"So you've come, daughter," she said, and stood wiping her hands on her apron while she waited for Dorinda to alight. How old she had grown, thought the girl, with a clutch at her heart. Only the visionary eyes looked out of the ravaged face through a film of despair, as stars shine through a fog.
Jumping out of the buggy, Dorinda took her mother into her arms; but while she pressed her lips to the wrinkled cheek, it occurred to her that it was like kissing a withered leaf.
"How is Pa?" she asked in an effort to conceal the embarrassment they both felt.
"About the same. I don't see any change."
"May I speak to him now?"
"You'd better have your breakfast first. I've got breakfast ready for you."
"In a minute, but I'd like just to say a word to him. Oh, there's dear old Rambler." She stooped to caress the hound. "I don't see Flossie."
"I reckon she's up at the barn hunting mice. She had a new set of kittens, but we had to drown all but one. We couldn't feed so many cats."
Embarrassment was passing away. How much had her mother known, she wondered; how much had she suspected?
"Well, I shan't be a minute," the girl said. "Is he in the chamber?"
"Yes, he hasn't been out of bed since his stroke. Go right in. I don't know whether he'll recognize you or not."
Pushing the door open, Dorinda went in, followed by Rambler, walking stiffly. The room was flooded with morning sunlight, for the green outside shutters were open, and the window was raised that looked on the pear orchard and the crooked path to the graveyard. It was all just as she remembered it, except that in her recollection the big bed was empty, and now her father lay supine on one side of it, with his head resting upon the two feather pillows. There was a grotesque look in his face, as if it had been pulled out of shape by some sudden twist, but his inquiring brown eyes, with their wistful pathos, seemed to be asking, "Why has it happened? What is the meaning of it all?" When she bent over and touched his forehead with her lips, she saw that he could not move himself, not even his head, not even his hand. Fallen and helpless, he lay there like a pine tree that has been torn up by the roots.
"I've come back to help take care of you, Pa."
His lips quivered, and she apprehended rather than heard what he said.
"I'm glad to see you again, daughter."
Dropping into the chair by the bedside, she laid her arms gently about him. "You don't suffer, do you?"
How immeasurably far away he seemed! How futile was any endeavour to reach him! Then she remembered that he had always been far away, that he had always stood just outside the circle in which they lived, as if he were a member of some affectionate but inarticulate animal kingdom.
He tried to smile, but the effort only accentuated the crooked line of his mouth.
"No, I don't suffer." For a moment he was silent; then he added in an almost inaudible tone: "It's sort of restful."
A leaden weight of tears fell on her heart. Not his death, but his life seemed to her more than she could bear. What was her pain, her wretchedness, compared to his monotony of toil? What was any pain, any wretchedness, compared to the emptiness of his life?
For a little while she talked on cheerfully, telling him of the lectures she had heard and the books she had read, and of all the plans she had made to help him with the farm.
"I've borrowed some money to start with, and we'll make something of it yet, Pa," she said brightly.
His lips moved, but she could not understand what he said. Straining her ears, she bent over him. For an instant it seemed to her that his tone became clearer, and that he was on the point of speaking aloud; then the struggle ceased, and he lay looking at her with his expression of mute resignation.
After this, though she tried to interest him in her plans, she saw that his attention was beginning to wander. Every now and then he made an effort to follow her, while a bewildered expression crept into his face; but it was only for a minute at a time that he could fix his mind on what she was saying, and when the strain became too great for him, his gaze wandered to the open window and the harp-shaped pine, which towered, dark as night, against the morning blue of the sky.
"Well, I'll go to breakfast now," she said, as carelessly as she could. "Ma has it ready for me."
Rising from her chair, she stood looking down on him with misty eyes. After all, the pathos of life was worse than the tragedy. "Is the light too strong?" she asked, as she turned away. "Shall I close one of the shutters?"
At first he did not follow her, his thoughts had roved so far away, and she repeated her question in another form. "Does the sun hurt your eyes?"
A smile wrung his lips. "No, I like to see the big pine," he answered; and stealing out noiselessly, she left him alone with the tree and the sky.
In the kitchen her mother stood over her while she ate, watching every mouthful with the eyes of repressed and hungry devotion.
"You ain't so plump as you were, Dorinda, but you've kept your high colour."
"Oh, I'm well enough, but you look worn out, Ma."
Mrs. Oakley hurried to the stove and back again. "Let me give you another slice of bacon. You must be empty after that long trip. Well, of course, I've had a good deal on me since your father got sick. Until Fluvanna came, I didn't have anybody but Elvira to help me, and though she was willing to do what she could, her fingers were all thumbs when it came to making up a bed or moving things in a sickroom."
"I can take most of the burden off you now. You know I learned a good deal about illness when I was with Doctor Faraday."
"Yes, you'll be a comfort, I know, but you're going back again as soon as your father begins to mend, ain't you?"
Dorinda shook her head with a smile, which, she told herself, looked braver than it felt. "No, I'm not going back. I'd sooner stay here and try to make something out of the farm. A thousand acres of land ought not to be allowed to run to broomsedge like an old field."
"Heaven knows we've tried, daughter. Nobody ever worked harder than your father, and whatever came of it?"
"Poor Pa. I know, but he came after the war when there wasn't any money or any labourers."
She told of the money Doctor Faraday would lend her, and of the hotel in Washington which would take all the butter she could make. "But it must be as good as the best," she explained, with a laugh. "I'm going over to Green Acres to buy seven Jersey cows. Seven is a lucky number for me, so I am going to start with it."
"You'll have to have some help, then."
"Not at first. Of course I'll need a boy for the barnyard, but I am going to do the milking and all the work of the dairy myself. You can help me with the skimming until we get a separator, and when Fluvanna isn't waiting on Pa, she can lend a hand at the churning."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head drearily. "You haven't tried it, Dorinda."
"I know I haven't, but I'm going to. I learned a lot in the hospital, and the chief thing was that it is slighting that has ruined us, white and black alike, in the South. Hasn't Fluvanna got a brother Nimrod that I could hire?" she asked more definitely.
"Yes, and he's a good boy too. Fluvanna had him over here one day last week chopping wood when Rufus was out in the field ploughing. That's a thrifty family, the Moodys. I never saw a darkey that had as much vim as Fluvanna. And she belongs to the new order too. I always thought it spoiled them to learn to read and write till I hired her. She's got all the sense Aunt Mehitable had, and she's picked up some education besides. I declare, she talks better than a lot of white people I know."
"I wonder if she'd stay on and help me with the farm?" Dorinda asked. "I mean," she added, while her face clouded, "after Pa is up again." Though she knew that her father would never be up again, she united with her mother in evading the fact.
"Oh, I'm sure she will," Mrs. Oakley responded, with eagerness. "She has been helping me with my white Leghorns. All the hens are laying well. I am setting Eva and Ida now."
"You didn't have them when I was here."
"No, Juliet hatched them. You remember Juliet? She was the first white Leghorn hen I ever had."
