She looked at him incredulously. "You aren't just making it up?" With a laugh he ignored the question. "You haven't any plans?"
"Oh, no. It will be too late to go to the dressmaker, and besides she might not have wanted me."
"You are sure you don't wish to go home?"
She gazed at his firm fleshy face, over which the clean shining skin was drawn so smoothly that it looked as if it were stretched; the thick brown hair, just going grey and divided by a pink part in the centre; the crisp beard, clipped close on the cheeks and rounding to a point at the chin. Yes, she liked his face. It was a comfortable face to watch, and she had never seen hands like his before, large, strong, mysteriously beneficent hands.
"No," she answered in her reserved voice, "I can't go back yet."
If she went back, she should be obliged to face the red chimneys of Five Oaks, the burned cabin, and the place where she had sat and waited for Jason's return. These things were still there, perpetual and unchanged.
"I've talked to my wife about you," Doctor Faraday said. "I believe you are a good girl, and we both wish to help you to lead a good life."
"You've been so kind," she responded. "I can't tell you what I feel, but I do feel that. I want you to know."
"My dear girl." He bent over and touched her hand. "I know it. If you'd had as much experience with emotional women as I've had, you'd understand the blessedness of reserve. Wait till you see my wife. You'll find her easy to talk to. Every one does."
A few mornings afterwards, as she was preparing to get up, Mrs. Faraday came and sat by the little bed. She was a plump, maternal-looking woman, with an ample figure, which did not conform to the wasp waist of the period, and a round pink face, to which her tightly crimped hair and small fashionable hat lent an air of astonishment, as if she were thinking continually, "I didn't know I looked like this." Her mantle was of claret-coloured broadcloth heavily garnished with passementerie, and she wore very short white kid gloves, above which her plump wrists bulged in infantile creases. While she sat there, panting a little from her tight stays and her unnatural elegance, Dorinda gazed at her sympathetically and thought it was a pity that she did her hair in a way that made her temples look skinned.
"Doctor Faraday is very much interested in your case," she began in a voice that was as fresh and sweet as her complexion. "He has been so kind to me."
"We both wish to help you, and we think it might be good for you to take the place in his office for a little while—a few weeks," she added cautiously, "until you are able to find something else. In that way the doctor can keep an eye on you until you are well again. Of course the work will be light. He has a nurse and a secretary. However, you could help with the children after the office hours are over. The nurse and Miss Murray, the governess, take them to the Park every afternoon; but there are six of them, and we can't have too much help. That's a large family for New York," she finished gaily.
"We have much larger ones at Pedlar's Mill. The Garlicks were twelve until one died last year, and old Mrs. Flower, the Mother of the auctioneer, had thirteen children."
"You like children?"
"Oh, yes, I like children." She couldn't put any enthusiasm into her voice, and she hated herself for the lack of it. She was dead, turned into stone or wood, and she didn't really care about anything. Did she or did she not like children? She couldn't have answered the question truthfully if her life had depended upon it. In her other existence she had liked them; but that was so long ago and far away that it had no connection with her now.
"Then that is settled." What a happy manner Mrs. Faraday had! "The nurse tells me you are leaving to-morrow. Will you come straight to us or would you like a day to yourself?"
"A day to myself, if you don't mind. I ought to get a dress, oughtn't I?"
"Oh, any plain simple dress will do. Navy blue poplin with white linen collar and cuffs would be nice. But don't tire yourself or spend any money you can't afford. Well arrange all that later."
Mrs. Faraday had risen and was holding out one firmly gloved hand. As she grasped it, Dorinda could feel the soft flesh beneath the deeply embedded buttons. "Then I'll look for you day after to-morrow," said the older woman in her sprightly tone. "Navy blue will look well on you with your hair and eyes," she added encouragingly. "I always liked blue eyes and black hair."
Dorinda smiled up at her. "And now half my hair is gone. I must look a fright, and the scar isn't even hidden. I'll be marked all my life."
"Oh, but your hair will come back thicker than ever. Even now your scalp is covered, and in a little while no one will know that there is a scar." She beamed down on the bed. "Here is the address. Have you a place you can put the card, so it won't slip away?"
"I've got my purse under my pillow." As Dorinda drew out the little leather bag, and slipped the card into it, she thought wearily, "How funny it is that this should have happened to me."
Since her illness, the whole of life, all she had gone through, all she saw around her, all feeling everywhere, appeared less tragic than ludicrous. Though her capacity for emotion was dead, some diabolical sense of humour had sprung up like, fireweed from the ruins. She could laugh at everything now, but it was ironic laughter.
Her first thought, when she opened her eyes the next morning, was that she was free to leave the hospital as soon as she pleased. If only she might have stayed there until she died, tranquil, indifferent, with nothing left but this sardonic humour. A little later, as she glanced at the other patients in the ward, at the woman who moaned incessantly and at the young girl, with flaming red hair, who had lost her leg in an accident, she told herself that there were people in the world who were worse off than she was. Through the high window she could see that the sky was clear, and that a strong breeze was blowing a flag on the top of a grey tower. She was glad it was not raining. It would have been a pity to go back into the world on a wet day.
After she had had her breakfast, and a glib young doctor had given her some directions, she got out of bed and a pupil nurse helped her to dress. They had arranged, she discovered presently, that a friend of one of the other patients—the moaning woman, it soon appeared—should go with her as far as her lodging-house. That was the stranger's way also, and she had promised to see that Dorinda reached her room safely.
"Do they know that you are coming?"
"Yes, the nurse telephoned for me. I can get the sane room, and they've put my bag in it."
"Well, I'll be glad to go with you," said the woman, a depressed-looking person, in rusty mourning. "You must be careful about crossing the street while you're so weak."
"I don't feel as if I could walk a step," Dorinda answered, sinking into a chair while she dressed.
Her street clothes were so uncomfortable that she wondered how she could ever have worn them. Her stockings were too large, and the feet of them were drawn out of shape; her dress felt as if it weighed tons. But her hair troubled her most. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make it look neat. So much of it had been cut away on the right side that she was obliged to wind what was left into a thin twist and fasten it like a wreath round her head. Her face was thin and pallid, just the shape and colour of an egg, she thought despondently, and "I'm all eyes," she added, while she gazed at herself in the small mirror.
It was late afternoon when she left the hospital, leaning on the arm of the stranger, who remarked with every other step, "I hope you ain't beginning to feel faint," or, "You'd better take it more slowly." The bereaved woman was provided with a collection of gruesome anecdotes, which she related with relish while they crept along the cross street in the direction of Sixth Avenue. "There ain't much I don't know about operations," she concluded at the end of her recital.
As the air brushed her face, Dorinda's first sensation was a physical response to the invigorating frostiness. Then it seemed to her that whenever she took a step forward the pavement rose slightly and slid up to meet her. In so short a time she had forgotten the way to walk, and she felt troubled because in her case the law of gravitation appeared to be arbitrarily suspended. When she put her foot out, she did not know, she told herself, whether it would have the weight to come down or would go floating up into the air. "Could anything have happened to my brain," she wondered, "when I was struck on the head?" In a little while, however, the sensation of lightness gave place to the more familiar one of strained muscles. Though she could walk easily now, she was beginning to feel very tired, and she could barely do more than crawl over the long block.
