"Six thousand dollars," sang the auctioneer. "Going—going—going for six thousand dollars. Only six thousand dollars. Will nobody bid more? Not a quarter of what it is worth. Will nobody bid more for this fine old farm? Going—going—what? Nobody bids more? Going—going—gone for six thousand dollars!"
She rose and went over to where Nathan stood surrounded by a few farmers, who were trying in vain to pretend that they did not think him a fool. "Should have thought you had as much land as you knew what to do with," John Appleseed was saying, as she approached. "What are you going to do with Five Oaks, now you've got it? Eat it, I reckon?"
"It ain't mine. I bid on it for my wife," Nathan replied stubbornly. "She was so set on it I couldn't hold out against her."
Yes, Nathan was a good man, there was no denying it. Feeling nearer to him than she had ever felt in her life, she moved over to his side and slipped her hand through his arm.
"Wall, she got it dirt cheap," the auctioneer declared. "Dirt cheap, if I do say so."
"I don't see what you want with two farms, ma'am," chuckled Mr. Kettledrum, the veterinarian. "It looks as if you was goin' to live on one an' let Nathan live by himself on the other."
Then the faint-hearted bidders mounted their horses or stepped into their buggies, while Ezra Flower invited the new owners into the house. "Come right in an' clinch the sale with Doctor Greylock. He's settin' right there now with the papers to draw up," he added persuasively, as Dorinda hung back.
Beckoning Lena to follow them, Dorinda went up the steps with Nathan and entered the hall. Only once before had she been inside the house; but every detail of the interior had bitten into her memory. She knew the bend in the staircase down which the old man had roamed with his whip at night. She had never forgotten the litter of dust in the corners; the guns and fishing-poles crowded behind the door; the collection of hats on the table and sofa; the empty whiskey bottles arranged in a row by the wainscoting. Above all, she remembered the stale odour of degeneration, of mingled whiskey and tobacco, which saturated the walls. Eighteen years ago, and nothing, not even that odour, had changed! In those eighteen years she had spent her youth and had restored dead land to life; but this house in which Jason had lived was still sunk in immovable sloth and decay.
Ezra Flower passed, with his sprightly sparrow-like twitter, through the hall, and flung open the door of a room on the right—the room in which she had sat with the drunken old man while the storm broke outside. Jason, she saw, was standing on the very spot in the rug where his father had stood that afternoon in November.
As she crossed the threshold, it seemed to her that the room shifted and came forward to meet her. She heard Nathan's voice saying meaningless words. Then Jason took her hand and dropped it so limply that it might have been a dead leaf.
"Won't you sit down?" he asked courteously, for he had evidently kept sober until the sale could be concluded. "So you've bought Five Oaks," he continued, as indifferently as if he were speaking of corn or wheat. "Well, it's never been any use to me, and I'm not sorry to get rid of it. But I don't see what you're going to do with it. Isn't one farm as much as you're able to manage?" As he finished, he pushed a decanter of whiskey in the direction of Nathan. "We might as well have a drink over it anyway."
Yes, nothing had altered. It might have been the same dust that lay in a film over the floor, the furniture and the walls. It might have been the same pile of old newspapers on the table. It might have been the same spot of grease on the table cover; the same rattrap baited with a piece of greenish cheese in one corner; the same light falling obliquely through the speckled window-panes. She would not have been surprised, when she turned her head, to see the sheets of rain blowing out like a curtain over the hunched box-bush.
Jason laughed, and the sound had a sardonic merriment. She had never thought that he resembled the old man, and she told herself now, while she watched him, that it was only the bad light or a trick of memory which gave him the discouraged and desperate air of his father. In looking at him she seemed not to brush aside, but to gather together all the years that had gone. Why had she ever loved him? What was there in this one man that was different from all other men whom she had known? Once she had beheld him within a magic circle of wonder and delight, divided and set apart from the surrounding dullness of existence. Now the dullness had swept over him as the waste flows over the abandoned fields.
He leaned back in his chair, glancing from Nathan to Ezra Flower with morose and weary eyes. His face, which had been charming in youth, was now spiritless and inert. There were yellow blotches under his eyes; his eyelids were puffed and heavy; his features were swollen and leaden in colour; and even his hair, which had once been so alive, was as sandy and brittle as straw. Yes, the broomsedge had grown over him.
For a minute she scarcely heard what they were saying; then the details of the sale were discussed, and she made an effort to follow the words. When, presently, Nathan asked her to sign a paper, she turned automatically and wrote her name in the race that Ezra Flower pointed out to her. As she laid down the pen, she saw that Jason was smiling, and for an instant a glimmer of his old bright charm shone in his expression. She wished that he had not smiled. Then, with the wish still in her mind, she saw that he was smiling, not at her, but at Lena. His heavy gaze turned Lena as instinctively as the eyes turn to a flaring lamp in a darkened room. His look was not amorous, for drink, Dorinda knew, not sex, was his preoccupation; but, while she watched it, a sensation of physical nausea attacked her.
Rising from her chair, she stood waiting for Nathan to finish the discussion. It was agreed, she understood vaguely, that Jason should leave the farm the first day of October, and that Nathan should take over the better part of the furniture. "I'll be glad to get rid of it," Jason remarked agreeably enough, "and I hope that you will make more out of the farm than I ever did. All I can say that it ruined me. If I had been hard-hearted about it instead of soft, I'd be a different man from the one I am to-day."
"Yes, you weren't cut out for a farmer," Nathan rejoined mildly, and he added with one of his untimely jests, "Now, is you'd been as thrifty as my wife, you'd have found a way to make two leaves of alfalfa grow where there wasn't even one blade of grass before."
At this, for the first time, Jason looked at her attentively, and she knew from his gaze that his interest in her was as casual as his interest in Nathan. With his look, she felt that the part of her that was sex withered and died; but something more ancient than sex came to her rescue, and this was the instinct of self-preservation which had made her resolve in her youth that no man should spoil her rife. In the matter of sex, he had won; matched merely as human beings, as man to man, she knew that she was the stronger. Though she did not realize its significance, the moment was a crisis in her experience; for when it had passed she had discarded for ever the allurements of youth. She felt securely middle-aged, but it was the middle age of triumphant independence.
Jason's glance had wandered from her to Nathan, and she detected the flicker of ridicule in his smile. Anger seized her at the suspicion that he was mocking them, and with the anger a passionate loyalty to Nathan welled up in her heart. She saw Nathan as clearly as Jason saw him, but she saw also something fine and magnanimous in his character which Jason could never see because he was blind to nobility. "I don't care," she thought indignantly, "he is worth twenty of Jason." Obeying a protective impulse, she moved nearer to her husband and laid her hand on his arm. It was the second time that afternoon that she had drawn closer to him of her own accord.
"Well, I reckon we'd better be starting home," Nathan said, as he held out his hand in simple good will. "I hope you'll make out all right where you're going."
"All I ask is a quiet life," Jason repeated. Then, as they were leaving the room, his eyes roved back to Lena and clung to her face as if he hated to see the last of her. "Take good care of that daughter of yours," he advised. "She's the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life."
"Well, she ain't bad-looking," Nathan retorted with spirit, "but she can't hold a candle to the way her mother and Dorinda looked when they were her age."