"Yes, I remember her. Have you got her still?"
Mrs. Oakley sighed. "No, a coon broke into the henhouse last winter and killed her. She was a good hen, if I ever had one." It was amazing to Dorinda the way her mother knew every fowl on the place by name. To be sure, there were only a dozen or so; but these white Leghorns all looked exactly alike to the girl, though Mrs. Oakley could tell each one at a distance and was intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of every rooster and hen that she owned.
"I'd like to get a hundred and fifty white Leghorns, if we could look after them," Dorinda said thoughtfully. "That's one good way to make money."
A ray of light, which was less a flush than a warmer pallor, flickered across Mrs. Oakley's wan features. While her mother's interest was awakening, Dorinda felt that her own was slowly drugged by the poverty of her surroundings. The sunlight bathing the ragged lawn only intensified the aspect of destitution. Colour, diversity, animation, all these were a part of the world she had relinquished. Pushing her chair away from the table, she went to the back door and stood gazing out over the woodpile in the direction of the well-house. A few cultivated acres in the midst of an encroaching waste land! From the broomsedge and the flat horizon, loneliness rose and washed over her. Loneliness, nothing more! The same loneliness that she had feared and hated as a child; the same loneliness from which she had tried to escape in flights of emotion. Food, work, sleep, that was life as her father and mother had known it, and that life was to be hers in the future. For an instant it seemed to her that she must break down. Then, lifting her head with a characteristic gesture of defiance, she turned back into the room. "I'd better start straight about it," she said aloud, smiling at Mrs. Oakley's startled look.
"Did you say anything, Dorinda? I believe I've got something wrong with my ears."
"I said I was going upstairs to change my dress. The same old room, I suppose?"
"Yes, I fixed the same room for you."
While she cleared off the table, Mrs. Oakley gazed after her daughter with a perplexed and anxious expression. Dorinda in her flowing veil, with her air of worldly knowledge and disillusioned experience, had awed and impressed her. Was it possible that she had created this superior intelligence, that she had actually brought this paragon of efficiency into the world? "Well, I hope it will turn out the way you want it," she remarked presently to her daughter's retreating back, "but, in my time, I've watched many a big bloom that brought forth mighty small fruit."
At sunset, when Nathan Pedlar came for his daily visit, Dorinda walked over a part of the farm with him. He was wearing his Sunday suit of clothes, and though this emphasized his grotesqueness, it increased also the air of having been well scrubbed and brushed which had distinguished him from the other farmers at the station. Since his wife's death he had prospered, as widowers were so frequently known to do, Dorinda reflected; and now that he was able to employ an assistant, he was not closely confined to the store. Though his neighing laugh still irritated the girl, she found herself regarding his deficiencies more leniently. After all, he was not to blame for the way he looked; he was not even to blame, she conceded less readily, for the things that he thought funny. Since that fantastic humour had taken root in her mind, she had been continually puzzled by the variety of obvious facts which people, and especially men, found amusing. She could not, to save her life, laugh at the spectacles they enjoyed, nor did the freakish destiny that provoked her to merriment appear to divert them at all. From the cool and detached point of view she had attained, life appeared to her to be essentially comic; but comic acts, whether presented in the theatre or in the waggish hilarity of Pedlar's Mill, seemed to her merely depressing. She was not amused by the classic jokes of the period, which were perpetually embodied in a married man who was too fat or an unmarried woman who was too thin. Flesh or the lack of it, hats or the pursuit of them, crockery or the breaking of it; none of these common impediments to happiness possessed, for her, the genuine qualities of mirth. But reprehensible though she knew it to be, she could not recall the misguided earnestness of her girlhood without the pricking of ridicule; and the image of mankind strutting with pompous solemnity into the inevitable abyss impressed her as the very spirit of comedy. Tragic but comic, too, as most tragedy was. Would it ever pass, she wondered, this capricious and lonely laughter?
"I can't help it," she thought, walking by Nathan's side, and listening soberly to his story of a coloured woman who had tried to make him pay an additional price for a chicken with three legs. "I can't help it if they, not the things they laugh at, seem funny to me."
It was a misty, lilac-scented afternoon in April. The sun shone softly when it began to go down, as if it were caught in a silver scarf, and the grass in the pear orchard was white with drifting blossoms. Those old trees always bloomed late, she remembered, and the ground was still snowy with fallen petals when the lilac bushes by the west wing were breaking into flower.
As she followed the beaten track by the orchard, her gaze swept the ploughed fields, where the upturned earth was changing from chocolate to purple as the light faded. Around her the farm spread out like an open fan, ploughed ground melting into waste land, fields sinking into neglected pasture, pasture rising gradually into the dark belt of the pines. She knew that the place was more to her than soil to be cultivated; that it was the birthplace and burial ground of hopes, desires, and disappointments. The old feeling that the land thought and felt, that it possessed a secret personal life of its own, brushed her mood as it sped lightly by.
"All this and just waste, waste, waste," she said slowly.
Nathan glanced up at the big pine on the hill. "Ever think of cutting that tree down for timber?" he inquired.
She shook her head. "It's the only thing Pa likes to watch now. He loves it."
Nathan neighed under his breath, with the sound Dan gave when he saw clover.
"Well, I kind of know how he feels. I like a big tree myself."
"Sometimes in stormy weather that pine is like a rocky crag with the sea beating against it," Dorinda said. "I used to remember it up in Maine. I suppose that is why Pa likes to look at it. All the meaning of his life has gone into it, and all the meaning of the country. Endurance, that's what it is."
"What a fancy you've got," Nathan answered admiringly, "and always had even when you were a child. But you're right about endurance. This farm looks to me as if it had endured about as much as it can stand."
"Oh, I'm going to change all that."
"Then you'd better get busy."
"I'll begin to-morrow, if you'll send me some field hands." She stopped and made a gesture, full of vital energy, in the direction of the road. "I want to make a new pasture out of that eighteen-acre field next to the old one."
"It has run to broomsedge now, hasn't it?"
"Yes, but it used to be a cornfield in great-grandfather's day. If you can get me the hands, I'll start them clearing it off the first thing in the morning."
He chuckled with enjoyment. "Oh, I'll get you anything you want, but the niggers won't work for nothing, you know."
"I've borrowed two thousand dollars. That ought to help, oughtn't it?" She wished he wouldn't say "niggers." That scornful label was already archaic, except among the poorest of the "poor white class" at Pedlar's Mill.
"Two thousand dollars!" he ejaculated. "Well, that ought to go some way."
"I'll have to spend a good deal for cows," she explained. "How much will they ask at Green Acres?"
For a minute he hesitated. "That's a fine Jersey herd," he replied presently. "I don't reckon they'll take less than a hundred dollars for a good cow. You can get scrub cows cheaper, but you want good ones."
"Oh, yes. I want good ones."