A high wind was blowing from the west, billowing the sleeves and skirts of women's dresses, whipping the dust into waves, and tossing the gay streamers in Fifth Avenue. The sunlight appeared to splinter as it struck against the crystal blue of the sky and to scatter a shower of sparkling drops on the city. Though it was all bright, gay, beautiful, to Dorinda the scene might have been made of glass in the windy hollow of the universe. "I'm dried up at the core," she thought, "and yet, I've got to go on pretending that I'm alive, that I'm like other people." She felt nothing; she expected nothing; she desired nothing; and this insensibility, which was worse than pain, had attacked her body as well as her heart and mind. "If somebody were to stick a pin in me, I shouldn't feel it," she told herself. "I'm no better than a dead tree walking."
At the corner of Sixth Avenue, a gust of wind struck her sharply, and still leaning on the arm of her companion, she drew back into the shelter of a shop.
"Let's stand here until the next car comes."
"Do you feel any worse?"
"No, not worse, only different."
"I've known 'em to faint dead away the first time they left the hospital."
"Well, I've no idea of fainting. Just tell me when you see the right car coming."
The thing that worried her most, and she had puzzled over this from the minute she came down the steps of the hospital, was the curious impression in her mind that she had seen everything and everybody before. Every face was familiar to her. She seemed to have known each person who passed her in some former time and place, which she dimly remembered; and each reminded her, in some vague resemblance of contour, feature, or shifting expression, of the way Jason had looked when she first loved him. "Just as I was trying to forget him," she thought, with irritation, "everybody begins to look like him."
When the car came, and she got on and found a seat beside a fat German, who was buried in his newspaper, this senseless irritation still persisted. "Maybe if I stop looking at their faces and keep my eyes fixed on their clothes, the resemblance will pass away," she told herself resolutely. "What a funny hat, just like a cabbage, that woman is wearing, and the man with her has on a tie like a little boy's. He must be an artist. I read in some book that artists wore velvet coats and flowing ties." Then, inadvertently, she raised her eyes to the face of the stranger, and discovered that he was gazing at her with a look that reminded her of Jason. Even the fat German wore a familiar expression when he turned to touch the bell and glanced down at her as he rose to go out of the car.
At the lodging-house, where she had to explain her case all over again, she was still haunted by this delusive resemblance. There might have been a general disintegration and reassembling of personalities since she had gone to the hospital, and she felt that she had seen them all before in other circumstances and other periods.
Alone, at last, in her little room, she dropped wearily on the hard bed, which, like the wife of the proprietor, bulged in the wrong places, and lay, without seeing or hearing, surrendered to the grey hollowness of existence. Sheer physical weakness kept her motionless for an hour; and when at the end of that time, she lifted her hands to take off her hat, she felt as if she were recovering from the effects of an anæsthetic. Gradually, as the stupor wore off, she became aware of the objects around her; of the hissing gas jet, which burned in the daytime; of the dirty carpet, with an ink splotch in the centre; of the unsteady washstand that creaked under its own weight; of the stale ashes of a cigar in the top of the soap dish; of the sharp ridge down the middle of the bed on which she was lying. And she thought clearly, "No matter how bad it is, I've got to go through with it."
The hardest thing, she knew, that she had to face was not the wreck of her happiness, but the loss of a vital interest in life. Even people who were unhappy retained sometimes sufficient interest in the mere husk of experience to make life not only endurable but even diverting. With her, however, she felt that she had nothing to expect and nothing to lose. One idea had possessed her so completely that now, when it had been torn out from the roots like a dying nerve, there was no substitute for happiness that she could put in its place. "I've finished with love," she repeated over and over. "I've finished with love, and until I find something else to fill my life, I shall be only an empty shell. . . ."
Rising from the bed, she opened her bag and unfolded her dresses. None of them would do for New York, she realized. All of them, she saw now, were absurd and countrified. As she shook out the blue nun's veiling, she said to herself, "If I hadn't bought this dress, perhaps he would never have fallen in love with me, and than I should still be living at Old Farm, and Ma would have her cow and nothing would have happened that has happened." She laughed with the perverse humour that she had brought back out of the depths of unconsciousness. If only one could get outside of it and stand a little way off, how ridiculous almost any situation in life would appear! Even those moments when she had waited in anguish at the fork of the road were tinged with irony when they revived now in her memory. "All the same I wouldn't go through them again for anything that life could offer," she thought.
Dorinda stood in Doctor Faraday's office and looked out into East Thirty-seventh Street. Beneath her there was a grey pavement swept by wind and a few pale bars of sunshine. She saw the curved iron railing of the porch and the steps of the area, where an ashcan, still unemptied, awaited the call of the ashcart. A fourwheeler, driven by a stout, red-faced driver, was passing in the street; at the corner an Italian youth with a hunchback was selling shoe-strings; on the pavement in front of the house, a maltese cat, wearing a bell on a red ribbon, sunned himself lazily while he licked the fur on his stomach. Overhead, the vault of the sky appeared remote, colourless, as impenetrable as stone.
When she turned into the house, she knew to weariness what she should find awaiting her. A narrow oval room, with sand-coloured walls, curtains of brown damask, and furniture of weathered oak, which was carved and twisted out of all resemblance to her mother's cherished pieces of mahogany. On the long tables piles of old magazines lay in orderly rows. In the fireplace three neat gas logs shed a yellow flame shot with blue sparkles. Very far apart, three patients were sitting, with strained expectant eyes turned in the direction of the folding doors which led into the inner office. In the last two years she had learned to know the office and the street outside as if they were books which she had studied at school.
Standing there, she thought idly of her new dress of navy blue poplin. She knew that she looked well in it, that the severe white linen collar and cuffs suited the grave oval of her face. Though she had lost her girlish softness and bloom, she had gained immeasurably in dignity and distinction, and people, she noticed, turned to look at her now when she went out alone in the street. The severe indifference of her expression emphasized the richness of her lips and the vivid contrast of her colouring. Her eyes had lost their springtime look, but they were still deeply blue beneath the black, shadows of her lashes. Young as she was she had acquired the ripe wisdom and the serene self-confidence of maturity; she had attained the immunity from apprehension which comes to those only who can never endure the worst again. Yet she was not unhappy. In the security of her disenchantment there was the quiet that follows a storm.
While she waited there for the sound of the doctor's bell, she thought dispassionately of what the last two years had meant in her life. Everything and nothing! Her outward existence had been altered by them, but to her deeper self they had been scarcely more than dust blowing across her face. Dust blowing, that was all they had meant to her!
She lived the period over again in her recollection, as she might have lived over one of the plays she had seen. She thought of the Faradays; of her diffidence, of their kindness; of the English governess and the French teacher, neither of whose speech was intelligible to her. She recalled the morning breakfasts; the walks in the Park in the afternoon; her nervous dread of the office; her first mistakes; the patience of the doctor and Mrs. Faraday; the way she had gradually become one of the family circle; the six small children, and especially the little girl Penelope, who had taken a fancy to her from the beginning; the two summers when she had gone to Maine with the family; the bathing, and how strange she had felt coming out on the beach with no shoes on and skirts up to her knees. Then she thought of Penelope's illness; of the sudden attack of pneumonia while Mrs. Faraday was in bed with influenza; of the days and nights of nursing because Penelope cried for her and refused to take her medicine from the trained nurse; of the night when they thought the child was dying, and how she had sat by the bed until the crisis at dawn. Then of the crisis when it came. The quieter breathing; the way the tiny hand fluttered in hers; the band of steel that loosened about her heart; and Mrs. Faraday crying from her bed, "Dorinda, we can never forget what you have done! You must stay with us always!" After that she had grown closer to them. Where else could she go? Nowhere, unless she went back to Pedlar's Mill, and that, she felt, was still impossible. Some day she might go back again. Not yet, but some day, when her hate was as dead as her love. There were moments when she missed Old Farm, vivid moments when she smelt growing things in the Park, when she longed with all her heart for a sight of the April fields and the pear orchard in bloom and the big pine where birds were singing. But the broomsedge she tried to forget. The broomsedge was too much alive. She felt that she hated it because it would make her suffer again.