Without touching Jason's hand again, Dorinda walked quickly down the hall and out of the house. Not until they were driving over Gooseneck Creek, did it occur to her that she had not opened her lips at Five Oaks.
"I hope you're satisfied, Dorinda," Nathan remarked, with hilarity.
"Yes, I'm satisfied."
"I fancied you looked kind of down in the mouth while we were in the room. You ain't changed your mind about wanting the farm, have you?"
"Oh, no, I haven't changed my mind."
"I'm glad of that. You never can tell about a woman. He seemed to think that Lena was good to look at."
Though she had believed that her anger was over, the embers grew red and then grey again. Middle age as an attitude of mind might enjoy an immunity from peril, but it suffered, she found, from the disadvantages of an unstable equilibrium.
"I wonder if he has forgotten Geneva," she observed irrelevantly.
At the reminder of that tragic figure Nathan's hilarity died. "When a thing like that has happened to a man," he responded, "he doesn't usually keep the dry bones lying around to look at."
The sun was beginning to go down and the sandy stretch of road, where the shadow of the surrey glided ahead of them, glittered like silver. After the intense heat of the day the fitful breeze was as torrid as the air from an oven.
"John Abner promised he would drive me over to the ice cream festival at the church," Lena said hopefully. There were pearly beads on her shell-like brow and Nathan's leathery face was streaming with perspiration.
"Poor John Abner! It is so hot and he will be tired!" protested Dorinda, though she was aware that any protest was futile, for Lena possessed the obstinacy peculiar to many weak-minded women.
"He needn't stay," retorted the girl. "Somebody will be sure to bring me home." She pressed her pink lips together and smiled with the secret wisdom of instinct.
As soon as they reached the house Dorinda slipped into her gingham dress and hurried out to the barn. Milking had already begun, but she knew that it would proceed with negligence if she were long absent. In summer, as in winter, they had supper after dark, and for a little while when the meal was over she liked to rest on the porch with Nathan and John Abner. To-night, John Abner was away with Lena, and when Dorinda came out into the air, she dropped, with a sigh of relief, into the hammock beneath the climbing rose Nathan had planted.
"I never felt anything like the heat," she said, "there's not a breath anywhere."
Nathan stirred in the darkness and removed his pipe from his mouth. "Yes, if it don't break soon, the drought will go hard with the crops."
"And with the dairy too. The ice melts so fast I can't keep the butter firm."
She leaned back, breathing in the scent of his pipe. The protective feeling, so closely akin to tenderness, which had awakened in her heart at Five Oaks, had not entirely vanished, and she felt nearer to her husband, sitting there in the moonlight of her thoughts, than she had felt since her marriage. Even that moment at Five Oaks when Jason had laughed at him had not brought him so close. She longed to tell him this because she knew how much the knowledge of it would mean to him; yet she could find no words delicate enough to convey this new sense of his importance in her life. The only words at her command were those that had struggled in her mind over at Five Oaks: "He is worth twenty of Jason," and these were not words that could be spoken aloud.
"There goes a shooting star!" Nathan exclaimed suddenly out of the stillness.
"And another," she added, after a brief silence.
"I wonder what becomes of them," he continued presently. "When you stop to think of it, it's odd what becomes of everything. It makes the universe seem like a scrap heap."
She left the hammock and sat down on the step at his feet. "That reminds me of all the trash over at Five Oaks. What in the world can we do with it? Doesn't that screech owl sound as if he were close by us."
"Well, we'll have to put a manager on that farm, I reckon. We can't look after both farms and make anything of them. I never heard so many tree frogs as we've had this summer. What with the locusts and the katydids you can't hear yourself talk. But it's right pleasant sitting here like this, ain't it?"
"Yes, it's pleasant." She tried to say something affectionate and gave up the effort. "I like to think that Five Oaks belongs to us." Her accent on the "us" was the best that she could do in the matter of sentiment; yet she was sure that he understood her mood and was touched by its gentleness.
They talked until late, planning changes in the old farm and improvements in the new one. It was an evening that she liked to remember as long as she lived. Whenever she looked back on it afterwards, it seemed to lie there like a fertile valley in the arid monotony of her life.
"For the next few years. . . ."
For the next few years she gave herself completely to Five Oaks. Only by giving herself completely, only by enriching the land with her abundant vitality, could she hope to restore the farm. Reclaiming the abandoned fields had become less a reasonable purpose than a devouring passion in her mind and heart. Old Farm was managed by Nathan now, and since he had let his own place to a thrifty German tenant, he had, as Dorinda frequently reminded him, "all the time in the world on his hands." The dairy work, which had prospered when three trains a day were run between Washington and the South, still remained under her supervision; but all the hours that she could spare were spent on the freshly ploughed acres of Five Oaks. Over these acres she toiled as resolutely as the pioneer must have toiled when he snatched a home from the wilderness. Though she had installed Martin Flower in the house, she had rejected Nathan's idea of letting the farm "on shares" to the tenant. This was the only disagreement she had ever had with Nathan, and he had yielded at last to the habit of, command which had fastened upon her. As she grew older she clung to authority as imperiously as a king who refuses to abdicate. There were moments in these years when, arrested by some sudden check on her arrogance, she stopped to wonder if any man less confirmed in humility than Nathan could have stood her as a wife. But, immediately afterwards, she would reflect, with the faint bitterness which still flavoured her opinion of love, that if she had married another man, he might not have found her overbearing.
Though the gentleness of mood which had stolen over her that August evening had not entirely departed, it lingered above the bare reason of her mind as a tender flush might linger over the austere pattern of the landscape. After that evening she had drawn no nearer to her husband, yet she had felt no particular impulse to stand farther away. Their association had touched its highest point in the soft darkness of that night, and she knew that they could never again reach the peak of consciousness together. But the quiet friendliness of their intercourse was not disturbed by Dorinda's interest in Five Oaks; and when, after a longer pursuit and a fiercer capture than usual, Lena finally married young Jim Ellgood, the days at Old Farm assumed the aspect of bright serenity which passes so often for happiness. Though Dorinda was not happy in the old thrilling sense of the word, she drifted, as middle age wore on, into a philosophy of acquiescence. John Abner was still her favourite companion, and he shared her ardent interest in Five Oaks. In time, she hoped he would marry some girl whom she herself should select, and that they would live with their children at Old Farm. When she suggested this to Nathan, he chuckled under his breath.
"It wouldn't surprise me if he wanted his head when he comes to marrying," he observed.
"Of course you think I am high-handed," she rejoined.
"Well, it don't make any difference to me what you are. And as long as you can manage me," he added, "you needn't worry about not keeping your hand in."
"It's for your own good anyway," she retorted. "You're too easy-going with everybody."
"I know it, honey. I ain't complaining."
He was refilling his pipe from his shabby old pouch of tobacco, and while he prodded the bowl with his thumb, he lifted his eyes and looked at her with his sheepish smile.
"I heard 'em talking about Jason Greylock yesterday at the store," he said.
She made a gesture of aversion. "What did they say?"
"Not much that I can recollect. Only that he is too lazy to come for his mail. He has buried himself in that house in the woods across Whippernock River, and he sometimes lets a whole month go by without coming to the post office."
"Perhaps he hasn't any way of getting over."
