Joe’s tongue lay cold, and numb as wood against his palate; no word would come to it; it would not move. The wonder of a new beauty in God’s created things was deep upon him; a warm fountain rose in him and played and tossed, with a new and pleasurable thrill. He saw and admired, but he was not ashamed.
All that he had come to say to her was forgotten, all that he had framed to speak as he bore hastily on toward the house had evaporated from his heated brain. A new world turned its bright colors before his eyes, a new breadth of life had been revealed, it seemed to him. In the pleasure of his discovery he stood with no power in him but to tremble and stare.
The flush deepened in Ollie’s cheeks. She understood what was moving in his breast, for it is given to her kind to know man before he knows himself. She feigned surprise to behold him thus stricken, staring and silent, his face scarlet with the surge of his hot blood.
With one slow-lifted hand she gathered the edges of her dress together, withdrawing the revealed secret of her breast.
“Why, Joe! What are you looking at?” she asked.
“You,” he answered, his voice dry and hoarse, like that of one who asks for water at the end of a race. He turned away from her then, saying no more, and passed quickly out of her sight beyond the shrubbery which shouldered the kitchen wall. 82
Slowly Ollie lifted the dasher which had settled to the bottom of the churn, and a smile broke upon her lips. As she went on with the completion of her task, she smiled still, with lips, with eyes, with warm exultation of her strong young body, as over a triumphant ending of some issue long at balance and undefined.
Joe went away from the kitchen door in a strange daze of faculties. For that new feeling which leaped in him and warmed him to the core, and gave him confidence in his strength never before enjoyed, and an understanding of things hitherto unrevealed, he was glad. But at heart he felt that he was a traitor to the trust imposed in him, and that he had violated the sanctity of his master’s home.
Now he knew what it was that had made his cheeks flame in anger and his blood leap in resentment when he saw Ollie in the door that morning, all flushed and trembling from Morgan’s arms; now he understood why he had lingered to interpose between them in past days. It was the wild, deep fear of jealousy. He was in love with his master’s wife! What had been given him to guard, he had looked upon with unholy hunger; that which had been left with him to treasure, he had defiled with lustful eyes.
Joe struck across the fields, his work forgotten, now hot with the mounting fires of his newly discovered passion, now cold with the swelling accusation of a trust betrayed. Jealousy, and not a regard for his master’s honor, had prompted him to put her on her guard against Morgan. He had himself coveted his neighbor’s wife. He had looked upon a woman to lust after her, he had committed adultery in his heart. Between him and Morgan there was no redeeming difference. One was as bad as the other, said Joe. Only this difference; he would stop there, in time, ashamed now of the offending of his eyes and the trespass of his heart. Ollie did not know. He had not wormed his way into her 83 heart by pitying her unhappiness, like the false guest who had emptied his lies into her ears.