"Then we can have butter and buttermilk with the ash cake!" exclaimed Rufus.
"I ain't so sure I'd want to buy that red cow of Doctor Greylock's," observed Josiah in a surly tone. That was his way, to make an objection to everything. He had, as his mother sometimes said of him, a good character but a mean disposition. At twenty he had married a pretty, light woman, who died with her first child; and now, after a widowerhood of ten years, he was falling in love with Elvira Snead, a silly young thing, the daughter of thriftless Adam Snead, a man with scarcely a shirt to his back or an acre to his name. Though Josiah was hardworking, painstaking, and frugal, he preferred comeliness to character in a woman. If it had been Rufus, Dorinda would have found an infatuation for Elvira easier to understand. Nobody expected Rufus to be anything but wild, and it was natural for young men to seek pleasures. The boy was different from his father and his elder brother, who required as little as cattle; and yet there was nothing for him to do in the long winter evenings, except sort potatoes or work over his hare traps. The neighbours were all too far away, and the horses too tired after the day's work to drag the buggy over the mud-strangled roads. Dorinda could browse happily among the yellowed pages in old Abernethy's library, returning again and again to the Waverley Novels, or the exciting Lives of the Missionaries; but Rufus cared nothing for books and had inherited his mother's dread of the silence. He was a high-spirited boy, and he liked pleasure; yet every evening after supper he would tinker with a farm implement or some new kind of trap until he was sleepy enough for bed. Then he would march upstairs to the fireless room under the eaves, where the only warmth came up the chimney from the kitchen beneath. That was all the life Rufus had ever had, though he looked exactly, Dorinda thought, like Thaddeus of Warsaw or one of the Scottish Chiefs.
In the daytime the kitchen was a cheerful room, bright with sunshine which fell through the mammoth scuppernong grapevine on the back porch. Then the battered pots and pans grew bright again, the old wood stove gave out a pleasant song; and the blossomless geraniums, in wooden boxes, decorated the window-sill. Much of her mother's life was spent in this room, and as a child Dorinda had played here happily with her corncob or hickory-nut dolls. Poor as they were, there was never a speck of dust anywhere. Mrs. Oakley looked down on the "poor white" class, though she had married into it; and her recoil from her husband's inefficiency was in the direction of a scrupulous neatness. She knew that she had thrown herself away, in youth, on a handsome face; yet she was just enough to admit that her marriage, as marriages go, had not been unhappy. Her unhappiness, terrible as it had been, went deeper than any human relation, for she was still fond of Joshua with the maternal part of her nature while she despised him with her intelligence. He had made her a good husband; it was not his fault that he could never get on; everything from the start had been against him; and he had always done the best that he could. She realized this clearly; but all the romance in her life, after the death of the young missionary in the Congo, had turned toward her religion. She could have lived without Joshua; she could have lived even without Rufus, who was the apple of her eye; but without her religion, as she had once confessed to Dorinda, she would have been "lost." Like her daughter, she was subject to dreams, but her dreams differed from Dorinda's since they came only in sleep. There were winter nights, after the days of whispering in the past, when the child Dorinda, startled by the flare of a lantern out in the darkness, had seen her mother flitting barefooted over the frozen ground. Shivering with cold and terror, the little girl had crept down to rouse her fathers who had thrown some garments over his nightshirt, and picking up the big raccoon-skin coat, had rushed out in pursuit of his demented wife. A little later Josiah had followed, and then Dorinda; and Rufus had brought sticks and paper from the kitchen and started a fire, with shaking hands, in their mother's fireplace. When at last the two men had led Mrs. Oakley into the house, she had, appeared so bewildered and benumbed that she seemed scarcely, to know where she had been. Once Dorinda had overheard Joshua whisper hoarsely to Josiah, "If I hadn't come up with her in the nick of time, she would have done it"; but what the thing was they, whispered about the child did not understand till long afterwards All she knew at the time was that her mother's "missionary" dream's had come back again; a dream of blue skies and golden sands, of palm trees on a river's bank, and of black babies thrown to crocodiles. "I am lost, lost, lost," Mrs. Oakley had murmured over and over, while she stared straight before her, with a prophetic gleam in her wide eyes, as if she were seeing unearthly visions.
They ate to-night, after Joshua had asked grace, in a heavy silence, which was broken only by the gurgling sounds Joshua and Josiah made over their coffee-cups. Mrs. Oakley, who was decently if not delicately bred, had become inured to the depressing tablet manners of her husband and her elder son. After the first disillusionment of her marriage, she had confined her efforts at improvement to the two younger children. They had both, she felt with secret satisfaction, sprung from the finer strain of the Abernethys; it was as if they had inherited from her that rarer intellectual medium in which her forbears had attained their spiritual being. There were hours when it seemed to her that the gulf between the dominant Scotch-Irish stock of the Valley and the mongrel breed of "poor white" which produced Joshua was as wide as the abyss between alien races. Then the image of Joshua as she had first known him would appear to her, and she would think, in the terms of theology which were natural to her mind, "It must have been intended, or it wouldn't have happened."
While the others were still eating, Mrs. Oakley rose from the food she had barely tasted, and began to clear the table. The nervous affection from which she suffered made it impossible for her to sit in one spot for more than a few minutes. Her nerves jerked her up and started her on again independently of her will or even of any physical effort. Only constant movement quieted the twitching which ran like electric wires through her muscles.
"Go and lie down, Ma. I'll clear off and wash up," Dorinda said. Her pity for her mother was stronger to-night than it had ever been, for it had become a part of the craving for happiness which was overflowing her soul. Often this starved craving had made her bitter and self-centred because of the ceaseless gnawing in her breast; but now it was wholly kind and beneficent. "If you would only stop and rest," she added tenderly, "your neuralgia would be better."
"I can't stop," replied Mrs. Oakley, with wintry calm. "I can't see things going to rack and ruin and not try to prevent it." After a minute, still moving about, she continued hopelessly, "It rests me to work."
"I brought the butter for you," returned Dorinda, in hurt tones, "and you didn't even touch it."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't mind going without," she responded. "You must keep it for the boys."
It was always like that. The girl had sometimes felt that the greatest cross in her life was her mother's morbid unselfishness. Even her nagging—and she nagged at them continually—was easier to bear.
"I've got the water all ready," Mrs. Oakley said, piling dishes on the tin tray. "I'll get right through the washing up, and then we can have prayers."
Family prayers in the evening provided the solitary emotional outlet in her existence. Only then, while she read aloud one of the more belligerent Psalms, and bent her rheumatic knees to the rag carpet in her "chamber," were the frustrated instincts of her being etherealized into spiritual passion. When the boys rebelled, as they sometimes did, or Dorinda protested that she was "too busy for prayers," Mrs. Oakley contended with the earnestness of a Covenanter: "If it wasn't for the help of my religion, I could never keep going."
Now, having finished their meal in silence, they gathered in the chamber, as the big bedroom was called, and waited for evening prayers. It was the only comfortable room in the house, except the kitchen, and the family life after working hours was lived in front of the big fireplace, in which chips, lightwood knots, and hickory logs were burned from dawn until midnight. Before the flames there was a crooked brass footman, and the big iron kettle it supported kept up an uninterrupted hissing noise. In one corner of the room stood a tall rosewood bookcase, which contained the romantic fiction Dorinda had gleaned from the heavy theological library in the parlour across the hall. Between the front windows, which looked out on a cluster of old lilac bushes, there was the huge walnut bed, with four stout posts and no curtains, and facing it between the windows, in the opposite walls, a small cabinet of lacquer-ware which her great-grandfather had brought from the East. In the morning and afternoon the sunlight fell in splinters over the variegated design of the rag carpet and the patchwork quilt on the bed, and picked out the yellow specks in the engravings of John Knox admonishing Mary Stuart and Martyrs for the Covenant.
