The Miller Of Old Church Part 33

While he sat there Reuben began to think, and as always, his thoughts were humble and without self-consciousness. As he looked under the gnarled boughs of the orchard, he seemed to see his whole life stretching before him--seventy years--all just the same except that with each he appeared a little older, a little humbler, a little less expectant that some miracle might happen and change the future. At the end of that long vista, he saw himself young and strong, and filled with a great hope for something--he hardly knew what--that would make things different. He had gone on, still hoping, year by year, and now at the end, he was an old, bent, crippled man, and the miracle had never happened. Nothing had ever made things different, and the great hope had died in him at last as the twenty seeds of which old Adam had spoken had died in the earth. He remembered all the things he had wanted that he had never had--all the other things he had not wanted that had made up his life. Never had a hope of his been fulfilled, never had an event fallen out as he had planned it, never had a prayer brought him the blessing for which he had prayed. Nothing in all his seventy years had been just what he had wanted--not just what he would have chosen if the choice had been granted him--yet the sight of the birds in the apple trees stirred something in his heart to-day that was less an individual note of rejoicing than a share in the undivided movement of life which was pulsing around him. Nothing that had ever happened to him as Reuben Merryweather would he care to live over; but he was glad at the end that he had been a part of the spring and had not missed seeing the little green leaves break out in the orchard.

And then while he sat there, half dreaming and half awake, the stillness grew suddenly full of the singing of blue birds. Spring blossomed radiantly beneath his eyes, and the faint green and gold of the meadows blazed forth in a pageant of colour.

"I'm glad I didn't miss it," he thought. "That's the most that can be said, I reckon--I'm glad I didn't miss it."

The old hound, dreaming of flies, flapped his long ears in the suns.h.i.+ne, and a robin, hopping warily toward a plate of seed-cakes on the arm of Reuben's chair, winged back for a minute before he alighted suspiciously on the railing. Then, being an old and a wise bird, he advanced again, holding his head slightly sideways and regarding the sleeping man with a pair of bright, inquisitive eyes. Rea.s.sured at last by the silence, he uttered a soft, throaty note, and flew straight to the arm of the chair in which Reuben was sitting. With his glance roving from the quiet man to the quiet dog, he made a few tentative flutters toward the plate of cake. Then, gathering courage from the adventure, he hopped deliberately into the centre of the plate and began pecking greedily at the scattered crumbs.

CHAPTER XIX

TREATS OF CONTRADICTIONS

As Molly pa.s.sed down the Haunt's Walk, it seemed to her, also, that the spring had suddenly blossomed. A moment before she had not known that the path she trod was changing to emerald, that the meadows were spangled with wild-flowers, that the old oaks on the lawn were blus.h.i.+ng in rose and silver. For weeks these miracles had happened around her, and she had not noticed. As oblivious to them as old Adam Doolittle was, she had remembered only that her birthday came on the seventeenth of April, when, except for some luckless mishap, the promise of the spring was a.s.sured.

A red-winged blackbird darted like a flame across the path in front of her, and following it into the open, she found Kesiah gathering wild azalea on the edge of the thicket.

At the girl's approach, the elder woman rose from her stooping posture, and came forward, wearing a frown, which, after the first minute, Molly saw was directed at the sunlight, not at herself. Kesiah's long, sallow face under the hard little curls of her false front, had never appeared more grotesque than it did in the midst of the delicate spring landscape. Every fragile blossom, every young leaf, every blade of gra.s.s, flung an insult at her as she stood there frowning fiercely at the sunbeams. Yet only five minutes before she had suffered a sharp recrudescence of soul--of that longing for happiness which is a part of the resurrection of the spring, and which may survive not only the knowledge of its own fruitlessness, but a belief in the existence of the very happiness for which it longs. All the unlived romance in her heart had come to life with the young green around her. Middle-age had not deadened, it had merely dulled her. For the pang of desire is not, after all, the divine prerogative of youth, nor has it even a conscious relation to the possibility of fulfilment. Her soul looked out of her eyes while she gazed over the azalea in her hand--yet, in spite of the songs of the poets, the soul in her eyes did not make them beautiful.

"I came down with Jonathan, Molly," she said. "You will doubtless find him at the brook." For an instant she hesitated in confusion and then added hurriedly, "We were speaking about you."

"Were you?" asked Molly a little awkwardly, for Kesiah always embarra.s.sed her.

"We were both saying how much we admired your devotion to your grandfather. One rarely finds such attachment in the young to the old."

"I have always loved him better than anybody except mother."

"I am sure you have, and it speaks very well for both of you. We are all much interested in you, Molly."

"It's kind of you to think about me," answered Molly, and her voice was constrained as it had been when she spoke in the library at Jordan's Journey.

"We feel a great concern for your future," said Kesiah. "Whatever we can do to help you, we shall do very gladly. I always felt a peculiar pity and sympathy for your mother." Her voice choked, for it was, perhaps, as spontaneous an expression of her emotions as she had ever permitted herself.

"Thank you, ma'am," replied Molly simply, and the t.i.tle of respect to which Reuben had trained her dropped unconsciously from her lips. She honestly liked Kesiah, though, in common with the rest of her little world, she had fallen into the habit of regarding her as a person whom it was hardly worth one's while to consider. Mrs. Gay had so completely effaced her sister that the rough edges of Kesiah's character were hardly visible beneath the little lady's enveloping charm.

