I. At Bottom's Ordinary
II. In Which Destiny Wears the Comic Mask
III. In Which Mr. Gay Arrives at His Journey's End
IV. The Revercombs
V. The Mill
VI. Treats of the Ladies' Sphere
VII. Gay Rushes Into a Quarrel and Secures a Kiss
VIII. Shows Two Sides of a Quarrel
IX. In Which Molly Flirts
X. The Reverend Orlando Mullen Preaches a Sermon
XI. A Flight and an Encounter
XII. The Dream and the Real
XIII. By the Mill-race
XIV. Shows the Weakness in Strength
XV. Shows the Tyranny of Weakness
XVI. The Coming of Spring
XVII. The Shade of Mr. Jonathan
XVIII. The Shade of Reuben
XIX. Treats of Contradictions
XX. Life's Ironies
XXI. In Which Pity Masquerades as Reason
I. In which Youth Shows a Little Seasoned
II. The Desire of the Moth
III Abel Hears Gossip and Sees a Vision
IV. His Day of Freedom
V. The Shaping of Molly
VI. In Which Hearts Go Astray
VII. A New Beginning to an Old Tragedy
VIII. A Great Passion in a Humble Place
IX. A Meeting in the Pasture
X. Tangled Threads
XI. The Ride to Piping Tree
XII. One of Love's Victims
XIII. What Life Teaches
XIV. The Turn of the Wheel
XV. Gay Discovers Himself
XVI. The End
Author's Note: The scene of this story is not the
place of the same name in Virginia.
It was past four o'clock on a sunny October day, when a stranger, who had ridden over the "corduroy" road between Applegate and Old Church, dismounted near the cross-roads before the small public house known to its frequenters as Bottom's Ordinary. Standing where the three roads meet at the old turnpike-gate of the county, the square brick building, which had declined through several generations from a chapel into a tavern, had grown at last to resemble the smeared face of a clown under a steeple hat which was worn slightly awry. Originally covered with stucco, the walls had peeled year by year until the dull red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of the wayfarer to the bar beneath. This cheerful room which sprouted, like some grotesque wing, from the right side of the chapel, marked not only a utilitarian triumph in architecture, but served, on market days to attract a larger congregation of the righteous than had ever stood up to sing the doxology in the adjoining place of worship. Good and bad prospects were weighed here, weddings discussed, births and deaths recorded in ever-green memories, and here, also, were reputations demolished and the owners of them hustled with scant ceremony away to perdition.
From the open door of the bar on this particular October day, there streamed the ruddy blaze of a fire newly kindled from knots of resinous pine. Against this pleasant background might be discerned now and then the shapeless silhouette of Betsey Bottom, the innkeeper, a soft and capable soul, who, in attaching William Ming some ten years before, had successfully extinguished his identity without materially impairing her own. Bottom's Ordinary had always been ruled by a woman, and it would continue to be so, please God, however loudly a mere Ming might protest to the contrary. In the eyes of her neighbours, a female, right or wrong, was always a female, and this obvious fact, beyond and above any natural two-sided jars of wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs. Ming as a conjugal martyr. Being an amiable body—peaceably disposed to every living creature, with the exception of William—she had hastened to the door to reprimand him for some trivial neglect of the grey mule, when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor with a bucket of soapsuds.
"Thar's nobody on earth out thar but young Mr. Jonathan Gay come back to Jordan's Journey," she said. "I declar I'd know a Gay by his eyes if I war to meet him in so unlikely a place as Kingdom Come. He's talkin' to old Adam Doolittle now," she added, for the information of the maid, who, being of a curious habit of mind, had raised herself on her knees and was craning her neck toward the door, "I can see his lips movin', but he speaks so low I can't make out what he says."
"Lemme git dar a minute, Miss Betsey, I'se got moughty sharp years, I is."
"They're no sharper than mine, I reckon, and I couldn't hear if I stood an' listened forever. It's about the road most likely, for I see old Adam a-pintin'."
For a minute after dismounting the stranger looked dubiously at the mottled face of the tavern. On his head the sunlight shone through the boughs of a giant mulberry tree near the well, and beyond this the Virginian forest, brilliant with its autumnal colours of red and copper, stretched to the village of Applegate, some ten or twelve miles to the north.
Starting southward from the cross-roads, the character of the country underwent so sudden a transformation that it looked as if man, having contended here unsuccessfully with nature, had signed an ignominious truce beneath the crumbling gateposts of the turnpike. Passing beyond them a few steps out of the forest, one found a low hill, on which the reaped corn stood in stacks like weapons of a vanished army, while across the sunken road, the abandoned fields, overgrown with broomsedge and life-everlasting, spread for several miles between "worm fences" which were half buried in brushwood. To the eyes of the stranger, fresh from the trim landscapes of England, there was an aspect of desolation in the neglected roads, in the deserted fields, and in the dim grey marshes that showed beyond the low banks of the river.
In the effort to shake off the depression this loneliness had brought on his spirits, he turned to an ancient countryman, wearing overalls of blue jeans, who dozed comfortably on the circular bench beneath the mulberry tree.
"Is there a nearer way to Jordan's Journey, or must I follow the turnpike?" he asked.
"Hey? Young Adam, are you thar, suh?"