"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork," read Mrs. Oakley in her high thin voice, with her mystic gaze passing over the open Bible to the whitewashed wall where the shadows of the flames wavered.
Motionless, in her broken splint-bottom chair, scarcely daring to breathe, Dorinda felt as if she were floating out of the scene into some world of intenser reality. The faces about her in the shifting firelight were the faces in a dream, and a dream that was without vividness. She saw Joshua bending forward, his pipe fallen from his mouth, his hands clasped between his knees, and his eyes fixed in a pathetic groping stare, as if he were trying to follow the words. The look was familiar to her; she had seen it in the wistful expressions of Rambler and of Dan and Beersheba, the horses; yet it still moved her more deeply than she had ever been moved by anything except the patient look of her father's hands. On opposite sides of the fireplace, Josiah and Rufus were dozing, Josiah sucking his empty pipe as a child sucks a stick of candy, Rufus playing with the knife he had used to whittle a piece of wood. At the first words of the Psalm he had stopped work and closed his eyes, while a pious vacancy washed like a tide over his handsome features. Curled on the rag carpet, Rambler and Flossie watched each other with wary intentness, Rambler contemplative and tolerant, Flossie suspicious and superior. The glow and stillness of the room enclosed the group in a circle that was like the shadow of a magic lantern. The flames whispered; the kettle hummed on the brass footman; the sound of Joshua's heavy breathing went on like a human undercurrent to the cadences of the Psalm. Outside, in the fields, a dog barked, and Rambler raised his long, serious head from the rug and listened. A log of wood, charred in the middle, broke in two and scattered a shower of sparks.
Prayers were over. Mrs. Oakley rose from her knees; Joshua prodded the ashes in his pipe; Josiah drew a twist of home-cured tobacco from his pocket, and cutting off a chew from the end of it, thrust it into his cheek, where it bulged for the rest of the evening; Rufus picked up a fishing pole and resumed his whittling. Until bedtime the three men would sprawl there in the agreeable warmth between the fireplace and the lamp on the table. Nobody talked; conversation was as alien to them as music. Drugged with fatigue, they nodded in a vegetable somnolence. Even in their hours of freedom they could not escape the relentless tyranny of the soil.
After putting away the Bible, Mrs. Oakley took out a dozen damask towels, with Turkey red borders and fringed ends, from her top bureau drawer and began to look over then. These towels were the possession she prized most, after the furniture of her grandfather, and they were never used except when the minister or a visiting elder came to spend the night.
"They're turning a little yellow," she remarked presently, when she had straightened the long fringe and mended a few places. "I reckon I might as well put them in soak to-night."
Rufus yawned and laid down his fishing-rod. "There ain't anything for me to do but go to bed."
"We all might as well go, I reckon," Joshua agreed drowsily. "It's gittin' on past eight o'clock, an' if the snow's off the ground, we've got a hard day ahead of us."
"I'll put these towels in soak first," his wife responded, "and I've got a little ironing I want to get through with before I can rest."
"Not to-night, Ma," Dorinda pleaded. While she spoke she began to yawn like the others. It was queer the way it kept up as soon as one of them started. Youth struggled for a time, but in the end it succumbed inevitably to the narcotic of dullness.
"I ain't sleepy," replied Mrs. Oakley, "and I like to have something to do with my hands. I never was one to want to lie in bed unless I was sleepy. The very minute my head touches the pillow, my eyes pop right open."
"But you get up so early."
"Well, the first crack of light wakes your father, and after he begins stirring, I am never able to get a wink more of sleep. He was out at the barn feeding the horses before day this morning." Dorinda sighed. Was this life?
"I don't see how you keep it up, Ma," she said, with weary compassion.
"Oh, I can get along without much sleep. It's different with the rest of you. Your father is out in the air all day, and you and the boys are young."
She went back to the kitchen, with the towels in her hand, while Dorinda took down one of the lamps from a shelf in the back hall, removed the cracked chimney, and lighted the wick, which was too short to burn more than an hour or two.
The evening was over. It was like every one Dorinda had known in the past. It was like every one she would know in the future unless—she caught her breath sharply—unless the miracle happened!
The faint grey light crept through the dormer-window and glimmered with a diffused wanness over the small three-cornered room. Turning restlessly, Dorinda listened, half awake, to the sound of her mother moving about in the kitchen below. A cock in the henhouse crowed and was answered by another. "It isn't day," she thought, and opening her eyes, she gazed through the window at the big pine on the hill. The sun rose over the pine; every morning she watched the twisted black boughs, shaped like a harp, emerge from obscurity. First the vague ripple of dawn, spreading in circles as if a stone had been cast into the darkness; then a pearly glimmer in which objects borrowed exaggerated dimensions; then a blade of light cutting sharply through the pine to the old pear orchard, where the trees still blossomed profusely in spring, though they bore only small green pears out of season. After the edge of brightness, the round red sun would ride up into the heavens and the day would begin. It was seldom that she saw the sunrise from her window. Usually, unless she overslept herself and her mother got breakfast without waking her, the men were in the fields and the two women were attending to the chickens or cleaning the house before the branches of the big pine were gilded with light.
"Poor Ma," Dorinda said, "she wouldn't wake me." But she was not thinking of her mother. Deep down in her being some blissful memory was struggling into consciousness. She felt that it was floating there, just beyond her reach, dim, elusive, enchantingly lovely. Almost she seized it; then it slipped from her grasp and escaped her, only to return, still veiled, a little farther off, while she groped after it. A new happiness. Some precious possession which she had clasped to her heart while she was falling asleep. Then suddenly the thing that she had half forgotten came drifting, through unclouded light, into her mind. "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon."
The sounds in the kitchen grew louder, and the whole house was saturated with the aroma of coffee and frying bacon. Beyond these familiar scents and sounds, it seemed to her that she smelt and heard the stirring of spring in the fields and the woods, that the movement and rumour of life were sweeping past her in waves of colour, fragrance, and music.
Springing out of bed, she dressed hurriedly, and decided, while she shivered at the splash of cold water, that she would clean her shoes before she went back to the store. The day was just breaking, and the corner where her pine dressing-table stood was so dark that she was obliged to light the lamp, which burned with a dying flicker, while she brushed and coiled her hair. Beneath the dark waving line on her forehead, where her hair grew in a widow's peak, her eyes were starry with happiness. Though she was not beautiful, she had her moments of beauty, and looking at herself in the greenish mirror, which reminded her of the water in the old mill pond, she realized that this was one of her moments. Never again would she be twenty and in love for the first time.
"If only I had something pretty to wear," she thought, picking up her skirt of purple calico and slipping it over her head. The longing for lovely things, the decorative instinct of youth, became as sharp as a pang. Parting the faded curtains over a row of shelves in one corner, she took down a pasteboard box, and selected a collar of fine needlework which had belonged to Eudora Abernethy when she was a girl. For a minute Dorinda looked at it, strongly tempted. Then the character that showed in her mouth and chin asserted itself, and she shook her head. "It would be foolish to wear it to-day," she murmured, and putting it back among the others, she closed the box and replaced it on the shelf.
"I'll black my shoes, anyway," she thought, as she hurried downstairs to breakfast. "Even if they do get muddy again as soon as I step in the road."
