Short Fiction · The Church with an Overshot-Wheel (2/2)

The old overshot-wheel, half covered with mountain ivy, caught patches of the warm sunlight filtering through the trees. The cottage across the road was still standing, but it would doubtless go down before the next winter’s mountain blasts. It was overrun with morning glory and wild gourd vines, and the door hung by one hinge.

Father Abram pushed open the mill door, and entered softly. And then he stood still, wondering. He heard the sound of someone within, weeping inconsolably. He looked, and saw Miss Chester sitting in a dim pew, with her head bowed upon an open letter that her hands held.

Father Abram went to her, and laid one of his strong hands firmly upon hers. She looked up, breathed his name, and tried to speak further.

“Not yet, Miss Rose,” said the miller, kindly. “Don’t try to talk yet. There’s nothing as good for you as a nice, quiet little cry when you are feeling blue.”

It seemed that the old miller, who had known so much sorrow himself, was a magician in driving it away from others. Miss Chester’s sobs grew easier. Presently she took her little plain-bordered handkerchief and wiped away a drop or two that had fallen from her eyes upon Father Abram’s big hand. Then she looked up and smiled through her tears. Miss Chester could always smile before her tears had dried, just as Father Abram could smile through his own grief. In that way the two were very much alike.

The miller asked her no questions; but by and by Miss Chester began to tell him.

It was the old story that always seems so big and important to the young, and that brings reminiscent smiles to their elders. Love was the theme, as may be supposed. There was a young man in Atlanta, full of all goodness and the graces, who had discovered that Miss Chester also possessed these qualities above all other people in Atlanta or anywhere else from Greenland to Patagonia. She showed Father Abram the letter over which she had been weeping. It was a manly, tender letter, a little superlative and urgent, after the style of love letters written by young men full of goodness and the graces. He proposed for Miss Chester’s hand in marriage at once. Life, he said, since her departure for a three-weeks’ visit, was not to be endured. He begged for an immediate answer; and if it were favourable he promised to fly, ignoring the narrow-gauge railroad, at once to Lakelands.

“And now where does the trouble come in?” asked the miller when he had read the letter.

“I cannot marry him,” said Miss Chester.

“Do you want to marry him?” asked Father Abram.

“Oh, I love him,” she answered, “but⁠—” Down went her head and she sobbed again.

“Come, Miss Rose,” said the miller; “you can give me your confidence. I do not question you, but I think you can trust me.”

“I do trust you,” said the girl. “I will tell you why I must refuse Ralph. I am nobody; I haven’t even a name; the name I call myself is a lie. Ralph is a noble man. I love him with all my heart, but I can never be his.”

“What talk is this?” said Father Abram. “You said that you remember your parents. Why do you say you have no name? I do not understand.”

“I do remember them,” said Miss Chester. “I remember them too well. My first recollections are of our life somewhere in the far South. We moved many times to different towns and states. I have picked cotton, and worked in factories, and have often gone without enough food and clothes. My mother was sometimes good to me; my father was always cruel, and beat me. I think they were both idle and unsettled.

“One night when we were living in a little town on a river near Atlanta they had a great quarrel. It was while they were abusing and taunting each other that I learned⁠—oh, Father Abram, I learned that I didn’t even have the right to be⁠—don’t you understand? I had no right even to a name; I was nobody.

“I ran away that night. I walked to Atlanta and found work. I gave myself the name of Rose Chester, and have earned my own living ever since. Now you know why I cannot marry Ralph⁠—and, oh, I can never tell him why.”

Better than any sympathy, more helpful than pity, was Father Abram’s depreciation of her woes.

“Why, dear, dear! is that all?” he said. “Fie, fie! I thought something was in the way. If this perfect young man is a man at all he will not care a pinch of bran for your family tree. Dear Miss Rose, take my word for it, it is yourself he cares for. Tell him frankly, just as you have told me, and I’ll warrant that he will laugh at your story, and think all the more of you for it.”

“I shall never tell him,” said Miss Chester, sadly. “And I shall never marry him nor anyone else. I have not the right.”

But they saw a long shadow come bobbing up the sunlit road. And then came a shorter one bobbing by its side; and presently two strange figures approached the church. The long shadow was made by Miss Phoebe Summers, the organist, come to practise. Tommy Teague, aged twelve, was responsible for the shorter shadow. It was Tommy’s day to pump the organ for Miss Phoebe, and his bare toes proudly spurned the dust of the road.

Miss Phoebe, in her lilac-spray chintz dress, with her accurate little curls hanging over each ear, courtesied low to Father Abram, and shook her curls ceremoniously at Miss Chester. Then she and her assistant climbed the steep stairway to the organ loft.

In the gathering shadows below, Father Abram and Miss Chester lingered. They were silent; and it is likely that they were busy with their memories. Miss Chester sat, leaning her head on her hand, with her eyes fixed far away. Father Abram stood in the next pew, looking thoughtfully out of the door at the road and the ruined cottage.

Suddenly the scene was transformed for him back almost a score of years into the past. For, as Tommy pumped away, Miss Phoebe struck a low bass note on the organ and held it to test the volume of air that it contained. The church ceased to exist, so far as Father Abram was concerned. The deep, booming vibration that shook the little frame building was no note from an organ, but the humming of the mill machinery. He felt sure that the old overshot-wheel was turning; that he was back again, a dusty, merry miller in the old mountain mill. And now evening was come, and soon would come Aglaia with flying colours, toddling across the road to take him home to supper. Father Abram’s eyes were fixed upon the broken door of the cottage.

And then came another wonder. In the gallery overhead the sacks of flour were stacked in long rows. Perhaps a mouse had been at one of them; anyway the jar of the deep organ note shook down between the cracks of the gallery floor a stream of flour, covering Father Abram from head to foot with the white dust. And then the old miller stepped into the aisle, and waved his arms and began to sing the miller’s song:

“The wheel goes round,

The grist is ground,

The dusty miller’s merry.”

—and then the rest of the miracle happened. Miss Chester was leaning forward from her pew, as pale as the flour itself, her wide-open eyes staring at Father Abram like one in a waking dream. When he began the song she stretched out her arms to him; her lips moved; she called to him in dreamy tones: “Dada, come take Dums home!”

Miss Phoebe released the low key of the organ. But her work had been well done. The note that she struck had beaten down the doors of a closed memory; and Father Abram held his lost Aglaia close in his arms.

When you visit Lakelands they will tell you more of this story. They will tell you how the lines of it were afterward traced, and the history of the miller’s daughter revealed after the gipsy wanderers had stolen her on that September day, attracted by her childish beauty. But you should wait until you sit comfortably on the shaded porch of the Eagle House, and then you can have the story at your ease. It seems best that our part of it should close while Miss Phoebe’s deep bass note was yet reverberating softly.

And yet, to my mind, the finest thing of it all happened while Father Abram and his daughter were walking back to the Eagle House in the long twilight, almost too glad to speak.

“Father,” she said, somewhat timidly and doubtfully, “have you a great deal of money?”

“A great deal?” said the miller. “Well, that depends. There is plenty unless you want to buy the moon or something equally expensive.”

“Would it cost very, very much,” asked Aglaia, who had always counted her dimes so carefully, “to send a telegram to Atlanta?”

“Ah,” said Father Abram, with a little sigh, “I see. You want to ask Ralph to come.”

Aglaia looked up at him with a tender smile.

“I want to ask him to wait,” she said. “I have just found my father, and I want it to be just we two for a while. I want to tell him he will have to wait.”