Young Adam, a dejected looking youth of fifty years, with a pair of short-sighted eyes that glanced over his shoulder as if in fear of pursuit, shuffled round the trough of the well, and sat down on the bench at his parent's side.
"He wants to know, pa, if thar's a short cut from the ornary over to
Jordan's Journey," he repeated.
Old Adam, who had sucked patiently at the stem of his pipe during the explanation, withdrew it at the end, and thrust out his lower lip as a child does that has stopped crying before it intended to.
"You can take a turn to the right at the blazed pine a half a mile on," he replied, "but thar's the bars to be pulled down an' put up agin."
"I jest come along thar, an' the bars was down," said young Adam.
"Well, they hadn't ought to have been," retorted old Adam, indignantly. "Bars is bars whether they be public or private, an' the man that pulls 'em down without puttin' 'em up agin, is a man that you'll find to be loose moraled in other matters."
"It's the truth as sure as you speak it, Mr. Doolittle," said a wiry, knocked-kneed farmer, with a hatchet-shaped face, who had sidled up to the group. "It warn't no longer than yesterday that I was sayin' the same words to the new minister, or rector as he tries to get us to call him, about false doctrine an' evil practice. 'The difference between sprinklin' and immersion ain't jest the difference between a few drips on the head an' goin' all under, Mr. Mullen,' I said, 'but 'tis the whole difference between the natur that's bent moral an' the natur that ain't.' It follows as clear an' logical as night follows day—now, I ax you, don't it, Mr. Doolittle—that a man that's gone wrong on immersion can't be trusted to keep his hands off the women?"
"I ain't sayin' all that, Solomon Hatch," responded old Adam, in a charitable tone, "seein' that I've never made up my own mind quite clear on those two p'ints—but I do say, be he immersed or sprinkled, that the man who took down them bars without puttin' 'em up ain't a man to be trusted."
"'Twarn't a man, 'twas a gal," put in young Adam, "I seed Molly
Merryweather goin' toward the low grounds as I come up."
"Then it's most likely to have been she," commented Solomon, "for she is a light-minded one, as is proper an' becomin' in a child of sin."
The stranger looked up with a laugh from the moss-grown cattle trough beside which he was standing, and his eyes—of a peculiar dark blue—glanced merrily into the bleared ones of old Adam.
"I ain't so blind yet as not to know a Gay when I see one," said the labourer, with a sly chuckle. "If I hadn't closed the eyes of old Mr. Jonathan when he was found dead over yonder by the Poplar Spring, I'd as soon as not take my Bible oath that he'd come young agin an' was ridin' along back to Jordan's Journey."
"Do you believe down here that my uncle killed himself?" asked the young man, with a furtive displeasure in his voice, as if he alluded to a disagreeable subject in response to some pressure of duty.
"'Tis as it may be, suh, I can't answer for that. To this day if you get Solomon Hatch or Betsey Bottom, (axin' her pardon for puttin' her last), started on the subject they'll contend till they're blue in the face that 'twas naught done but pure murder. However, I'm too old at my time of life to take up with any opinion that ain't pleasant to think on, an', when all's said an' done, pure murder ain't a peaceable, comfortable kind of thing to believe in when thar's only one Justice of the Peace an' he bed-ridden since Christmas. When you ax me to pin my faith on any p'int, be it for this world or the next, my first question consarnin' it is whether that particular p'int happens to be pleasant. 'Tis that little small argyment of mine that has confounded Mr. Mullen more than once, when he meets me on equal ground outside the pulpit. 'Mebbe 'tis an' mebbe 'tisn't,' as I remarked sociably to him about the matter of eternal damnation, 'but you can't deny, can you, suh, bein' outside the pulpit an' bound to speak the truth like the rest of us, that you sleep a long sight easier in yo' bed when you say to yo'self that mebbe 'tisn't?'"
"You see pa's old, an' he won't harbour any belief at his time of life that don't let him rest comfortable," remarked young Adam, in an apologetic aside. "It's that weakness of his that keeps him from bein' a thorough goin' good Christian."
"That strange young clergyman has stirred us all up about the doctrines," said Solomon Hatch. "He's opened Old Church agin, an' he works terrible hard to make us feel that we'd rather be sprinkled on the head than go under all over. A nice-mannered man he is, with a pretty face, an' some folks hold it to be a pity that we can't change our ideas about baptism and become Episcopals in our hearts, jest to oblige him. The women have, mostly, bein' an accommodatin' sex in the main, with the exception of Mrs. Mallory, the blacksmith's mother, who declars she'd rather give up eternal damnation any day than immersion."
"I ain't goin' so fur as that," rejoined old Adam, "an' mo'over, when it comes to the p'int, I've never found any uncommon comfort in either conviction in time of trouble. I go to Mr. Mullen's church regular every Sunday, seein' the Baptist one is ten miles off an' the road heavy, but in my opinion he's a bit too zealous to turn over the notions of the prophets an' set up his own. He's at the age when a man knows everything on earth an' generally knows it wrong."
"You see pa had been settin' on the anxious bench for forty years," explained young Adam, "an' when Mr. Mullen came, he took it away from under him, so to speak, while he was still settin' on it."
"'Twas my proper place," said old Adam resentfully, "when it comes to crops or the weather I am firm fixed enough in my belief, but in matters of religion I hold with the onsartain."
