The Miller of Old Church | Page 9

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