They missed her at home, she knew. Her father had not been well. He was getting old. Every month she sent him half of her salary. They would not have had that much if she had stayed at Pedlar's Mill; and then there was the extra money at Christmas. Last Christmas the doctor had given her a check for fifty dollars, and after Penelope's illness, they had wished to give her more, but she had refused to let them pay her for nursing the child. . . . There was a cow at home now, not the red one of Doctor Greylock's, but a Jersey her father had bought from James Ellgood. Her father's tobacco crop had done well last year, and he had mended some of the fences. When the mortgage came due, she hoped he would be able to meet it. She wondered if life had changed there at all. Rose Emily was dead—that would make a difference to her. And Jason's father, that horrible old man, was actually dying, her mother had written. . . .
The doctor's bell rang, and she turned, while the folding doors opened, to usher the next patient into the private office. Two women went in together, while the doctor's assistant, a young physician named Burch, led the remaining patient away for examination. She had grown to know the young doctor well, and since last summer, when he spent his vacation in Maine, she had suspected that he was on the verge, of falling in love with her. Cautious, deliberate, methodical, he was in no danger, she felt, of plunging precipitately into marriage. Doctor Faraday approved, she was aware, and his wife had done all in her power to make the match; but Dorinda had felt nothing stronger than temperate liking. Richard Burch was not ugly; he was even attractive looking after you got used to his features. He had a short, rather stocky figure, and a square, not uninteresting face, a good face, Mrs. Faraday called it. Almost any girl who had the will to love might have argued herself into loving him. That emotion was, in part at least, the result of a will to love, Dorinda had learned in the last two years, since she had picked up more or less of the patter of science; and the last thing she wished to do, she assured herself, was ever to live through the destructive process again. With a complete absence of self-deception, she could ask herself now if she had been in love with love when she met Jason Greylock, and if any other reasonably attractive man would have answered as well in his place. Was it the moment, after all, and not the man, that really mattered? If Bob Ellgood had shown that admiring interest in her the year before instead of the day after she met Jason, would her life have been different? Did the importunate necessity exist in the imagination, and were you compelled to work it out into experience before you could settle down to the serious business of life?
She looked round as the door opened, and saw Doctor Burch coming out with the two women patients.
"At ten to-morrow," the elder woman said, as she slipped on her fur coat.
"Ten to-morrow," Dorinda repeated mechanically, while she went over to the desk and wrote down the appointment in the office book. When she turned away, the woman had gone, and Doctor Burch was gazing at her with his twinkling, near-sighted eyes from behind rimless eyeglasses.
"There's one more to come," she observed in a brisk, professional tone.
"One more?"
"Patient, I mean."
"Oh, yes. That will finish them till we go out. You ought to thank your stars you don't have to make calls."
"Yes. I get tired listening to complaints."
He smiled. "You aren't sympathetic?"
She thought of Rose Emily. "Well, I've seen so much real misery."
"It's real enough everywhere."
"Yes, I know. I suppose the truth is that life doesn't seem to me to be worth all the fuss they make over it. The more they suffer, the harder they appear to cling to living. I believe in facing what you have to face and making as little fuss about it as possible."
"I've noticed that. You hate fussiness."
She assented gravely. "When you've been very poor, you realize that it is the greatest extravagance."
"You've been very poor, then?"
"Almost everybody is poor at Pedlar's Mill. The Ellgoods are the only people who have prospered. The rest of us have had to wring whatever we've had out of barren ground. It was a struggle to make anything grow."
"Well, your face gives you away," he said thoughtfully. "Any nerve specialist could tell you that you are made up of contradictions. You've got the most romantic eyes I ever saw—they are as deep as an autumn twilight—and the sternest mouth. Your eyes are gentle and your mouth is hard—too hard, if you don't mind my saying so."
"Oh, I don't mind. People say we make our mouths. I heard Doctor Faraday tell a woman that a few days ago. But it isn't true. Life makes us and breaks us. We don't make life. The best we can do is to bear it."
"And you do that jolly well."
She did not smile as she answered. "Oh, I'm satisfied. I'm not unhappy—except in spots," she corrected herself.
"Yet you have very little pleasure. You never go out."
"Yes, I do—sometimes. Every now and then Mrs. Faraday takes me to the theatre."
"Do you ever go to hear music?"
"No, Mrs. Faraday doesn't care for it." She laughed. "The best I've ever heard was a band in the street."
For an instant he hesitated, and she wondered what was coming. Then he said persuasively: "There's a good concert to-morrow. Would you care to come?"
She glanced at him inquiringly. "Sunday afternoon?"
"Yes, there's this new pianist, Krause. You aren't too pious, are you?"
"I'm not pious at all." A satirical memory sifted through her mind, and she heard her own voice saying, "Will you let her die without giving her time to prepare?"
"Then I'll come for you at half-past two. We'll hear the concert, and then have tea somewhere, or a stroll in the Park."
When he had gone, she put the office in order, and then waited until the last patient should leave. After all, why shouldn't she try to find some pleasure in life? Her hesitation had come, she felt, from a nervous avoidance of crowds, a shrinking from any change in her secluded manner of living. She hummed a line from one of the Gospel hymns. "Rescue the perishing, care for the dying."
"How ignorant he will think me when he discovers I have never heard any music. I am ignorant, yet I am educated compared to what I was two years ago. I know life now, and that is a great deal."
The patient came out and left, and in a few minutes Doctor Faraday passed through the room on his way to put on his overcoat.
"Are you going out before lunch?" she asked, because she knew Mrs. Faraday hated to have him miss his meals.
"Yes, I can't wait, but I'll light a cigar."
He took out one of the long slender cigars he preferred, and stopped in front of her while she struck a match and held her hand by the flame.
"That's a suitable young man, Dorinda," he remarked irrelevantly, with his whimsical smile.
"Young man?" She glanced up inquiringly. Though her sense of humour had developed almost morbidly, she had discovered that it was of a wilder variety than Doctor Faraday's.
"I think, my dear girl," he explained, "that you could go farther and do worse than take Richard. If I'm not mistaken, he has a future before him."
She laughed. "There wouldn't be much for me in that sort of future."
"But there might be in the results." Then he grew serious. "He is interested in you, and I hope something will come of it."
A pricking sensation in her nerves made her start away from him.
"Don't," she said sharply. "I've finished with all that sort of thing." "Not for good. You are too young." "Yes, for good. I can't explain what I mean, but the very thought of that makes me—well, sick all over."
Her face had gone white, and struck by the change, he looked at her closely. "Some women," he said, "are affected that way by a shock."
"You mean by a blow on the head?"
"No, I don't mean a physical blow. I mean an emotional shock. Such a thing may produce a nervous revulsion."
"Well, that has happened to me."