"Only his powerful belief in the Devil an' all his works keeps him from bein' a heathen," observed young Adam in awe-stricken pride. "Even Mr. Mullen can't move him, he's so terrible set."
"Well, he ain't my Redeemer, though doubtless he'd be cast down if he was to hear as I'd said so," chuckled the elder. "The over earnest, like the women folk, are better not handled at all or handled techily. I'm near blind as it is, but ain't that the man yonder leadin' his horse out of the Applegate road?"
"'Taint the rector, but the miller," responded his son. "He's bringin' over Mrs. Bottom's sack of meal on the back of his grey mare."
"Ah, he's one of the folks that's gone over neck an' crop to the Episcopals," said Solomon Hatch. "His folks have been Presbyterians over at Piping Tree sence the time of Noah, but he recites the Creed now as loud as he used to sing the doxology. I declar his voice boomed out so in my ears last Sunday that I was obleeged to put up my hands to keep 'em from splittin'. Have you ever marked, Mr. Doolittle, havin' had the experience of ninety years, that when a man once takes up with a heresy, he shouts a heap louder than them that was born an' baptised in it? It seems as if they can't desert the ancient ways without defying 'em as well."
"'Tis so, 'tis so," admitted old Adam, wagging his head, "but Abel Revercomb was al'ays the sort that could measure nothin' less than a bushel. The pity with big-natured folk is that they plough up a mountain and trip at last over a pea-vine!"
From the gloom and brightness of the Applegate road there emerged the large figure of a young man, who led a handsome grey mare by the halter. As he moved against the coloured screen of the leaves something of the beauty of the desolate landscape showed in his face—the look of almost autumnal sadness that one finds, occasionally, in the eyes of the imaginative rustic. He wore a pair of sheepskin leggins into which the ends of his corduroy trousers were stuffed slightly below the knees. His head was bare, and from the open neck of his blue flannel shirt, faded from many washings, the muscles in his throat stood out like cords in the red-brown flesh. From his uncovered dark hair to his heavy boots, he was powdered with the white dust of his mill, the smell of which floated to the group under the mulberry tree as he passed up the walk to the tavern.
"I lay he seed Molly Merryweather comin' up from the low grounds," remarked Solomon, when the young man had moved out of earshot.
"Thar's truth spoken for once, if only by accident," retorted old Adam. "Yonder comes Reuben Merryweather's wagon now, laden with fodder. Is thar anybody settin' on it, young Adam? My eyes is too po' to make out."
"Molly Merryweather, who else?" responded the younger.
The wagon approached slowly, piled high with fodder and drawn by a pair of old oxen. In the centre of the load a girl was sitting, with a pink sunbonnet on her shoulders, and the light wind, which drove in gusts from the river, blowing the bunch of clustering brown curls on her neck. She was a small vivid creature, with a sunburned colour and changeable blue eyes that shone almost green in the sunlight.
"Terr'ble light minded as you can tell to look at her," said Solomon Hatch, "she's soft enough, so my wife says, where sick folks an' children an' animals are consarned, but she acts as if men war born without common feelin's of natur an' didn't come inside the Commandments. It's beyond me how a kind-hearted woman can be so unmerciful to an entire sex."
"Had it been otherwise 'twould have been downright disproof of God's providence and the bond of matrimony," responded old Adam.
"True, true, Mr. Doolittle," admitted Solomon, somewhat abashed. "Thar ain't any in these parts as can equal you on the Scriptures, as I've said over an' over agin. It's good luck for the Almighty that He has got you on His side, so to speak, to help Him confound His enemies."
"Thar're two sides to that, I reckon, seein' I confound not only His enemies, but His sarvents. Sech is the shot an' shell of my logic that the righteous fall before it as fast as the wicked—faster even I might say if I war speakin' particular. Have you marked how skeery Mr. Mullen has growed about meetin' my eyes over the rail of the pulpit? Why, 'twas only yesterday that I brought my guns to bear on the resurrection of the body, an' blowed it to atoms in his presence. 'Now thar's Reuben Merryweather who buried one leg at Manassas, Mr. Mullen,' I said as pleasant an' natchel as if I warn't about to confound him, 'an' what I'd like to have made clear an' easy to me, suh, is what use the Almighty is goin' to make of that odd leg on the Day of Jedgment? Will he add a new one onto Reuben,' I axed, 'when, as plain as logic will have it, it won't be a resurrection, but a creation, or will he start that leg a-trampin' by itself all the way from Manassas to jine the other at Old Church?' The parson had been holdin' pretty free all the mornin' with nobody daring to contradict him, and a man more taken aback by the power of logic my sight never lit on. 'Spare me, Mr. Doolittle,' was all he said, never a word mo'. 'Spare me, Mr. Doolittle.'"
"Ah, a tough customer you are," commented Solomon, "an' what answer did you make to that, suh?"
Old Adam's pipe returned to his mouth, and he puffed slowly a minute.
"'Twas a cry for mercy, Solomon, so I spared him," he responded.
