"There wasn't anything else to do, was there, John Abner?" she asked, in the deferential tone she reserved for a crisis. It was not often that Dorinda deferred, and on the rare occasions when she did so, she was able to administer a more piquant flattery than the naturally clinging woman has at her command.
"It looks to me as if they were letting you down," John Abner rejoined moodily; but his face cleared under her persuasion. After all, what he liked best was to be treated as an authority not only on farming, but on human nature as well. The fact that he had lived as a recluse, and knew nothing whatever of life, did not interfere with the sincerity of his claim to profound wisdom. Men were so immature, she found herself thinking; and they were never so immature as when they strutted most with importance. Since the emotional disaster of her youth, she had been incapable of either loving or hating without a caustic reservation; and she felt that the hidden flaw in her relations with men was her inability to treat a delusion of superiority as if it were a moral principle. This was a small indulgence, she imagined, to a woman who loved passionately; but to one who had safely finished with love and attained the calm judgment of the disillusioned, it was an indulgence which might prove to be particularly irksome.
Slipping her arm through John Abner's, she walked with him into the house. "Well, of course, in a way you're right; but after all, even if they are imposing on us, we couldn't very well refuse to do anything."
Though the two farms would go to John Abner at her death, there were moments when, notwithstanding his affection for her, she suspected uncomfortably that he would like complete authority while she was living. Not that he was ever disagreeable or ungenerous about the way she managed him. He was, she knew, honestly devoted to her, and he admired her without the pity that had always tempered her admiration for him. But he shared, she told herself, with all males who were not milksops, the masculine instinct to domineer over the opposite sex.
"Well, if it's anybody's business, it's James Ellgood's," he protested.
She raised her straight grey eyebrows with a quizzical smile. "All the same you can hardly blame James Ellgood for not making it his business. Nothing will ever let him forget that Jason drove Geneva out of her mind."
"Well, perhaps he did, but there was no law to punish him."
"That's what James Ellgood feels, of course, and I suppose he is right. If it were simply a question of punishment——"
"You mean it's more than that?"
"Well, isn't it?" She had learned that she could always win him to her point of view by disguising a naked fact in the paraphernalia of philosophy. "From our side, I suppose it's one of humanity." Though she despised sophistry as heartily as she despised indirectness, she could bend both to her purpose when it was a matter of compulsion.
"If you mean that our humanity is more important than his punishment?" he returned in a mollified tone.
"Yes, I do mean that. You have said it so often yourself." That would finish his opposition, she knew, and without his opposition, life on the farm would be easier for the next two or three weeks.
"Won't it make a lot of trouble?" he inquired.
She frowned. "I'm afraid it will. Of course, if he gets better, he can move over to Five Oaks, and anyway the authorities ought to make some kind of provision for him. We can't be expected to take over the poor farm." Her tone was suddenly bitter with memory; but she concluded hastily: "In the meantime, I'll warm the spare room and get it ready. If the doctor says he must have fresh air, we can move his bed out on the back porch."
John Abner looked resentful. "I'm sorry for the poor devil, of course, even if he did drive his wife crazy; but I don't see the sense in turning the place upside down for somebody who hasn't the slightest claim on you. He isn't even a poor relation."
"He isn't anybody's poor relation, that's the trouble."
"I'm not so sure." John Abner could be brutally candid at times. "There are a lot of Idabella's mulatto children still hanging about Five Oaks."
She shivered with disgust. "What the law doesn't acknowledge, I suppose it doesn't bother about."
"Well, it isn't any business of mine," John Abner said, after deliberation. "If you choose to bring him here, of course you have the right. But I hope you aren't going to wear yourself out waiting on him. You've got no moderation in such things. After Snowbird's sickness last winter, you didn't look like yourself."
She shook her head. "I'd do much more for Snowbird. But I shan't wait on him. I'll get Fluvanna's sister, Mirandy. She's an old woman, and a good hand with sick people, even if she hasn't any sense in the dairy." As she finished, she heard a voice in her mind asking distinctly, "Why am I doing this? Why should I take the trouble?" And there wasn't any answer. Even when she dragged her mind for an excuse or even an idea, she could not unearth one. She had stopped loving Jason thirty years ago; she had stopped hating him at an indefinite period; she had stopped even remembering that he was alive; yet she could not, without doing violence to her own nature, let him die in the poorhouse. After all, it was not her feeling or lack of feeling for him, it was the poorhouse and her horror of the poorhouse that decided his fate.
"I'll have to go with you," John Abner was saying. "You can't manage it by yourself."
"No. I'd rather have you. If we start right after dinner, that ought to bring us back before the milking is over. The road is rough, I'm afraid. We'll have to take some pillows in the back of the car."
"If he's bad off, perhaps Doctor Stout won't let him come," John Abner suggested hopefully.
"Well, we'll stop at the doctor's house on the way. That's why I want to start early."
That night, after the last of the day's work was over, they sat in front of Dorinda's fire and talked as they used to talk when John Abner was a boy and had not been warped by disappointment. Their thoughts were in the future, not in the past, and Dorinda's visions were coloured by the optimism which she had won more from perseverance than from any convincing lesson of experience. Because of the very defects of his qualities, John Abner suited her. It was true that his companionship had its imperfections; but she would not have exchanged his sullen reticence for the golden fluency of the new minister at Pedlar's Mill. Her stepson's personality was attractive to her, for he gave an impression of inexhaustible strength in reserve; and in the matter of disposition he influenced her less as an example than as a warning, which, after all, she reflected, was the kind of influence she needed.
"When all is said, we are as contented as we could expect to be," she remarked, when he rose to go upstairs. "If you don't marry, we'll have a pleasant old age by the fireside."
He laughed shortly, for he was in one of his gentler moods. There was a charm, she thought, in his long thin features, his sallow skin with bluish shadows about the mouth, his squinting eyes, and his straight black hair which fell in stringy locks over his forehead.
"You may marry again yourself," he said abruptly. "You aren't as handsome as you used to be, but you're still better-looking than anybody about here."
She shook her head obstinately. "With white hair and wrinkles!"
"Well, there's more than white hair and wrinkles. I don't know what it is, but it's there," he answered, as he turned away and went out of the room.