He laid his hand on her shoulder. "It will pass probably. You are handsomer than ever. It is natural that you should need love."
A wave of aversion swept over her face. "But 'I don't need it. I am through with all that."
He looked at her gravely. "And you will fill your life—with what?"
She laughed derisively. How little men knew! "With something better than broomsedge. That's the first thing that puts out on barren soil, just broomsedge. Then that goes and pines come to stay—pines and life-everlasting. You won't understand," she explained lightly. "I was talking to Doctor Burch about Pedlar's Mill just before you came in, and I told him we had to get our living from barren ground."
He patted her shoulder. "Well, I hope that, too, will pass," he answered as he turned to put on his overcoat.
She remembered his words the next day while she sat in the concert hall waiting for the music to begin. At first she had tried to make out the names on the programme, desisting presently because they confused her. Beethoven. Bach. Chopin. She went over the others again, stumbling because she could make nothing of the syllables. A-p-p-a-s-s-i-o-n-a-t-a. What did the strange word mean? P-a-t-h-é-tique—that she could dimly grasp. Sonata? Nocturne? What did the strange words mean? How could she be expected to know she had never heard them before?
Suddenly, while she struggled over the letters, the music floated toward her from the cool twilight of the distance. This was not music, she thought in surprise, but the sound of a storm coming up through the tall pines at Old Farm. She had heard this singing melody a thousand times, on autumn afternoons, in the woods. Then, as it drew nearer, the harmony changed from sound into sensation; and from pure sensation, rippling in wave after wave like a river, it was merged and lost in her consciousness.
In the beginning, while she sat there, rapt in startled apprehension, she thought of innumerable things she had forgotten; detached incidents, impressions which glittered sharply, edged with light, against the mosaic of her recollections. Mellow sunshine, sparkling like new cider, streamed over her. Music, which she had imagined to be sound only, was changing into colour. She saw it first in delicate green and amber; then in violent clashes of red and purple; but she saw it always as vividly as if it reached her brain through her eyes. She thought first of the evening sky over the bulrushes; of the grass after rain in the pasture; of the pear trees breaking with the dawn from palest green into white. Then the colours changed, and she remembered sunsets over the broomsedge. The glow cast upward from the earth as if the wild grass were burning. The bough of a black-gum tree emblazoned in scarlet on the blue sky. The purple mist of autumn twilight, like the bloom on a grape. The road home through the abandoned fields. The solitary star in a sky which was stained the colour of ripe fruit. The white farm-house. The shingled roof like a hood. Swallows flying. Swallows everywhere, a world of swallows spinning like curved blades in the afterglow.
With the flight of wings, ecstasy quivered over her, while sound and colour were transformed into rhythms of feeling. Pure sensation held and tortured her. She felt the music playing on her nerves as the wind plays on a harp; she felt it shatter her nerves like broken string, and sweep on crashing, ploughing through the labyrinth of her soul. Down there, in the deep below the depths of her being, she felt it tearing her vitals. Down there, in the buried jungle, where her thoughts had never penetrated, she felt it destroying the hidden roots of her life. In this darkness there was no colour; there was no glimmer of twilight; there was only the maze of inarticulate agony. . . .
Now it was dying away. Now it was returning. Something that she had thought dead was coming to life again. Something that she had buried out of sight under the earth was pushing upward in anguish. Something that she had defeated was marching as a conqueror over her life. Suddenly she was pierced by a thousand splinters of crystal sound. Little quivers of light ran over her. Beads of pain broke out on her forehead and her lips. She clenched her hands together, and forced her body back into her chair. "I've got to stand it. No matter what it does to me, I've got to stand it."
"I am afraid you found it difficult," Doctor Burch said, when it was over. "It wasn't an easy programme. I wish there had been more of Krause."
"I'm not sure I liked it," she answered wearily. "I feel as if I had ploughed a field. It made me savage, just the way moonlight used to when I was growing up."
"That is the pure essence of sensation. Now, I never get that response to music. To me it is little more than an intellectual exercise. The greatest musician I ever knew told me once that his knowledge of the theory of music had, in a way, spoiled his complete enjoyment of a concert."
She had refused tea, and they had strolled in the direction of the Park. As she left the concert hall, it had seemed to her that she was stifling for air, and now, when they entered the Park, she threw back her head and breathed quickly, with her gaze on the bright chain of sky threading the tree-tops.
"This smells like November at Old Farm," she said. "Whenever I smell the country, I want to go home."
"Yours is a large farm?"
She laughed. "A thousand acres and we couldn't afford to buy a cow. Do you know what it means to be land poor? After the war my father couldn't hire labour, so he had to let all the land go bad, as we say, except the little he could cultivate himself. The rest has run to old fields. Everything is eaten up by the taxes and the mortgage. There are pines, of course, and Nathan Pedlar tells us if we let the timber stand, it will one day be valuable. Now we can't get a good price because the roads are so bad it takes too many mules to haul it away. Once in a while, we sell some trees to pay the taxes, but they bring so little. My father cut down seven beautiful poplars at Poplar Spring; but when he sold them he couldn't get but a dollar and a half for each one where it fell. It doesn't seem worth while destroying trees for that."
"What do you do with the abandoned fields?"
"Nothing. Some people turn sheep into them, but my father says that doesn't pay. The fields run to broomsedge and life-everlasting, and in time pine and scrub oak get a good start."
"But they can be reclaimed. The land can be brought back, if it is well treated."
"I know, but that takes labour; and Father and Josiah have as much work as they can manage. There isn't any money to pay the wages of hands. We've got some good pastures too. If only there was something to begin with, we might have a dairy farm. Nathan Pedlar says, or a stock farm like James Ellgood's. I wish I knew the science of farming," she concluded earnestly. "Doctor Faraday says it is as much a science as medicine."
It was The first time he had seen her deeply interested. Strange, the hold the country could get over one!
"Is there any way I could learn farming from books?" Dorinda asked before he could reply. "I mean learn the modern ways of getting the best out of the soil?"
He smiled. "It all comes back to chemistry, doesn't it? That, I imagine, is what Doctor Faraday meant— the chemistry of agriculture. Yes, there are books you can study. I'll get you a list from a friend of mine who is a professor in the University of Wisconsin. By the way, he is to give a lecture on that very subject in New York next month. There is to be a series of lectures. I'll find out about it and take you if you'll go with me. You must remember, though, that practical experience is always the best teacher."
She shook her head. "We have the experience of generations, and it has taught us nothing except to do things the way we've always done them. Mother used to say that the only land she would ever cultivate, if she had to choose over again, is the land of Canaan where
'generous fruits that never fail,On trees immortal grow!'"
'generous fruits that never fail,On trees immortal grow!'"
He laughed. "I think I'd like your mother."
The casual remark arrested her. Would he really like her mother, she wondered, with her caustic humour, her driven energy, her periodical neuralgia, and her perpetual melancholy? Had he ever known any one who resembled her? Had he ever known any woman whose life was so empty?
"Poor Ma!"—She corrected herself: "Poor Mother, the farm has eaten away her life. It caught her when she was young, and she was never able to get free."
"Doesn't she care for it?"
"I don't know. I sometimes think she hates it, but I know it would kill her to leave it. It is like a bad heart. You may suffer from it, but it is your life, and it would kill you to lose it." She broke off, pondered deeply for a few moments, and then added impulsively, "If I had the money, I'd go back and start a dairy farm there."