The wagon had reached the well, and without stopping, the large white-and-red oxen moved on into the turnpike. Bending from her high seat, Molly Merryweather smiled at the miller, who made a single stride toward her. Then her glance passed to the stranger, and for an instant she held his gaze with a pair of eyes that appeared to reflect his in shape, setting and colour. In the man's face there showed perplexity, admiration, ironic amusement; in the girl's there was a glimmer of the smile with which she had challenged the adoring look of the miller.
The flush left the features of young Revercomb, and he turned back, with a scowl on his forehead, while old Adam cackled softly over the stem of his pipe.
"Wiles come as natchel to women as wickedness to men, young Adam," he said. "The time to beware of 'em is in yo' youth befo' they've bewitched yo'. Why, 'tis only since I've turned ninety that I've trusted myself to think upon the sex with freedom."
"I'm bewarin'," replied his son, "but when Molly Merryweather widens her eyes and bites her underlip, it ain't in the natur of man or beast to stand out agin her. Why, if it had been anybody else but the rector I could have sworn I saw him squeezin' her hand when he let down the bars for her last Sunday."
"It's well knowed that when he goes to upbraid her for makin' eyes at him durin' the 'Have mercy on me,' he takes a mortal long time about the business," responded Solomon, "but, good Lord, 'tain't fur me to wish it different, seein' it only bears out all I've argured about false doctrines an' evil practice. From the sprinklin' of the head thar's but a single step downward to the holdin' of hands."
"Well, I'm a weak man like the rest of you," rejoined young Adam, "an' though I'm sound on the doctrines—in practice I sometimes backslide. I'm thankful, however, it's the lesser sin an' don't set so heavy on the stomach."
"Ah, it's the light women like Molly Merryweather that draws the eyes of the young," lamented old Adam.
"A pretty bit of vanity, is she?" inquired the stranger lightly, and fell back the next instant before the vigorous form of the miller, who swung round upon him with the smothered retort, "That's a lie!" The boyish face of the young countryman had paled under his sunburn and he spoke with the suppressed passion of a man who is not easily angered and who responds to the pressure of some absorbing emotion.
"Lord, Lord, Abel, Mr. Jonathan warn't meanin' no particular disrespect, not mo' was I," quavered old Adam.
"You're too pipin' hot, miller," interposed Solomon. "They warn't meanin' any harm to you nor to the gal either. With half the county courtin' her it ain't to be expected that she'd go as sober as a grey mare, is it?"
"Well, they're wastin' their time," retorted the miller, "for she marries me, thank God, this coming April."
Turning away the next instant, he vaulted astride the bare back of the mare, and started at a gallop in the direction of the turnpike.
"I'll be blessed if that little gal of Reuben Merryweather's ain't his religion," commented young Adam.
"An' he's of the opinion that he's going to marry her this comin' spring," cackled Solomon. "Well, I could be namin' two or three others of the same mind, if I'd take the trouble. It's all sensible enough to lambaste the women when they don't pick up every virtue that we throw away, but what's to be expected of 'em, I ax, when all the men sence Adam have been praisin' the sober kind of gal while they was runnin' arter the silly? Thar're some among 'em, I reckon, as have reasoned out to themselves that a man's pursuit speaks louder in the years, arter all, than his praise. Now, thar's a fine, promisin' farmer, like the miller gone runnin' loose, mo's the pity."
"A kind heart at bottom," said old Adam, "but he's got a deal of larnin' to do befo' he'll rest content to bide along quietly in the same world with human natur."
"Oh, he's like the Revercombs from the beginnin'," protested Solomon, "slow an' peaceable an' silent until you rouse 'em, but when they're once roused, they're roused beyond God or devil."
"Is this young Cain or Abel the head of the family?" inquired the stranger.
"Bless you, no, Mr. Jonathan, he ain't the head—for thar's his brother Abner still livin'—but, head or tail, he's the only part that counts, when it comes to that. Until the boy grew up an' took hold of things, the Revercombs warn't nothin' mo' than slack fisted, out-at-heel po' white trash, as the niggers say, though the old man, Abel's grandfather, al'ays lays claim to bein' connected with the real Revercombs, higher up in the State—However that may be, befo' the war thar warn't no place for sech as them, an' 'tis only since times have changed an' the bottom begun to press up to the top that anybody has heerd of 'em. Abel went to school somehow by hook or crook an' got a good bit of book larnin', they say, an' then he came back here an' went to turnin' up every stone an' stick on the place. He ploughed an' he sowed an' he reaped till he'd saved up enough to buy that piece of low ground betwixt his house and the grist-mill. Then Ebenezer Timberlake died of the dropsy an' the first thing folks knew, Abel had moved over and turned miller. All the grain that's raised about here now goes to his mill, an' they say he'll be throwin' out the old and puttin' in new-fangled machinery befo' the year is up. He's the foremost man in these parts, suh, unless you war to come to Jordan's Journey to live like yo' uncle."
"To live like my uncle," repeated the young man, with an ironic intonation that escaped the ears of old Adam. "But what of the miller's little sweetheart with the short hair and the divine smile? Whose daughter is she?"
Old Adam's thin lips flattened until a single loosened tooth midway of his lower gum wagged impishly back and forth. His face, sunburned and frosted like the hardened rind of some winter fruit, revealed the prominent bones of the skull under the sunken flesh. One of his gnarled old hands, trembling and red, clutched the clay bowl of his pipe; the other, with the callous skin of the palm showing under the bent fingers, rested half open on the leather patch that covered the knee of his overalls. A picture of toilworn age, of the inevitable end of all mortal labour, he had sat for hours in the faint sunshine, smiling with his sunken, babyish mouth at the brood of white turkeys that crowded about the well.
