The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Miller Of Old Church, by Ellen Glasgow

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Title: The Miller Of Old Church

Author: Ellen Glasgow

Release Date: April 30, 2006 [EBook #18286]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH ***

Produced by Doug Levy

THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH

by Ellen Glasgow

To my sister Cary Glasgow McCormack In loving acknowledgment of help and sympathy through the years

CONTENTS

BOOK FIRST

JORDAN'S JOURNEY

Chapter

     I. At Bottom's Ordinary
     II. In Which Destiny Wears the Comic Mask
     III. In Which Mr. Gay Arrives at His Journey's End
     IV. The Revercombs
     V. The Mill
     VI. Treats of the Ladies' Sphere
     VII. Gay Rushes Into a Quarrel and Secures a Kiss
     VIII. Shows Two Sides of a Quarrel
     IX. In Which Molly Flirts
     X. The Reverend Orlando Mullen Preaches a Sermon
     XI. A Flight and an Encounter
     XII. The Dream and the Real
     XIII. By the Mill-race
     XIV. Shows the Weakness in Strength
     XV. Shows the Tyranny of Weakness
     XVI. The Coming of Spring
     XVII. The Shade of Mr. Jonathan
     XVIII. The Shade of Reuben
     XIX. Treats of Contradictions
     XX. Life's Ironies
     XXI. In Which Pity Masquerades as Reason

BOOK SECOND

THE CROSS-ROADS

Chapter

     I. In which Youth Shows a Little Seasoned
     II. The Desire of the Moth
     III Abel Hears Gossip and Sees a Vision
     IV. His Day of Freedom
     V. The Shaping of Molly
     VI. In Which Hearts Go Astray
     VII. A New Beginning to an Old Tragedy
     VIII. A Great Passion in a Humble Place
     IX. A Meeting in the Pasture
     X. Tangled Threads
     XI. The Ride to Piping Tree
     XII. One of Love's Victims
     XIII. What Life Teaches
     XIV. The Turn of the Wheel
     XV. Gay Discovers Himself
     XVI. The End

     Author's Note: The scene of this story is not the
     place of the same name in Virginia.

BOOK FIRST

JORDAN'S JOURNEY

THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH

CHAPTER I

AT BOTTOM'S ORDINARY

It was past four o'clock on a sunny October day, when a stranger, who had ridden over the "corduroy" road between Applegate and Old Church, dismounted near the cross-roads before the small public house known to its frequenters as Bottom's Ordinary. Standing where the three roads meet at the old turnpike-gate of the county, the square brick building, which had declined through several generations from a chapel into a tavern, had grown at last to resemble the smeared face of a clown under a steeple hat which was worn slightly awry. Originally covered with stucco, the walls had peeled year by year until the dull red of the bricks showed like blotches of paint under a thick coating of powder. Over the wide door two little oblong windows, holding four damaged panes, blinked rakishly from a mat of ivy, which spread from the rotting eaves to the shingled roof, where the slim wooden spire bent under the weight of creeper and innumerable nesting sparrows in spring. After pointing heavenward for half a century, the steeple appeared to have swerved suddenly from its purpose, and to invite now the attention of the wayfarer to the bar beneath. This cheerful room which sprouted, like some grotesque wing, from the right side of the chapel, marked not only a utilitarian triumph in architecture, but served, on market days to attract a larger congregation of the righteous than had ever stood up to sing the doxology in the adjoining place of worship. Good and bad prospects were weighed here, weddings discussed, births and deaths recorded in ever-green memories, and here, also, were reputations demolished and the owners of them hustled with scant ceremony away to perdition.

From the open door of the bar on this particular October day, there streamed the ruddy blaze of a fire newly kindled from knots of resinous pine. Against this pleasant background might be discerned now and then the shapeless silhouette of Betsey Bottom, the innkeeper, a soft and capable soul, who, in attaching William Ming some ten years before, had successfully extinguished his identity without materially impairing her own. Bottom's Ordinary had always been ruled by a woman, and it would continue to be so, please God, however loudly a mere Ming might protest to the contrary. In the eyes of her neighbours, a female, right or wrong, was always a female, and this obvious fact, beyond and above any natural two-sided jars of wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs. Ming as a conjugal martyr. Being an amiable body—peaceably disposed to every living creature, with the exception of William—she had hastened to the door to reprimand him for some trivial neglect of the grey mule, when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor with a bucket of soapsuds.

"Thar's nobody on earth out thar but young Mr. Jonathan Gay come back to Jordan's Journey," she said. "I declar I'd know a Gay by his eyes if I war to meet him in so unlikely a place as Kingdom Come. He's talkin' to old Adam Doolittle now," she added, for the information of the maid, who, being of a curious habit of mind, had raised herself on her knees and was craning her neck toward the door, "I can see his lips movin', but he speaks so low I can't make out what he says."

"Lemme git dar a minute, Miss Betsey, I'se got moughty sharp years, I is."

"They're no sharper than mine, I reckon, and I couldn't hear if I stood an' listened forever. It's about the road most likely, for I see old Adam a-pintin'."

For a minute after dismounting the stranger looked dubiously at the mottled face of the tavern. On his head the sunlight shone through the boughs of a giant mulberry tree near the well, and beyond this the Virginian forest, brilliant with its autumnal colours of red and copper, stretched to the village of Applegate, some ten or twelve miles to the north.

Starting southward from the cross-roads, the character of the country underwent so sudden a transformation that it looked as if man, having contended here unsuccessfully with nature, had signed an ignominious truce beneath the crumbling gateposts of the turnpike. Passing beyond them a few steps out