"He's still got his horse and buggy. I doubt if he's really as poor as he makes out. He hires Aunt Mehaley Plumtree to cook for him and look after the poultry. She comes every morning and stays till dark."
"To think of coming down to that after Five Oaks!"
"Well, the country goes against you when you ain't cut out for a farmer. Since the old man brought him back from the North, I reckon Jason has had a hard row to hoe."
"He wasn't obliged to stay here," she observed scornfully.
"No, but he was always too easy-going. A pleasant enough fellow when he was a boy; but soon ripe, soon rotten."
"Oh, I give it up." Dorinda was untying her apron while she answered. "He isn't worth all the time we've wasted talking about him."
"Good Lord, Dorinda! You haven't been sitting here ten minutes."
"Well, ten minutes will pick a bushel, as Ebenezer says. They are waiting for me over at Five Oaks."
This was the secret of her contentment, she knew, breathless activity. If she was satisfied with her life, it was only because she never stopped long enough in her work to imagine the kind of life she should have preferred. While her health was good and her energy unimpaired, she had no time for discontent. If she had looked for it, she sometimes told herself, she could have found sufficient cause for unhappiness; but she was careful not to look for it.
In these years there were brief periods when her old dreams awakened. Beauty that seemed too fugitive to be real was still more a torment than a delight to her. The moon rising over the harp-shaped pine; the shocked corn against the red sunsets of autumn; the mulberry-coloured twilights of winter;—while she watched these things the past would glow again with the fitful incandescence of memory. But the inner warmth died with the external beauty, and she dismissed the longing as weakness. "You know where that sort of thing leads you," she would tell herself sternly. "Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of your life."
Looking round at other women, she could not see that they were better off in the matter of love than she was herself. Even the few who had married the men they had chosen had paid for it—or so it appeared to her—with a lifetime of physical drudgery or emotional disappointment. She supposed they had compensations that she could not discover—otherwise how could they have borne with their lives?—but there was lot one among them with whom she would have changed places. Those who had been most deeply in love appeared to her to have become most bitterly disenchanted.
"I've a lot to be thankful for," she would repeat, while she went out to struggle against he scrub pine or broomsedge.
At Five Oaks, during those first seasons, she converted her repressed energy into the work of destruction. She would watch the reclaiming of the waste places, the burning of the broomsedge, the grubbing up of the pin and the sassafras, as if the fire and smoke were clearing her life of its illusions. Her nightmare dream of ploughing under the thistles was translated into the actual event. Perhaps, as the years went by, the reality would follow the dream into oblivion. At thirty she had looked forward to forty, as the time of her release from van expectation; but when forty came, she pushed the horizon of her freedom still farther away. "Perhaps at fifty I shall be rid of it for ever," she thought.
The winter had begin with a heavy snowstorm in December, and the week before Christmas Nathan went to bed with a cold which left him with at abscess in one of his teeth. There was no dental surgeon nearer than Richmond, and Doctor Stout had advised him to go to the city and have the tooth out as quickly as possible. "You won't lave a minute's peace until you do," the doctor added decisively.
That was weeks ago, for Nathan had deferred the evil day until the twentieth of January when he was required as a witness in a lawsuit Bob Ellgood was bringing against the railroad. "As long as I've got to go to Richmond anyway, I might as well wait and kill two birds with one store," he said.
A few days before the case was called his toothache began again with violence, and for two nights he had walked the floor in agony.
"You will be so thankful afterwards that it is over!" Dorinda assured him encouragingly.
She was busily seeding raisins for a plum pudding, and she paused long enough in her task to glance out of the window and shake her head. Though her forty-second birthday had just gone, the wintry flush in her cheeks and the imperious carriage of her head still created, at a little distance, the aspect of youth. There was a white lock on her forehead; but the premature greyness appeared theatrical rather than elderly above the intense blue of her eyes. "You look as good to me as you ever did," Nathan had said to her on her birthday.
As she turned from the window and put down the bowl of raisins, a frown wrinkled her forehead. "I wonder if it will ever stop snowing?" she said.
For days the weather had been bitterly cold, and the bare country had frozen under a leaden sky. Then at sunset the evening before a red fire had streamed over the rim of the horizon, and in the night snow had begun to fall. When Dorinda had gone out to the barn at five o'clock, she had found the landscape covered with a white blanket and deep drifts at the corners of the house and on the north side of the well and the woodpile. The blackness had been so thick that she had been obliged to walk in the flitting circle of light her lantern had cast on the ground. She had already sent off the butter to meet the five o'clock train to Washington; but Nimrod had overslept himself, and Nathan had hurried to the cabin to wake him, while John Abner had harnessed the horses to the wagon. Even then the coloured boy had had to take his breakfast with him and eat it at the station. If the train had been delayed, the butter would not have reached Washington until the day was well advanced.
All the morning and afternoon the flakes were driven in the high wind. Though Dorinda could see only a few feet in front of her, she knew that the dim fleecy shapes huddled on the lawn were not sheep but lilac bushes and flower-beds. The animals and the birds had long ago fled to shelter. As soon as the snow stopped falling the crows would begin flying over the fields; but now the world appeared as deserted as if it were the dawn of creation. In the kitchen, where she stayed when she was not obliged to be in the dairy, there was an ashen light which gave everything, even the shining pots and pans, an air of surprise. Fluvanna, who was stirring the mixture for the plum pudding, sat as close to the stove as she could push her chair, and shivered beneath her shawl of knitted grey wool.
"Well, I reckon I'll be glad to get it over," Nathan said in a mournful voice. "I've stood it' about as long as I can."
He had dropped disconsolately into a chair by the table, and sat with his hands hanging helplessly between his knees. His face was tied up in a white silk handkerchief which Dorinda had given him at Christmas, and while she looked at him with sympathy, she could not repress a smile at the comical figure he made. Like a sick sheep! That was the way he always looked when anything hurt him. He was a good man; she was sincerely attached to him; but there was no use denying that he looked like a sick sheep.
"Nimrod can drive you over with the butter in the morning," she rejoined. "Then you can have your tooth pulled before you have to go to court."
Afterwards, when she recalled this conversation, the ashen light of the kitchen flooded her mind. A small thing like that to decide all one's future! Yet it seemed to her that it was always the little things, not the big ones, that influenced destiny; the fortuitous occurrence instead of the memorable occasion. The incident of his going was apparently as trivial as her meeting with Jason in the road, as the failure of her aim when the gun had gone off, as the particular place and moment when she had fallen down in Fifth Avenue. These accidents had changed utterly the course of her life. Yet none of them could she have foreseen and prevented; and only once, she felt, in that hospital in New York, had the accident or the device of fortune been in her favour.
"Yes, I'll do it," Nathan repeated firmly. "Ebenezer or Nimrod can meet the evening train. That ought to get me home in time for supper."
"If this keeps up," Dorinda observed, "everything will be late."
In the morning, as she had foreseen, everything was an hour later than usual. "The train is obliged to be behindhand," she thought, "so it won't really matter." Though it was still snowing, the wind had dropped and the stainless white lay like swan's-down over the country. All that Dorinda could see was the world within the moving circle of the lantern; but imagination swept beyond to the desolate beauty of the scene. "I'd like to go over with you," she said, when they had finished breakfast, "only the roads will be so heavy I oughtn't to add anything on the horses."