In the morning she awoke with a feeling of despondency. Dread had come over her while she slept, and she felt it dragging at her memory after she had opened her eyes. Why had she yielded to that erratic impulse the evening before? Why had she allowed those two men to impose on her? "If is because I am a woman," she thought. "If I were a man, they would never have dared." Yes, John Abner was right (here was another instance of how right he so often was) and the county authorities had taken advantage of her weakness. "Well, I've let myself in for it now, and I'll have to go through with it," she said aloud, as she got out of bed and began dressing.
At breakfast, while she tried to eat and could not because of the lump in her throat, she reminded herself of her mother on the day of her journey to the Courthouse. "All I need is a crape veil and a handkerchief scented with camphor," she said, with a laugh.
"What are you talking about, Dorinda?" John Abner asked, with a frown.
"I was thinking of my mother. Poor Ma! She'd be living now if she hadn't worried so."
"Well, she'd be nearly a hundred, I reckon. And don't you begin worrying. Are you out of temper because you let those men put something over on you?"
"I don't know. It seems different this morning. I can't see why I did it."
"I heard the men talking about it in the barn. Somebody, the sheriff, I reckon, had told Martin Flower, and he said you'd bitten off more than you could chew."
Dorinda flushed angrily. "When I want Martin Flower's interference, I'll ask for it."
Already a message had gone to Mirandy, and the old negress was waiting outside for directions when breakfast was over. The floor and the woodwork of the spare room must be scrubbed; the bed thoroughly aired before it was made up; a fire kindled in the big fireplace; and the red-bordered towels, which her mother had reserved for the visiting elder, must be hung on the towel-rack. Last of all, Mirandy must remember to keep a kettle boiling day and night on the brass footman.
"I wonder why I am doing all this?" Dorinda asked herself. Was it, as she believed, from impersonal compassion? Or was it because her first lover, merely because he had been the first, was impressed eternally on the unconscious cells of her being? "No, I'm not doing it for Jason," she answered. "Even if I had never loved him, I couldn't let the man who had owned Five Oaks die in the poorhouse."
"Before we bring him here," John Abner said, "you'd better warn Aunt Mirandy that consumption is catching." He shook his head with a sardonic smile. "I'm afraid he's going to be a nuisance; but I believe you would have done the same thing if it had been smallpox."
She looked at him with inscrutable eyes. "I was never afraid of taking things."
"But you don't even like Jason Greylock."
"Like him? Who could? What has that to do with the poorhouse?"
A look of rare tenderness, for he was not often tender, came into John Abner's eyes while he squinted at her over the table. "Well, you're a big woman, Dorinda, even if you're trying at times. There's an extra dimension in you somewhere."
Though praise from John Abner was one of the things that pleased her most, she was incapable, she knew, of draining the sweetness of the moment before it escaped her. When happiness came to her she had always the feeling that she was too dull or too slow to realize it completely until it was, over, when she responded to the memory as she had never responded to the actual occurrence.
"You're very good to me, John Abner," she answered. Her words were insufficient, but the habit of reticence was, as usual, too strong for her.
For hours she went about her work with the thoroughness that she exacted of herself on days of mental disturbance. Not until the car was waiting at the door, and Fluvanna was hastening out with robes and pillows, did Dorinda turn aside from her ordinary activities, and go into the room she had selected for Jason. Yes, everything was in order. The floor and walls were clean; the windows had been closed after an airing; and the fire burned brightly on the sunken stones in the fireplace. Even the big iron kettle steamed away on the footman. There was soap in the soap-dish on the washstand; an abundance of soft warm blankets covered the bed; on the candlestand stood a blue thermos bottle, and her mother's Bible lay beside it, with the purple bookmarker she had embroidered marking a favourite text. "It ought to seem pleasant," she thought, "after the poorhouse."
Outside, she found John Abner at the wheel of the car and Fluvanna arranging the pillows on the back seat.
"Would you like to drive, Dorinda?"
"No, but I'll sit in front with you. When we come back, one of us will have to sit with him, and I'd rather it would be you."
They talked little on the long drive. John Abner was intent on the wheel, and Dorinda held her cape closely about her, and gazed straight ahead at the twisted road and the hazy brightness of the October landscape. A veil of glittering dust drifted up from the meadows of life-everlasting; in the underbrush by the fences, sumach and sassafras made splashes of crimson and wine-colour; farther away, the changing woods were tossed in broken masses against the cloudless arch of the sky.
As they approached the Courthouse, the country was less thinly settled, and throngs of barefooted children ran beside the car and offered bunches of prince's feather and cockscomb. In some of the fields men were ploughing, and among them Dorinda observed the phlegmatic faces of Swedes or Germans. As the car sped by, they stopped in their ploughing or cutting, and turned to stare curiously like slow-witted animals. Over all was the blue haze of October and the drifting silver pollen of life-everlasting.
At Doctor Stout's, a new green and white cottage near the road, which looked as trivial as a butterfly on the edge of the autumnal solitude, they were told that the doctor had already gone to the poorhouse.
"He was that upset he couldn't sleep last night," said Mrs. Stout, a pretty, plump, deep-bosomed woman, in a pink and white gingham dress and a starched apron. "It seemed to prey on him to think of Doctor Greylock, who used to have the best practice around here, dying up yonder in the poorhouse. He was so promising, too, they say, when he came back, and his people owned that big place over near Pedlar's Mill. Drink was his ruin, I reckon, and that made it so hard, for everybody was afraid to take in a man that was out of his head. I couldn't have had him here on account of the children and measles just broken out yesterday. But there ought to be some way of caring for sick and crazy people without sending them to the poorhouse. And now with all the poorhouses going, there soon won't be any place for them but the gaol." She was a voluble person, but at last the flow of words stopped, and they drove on between dusty borders of sassafras.
"Is it true that Doctor Stout was born in a poorhouse?" Dorinda asked presently.
"Nobody knows. It doesn't surprise me to hear that he was."
"And now Jason is dying in one. Is that the result of character or merely accident, I wonder?"
"Of both probably," John Abner rejoined. "I've read of too many decent human beings going on the rocks to believe the fable that virtue alone will get you anywhere, unless it is to the poorhouse instead of the gaol."
"There it must be now," Dorinda exclaimed, pointing to the right of the road. "Do we turn in over that ditch?"