While she spoke a vision glimmered between the windy dusk in the Park and the orange light of the afterglow. She saw it with an intensity, an eagerness that was breathless;—the fields, the roads, the white gate, the long low house, the lamp shining in the front window. For the first time she could think of Old Farm without invoking the image of Jason. For the first time since she had left home, she felt that earlier and deeper associations were reaching out to her, that they were groping after her, like the tendrils of vines, through the darkness and violence of her later memories. Earlier and deeper associations, rooted there in the earth, were drawing her back across time and space and forgetfulness. Passion stirred again in her heart; but it was passion transfigured, recoiling from the personal to the impersonal object. It seemed to her, walking there in the blue twilight, that the music had released some imprisoned force in the depths of her being, and that this force was spreading out over the world, that it was growing wider and thinner until it covered all the desolate country at Old Farm. With a shock of joy, she realized that she was no longer benumbed, that she had come to life again. She had come to life again, but how differently!
"I feel as if the farm were calling to me to come back and help it," she said.
That night she dreamed of Pedlar's Mill. She dreamed that she was ploughing one of the abandoned fields, where the ghostly scent of the life-everlasting reminded her of the smell of her mother's flowered bandbox when she took it out of the closet on Sunday mornings—the aroma of countless dead and forgotten Sabbaths. Dan and Beersheba were harnessed to the plough, and when they had finished one furrow, they turned and looked back at her before they began another. "You'll never get this done if you plough a hundred years," they said, "because there is nothing here but thistles, and you can't plough thistles under." Then she looked round her and saw that they were right. As far as she could see, on every side, the field was filled with prickly purple thistles, and every thistle was wearing the face of Jason. A million thistles, and every thistle looked up at her with the eyes of Jason! She turned the plough where they grew thickest, trampling them down, uprooting them, ploughing them under with all her strength; but always when they went into the soil, they cropped up again. Millions of purple flaunting heads! Millions of faces! They sprang up everywhere; in the deep furrow that the plough had cut; in the dun-coloured clods of the upturned earth; under the feet of the horses; under her own feet, springing back, as if they were set on wire stems, as soon as she had crushed them into the ground. "I am going to plough them under, if it kills me," she said aloud; and then she awoke. A chill wind was blowing the white curtains at the window. Was it only her imagination, or did the wind, blowing over the city, bring the fragrance of pine and life-everlasting? For an instant, scarcely longer than a quick breath, she felt a sensation of physical nearness, as if some one had touched her. Then it vanished, leaving her in a shudder of memory. It was not love; of this she was positive. Was it hate which had assumed, in the moment between sleep and waking, the physical intensity of love? It was the first time she had dreamed of Jason. Long after she had ceased to think of him, she told herself resentfully.
The next morning, when office hours were over, she went to the library and asked for a list of books on dairy farming. She read with eagerness every one that was given to her, patiently making notes, keeping in her mind the peculiar situation at Old Farm. When Doctor Burch arranged for the course of lectures, she attended them regularly, adding, with diligence, whatever she could to her knowledge of methods; gleaning, winnowing, storing away in her memory the facts which she thought might some day be useful. Before her always were the neglected fields. She saw the renewal of promise in the land; the sowing of the grain, the springing up, the ripening, the immemorial celebration of the harvest. She saw the yellowing waves of wheat, the poetic even swath falling after the mower. "All that land," she thought, "all that land wasted!" The possibility of the dairy farm haunted her mind. Enterprise, industry, and a little capital with which to begin! That was all that one needed. If she could start with a few cows, six perhaps, and do all the work of the dairy herself, it might be managed. But Old Farm must be made to pay, she decided emphatically. Old Farm with a thousand acres could supply sufficient pasture and fodder for as many cows as she would ever be likely to own. "If I could get the labour it wouldn't be so hard," she thought one day, while she was sitting by the window in the nursery. "If I could buy the cows and hire a little extra labour, it wouldn't be impossible to make a success." Then her spirit drooped. "You can't do anything without a little money," she thought, and laughed aloud. "Not much, but a little makes all the difference."
"What are you laughing at, Dorinda?" asked Mrs. Faraday, turning from the crib, where she was bending over the baby.
"I was thinking I'd give anything I've got for six—no, a dozen cows."
"Cows?"
"At Old Farm. It hurts me to think of all that land wasted."
"It is a pity. I suppose it was good land once?"
"In great-grandfather's day it was one of the best farms in that part of the country. Of course he never cultivated much of it. He let a lot of it stand in timber. That's what we paid the taxes with right after the war. Father and Josiah do the best they can," she added, "but everything is always against them. Some people are like that, you know."
"It's a bad way to be," commented Mrs. Faraday, and she asked presently, "What would you like to do with the farm?"
Dorinda's cheeks flushed as she answered. "First, if I had the money, I'd try to bring up the fields. I'd sow cowpeas and turn them under this year wherever I could. Then I'd add to the pasture. We can easily do that, and in a little while we could get a good stand of grass. Then I'd buy some cows from James Ellgood, some of his Jerseys, and try to set up a dairy farm, a very little one, but I wouldn't let anybody touch the milk and butter except Mother and myself. I wouldn't be satisfied with anything that wasn't better than the best," she concluded, with an energy that was characteristic of the earlier Dorinda.
"And you'd sell your butter—where?"
For an instant this dampened the girl's enthusiasm. How funny that she had never once thought of that!
"Oh, well, we're near enough to Richmond or Washington," she said. "The road to the station is bad, but it is only two miles. We could churn one day and send the butter out before sunrise the next morning."
Mrs. Faraday looked at her sympathetically. "I could help you in Washington," she said. "I've a friend there who owns one of the biggest hotels. The manager would take your butter, I know, and eggs too, if they are the very best that can be bought. And you'd ask a large price. People are always willing to pay for the best."
Dorinda sighed. "It's just like a fairy tale," she said, "but, of course, it is utterly out of the question."
"Well, I don't see why." Mrs. Faraday lifted the baby from the crib and sat down to nurse it. "We would lend you the money you needed to start with. After all you've done for Penelope, we'd be only too glad to do that in return. But it would be drudgery, even if you succeeded, and you ought not to look forward to that. You ought to marry, my dear."
Dorinda flinched. "Oh, I've finished with all that!"
"But you haven't. You're too young to give up that side of life."
"I don't care. I'm through with it," repeated Dorinda, and she meant it.
"Well, just remember that we are ready to help you at any time. It would mean nothing to us to invest a few thousand dollars in your farm. You could pay us back when you succeeded."
"And I could pay you interest all the time."
"Of course—if it would make you feel easier. Only don't let your foolish pride stand in the way of achieving something in the end."
Dorinda gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Her pride was foolish, she supposed, but it was all that she had. With nothing else to fall back on, she had taken refuge in an exaggerated sense of independence.
"You are so capable," Mrs. Faraday was saying, "that I am sure you will never fail in anything that you undertake. The doctor was telling me only yesterday that, for a woman without special training, your efficiency is really remarkable. It isn't often the girls of your age are so practical."
A laugh without merriment broke from Dorinda's lips. "That would please my mother," she said. "They used to say at Old Farm that my head was full of notions."
"Most young girls' are. But you were fortunate to settle down as soon as you did."
Without replying, Dorinda stared at the baby in Mrs. Faraday's arms. It was a fat, pink baby, with a round face in which the features were like tiny flowers, and a bald head, as clear and smooth as an egg shell. When it laughed back at her, the pink face crumpled up and it gurgled with toothless gums.