"It will be pretty hard driving," Nathan returned. "I hope I shan't take cold in my tooth."
"Oh, I can wrap up your face in a shawl, and I've got out that old sheepskin Pa used to use. You couldn't suffer more than you did last night. Doctor Stout says the trouble isn't from cold but from infection."
He shook his head dolefully. "No, I couldn't stand another night as bad as that. The train will be warm anyhow, and even the drive won't be much worse than the barn was this morning. Jim Ellgood has his barn heated. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea for us to heat ours next year. Milking ain't much fun when your hands are frostbitten."
"Yes, it would be a good idea," she conceded inattentively, while she brought a pencil and a piece of paper and made a list of the things she wished him to buy in town. "You may hear something about the war in Europe," she added, in the hope of diverting his mind from the pain in his tooth. Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who had taken the trouble to study the battles in France, and even Dorinda, though she made no comment, thought he was going too far when he brought home an immense new map of Europe and spent his evenings following the march of the German Army. Already lie had prophesied that we should be drawn into the war before it was over; but like his other prophecies, this one was too farsighted to be heeded by his neighbours.
When it was time for him to start, and Nimrod had brought the wagon to the door, she wrapped Nathan's face in her grey woollen scarf and tied the ends in a knot at the back of his head. "You can get somebody to undo you at the station."
He smiled ruefully. "No, I don't reckon I'd better get on the train tied up like this. I must look funny."
"It doesn't matter how you look," she responded; but she could not keep back a laugh.
As the wagon ploughed through the snow, she stood there, with her shawl wrapped tightly over her bosom and the lantern held out into the blackness before dawn. The air was alive with a multitude of whirling flakes, which descended swiftly and sped off into the space beyond the glimmer of her lantern. After the wagon had disappeared the silence was so profound that she could almost hear the breathless flight of the snow-flakes from the veiled immensity of the sky. By the glow of the lantern she could just distinguish the ghostly images of trees rising abruptly out of the shrouded stillness of the landscape. While she lingered there it seemed to her that the earth and air and her own being were purified and exalted into some frigid zone of the spirit. Humanity, with its irksome responsibilities and its unprofitable desires, dropped away from her; but when she turned and entered the house, it was waiting in the ashen light to retard her endeavours.
In the kitchen John Abner was lingering over his breakfast, and Fluvanna was frying bacon and eggs, while she complained of the weather in a cheerful voice.
"Are the cows all right?" Dorinda inquired of her stepson. Until the storm was over, the cows must be kept up, and John Abner, who was a diligent farmer, had been out to feed and water them.
"Yes, but it's rough on them. It's still as black as pitch, but the sooner we get the milking over the better. The hands are always late on a morning like this."
Dorinda glanced at the tin clock on the shelf. "It isn't five o'clock yet. We'll start as soon as you finish breakfast whether the other milkers have come or not. The cows can't wait on the storm."
"It's a pity Father had to go to town to-day."
"It may be fortunate that something decided him. The doctor said he wouldn't be any better until he had that tooth out. He walked the floor all night with whiskey in his mouth."
The smile that came into Dorinda's eyes when she looked at her stepson made her face appear girlish, in spite of its roughened skin and the lines which were deeper in winter. "I see the lanterns outside now," she added. "The women must be on the way to the milking." Wrapping her shawl over her head, she took down a coat of raccoon skins, which was hanging behind the door, and slipped her arms into the shapeless sleeves. Then going out on the back porch, she felt under a snow-laden bench for the overshoes she had left there last evening. Dawn was still far away, and in the opaque darkness she could see the lanterns crawling like frozen glowworms through the whirling snow, which was blown and scattered in the glimmering circles of light.
In one of the long low buildings where the milk cows were sheltered, she found a few grotesquely arrayed milkers. From the beginning she had employed only women milkers, inspired by a firm, though illogical, belief in their superior neatness. Yet she had supplemented faith with incessant admonition, and this was, perhaps, the reason that the women wore this morning neat caps and aprons above a motley of borrowed or invented raiment. When she entered, stepping carefully over the mixture of snow and manure on the threshold, they greeted her with grumbling complaints of the weather; but before the work was well started they had thawed in the contagious warmth of her personality, and were chattering like a flock of blackbirds in a cherry tree. Since it is the law of African nature to expand in the sunshine, she was particular never to wear a dismal face over her work.
For the first minute, while she hung the lantern on the nail over her head, she felt that the meadow-scented breath of the cows was woven into an impalpable vision of summer. Though she shivered outwardly in the harsh glare of light, a window in her mind opened suddenly, and she saw Jason coming toward her through the yellow-green of August evenings. As with her mother's missionary dream, these visitations of the past depended less upon her mood, she had discovered, than upon some fugitive quality in time or place which evoked them from the shadows of memory. Concealing a shiver of distaste, she turned away and bent over a milk pail.
"Your fingers are stiff, Jessie, let me try her a moment."
Hours later, when light had come and the work of the dairy was over for the morning, she went back into the house, and the ashen light went with her over the threshold. Fluvanna was busy with dinner, and a pointer puppy named Pat was fast asleep by the stove. Young Ranger, the son of old Ranger, lay on a mat by the door, and though many Flossies had passed away, there was always a grey and white cat bearing the name to get under one's feet between the stove and the cupboard. The room, Dorinda told herself, was more cheerful than it had ever been. She remembered that her mother could never afford curtains for the windows, and that Fluvanna had laughed at her when she had bought barred muslin and edged it with ruffles. "Good Lord, Miss Dorinda, who ever heard tell!" the girl exclaimed. Yet, in the end, the curtains, with other innovations, had become a part of the established order of living. Why was it so difficult, she wondered, to bring people to accept either a new idea or a new object? Nathan was the only man at Pedlar's Mill who lived in the future, and Nathan had always been ridiculed by his neighbours. The telephone, the modern churn, and the separator, what a protracted battle he had fought for each of these labour-saving inventions! He was talking now of the time when they would have an electric plant on the farm and all the cows would be milked and the cream separated by electricity. Was this only the fancy of a visionary, or, like so many of Nathan's imaginary devices, would it come true in the end?
At twelve o'clock John Abner came in for dinner, and, after a hurried meal, went out to help clear away the snow from the outbuildings. As there was no immediate work to be done, Dorinda sat down before the fire in her bedroom and turning to her workbasket, slipped her darning-egg into one of Nathan's socks. She disliked darning, and because she disliked it she never permitted herself to neglect it. Her passionate revolt from the inertia of the land had permeated the simplest details of living. The qualities with which she had triumphed over the abandoned fields were the virtues of the pioneers who had triumphed over life.