That was with the surface of her mind. In the depths beneath she was thinking without words, "Now that he has come, life will never again be what it was yesterday."
In the kitchen the lamp had just been put out, and the room was flooded with the ashen stream of daybreak. Mrs. Oakley was on her knees, putting a stick of wood into the stove, and the scarlet glare of the flames tinged her flesh with the colour of rusty iron. After a sleepless night her neuralgia was worse, and there was a look of agony in the face she lifted to her daughter.
"Why didn't you wake me, Ma?" Dorinda asked a little impatiently. "You aren't fit to get breakfast."
"I thought you might as well have your sleep out," her mother replied in a lifeless voice. "I'll have some cakes ready in a minute. I'm just making a fresh batch for Rufus."
"You oughtn't have made cakes, as bad as you feel," Dorinda protested. "Rufus could have gone without just as well as the rest of us."
Mrs. Oakley struggled to her feet, and picking up the cake lifter, turned back to the stove. While she stood there against the dull glow, she appeared scarcely more substantial than a spiral of smoke.
"Well, we don't have butter every day," she said. "And I can't lie in bed as long as I've got the strength to be up and doing. Wherever I turn, I see dirt gathering."
"No matter how hard you work, the dirt will always be there," Dorinda persisted. It was useless, she knew, to try to reason with her mother. One could not reason with either a nervous malady or a moral principle; but, even though experience had taught her the futility of remonstrance, there were times when she found it impossible not to scold at a martyrdom that seemed to her unnecessary. They might as well be living in the house, she sometimes thought, with the doctrine of predestination; and like the doctrine of predestination, there was nothing to be done about it.
With a sigh of resignation, she turned to her father, who stood at the window, looking out over the old geraniums that had stopped blooming years ago. Against the murky dawn his figure appeared as rudimentary as some prehistoric image of man.
"Do you think it is going to clear off, Pa?" she asked.
He looked round at her, prodding the tobacco into his pipe with his large blunt thumb. "I ain't thinkin', honey," he replied in his thick, earthy drawl. "The wind's settin' right, but thar's a good-size bank of clouds over toward the west."
"You'd better make Rufus take a look at those planting beds up by Hoot Owl Woods," said Josiah, pushing back his chair and rising from the table. "One of Doctor Greylock's steers broke loose yesterday and was tramplin' round up there on our side of the fence."
Rufus looked up quickly. "Why can't you attend to it yourself?" he demanded in the truculent tone he always used to his elder brother.
Josiah, who had reached the door on his way out, stopped and looked back with a surly expression. With his unshaven face, where the stubby growth of a beard was just visible, and his short crooked legs, he bore still some grotesque resemblance to his younger brother, as if the family pattern had been tried first in caricature.
"I've got as much as I can do over yonder in the east meadow," he growled. "You or Pa will have to look after those planting beds." Rufus frowned while he reached for the last scrap of butter. There would be none for his mother and Dorinda; but if this fact had occurred to him, and it probably had not, he would have dismissed it as an unpleasant reflection. Since he was a small child he had never lacked the courage of his appetite.
"What's the use of my trying to do anything when you and Pa are so set you won't let me have my way about it?" he asked. "I'd have moved those tobacco beds long ago, if you'd let me."
"Well, they've always been thar, son," Joshua observed in a peaceable manner. He stood in the doorway, blowing clouds of smoke over his pipe, while he scraped the caked mud from his boots. His humble, friendly eyes looked up timidly, like the eyes of a dog that is uncertain whether he is about to receive a pat or a blow. "Besides, we ain't got the manure to waste on new ground," Josiah added, with his churlish frown. "We need all the stable trash we can rake and scrape for the fields."
Mrs. Oakley, bringing a plate of fresh cakes as a peace offering, came over to the table. "Don't you boys begin to fuss again," she pleaded wearily. "It's just as much as I can do to keep going anyway, and when you start quarrelling it makes me feel as if I'd be obliged to give up. You'd just as well take all these cakes, Rufus. I can make some more for Dorinda by the time she is ready."
Dorinda, who was eating dry bread with her coffee, made a gesture of exasperated sympathy. "I don't want any cakes, Ma. I'm going to start washing up just as soon as you sit down and eat your breakfast. If you'd try to swallow something, whether you want it or not, your neuralgia would be better."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head, while she dragged her body like an empty garment back to the stove. From the way she moved she seemed to have neither bone nor muscle, yet her physical flabbiness was sustained, Dorinda knew, by a force that was indomitable.
"I don't feel as if I could touch a morsel," she answered, pressing her fingers over her drawn brow and eyes.
"Oh, Rufus can eat his head off, but he'll never work to earn his keep," Josiah grumbled under his breath.
"Well, I'm not a slave, anyway, like you and Pa," Rufus flared up. "I'd let the farm rot before it would be my master."
Josiah had pushed past his father in the doorway. A chill draught blew in, and out of the draught his slow, growling voice floated back. "Somebody's got to be a slave. If Ma didn't slave for you, you'd have to, I reckon, or starve."
He went out after his father, slamming the door behind him, and Dorinda, hurriedly finishing her breakfast, rose and began to clear the table. The sallow light at the window was growing stronger. Outside, there was the sound of tramping as the horses were led by to the trough at the well, and the crowing in the henhouse was loud and insistent. The day had begun. It was like every other day in the past. It would be like every other day in the future. Suddenly the feeling came over her that she was caught like a mouse in the trap of life. No matter how desperately she struggled, she could never escape; she could never be free. She was held fast by circumstances as by invisible wires of steel.
Several hours later, when she started to the store, the trapped sensation vanished, and the gallant youth within her lifted its head. There was moisture that did not fall in the air. A chain of sullen clouds in the west soared like peaks through a fog. Straight before her the red road dipped and rose and dipped again in the monotonous brown of the landscape. A few ragged crows flapped by over the naked fields.
Turning at the gate, which was never closed, she looked back at the house huddled beneath its sloping shingled roof under the boughs of the old locust trees. The narrow dormer-windows stared like small blinking eyes, shy and furtive, down on the square Georgian porch, on the flagged walk bordered by stunted boxwood, on the giant lilac bushes which had thriven upon neglect, and on the ruined lawn with its dead branches and its thicket of unmown weeds. In recent years the whitewashed walls had turned yellow and dingy; the eaves were rotting away where birds nested; and in June the empty chimneys became so alive with swallows that the whole place was faintly murmurous, as if summer stirred in the dead wood as well as in the living boughs.
Whenever she looked back upon it from a distance, she was visited again by the image of the house as a frightened thing that waited, shrinking closer to the earth, for an inevitable disaster. It was, as if the place had preserved unaltered a mood from which she herself had escaped, and occasionally this mood awoke in her blood and nerves and flowed through her again. Recollection. Association. It was morbid, she told herself sternly, to cherish such fancies; and yet she had never been able entirely to rid her memory of the fears and dreads of her childhood. Worse than this even was the haunting thought that the solitude was alive, that it skulked there in the distance, like a beast that is waiting for the right moment to spring and devour.
