The Miller Of Old Church Part 20

"I met Abel and Archie as I was coming and they made me go back with them," she answered, placing her hand on her bosom, which rose and fell with her fluttering breath. It was characteristic of their different temperaments that, although he had seen her every day for three weeks, he still met her with outstretched arms, which she still evaded.

Since that first stolen kiss, she had held off from him, alluring yet unapproachable, and this gentle, but obstinate, resistance had inflamed him to a point which he admitted, in the cold grey morning before he had breakfasted, to have become positively dangerous. Ardently susceptible to beauty, the freedom of his life had bred in him an almost equal wors.h.i.+p of the unattainable. If that first kiss had stirred his fancy, her subsequent repulse had established her influence. The stubborn virtue, which was a part of the inherited fibre of her race, had achieved a result not unworthy of the most finished coquette. Against his desire for possession there battled the instinctive chast.i.ty that was woven into the structure of Sarah Revercomb's granddaughter. Hardly less violent than the natural impulse against which it warred, it gave Blossom an advantage, which the obvious weakness of her heart had helped to increase. It was as though she yearned toward him while she resisted--as though she feared him most in the moment that she repulsed him.

"Good G.o.d! how beautiful you are and how cold!" he exclaimed.

"I am not cold. How can you say so when you know it isn't true?"

"I've been waiting here an hour, half dead with impatience, and you won't so much as let me touch you for a reward."

"I can't--you oughtn't to ask me, Mr. Jonathan."

"Could a single kiss hurt you? I kissed you once."

"It's--it's because you kissed me once that you mustn't kiss me again."

"You mean you didn't like it?"

"What makes you so unkind? You know it isn't that."

"Then why do you refuse?" He was in an irritable humour, and this irritation showed in his face, in his movements, in the short, abrupt sound of his words.

"I can't let you do it because--because I didn't know what it was like until that first time," she protested, while two large tears rolled from her eyes.

Softened by her confusion, his genial smile shone on her for an instant before the gloom returned to his features. The last few weeks had preyed on his nerves until he told himself that he could no longer control the working of his emotions. The solitude, the emptiness of his days, the restraint put upon him by his invalid mother--all these engendered a condition of mind in which any transient fancy might develop into a winged fury of impulse. There were times when his desire for Blossom's beauty appeared to fill the desolate s.p.a.ce, and he hungered and thirsted for her actual presence at his side. In the excitement of a great city, he would probably have forgotten her in a month after their first meeting. Here, in this monotonous country, there was nothing for him but to brood over each trivial detail until her figure stood out in his imagination edged by the artificial light he had created around it.

Her beauty, which would have been noticeable even in a crowd, became G.o.ddess-like against the low horizon in the midst of the November colours.

"If you only knew how I suffer from you, darling," he said, "I haven't slept for nights because you refused to kiss me."

"I--I haven't slept either," she faltered.

"Because of me, Blossom?"

"I begin to think and it makes me so unhappy."

"Oh, d.a.m.n it! Do you love me, Blossom?"

"What difference does it make whether I do or not?"

"It makes all the difference under Heaven! Would you like to love me, Blossom?"

"I oughtn't to let myself think of it, and I don't when I can help it."

"But can you help it? Tell me, can you help it?"

Turning away from him, she cast a startled glance under the willows in the direction of the house.

"I must be going back. They will miss me."

"Don't you think I shall miss you, Beauty?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought."

"If you knew how miserable I'll be after you have left me, you'd kiss me once before you go."

"Don't ask me, I can't--I really can't, Mr. Jonathan."

"Hang Mr. Jonathan and all that appertains to him! What's to become of me, condemned to this solitude, if you refuse to become kind to me? By Jove, if it wasn't for my mother, I'd ask you to marry me!"

"I don't want to marry you," she responded haughtily, and completed her triumph. Something stronger than pa.s.sion--that _something_ compounded partly of moral fibre, partly of a phlegmatic temperament, guided her at the critical moment. His words had been casual, but her reception of them charged them with seriousness almost before he was aware. A pa.s.sing impulse was crystallized by the coldness of her manner into a permanent desire.

"If I were free to do it, I'd make you want to," he said.

She moved from him, walking rapidly into the deeper shelter of the willows. The autumn sunlight, s.h.i.+ning through the leafless boughs, cast a delicate netting of shadows over the brilliant fairness of her body.

He saw the rose of her cheek melting into the warm whiteness of her throat, which was encircled by two deliciously infantile creases of flesh. To look at her led almost inevitably to the desire to touch her.

"Are you going without a word to me, Blossom?"

"I don't know what to say--you never seem to believe me."

"You know well enough what I want you to say--but you're frozen all through, that's what's the matter."

"Good-bye, Mr. Jonathan."

"At what hour to-morrow, Blossom?"

She shook her head, softly obstinate.

"I mustn't meet you again. If grandma--or any of the others found out they would never forgive me--they are so stern and straight. I've gone too far already, and besides---"

"Besides what?"

"You make me feel wicked and underhand."

"Do you mean that you can walk off like this and never see me again?"

Tears came to her eyes. "You oughtn't to put it like that!"

"But that's just what it means. Now, darling, do you think you can do it?"

"I won't think--but I'll have to do it."

His nervous irritability became suddenly violent, and the muscles of his face contracted as if from a spasm of physical pain.

"Confound it all! Why shouldn't I marry you, Blossom?" he burst out.

"You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and you look every inch a lady. If it wasn't for my mother I'd pick you up to-day and carry you off to Was.h.i.+ngton."

"Your mother would never give in. There's no use talking about it."

"It isn't her giving in, but her health. You see, she has heart disease, and any sudden shock brings on one of these terrible attacks that may kill her. She bears everything like an angel--I never heard a complaint from her in my life--not even when she was suffering tortures--but the doctors say now that another failure of her heart would be fatal."