The room was quiet except for the crackling of the flames and the brushing of an old pear-tree against the window. In the warmth of the firelight the glimpse of the snow-covered country produced a sensation of physical comfort, which stole over her like the Sabbath peace for which her mother had yearned. Lifting her eyes from her darning, she glanced over the long wainscoted room, where the only changes were the comforts that Nathan had added. The thick carpet, the soft blankets, the easy chair in which she was rocking,—if only her mother had lived long enough to enjoy these things! Then the thought came to her that, if her parents had been denied material gifts, they had possessed a spiritual luxury which she herself had never attained. She had inherited, she realized, the religious habit of mind without the religious heart; for the instinct of piety had worn too thin to cover the generations. Conviction! That, at least, they had never surrendered. The glow of religious certitude had never faded for them into the pallor of moral necessity. For them, the hard, round words in her great-grandfather's books were not as hollow as globes. Her gaze travelled slowly over the rows of discoloured bindings in the bookcases, and she remembered the rainy days in her childhood when, having exhausted the lighter treasures of adventure, she had ploughed desperately in the dry and stubborn acres of theology. After all, was the mental harvest as barren as she had believed? Firmness of purpose, independence of character, courage of living, these attributes, if they were not hers by inheritance, she had gleaned from those heavy furrows of her great-grandfather's sowing. "Once a Presbyterian, always a Presbyterian," her mother had said when she was dying.
As the afternoon wore on she grew restless from inaction, and the ruddy firelight, which had been so pleasant after the cold morning, became oppressive. Putting her work basket aside, she went out into the hall and opened the back door, where Ebenezer, with a comforter of crimson wool tied over his head and ears, was shovelling the snowdrifts away from the angle of the porch. At a distance other men were digging out the paths to the barn, and the narrow flagged walk to the dairy was already hollowed into a gully between high white banks.
Ebenezer, a big, very black negro, with an infinite capacity for rest and the mournful gaze of an evangelist, wielded his shovel vigorously at the sound of the opening door, while he hummed in a bass voice which was like the drone of a tremendous beehive. He was subject to intervals of dreaminess when he would stop work for ten minutes at a time; but the only attention Dorinda had bestowed on his slackness was a mild wonder if he could be thinking.
"Try to get that snow away before dark, Ebenezer," she said, "and tell Nimrod he must start earlier than usual to meet the evening train."
Turning back into the empty hall, she was surprised to find that she had begun to miss Nathan. It was the first time since her marriage that he had spent a whole day away from the farm, and she realized that she should be glad to have him in the house again. The discovery was so unexpected that it startled her into gravity, and passing the kitchen, where she saw Fluvanna poking wood into the open door of the stove, she walked slowly into her room and stood looking about her as if a fresh light had fallen across her surroundings. Yes, incredible as it was, she really missed Nathan! Though she had never loved him, after nine years of marriage she still liked him with a strong and durable liking. It was a tribute, she realized, to her husband's character that this negative attachment should have remained superior to the universal law of diminishing returns. No woman, she told herself, could have lived for nine years with so good a man as Nathan and not have grown fond of him. She recognized his disadvantages as clearly as ever; yet recognizing them made little difference in her affection. She liked him because, in spite of his unattractiveness, he possessed a moral integrity which she respected and a magnanimity which she admired. He had accepted her austerity of demeanour as philosophically as he accepted a bad season; and to love but to refrain from the demands of love, was the surest way he could have taken to win her ungrudging esteem.
When she went out to remind Nimrod that he must start earlier to meet the six o'clock train, the snow was light and feathery on the surface, and the air was growing gradually milder. At sunset the sky was shattered by a spear of sunshine which pierced the wall of clouds in the west. Between that golden lance and the solitary roof under which she stood swept the monotonous fields of snow.
"If it clears, there'll be a good moon to-night," she thought.
When the milking hour came she yielded to the persuasions of John Abner and did not go out to the barn. "It is time you learned that nobody is indispensable," he said, half sternly, half jestingly. "There are mighty few jobs that a full-grown man can't do as well as a woman, and loafing round a cow-barn in wintertime isn't one of them."
"The negroes get so careless," she urged, "if they aren't watched."
He was standing in front of the fire, and while he held out his stout boots, one by one, to the flames, the snow in the creases of the leather melted and ran down on the hearth. The smell of country life in winter—a mingled odour of leather, manure, harness oil, tobacco, and burning leaves—was diffused by the heat and floated out with a puff of smoke from the chimney. His features, seen in profile against the firelight, reminded her of Jason. John Abner was not really like him, she knew; but there were traits in every man, tricks of expression, of gesture, of movement, which brought Jason to life again in her thoughts. Twenty-two years ago she had known him! Twenty-two years filled to overflowing with dominant interests; and yet she could see his face as distinctly as she had seen it that first morning in the russet glow of the broomsedge. Dust now, she told herself, nothing more. Her memories of him were no better than deserted wasps' nests; but these dry and brittle ruins still clung there amid the cobwebs, in some obscure corner of her mind, and she could not brush them away. Neither regret nor sentiment had preserved them, and yet they had outlasted both sentiment and regret.
With a start of exasperation, she tore her mind from the past and glanced down at John Abner's clubfoot. "Are those boots comfortable?" she asked gently.
"Oh, they do as well as any," he replied irritably. Though any reference to his deformity annoyed him, there were times when she felt obliged to allude to it as a factor in his career. For good or ill, that clubfoot, like the mark of Jason in her life, had been his destiny. With his unusual gifts and without the sensitive shrinking from crowds which his lameness had developed into a disease, he might have achieved success in any profession that he had chosen. "You stay by the fire," he added, "while I take a turn at the bossing."
She nodded. "Very well, I'll be in the dairy when you are ready for me."
"I'll manage the whole business if you'll let me."
"But I shan't let you." She was smiling as she answered, and she perceived from his face that he was big enough to respect her for her inflexible purpose. While authority was still hers she would cling to it as stubbornly as she had toiled to attain it.
He went out laughing, and she dropped back in her chair to wait until the hour came for her work in the dairy. John Abner was right, of course. One of the exasperating things about men, she reflected, was that they were so often right. It was perfectly true that she could not stay young for ever, and at forty-two, after twenty years of arduous toil, she ought to think of the future and take the beginning of the hill more gradually. Though she was as strong, as vital, as young, in her arteries at least, as she had ever been, she could not, she realized, defend herself from the inevitable wearing down of the years. Her eyes wandered to the mirror in the bureau which had belonged to her mother, and it seemed to her that, sitting there in the ruddy firelight, the magic of youth enveloped her again with a springtime freshness. Her eyes looked so young in the dimness that they bathed her greying hair, her weatherbeaten skin, and her tall, strong figure, which was becoming a little dry, a trifle inelastic, in the celestial blueness of a May morning.
"I wonder if it is because I've missed everything I really wanted that I cannot grow old?" she asked herself with a start.
It was seven o'clock when she returned from the dairy, and John Abner was already in the kitchen demanding his supper.
"The train is certain to be hours late," he said. "There's no use waiting any longer for Father."
"Yes, we might as well have supper. I can cook something for him when he comes."
"I saw Mr. Garlick going over a few minutes ago. His daughter, Molly, went down yesterday with young Mrs. Ellgood to a concert. Mrs. Ellgood has always been crazy about music. Did you ever hear her play on the violin?"
"No, I never went anywhere even before I was married. I'm glad she's coming up with your father. He always liked her in spite of the fact that she despises the country."
When supper was over, and John Abner had eaten with an amazing appetite, they went back into her bedroom and sat down to wait before the fire. Though she had never been what Nathan called "an easy talker," she could always find something to say to her stepson; and they talked now, not only of the farm, the spring planting, the new tractor-plough they had ordered, but of books and distant countries and the absurd illustrations in the Lives of the Missionaries, which John Abner was reading for the fourth time.