"Well, seeing it's you, Jim Ellgood may let you have them for less. I don't know; but he got a hundred and fifty for those he sold at the fair. One of his young bulls took the blue ribbon, you know."
She nodded. "I'm going over to see him to-morrow, if Pa doesn't get worse."
"Jim's a first-rate land doctor. He'll tell you what to do with that old field."
"Why, everybody says you're as good a farmer as James Ellgood."
"Oh, no, I'm not. Not by a long way. He spends a lot of money on phosphate and nitrate of soda; but in the end he gets it back again. He reclaimed some bad land several years ago and made it yield forty bushels an acre. For several years he kept sowing cowpeas and turning them under. Then he sowed sweet clover with lime, and when it was in full bloom, he turned that under too. Takes money, his method, but it pays in the long run. He has just begun using alfalfa; but you watch and he'll get five cuttings from it in no time. I get four, and Jim always goes me one better."
She was listening to him, for the first time in her life, with attention and interest. It was surprising, she reflected, what a bond of sympathy farming could make. He was as dull probably as he had ever been; but his dullness had ceased now to bore her. "I'll find him useful, anyhow," she thought; and usefulness, she was to discover presently, makes an even firmer bond than an interest in farming. Her mind was filled with her new vocation, and just as in that earlier period she had had ears for any one who would speak to her of Jason, so she listened now to whoever displayed the time and the inclination to talk of Old Farm. After all, how much mental tolerance, she wondered, was based upon the devouring egoism at the heart of all human nature? It was a question her great-grandfather might have asked, for though she had burst the cocoon of his theology, her mind was still entangled in the misty cobwebs of his dialectics. Yes, she had always deluded herself with the belief that the superior Rose Emily had made it possible for her to think tolerantly of Nathan. Yet, deprived of that advantage, and left to flounder on without intelligent guidance, he had become, Dorinda admitted thoughtfully, more likable than ever. For the first time it occurred to her that a marriage too much above one may become as great an obstacle as a marriage too much below one.
"How big is Green Acres?" she asked, keenly interested.
Nathan's gaze sought the horizon. Before he replied he spat a wad of tobacco from his mouth, while she looked vaguely over the fields.
"Counting the wasteland, it's near about fourteen hundred acres, I reckon," he answered. "If Old Farm and Five Oaks were thrown together, they'd more than balance Jim's land."
"Are they doing anything over at Five Oaks?"
"It don't look so, does it?" He waved his arm vaguely toward the blur of spring foliage in the southeast. "I ain't heard any talk of it lately." His tone had taken a sharper edge, and Dorinda knew he was thinking that Jason had jilted her. People would always remember that whenever they heard her name or Jason's. If they both lived to be old persons, and never spoke to each other again, they could never dissolve that intangible bond. In some subtle fashion, which she resented, she and Jason were eternally joined together.
"If they don't look sharp," Nathan concluded without glancing at her, "the place will slip through their fingers. The old man has a big mortgage on it. I took a share of it myself, and some day, if Jason keeps going downhill, there'll be a foreclosure right over his head."
A flame passed over Dorinda's face. So vivid was the sensation that she felt as if they were encircled by burning grass. Ambition, which had been formless and remote, became definite and immediate.
"I'd give ten years of my life to own Five Oaks," she said.
"You would?" The wish appeared to amuse him. "Looks as if you were beginning to count your chickens before they're hatched."
"Yes, it's absurd; but all the same I'd give ten years of my life to own Five Oaks."
The colour burned in her face and in her blue eyes which were looking straight at the sunset. She appeared suddenly taller, stronger, more imperious in her demands of life.
"If we ever foreclose the mortgage, I'll bid in the farm for you," he returned, with admiring facetiousness. A flush like the stain of pokeberry juice was spreading over his leathery skin.
She nodded gravely. "By that time I may be able to buy it. If hard work can get you anywhere on a farm, I am going to be one of the best farmers in this country."
"Is Rufus to have any hand in it? You won't get far with Rufus."
"No, he hates it. He is going to the city next winter. There won't be anybody but Pa and me to manage." Her voice faltered from its dominant note. Would there be her father?
"Well, I'll help you," he promised, "all' I can. I've learned a little by failing. That's as much as most farmers can say." When he dropped the personal tone and began to talk of the things he knew, there was a rustic dignity in his ugliness. After all, she could depend on him, and that meant a good deal to her as a farmer. Rose Emily, she remembered, used to say that you never realized Nathan's value until you tried depending upon other people. The vision of Rose Emily illuminated her thoughts like the last flare of the sunset. How brave she was, and how brilliant! Though Nathan had loved her and been faithful to her while she lived, after her death he had ceased to think of her with the mental alacrity which appeared to overtake the emotions of the faithful and the unfaithful alike. Already, she felt, Rose Emily was becoming nearer to her than to Nathan. Nathan had lost a wife; but as the years passed her friend would begin to live more vitally in her memory.
They followed the band of pines and crossed an old hayfield, where a flock of meadow-larks drifted up from the grass and scattered with a flutter of white tail feathers. It was the thrushes' hour, and the trees, reaching tall and straight up into the golden air, were as musical as harps. She had forgotten Nathan now, and while she walked on rapidly she was thinking that she would divide the farm into five separate parts, leaving the larger part still abandoned. "I must go slowly," she thought. "If I overdo it in the beginning, I'll spoil everything."
"You're up against something," Nathan was saying facetiously but firmly. "This used to be good land in your great-grandfather's day, and some of it ain't gone so bad but a thorough fertilizing would bring it back. Your father did all he could, but one man ain't a team. He had to work uphill with every darn thing, including the elements, against him."
"Yes, of course Pa did all he could." She had spoken the words so often that they sounded now as hollow as a refrain. Yet they were true. Her father had done all that one man could do on the farm. Yet the farm had conquered him in the end and eaten away his strength.
They were approaching Poplar Spring, where a silver vein of a stream trickled over the flat grey rocks. The smell of wet leaves floated toward her, and instantly the quiet moment snapped in two as if a blow had divided it. Half of her mind was here, watching the meadow-larks skimming over the fields, and the other half crouched under the dripping boughs by the fork of the road. Only the imaginary half seemed more real, more physical even, than the actual one. Not her mind, she felt with horror, but her senses, her nerves, and the very corpuscles of her blood, remembered the agony.
"I think I'll go back," she said, turning quickly. "Ma might want me to help her."
"You look tired," he returned, with the consideration which Rose Emily had disciplined into a habit. "Would you like to sit down and rest?"
"No, I'd better go back."
They walked to the house in silence, and she scarcely heard him when he said, "Good night," at the porch.
"I hope you'll find your father better."
"Yes, I hope I'll find him better."
"If there's anything I can do, let me know."
"If there is, I'll let you know."
As he stepped into his buggy, he turned and called out, "I'll try to get word to the hands to-night, and send them over the first thing in the morning."