"It seems to be the only way. Hey! Get out of the road there!" shouted John Abner to a skulking black and tan foxhound.
Withdrawn from the road, behind the fallen planks which had once made a fence, the poorhouse sprawled there, in the midst of the life-everlasting, like the sun-bleached skeleton of an animal which buzzards had picked clean of flesh. The walls and roof were covered with whitewash; there was whitewash on the smooth, round stones that bordered the path to the door; and the few starved cedar trees in the yard were whitewashed to the thin foliage at their tops. At one side, a few coarse garments were fluttering from clothes-lines, and several decrepit paupers were spreading wet things on the bushes that grew by the back porch.
Like other relics of an abruptly changing era, the county poorhouse possessed both the advantages and the disadvantages of desuetude. The seven aged paupers and the one indigent young mother who now accepted its charity were neglected, it is true, but they were neglected in freedom. Where there was no system there was less room for interference. If the coarse clothes were thin, they were as varied as the tempers or the inclinations of the paupers. Though the fare was mean, the complaints over it were bountiful. It is hard to be a pauper; it is particularly hard to be an aged pauper; but if these nine inmates (including the week-old infant) could have chosen between liberty and fraternity, they would probably have preferred the scant food and the rough clothes to the neat livery of dependence. Dorinda, however, perceived none of the varied blessings attendant upon orderless destitution. All she saw was the ramshackle building and the whitewashed cedars, which reminded her vaguely of missionary stories of the fences of dry bones surrounding the huts of Ethiopian kings. "It looks as bare as the palm of my hand," she said aloud.
The doctor's Ford car was standing in front of the door, with one wheel in a mudhole and one in a pile of trash; and when they stopped, an old woman, who was hanging the wash to dry on the bushes, put down the wet clothes and came over to meet them. She was so old that her skin was like bark; her mouth was closed as tight as a nutcracker over her toothless gums; and her small red eyes flickered between eyelids which looked as if they had worn away. As she mumbled at them, she wiped her steaming wet hands on her skirt.
"You ain't got any sweet stuff, is you, honey?" she whined, until the doctor appeared at the door and beckoned them round the corner of the house where the sunshine was falling. As usual he looked brisk, kind, incurably sanguine.
"There is no longer any question. These county poorhouses must go," he said, as they followed the beaten track which wound by the side of the building. "It costs the county not a cent under two thousand dollars a year to keep this place open for these eight inmates. It would be cheaper in the end to board them at the City Home where there is some system about the way things are managed." Then he lowered his voice, which had been high and peremptory, as if he wished to be overheard. "We brought Doctor Greylock here because he couldn't be left alone, and none of the negroes would go near him. There's a scare about him, though he's perfectly harmless. A little out of his dead now and then, but too weak to hurt anybody even if he tried."
"Is he delirious now?"
"No, he's in his senses this morning, and quiet—you'll find him as quiet as you could wish. Is there anybody to look after him at Five Oaks?"
"We're not taking him to Five Oaks. There's no place for him there. But I've got a nurse for him, Aunt Mirandy Moody. She knows how to take care of the sick, and I believe the can manage him."
"Oh, anybody can manage him now," Doctor Stout said reassuringly.
A tremor of weakness passed over Dorinda. She felt that her knees and elbows were shaking, and there was a meaningless noise in her ears. Was it Jason of whom they were speaking? No, it was not Jason, for it seemed to her that Jason had died long ago, so long ago that she couldn't remember him. She was standing by the wall of the poorhouse, and an obscure pauper, somebody who could be "easily managed," was dying within. She dropped her eyelids to shut out the brown cloud, as thick as the smoke of burning leaves, which rolled up from the meadows. When she opened her eyes again the sunshine on the whitewashed wall dazzled her. If only she had known! If only she could have looked ahead to this moment! Those summer evenings thirty years ago, and this autumn day beside the wall of the poorhouse! The whitewashed cedars, the sunken road, the flat fields, the ridged earth where labourers moved slowly, and over all the glittering dust of life-everlasting.
"He ought to drink as much milk as he can," Doctor Stout was saying in his professional voice. "And eggs when he will take them. Every two hours he should have nourishment in some form, and an eggnog with whiskey three or four times a day. You can't expect him to do without whiskey. I've got a bottle for you to take back with you. He may need some on the way if he seems to be losing strength."
She nodded. "I learned a little when I was a girl in a doctor's office in New York; but everything has changed since the war. You'll come over to-morrow?"
"I'll drop in whenever I am called that way. If he gets much worse, you can telephone me. I feel that he has a professional claim on me."
The weakness had gone now. She felt courageous and full of vitality, as if the rich blood had surged up through her veins. With the return of strength, her self-reliance, her calm efficiency, revived. She was facing the present now, not the past, and she faced it imperiously.
"You think he is able to be moved?" she asked.
"Even if it is a risk,"—he met her gaze candidly,—"wouldn't anything be better than to die in this place?"
She acquiesced by a gesture. Then, threading her way between the stunted rosebushes, she spoke in a smothered voice, "Is he ready to go with us?"
"He is waiting on the back porch. It's sunny there."
"The car is open, you know, but John Abner is putting up the top."
"Fresh air won't hurt him. You've plenty of rugs, I suppose, and he'll need pillows."
"I've thought of that. You can fix the back seat like a bed. Of course we shall drive very slowly." Glancing up at the sun, she concluded in her capable manner: "It's time we were starting. John Abner and I both have work to do on the farm."
Doctor Stout bent an admiring gaze on her, and she knew from his look that he was thinking, "Sensible woman. No damned mushiness about her." Aloud, he said, "He is ready to go. You'll find that he doesn't say much. When a man has touched the bottom of things, there isn't much talk left in him. But I think he'll be glad to get away."
"Well, I'll see what I can do." Stepping in front of him, she turned the sharp angle of the wall and saw Jason lying on a shuck mattress in the sunshine. Beneath his head there was a pile of cotton bags stuffed with feathers and tied at the ends. Several patchwork quilts were spread over him, and one of the old women was covering his feet as Dorinda approached. His eyes were closed, and if he heard her footsteps on the ground, he made no sign. A chain of shadows cast by the drying clothes on the line fell over him, and these intangible fetters seemed to her the only bond linking him to existence. While she looked down on him, all connection between him and the man she had once loved was severed as completely as the chain of shadows when the wind moved the clothesline.