"Alfalfa has been the making of Five Oaks," Dorinda said. "It's a shame Pa never knew of it."
"I wonder if Doctor Greylock ever comes back to his farm. If he does, he must be sorry he lost it."
"Well, he ruined the place, he and his father before him. It was no better than waste land when we bought it."
John Abner bent over to caress the head of the pointer. "I can't blame anybody for wanting to quit," he said. "There's a lot to be said for those missionary chaps. They were the real adventurers, I sometimes think."
He rose from his chair and shook himself. "Why, it's almost ten o'clock. There's no use staying up any longer. If we've got to wake before five, it is time we were both asleep."
"I believe I hear the buggy now." Dorinda bent her ear listening. "Isn't that a noise on the bridge? Or is it only another branch cracking?"
"You can't hear wheels in this snow. But I'll go out and take a look round. There's a fine moon coming up."
When he had unbarred the front door, she slipped into her raccoon coat and overshoes, and flung her knitted shawl over her head. After a minute or two, she saw John Abner's figure moving among the shrouded trees to the gate, and descending the steps as carefully as she could, she followed slowly in the direction he had taken. By the time she was midway down the walk, he had disappeared up the frozen road. Except for the lighted house at her back she might have been alone in a stainless world before the creation of life. A cold white moon was shedding a silver lustre over the landscape, which appeared as transparent as glass against the impenetrable horizon. Even the house, when she glanced round at it, might have been only a shadow, so unreal, so visionary, it looked in the unearthly light of the snow. While she lingered there it seemed to her that the movement of the air, the earth, and the stars, was suspended. Substance and shadow melted into each other and into the vastness of space. Not a track blurred the ground, not a cloud trembled in the sky, not a murmur of life broke the stillness.
Presently, as she drew nearer the gate, a moving shape flitted in from the trees by the road, and John Abner called to her that the buggy was in sight. "I'll wait and bed down the mare," he said. "Nimrod will be pretty hungry, I reckon, and he won't look after her properly."
"Well, I'll go right in and fix supper for both of them."
Without waiting for the vehicle, she hurried into the house and replenished the fire in the stove. Thin, while she broke the eggs and put on water to boil for coffee, she told herself that Nathan's coffee habit was as incurable as a taste for whiskey. The wood had caught and the fire was burning well when John Abner appeared suddenly in the doorway. He looked sleepy and a trifle disturbed.
"That wasn't Father after all," he said. "They told Nimrod there wasn't any use waiting longer. He was shaking with cold, so I sent him to bed. As soon as I've made the mare comfortable, I'll come and tell you all about it."
"I was just scrambling some eggs. I wish you'd eat them. I hate to waste things."
"All right. I'll be back in a jiffy."
He ran out as quickly as his lameness would permit, and she arranged the supper on the table. After all, if Nathan wasn't coming home to-night, John Abner might as well eat the eggs she had scrambled. There was no sense in wasting good food.
After attending to the mare the boy came in and began walking up and down the floor of the kitchen. He did not sit down at the table, though Dorinda was bringing the steaming skillet from the stove. "It's a nuisance all the wires are down," he said presently.
"Yes, but for that we might telephone."
"The telegraph wires have fallen too. Nimrod said they didn't know much more at the store than we do."
"Well, you'd better sit down and eat this while it's hot. It doesn't do any good to worry about things."
"One of the coloured men, Elisha Moody, told Nimrod he would be coming home in an hour, and he would stop and tell us the news. Mr. Garlick is going to wait at the station until his daughter comes."
"The news?" she asked vaguely. For the first time the idea occurred to her that John Abner was holding back what he had heard. "Doesn't Nimrod know when the train is expected?"
"Nobody knows. The wires are broken, but the train from Washington went down and came up again with news of a wreck down the road. I don't know whether it is Father's train or another, Nimrod was all mixed up about it. He couldn't tell me anything except that something had happened. The thing that impressed Nimrod most was that all the freight men carried axes. He kept repeating that over and over."
"Axes?" Dorinda's mind had stopped working. She stood there in the middle of the kitchen floor, with the coffee-pot in her hand, and repeated the word as if it were strange to her. Behind her the fire crackled, and the pots of rose-geraniums she had brought away from the window-sill stood in an orderly row on the brick hearth.
"I suppose they had to cut the coaches away from the track," replied John Abner indefinitely. "Elisha will tell us more when he stops by. He's got more sense than Nimrod, who was scared out of his wits."
"I would have given him some supper. Why didn't he come in?"
"He said his wife was waiting for him and he wanted to get to his cabin."
Dorinda poured out the coffee and carried the pot back to the stove. "I'm afraid your father will catch his death of cold," she said anxiously, "and with that tooth out!"
She was fortified by a serene confidence in Nathan's ability to take care of himself. The only uneasiness she felt was on account of the abscess. With all his good judgment, when it came to toothache he was no braver than a child.
John Abner seemed glad to get the hot coffee. "You might as well keep some for Elisha," he suggested. "It's almost time he was coming and I know he'll be thankful for something hot."
Though he ate and drank as if he were hungry, there was a worried look in his face, and he kept turning his head in the direction of the road.
"I don't suppose it's anything really serious," Dorinda remarked reassuringly. "If it had been, we should certainly have heard it sooner."
Dropping into a chair beside him, she raised a cup of coffee and drank it slowly in sips. Presently, notwithstanding her effort to minimize the cause for alarm, she became aware that anxiety was stealing over her as if it emanated from her surroundings. She felt it first in the creeping sensation which ran like spiders over her flesh; then in an almost imperceptible twitching of her muscles; and at last in a delicate vibration of her nerves, as if a message were passing over electric wires in her body. Then, suddenly, the fear mounted to her brain, and she found herself listening like John Abner for the crunching of wheels in the snow.
"Do you hear anybody, John Abner?"
"A branch snapped, that was all. I'll make up the fire in your chamber. It's more comfortable in there."
After he had gone into the bedroom, she fed the two dogs and the cat before she washed the dishes and placed the coffee where it would keep hot for Elisha. As she was leaving the kitchen she noticed the rose-geraniums and moved the pots farther away from the heat. "If we are going to keep up the fire, it will be too warm for them there," she thought.
The log fire was blazing in her bedroom, and John Abner stood before the window which looked on the gate and the road.
"The panes are so frosted you can't see your hand before you," he said, as she entered.
Standing there beside him, she gazed through the leafless boughs of the lilac bushes. "No, even the moonlight doesn't help you," she answered. "It must be bitterly cold in the road. I hope the mare got warm again."
"Yes, I covered her up. Nimrod had some whiskey and he was going to make a hot toddy." John Abner shivered in the icy draught that crept in through the loose window sashes. "Hadn't you better lie down?" he asked, turning back to the fire. "It won't be long now."
She shook her head. "That coffee will keep me awake. Lie down on the couch, and I'll listen for Elisha. I drew up the shades, so he will know we haven't gone to bed."
For a few minutes he resisted her, his eyes blinking in the firelight while he struggled to bite back a yawn. Then he gave up and flung himself down on the big soft couch. "It would take something stronger than coffee to keep me awake to-night," he said. "If I drop off, will you wake me?"
"If there is any news. But you will hear Elisha when he comes." He laughed drowsily. "I believe I could sleep straight through Judgment Day."