"Well, she's Reuben Merryweather's granddaughter, suh," replied Solomon in the place of the elder. "He was overseer at Jordan's Journey, you know, durin' the old gentleman's lifetime, after the last Jordan died and the place was bought by yo' uncle. Ah, 'twas different, suh, when the Jordans war livin'!"
Some furtive malice in his tone caused the stranger to turn sharply upon him.
"The girl's mother—who was she?" he asked.
"Janet Merryweather, the prettiest gal that ever set foot on these roads. Ah, 'twas a sad story, was hers, an' the less said about it, the soonest forgotten. Thar was some folks, the miller among 'em, that dropped dead out with the old minister—that was befo' Mr. Mullen's time—for not wantin' her to be laid in the churchyard. A hard case, doubtless, but a pious man such as I likes to feel sartain that however much he may have fooled along with sinful women in this world, only the most respectable of thar sex will rise around him at the Jedgment."
"And the father?" inquired the stranger, with a sound as if he drew in his breath sharply.
"Accordin' to the Law an' the Prophets she hadn't any. That may be goin' agin natur, suh, but 'tis stickin' close to Holy Writ an' the wisdom of God."
To this the young man's only response was a sudden angry aversion that showed in his face. Then lifting his horse's head from the trodden grass by the well, he sprang into the saddle, and started, as the miller had done, over the three roads into the turnpike. Remembering as he passed the gate posts that he had spoken no parting word to the group under the mulberry tree, he raised himself in his stirrups, and called back "Good day to you. Many thanks," in his pleasant voice.
Putting his horse to a canter, Mr. Jonathan Gay rode through the old gate into the turnpike. His still indignant look was fixed on the heavy wheelruts ahead, while his handsome though fleshy figure inclined slightly forward in the saddle after a foreign fashion. Seen close at hand his face, which was impressive at a distance, lost a certain distinction of contour, as though the marks of experience had blurred, rather than accentuated, the original type. The bones of forehead and nose still showed classic in outline, but in moulding the mouth and chin nature had not adhered closely to the aristocratic structure beneath. The flesh sagged a little in places; the brow was a trifle too heavy, the jaw a trifle too prominent, the lips under the short dark moustache were a trifle too full. Yet in spite of this coarseness of finish, his face was well coloured, attractive, and full of generous, if whimsical, humour. A judge of men would have seen in it proof that Mr. Gay's character consisted less in a body of organized tendencies than in a procession of impulses.
White with dust the turnpike crawled straight ahead between blood-red clumps of sumach and bramble on which the faint sunlight still shone. At intervals, where the dripping from over-hanging boughs had worn the road into dangerous hollows, boles of young saplings had been placed cross-wise in a corduroy pattern, and above them clouds of small belated butterflies drifted in the wind like blown yellow rose leaves. On the right the thin corn shocks looked as if they were sculptured in bronze, and amid them there appeared presently the bent figure of a harvester, outlined in dull blue against a sky of burnt orange. From the low grounds beside the river a mist floated up, clinging in fleecy shreds to the short grass that grew in and out of the bare stubble. The aspect of melancholy, which was depressing even in the broad glare of noon, became almost intolerable under the waning light of the afterglow. Miles of loneliness stretched on either side of the turnpike, which trailed, without fork or bend, into the flat distance beyond the great pine at the bars.
For the twentieth time since he had left the tavern, Mr. Gay, whose habit it was to appear whimsical when he felt despondent, declared to himself that he'd be damned if the game was worth half what the candle was likely to cost him. Having arrived, without notable misadventure, at the age of thirty, he had already reduced experience to a series of episodes and had embraced the casual less as a pastime than as a philosophy.
"If the worst comes to the worst—hang it!—I suppose I may hunt a Molly Cotton-tail," he grumbled, bringing his horse's gait down to an amble. "There ought to be good hounds about, judging from the hang-dog look of the natives. Why in thunder did the old boy want to bury himself and his heirs forever in this god-forsaken land's end, and what in the deuce have mother and Aunt Kesiah done with themselves down here for the last twenty years? Two thousand acres? Damn it! I'd rather have six feet on the good English soil! Came to get rid of one woman, did he?—and tumbled into a pretty puddle with another as soon as he got here. By George, it's in the bone and it is obliged to come out in the blood. A Gay will go on ogling the sex, I suppose, as long as he is able to totter back from the edge of the grave."
As he approached the blazed pine, a spot of darkness, which he had at first mistaken for a small tree, detached itself from the surrounding shadows, and assumed gradually a human shape. His immediate impression was that the shape was a woman and that she was young. With his next breath he became aware that she was also beautiful. In the fading light her silhouette stood out as distinctly against the mellow background of the sky, as did the great pine which marked the almost obliterated path over the fields. Her dress was the ordinary calico one, of some dull purplish shade, worn by the wives and daughters of the neighbouring farmers; and on her bare white arm, with its upturned sleeve, she carried a small split basket half filled with persimmons. She was of an almost pure Saxon type—tall, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, with a skin the colour of new milk, and soft ashen hair parted smoothly over her ears and coiled in a large, loose knot at the back of her head. As he reached her she smiled faintly and a little brown mole at the corner of her mouth played charmingly up and down. After the first minute, Gay found himself fascinated by this single imperfection in her otherwise flawless features. More than her beauty he felt that it stirred his blood and aroused in him the physical tenderness which he associated always with some vague chivalrous impulse.