What hands? What did they matter? What did anything matter? It seemed to her suddenly that, not only her love for Jason, but everything, the whole of life, was a mistake. Even her best endeavours, even her return to the farm—"It might have been better if I'd decided differently," she thought wearily; but when she tried to be definite, to imagine some other decision she might have made, nothing occurred to her. Something? But what? Where? She saw no other way, and she felt blindly that she should never see one.
"I'm tired," she thought, "and this makes me weak. Weakness doesn't help anything." For an instant this thought held her; then it occurred to her that, in the years to come, she would be continually tired; and that, tired or not, she must fight against weakness. "I've got to go straight ahead, no matter how I feel."
"Ebenezer Green?"
"Dat's me."
"Peter Plumtree?"
"Dat's me."
"Toby Jackson?"
"Dat's me, Miss D'rindy."
"Rapidan Finley?"
"Dat's me."
She was calling the names of the field hands, and while she went over the list, her mind was busily assorting and grouping the faces before her. Yes, she knew them all. Ever since she could remember they had been a part of the country; she had passed them in the road every week, or seen them in the vegetable patches in front of their cabins. Like her mother, she was endowed with an intuitive understanding of the negroes; she would always know how to keep on friendly terms with that immature but not ungenerous race. Slavery in Queen Elizabeth County had rested more lightly than elsewhere. The religion that made people hard to themselves, her mother had often pointed out, made them impartially just to their dependents; and like most generalizations, this one was elastic enough to cover the particular instance. It was true that the coloured people about Pedlar's Mill were as industrious and as prosperous as any in the South, and that, within what their white neighbours called reasonable bounds, there was, at the end of the nineteenth century, little prejudice against them. Here and there a thriftless farmer, such as Ike Pryde or Adam Snead, would display a fitful jealousy of Micajah Green, who had turned a few barren acres into a flourishing farm; but the better class of farmers preferred the intelligent coloured neighbour to the ignorant white one. Both were social inferiors; but where the matter was one solely of farming, the advantages would usually fall to the more diligent. As for the negroes themselves, they lived contentedly enough as inferiors though not dependents. In spite of the influence of Aunt Mehitable Green, they had not yet learned to think as a race, and the individual negro still attached himself instinctively to the superior powers.
"I remember you well, Ebenezer," she said; "you have a sister, Mary Joe. I want her to help look after my henhouse." She laughed as she spoke because she knew that the negroes would work twice as well for an employer who laughed easily; but she wondered if they detected the hollowness of the sound. It occurred to her, as she looked at the doomed broomsedge across the road, that farming, like love, might prove presently to be no laughing matter.
Turning back toward the house, she met her mother, who was coming out with a basin of cornmeal dough for the chickens. The sun had just risen, and there was a sparkling freshness over the earth and in the luminous globe of the sky. She had slept well, and with the morning weakness had vanished. The wild part of her had perished like burned grass; out of nothing, into nothing, that was the way of it. Now, armoured in reason, she was ready to meet life on its own terms.
"Do you know where Rufus is?" she asked. "I want him to see the hands start work in the eighteen-acre field."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "I don't know. I thought he was going to finish ploughing the tobacco field, but I saw him start off right after breakfast with Ike Pryde. It seems they found honey in a big oak over by Hoot Owl Woods, and they've set off with an axe to cut down the tree."
"Oh, the fool, the fool!" Dorinda exclaimed, and determined that she would expect nothing more from Rufus.
"Well, you know how men are," returned her mother, with unpolemical wisdom. "They'll seize any excuse to stop work and cut down a tree."
"I do know. But to cut down a big oak, and for honey!"
The old woman scattered dough on the ground with an impartial hand. "Rufus has got a mighty sweet tooth," she remarked.
"So has Pa, but you never found him making an excuse to stop work."
"I know. Your Pa always put his wishes aside. There ain't many men you can say that of." Though she sighed over the fact, she accepted it as one of the natural or acquired privileges of the male; and she felt that these were too numerous to justify a special grievance against a particular one. Even acquiescence with a sigh is easier than argument when one is worn out with neuralgia and worse things. A frost had blighted her impulse of opposition, and this seemed to Dorinda one of the surest signs that her mother was failing. There were moments when it would have been a relief to be contradicted.
"Well, I'll have to do it myself. Because I am a woman the hands will expect me to shirk, and I must show them that I know what I am about."
"I'll help you all I can, daughter."
"I know you will." Dorinda's conscience reproached her for her impatience. "You will be wonderful with the hens, and I'll get Ebenezer's sister Mary Joe to help you. She must be fourteen or fifteen."
"Yes, she's a real bright girl," Mrs. Oakley remarked, without enthusiasm. She had scarcely closed her eyes all night, and bright coloured girls, even when they helped in the henhouse, left her indifferent. "I'm going down in the garden to see if I can find a mess of turnip salad," she added after a pause, in which she scooped the last remnant of dough out of the basin and flung it into the midst of the brood of chickens.
"Let me go while you sit with Pa. I was coming in to see about him before I went down to the field where they are working."
Mrs. Oakley shook her head. "No, I can't keep still in the daytime. It's hard enough having to do it at night. Fluvanna couldn't get over early to-day; but she sent her little sister Ruby, and she is keeping the flies off your father's face. That's all anybody can do for him now."
"Well, I'll speak to him anyway. Then I'll see after the hands."
Mrs. Oakley raised her eyes to her daughter's face. "You've brought back a heap of vim, Dorinda," she said dispassionately, "but I reckon you've been away from the farm too long to know what it's like."
She put the basin down on a bench, picked up a blue gingham sunbonnet she had laid there when she came out, and started, with her nervous walk, to the garden at the end of the yard.
In her father's room, Dorinda found a small coloured girl, in a pink calico slip, perched on a high stool by the bedside. Her bare feet clutched the round of the stool; her eyes, like black beads, roved ceaselessly from the wall to the floor; and her thin monkey-like hand waved a palm-leaf fan to and fro over Joshua's immovable features.
"Good morning, Ruby. Has Pa moved since you've been here?"
"Gwamawnin'. Naw'm, he ain' don ez much ez bat 'is eyelids."
Dorinda caught the fan away from her. "Don't you go to school in the mornings?" she inquired, after a pause in which she tried to think of something to say.
"Dar ain' none."
"Aren't you learning to read and write?"
"Yes'm. Fluvanna she knows, en she's larnin' me."
"Well, run away now, and come back when I call you."
The little girl ran out gladly, and Dorinda took her place on the stool and brushed the flies away with slow, firm waves of the fan. Immediately, as soon as she had settled herself, something of her mother's restlessness rushed over her, and she felt a hysterical longing to get up and move about or to go out into the air. "If I feel this way," she thought, "what must it mean to poor Pa to lie there like that?"
Since the hour of her return he had not appeared to recognize her. He was beyond reach of any help, of any voice, of any hand, lost in some mental wilderness which was more impenetrable than the jungles of earth. Though he was apparently not unconscious, he was beyond all awareness. His eyes never left the great pine, and once when his wife had started to close the shutters, a frown had gathered on his forehead and lingered there until she had desisted and turned away from the window. Then his face had cleared and the look of hard-earned rest had returned to his features.
