The Miller Of Old Church Part 17

"Oh, perfectly, you are always so thoughtful, Mr. Mullen."

"I think I am right in ranking thoughtfulness--or consideration, I should have said--among the virtues."

"Indeed you are; as soon as I found that you had not gone to Applegate as you intended to, I said to myself that, of course, some act of kindness had detained you."

His large, very round grey eyes grew soft as he looked at her.

"You have expressed it beautifully, as 'an act of kindness,'" he returned, "since you yourself were the cause of my postponing my visit."

"I--oh, you can't mean it? What have I done?"

"Nothing. Don't alarm yourself--absolutely nothing. Three months ago when I spoke to you of marriage, you entreated me to allow you a little time in which to accustom yourself to my proposal. That time of probation, which has been, I hope, equally trying to us both, has ended to-day."

"But I don't think I really love you, Mr. Mullen."

"I trust your eyes rather than your words--and your eyes have told me, all unconsciously to yourself, your secret."

"Well, I do love your sermons, but---"

"My sermons are myself. There is nothing in my life, I trust, that belies my preaching."

"I know how good you are, but honestly and truly, I don't want to marry anybody."

His smile hardened slowly on his face like an impression on metal that cools into solidity. From the beginning he had conducted his courts.h.i.+p, as he had conducted his sacred office, with the manner of a gentleman and the infallibility of an apostle. Doubt of his perfect fitness for either vocation had never entered his head. Had it done so he would probably have dismissed it as one of the insidious suggestions of the lower man--for the lower man was a creature who habitually disagreed with his opinions and whom his soul abhorred.

As he sat beside her, clerical, well-groomed, with his look of small yet solemn intelligence, she wondered seriously if he would, in spite of all opposition, have his way with her at last and pattern her to his liking?

"I am not in the least what you think me, Mr. Mullen--I don't know just how to say it---"

"There is but one thing you need know, dearest, and that is that you love me. As our greatest poet has expressed it 'To know no more is woman's happiest knowledge.'"

"But I can't feel that you really--really care for me. How can you?"

With a tender gesture, he laid his free hand on hers while he looked into her downcast face.

"You allude, I suppose, to the sad fact of your birth," he replied gently, "but after you have become my wife, you will, of course need no name but mine."

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Mullen, but really I didn't mean you to think--Oh, there's the mill and Abel looking out of the window. Please, please don't sit so close to me, and look as if we were discussing your sick paris.h.i.+oners."

He obeyed her instantly, quite as circ.u.mspect as she in his regard for the proprieties.

"You are excited now, Molly dear, but you will not forbid my hoping that you will accept my proposal," he remarked persuasively as the gig drew up to the Revercombs' gate.

"Well, yes, if you'll let me get down now, you may hope, if you wish to."

Alighting over the wheel before he could draw off his glove and a.s.sist her, she hurried, under Abel's eyes, to the porch, where Blossom Revercomb stood gazing happily in the direction of Jordan's Journey.

CHAPTER X

THE REVEREND ORLANDO MULLEN PREACHES A SERMON

On the following Sunday, a mild autumn morning, Mr. Mullen preached one of his most impressive sermons from the text, "_She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness_."

Woman, he said in the course of it, was created to look after the ways of her household in order that man might go out into the world and make a career. No womanly woman cared to make a career. What the womanly woman desired was to remain an Incentive, an Ideal, an Inspiration. If the womanly woman possessed a talent, she did not use it--for this would uns.e.x her--she sacrificed it in herself in order that she might return it to the race through her sons. Self-sacrifice--to use a worn metaphor--self-sacrifice was the breath of the nostrils of the womanly woman. It was for her power of self-sacrifice that men loved her and made an Ideal of her. Whatever else woman gave up, she must always retain her power of self-sacrifice if she expected the heart of her husband to rejoice in her. The home was founded on sacrifice, and woman was the pillar and the ornament of the home. There was her sphere, her purpose, her mission. All things outside of that sphere belonged to man, except the privilege of ministering to the sick and the afflicted in other households.

He leaned forward in the old pulpit, his shapely, well-kept hand hanging over the edge in one of his most characteristic gestures; and the autumn sunlight, falling through the plain gla.s.s windows, shone on his temples.

Immediately below him, in a front pew, sat his mother, a dried little old woman, with beady black eyes and a pointed chin, which jutted out from between the stiff taffeta strings of her poke bonnet. She gazed upward, clasping her Prayer-book in her black woollen gloves, which were darned in the fingers; and though she appeared to listen attentively to the sermon, she was wondering all the time if the coloured servant at home would remember to baste the roast pig she had left in the oven.

To-day was the Reverend Orlando's birthday, and the speckled pig she had fattened throughout the summer, lay now, with an apple in his mouth, on the trencher. She had invited Molly to dine with them rather against her wishes, for she harboured a secret fear that the girl was trying to marry the rector. Besides, as she said to herself, with her eyes on Orlando's hand, how on earth could he do full justice to the pig if there was a pretty paris.h.i.+oner to distract his attention?

In the pew next to Mrs. Mullen sat old Adam Doolittle, his hand behind his left ear, his withered old lips moving as if he were repeating the words of the sermon. From time to time he shook his head as though he disagreed with a sentence, and then his lips worked more rapidly, and an obstinate, argumentative look appeared in his face. Mentally he was conducting a theological dispute with the preacher in which the younger man suffered always a crus.h.i.+ng rhetorical defeat. Behind him sat the miller and Blossom Revercomb, who threw an occasional anxious glance at the empty seat beside Mrs. Gay and Kesiah; and behind them Judy Hatch raised her plain, enraptured face to the pulpit, where the rector had shaken out an immaculately ironed handkerchief and wiped his brow.