He lay straight and stiff under the quilts, and above the variegated pattern his features protruded, shrivelled, inanimate, expressionless, like the face of a mummy that would crumble to dust at a touch. His eyes beneath his closed lids were sunk in hollows from which the yellow stains spilled over on his bluish cheeks. The chin under the short stubble of beard was thrust out as if it would pierce the withered skin. It was not the face of Jason Greylock. What she looked on was merely a blank collection of features from which poverty and illness had drained all human intelligence. Turning away, she saw through a mist the doddering old woman who was fussing about the mattress and the decrepit manager who was too ancient and incompetent for more serious employment.
"They've come for you. We'll get you away," Doctor Stout said in his cheerful tones which rang with an artificial resonance. Then he turned to Dorinda. "The stimulant is wearing off. He'll need something stronger before he is able to start."
At the words, Jason opened his eyes and looked straight up at the sky. "I am thirsty," he said, while his hand made an empty claw-like gesture. If he were aware of their figures, she realized that they meant nothing to him. He had withdrawn from the external world into the darkness of some labyrinth where physical sensations were the only realities. While she watched him it came over her with a shock that the last thing to die in a human being is not thought, is not even spirit, but sensation.
One of the old women, who appeared to be in authority, brought a glass of blue milk, and taking a flask from his pocket the doctor added a measure of whiskey. Then lifting Jason's head, he held the glass to his lips.
Suddenly, it seemed to Dorinda that her impressions of the actual scene dissolved and slipped like quicksilver from her mind. She ceased to look, ceased to think, overcome by an emotion which was not grief, though it was the very essence of sadness. Closing her eyes, she waited for some sound or touch that would restore the fading glow of her reason. Why was she here? Where was it leading her? What was the meaning of it all?
She heard a strangled voice gasp, "You're hurting me," and looking round she saw that the doctor and John Abner were carrying Jason to the car.
"You'll feel better presently," the doctor said soothingly. "I'll give you something for the pain."
Like an automaton, she followed them; like an automaton, she stepped into the car and took her place by Jason's side on the back seat. She had intended to drive home, but she knew that she was incapable of controlling the big car. "Some one had better be back here with him," the doctor had insisted, and she had obeyed his directions in silence. "I've put the whiskey under the rug. Give him an eggnog as soon as you put him to bed."
The car started slowly, and they had driven for some miles before she found sufficient courage to turn and look at the figure beside her. Dazed by the sedative, he was staring straight in front of him, oblivious of the autumn sunshine, oblivious of the uninteresting country, oblivious of her presence, lost beyond reach in that dark labyrinth of sensation. His face was the face of one who had come to the edge of the world and looked over. It expressed not pain, not despair even, but nothingness. A grey woollen comforter was tied over his head, and his features appeared to have fallen away beneath the mummy-like covering. He was neither young nor old, she saw; he was over and done with, a thing with which time had finished. And he was a stranger to her! She had never loved him; she had never known him until to-day. The weight on her heart was so heavy that it was suffocating her. Again she thought: "Why am I here? What is the meaning of it all?" Again she felt as she had felt at her father's death: "The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy."
They drove on in silence; but it was a silence that reverberated like thunder in her brain. Nothing and everything was over. Ahead of her the road sank between the autumn fields and the brilliant patches of woods. The blue haze swam before her in the direction of the river. They passed the same ragged white and black children, who held up the same withered flowers. The same labourers were at work in the fields, bent in the same gestures of ploughing. As they went by a house set far back from the road, with a little crooked path leading up to a white wicket-gate, she imagined herself walking up the path and through the wicket-gate into another life.
John Abner looked back. "Am I going too fast? He coughs as if he were choking."
She turned to Jason and replaced a pillow which had slipped from under his head. His boots, with lumps of red clay still clinging to them, were stretched out stiffly on the pile of rugs. And those worn boots with the earth on the soles seemed to her so poignantly moving that her eyes filled with tears. His cough stopped, and she spoke to him in a raised voice as if he were at a distance, "Are you suffering now?"
If he heard her, he made no response. It seemed to her while she looked at him that he was in reality at a distance, that everything but the shell of physical pain in which he was imprisoned had already perished. She wondered if he remembered her, or if her image had dropped from him, with other material objects, in that blind wilderness. From his apathy, she might have been no more to him than one of the old women in the poorhouse. A shiver ran over her, as if she had been touched by a dead hand. Youth, beauty, victory, revenge,—what did any of these things signify before the inevitable triumph of time?
Yes, time had revenged her. If she had stood still, if she had not lifted a finger to help, time would still have revenged her; for time, she saw, always revenges one. She thought of the hot agony of that other October afternoon. Of the patter of rain on the roof. Of the smell of wet grass underfoot. Of the sodden sky. Of the branches whipping her face.
They passed the station, where a train had just gone by; they passed the old Haney place, where the new German tenant was ploughing; they passed Honeycomb Farm and the fork of the road, where the burned cabin and the blasted oak used to be. The new gate stood there now, and beyond it, there was the sandy road through the meadows of Joe-Pyeweed and life-everlasting. Against the sky, she could still see unchanged the chimneys of Five Oaks. Then they spun easily down the wooded slope, crawled over the patch of corduroy road, and, turning in at the bridge, rolled up to the front porch of Old Farm.
"Well, we got him here," John Abner said, with a breath of relief.
As they helped Jason to alight, it seemed to Dorinda that his bones were crumbling beneath her touch. If she had awakened to find that the whole afternoon had been a nightmare, she would have felt no surprise. Even the quiet house, with its air of patient expectancy, startled her by its strangeness.
Mirandy, a big, strong, compassionate old negress, who was born for a nurse but had missed her vocation until she was too old to profit by it, came out to help, and among them they carried Jason into the spare room and put him to bed. His clothes were so soiled and ragged that John Abner went upstairs and brought down some woollen things of his own. A fire blazed in the cavernous fireplace. Ripples of light and shadow danced over the yellow walls. The whole room smelt of burning logs and of the branches of pine on the mantelpiece. Warmth, peace, comfort, enfolded them as they entered.
