only a month old. Can"t you forget it?"
"I"ll never forget it--not even at the Day of Judgment. I don"t care how I"m punished."
Her violence, which seemed to him sinful and unreasonable, reduced him to a silence that goaded her to a further expression of anger. While she spoke he watched her eyes shine green in the sunlight, and he told himself that despite her pa.s.sionate loyalty to her mother, the blood of the Gays ran thicker in her veins than that of the Merryweathers. Her impulsiveness, her pride, her lack of self-control, all these marked her kinship not to Reuben Merryweather, but to Jonathan Gay. The qualities against which she rebelled cried aloud in her rebellion. The inheritance she abhorred endowed her with the capacity for that abhorrence. While she accused the Gays, she stood revealed a Gay in every tone, in every phrase, in every gesture.
"It isn"t you, Molly, that speaks like that," he said, "it"s something in you." She had tried his patience almost to breaking, yet in the very strain and suffering she put upon him, she had, all unconsciously to them both, strengthened the bond by which she held him.
"If I"d known you were going to preach, I shouldn"t have stopped to speak to you," she rejoined coldly. "I"d rather hear Mr. Mullen."
He stood the attack without flinching, his hazel eyes full of an angry light and the sunburnt colour in his face paling a little. Then when she had finished, he turned slowly away and began tightening the feed strap of the mill.
For a minute Molly paused on the threshold in the band of sunlight. "For G.o.d"s sake speak, Abel," she said at last, "what pleasure do you think I find in being spiteful when you won"t strike back?"
"I"ll never strike back; you may keep up your tirading forever."
"I wouldn"t have said it if I"d known you"d take it so quietly."
"Quietly? Did you expect me to pick you up and throw you into the hopper?"
"I shouldn"t have cared--it would have been better than your expression at this minute. It"s all your fault anyway, for not falling in love with Judy Hatch, as I told you to."
"Don"t worry. Perhaps I shall in the end. Your tantrums would wear the patience of a Job out at last. It seems that you can"t help despising a man just as soon as he happens to love you."
"I wonder if that"s true?" she said a little sadly, turning away from him until her eyes rested on the green rise of ground over the meadow, "I"ve seen men like that as soon as they were sure of their wives, and I"ve hated them for it."
"What I can"t understand," he pursued, not without bitterness, "is why in thunder a man or a woman who isn"t married should put up with it for an instant?"
At his words she left the door and came slowly back to his side, where he bent over the meal trough.
"The truth is that I like you better than anyone in the world, except grandfather," she said, "but I hate love-making. When I see that look in a man"s face and feel the touch of his hands upon me I want to strike out and kill. My mother was that way before I was born, and I drank it in with her milk, I suppose."
"I know it isn"t you fault, Molly, and yet, and yet---"
She sighed, half pitying his suffering, half impatient of his obtuseness. As he turned away, her gaze rested on his sunburnt neck, rising from the collar of his blue flannel shirt, and she saw that his hair ended in a short, boyish ripple that was powdered with mill-dust. A sudden tenderness for him as for a child or an animal pierced her like a knife.
"I shouldn"t mind your kissing me just once, if you"d like to, Abel,"
she said.
A little later, when he had helped her over the stile and she was returning home through the cornlands, she asked herself with pa.s.sionate self-reproach why she had yielded to pity? She had felt sorry for Abel, and because she had felt sorry she had allowed him to kiss her. "Only I meant him to do it gently and soberly," she thought, "and he was so rough and fierce that he frightened me. I suppose most girls like that kind of thing, but I don"t, and I shan"t, if I live to be a hundred.
I"ve got no belief in it--I"ve got no belief in anything, that is the trouble. I"m twisted out of shape, like the crooked sycamore by the mill-race."
A sigh pa.s.sed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike. As she climbed the low rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the old family carriage from Jordan"s Journey returning with the two ladies on the rear seat. The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner"s physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle patronage, if she would ride with the driver?
"Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it"s only a quarter of a mile and I don"t mind the walk."
"We"ve brought an overcoat--Kesiah and I--a good thick one, for your grandfather. It worried us last winter that he went so lightly clad during the snow storms."
Molly"s face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure.
"Oh, thank you, thank you!" she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant politeness. "I"ve been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates to spend money on himself."
Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conversation, with the scowling look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay"s salts. She was one of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end for which woman was formed. As her very right to existence lay in her possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the frustration of it by circ.u.mstances, had deprived her, almost from the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for being. Her small, short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in having permitted herself to be born.
"Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly," said Mrs. Gay, in a flutter of emotion. "Have you had a glimpse of him yet?"
The girl nodded. "He took supper at our house the night he got here."
"It was such a surprise. Was he looking well?"
"Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you know."
"Ah, I forgot. Are you sure you won"t get in, child? Well, drive on, Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage."
Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plodding obstinately after the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust that floated after the wheels.
CHAPTER VI
TREATS OF THE LADIES" SPHERE
As the carriage rolled up the drive, there was a flutter of servants between the white columns, and Abednego, the old butler, pushed aside the pink-turbaned maids and came down to a.s.sist his mistress to alight.
"Take the bird cage, Abednego, I"ve bought a new canary," said Mrs. Gay.
"Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas."
She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this helplessness was expressed in every lovely line of her figure. The most casual observer would have discerned that she had surrendered all rights in order to grasp more effectively at all the privileges. She was clinging and small and delicate and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united in an irresistible appeal to emotions.
"Where is Jonathan?" she asked, "I hoped he would welcome me."
"So I do, dearest mother--so I do," replied the young man, running hurriedly down the steps and then slipping his arm about her. "You came a minute or two earlier than I expected you, or I should have met you in the drive."
Half supporting, half carrying her, he led the way into the house and placed her on a sofa in the long drawing-room.
"I am afraid the journey has been too much for you," he said tenderly.
"Shall I tell Abednego to bring you a gla.s.s of wine."
"Kesiah will mix me an egg and a spoonful of sherry, dear, she knows just how much is good for me."