While she sat there, Dorinda began counting imaginary chickens, a method of collecting her thoughts which she had learned as a child from Aunt Mehitable. She was still counting the fictitious flock when Joshua opened his eyes and looked straight up at her with an expression of startled wonder and surprise, as if he were on the point of speaking.
"What is it?" she asked, bending nearer.
His lips moved, and for an instant she was visited by an indescribable sensation. He was so near to her that she seemed, in the same moment, never to have known him before and yet to know him completely. She felt that he was trying to speak some words that would make everything clear and simple between them, that would explain away all the mistakes and misunderstandings of life.
"What is it?" she repeated, breathless with hope.
Again his lips moved slightly; but no sound came, and the look of wonder and surprise faded slowly out of his face. His eyes closed, and a minute later his heavy breathing told her that he had relapsed into stupor.
"I must ask him when he wakes," she thought. "I must ask him what he wanted to tell me."
After dinner she hunted for Rufus again, but he had not, it appeared, returned to the farm.
"I reckon he went home with Ike Pryde," his mother said. "He's been seeing too much of Ike, and I'm afraid it ain't good for him. The last time Almira was over here she told me Ike was drinking again." She was worried and anxious, and the twitching was worse in her face. "I declare I don't see how Almira can put up with him," she said.
"Then I'll have to harness Dan myself," Dorinda replied. "I've got on my best dress, so I hoped Rufus would drag out the buggy. I'm going over to Green Acres."
"I was wondering what you'd put on your blue poplin for," Mrs. Oakley returned. "I'd think that hanging veil would get in your way; but if you're going over to the Ellgoods', I'm glad you dressed up. Fluvanna, I reckon, will hitch up the buggy for you."
Fluvanna, emerging from the kitchen, offered eagerly to look for Dan in the pasture. "He ain't got away," she said, "for I saw him at the bars jest a minute ago." She had gone to school whenever there was one for coloured children in the neighbourhood, and though her speech was still picturesque, she had discarded the pure dialect of Aunt Mehitable and her generation. "Don't you worry, Miss Dorinda," she added, hurrying down the path to the pasture.
"I tell Fluvanna that her sunny disposition is worth a fortune," Mrs. Oakley remarked. "She never gets put out about anything."
"I believe she'll be a great comfort to us," Dorinda returned thoughtfully. She liked the girl's pleasant brown face, as glossy as a chestnut, her shining black eyes, and her perfect teeth, which showed always, for she never stopped smiling. "Just to have anybody look intelligent is a relief."
"Well, you'll find that Fluvanna has plenty of sense. Of course she slights things when she can, but she is always willing and good-humoured. You don't often find a hard worker, white or black, with a sunny temper."
They were still discussing her when Fluvanna drove up in the buggy and descended to offer the dilapidated reins to Dorinda.
"Thank you, Fluvanna. I declare this buggy looks as if it hadn't been washed off for a year."
Fluvanna, who had not observed the mud, turned her beaming eyes on the buggy and perceived that it was dirty.
"I'll come over the first thing in the mawnin' an' wash it for you," she promised. "There ain't a bit of use dependin' on Mr. Rufus. He won't do nothin'."
Dorinda gathered up the reins, settled herself on the bagging which covered the seat, and turned Dan's head kindly but firmly away from the pasture.
"I wonder if things used to look as dilapidated, only I didn't notice them so much," she thought.
Dan travelled slowly, and the Ellgoods lived three miles on the other side of Pedlar's Mill. Green Acres was the largest stock farm in the county; but what impressed Dorinda more than the size was the general air of thrift which hovered over the pastures, the deep green meadows, and the white buildings clustering about the red brick house.
"I couldn't have anything like this in a hundred years," she thought cheerlessly. Her scheme, which had appeared so promising when she surveyed it from Central Park, presented, at a closer view, innumerable obstacles. There was not one chance in a thousand, she told herself now, that the venture would lead anywhere except into a bog. "But I'm in it now, and I must see it through," she concluded, with less audacity than determination. "I'll not give up as long as there is breath left in my body." Rolling in mud-caked wheels up the neat drive to the house, she resolved stubbornly that no one, least of all James Ellgood, should suspect that she had lost heart in her enterprise.
James Ellgood was at Queen Elizabeth Courthouse for the day; but Bob, his son, who had recently brought home a dissatisfied and delicate wife from a hospital in Baltimore, was on the front porch awaiting his visitor. When she appeared in sight, he threw away the match he was striking on his boot, and after thrusting his old brier pipe into his pocket, descended the steps and came across the drive to the buggy. Nathan would have smoked, or still worse have chewed, Dorinda knew, while he received her; but inconsistently enough, she did not like him the less for his boorishness. Utility, not punctilio, was what she required of men at this turning point in her career.
While Bob Ellgood held out his hand, she could see her reflection in his large, placid eyes as clearly as if her features were mirrored in the old mill pond. It gave her pleasure to feel that she was more distinguished, if less desirable, than she had been two years ago; but her pleasure was as impersonal as her errand. She had no wish to attract this heavy, masterful farmer, who reminded her of a sleek, mild-mannered Jersey bull; no wish, at least, to attract him beyond the point where his admiration might help her to drive a bargain in cows. Gazing critically at his handsome face, she remembered the Sunday mornings when she had watched him in church and had wished with all her heart that he would turn his eyes in her direction. Then he had not so much as glanced at her over his hymn book, his slow mind was probably revolving round his engagement; but now she felt instinctively that he was ready to catch fire from a look or a word. The absurd twist of an idea jerked into her mind. "He would have suited me better than Jason, and I should have suited him better than the woman he married." Well, that was the way the eternal purpose worked, she supposed, but it seemed to her a cumbersome and blundering method.
"Nathan told me you wanted to buy some cows," he was saying, for he was as single-minded as other successful men, only more so. "I picked out seven fine ones this morning and had them brought up to the small pasture. They'll be at the bars now, and you can look them over. There isn't a better breed than the Jersey, that's what we think, and these young cows are as good as any you'll find."
At the bars of the pasture, where a weeping willow dipped over the watering trough, the Jerseys were standing in a row, satin-coated, fawn-eyed, with breath like new-mown hay. What beauties they were, thought Dorinda, swept away in spite of her determination to bargain. When Bob told her the names she repeated them in blissful accents. "Rose. Sweetbriar. Hollyhock. Pansy. Daisy. Violet. Verbena." To think that she, who had never owned anything, should actually possess these adorable creatures! Even the price, which seemed to her excessively high, could not spoil her delight. A hundred dollars for each cow, Bob explained, was a third less than they would bring at the fair next autumn.