Taking the quilt from the bed, she covered him carefully from head to foot. As she tucked him in, she remembered her wedding night when she had found Nathan asleep on the couch in front of the fire. "If he hadn't been like that, I couldn't have stood him," she thought.
Sinking into the easiest chair by the flames, she picked up the sock she had partly darned in the afternoon. Then, observing that the lamp was shining in John Abner's face, she lowered the wick and folding the sock, replaced it in her work basket. The chair creaked gently as she rocked, and fearing the noise might disturb him, she sat motionless, with her eyes on the hickory logs and her foot touching the neck of the pointer.
While she sat there she recalled, with one of the irresponsible flashes of memory which revived only when she was inactive, the afternoon when she had waited in the dripping woods to see Jason drive home with Geneva. She was a girl then; now she was a woman and middle-aged; yet there was an intolerable quality in all suspense which made it alike. Compared to those moments, this waiting was as the dead to the living agony. "Suppose I had married Jason and he was on that train, could I sit here like this?" she asked herself. "Suppose I had married Jason instead of Nathan, would marriage have been different?"
Then, because the question was useless and she had no room for useless things in her practical mind, she put it sternly away from her, and rising, slipped into her coat and went out of the house. Closing the door softly, she passed out on the porch and down the frozen steps to the lawn. The snow was slippery in thin places, and she knew that Elisha would try to keep to the road where the deep drifts were less dangerous. Advancing cautiously, she moved in the direction of the gate, but she had gone only a few steps when she saw Elisha's old spring wagon rolling over the bridge. Quickening her steps dangerously, she ran over the slippery ground.
"I've kept some hot coffee for you, Uncle Elisha. Can't you come into the kitchen and get something to eat?"
"Naw'm, I reckon I'd better be gittin' erlong home. My ole grey mare, she's had jes' about enuff er dis yeah wedder, en she's kinder hankerin' fur de stable."
"We can keep her here. There's plenty of room in the stable, and you can spend the night with Ebenezer."
"Thanky, Miss Dorindy, bofe un us sutney would be glad uv er spell er res'. My son Jasper, he's on dat ar train dat's done been stalled down de track, an' I'se gwine out agin about'n sunup."
"Have they heard anything yet?" asked Dorinda, while the wagon crawled over the snags of roots in the direction of the stable.
Elisha shook his muffled head. "Dey don' know nuttin', Miss Dorindy, dat's de Gospel trufe, dey don' know nuttin' 'tall. Dar's a train done come down Pom de Norf, en hit's gwine on wid whatevah dey could git abo'd hit. Hi! Dey's got axes erlong, en I 'low dar ain' nary a one un um dat kin handle an axe like my Jasper."
"I'm afraid it's a bad wreck," Dorinda said uneasily.
"Yas'm, dar's a wreck somewhar, sho 'nuff, but dey don' know nuttin' out dar at de station. All de wires is down, ev'y las' one un um, en dar ain' nobody done come erlong back dat went down de road. Ef'n you'll lemme res' de night heah, me en de mare'll go out agin befo' sunup."
"There's all the room in the world, Uncle Elisha. Wait, and I'll give you a lantern to take to the stable." She went indoors and returned in a few minutes with a light swinging from her hand. "As soon as you've attended to your mare, come in and I'll have something for you to eat."
As she passed her bedroom on the way to the kitchen she saw that John Abner was still sleeping, and she did not stop to arouse him. Why should she disturb his slumber when there was nothing definite that she could tell him? Instead, she hastened about her preparations for Elisha's supper, and by the time the old negro came in from bedding the mare, the bacon and eggs were on the table. Withdrawing to a safe distance from the stove, he thawed his frostbitten hands and feet, while his grizzled head emerged like some gigantic caterpillar from the chrysalis of shawls he had wound about him.
"Were there many people at the station?" she inquired presently.
"Naw'm, hit was too fur fur mos' folks. Marse John Garlick, he wuz spendin' de night in de sto', en so was Marse Jim Ellgood. Young Marse Bob en his wife wuz bofe un um on de train."
"Well, make a good supper. Then you can go up to Ebenezer's. I saw smoke coming out of his chimney, so it will be warm there."
Because she knew that he would enjoy his supper more if he were permitted to eat it alone, she went back to the fire in her bedroom where John Abner was still sleeping. She watched there in the silence until she heard Elisha exclaim, "Good night, Miss Dorindy!" and go out, shutting the back door behind him. Then she locked up the house, and after lowering the wick of the hall lamp, touched John Abner on the shoulder.
"You'd better go to bed. In a little while you will have to be up again."
He opened his eyes and sat up, blinking at the firelight. "I could have slept on into next week."
"Well, don't wake up. Go straight upstairs."
"Did Elisha ever come?"
"Yes, he put his mare in the stable and went up to spend the night with Ebenezer."
"What did he tell you?"
"Only that they haven't found out anything definite at the station. You know how cut off everything is when the wires are down. Mr. Garlick and James Ellgood are both waiting out there all night."
"Then it was Father's train. It must have been a bad wreck."
"I'm afraid so. This suspense is so baffling. Anything in the world might happen, and we shouldn't know of it until the next day."
Her face was pale and drawn, and while she spoke, she shivered, not from cold but from anxiety. She saw John Abner glance quickly toward the front window and she knew that he, like herself, was feeling all the terror of primitive isolation. How did people stand it when they were actually cut off by the desert or the frozen North from communication with their kind?
"You know now what it must have been like in the old days before we had the telegraph and the telephone," she said. "Pedlar's Mill was scarcely more than a stopping place in the wilderness, and my mother would be shut in for days without a sign from the outer world."
"I never thought of it before," said John Abner, "but it must have been pretty rough on her. The roads were no better than frozen bogs, so she couldn't get anywhere if she wanted to."
"That was why she got her mania for work. The winter loneliness; she said, was more than she could endure without losing her mind. She had to move about to make company for herself. There were weeks at a time, she told me once, when the roads were so bad that nobody went by, not even Mr. Garlick, or an occasional negro. During the war the trains stopped running on this branch road, and afterwards there were only two trains passing a day."
"I suppose it was always better on the other side of the railroad."
"They're nearer the highway, of course, though that was bad enough when Ma was first married. Over here the roads were never mended unless a few of the farmers agreed to give so much labour, either of slaves or free negroes. Then, after the contract was made, something invariably got in the way and it fell through. Somebody died or fell ill or lost all his crops. You know how indisposed tenant farmers are to doing their share of work."
"And there wasn't even a store at Pedlar's Mill until Father started one?"
"Nothing but the mill. That was there as far back as anybody could remember, and there was always a Pedlar for a miller. The farmers from this side took corn there to be ground, and sometimes they would trade it for sugar or molasses. But the only store was far up at the Courthouse. People bought their winter supplies when they went to town to sell tobacco. All the tobacco money went for coffee and sugar and clothes. That was why Pa raised a crop every year to the end of his life."
John Abner rose and stretched himself. "Well, I'm precious glad I live in the days of the telephone and the telegraph, with the hope of owning an automobile when they get cheaper." Going over to the window, he held his hand over his eyes and peered out. "You can't see a thing but snow. We might as well be dead and buried under it. Shall I take the butter over in the morning?"