She moved slightly when he dismounted beside her, and a number of small splotches of black circling around her resolved themselves into a bodyguard of little negroes, clad in checked pinafores, with the scant locks wrapped tightly with crimson cotton.
"May I let down the bars for you?" he asked, turning to look into her face with a smile, "and do you take your collection of piccaninnies along for protection or for amusement?"
"Grandma doesn't like me to go out alone, sir—so many dreadful things happen," she answered gently, with an utter absence of humour. "I can't take anybody who is at work, so I let the little darkies come. Mary Jo is the oldest and she's only six."
"Is your home near here?"
"I live at the mill. It's a mile farther on, but there is a short cut."
"Then you are related to the miller, Mr. Revercomb—that fine looking chap I met at the ordinary?"
"He is my uncle. I am Blossom Revercomb," she answered.
"Blossom? It's a pretty name."
Her gaze dwelt on him calmly for and instant, with the faintest quiver of her full white lids, which appeared to weigh heavily on her rather prominent eyes of a pale periwinkle blue.
"My real name is Keren-happuch," she said at last, after a struggle with herself, "grandma bein' a great Scripture reader, chose it when I was born—but they call me Blossom, for short."
"And am I permitted, Miss Keren-happuch, to call you Blossom?"
Again she hesitated, pondering gravely.
"Mary Jo, if you unwrap your hair your mother will whip you," she said suddenly, and went on without a perceptible change of tone, "Keren-happuch is an ugly name, and I don't like it—though grandma says we oughtn't to think any of the Bible names ugly, not even Gog. She is quite an authority on Scripture, is grandma, and she can repeat the first chapter in Chronicles backward, which the minister couldn't do when he tried."
"I'd like to hear the name that would sound ugly on your lips, Miss
Keren-happuch."
If the sons of farmers had sought to enchant her ears with similar strains, there was no hint of it in the smiling eyes she lifted to his. The serenity of her look added, he thought, to her resemblance to some pagan goddess—not to Artemis nor to Aphrodite, but to some creature compounded equally of earth and sky. Io perhaps, or Europa? By Jove he had it at last—the Europa of Veronese!
"There'll have to be a big frost before the persimmons get sweet," she observed in a voice that was remarkably deep and full for a woman. With the faint light on her classic head and her milky skin, he found a delicious piquancy in the remark. Had she gossiped, had she even laughed, the effect would have been disastrous. Europa, he was vaguely aware, would hardly have condescended to coquetry. Her speech, like her glance, would be brief, simple, direct.
"Tell me about the people here," he asked after a pause, in which he plucked idly at the red-topped orchard grass through which they were passing. Behind them the six little negroes walked primly in single file, Mary Jo in the lead and a chocolate-coloured atom of two toddling at the tail of the procession. From time to time shrill squeaks went up from the rear when a startled partridge whirred over the pasture or a bare brown foot came down on a toad or a grasshopper.
As she made no reply, he added in a more intimate tone, "I am Jonathan
Gay, of Jordan's Journey, as I suppose you know."
"The old gentleman's nephew?" she said, while she drew slightly away from him. "Mary Jo, did you tell Tobias's mammy that he was coming along?"
"Nawm, I ain done tole nobody caze dar ain nobody done ax me."
"But I said that you were not to bring him without letting Mahaly know.
You remember what a whipping she gave him the last time he came!"
At this a dismal howl burst from Tobias. "I ain't-a-gwine-ter-git-a-whuppin'!"
"Lawd, Miss Blossom, hit cyarn' hut Tobias ez hit ud hut de res'er us," replied Mary Jo, with fine philosophy, "case dar ain but two years er 'im ter whup."
"I ain't-a-gwine-ter-git-a-whuppin'!" sang Tobias in a passionate refrain.
"Now that's just it," said Gay, feeling as though he should like to throttle the procession of piccaninnies. "What I can't understand is why the people about here—those I met at Bottom's Ordinary, for instance, seem to have disliked me even before I came."
Without surprise or embarrassment, she changed the basket from her right to her left arm, and this simple movement had the effect of placing him at a distance, though apparently by accident.
"That's because of the old gentleman, I reckon," she answered, "my folks all hated him, I don't know why."
"But can you guess? You see I really want to understand. I've been away since I was eight years old and I have only the haziest memories."