"I am glad you are going into the dairy business," he proceeded. "I always said this country would do for dairy farming, though it takes more money, of course, to start a dairy farm than it does just to plant crops. The cows ain't all of it, you know. You ought to raise your own hay and the corn you need for silage. Borrow money, too, if you haven't got it, to drain and tile your fields. It will pay you back in the long run, for I doubt if you will get any good clover until you put ditches in your land. All that takes money, of course," he continued, with depressing accuracy, "but it is the only way to make anything out of a farm. Father says there ain't but one way to learn to do anything, and that's the right way."
"I know," Dorinda assented. Her tone was confident, but it seemed to her while she spoke that she was being buried under the impoverished acres of Old Farm.
"And there's machinery," he added. "Father borrowed money after the war to buy new machinery. When he came home after Appomattox, all the farm implements were either lost or good for nothing. He went in debt and bought the newest inventions, and that was the beginning of his success. The legacy from Uncle Mitchell came after he was well started, and he always says he could have got on without it, though perhaps not on so large a scale."
"Well, I'll borrow," said Dorinda defiantly. "We've always been afraid of debt; but I've already borrowed two thousand dollars, and if I need more, I'll try to get it. Nathan is going to pick up whatever machinery he can at auction. That will be less than half the actual cost, he says."
He was looking at her now with keen, impersonal admiration. Just as if she had been a man, she thought, with a glow of triumph. Though the sensation was without the excitement of sex vanity, she found that it was quite as gratifying, and, she suspected, more durable. Already he had forgotten the momentary physical appeal she had made to him in the beginning; and she felt that his respect for her was based upon what he believed to be her character. "It isn't what I am really that matters," she thought. "It is just the impression I make on his mind or senses. Men are all like that, I suppose. They don't know you. They don't even wish to know you. They are interested in nothing on earth but their own reactions." And she remembered suddenly that Jason had once generalized like this about women, and that she was merely copying what he had said. How stupid generalizations were, and how deceptive!
"I hope you'll make a success of it," Bob said. "I like women who take hold of things and aren't afraid of work when they have to do it. That's the right spirit." A moody frown contracted his fore head, and she knew that he was thinking of his wife, though he added after a moment's hesitation, "Look at my sister now. She's as young as you are and she lies round all day like an old woman."
"Perhaps it's her health," Dorinda suggested, moving away.
"Why shouldn't she be healthy? We're all healthy enough, Heaven knows! Not that I wonder at it," he continued thoughtlessly, "when I remember that she was such a fool as to fall in love with Jason Greylock." The next instant a purple flush dyed his face, and she could see his thoughts rising like fish to the fluid surface of his mind. "Not that he ill-treats her. He knows Father wouldn't stand for that," he added hurriedly, caught in the net he had unconsciously spread. "But his laziness is bred in the bone, and he's the sort that will let apples rot on the ground rather than pick them up."
"I know," Dorinda said, and she did. That was what her mother called the mental malaria of the country.
"Well, it's the blood, I reckon," he conceded more tolerantly. "There's enough to work against without having to struggle to get the better of your own blood. Come this way," he continued, leading her to a different pasture, "I want you to have a look at our prize bull. Five blue ribbons already; and we've a yearling that promises to be still finer. A beauty, isn't he?"
Dorinda gazed at the bull with admiration and envy, while he returned her look with royal, inscrutable eyes. "I wonder if I shall ever own a creature like that?" she thought. "He looks as if he owned everything and yet despised it," she said aloud.
Bob laughed. "Yes, he's got a high-and-mighty air, hasn't he? By the way, those Jerseys have never been milked by a woman. I don't know how they'll take to it. Will you hire a man?"
"Not at first. Until I get started well, I'm going to do my own milking. I can put on Rufus's overalls, and when I milk myself I can be sure of the way the cows are handled. With negroes you can never tell. Nathan says they let his cows go dry because they don't take the trouble to milk them thoroughly. And they won't be clean, no matter how much you talk to them. When I tell them I'm going to keep my cows washed and brushed and the stalls free from a speck of dirt, they think it's a joke."
"That's the trouble. Cleanliness is a joke with most of the farmers about here, but it's the first step to success in dairy farming. It keeps down disease, especially contagious abortion, better than anything else. Yes, you've got the right idea. It means hard work, of course, though you'll find it's worth while in the end."
"Oh, I don't mind work. What else is there in life?"
His eyes were shining as he looked at her. "Well, I wish my wife had a little of your spirit. It isn't only that she's delicate. I believe that she's afraid of everything in the country from a grasshopper to an ox."
"She didn't grow up on a farm. That makes a difference." He sighed. "Yes, it does make a difference."
"Well, it's a pity. I'm glad I don't have to struggle with fear." A little later, as she drove across the railway tracks and down the long slope in the direction of Old Farm, she reflected dispassionately upon the crookedness of human affairs. Why had that honest farmer, robust, handsome, without an idea above bulls and clover, mated with a woman who was afraid of a grasshopper? And why had she, in whom life burned so strong and bright, wasted her vital energy on the mere husk of a man? Why, above all, should Nature move so unintelligently in the matter of instinct? Did this circle of reasoning lead back inevitably, she wondered, to the steadfast doctrine of original sin? "The truth is we always want what is bad for us, I suppose," she concluded, and gave up the riddle.
Just beyond the station, in front of the "old Haney place," she met William Fairlamb, and stopped to ask him about repairing the cow-barn and the henhouse. He was a tall, stooped, old-looking young man, with shaggy flaxen hair and round grey eyes as opaque as pebbles. Though his expression was stupid, he had intelligence above the ordinary, and was the best carpenter at Pedlar's Mill.
"If you're going to keep cows, you'd better see that Doctor Greylock mends his fences," he said, after he had promised to begin on the cow-barn as soon as he had finished his contract with Ezra Flower. "That old black steer of his is a public nuisance. I've had him wandering over my wheat-fields all winter. It's a mortal shame the way the Greylocks are letting that farm peter out."
"Yes, it's a shame," she agreed, and drove on again. Wherever she turned, it appeared that she was to be met by a reminder that Jason was living so near her. "If only he were dead," she thought, as impersonally as if she were thinking of the black steer that trampled the ploughed fields. "I shall have to go on hearing about him now until the end of my days."
There was no regret, she told herself, left in her memory; yet whenever she heard his name, or recalled his existence, her spirits flagged beneath an overpowering sense of futility. At such moments, she was obliged to spur her body into action. "It will be like this always, until one of us is dead," she reflected. Though she neither loved nor hated him now, the thought of him, which still lived on in some obscure chamber of her mind, was sufficient to disturb and disarrange her whole inner life. The part of her consciousness that she could control she had released from his influence; but there were innate impulses which were independent of her will or her emotions; and in these blind instincts of her being there were even now occasional flashes of longing. While she was awake she could escape him; but at night, when she slept, she would live over again all the happiest hours she had spent with him. Never the pain, never the cruelty of the past; only the beauty and the unforgettable ecstasy came back to her in her dreams.