Bleak, raw, windswept, the morning had begun with a wintry chill. The snow of yesterday was gone; only an iridescent vapour, as delicate as a cobweb, was spun over the ground. Already, as she turned and went on again, the light was changing, and more slowly, as if a veil fluttered before it was lifted, the expression of the country changed with it. In the east, an arrow of sunshine, too pallid to be called golden, shot through the clouds and flashed over the big pine on the hill at the back of the house. The landscape, which had worn a discouraged aspect, appeared suddenly to glow under the surface. Veins of green and gold, like tiny rivulets of spring, glistened in the winter woods and in the mauve and brown of the fields. The world was familiar, and yet, in some indescribable way, it was different, shot through with romance as with the glimmer of phosphorescence. Life, which had drooped, flared up again, burning clear and strong in Dorinda's heart. It had come back, that luminous expectancy, that golden mist of sensation. "Don't forget me. I shall see you soon," repeated an inner voice; and immediately she was lost in an ecstasy without words and without form like the mystic communion of religion. Love! That was the end of all striving for her healthy nerves, her vigorous youth, the crown and the fulfilment of life! At twenty, a future without love appeared to her as intolerable as the slow martyrdom of her mother.
Beyond the gate there was the Old Stage Road, and across the road, in front of the house, ran the pasture, with its winding creek fringed by willows. Though this stream was smaller than Gooseneck Creek on the Greylocks' farm, the water never dried even in the severest drought, and a multitude of silver minnows flashed in ripples over the deep places. For a quarter of a mile the road divided the pasture from the wide band of woods on the left, and farther on, though the woods continued, the rich grass land was fenced off from several abandoned acres, which had been once planted in corn, but were now overgrown with broomsedge as high as Dorinda's waist. Sprinkled over the fields, a crop of scrub pine, grown already to a fair height, stood immovable in the ceaseless rise and fall of the straw. Though her eyes wandered over the waste ground as she passed, Dorinda was blind to-day to the colour and the beauty. What a pity you could never get rid of the broomsedge, she thought. The more you burned it off and cut it down, the thicker it came up again next year.
For a quarter of a mile the road was deserted. Then she came up with a covered wagon, which had stopped on the edge of the woods, while the mules munched the few early weeds in the underbrush. She had seen these vehicles before, for they were known in the neighbourhood as Gospel wagons. Usually there was a solitary "Gospel rider," an aged man, travelling alone, and wearing the dilapidated look of a retired missionary; but to-day there were two of them, an elderly husband and wife, and though they appeared meagre, chilled and famished, they were proceeding briskly with their work of nailing texts to the trees by the wayside. As Dorinda approached, the warning, "Prepare to Meet Thy God," sprang out at her in thick charcoal. The road to the station was already covered, she knew, and she wondered if the wagon had passed Jason at the gate by the fork.
Hearing her footsteps, one of the missionaries, a woman in a black poke bonnet, turned and stared at her.
"Good morning, sister. You are wearing a gay shawl."
Dorinda laughed. "Well, it is the only gay thing you will find about here."
With the hammer still in her hand, the woman, a lank, bedraggled figure in a trailing skirt of dingy alpaca, scrambled over the ditch to the road. "Yes, it's a solemn country," she replied. "Is there a place near by where we can rest and water the mules?"
"Old Farm is a little way on. I live there, and Ma will be glad to have you stop."
Such visitors, she knew, though they made extra work, were the only diversion in her mother's existence. They came seldom now; only once or twice in the last few years had the Gospel wagon driven along the Old Stage Road; but the larger trees still bore a few of the almost obliterated signs.
"Then we'll stop and speak a word to her. We'd better be going on, Brother Tyburn," observed the woman to her companion, who was crawling over the underbrush. "This don't look as if it was a much travelled road. Brother Tyburn is my husband," she explained an instant later. "We met when we were both doing the Lord's work in foreign fields."
Golden sands. Ancient rivers. Black babies thrown to crocodiles. Her mother's missionary dream had come to life.
"Were you ever in Africa?" asked Dorinda.
"Yes, in the Congo. But we were younger then. After Brother Tyburn lost his health, we had to give up foreign work. Did you say your house was just a piece up the road?"
"A quarter of a mile. After that you won't find anything but a few negro cabins till you come to the Garlicks' place, three miles farther on."
The man had already climbed into the wagon and was gathering up the reins; the mules reluctantly raised their heads from the weeds; and the woman lifted her skirt and stepped nimbly up on the wheel. After she had seated herself under the canvas, she leaned down, gesticulating with the hammer which she still held.
"Thank you, sister. Have you given a thought to your soul?" Wrapped in her orange shawl, Dorinda lifted her head with a spirited gesture.
"I joined the church when I was fifteen," she answered.
While she spoke she remembered vividly the way grace had come to her, a softly glowing ecstasy, which flooded her soul and made her feel that she had entered into the permanent blessedness of the redeemed. It was like the love she felt now, only more peaceful and far less subject to pangs of doubt. For a few months this had lasted, while the prosaic duties of life were infused with a beauty, a light. Then, suddenly, as mysteriously as it had come, the illumination in her soul had waned and flickered out like a lamp. Religion had not satisfied.
The wagon joggled on its way, and floating back, above the rumble of the wheels, there came presently the words of a hymn, at first clear and loud, and then growing fainter and thinner as the distance widened. Often Dorinda had sung the verses in Sunday School. The hymn was a favourite one of her mother's, and the girl hummed it now under her breath:
"Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;Weep o'er the err-ing one, lift up the fall-en,Tell them of Je-sus, the migh-ty to save.Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,Je-sus is mer-ci-ful, Je-sus will save."
"Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;Weep o'er the err-ing one, lift up the fall-en,Tell them of Je-sus, the migh-ty to save.Res-cue the per-ish-ing, care for the dy-ing,Je-sus is mer-ci-ful, Je-sus will save."
No, religion had not satisfied.
She was still humming when she reached the fork of the road. Then, glancing at the red gate of Five Oaks, she saw that Jason Greylock stood there, with his hand on the bar.
"I'd just got down to open the gate, when I looked up the road and saw you coming," he said. "I knew there wasn't another woman about who was wearing an orange shawl, and if there were, I'd wait for her just out of curiosity."
Though he spoke gaily, she felt, without knowing why, that the gaiety was assumed. He looked as if he had not slept. His fresh colour had faded; his clothes were rumpled as if he had lain down in them; and while she walked toward him, she imagined fancifully that his face was like a drowned thing in the solitude. If she had been older it might have occurred to her that a nature so impressionable must be lacking in stability; but, at the moment, joy in his presence drove every sober reflection from her mind.
"Is there anything the matter?" she asked, eager to help.
He looked down while the gate swung back, and she saw a quiver of disgust cross his mouth under the short moustache. Before replying, he led his horse into the road and turned back to lower the bar. Then he held out his hand to help her into the buggy.
"Do I look as if I'd had no sleep?" he inquired. "Father had a bad night, and I was up with him till daybreak."
Then she understood. She had heard tales from Aunt Mehitable, whose daughter worked at Five Oaks, of the old man's drunken frenzies, and the way his mulatto brood ran shrieking about the place when he turned on them with a horsewhip. Would Jason be able to rid the house of this half-breed swarm and their mother, a handsome, slatternly yellow woman, with a figure that had grown heavy and shapeless, and a smouldering resentful gaze? Well, she was sorry for him if he had to put up with things like that.
"I am sorry," she responded, and could think of nothing to add to the words, which sounded flat and empty. In front of her on the blasted oak she saw the staring black letters of the Gospel riders, "After Death Comes the Judgment." Depression crept like a fog into her mind. If only she could think of something to say! While they drove on in silence she became aware of her body, as if it were a weight which had been fastened to her and over which she had no control. Her hands and feet felt like logs. She was in the clutch, she knew, of forces which she did not understand, which she could not even discern. And these forces had deprived her of her will at the very moment when they were sweeping her to a place she could not see by a road that was strange to her.
