The Miller Of Old Church Part 46

"No, thar never was much natur in me," responded Sarah, lifting her bombazine skirt with both hands as she stepped over a puddle. Her floating c.r.a.pe veil, bought ten years after her husband's death, with the money made from her turkeys, represented the single extravagance as well as the solitary ambition of her life. Even as a child she had longed ardently to wear c.r.a.pe, and this secret aspiration, which had smouldered in the early poverty-stricken years of her marriage, had burst suddenly into flame when she found herself a widow. During the burial service over her husband, while she had sat bowed in musty black cotton, which had been loaned her by a neighbour, she had vowed earnestly that she would wear weeds yet for Abner before she died. Ten years of sc.r.a.ping and saving were devoted to this sacred resolve, and now, twenty years after the death of Abner Revercomb, she was wearing a c.r.a.pe veil for him to his son's wedding. As she walked, so strong a smell of camphor floated from her garments, that old Adam sneezed twice, and then muttered hurriedly that "'twas the very season for chills."

Something of her secret pride in her garb of mourning had entered into him while he limped beside her on his rheumatic old legs.

Instead of stopping with the others for the wedding feast at the Solomon's cottage, Sarah pleaded a sudden palpitation of the heart, and hurried home to put the house in order before the arrival of the bride.

Already she had prepared the best chamber and set the supper table with her blue and white china, but as she walked quietly home from church at the side of old Adam, she had remembered, with a sensation of panic, that she had forgotten to make up the the feather bed, which she rolled over for an airing. Not a speck of dust was left on the floor or windows, and a little later, while she began spreading the sheets, without waiting to remove her bonnet, she thought proudly that Judy probably never stayed in so entirely respectable a chamber in her life.

Even the pitcher and basin were elaborately ornamented with peonies, the colour of the sampler in crewel work over the washstand; and on the bureau, between two crocheted mats of an intricate pattern, there was a pincus.h.i.+on in the shape of a monstrous tomato.

Yes, it was all ready for them, she reflected, while she stood in the doorway and surveyed the results of her handiwork. "Thar's something wantin'," she observed presently to herself. "I never could feel that a weddin' or a funeral was finished without a calla lily somewhere around." Going downstairs to the kitchen, she clipped the last forced blossoms of an unusual size from her "prize" plant, and brought them back in a small gla.s.s vase to decorate Judy's bureau. "Now it's just like it was when I was married," she thought, "an' it's just as it will be when Abel's sons are bringin' home their brides." There was no sentiment in her thoughts, for she regarded sentiment as a mere morbid stimulant to the kind of emotion she considered both dangerous and useless. Even the look on Abel's face, which she had been forced to recognize as that of despair, seemed to her, on the whole, a safer expression than one of a too-exultant joy. She was not afraid of despair--its manifestations were familiar to her, and she had usually found them amenable to the laws of propriety. But she felt vaguely that happiness in some mysterious way was related to sin, and the shameless ecstasy with which Abel had announced his engagement to Molly had branded his emotion as positively immoral in her sight. "No decent feelin' is goin' to make anybody's face s.h.i.+ne like a bra.s.s plate," she had said to herself.

After straightening the crocheted mats for the last time, she went downstairs to the kitchen to describe the wedding to the two old people, who, chained to their chairs by rheumatism, were on the point of bursting with curiosity.

"An' you didn't bring me so much as a bite of cake," whimpered grandmother, seeing her empty hands. "Here I've been settin' all day in this cheer with my mouth waterin' for that weddin' cake."

"I'm just as sure as I can be that Mrs. Hatch is goin' to send you some made by Blossom," replied Sarah soothingly.

"Ah, to think of Abel bein' at his own weddin' an' we settin' here,"

piped grandfather. "'Twas a hasty business, but we Revercombs were al'ays the folk to swallow our puddin' while 'twas smokin' an' then cry out that we didn't know 'twas hot. I never knew one of us that didn't have to larn he was a fool befo' he could come at any wisdom."

"Well, I ain't got anything particular against the girl," said Sarah, "but it's my bounden belief that she'll turn out a slattern. Thar's something moonstruck about her--you can tell it by that s.h.i.+ftin'

skeered-rabbit look in her eyes. She's just the sort to sweep all the trash under the bed an' think she's cleaned the room."

"It's amazin', the small sense men have in sech matters," remarked grandfather. "Thar's a feelin' among us, I don't know whar it comes from, that the little and squinched-up women generally run to virtue."

"Oh, I ain't sayin' she's not a good girl accordin' to her lights,"

returned Sarah, "an', after all, it ain't a man but his mother that suffers from a slattern. Well, I must go an' lay off my weeds befo' it's time for 'em to get here. Don't you fret, ma, Mrs. Hatch is surely goin'

to send you something."