As she drove out of the woods the sun was sinking beyond the cleft of the road, and a slow procession of shadows was moving across the broomsedge, where little waves of light quivered and disappeared and quivered again like ripples in running water. While she passed on, the expression of the landscape faded from tranquil brightness to the look of unresisting fortitude which it had worn as far back as she could remember. In her heart also she felt that the brightness quivered and died. With her drooping energy, weariness had crept over her; but out of weariness, she passed presently, like the country, into a mood of endurance. She realized, without despair, that the general aspect of her life would be one of unbroken monotony. Enthusiasm would not last. Energy would not last. Cheerfulness, buoyancy, interest, not one of these qualities would last as long as she needed it. Nothing would last through to the end except courage.
Her gaze was on the horizon. The reins, tied together with a bit of rope, were held loosely in her hands. With every turn of the wheel, a shower of dried mud was scattered over her clothes. So completely lost was she in memory that at first she barely heard the noise of an approaching rider, and the hollow sound of horseshoes striking on rock. Even before her mind became aware of Jason's approach, her startled senses leaped toward him. Her body bent for an instant, and then sprang back like a steel wire. With an impassive face, and a torment of memory in her heart, she sat staring far ahead, at the blur of road by the cabin. She was back again within the prison of that moment which was eternal; yet there was no sign of suffering in the blank look of her eyes. Her hand did not tremble; the loosened reins did not waver; and when a voice called her name, she did not reveal by the quiver of an eyelash that she listened.
"Dorinda! Dorinda, let me speak to you!"
She raised her eyes from the road and looked beyond the waving broomsedge to the topaz-coloured light on the western horizon. The longing to look in his face, to turn and rend him with her scorn, was as sharp as a blade; but some deep instinct told her that if she yielded to the impulse, the struggle was lost. To recognize his existence was to restore, in a measure, his power over her life. Only by keeping him outside her waking moments could she win freedom.
"Dorinda, you are hard. Dorinda——"
They were side by side now in the road. If he had reached out his hand, he could have touched her. If she had turned her head, she might have looked into his eyes. But she did not turn; she did not withdraw her gaze from the landscape; she did not relax in the weakest muscle from her attitude of unyielding disdain. Though he were to ride all the way home with her, she told herself, he could not force her to speak to him. No matter what he did, he could never make her speak to him or look at him again!
The sunken places in the road retarded him, and when he reached her side again, they were passing the burned cabin. For an instant, when they approached the fork, he hesitated, as if he were tempted to follow her still farther. Then, deciding abruptly, he wheeled about and alighted to open the red gate of Five Oaks.
"I'll see you again," he called back.
For a few minutes after he had disappeared, she sat rigidly erect, as if she had been frozen into her attitude of repulsion. Then, suddenly, she gave way; a shudder seized her limbs, and the reins slipped from her hands to the bottom of the buggy. She was like a person who has escaped some fearful calamity, and who has not realized the danger until it is over. When the trembling had passed, she stooped and picked up the reins. "It will be easier next time," she said, and a moment later, "I suppose I've got to get used to it. You can get used to anything if you have to." A dull misery stupefied her thoughts, and she was without clear perception of what the meeting had meant to her. "I can't understand why I suffer so," she pondered. "I can't understand how a person you despise can make you so unhappy."
As she drew nearer home, Dan quickened his pace, and the buggy rattled over the bridge and up the rocky slope to the stable. The glow had faded from the west, and the long white house glimmered through the twilight, which was settling like silver dust over the landscape. A banner of smoke drooped low over a single chimney. Beyond the roof the budding trees appeared as diaphanous as mist against the greenish-blue of the sky. In the window of the west wing a lamp was shining. So she had seen it on innumerable evenings in the past; so she would see it, if she lived, on innumerable evenings in the future.
Then, just as she was about to drive on to the stable, she observed that shadows were moving to and fro beyond the single lighted window. Though the outward aspect of the house was unchanged, there was, nevertheless, a subtle alteration in its spirit. For an instant, while she hesitated, there seemed to her an ominous message in these hurried shadows and this absence of noise. Her throat tightened, and she sprang from the buggy as the door opened and Rufus came out.
"He died a few minutes ago," he said.
A few minutes ago! "I'll never know now what he tried to tell me," she thought. "No matter how long I live, I shall never know."
After the last prayer, the earth was shovelled back into the hollow beneath the great pine in the graveyard, and the movement of the farm began again with scarcely a break in its monotony. Joshua Oakley had sacrificed his life to the land, and yet, or so it seemed to Dorinda, his death made as little difference as if a tree had fallen and rotted back into the soil. Even her own sorrow was a sense of pity rather than a personal grief.
When the neighbours had driven solemnly out of the gate, the family assembled in Mrs. Oakley's chamber and gazed through the window to the graveyard on the hill, as if they were waiting expectantly for the dead man to rise and return to his work. The only change would be, they acknowledged, that two hired labourers would grumble over a division of the toil which Joshua had performed alone and without a complaint. The farm had always belonged to Mrs. Oakley; but in order that her authority might be assured, Joshua had made a will a few months before his death and had left her the farm implements and the horses. Dissimilar as her parents had appeared to be, there was a bond between them which Dorinda felt without comprehending. This was the growth of habit, she supposed, or the tenacious clinging of happy memories which had survived the frost of experience. In his dumb way, Joshua had been proud of his wife, and Eudora had depended upon her husband for more substantial qualities than those of sentiment. He had been useful to her in the practical details of living, and she was feeling his loss as one feels the loss of a faculty. Here was another proof, Dorinda reflected, of the varied texture of life, another reminder of her folly in attempting to weave durable happiness out of a single thread of emotion.
"I don't see how we'll manage to get on without him," said Mrs. Oakley, who looked gaunt and bleached in the old mourning she had worn for her dead children.
"I reckon it means I'll have to stay on here," Rufus muttered in a tone of sullen rebellion. "I'll have to give up that job Tom Garlick promised me next winter in New York. It's darn luck, that's what I call it."
"Oh, no, you mustn't stay," Dorinda urged. "Ma and I can get on perfectly by ourselves. It won't make any difference if you go in the fall."
"You'd better take Dorinda's advice and get away, Rufus." Though Mrs. Oakley spoke in a quiet voice, her face had gone grey at the thought of losing Rufus also.
"Well, I'm afraid I can't help you now," said Josiah, glancing furtively at his wife, who had proved to be a termagant with generous impulses which were brief but explosive.
"Of course your Ma could always come to live with us," suggested Elvira, obeying the briefest of these impulses. "She'd find plenty to do looking after the chickens, and the children would keep her from being lonesome."
Mrs. Oakley's eyes filled with tears. The old hound, having outlived his master, lay at her feet, and stooping over she stroked his head with a trembling hand. "But what would become of the farm?" she asked in a voice that quavered. "I want to die on the farm where I was born."
"We'll stay here alone, Ma and I," Dorinda declared, with the stern integrity she had won from transgression. "The farm belongs to Ma, and she and I can take care of it. We don't need a man," she added crisply. "If I couldn't do better than the men about here, I'd be a mighty poor farmer."