When they had undressed Jason and covered him up warmly, Dorinda brought the eggnog, and Mirandy slipped her arm under the pillow and raised his head while he drank it. The tormented look had gone from his face. About his mouth the outline of a smile flickered.
"It feels good," he said, and closed his eyes as the glass was taken away.
"You'll eat some supper?"
"Yes, I'll eat some supper."
"You're not in pain now?"
"No, I'm not in pain now."
He spoke in a dazed way, like a child that is repeating words it does not understand. Had he forgotten that he had known her? Or had he reached the depths from which all memories appear as frail as the bloom on a tree? She did not know. She would never know probably. She had lost even the wish to know. Whether he had loved her or not made no difference. It made no difference whether or not he remembered. In that instant beside the poorhouse wall, the old Jason had been submerged and lost in this new Jason who was a stranger. Not in thirty years but in a single minute, she had lost him. Stripped of associations, stripped of sentiment, this new Jason was protected only by the intolerable pathos of life. How futile, how unnecessary, it had all been,—her love, her suffering, her bitterness.
He opened his eyes and looked at her.
"This isn't Five Oaks?"
"No, it is Old Farm."
"Old Farm? That is the Oakley place. Am I going to stay here?"
"Until you are better."
"Until I am better," he repeated.
"Are you comfortable now?"
He closed his eyes again. "Yes, it feels good."
"In a little while I'll give you some veronal and you will sleep."
A change passed over his face and he sighed, "I'd like to sleep."
She drew back and turned to go out of the room. Yes, the connection between youth and middle age was broken for ever.
In the night she heard him coughing, and slipping into her flannel wrapper, she went into the kitchen and beat up an egg with milk and brandy. When she took it into his room, he appeared feverish and asked for veronal. "But the brandy will undo it," he added mechanically. His face was flushed and when she touched his hand it was burning. "Is it near day?" he inquired.
"No, it is only one o'clock. I thought you were sleeping."
"I was, but I wake up this way. I've done it every night for months."
She gave him veronal, and then raised his head while he sipped the eggnog. "An owl has been hooting so loud I thought it was at the window," he said, looking up at her over the rim of the glass.
"It's up in the big pine. You've been dreaming."
The fire had burned down to a few embers, which flickered out when she tried to stir them to life. A dim light from the screened lamp on the floor behind the chintz-covered chair left the bed and his uncovered face in shadow.
"Do you feel better?" she asked, as she was turning away.
"Yes, I feel better." His eyes followed her from the shadow with a glance of mute interrogation.
"I'll put this stick by your bed." She went out into the hall and came back with one of John Abner's hickory sticks. "If you want anything or feel nervous, knock on the wall. I am a light sleeper, and Mirandy is in the room off the kitchen."
She waited, but he did not answer. Had he understood her, or was he incapable of grasping the meaning of sounds? It was like the inconsistency of life, she thought, that he, who once had been so voluble, should have become almost inarticulate at the end. She knew that he was trying to give as little trouble as possible, yet he seemed unable to put his wish into words.
Before going out, she made one last effort with the embers, but the wood she threw into the fireplace did not catch. When she went over to the bed again, Jason was lying with closed eyes. "He doesn't look as if he could last much longer," she thought dispassionately.
The still October days drifted by, hazy, mellow, declining into the rich light of the sunsets. With the dry weather and sufficient food after starvation, Jason appeared to improve. The old wheel-chair which had once belonged to Rose Emily was brought down from the attic, and he sat out, muffled in rugs, on bright afternoons. He liked his meals, though he never asked for them. Sometimes, after a hard spell of coughing, he would say, "How long is it before I have my eggnog?"; yet he never attempted to hasten the hour. Twice, after a severe hæmorrhage, they believed he was dying, but he recovered and was wheeled out again on the lawn. Day after day, he sat there in the sunshine, passive, silent, wrapped in a curious remoteness which was like the armour of an inscrutable reserve. Yet it was not reserve, she felt instinctively. It was something thinner; vaguer, something as impalpable as a shadow. It was, she realized suddenly one day, an emptiness of spirit. He was silent because there was nothing left in him to be uttered. He was remote because he had lost all connection with his surroundings, with events, with the material structure of living. Through the autumn days he would sit there, propped on pillows, in his wheel-chair between the half-bared lilac bushes and the "rockery," where Mrs. Oakley had planted portulaca over an old stump. His head would sink down into the rugs, and his unseeing eyes would gaze up the road to the starry fields of the life-everlasting. Behind him there was the porch and the long grey roof where swallows were wheeling. From the locust trees by the wings a rain of small yellow leaves fell slowly and steadily in the windless air, turning once as they left the stem, and drifting down to the flagged walk and the borders of sheepmint and wire-grass. His figure, bowed under the rugs, seemed to her to become merely another object in the landscape. He was as inanimate as the fields or the trees; and yet he made the solitude more lonely and the autumn dreaminess more pensive. His features had the scarred and seared look that is left in the faces of men who had fought their way out of a forest fire. Only the look that Jason wore now had passed from struggle into defeat. He appeared to be waiting, without fear and without hope, for whatever might happen. "I've seen so many people die," she thought, and then, "In fifty years many people must die."
She had come home this afternoon a little earlier than usual, and, still in riding breeches, she stood by the porch and looked down on the inert figure in the wheel-chair. Jason's eyes were open, but she could not tell whether he saw her or not. The mask of his features was as blank as if an indestructible glaze were spread over his face; and he stared straight before him, searching the road and the distant fields of life-everlasting for something that was not there. Though his helplessness was his only hold on her, she felt that it had become too poignant for her to bear. If only he would speak! If only he would complain! If only he would say what he was seeking! In the faint sunshine, beneath the ceaseless rain of leaves, he gathered, a deeper meaning, a fresher significance. A glamour of sadness enveloped him. For an instant the memory of the Jason she had first known flickered over him like a vanishing ray of sunlight. As the gleam faded, she felt that he was passing with it into some unearthly medium where she could not follow. It was, she told herself, only the endless riddle of mortality, renewed again and yet again in each human being. It was the old baffling sense of a secret meaning in the universe, of a reality beneath the actuality, of a deep profounder than the deeps of experience. The reserve of even one human being was impenetrable; the reserve of every human being was impenetrable. Of what was he thinking? she wondered, and knew that she could never discover. Had he loved her in the past, or had his desire for her been merely a hunger? Would he have been faithful to her if stronger forces had not swept him away? Which was the accident, his love or his faithlessness? When it was over, had she dropped out of his life, or had she continued to exist as a permanent influence? Was he better or worse than she had believed him to be? She had never known, and now she could never know. The truth would always elude her. She could never wring his secret from this empty shell which was as unfathomable as the sea. She felt that the mystery was killing her, and she knew that it was a mystery which could never be solved.