"If you've ever been poor, you can't get over the dread of having to borrow," she answered after a pause.
For the next few months, while she read books and attended lectures without understanding them, the idea of the country worked like leaven in Dorinda's imagination. Gradually, though she was unprepared for the change in her attitude, some involuntary force was driving her back to Old Farm. Problems that had appeared inexplicable became as simple as arithmetic; obstacles that had looked like mountains evaporated into mist as she approached them. "I couldn't let them do it," she would declare, adding a minute later, with weakening obstinacy, "After all, it isn't as if they were giving me the money. I can always pay them in the end, even if I have to mortgage the farm."
As the winter passed, she saw more and more of Burch. She liked him; she enjoyed her walks with him; his friendship had become a substantial interest in her life; but she realized now and then, when he accidentally touched her hand, that every nerve in her body said, "So far and no farther" to human intercourse. Her revulsion from the physical aspect of love was a matter of the nerves, she knew, for more than two years under the roof of a great surgeon had taught her something deeper than the patter of science. Yet, though her shrinking was of the nerves only, it was none the less real. One side of her was still dead. The insensibility of the last two years, which had made her tell herself at moments that she could not feel the prick of a pin in her flesh, had worn off slowly from that area of her mind which was superior to the emotions. But the thought of love, the faintest reminder of its potency, filled her with aversion, with an inexpressible weariness. She simply could not bear, she told herself bluntly, to be touched.
"There must be something in life besides love," she thought, in revolt from the universal harping upon a single string. Watching the people in the street, she would find herself thinking, "That woman looks as if she lived without love, but she doesn't look unhappy. She must have found something else." Then, with the vision of Old Farm in her mind, she would reflect exultantly: "There is something else for me also. Love isn't everything."
"Do you know, I've almost decided to go home," she said to Doctor Burch one day in April, when they were sitting in the Park. "Did you see those lilacs in the florists' windows as we passed? It is lilac time at Old Farm now, and the big bushes in the corner of the west wing are all in bloom. They are so old that they reach to the roof, and the catbirds build in them every year." She lifted her head and looked at the delicate pattern of the elms against the pale sky. How cold and thin spring was in the North!
"You mean you'll go back and begin farming?"
"I mean I can't stay away any longer. I'm part of it. I belong to the abandoned fields."
"Will you let me come?" he asked abruptly.
Her hand lay, palm upward, in her lap, and as he asked the question, his fingers closed caressingly over hers. Instantly the alarm began in her nerves; she felt the warning quiver dart through them like the vibration in a wire. Her nerves, not her heart, repulsed him. She might even love him, she thought, if only he could keep at a distance; if he would never touch her; if he would remain contented and aloof, neither giving nor demanding the signs of emotion. But at the first gesture of approach every cell in her body sprang on the defensive.
"You wouldn't be comfortable," she said, while an expression that was almost hostile crept over her full red mouth. "It is so different from anything you have known."
His smile was winning. "I shouldn't mind that if you wanted me."
She looked over his head at the elm boughs arching against the sky. Yes, it was lilac time in Virginia. She saw the rich clusters drooping beside the whitewashed walls, under the grey eaves where wrens were building. The door was open, and the fragrance swept the clean, bare hall, with the open door at, the other end, beyond which the green slope swelled upward to the pear orchard. Over all, there was the big pine on the hill, brushing the quiet sky like a bird's outstretched wing. How peaceful it seemed. After the storm through which she had passed, tranquillity meant happiness.
The silence had grown intimate, tender, provocative; and for a moment she had a feeling of relaxation from tension, as if the iron in her soul were dissolving. Then the pressure of his fingers tightened, and she shivered and drew away her hand.
"You don't like me to touch you?" he asked, and there was a hurt look in his eyes.
She shook her head. "I don't like anybody to touch me."
"Are you as hard as that?"
"I suppose I am hard, but I can't change."
"Not if I wait? I can wait as long as you make me."
"It wouldn't make any difference. Waiting wouldn't change me. I've finished with all that."
She rose because the thought of Jason had come to her out of the vision of Old Farm; and though she no longer loved him, though she hated him, this thought was so unexpected and yet so real that it was as if he had actually walked into her presence. He was nothing to her, but his influence still affected her life; he was buried somewhere in her consciousness, like a secret enemy who could spring out of the wilderness and strike when she was defenseless.
On the hall table, when she entered the house, she found a letter, addressed in the pale, repressed handwriting of her mother. As she went upstairs she tore it open, and dropping into a chair by the window of her room, she read the closely written sheets by the last gleam of daylight.
My dear Daughter:I hate to have to send you bad news, but your father had a stroke last Saturday while he was ploughing the tobacco field. He had not been well for several days, but you know he never complains, and he did not stop work till he dropped in the field. Josiah and Rufus had to pick him up between them and bring him into the house.We sent straight for the doctor. Rufus saddled Beersheba and rode to Pedlar's Mill, and Nathan sent word to Doctor Stout up near the Courthouse. It was more than two hours before the doctor got here, but your father had not come to himself. The doctor says he will never be up again, and if you want to see him alive, you had better come as soon as you can. We do everything that is possible, and Nathan has been the greatest help in the world. I don't know what I should do without him. Josiah spends the nights here. Since his marriage he has lived, as I wrote you, in that place over beyond Plumtree, but he is real good about helping, and so is Elvira. She has offered to help me nurse, but she is so flighty that I had rather have Aunt Mehitable's granddaughter, Fluvanna Moody. Fluvanna comes every day. She is a mighty good nurse and your father likes to have her around, even if she is one of the new order of darkeys. I believe she takes after Aunt Mehitable more than any of the other grandchildren. Your father does not give any trouble, and he has not spoken but twice since his fall. It is right hard to understand what he says—he speaks so thickly—but Fluvanna and I both think he was asking for you.The farm is going on just the same. Rufus hates the work here, and wants to go to the city. A week before his stroke your father was offered a thousand dollars for the timber between Poplar Spring and the back gate. Nathan advised him to hold on a little longer, but I reckon we will have to sell it now to pay for your father's sickness. The cow is a great comfort. Your father cannot take any solid food. I give him a little milk and a few swallows of chicken broth. Mrs. Garlick sent him some chicken broth yesterday, and one of the Miss Sneads comes over with something every day.Your affectionate mother,EUDORA ABERNETHY OAKLEY.
My dear Daughter:
I hate to have to send you bad news, but your father had a stroke last Saturday while he was ploughing the tobacco field. He had not been well for several days, but you know he never complains, and he did not stop work till he dropped in the field. Josiah and Rufus had to pick him up between them and bring him into the house.
We sent straight for the doctor. Rufus saddled Beersheba and rode to Pedlar's Mill, and Nathan sent word to Doctor Stout up near the Courthouse. It was more than two hours before the doctor got here, but your father had not come to himself. The doctor says he will never be up again, and if you want to see him alive, you had better come as soon as you can. We do everything that is possible, and Nathan has been the greatest help in the world. I don't know what I should do without him. Josiah spends the nights here. Since his marriage he has lived, as I wrote you, in that place over beyond Plumtree, but he is real good about helping, and so is Elvira. She has offered to help me nurse, but she is so flighty that I had rather have Aunt Mehitable's granddaughter, Fluvanna Moody. Fluvanna comes every day. She is a mighty good nurse and your father likes to have her around, even if she is one of the new order of darkeys. I believe she takes after Aunt Mehitable more than any of the other grandchildren. Your father does not give any trouble, and he has not spoken but twice since his fall. It is right hard to understand what he says—he speaks so thickly—but Fluvanna and I both think he was asking for you.