"I suppose my nerves aren't what they ought to be," he said presently, and she knew that he was miles away from her in his thoughts. "They've always been jumpy ever since I was a child, and a night like that puts them on edge. Then everything is discouraging around here. I thought when I first came back that I might be able to wake up the farmers, but it is uphill ploughing to try to get them out of their rut. Last night I had planned a meeting in the schoolhouse. For a week I had had notices up at the store, and I'd got at least a dozen men to promise to come and listen to what I had to tell them about improved methods of farming. I intended to begin with crops and sanitation, you know, and to lead off gradually, as they caught on, to political conditions;—but when I went over," he laughed bitterly, "there was nobody but Nathan Pedlar and that idiot boy of John Appleseed's waiting to hear me."
"I know." She was sympathetic but uncomprehending. "They are in a rut, but they're satisfied; they don't want to change." He turned to look at her and his face cleared. "You are the only cheerful sight I've seen since I got here," he said.
The light had changed again and her inner mood was changing with the landscape. A feeling of intimate kinship with the country returned, and it seemed to her that the colour of the broomsedge was overrunning the desolate hidden field of her life. Something wild and strong and vivid was covering the waste places.
"I am glad," she answered softly.
"It does me good just to look at you. I ought to be able to do without companionship, but I can't, not for long. I am dependent upon some human association, and I haven't had any, nothing that counts, since I came here. In New York I lived with several men (I've never been much of a woman's man), and I miss them like the devil. I was getting on well with my work, too, though I never wanted to study medicine—that was Father's idea. At first I hoped that I could distract myself by doing some good while I was here," he concluded moodily; "but last night taught me the folly of that."
Though he seemed to her unreasonable, and his efforts at philanthropy as futile as the usual unsettling processes of reform, she felt passionately eager to comfort him in his failure. That she might turn his disappointment to her own advantage had not occurred to her, and would never occur to her. The instinct that directed her was an unconscious one and innocent of design.
"Well, you've just begun," she replied cheerfully. "You can't expect to do everything in the beginning."
He laughed. "I knew you'd say that. Even in New York they tell me I try to hurry nature. I'm easily discouraged, and I take things too hard, I suppose. Coming back here was a bitter pill, but I had to swallow it. If I'd been a different sort of chap I might have gone on with my work in New York, and let Father die alone there at Five Oaks. But when he sent for me I hadn't the heart or the courage to refuse to come. The truth is, I've never been able to go ahead. It seems to me, when I look back, that I've always been balked or bullied out of having what I wanted in life. I remember once, when I was a little child, I went out with Mother to gather dewberries, and just as I found the finest briar, all heavy with fruit, and reached down to pick it, a moccasin snake struck out at my hand. I got a fit, hysterics or something, and ever since then the sight of a snake has made me physically sick. Worse than that, whenever I reach out for anything I particularly want, I have a jumping of the nerves, just as if I expected a snake to strike. Queer, isn't it? I wonder how much influence that snake has had on my life?"
Though he laughed, his laugh was not a natural one and she asked herself if he could be in earnest. She was still young enough to find it difficult to distinguish between the ironically wise and the incredibly foolish.
"I wish I could help you. I'll do anything in the world I can to help you," she murmured in a voice as soft as her glance.
Their eyes met, and she watched the bitterness, the mingling of disappointment and mortification, fade in the glow of pleasure—or was it merely excitement?—that flamed in his face.
"Then wear a blue dress the colour of your eyes," he rejoined with the light-hearted audacity of the day before.
The difference in his tone was so startling that she blushed and averted her gaze.
"I haven't a blue dress," she replied stiffly, while her troubled look swept the old Haney place as they went past. In a little while they would reach the station. Even now they were spinning up the long slope, white as bone dust, that led to the store.
The change in his tone sent the blood in quivering rushes to her cheeks. She felt the sound beating in her ears as if it were music.
"Then beg, borrow, or steal one," he said gaily, "before I see you again."
His smile died quickly, as if he were unable to sustain the high note of merriment, and the inexplicable sadness stole into his look. Was it substance or shadow, she wondered. Well, whatever it was, it stirred a profound tenderness in her heart.
When they parted at the station there was a dreaming smile on her lips; and though she tried to drive it away as she entered the store, she felt that the smile was still there, hovering about her mouth. A physical warmth, soft and penetrating, enveloped her like sunshine. And the miracle (for it was a miracle) had changed her so utterly that she was a stranger to the Dorinda of yesterday. Where that practical girl had been, there was now a tremulous creature who felt that she was capable of unimaginable adventures. How could she reflect upon the virtues of the red cow she would buy from old Doctor Greylock when she could not detach her mind from the disturbing image of Doctor Greylock's son? Over and over, she repeated mechanically, "Thirty dollars for the red cow"; yet the words might have been spoken by John Appleseed or his idiot boy, who was lounging near the track, so remote were they from her consciousness. Thirty dollars! She had saved the money for months. There would be just that much after the interest on the mortgage was paid. She had it put away safely in the best pickle-dish in the china press. Ten dollars a month didn't go far, even if it was "ready money."Then wear a blue dress the colour of your eyes. Beg, borrow, or steal one before I see you again.From whom or where had the words come? Something within herself, over which she had no control, was thinking aloud. And as if her imagination had escaped from darkness into light, a crowd of impressions revolved in her mind like the swiftly changing colours of a kaleidoscope. His eyes, black at a distance, brown when you looked into them. The healthy reddish tan of his skin. The white streak on his neck under his collar. The way his hair grew in short close waves like a cap. His straight red lips, with their look of vital and urgent youth. The fascinating curve of his eyebrows, which bent down when he smiled or frowned over his deep-set eyes. The way he smiled. The way he laughed. The way he looked at her.
Nathan had opened the store and was already sweeping the tracks of mud from the platform. Somebody was in the store behind him. He talked while he swept, jerking his scraggy shoulders with an awkward movement. Poor Nathan, he had as many gestures as a puppet, and they all looked as if they were worked by strings.
Then, as she hastened up the steps of the store, there occurred one of those trivial accidents which make history. Miss Seena Snead, attired for travelling in her best navy blue lady's cloth and her small lace bonnet with velvet strings, came out of the door.
"I'm runnin' down to Richmond to buy some goods and notions," she said. "Is there any errand I can do for you or yo' Ma?"
Out of that golden mist, the strange Dorinda who had taken the place of the real Dorinda, spoke eagerly: "I wonder—oh, I wonder, Miss Seena, if you could get me a blue dress?"
"A blue dress? Why, of course I can, honey. Do you want gingham or calico? I reckon Nathan has got as good blue and white check as you can find anywhere. I picked it out for him myself."
Dorinda shook her head. Her eyes were shining and her voice trembled; but she went on recklessly, driven by this force which she obeyed but could not understand. "No, not gingham or calico. I don't want anything useful, Miss Seena. I want cashmere—or nun's veiling. And I don't want dark blue. I want it exactly the colour of my eyes."
"Well, I declare!" Miss Seena looked as if she could not believe her ears. "Whoever heard of matchin' material by yo' eyes?" Then turning the girl round, she examined her intently. "I ain't never paid much attention to yo' eyes," she continued, "though I always thought they had a kind, pleasant look in 'em. But when I come to notice 'em, they're jest exactly the shade of a blue jay's wing. That won't be hard to match. I can carry a blue jay's wing in my mind without a particle of trouble. You want a new dress for spring, I s'pose? It don't matter whether a girl's a Methodist or an Episcopalian, she's mighty sure to begin wantin' a new dress when Easter is comin'. Geneva Ellgood ordered her figured challis yestiddy from one of them big stores in New York. She picked the pattern out of a fashion paper, and when the goods come, I'm goin' to spend a week at Green Acres, an' make it up for her. It is a real pretty pattern, and it calls for yards and yards of stuff. They say young Doctor Greylock was a beau of hers when she was in New York last summer, an' I reckon that's why she's buyin' so much finery. Courtin' is good for milliners, my Ma used to say, even if marriage is bad for wives. She had a lot of dry fun in her, my Ma had. Geneva is gettin' a mighty pretty hat too. She's bought a wreath of wheat and poppies, an' I'm takin' it down to Richmond to put on one of them stylish new hats with a high bandeau."