She tried to ask, "How much did I mean in your life?" an found herself reciting, parrot-like, "Do you feel any pain?"
He shook his head, without looking at her. His gaze was still on the road where it dipped at the bridge and travelled upward into the dreamy distance.
"Are you ready for your eggnog?" The effort to make her voice sound light and natural brought tears to her eyes.
At last she had touched him. The quiver of appetite stole over his face, and he turned his eyes, which were dark with pain, away from the road. "Is it almost time?" This was what he lived for now, an egg with milk and whiskey every four hours.
"It must be nearly. I'll go and see." As she still lingered, the quiver on his face deepened into a look of impatience, and he repeated eagerly, "You will go and see?"
"In a minute. Has the doctor been here?"
"Nobody has been here. A few people went by in the road, but they did not stop."
"Something must have prevented the doctor. He will come to-morrow."
"It makes no difference. I am a doctor."
A thought occurred to her while she watched him. "Would you rather be at Five Oaks? It might be managed."
He shook his head. "It doesn't matter. You are good to me here. I don't know why." He broke off with a rough, grating cough which sounded like the blows of a hammer. A few minutes afterwards, when the spell of coughing was over, he repeated, so mechanically that the words seemed to reach no deeper than his lips, "I don't know why."
He had not said as much as this since she had brought him to Old Farm, and while she listened a piercing light flashed into her mind, as if a lantern had been turned without warning on a dark road. In this light, all the hidden cells of her memory were illuminated. Things she had forgotten; things she had only dimly perceived when they were present; swift impulses; unacknowledged desires; flitting impressions like the shadow of a bird on still water,—all these indefinite longings started out vividly from the penumbra of darkness. As this circle of light widened, she saw Jason as she had first seen him more than thirty years ago, on that morning in winter. She saw his dark red hair, his brown-black eyes, his gay and charming smile with its indiscriminate friendliness. Time appeared to stand still at that instant. Beyond this enkindled vision there was only the fall of the locust leaves, spinning like golden coins which grew dull and tarnished as soon as they reached the ground. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the vision faded and the light flickered out. There remained this stranger, huddled beneath the rugs in the wheel-chair, and around him the melancholy stillness of the October afternoon.
"People have to be kind to each other sometimes," she answered.
His brief animation had passed. He seemed to have forgotten his words as soon as he had uttered them. The blank despair was in his eyes again as he fixed them on the empty road, searching—searching. His face, so scarred and burned out by an inner fire, wore a lost and abstracted look, as if he were listening for some sound at a distance.
"I'll bring the eggnog in a minute," she added hastily, and went into the house. She felt embarrassed by her rugged health, and by her firm and energetic figure when she contrasted it with his diminished frame. Yet her pity, she knew, could make no impression on vacancy.
As the weeks passed, she grew to look for his chair when she returned from work in the fields. There was no eagerness, no anxiety even. There was merely the wonder if she should still find him in the pale afternoon sunshine, watching the road for something that never came. If he had been absent, she would scarcely have missed him; yet, in a way, his wheel-chair made the lawn, or the fireside on wet days, more homelike. He was a poor thing, she felt, to look forward to, but at least he was dependent upon her compassion.
Then one afternoon in November, when she returned, riding her white horse through the flame and dusk of the sunset, she saw that the wheel-chair was not in its accustomed place between the porch and the "rockery." When she had dismounted at the stable door and watched the bedding down of Snowbird, she walked slowly back to the house. Even before she met Mirandy running to look for her, she knew that Jason was dead.
"He 'uz settin' out dar de hull evelin'," began Mirandy, who being old still spoke the vivid dialect of her ancestors. "He sot out dar jes' lak he's done day in an' day out w'ile I wuz gittin' thoo wid de ironin'. Den w'en de time come fuh his eggnog, I beat it up jes' ez light, en tuck it out dar ter de cheer, en dar he wuz layin' back, stone daid, wid de blood all ovah de rugs en de grass. He died jes' ez quick ez ern he ain' nevah ketched on ter w'at wuz gwinter happen. 'Fo' de Lawd, hit wa'n't my fault, Miss Dorindy. I 'uz jes' gittin' erlong thoo wid de ironin', lak you done tole me."
"No, it wasn't your fault, Mirandy. Have you telephoned for the doctor?"
"Yas'm, Fluvanna, she done phone fuh 'im right straight away. We is done laid 'im out on de baid. You'd 'low jes' ter look at 'im dat hit wuz a moughty pleasant surprise ter find out dat he wuz sholy daid."
Turning away from her, Dorinda went into the spare room, where the fire was out, and in deference to one of Aunt Mehitable's superstitions, Mirandy had draped white sheets over the furniture and the pictures. The windows were wide open. In the graveyard on the curve of the hill, she could see the great pine towering against the evening sky. A stray sheep was bleating somewhere in the meadow, and it seemed to her that the sound filled the universe.
So at last he was dead. He was dead, and she could never know whether or not he remembered. She could never know how much or how little she had meant in his life. And more tragic than the mystery that surrounded him at the end, was the fact that neither the mystery nor his end made any difference. The passion that had ruined her life thirty years ago was nothing, was less than nothing, to her to-day. She was not glad that he was dead. She was not sorry that he had died alone.
Turning back the end of the sheet, she looked down on his face. Despair had passed out of it. The scarred and burned look of his features had faded into serenity. Death had wiped out the marks of the years, and had restored, for an instant, the bright illusion of youth. He wore, as he lay there with closed eyes, an expression that was noble and generous, as if he had been arrested in some magnanimous gesture. This was what death could do to one. He had wasted his life, he had destroyed her youth; yet, in a few hours, death had thrown over him an aspect of magnanimity.