"No, I'd like to go myself. You'd better stay and look after the milking." How inexorable were the trivial necessities of the farm! Anxieties might come and go, but the milking would not wait upon life or death. Not until John Abner had gone upstairs did she perceive that she had been talking, as her mother would have said, "to make company for herself." "I've almost lost my taste for books," she thought, "and I used to be such a hungry reader."
After putting a fresh log on the fire, she flung herself on the bed, without undressing, and lay perfectly still while a nervous tremor, like the suspension of a drawn breath, crept over her. Toward daybreak, when the crashing of a dead branch on one of the locust trees sounded as if it had fallen on the roof, she realized that she was straining every sense for the noise of an approaching vehicle in the road. Then, rising hurriedly, she threw open the window and leaned out into the night. Nothing there. Only the lacquered darkness and the moon turning to a faint yellow-green over the fields of snow!
At four o'clock she went into the kitchen and began preparations for breakfast. When the coffee was ground, the water poured over it in the coffee-pot, and the butterbread mixed and put into the baking dish, she returned to her room and finished her dressing. By the time John Abner came down to go out to the cow-barn, she was waiting with her hat on and a pile of sheepskin rugs at her feet.
"I suppose we might as well send the butter out. Fluvanna has it ready," she said, watching him while he lighted his lantern from the lamp on the breakfast table. "If the trains have begun running again, they will expect it in Washington."
"It won't hurt anyway to take it along. I'll tell Nimrod to hitch up."
They both spoke as if the wreck had been merely a temporary inconvenience which was over. Vaguely, there swam through Dorinda's mind the image of her mother cooking breakfast in her best dress before she went to the Courthouse. The old woman had worn the same expression of desperate hopefulness that Dorinda felt now spreading like a mask of beeswax over her own features. Already, though it was still dark, the life of the farm was stirring. As John Abner went out, she saw the stars of lanterns swinging away into the night, and when he returned to breakfast, Fluvanna was in the kitchen busily frying bacon and eggs. Before they had finished the meal, Nimrod appeared to say that the wagon was waiting, and rising hastily Dorinda slipped on her raccoon-skin coat.
"We'd better start," she said. "Give Uncle Elisha his breakfast, and tell him we will bring Jasper back with us. Keep the kettle on, so you can make coffee for Mr. Nathan as soon as he gets here."
Hurrying out, she climbed into the heavy wagon, and they started carefully down the slippery grade to the road. As they turned out of the gate, the wheels slid over the embedded rocks to the frozen ruts in the snow. Only a circle of road immediately in front of them was visible, and while the wagon rolled on, this spot of ground appeared to travel with them, never changing and never lingering in its passage. Into this illuminated circle tiny tracks of birds drifted and vanished like magic signs.
Presently, as they drew nearer Pedlar's Mill, a glimmer, so faint that it was scarcely more than a ripple on the surface of black waters, quivered in the darkness around them. With this ripple, a formless transparency floated up in the east, as a luminous mist swims up before an approaching candle. Out of this brightness, the landscape dawned in fragments, like dissolving views of the Arctic Circle. The sky was muffled overhead, but just as they reached the station a pale glow suffused the clouds beyond the ruined mill on the horizon.
"If the train was on time, it must have gone by an hour ago," Dorinda said, but she knew that there was no chance of its having gone by.
"Hit's gwinter thaw, sho' nuff, befo' sundown," Nimrod rejoined, speaking for the first time since they started.
"Yes, it's getting milder."
At that hour, in the bitter dawn, the station looked lonelier and more forsaken than ever. Hemmed in by the level sea of ice, the old warehouse and platform were flung there like dead driftwood. Even the red streak in the sky made the winter desolation appear more desolate.
At first she could distinguish no moving figures; but when they came nearer, she saw a small group of men gathered round an object which she had mistaken in the distance for one of the deserted freight cars.
Now she saw that this object was a train of a single coach, with an engine attached, and that the men were moving dark masses from the car to crude stretchers laid out on the snow.
"The trains are running again," Dorinda said hoarsely. "They must have got the track cleared."
"I hope dey's gwinter teck dis yeah budder," Nimrod returned. "Git up heah, hosses! We ain' got no mo' time to poke."
A chill passed down Dorinda's spine; but she was unaware of the cause that produced it, and her mind was vacant of thought. Then, while the wagon jolted up the slope, some empty words darted into her consciousness. "Something has happened. I feel that something has happened."
"Do you see anybody that you know, Nimrod?"
"Naw'm, I cyarn see nobody." Then he added excitedly, "But dar's somebody a-comin'. Ain' he ole Marse Jim Ellgood?"
The horses stopped by the fence and began nuzzling the snow, while Nimrod dropped the reins and jumped down to lift out the butter. Standing up in the wagon, Dorinda beat her chilled hands together. Her limbs felt stiff with cold, and for a moment they refused to obey her will. Then recovering control of herself, she stepped down from the wagon and followed Nimrod in the direction of the store. Immediately, she was aware of a bustle about the track, and she thought, "How much human beings are like turkeys!" The group of men had separated as she approached, and two figures came forward to meet her across the snow. One was a stranger; the other, though it took her an instant to recognize him, was Bob Ellgood. "Why, he looks like an old man," she said to herself. "He looks as old as his father." The ruddy, masterful features were scorched and smoke-stained, and the curling fair hair was burned to the colour of singed broomsedge. Even his eyes looked burned, and one of his hands was rolled in a bandage.
She stopped abruptly and stood motionless. Though she was without definite fear, an obscure dread was beating against the wall of her consciousness. "Something has happened. Something has happened. Something has happened." Her mind seemed to have no relation to herself, to her feelings, to her beliefs, to her affections. It was only an empty shed; and the darkness of this shed was filled suddenly with the sound of swallows fluttering.
When Bob Ellgood reached her, he held out his unbandaged hand. "Father and I were just going over to your place, Mrs. Pedlar," he said. "We wanted to be the first to see you. We wanted you to hear of Nathan from us——"
"Then he is dead," she said quietly. It had never seemed possible to her that Nathan could die. He had not mattered enough for that. But now he was dead.
"He died a hero," a stranger, whom she had never seen before, said earnestly.
"Yes, he died a hero," Bob Ellgood snatched the words away from the other. "That is what we wish you to know and to feel as long as you live. He gave his life for others. He had got free, without a scratch, and he went back into the wreck. The train had gone over the embankment. It was burning and women were screaming. He went down because he was strong. He went down and he never came back."
"God! Those shrieks!" exclaimed the strange man. "I'll hear them all my life. As long as I live, I'll never stop hearing them."
"He got free?" she repeated stupidly.
"But he went back. He got an axe from somebody, and he went back because he was strong. He was cutting the car away to get a woman out. He did get her out——" He broke off and added hastily, "When we found him, he was quite dead. . . ."
Dorinda stared at him vacantly, seeing nothing but his blackened features and the scorched place on his head. "Will they bring him to the farm?" she asked.
"If you wish it." Bob's voice was shaken. "But we feel that we should like him to rest in the churchyard."
Silently, scarcely knowing what he asked, she assented. So Nathan had forced people to take him seriously, even though he had to die before they would do it. Was it worth it? she wondered. Would it have pleased him if he had known?