The farm is going on just the same. Rufus hates the work here, and wants to go to the city. A week before his stroke your father was offered a thousand dollars for the timber between Poplar Spring and the back gate. Nathan advised him to hold on a little longer, but I reckon we will have to sell it now to pay for your father's sickness. The cow is a great comfort. Your father cannot take any solid food. I give him a little milk and a few swallows of chicken broth. Mrs. Garlick sent him some chicken broth yesterday, and one of the Miss Sneads comes over with something every day.
Your affectionate mother,
EUDORA ABERNETHY OAKLEY.
So, after all, the decision had been taken out of her hands. Life was treating her still as if she were a straw in the wind, a leaf on a stream. The invisible processes which had swept her away were sweeping her back again. While she sat there with the letter in her hand, she had the feeling that she was caught in the whirlpool of universal anarchy, and that she could not by any effort of her will bring order out of chaos.
"Poor Pa." This was her first thought, and she used instinctively the name that had been on her lips as a child. So this was the end for him, and what had he ever had? He had known nothing except toil. Suddenly, as if the fact added an intolerable poignancy to her grief, she remembered that he had never learned even to read and write. He could sign his name, that was all. When he was a child the "poor white" was expected to remain unlettered, and in later years the knowledge her mother had taught him had not, as he used to say apologetically, "stuck by him."
Rising quickly, she put the letter aside and began folding her clothes.
As the train rushed through the familiar country, Dorinda counted the new patches of ploughed ground in the landscape. "James Ellgood must be trying to reclaim all his old fields," she thought.
The sun had not yet risen above the fretwork of trees on the horizon, but the broomsedge had felt the approach of day and was flying upward to meet it. Out of the east, she saw gradually emerge the serpentine curves of Whippernock River; then the clouds of blown smoke, the irregular pattern of the farms, and the buildings of the station, which wore a startled and half-awake air in the dawn.
After more than two years how strange it felt to be back again! To be back again just as if nothing had happened! How small the station looked, and how desolate, stranded like a wrecked ship in the broomsedge. What isolation! What barrenness! In her memory the horizon had been so much wider, the road so much longer, the band of woods so much deeper. It seemed to her that the landscape must have diminished in an incredible way since she had left it. Even the untidy look of the station; the litter of shavings and tobacco stems; the shabbiness and crudeness of the country people meeting the train; the disreputable rags of Butcher, the lame negro, who lived in the freight car; the very fowls scratching in the dust of the cleared space;—all these characteristic details were uglier and more trivial than she had remembered them. A sense of loneliness swept her thoughts, as if the solitude had blown over her like smoke. She realized that the Pedlar's Mill of her mind and the Pedlar's Mill of actuality were two different places. She was returning home, and she felt as strange as she had felt in New York. Well, at least she had not crawled back. She had returned with her head held high, as she had resolved that she would.
The whistle was sounding again, and the brakeman was hastily gathering her bags. She followed him to the platform, where the conductor stood waiting, the same conductor who had helped her into the train the morning she had gone away. He did not recognize her, and for some obscure reason, she felt flattered because he had forgotten her.
The train was stopping slowly. The faces of the assembled farmers started out so close to the track that they gave her a shock. There was Jim Ellgood ready to leave for Richmond; there was Mr. Garlick meeting somebody, his daughter probably; there was Mr. Kettledrum, looking as stringy and run-to-seed, as if he had not moved out of his wheelrut since the morning he had picked her up in the rain. In the little group she saw Rufus, slender, handsome, sullen as ever. How black his eyes were, and how becoming the dark red was in his cheeks! Then, as the train reached the station, she saw Nathan Pedlar running down to the track with the mail bag in his hand. Just at the last minute, but always in time—how like Nathan that was!
The conductor, with one foot on the step, was swinging his free leg while he felt for the ground. She put up her hand, hurriedly arranging her small blue hat with the flowing chiffon veil. Then she lifted the folds of her skirt as the conductor, who was firmly planted now on the earth, helped her to alight. Her heart was sad for her father, but beneath the sadness her indomitable pride supported her. Yes, she had come back unashamed. She might not return as a conqueror, but she had returned undefeated. They were looking at her as she stepped to the ground, and she felt, with a thrill of satisfaction, that, in her navy blue poplin with the chiffon veil framing her face (hanging veils were much worn in New York that year) she was worthy of the surprised glances they cast at her. A little thinner, a little paler, less girlish but more striking, than she had been when she went away. Her height gave her dignity, and this dignity was reflected in her vivid blue eyes, with their unflinching and slightly arrogant gaze. Romantic eyes, Burch had called them, and she had wondered what he meant, for surely there was little romance left now in her mind. If experience had taught her nothing else, it had at least made her a realist. She had learned to take things as they are, and that, as Burch had once remarked whimsically, "in the long run fustian wears better than velvet." She had learned, too, she told herself in the first moments of her homecoming, that so long as she could rule her own mind she was not afraid of the forces without.
They had gathered round her. She was smiling and shaking the outstretched hands. "Well, it looked as if we'd about lost you for good." "You've been gone two years, ain't you?" "Hardly know Pedlar's Mill, I reckon, since Nathan's painted the store red?" "I saw her off," Mr. Kettledrum was saying over and over. "I saw her off. A good long visit, warn't it?"
Moving out of the throng, she kissed Rufus, who looked dejected and resentful.
"How is Pa, Rufus?"
"There ain't any change. The doctor says he may drag on this way for several weeks, or he may go suddenly at any time."
"Well, we'd better start right on." Walking quickly up the slope to where the old buggy was standing, she put her arms round Dan's neck and laid her cheek against him. "He knows me," she said, "dear old Dan, he hasn't forgotten me. Is there anything you want for Ma at the store?"
"She gave me a list. I left it with Minnie May."
"Minnie May doesn't work in the store, does she? Who looks after the children?"
"She does. She does everything."
"Well, it's a shame. She oughtn't to, and only thirteen. I'll speak to Nathan about it."
At her commanding tone, Rufus grinned. "You've come back looking as if you could run the world, Dorinda," he observed, with envy. "I wish I could go away. I'd start to-morrow, if it wasn't for Pa."
"Yes, that's why I came back. We can't leave Pa and Ma now. But it's hard on you, Rufus."
"You bet it is! It's my turn to get away next."
She assented. "I know it. If the time comes when Pa can do without you, I'll help you to go. You'll never make much of a farmer."
He stared moodily at the road, but she could see that her promise had encouraged him. "There's nothing in it," he answered. "I believe it is the meanest work ever made. You may slave till you drop, and there's never anything to show for it. Look at Pa."
"Pa never had a chance. He grew up at the wrong time. But all farming isn't bad. Suppose we had a dairy farm?"
He grinned again. "O Lord! with one cow! You're out of your head!"
"Perhaps. Anyway, I've come back to see what I can do."
Her glance wavered as Nathan, having dashed into the store with the mail bag, came toward them with the kind of lope that he used when he was in a hurry. "I didn't get a chance to speak to you at the train, Dorinda," he said, "but all the same I'm glad you're home again. The children want to get a peek at you in your city clothes. Minnie May's gone crazy about your veil."