She was standing there when John Abner came in from milking and joined her. "Poor devil," he said. "I suppose it's the best thing that could have happened."
"Yes, it's the best thing."
"Is there anybody we'd better get a message to?"
"No one I can remember. He had lost all his friends."
"Has the doctor been here?"
"Not yet, but Fluvanna telephoned for him."
"Then we might as well have the funeral to-morrow. There is no reason to postpone it. He's been dying for months."
Yes, he had been dying for months; yet, she realized now, his death had come to her with a shock. Though the moment had been approaching so long, she felt that it had taken her by surprise, that she had not had sufficient time to prepare.
"Of course, it isn't as if we could be expected to feel it," John Abner said, reasonably enough, and she repeated vacantly: "No, of course it isn't."
The next afternoon, standing beneath an inclement sky in the overgrown graveyard at Five Oaks, she wondered how, even after thirty years, she could have become so insensible.
There had been rain in the night, and the weather was raw and wintry, with a savage wind which prowled at a distance in the fields and woods. Over the graveyard, where the sunken graves were almost obliterated by periwinkle, the dead leaves were piled in sodden drifts which gave like moss underfoot. The paling fence had rotted away, and white turkeys were scratching in the weeds that edged the enclosure. Dampness floated down in a grey vapour from the boughs of the trees. When the new minister opened his mouth to speak his breath clung like frost to his drooping moustache. Yet, bad as the day was, either compassion or curiosity had drawn the nearer farmers and their families to Five Oaks, and a little gathering of men and women who remembered the Greylocks in their prosperity watched the lowering of Jason's body into the earth. In the freshly ploughed field beyond, Mirandy and Fluvanna stood among an inquisitive crowd of white and coloured children.
More than thirty years ago. More than thirty years of effort and self-sacrifice—for what? Was there an unfulfilled purpose, or was it only another delusion of life? The moaning wind plunged down on the dead leaves and drove them in eddying gusts over the fields, over the road, and into the open grave. It seemed to her that the sound of the autumn wind, now rising, now sinking, now almost dying away, was sweeping her also into the grave at her feet. She had no control over her memories; she had no control over her thoughts. They stirred and scattered, as aimless, as inanimate, as the dead leaves on the ground. Memories that had outlived emotions, as empty as withered husks, were released from their hidden graves, and tossed wildly to and fro in her mind. Little things that she had forgotten. Little things that mean nothing when they happen and break the heart when they are remembered. She felt no sorrow for Jason. He was nothing to her; he had always been nothing; yet her lost youth was everything. What she mourned was not the love that she had had and lost, but the love that she had never had. Impressions drifted through her thoughts, vague, swift, meaningless, without form or substance. . . .
Out of this whirling chaos in her mind, Jason's face emerged like the face of a marionette. Then dissolving as quickly as it had formed, it reappeared as the face of Nathan, and vanished again to assume the features of Richard Burch, of Bob Ellgood, and of every man she had ever known closely or remotely in her life. They meant nothing. They had no significance, these dissolving faces; yet as thick and fast as dead leaves they whirled and danced there, disappearing and reassembling in the vacancy of her thoughts. Faces. Ghosts. Dreams. Regrets. Old vibrations that were incomplete. Unconscious impulses which had never quivered into being. All the things that she might have known and had never known in her life.
The minister's voice ceased at last. Since he had never seen Jason he had trusted, perhaps imprudently, to his imagination, and Dorinda wondered how he could have found so much to say of a life that was so empty. She bent her head in prayer, and a few minutes afterwards, she heard the thud of earth falling from the spade to the coffin. The red clay fell in lumps, dark, firm, heavy, smelling of autumn. It fell without breaking or scattering, and it fell with the sound of inevitableness, of finality. For an eternity, she heard the thuds on the coffin. Then the voice of the minister rose again in the benediction, and she watched, as in a trance, John Abner bring the two flat stones from the edge of the ploughed field and place them at the head and foot of the grave.
She turned away, and became aware presently that the clergyman had followed her and was speaking. "It is a sad occasion, Mrs. Pedlar," he said, and coughed because her blank face startled the end of his remark out of his mind. "A sad occasion," he repeated, stammering.
"All funerals are sad occasions," she responded, and then asked: "Will you come to the house for a cup of coffee?"
She hoped he would refuse, and he did refuse after a brief hesitation. He had a sick call to make near by, and already the day was closing in. While he held her hand he spoke with unction of her generosity. Wherever he went, he said, he heard of her good works. This, he realized, was a concrete example of her many virtues, and he reminded her hopefully that the greatest of these is charity. Then he went off in his Ford car, and Dorinda stood where he had left her and stared after him as if she were rooted there in the damp periwinkle.
"The wind is cutting. Come away," John Abner urged, taking her arm. "Funerals are always depressing, but you did what you could." It was true. She had done what she could, and she realized that this, also, would not make any difference.
She walked away very slowly because she found that her knees were stiff when she attempted to move. It was while she was treading on the spongy earth at the edge of the ploughed field that she saw life crumble like a mountain of cinders and roll over her. She was suffocated, she was buried alive beneath an emptiness, a negation of effort, beside which the vital tragedy of her youth appeared almost happiness. Not pain, not disappointment, but the futility of all things was crushing her spirit. She knew now the passive despair of maturity which made her past suffering seem enviable to her when she looked back on it after thirty years. Youth can never know the worst, she understood, because the worst that one can know is the end of expectancy.
Smothered in this mountain of cinders, she walked to the old buggy and stepped between the wheels to the front seat. A minute later they drove past the barn where she would have killed Jason if her hand had not wavered. Past the house where she had felt her heart crouching in animal terror before the evil old man. Through the woods where the wet boughs had stung her face. Rain. Rain. The sound of rain beating into her memory. Rain on the shingled roof, pattering like the bare feet of children. Rain on the hunched box-bush and the white turkeys. Rain on the sandy road. Rain on the fork of the road, on the crushed leaves smelling of autumn. Everything was before her then. There is no finality when one is young. Though they had been unendurable while she had passed through them, those years of her youth were edged now with a flame of regret. She felt that she would give all the future if she could live over the past again and live it differently. How small a thing her life appeared when she looked back on it through the narrow vista of time! It was too late now, she knew, for her youth was gone. Yet because it was too late and her youth was gone, she felt that the only thing that made life worth living was the love that she had never known and the happiness that she had missed.