"It is natural that you should have felt bitterly toward your father,"

began the older woman again in a trembling voice, "but I hope you realize that the thought of his wrong to you and your mother saddened his last hours."

To her surprise Molly received the remark almost pa.s.sionately.

"How could that give me back my mother's ruined life?" she demanded.

"I know, dear, but the fact remains that he was your father---"

"Oh, I don't care in the least about the fact," retorted Molly, with her pretty rustic attempt at a shrug, which implied, in this case, that the government of nature, like that of society, rested solely on the consent of the governed. What was clear to Kesiah was that this rebellion against the injustice of the universe, as well as against the expiation of Mr. Jonathan, was the outcome of a strong, though undisciplined, moral pa.s.sion within her. In her way, Molly was as stern a moralist as Sarah Revercomb, but she derived her convictions from no academic system of ethics. Kesiah had heard of her as a coquette; now she realized that beneath the coqueteries there was a will of iron.

"You must come to us, some day, dear, and let us do what we can to make you happy," she said. "It would be a pity for all that money to go to the conversion of the Chinese, who are doubtless quite happy as they are."

"I wonder why he chose the Chinese?" replied the girl. "They seem so far away, and there's poor little Mrs. Meadows at Piping Tree who is starving for bread."

"He was always like that--and so is my sister Angela--the thing that wasn't in sight was the thing he agonized over." She did not confess that she had detected a similar weakness in herself, and that, seen the world over, it is the indubitable mark of the sentimentalist.

a.n.a.lysis of Mr. Jonathan's character, however, failed to interest his daughter. She smiled sweetly, but indifferently, and made a movement to pa.s.s on into the meadow. Then, looking into Kesiah's face, she said in a warmer voice: "If ever you want my help about your store room, Miss Kesiah, just send for me. When you're ready to change the brine on your pickles, I'll come down and do it."

"Thank you, Molly," answered the other; "you're a nice light hand for such things."

In some almost imperceptible manner she felt that the girl had rebuffed her. The conversation had been pleasant enough, yet Kesiah had meant to show in it that she considered Molly's position changed since the evening before; and it was this very suggestion that the girl had tossed lightly aside--tossed without rudeness or malice, but with a firmness, a finality, which appeared to settle the question forever. The acknowledged daughter of Mr. Jonathan Gay was determined that she should continue to be known merely as the granddaughter of his overseer.

Kesiah's overtures, had been--well, not exactly repulsed, but certainly ignored; her advice had melted to thin air as soon as it was spoken.

As Molly flitted from her over the young weeds in the meadow, the older woman stood looking after her with a heaviness, like the weight of unshed tears, in her eyes. Not the girl's future, but her own, appeared to her barren of interest, robbed even of hope. The spirit that combats, she saw, had never been hers--nor had the courage that prevails. For this reason fate had been hard to her--because she had never yielded to pressure--because she had stepped by habit rather than choice into the vacant place. She was a good woman--her heart a.s.sured her of this--she had done her duty no matter what it cost her--and she had possessed, moreover, a fund of common sense which had aided her not a little in doing it. It was this common sense that told her now that facts were, after all, more important than dreams--that the putting up of pickles was a more useful work in the world than the regretting of possibilities--that the sordid realities were not less closely woven into the structure of existence than were the romantic illusions. She told herself these things, yet in spite of her words she saw her future stretching away, like her past, amid a mult.i.tude of small duties for which she had neither inclination nor talent. One thing after another, all just alike, day after day, month after month, year after year.

Nothing ahead of her, and, looking back, nothing behind her that she would care to stop and remember. "That's life," she said softly to herself and went on her way, while Molly, glancing back, beheld her only as a blot on the suns.h.i.+ne.

"Poor Miss Kesiah," the girl thought before she forgot her. "I wonder if she's ever really lived?"

Then the wonder fled from her mind, for, as a shadow fell over her path, she looked up, startled, into the eyes of Gay, who had burst suddenly out of the willows. His face was flushed and he appeared a trifle annoyed. As he stopped before her, he cut sharply at the weeds with a small whip he carried.

"Don't, please," she said; "I hate to see people cut off the heads of innocent things."

"It is rather beastly," her returned, his face clearing. "Did you come out to find me, cousin?"

"Why should I, Mr. Jonathan?"

"You don't soften the blow--but why 'Mr. Jonathan'?"

"I thought it was your name."

"It's not my name to you--I say, Molly, do you mind my telling you that you're a brick?"

"Oh, no, not if you feel like it."

"I do feel like it tremendously."

"Then I don't mind in the least," and to prove it she smiled radiantly into his face. Her smile was the one really beautiful thing about Molly, but as far as her immediate purpose went it served her as successfully as a host.

"By George, I like your devotion to the old chap!" he exclaimed. "I hope a girl will stick by me as squarely when I am beginning to totter."

"Have you ever been as good to one?" she asked quite seriously, and wondered why he laughed.

"Well, I doubt if I ever have, but I'd like very much to begin."

"You're not a grandfather, Mr. Jonathan."

"No, I'm not a grandfather--but, when I come to think of it, I'm a cousin."

She accepted this with composure. "Are you?" she inquired indifferently after a minute.

While she spoke he asked himself if she were really dull, or if she had already learned to fence with her exrustic weapons? Her face was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with expression, but, as he reminded himself, one never could tell.