Inspired by this prophecy, grandmother began immediately to show signs of reviving hope, and a little later, when the sound of wheels was heard on the road, she was seized with an antic.i.p.ation so violent that she fluttered like a withered leaf in the wind. Then the wheels stopped at the gate, and Blossom and Mr. Mullen entered, bearing a small basket, which contained disordered remains of the wedding feast.

"Whar's Abel?" inquired Sarah, bowing stiffly to the young clergyman.

"We pa.s.sed them in the road. My horse for once outstripped his mare,"

replied Mr. Mullen, who felt a crawling sensation in the back of his neck whenever Sarah was present, as if he were called upon to face in her single person an entire parsimonious vestry. "I had the pleasure of driving your granddaughter home, and now I must be going back to bring mother. It was a delightful occasion, Mrs. Revercomb, and you are to be congratulated on the charming addition to your family." He hadn't meant to use the word "charming"--he had intended to say "estimable"

instead--but Sarah embarra.s.sed him by her expression, and it slipped out before he was aware of it. Her manner annoyed him excessively. It was as bad as looking up suddenly in the midst of one of the finest paragraphs in his sermon and meeting a supercilious look on a face in his congregation.

"Humph!" observed Sarah shortly, and when he had gone, she emitted the sound again, half to herself, half to her audience, "humph!"

"What's the matter, grandma?" inquired Blossom listlessly, "you don't look as if you were pleased."

"Oh, I'm pleased," replied Sarah curtly. "I'm pleased. Did you notice how yellow Abel was lookin' at the weddin'? What he needs is a good dose of castor oil. I've seen him like that befo', an' I know."

"Oh, grandma! how can you? who ever heard of anybody taking castor oil on their wedding day?"

"Well, thar's a lot of 'em that would better," rejoined Sarah in her tart manner. The perfection of Mr. Mullen's behaviour in church combined with her forgetfulness to make up the feather bed had destroyed her day, and her irritation expressed itself as usual in a moral revolt from her surroundings. "To think of makin' all this fuss about that pop-eyed Judy Hatch," she thought, and a minute later she said aloud, "Thar they are now; Blossom, you take Judy upstairs to her room an' I'll see after Abel. It ain't any use contradictin' me. He's in for a bilious spell just as sure as you are born." She spoke irritably, for her anxiety about Abel's liver covered a deeper disquietude, and she was battling with all the obstinacy of the Hawtreys against the acknowledgment that the ailment she was preparing to dose with drugs was a simple malady of the soul. In her moral universe, sin and virtue were two separate ent.i.ties, as easily distinguished on the surface as any other phenomena.

That a mere feeling, not produced by a disordered liver, could make a man wear that drawn and desperate look in his face, appeared to her both unnatural and reprehensible.

But Abel did not appear, though Sarah awaited his entrance with a bottle in her hand. As soon as he had turned his mare out to pasture, he crossed the road to the mill, and stopping beside the motionless wheel, watched the excited swallows fly back and forth overhead. He knew how a man felt who was given a life sentence in prison for an act committed in a moment of madness. Why he had ever asked Judy to marry him--why he had gone on calmly approaching the day of his wedding--he could no more explain than he could explain the motives which impelled him to the absurdities in a nightmare. It was all a part of the terrible and yet useful perversity of life--of the perversity that enables a human being to pa.s.s from inconsistency to inconsistency without pausing in his course to reflect on his folly.

In front of him was the vivid green rise in the meadow, which showed like a burst of spring in the midst of the November landscape. Beyond it, the pines were etched in sharp outlines on the bright blue sky, where a buzzard was sailing slowly in search of food. The weather was so perfect that the colours of the fields and the sky borrowed the intense and unreal look of objects seen in a crystal.

"Well, it's over and done," said Abel to himself; "it's over and done and I'm glad of it." It seemed to him while he spoke that it was his life, not his marriage, to which he alluded--that he had taken the final, the irremediable step, and there was nothing to come afterwards.

The uncertainty and the suspense were at an end, for the clanging of the prison doors behind him was still in his ears. To-morrow would be like yesterday, the next year would be like the last. Forgetting his political ambition, he told himself pa.s.sionately that there was nothing ahead of him--nothing to look forward to. Vaguely he realized that inconsistent and irreconcilable as his actions appeared, they had been, in fact, held together by a single, connecting thread, that one dominant feeling had inspired all of his motives. If he had never loved Molly, he saw clearly now, he should never have rushed into his marriage with Judy. Pity had driven him first in the direction of love--he remembered the pang that had racked his heart at the story of the forsaken Janet--and pity again had urged him to the supreme folly of his marriage. All his life he had been led astray by a temptation for drink.