When she reached the house she went to her room in silence, and sank on a couch in front of the fire as if she were sinking out of existence. Fluvanna, finding her there a little later, helped to undress her and went to tell John Abner that she was ill enough to have the doctor summoned. Hearing her from the hall, Dorinda did not take the trouble to contradict. The doctor did not matter. Illness did not matter. Nothing mattered but the things of which life had cheated her.
Lying there in the shadowy firelight of the room, she heard the wind wailing about the corners of the house and rustling in the old chimneys. She saw the crooked shape of a bough etched on the window-panes, and she listened for the soft thud of the branches beneath the sobbing violence of the storm. Though the room was bright and warm, a chill was striking through her flesh to the marrow of her bones. Shivering by the fire, she drew the blankets close to her chin.
The door opened and John Abner came in. "Can't you eat any supper, Dorinda?"
Behind him, in the glare of lamplight, she saw Fluvanna with a tray in her hands. The blue and white china and the Rebekah-at-the-well tea-pot lunged toward her.
"No, I can't eat a mouthful." Then changing her mind, she sat up on the couch and asked for tea. When they poured it out for her, she drank three cups.
"You got a chill, Dorinda. It was raw and wet out there."
"Yes, I got a chill," she replied; but it was the chill of despair she meant.
"The wind is rising. We are going to have a bad storm. I suppose I'd better go out again and take a look."
After he had gone, she lay there still shivering beneath the blankets, with her eyes on the low white ceiling, where the firelight made shimmering patterns. Outside, the wind grew louder. She heard it now at a distance, howling like a pack of wolves in the meadow. She heard it whistling round the eaves of the house and whining at the sills of the doors. All night the gusts shook the roof and the chimneys, and all night she lay there staring up at the wavering shadows of the flames.
And the youth that she had never had, the youth that might have been hers and was not, came back, in delusive mockery, to torment her. It was as if the sardonic powers of life assumed, before they vanished for ever, all the enchanting shapes of her dreams. She remembered the past, not as she had found it, but as she had once imagined that it might be. She saw Jason, not as she had seen him yesterday or last year, but as he was when she had first loved him. Though she tried to think of him as broken, ruined, and repellent, through some perversity of recollection, he returned to her in the radiance of that old summer. He returned to her young, ardent, with the glow of happiness in his eyes and the smile of his youth, that smile of mystery and pathos, on his lips. In that hour of memory the work of thirty years was nothing. Time was nothing. Reality was nothing. Success, achievement, victory over fate, all these things were nothing beside that imperishable illusion. Love was the only thing that made life desirable, and love was irrevocably lost to her.
Toward morning she fell asleep, and when she awoke at dawn the wind had lulled and a crystal light was flooding the room. Within herself also the storm was over. Life had washed over her while she slept, and she was caught again in the tide of material things. Rising from the couch, she bathed and dressed and went out of doors into the clear flame of the sunrise.
Around her the earth smelt of dawn. After the stormy night the day was breaking, crisp, fair, windless, with the frost of a mirage on the distant horizon. The trees were bare overhead. Bronze, yellow, crimson and wine-colour, the wet leaves strewed the flagged walk and the grass. Against the eastern sky the boughs of the harp-shaped pine were emblazoned in gold.
Turning slowly, she moved down the walk to the gate, where, far up the road, she could see the white fire of the life-everlasting. The storm and the hag-ridden dreams of the night were over, and the land which she had forgotten was waiting to take her back to its heart. Endurance. Fortitude. The spirit of the land was flowing into her, and her own spirit, strengthened and refreshed, was flowing out again toward life. This was the permanent self, she knew. This was what remained to her after the years had taken their bloom. She would find happiness again. Not the happiness for which she had once longed, but the serenity of mind which is above the conflict of frustrated desires. Old regrets might awaken again, but as the years went on, they would come rarely and they would grow weaker. "Put your heart in the land," old Matthew had said to her. "The land is the only thing that will stay by you." Yes, the land would stay by her. Her eyes wandered from far horizon to horizon. Again she felt the quickening of that sympathy which was deeper than all other emotions of her heart, which love had overcome only for an hour and life had been powerless to conquer in the end, the living communion with the earth under her feet. While the soil endured, while the seasons bloomed and dropped, while the ancient, beneficent ritual of sowing and reaping moved in the fields, she knew that she could never despair of contentment.
Strange, how her courage had revived with the sun! She saw now, as she had seen in the night, that life is never what one dreamed, that it is seldom what one desired; yet for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibilities of high adventure. Though in a measure destiny had defeated her, for it had given her none of the gifts she had asked of it, still her failure was one of those defeats, she realized, which are victories. At middle age, she faced the future without romantic glamour, but she faced it with integrity of vision. The best of life, she told herself with clear-eyed wisdom, was ahead of her. She saw other autumns like this one, hazy, bountiful in harvests, mellowing through the blue sheen of air into the red afterglow of winter; she saw the coral-tinted buds of the spring opening into the profusion of summer; and she saw the rim of the harvest moon shining orange-yellow through the boughs of the harp-shaped pine. Though she remembered the time when loveliness was like a sword in her heart, she knew now that where beauty exists the understanding soul can never remain desolate.
A call came from the house, and turning at the gate, she went back to meet John Abner, who was limping toward her over the dead leaves in the walk. His long black shadow ran ahead of him, and while he approached her, he looked as if he were pursuing some transparent image of himself.
"You are yourself again," he said, as he reached her. "Last night I was disturbed about you. I was afraid you'd got a bad chill."
"It went in the night. The storm wore on my nerves, but it was over by morning." Then before he could reply, she added impulsively, "Bear with, my fancies now, John Abner. When I am gone, both farms will be yours."
"Mine?" John Abner laughed as he looked at her. "Why, you may marry again. They are saying at Pedlar's Mill that you may have Bob Ellgood for the lifting of a finger."
Dorinda smiled, and her smile was pensive, ironic, and infinitely wise. "Oh, I've finished with all that," she rejoined. "I am thankful to have finished with all that."