For an instant Dorinda held her breath while a wave of dull sickness swept over her. At that moment she realized that the innocence of her girlhood, the ingenuous belief that love brought happiness, had departed for ever. She was in the thick of life, and the thick of life meant not peace but a sword in the heart. Though she scarcely knew Geneva Ellgood, she felt that they were enemies. It was not fair, she told herself passionately, that one girl should have everything and one nothing! A primitive impulse struggled like some fierce invader in her mind, among the orderly instincts and inherited habits of thought. She was startled; she was frightened; but she was defiant. In a flash the knowledge came to her that habit and duty and respectability are not the whole of life. Beyond the beaten road in which her ideas and inclinations had moved, she had discovered a virgin wilderness of mystery and terror. While she stood there, listening to the gossip of the dressmaker, the passion that abides at the heart of all desperation inflamed her mind. She had learned that love casts its inevitable shadow of pain.
"I want a hat too, Miss Seena," she said quickly. "A white straw hat with a wreath of blue flowers round the crown."
Miss Seena lifted her spectacles to her forehead, and gazed at the girl inquiringly with her small far-sighted eyes. "I always thought you had too much character to care about clothes, Dorinda," she said, "but that jest proves, I reckon, that you never can tell. I s'pose youth is obleeged to break out sooner or later. But it will cost a good deal, I'm afraid. Wreaths are right expensive, now that they're so much worn. Yo' Ma told me the last time I was over thar that you were savin' all you made to help yo' Pa with the farm."
Her glance was mild, for she was not unsympathetic (when was a dressmaker, especially a dressmaker who was at the same time a sentimental spinster, unsympathetic about clothes?) but she wished to feel sure that Dorinda would not regret her extravagance after it was too late.
"You mustn't think that you can keep up with Geneva, honey," she added kindly but indiscreetly. "You're prettier than she is, but her Pa's the richest man anywhar about here, an' I reckon thar ain't much ugliness that money ain't able to cure."
The advice was wholesome, but Dorinda frowned and shook her head stubbornly. The shawl had slipped to her shoulders, and the sunlight, which was struggling through the clouds, brought out a bluish lustre on her black hair. Miss Seena, watching her closely, reflected that hair and eyes like those did not often go together. With this vivid contrast and the high colour in her lips and cheeks the girl appeared almost too conspicuous, the dressmaker decided. "It always seemed to me mo' refined when yo' eyes and hair matched better," she thought, "but I s'pose most men would call her handsome, even if her features ain't so small as they ought to be."
"I'm going to have one nice dress, I don't care what happens," Dorinda was saying. "I don't care what happens," she repeated obstinately. "I've got thirty dollars put away, and I want you to buy that dress and hat if it takes every cent of it. I'm tired of doing without things."
"Well, I don't reckon they will cost that much," returned Miss Seena, after a quick sum in mental arithmetic. "You can buy right nice, double-width nun's veiling for seventy-five cents a yard, and I can get you a dress, I reckon, by real careful cuttin', out of nine yards. The fashion books call for ten, but them New York folks don't need to cut careful. To be sure, these here bell skirts and balloon sleeves take a heap of, goods, but I s'pose you'll want yours jest as stylish as Geneva's?" Since the girl was determined to waste her money, it would be a pity, Miss Seena reflected gently, to spoil the pleasure of her improvidence. After all, you weren't young and good-looking but such a little while!
"I'll do the best I can, honey," she said briskly. "And they'll charge it to me at Brandywine and Plummer's store, so you don't need to bring the money till the first of the month. Thar's the train whistlin' now, and Sister Texanna is waitin' at the track with my basket and things. Don't you worry, I'll get you jest the very prettiest material I can find."
Turning away, the dressmaker hurried with birdlike fluttering steps to the track, where Dorinda saw the stately figure of Miss Texanna standing guard beside an indiscriminate collection of parcels. Miss Texanna, unlike her sisters, had been pretty in her youth, and a dull glamour of forgotten romance still surrounded her. Though she had never married, she had had a lover killed in the war, which, as Miss Tabitha had once remarked, was "almost as good." But Dorinda, while she watched the approaching train, did not think of the three sisters. "I oughtn't to have done it," she said to herself, with a feeling of panic, and then desperately, "Well, I'm going to have one good dress, I don't care what happens!"
A few farmers were taking the early train to town, and Dorinda saw that Geneva Ellgood had driven her father to the station in her little dogcart with red wheels. She was a plain girl, with a long nose, eyes the colour of Malaga grapes, and a sallow skin which had the greenish tinge of anemia. Her flaxen hair, which she arranged elaborately, was profuse and beautiful, and her smile, though it lacked brightness, was singularly sweet and appealing.
As the two girls looked at each other, they nodded carelessly; then Geneva leaned forward and held out a slip of paper.
"I wonder if you would mind fixing up this list for me?" she asked in a friendly tone. "I don't like to leave Neddy, and Bob has gone in to see if there are any letters."
Running down the steps, Dorinda took the list from her and glanced over it. "We haven't got the kind of coffee you want," she said. "It was ordered two weeks ago, but it hasn't come yet."
"Well, we'll have to make out with what you have. If you'll wrap up the things, Bob will bring them out to me."
She was a shy girl, gentle and amiable, yet there was a barely perceptible note of condescension in her manner. "Just because she's rich and I'm poor, she thinks she is better than I am," Dorinda thought disdainfully, as she went up the steps.
While she was weighing and measuring the groceries, Bob Ellgood came from the post office (which consisted of a partition, with a window, in one corner of the store) and stopped by the counter to speak to her. He was a heavy, slow-witted young man, kind, temperate, and good-looking in a robust, beefy fashion. Because he was the eldest son of James Ellgood, he was regarded as desirable by the girls in the neighbourhood, and Dorinda remembered that, only a few Sundays ago, she had looked at him in church and asked herself, with a start of expectancy, "What if he should be the right one after all?" She laughed softly over the pure absurdity of the recollection, and a gleam of admiration flickered in the round, marble-like eyes of the young man.
"I hope the Greylocks' steer didn't harm your father's plant beds," he said abruptly.
"No," she shook her head. "I haven't heard that they suffered."
Having weighed the sugar, she was pouring it into a paper bag, and his eyes lingered on the competent way in which her fingers turned down the opening, secured it firmly, and snipped off the end of the string with an expert gesture. Only a week ago his attention would have flattered her, but to-day she had other things to think of, and his admiring oxlike stare made her impatient. Was that the way things always came, after you had stopped wanting them?
"Well, he ought to have a good crop after the work he's put on those fields," he continued, as she placed the packages in a cracker box and handed them to him over the counter.
She shook her head. "No matter how hard you work it always comes back to the elements in the end. You can't be sure of anything when you have to depend upon the elements for a living."
"That's what Father says." He accepted the fatalistic philosophy without dispute. "After all, the rain and frost and drought, not the farmer, do most of the farming." He had had a good education, and though his speech was more provincial than Jason's, it lacked entirely the racy flavour of Pedlar's Mill.
