Page:Mehalah 1920.djvu/193

Rh "So you ought," said the widow. "Elijah, I am sure, is willing. It is what he has been wishing and hoping for all along, but you have been so stubborn and set against him. After all he has done for us you might yield a bit."

"I will never marry him."

"Don't say that. You will do anything to secure a comfortable home for me. It may not be long that I may have to trouble you,—I know you look on me as a trouble, I know that but for me you would feel free, and go away into the world. You think me a burden on you, because I can do nothing; you are young and lusty. But I bore with you, Mehalah, when you was young and feeble, and I laid by for you money that would have been very acceptable to me, and bought me many little comforts that I forbore, to save for you—" The old woman with low cunning had discovered the thread to touch, to move her daughter.

"Say no more, say not another word, mother," exclaimed Mehalah. "You know that I never, never will forsake you, that you are more to me a thousand times than my own life. But there is one thing I never will do for you. I will never marry Elijah."

"I am afraid, Mehalah, that folks will talk."

"I fear so too, but they have no occasion. I will show them that. I will find a situation elsewhere."

"You shall not, Mehalah!"

"I must, mother."

She thought for some time what she should do, and then put on her bonnet, and walked into Salcot. She had not been into the village since her arrival at Red Hall.

Salcot is a small village of old cottages at the head of a creek that opens out of the Blackwater. It has a church with a handsome tower built of flints, but with no chancel. Within a bowshot, across the creek, connected with it by a bridge, is Virley church, a small hunchbacked edifice in the last stages of dilapidation, in a graveyard unhedged, unwalled; the church is scrambled over by ivy, with lattice windows bulged in by the violence of the gales, and a bellcot leaning on one side like a drunkard. Near this decaying church is a gabled farm, and this and a cottage form Virley village. The principal population