In two years he had altered as little as the landscape. Lank, sand-coloured, with his loping, stride, his hands that were all knuckles, and his kindly clown's face under hair that was as short as rubbed-off fur, he appeared to her, just as he used to do, as both efficient and negligible. Poor Nathan, how unattractive he was, but how good and faithful! Clean, too, notwithstanding the fact that he never stopped working. His face and neck looked well scrubbed, and his blue cotton shirt was still smelling of starch and ironing. The memory of the lunch he had given her when she went away was in her mind as she held out her hand to him and then stooped to kiss the children, one after another. How they must miss their mother, these children! She must do something for Minnie May, who had the stunted look of overworked childhood. Nathan was well off for Pedlar's Mill, yet he let the little girl work like a servant. It was simply that he did not know, and she would make it her business, she told herself firmly, to instruct him. Minnie May was a nice, earnest child, with the look of her mother. She would be almost pretty, too, if she could get that driven expression out of her pinched little face. Her hair was really lovely, wheaten red like Rose Emily's, only it needed brushing, and she wore it dragged back from her forehead where, at thirteen, wrinkles were already forming. Yes, Dorinda decided, she would certainly speak to Nathan.
"You look fine, Dorinda," he was saying while he stared at her.
"She is like a paper doll in a book," Minnie May exclaimed. "One of those fashion books Miss Seena Snead has."
The three smaller children were staring with wide open eyes and mouths, and John Abner, the baby, she remembered, with the clubfoot, was holding a slice of bread and butter in both hands. He limped badly when he walked, she noticed. What a job it must be keeping these children washed and dressed.
"Are you the nurse too, Minnie May?" she inquired.
"Yes, I do everything," the little girl replied proudly, wrinkling her forehead. "We had a coloured girl, but the children didn't like her and wouldn't mind her."
Dorinda turned to Nathan. "It's too much, Nathan. You oughtn't to let her do it."
"I tell her not to slave so hard," he answered helplessly. "But it doesn't do any good. She promised her mother that she would take care of the children."
"But Rose Emily never meant this. It is making an old woman of the child before she grows up."
"I can't help it. She's as stubborn as a mule about it. Maybe you can do something."
Dorinda nodded with her capable air. "Well, I'll fix it." She looked cool, composed, and competent, the picture of dignified self-reliance, as she stepped between the muddy wheels of the dilapidated buggy.
"I hope you'll find your father better," Nathan said. "I'll come over later in the day and see if there is anything I can help about." She smiled gratefully over her shoulder, and Rufus remarked, in his sullen, suppressed voice, as they drove off, "He's been over every single evening since Pa had his stroke."
"Nobody ever had a kinder heart," Dorinda responded absently, for she was not thinking of Nathan.
As the buggy jolted down the slope to the pine woods, a dogcart passed them on the way to the station, and she recognized Geneva Greylock. She was driving the dogcart with red wheels which she had used before her marriage; she was wearing the same jaunty clothes; but the change in her appearance made Dorinda turn to glance back at her. Though she was still in her early twenties, she looked like a middle-aged woman. Her sallow cheeks had fallen in, her long nose was bony and reddened at the tip, and her abundant flaxen hair was lustreless and untidy.
"How soon blondes break," Dorinda said aloud, and she thought, "Two years of marriage have made an old woman of her."
"Yes, she's lost what looks she ever had," returned Rufus. "She was always delicate, they say, and now her health has gone entirely. It's the life she leads, I reckon. Folks say he is beginning to follow in his father's footsteps. That's why the new doctor up by the Courthouse is getting all his practice." When he spoke of Jason he carefully refrained from calling his name.
"Are there any children?" Dorinda asked. Her spirits were drooping; but this depression, as far as she was aware, had no connection with Jason. Not her own regret, but the futility of things in general, oppressed her with a feeling of gloom.
"Not that I ever heard of," Rufus replied. "To tell the truth I never hear anybody mention his name. You can ask Nathan. He knows everything about everybody." He shut his sullen lips tight, and stared straight ahead of him.
"Oh, it doesn't matter. I was merely wondering why her health had failed."
They had come out of the woods, and the wheels were creaking over the dried mudholes. The sun had risen through a drift of cloud, and beneath the violet rim an iridescent light rained over the abandoned fields. While they drove on, it seemed to Dorinda that it was like moving within the heart of an opal. Every young green leaf, every dew-drenched weed, every silken cobweb, every brilliant bird, or gauzy insect,—all these things were illuminated and bedizened with colour. Only the immense black shadow of the horse and buggy raced sombrely over the broomsedge by the roadside.
"Nothing has changed," Dorinda thought. "Nothing has changed but myself."
Yes, it was all familiar, but it was different, and this difference existed only within herself. All that she had suffered was still with her. It was not an episode that she had left behind in the distance; it was a living part of her nature. Even if she worked her unhappiness into the soil; even if she cut down and burned it off with the broomsedge, it would still spring up again in the place where it had been. Already, before she had reached the house, the past was settling over her like grey dust.
They passed the Sneads' red brick house with white columns. The same flowers bloomed in the borders; the same shrubs grew on the lawn; the same clothes appeared to hang perpetually on the same clothes-line at the corner of the back porch. In the pasture, the friendly faces of cows looked at her over the rail fence, and she remembered that two years ago, as she went by, she had seen them filing to the well trough. In a few minutes she would pass the burned cabin and the oak with the fading Gospel sign fastened to its bark. Her heart trembled. The racing shadow by the road appeared to stretch over the sunrise. She felt again the chill of despair, the involuntary shudder of her pulses. Then she lifted her eyes with a resolute gesture and confronted remembrance.
The place was unchanged. The deep wheelruts where the road forked; the flat rock on which the mare slipped; the cluster of dogwood which screened the spot where she had waited for Jason's return; the very branch she had pushed aside,—not one of these things had altered. Only the fire in her heart had gone out. The scene was different to her because the eyes with which she looked on it had grown clearer. The stone was merely a stone; the road was nothing more than a road to her now. Over the gate, she could see the willows of Gooseneck Creek. Beyond them the tall chimneys of Five Oaks lay like red smears on the changeable blue of the sky.
After they had left the fork, Dan quickened his pace.
"The fence has been mended, I see, Rufus."
"Yes, we had so much trouble with the cow straying. Pa was trying to get all the fences near the house patched before fall. We were using the rails that were left over from the timber he sold."
"Those weren't the woods Ma wrote me about?" She could never think of living trees as timber.
"No, he is holding on to that in hope of getting a better price."
They travelled the last quarter of a mile without speaking, and not until the buggy had turned in at the gate and driven up the rocky grade to the porch, did Dorinda ask if her father expected her.
"Yes, Ma told him, but she wasn't sure that he understood. He was awake before I left the place and Ma was seeing about breakfast."
"Haven't you had any yet?"
"Yes, I had a bite before I started. I'm no friend to an empty stomach, and I reckon I can manage a little something after I've turned Dan into the pasture. Pa was ploughing the tobacco field when he had his stroke, but he had decided not to plant tobacco there this year. We're going to try corn."
"I'm glad he's given up tobacco."
"He hasn't. Not entirely. But it takes more manure than he can spare this year. Well, we're here at last. Is that you, Ma?" he shouted, as the wheel scraped against the "rockery" by the steps.
At his second call, the door opened and Mrs. Oakley ran out on the porch.