With the box under one arm, he was still gazing at her, when the impatient voice of Geneva rang out from the doorway, and the girl came hurrying into the store.
"What are you waiting for, Bob? I thought you were never coming." Then, as her eyes fell on Dorinda, she added apologetically, "Of course I know the things were ready, but Bob is always so slow. I've got to hurry back because Neddy won't stand alone."
She turned away and went out, while Bob followed with a crestfallen air.
"As if I cared!" thought Dorinda proudly. "As if I wanted to talk to him!"
The train to the north had gone by at five o'clock, and the next one, which Miss Seena had just taken to Richmond, was the last that would stop before afternoon. The few farmers who had lounged about the track were now waiting in the store, while Nathan weighed and measured or counted small change into callous palms. Here and there a negro in blue jeans overalls stood patiently, with an expression of wistful resignation which was characteristic less of an individual than of a race. There was little talk among the white farmers, and that little was confined to the crops, or the weather. Rugged, gnarled, earth-stained, these men were as impersonal as trees or as transcendental philosophers. In their rustic pride they accepted silence as they accepted poverty or bad weather, without embarrassment and without humility. If they had nothing to say, they were capable of sitting for hours, dumb and unabashed, over their pipes or their "plugs" of tobacco. They could tell a tale, provided there was one worth the telling, with caustic wit and robust realism; but the broad jest or the vulgar implication of the small town was an alien product among them. Not a man of them would have dared recite an anecdote in Pedlar's store that Dorinda should not have heard. The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.
"Do you want me to wait on Mr. Appleseed?" asked Dorinda, glancing past Nathan to the genial, ruddy old farmer, who was standing near her, with his idiot son close at his side. As she spoke she lifted the top from one of the tall jars on the counter, and held out a stick of striped peppermint candy. "Here's a stick of candy for you, Billy."
The boy grinned at her with his sagging mouth, and made a snatch at the candy.
"Say thanky, son," prompted John Appleseed.
"Thanky," muttered Billy obediently, slobbering over the candy.
"No, I'll look after John as soon as I've fixed up this brown sugar," said Nathan. "I wish you'd take those ducks from Aunt Mehitable Green. She's been waitin' a long time, and she ain't so young as she used to be. Tell her I'll allow her seventy-five cents for the pair, if they're good size. She wants the money's worth in coffee and Jamaica ginger."
"Why, I didn't know Aunt Mehitable was here!" Glancing quickly about, she discovered the old woman sitting on a box at the far end of the room, with the pair of ducks in her lap. "I didn't see you come in, or I'd have spoken to you before," added the girl, hurrying to her.
Aunt Mehitable Green had assisted at Dorinda's birth, which had been unusually difficult, and there was a bond of affection, as well as a sentimental association, between them. Mrs. Oakley, with her superior point of view, had always been friendly with the negroes around her. During Dorinda's childhood both mother and daughter had visited Aunt Mehitable in her cabin at Whistling Spring, and the old midwife had invariably returned their simple gifts of food or wine made from scuppernong grapes, with slips of old-fashioned flowers or "physic" brewed from the mysterious herbs in her garden. She still bore the reputation, bestowed half in fear, half in derision, of "a conjure woman," and not a negro in the county would have offended her. Though there was a growing scepticism concerning her ability to "throw spells" or work love charms, even Mrs. Oakley admitted her success in removing moles and warts and in making cows go dry at the wrong season. She was a tall, straight negress, with a dark wrinkled face, in which a brooding look rippled like moonlight on still water, and hair as scant and grey as lichen on an old stump. Her dress of purple calico was stiffly starched, and she wore a decent bonnet of black straw which had once belonged to Mrs. Oakley. The stock she came of was a good one, for, as a slave, she had belonged to the Cumberlands, who had owned Honeycomb Farm before it was divided. Though that prosperous family had "run to seed" and finally disappeared, the slaves belonging to it had sprung up thriftily, in freedom, on innumerable patches of rented ground. The Greens, with the Moodys and Plumtrees, represented the coloured aristocracy of Pedlar's Mill; and Micajah Green, Aunt Mehitable's eldest son, had recently bought from Nathan Pedlar the farm he had worked, with intelligence and industry, as a tenant.
"I hope you didn't walk over here," said Dorinda, for Whistling Spring was five miles away, on the other side of the Greylocks' farm, beyond Whippernock River.
The old woman shook her head, while she began unwrapping the strips of red flannel on the legs of the ducks. "Naw'm, Micajah brung me over wid de load er pine in de oxcyart. I ain' seen you en yo' Ma; fur a mont' er Sundays, honey," she added.
"I've wanted to get down all winter," answered Dorinda, "but the back roads are so bad I thought I'd better wait until the mud dried. Are any of your children living at home with you now?"
Aunt Mehitable sighed. "De las oner dem is done lef' me, but I ain't never seed de way yit dat de ole hen kin keep de fledglin's in de chicken coop. Dey's all done moughty well, en dat's sump'n de Lawd's erbleeged ter be praised fur. Caze He knows," she added fervently, "de way I use'n ter torment de Th'one wid pray'r when dey wuz all little."
"Pa says Micajah is one of the best farmers about here."
"Dat's so. He sholy is," assented the old midwife. "En Micar he's steddyin' 'bout horse sickness along wid Marse Kettledrum, de horse doctah," she continued, "en Moses, he's gwineter wuck on de railroad ontwel winter, en Abraham, he's helpin' Micajah, en Eliphalet, he's leasin' a patch er ground f'om Marse Garlick over yonder by Whippernock, en Jemima, de one I done name arter ole Miss, she's wuckin' at Five Oaks fur ole Doctah Greylock——"
"I thought she'd left there long ago," Dorinda broke in.
"Naw'm, she ain' left dar yit. She wuz fixin' ter git away, caze hit's been kinder skeery over dar sence de ole doctah's been gittin' so rambunctious; en Jemima, she ain' gwineter teck er bit er sass f'om dat ar yaller huzzy, needer. Yas'm, she wuz all fixin' ter leave twell de young doctah come back, an he axed 'er ter stay on dar en wait on him. Huh!" she exclaimed abruptly, after a pause, "I 'low dar's gwinter be some loud bellowin's w'en de young en de ole steer is done lock dere horns tergedder." With a gesture of supreme disdain, she thrust the two ducks away from her into Dorinda's hands. "Dar, honey, you teck dese yer ducks," she said. "I'se moughty glad to lay eyes on you agin, but I'se erbleeged ter be gittin' erlong back wid Micajah. You tell yo' Ma I'se comin' ter see 'er jes' ez soon ez de cole spell is done let up. I sholy is gwineter do hit."
When the old woman had gone, with the coffee and Jamaica ginger in her basket, Dorinda hurried into the room at the back of the store, where Rose Emily and the children were waiting for her.
"I couldn't get here any sooner," she explained as she entered. "First Miss Seena Snead and then Aunt Mehitable stopped me. Are you feeling easier to-day, Rose Emily?"
Mrs. Pedlar, wrapped in a pink crocheted shawl, with her hectic colour and her gleaming hair, reminded Dorinda of the big wax doll they had had in the window of the store last Christmas. She was so brilliant that she did not look real.
"Oh, I feel like a different person this morning," she answered. It was what she always said at the beginning of the day. "I'm sure I shall be able to get up by evening."
"I'm so glad," Dorinda responded, as she did every morning. "Wait and see what the doctor says."
"Yes, I thought I'd better stay in bed until he comes." She closed her eyes from weakness, but a moment later, when she opened them, they shone more brightly than ever. "He said he would stop by."