The question brought them into a sudden intimacy, as if his impulsive appeal to her had established a relation which had not existed the minute before. He liked the look of her strong shoulders, of her deep bosom rising in creamy white to her throat; and the quiver of her red lower lip when she talked, aroused in him a swift and facile emotion. The melancholy of the landscape, reacting on the dangerous softness of his mood, bent his nature toward her like a flame driven by the wind. Around them the red-topped orchard grass faded to pale rose in the twilight, and beyond the crumbling rail fence miles of feathery broomsedge swept to the pines that stood straight and black against the western horizon. Impressions of the hour and the scene, of colour and sound, were blended in the allurement which Nature proffered him, for her own ends, through the woman beside him. Not Blossom Revercomb, but the great Mother beguiled him. The forces that moved in the wind, in the waving broomsedge, and in the call of the whip-poor-will, stirred in his pulses as they stirred in the objects around him. That fugitive attraction of the body, which Nature has shielded at the cost of finer attributes, leaped upon him like a presence that had waited in earth and sky. Loftier aspirations vanished before it. Not his philosophy but the accident of a woman's face worked for destiny.
"I never knew just how it was," she answered slowly as if weighing her words, "but your uncle wasn't one of our folks, you know. He bought the place the year before the war broke out, and there was always some mystery about him and about the life he led—never speaking to anybody if he could help it, always keeping himself shut up when he could. He hadn't a good name in these parts, and the house hasn't a good name either, for the darkies say it is ha'nted and that old Mrs. Jordan—'ole Miss' they called her—still comes back out of her grave to rebuke the ha'nt of Mr. Jonathan. There is a path leading from the back porch to the poplar spring where none of them will go for water after nightfall. Uncle Abednego swears that he met his old master there one night when he went down to fill a bucket and that a woman was with him. It all comes, I reckon, of Mr. Jonathan having been found dead at the spring, and you know how the darkies catch onto any silly fancy about the dead walking. I don't believe much in ha'nts myself, though great-grandma has seen many a one in her day, and all the servants at Jordan's Journey will never rest quiet. I've always wondered if your mother and Miss Kesiah were ever frightened by the stories the darkies tell?" For a moment she paused, and then added softly, "It was all so different, they say, when the Jordans were living."
Again the phrase which had begun to irritate him! Who were these dead and gone Jordans whose beneficent memory still inhabited the house they had built?
"I don't think my mother would care for such stories," he replied after a minute. "She has never mentioned them in her letters."
"Of course nobody really puts faith in them, but I never pass the spring, if I can help it, after the sun has gone down. It makes me feel so dreadfully creepy."
"The root of this gossip, I suppose, lies in the general dislike of my uncle?"
"Perhaps—I'm not sure," she responded, and he felt that her rustic simplicity possessed a charm above the amenities of culture. "The old clergyman—that was before Mr. Mullen's day—when we all went to the church over at Piping Tree—used to say that the mercy of God would have to exceed his if He was ever going to redeem him. I remember hearing him tell grandma when I was a child that there were a few particulars in which he couldn't answer with certainty for God, and that old Mr. Jonathan Gay was one of 'em. 'God Almighty will have to find His own way in this matter,' he used to declare, 'for I wash my hands of it.' I'm sorry, sir," she finished contritely, "I forgot he was your own blood relation."
In the spirit of this contrition, she changed the basket back again to her left arm; and perceiving his advantage, Gay acted upon it with his accustomed alacrity.
"Don't apologize, please, I am glad I have this from your lips—not from a stranger's."
Under the spell of her beauty, he was aware of a pleasurable sensation, as though the pale rose of the orchard grass had gone to his head and coloured his vision. There was a thrill in feeling her large, soft arm brushing his sleeve, in watching the rise and fall of her bosom under her tight calico dress.
"I shall always know that we were friends—good friends, from the first," he resumed after a minute.
"You are very kind, sir," she answered, "this is my path over the stile and it is growin' late—Tobias's mother will surely give him a whippin'. I hope you don't mind my havin' gathered these persimmons on your land," she concluded, with an honesty which was relieved from crudeness by her physical dignity, "they are hardly fit to eat because there has been so little frost yet."
"Well, I'm sorry for that, Miss Keren-happuch, or shall it be Blossom?"
"I like Blossom better," she answered shyly, lifting her scant calico skirt with one hand as she mounted the stile.
"Then good night, lovely Blossom," he called gaily while he turned back into the bridle path which led like a frayed white seam over the pasture.
Broad and low, with the gabled pediment of the porch showing through boughs of oaks, and a flight of bats wheeling over the ivied roof, the house appeared to Gay beyond a slight swell in the meadows. The grove of oaks, changing from dark red to russet, was divided by a short walk, bordered by clipped box, which led to the stone steps and to two discoloured marble urns on which broken-nosed Cupids were sporting. As he was about to slip his reins over the back of an iron chair on the lawn, a shriek in a high pitched negro voice pierced his ears from a half shuttered dormer-window in the east wing.
"Fo' de Lawd, hit's de ha'nt er ole marster! Yessuh—Yessuh—I'se a-comin'—I'se a-comin'."
The next instant the window slammed with a bang, and the sound of flying footsteps echoed through the darkened interior of the house.
"Open the door, you fool! I'm not a ghost!" shouted Gay, but the only response came in an hysterical babble of moans from the negro quarters somewhere in the rear and in the soft whir in his face of a leatherwing bat as it wheeled low in the twilight. There was no smoke in the chimneys, and the square old house, with its hooded roof and its vacant windows, assumed a sinister and inhospitable look against the background of oaks. His mother and his aunt, he concluded, were doubtless away for their winter's shopping, so lifting his horse's head from the grass, he passed between the marble urns and the clipped box, and followed a path, deep in leaves, which led from the west wing of the house to the outside kitchen beyond a paved square at the back. Half intelligible words floated to him as he approached, and from an old pear-tree near the door there was a flutter of wings where a brood of white turkeys settled to roost. Beyond the bole of the tree a small negro in short skirts was "shooin'" a large rooster into the henhouse, but at the muffled fall of Gay's horse's hoofs on the dead leaves, she turned with a choking sound, and fled to the shelter of the kitchen at her back.