She knew who had ironed that handkerchief on Wednesday, which was Mrs.

Mullen's was.h.i.+ng day, and her heart rejoiced as she remembered the care with which she had folded the creases.

It made no difference, said Mr. Mullen, replacing the handkerchief somewhere under his white surplice, whether a woman was ugly or beautiful, since they possessed Scriptural authority for the statement that beauty was vain, and no G.o.d-fearing man would rank loveliness of face or form above the capacity for self-sacrifice and the unfailing attendance upon the sick and the afflicted in any parish. Beauty, indeed, was but too often a snare for the unwary--temptresses, he had been told, were usually beautiful persons.

Molly's lips trembled into a smile, and her eyes were wide and bright as she met those of the preacher. For an instant he looked at her, gentle, admonis.h.i.+ng, reproachful--then his gaze pa.s.sed over Judy's seraphic features to the face of an old grey horse that stared wonderingly in through the south window. Along the whitewashed plank fence of the church-yard, other horses were waiting patiently for the service to end, and from several side saddles, of an ancient pattern, hung flopping alpaca riding skirts, which the farmer's wives or daughters had worn over their best gowns to church. A few locust trees shed their remaining small yellow leaves on the sunken graves, which were surrounded by crumbling wooden enclosures. Here and there, farther off, a flat tombstone was still visible in the tall gra.s.s; and over the dust of old Jonathan Gay a high marble cross, selected by his brother's widow, bore the words, unstained by the dripping trees, and innocent of satire: "Here lieth in the hope of a joyful resurrection---"

At the end of the service there was a rustle either of relief or disappointment, and the congregation filed slowly through the south doors, where the old grey horse stood resigned and expectant amid the obliterated graves. Mrs. Gay, who had lingered in the walk to speak to Mr. Mullen, raised her plaintive violet eyes to his face when he appeared.

"You are always so comforting. I don't know how to thank you for helping me," she murmured, and added impulsively to the little old woman at his side, "Oh, what a blessing such a son must be to you!"

"Orlando's never given me a moment's worry in his life, ma'am--not even when he was teething," replied Mrs. Mullen, who looked sharper and more withered than ever in the broad daylight. "If you'll believe me, he wasn't more than six months old when I said to his father that I could tell by the look of him he was intended for the ministry. Such sweetness, such self-control even as an infant."

"How happy he must make you! And then, to have the privilege of hearing his beautiful sermons! But you'll lose him some day, as I was just saying to Kesiah. It won't be long before some fortunate woman takes him away from you. We can only hope she will be worthy of the ideal he has for her."

"Ah, that's just it, Mrs. Gay, I sometimes tell myself there isn't a woman in the world that's fit for him."

She spoke as fast as she could, eager to dilate on the subject of the embarra.s.sed Orlando's virtues, flattered in her motherly old heart by the praise of his sermons, and yet, all the time, while her peaked chin worked excitedly, thinking about the roasted young pig that waited for her to attend to the garnis.h.i.+ng.

The delay was short; Orlando silenced her at last by a gentle admonitory pressure of her elbow, and the two ladies drove off in their carriage, while Molly walked sedately out of the churchyard between the clergyman and his mother. The girl was pleasantly aware that the eyes of the miller and of Jim Halloween followed her disapprovingly as she went; and she thought with complacency that she had never looked better than she did in her white felt hat with its upturned brim held back by cherry-coloured ribbon. It was all very well for the rector to say that beauty was of less importance than visiting the sick, but the fact remained that Judy Hatch visited the sick more zealously than she--and yet he was very far, indeed, from falling in love with Judy Hatch! The contradiction between man and his ideal of himself was embodied before her under a clerical waistcoat.

"I believe," remarked the Reverend Orlando, thrusting his short chin as far as possible over his collar, which b.u.t.toned at the back, "I believe that the elder Doolittle nourishes some private grudge against me. He has a most annoying habit of shaking his head at me during the sermon as though he disagreed with my remarks."

"The man must be an infidel," observed Mrs. Mullen, with asperity, as she moved on in front of him.

"He doesn't know half the time what he is doing," said Molly, "you know he pa.s.sed his ninetieth birthday last summer."

"But surely you cannot mean that you consider age an excuse for either incivility or irreligion," rejoined her lover, pus.h.i.+ng aside an impertinent carrot flower that had shed its pollen on his long coat, while he regarded his mother's back with the expression of indignant suspicion he unconsciously a.s.sumed on the rare occasions when his opinions were disputed. "Age should mellow, should soften, should sweeten."

"I suppose it should, but very often it doesn't," retorted Molly, a trifle tartly, for the sermon had bored her and she looked forward with dread to the dinner.

At her words Mrs. Mullen, who was walking a little ahead, with her skirts held up to avoid the yellow stain of the golden-rod, glanced sharply back, as she had done in church when old Adam had coughed at the wrong time and spoiled the full effect of a period.

"One reason that Orlando is so helpful to people is that he always sees so clearly just what they ought to be," she observed. "I don't believe there's a man in the ministry or out, who has a higher ideal of woman and her duty."