For an instant Dorinda hesitated; then she answered in a hushed voice. "I met him in the road, and he drove me over."
Rose Emily's face was glowing. "Oh, did he? I'm so glad," she breathed.
"I'm afraid things aren't going well at Five Oaks," Dorinda pursued in a troubled voice. "He looked dreadfully worried. It's the old man, I suppose. Everybody says he's drinking himself to death, and there's that coloured girl with all those children."
"Well, he can't live much longer," Rose Emily said hopefully, "and then, of course, Jason will send them all packing." She reflected, as if she were trying to recall something that had slipped her memory. "Somebody was telling me the other day," she continued, "it must have been either Miss Texanna or Miss Tabitha. Whoever it was thought Jason had made a mistake to come back. Oh, I remember now! It was Miss Tabitha, and she called Jason a fool to let his father manage his life. She said he had a sweet nature, but that he was as light as a feather and a strong wind could blow him away. Of course she didn't know him."
"Of course not," Dorinda assented emphatically.
"Well, I haven't seen him often, but he didn't seem to me to lack backbone. Anyhow, I'd rather be married to a sweet nature than to a strong will," she added. Ever since Jason's return, she had hoped so ardently that he might fall in love with Dorinda that already, according to her optimistic habit of mind, she regarded the match as assured.
They were still discussing young Doctor Greylock when Minnie May ran in to say that Bud "would not mind what she told him," and Mrs. Pedlar shifted her feverish animation in the direction of her daughter.
"Tell him if he doesn't do what you say, I'll make his Pa whip him as soon as the store is closed," she said sternly, for she was a disciplinarian; and the capable little girl ran out again, wiping her red and shrivelled hands on the towel she had pinned over her short dress.
"I declar that child's a born little mother," Rose Emily continued. "I don't see how I could ever have pulled through without her."
Trivial as the incident was, Dorinda never forgot it. Years afterwards the scene would return to her memory, and she would see again the sturdy, energetic little figure, with the two thick wheaten red braids and the towel pinned about her waist, hurrying out of the room. A born little mother, that was the way Minnie May always appeared to her.
"Nathan needs me to help. I'd better go back," she said. "I'll look in every now and then to see how you are." Smoothing her hair with her hand, she hastened into the store.
As the morning advanced a line of white and coloured farmers, assembled by the counter, with the chickens, eggs, and pats of butter which they had brought to exchange for coffee, molasses, sugar, or simple household remedies such as Jamaica ginger and Sloan's liniment. Tea was used only in case of illness, and the brown tin canister on the shelf sometimes remained empty for weeks.
Until yesterday Dorinda had regarded the monotonous routine of the store as one of the dreary, though doubtless beneficial, designs of an inscrutable Providence. A deep-rooted religious instinct persuaded her, in spite of secret recoils, that dullness, not pleasure, was the fundamental law of morality. The truth of the matter, she would probably have said, was that one did the best one could in a world where duty was invariably along the line of utmost resistance. But this morning, even while she performed the empty mechanical gestures, she felt that her mind had become detached from her body, and was whirling like a butterfly in some ecstatic dream. Flightiness. That was how it would have appeared to her mother. Yet, if this were flightiness, she thought, who would ever choose to be sober? Beauty, colour, sweetness, all the vital and radiant energy of the spring, vibrated through her. Her ears were ringing as if she moved in a high wind. Sounds floated to her in thin strains, from so great a distance that she was obliged to have questions repeated before they reached her ears. And all the time, while she weighed chickens and counted eggs and tasted butter, she was aware that the faint, slow smile clung like an edge of light to her lips.
The morning was well over when Minnie May came running into the store to ask Dorinda to come to her mother.
"The doctor is with her," said the child, "and he wants to leave some directions."
"Hadn't your father better see him?" Dorinda inquired, longing yet hesitating.
"No, you go," answered Nathan before the child could reply. "You're so much quicker at understanding," he explained, "and you can tell me what he says after he's gone."
He looked, for all his immense frame, more bent and colourless and ineffectual, she thought, than she had ever seen him. What a mean life he had had! And he was good. There wasn't a better husband and father in the world than Nathan Pedlar, and for the matter of that, there wasn't a more honest tradesman. Yet everybody, even his own children, pushed him aside as if he were of no consequence.
A few minutes later she was in Rose Emily's room, and her bright gaze was on the clean-cut youthful figure leaning over her friend. Though she had known that he would be there, her swift impression of him startled her by its vividness. It was like this every time that she saw him. There was an animation, a living quality in his face and smile which made everything appear lifeless around him. Long afterwards, when she had both remembered and forgotten, she decided that it was simply the glamour of the unknown that she had felt in him. In those first months after his return to Pedlar's Mill, he possessed for her the charm of distant countries and picturesque enterprises. It was the flavour of personality, she realized, even then, not of experience. He had travelled little, yet his presence diffused the perilous thrill of adventure.
"This is Dorinda," Rose Emily said; and he looked up and nodded as casually as if he had never seen her before, or had just parted from her. Which impression, Dorinda wondered, did he mean to convey?
"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a hammock?" he inquired. "What we need is to get her out on the porch. I've told her that every time I've seen her."
"There are several hammocks in the store." As she answered his question, Dorinda glanced at him doubtfully. In the sickroom he appeared to have shed his youth as a snake sheds its skin. He might have been any age. He was brisk, firm, efficient, and as sexless as a machine.
"Wouldn't it be safer to wait until the weather is milder?" Rose Emily asked, with an anxious smile. "Cold is so bad for me."
"Nonsense!" He shook his head with a laugh. "That's the whole trouble with you. Your lungs are starving for air. If you'd kept out of doors instead of shutting the windows, you wouldn't be where you are now."
At this his patient made a timid protest. "Your father always said——"
He interrupted her brusquely. "My father was good in his generation, but he belongs to the old school."
After this he talked on cheerfully, flattering her, chaffing her, while he made fun of her old-fashioned hygiene and asked innumerable questions, in a careless manner, about her diet, her medicine, her diversions, and the deformity of the baby, John Abner, who was born with a clubfoot. Though it seemed a long time to Dorinda, it was in fact not more than a quarter of an hour before he said good-bye and nodded to the girl to follow him out on the porch.
"I'll show you the very place to hang that hammock," he remarked as he led the way out of doors.
Rose Emily stretched out her thin arm to detain him. "Don't you think I'm getting better every day, Doctor?"
"Better? Of course you're better." He looked down at her with a smile. "We'll have you up and out before summer."
Then he opened the door, and Dorinda obediently followed him outside.
"How on earth does she breathe in that oven?" he demanded moodily, while he walked to the far end of the porch. "She'll be dead in three months, if she doesn't get some fresh air into her lungs. And the children. It's as bad as murder to keep them in that room."
He frowned slightly, and with his troubled frown, Dorinda felt that he receded from her and became a stranger. His face was graver, firmer, harassed by perplexity. It seemed to her incredible that he had looked at her that morning with the romantic pathos and the imperative needs of youth in his eyes.
"Will she really be up by summer?" she asked, breathless with hope and surprise.
"Up?" He lowered his voice and glanced apprehensively over his shoulder. "Why, she's dying. Don't you know she is dying?"
"I thought so," her voice broke. "But you told her——"
"You didn't expect me to tell her the truth, did you? What kind of brute do you take me for?"
This new morality, for which neither religious doctrine nor experimental philosophy had prepared her, stunned her into silence; and in that silence he repeated, with a gesture of irritation, as if the admission annoyed him excessively: "She'll be in her grave in six months, but you couldn't expect me to tell her so."