"My time's done come, but I ain't-a-gwine! I ain't-a-gwine!" wailed the chorus within. "Ole marster's done come ter fotch me, but I ain't-a-gwine! O Lawd, I ain't-a-gwine! O Jesus, I ain't-a-gwine!"
"You fools, hold your tongues!" stormed the young man, losing his temper. "Send somebody out here to take my horse or I'll give you something to shout over in earnest."
The shrieks trembled high for an instant, and then died out in a despairing moan, while the blanched face of an old servant appeared in the doorway.
"Is hit you er yo' ha'nt, Marse Jonathan?" he inquired humbly.
"Come here, you doddering idiot, and take my horse."
But half reassured the negro came a step or two forward, and made a feeble clutch at the reins, which dropped from his grasp when the roosting turkeys stirred uneasily on the bough above.
"I'se de butler, marster, en I ain never sot foot in de stable sence de days er ole miss."
"Where's my mother?"
"Miss Angela, she's done gone up ter town en Miss Kesiah she's done gone erlong wid 'er."
"Is the house closed?"
"Naw, suh, hit ain closed, but Miss Molly she's got de keys up yonder at de house er de overseer."
"Well, send somebody with a grain of sense out here, and I'll look up
Miss Molly."
At this the butler vanished promptly into the kitchen, and a minute later a half-grown mulatto boy relieved Gay of his horse, while he pointed to a path through an old apple orchard that led to the cottage of the overseer. As the young man passed under the gnarled boughs to a short flagged walk before the small, whitewashed house in which "Miss Molly" lived, he wondered idly if the lady who kept the keys would prove to be the amazing little person he had seen some hours earlier perched on the load of fodder in the ox-cart. The question was settled almost before it was asked, for a band of lamplight streamed suddenly from the door of the cottage, and in the centre of it appeared the figure of a girl in a white dress, with red stockings showing under her short skirts, and a red ribbon filleting the thick brown curls on her forehead. From her movements he judged that she was mixing a bowl of soft food for the old hound at her feet, and he waited until she had called the dog inside for his supper, before he went forward and spoke her name in his pleasant voice.
At the sound she turned with a start, and he saw her vivid little face, with the wonderful eyes, go white for a minute.
"So you are Mr. Jonathan? I thought so," she said at last, "but grandfather told me you sent no word of your coming."
She spoke quickly, with a refinement of accent which puzzled him until he remembered the malicious hints Solomon Hatch had let fall at the tavern. That she was, in reality, of his blood and the child of his uncle, he had not doubted since the moment she had smiled at him from her seat on the oxcart. How much was known, he now wondered. Had his uncle provided for her? Was his mother—was his Aunt Kesiah—aware of the truth?
"She missed my letter, I suppose," he replied. "Has she been long away?"
"Only a week. She is expected home day after to-morrow."
"Then I shall beg you to open the house for me."
She had turned back to the old hound, and was bending over to place his bowl of bread and milk on the hearth. A log fire, in which a few pine branches stood out illuminated like boughs of flame, filled the big stone fireplace, which was crudely whitewashed to resemble the low walls of the room. A kettle hung on an iron crane before the blaze, and the singing of the water made a cheerful noise amid a silence which struck Gay suddenly as hostile. When the girl raised her head he saw that her face had grown hard and cold, and that the expression of her eyes had changed to one of indignant surprise. The charming coquetry had fled from her look, yet her evident aversion piqued him into a half smiling, half serious interest. He wondered if she would marry that fine looking rustic, the miller, and if the riotous Gay blood in her veins would flow placidly in her mother's class? Had she, too, inherited, if not the name, yet the weaknesses of an older race? Was she, like himself, cursed with swift fancies and swifter disillusionments? How frail she was, and how brilliant! How innocent and how bitter!
He turned away, ostensibly to examine a print on the wall, and while his back was toward her, he felt that her gaze stabbed him like the thrust of a knife. Wheeling quickly about, he met her look, but to his amazement, she continued to stare back at him with the expression of indignant surprise still in her face. How she hated him and, by Jove, how she could hate! She reminded him of a little wild brown animal as she stood there with her teeth showing between her parted red lips and her eyes flashing defiance. The next minute he found himself asking if she could ever grow gentle—could ever soften enough to allow herself to be stroked? He remembered Solomon Hatch's remark that "she was onmerciful to an entire sex," and in spite of his effort at composure, a laugh sprang to his lips.
In the centre of the room a table was laid, and going over to it, she busied herself with the cups and saucers as though she were anxious to put a disagreeable presence out of her thoughts.
"May I share your supper?" he asked, and waited, not without amusement, for her answer.
"I'm sorry there isn't any for you at the big house," she answered politely. "If you will sit down, I'll tell Delily to bring in some batter bread."
"And you?"
"I'll have mine with grandfather. He's out in the barn giving medicine to the red cow."