"Poor Judy," he said aloud after a minute, "she deserves to be happy and I'm going to try with all the strength that is in me to make her so."

And then there rose before him, as if it moved in answer to his resolve, a memory of the past so vivid that it seemed to exist not only in his thoughts, but in the radiant autumn fields at which he was looking. All the old pa.s.sionate sweetness, as sharp as pain, appeared to float there in the Indian summer before him. Rapture or agony? He could not tell, but he knew that he had lost it forever.

Turning away, he recrossed the log, and stood for a moment, hesitating, with his hand on the gate. A decrepit figure, hobbling with bent head through a golden cloud of dust, signed to him to stop, and while he waited, he made out the person of old Adam, slightly the worse, he gathered, for the wedding feast.

"I tarried thar till the last, hopin' to have still another taste of toddy," remarked the aged merrymaker. "When a man has turned ninety he might as well cease to take thought for his morals, an' let the natchel bent of 'em have a chance."

It was plain that his last gla.s.s had been too much for him, and that, for the first time in his temperate career, he was rapidly approaching a condition of alcoholic ecstasy.

"You'd better go home and take a nap," said Abel kindly. "You can't very well get lost between here and your house, or I'd go with you."

"It warn't the weddin' gla.s.s that was too much for me," replied the old man at the point of tears, "'twas the one I had arterwards at the or'nary. Not wis.h.i.+n' to depart from an old custom on account of a rare festival, I stopped at Mrs. Bottom's just as young Mr. Jonathan an'

Reuben Merryweather's gal drove up from Applegate. Ah, sech a sight as she was--all in shot silk that rustled when you looked at it--an' as pretty as a pictur."

"So they've come back?" asked Abel, almost in a whisper.

"Yes, they've come back, an' a sad comin' it was for her, as I could see in her face. 'What are you wearin' yo' Sunday best for, Mr. Doolittle?'

asked Mr. Jonathan, spry as a cricket. 'It's a fine weddin' I've been to, Mr. Jonathan,' I answered, 'an' I've seen two lovin' hearts beatin'

as one befo' Mr. Mullen at the altar.' Then Reuben Merryweather's gal called out right quickly, 'Whose weddin', old Adam?' an' when I replied, 'Abel Revercomb's,' as I was bound to, her face went as white as a han't right thar befo' me---"

"You'd better go home or you won't be in any condition to walk there,"

said Abel angrily. "It's down right indecent to see a man of your age rocking about in the road."

Turning quickly in his tracks, he went over the log again and on to the loneliness of the meadows beyond.

"And she went as white as a haunt," he muttered under his breath.

CHAPTER VIII

A GREAT Pa.s.sION IN A HUMBLE PLACE

Time does not stand still even for the unhappily married. A man may have wedded the wrong woman, but he comes down to his breakfast and goes about his work as punctually as if he had wedded the right one. To Abel, with the thought of Molly throbbing like a fever in his brain, it was still possible to grind his grist and to subtract carefully the eighth part as a toll--while Judy, hushed in day dreams, went on making b.u.t.ter in a habit of absent-minded tranquillity. Life seldom deals in cataclysmic situations--at least on the surface. Living side by side in a married intimacy for months, Abel and Judy were still strangers to each other. Their bodies touched while their souls were crucified at an immeasurable distance.

To Sarah, who embraced Christian theology while she practised religiously the doctrine of the physical basis of life, there had seemed no cause for disturbance, until Judy entered the kitchen on a stormy evening in June, and turned a pair of inflamed eyes on the face of her mother-in-law. The young woman wore her wedding dress, now nearly seven months old, and clasped in her hand a neatly bound prayer-book which had been the gift of the Reverend Orlando. For more than six months she had suffered silently under Sarah's eyes, which saw only outward and visible afflictions. Now, at the first sign of quivering flesh, the older woman was at once on the alert.

"Whar you goin', Judy?" she inquired. "You ain't thinkin' about traipsin' out of doors on a night like this, are you?"

"Archie promised to take me to the Bible cla.s.s, an' he hasn't come back," replied Judy, while her face worked convulsively. "I've waited for him since half past seven."

"If that don't beat all!" exclaimed Sarah. "Why, it's thunderin' like Jedgment Day. Can't you hear it?"

"But I promised Mr. Mullen I wouldn't let anything prevent me," returned Judy, growing sullen. "Archie said he'd be back here without fail, an' I know he's stayed to supper over at the Halloweens'."