Elvira breathed more freely, and the wrinkles vanished from Josiah's forehead. As for Rufus, he had lost interest in the discussion as soon as it was decided that he might leave the farm in the autumn.
"I'm sure none of us would want to take Ma against her will," Elvira said, relieved and conciliatory because her generosity had been wasted. "The place belongs to her anyway, so the rest of us haven't anything to say about what she does with it." With a habitual jerk, which had annoyed Dorinda the first moment she saw her, the girl adjusted the belt of her skirt and rested her hands on her rapidly spreading hips.
"You needn't worry about Ma," Dorinda rejoined firmly. "I am going to take care of her." Her one wish, she felt, was to get Elvira and Josiah out of the house. Even Rufus was less depressing. Rufus at least had good looks; but Josiah and Elvira existed in her mind only as appalling examples of inherent futility. While she looked at Josiah, it seemed to her that failure oozed out of the very pores of his skin. Though he worked from morning till night, he was hampered by a fumbling slowness which reminded Dorinda of the efforts of a half-witted person. Yet her father, in spite of his ignorance, had possessed an industry that was tireless, while her mother was afflicted by a veritable mania of energy. Was it a matter of circumstances, after all, not of heredity? Had the more active strain succumbed at last to the climatic inertia? Well, if the fight had narrowed down to one between herself and her surroundings, she was determined to conquer. Beneath her sombre brows her eyes looked out like caged bluebirds. She was wearing a black calico dress which had once belonged to Miss Seena Snead, and the mourning brought out vividly the dusk of her hair and the bright red of her lips. "There's no use talking to me. I've made up my mind," she said.
An hour later, when Josiah and Elvira had gone home, Dorinda helped her mother to take off her mourning and straighten the chamber in which Joshua had lain.
"It's the smell of mourning I can't stand," said the girl, while she folded the crape veil and laid it away in the bandbox. "Do you think I'll have to wear it?"
"It wouldn't be respectful not to," Mrs. Oakley replied, and she asked after a minute: "What do you want with those overalls of Rufus's that you took upstairs?"
Dorinda turned from the wardrobe and looked at her. "They are old ones I'm patching," she answered. "I am going to wear them when I'm milking. Those Jerseys have never been milked by a woman."
"I s'pose they'd get used to it."
"They might, but it's easier for me to wear overalls than to break them. You can't farm in skirts anyway."
"You ain't going to wear them on the farm, are you?"
"If I can farm better in them, I'm going to wear them."
Mrs. Oakley sighed. "Well, I hope nobody will see you."
"I don't care," Dorinda replied stubbornly. "I'm going to milk my cows my own way. I've got some common sense," she added sternly, "and I'm the only person, man or woman, in the county who has."
The old woman's face was as inanimate as a mask, but her eyes were fixed, with their look of prophetic doom, on the great pine in the graveyard. "I can't help thinking," she murmured, "how your father used to lie here day after day and look at that big pine. It seems as if that tree meant more to him than anything human."
Dorinda followed her gaze. "In a way it did," she said slowly, as if some inscrutable mystery were dissolving in a flood of surprise. "In a different way."
With a band of crape in her hands, Mrs. Oakley stared up at the harp-shaped boughs. "I reckon it's a heathenish way to think about things," she observed presently, "but I can't help feeling there's a heap of comfort in it."
When the room had been cleaned and the mourning pinned up again in newspapers, Dorinda begged her mother to rest before Rufus came back to supper.
"I couldn't, daughter, not with all I've got on my mind," Mrs. Oakley replied firmly. "I remember when the doctor tried to get your father to give up for a while, he'd shake his head and answer, 'Doctor, I don't know how to stop.' That's the trouble with me, I reckon. I don't know how to stop."
"If you choose to kill yourself, I don't see how I can prevent it." Dorinda's voice wavered with exasperation. If only her mother would listen to reason, she felt, both of their lives would be so much easier. But did mothers ever listen to reason? "I'm going to walk up to Poplar Spring and look at the woods you wrote me about," she added. "I hope we shan't have to sell them and put the money into the land."
"Your father was holding on to that timber to bury us with. There are all the funeral expenses to come."
"Yes, I know." Dorinda regarded her thoughtfully. "Poor Pa, it was all he had and he wanted to hold on to it. But, you see,"—her tone sharpened to the bitter edge of desperation—"I am depending upon my butter to bury us both, and who knows but your chickens may supply us with tombstones."
"I hope New York didn't turn you into a scoffer, Dorinda."
Dorinda laughed. "New York didn't get a chance, Ma. Pedlar's Mill had done it first."
"Well, there ain't anything too solemn for some folks to joke about. You ain't goin' out in Seena Snead's black dress, are you?"
"She's gone out of mourning, so she gave it to me."
"I'd think you'd hate to take charity."
There were times when it seemed to Dorinda that she could not breathe within the stark limitations of her mother's point of view. As she ran out of the room and the house, without heeding Mrs. Oakley's request that she should wear a hat at least on the day of the funeral, she asked herself if this aimless nagging was all that she could expect in the future. She was fond of her mother; but fondness, strangely enough, did not seem to make it easier for people to bear one another's tempers.
The path to Poplar Spring ran beside the eighteen-acre field, and she stopped amid the dusty fennel and ragweed to inspect the work of the last two days. The broomsedge had been partly cut down and burned, and the blackened ruins waited now for the final obliteration. "It will be hard work to get good grass here," she thought, "but if I keep turning cowpeas under, I may bring up the soil in time." In the pasture, beyond a rail fence, the grass was rank and high, for only Dan and Beersheba had grazed there for the last four or five years. The solitary cow, when they were fortunate as to own one, lived on the lawn or what was called "the home field," where Mrs. Oakley milked in summer. Across the road she saw the scantily fenced west meadow, where her father had sown his winter wheat, and her eyes filled with tears as she gazed on the sprinkling of green over the earth. While she stood there she remembered the look on his face when he lay in his coffin; a look which was austere, inaccessible, with a reproachful wonder beneath its mask of solemnity, as if he were still asking life why it had crushed him. "Whatever I give, the farm will be always mine," she thought. "That was the way he felt. The farm isn't human and it won't make you suffer. Only human things break your heart." Everything appeared so simple when she regarded it through the film of sentiment that obscured her judgment. Kinship with the land was filtered through her blood into her brain; and she knew that this transfigured instinct was blended of pity, memory, and passion. Dimly, she felt that only through this fresh emotion could she attain permanent liberation of spirit.
Moving away, she followed the path which threaded the scrub pines on the border of the broomsedge. Presently she distinguished the blur of Poplar Spring in the distance, and toward the east the acres of fair timber which had matured since her great-grandfather's death. In her new reverence for her father she shrank from cutting down the tall trees. "It would be slaughter," she said to herself. "I'll let the woods stand as long as I can."
Overhead, the pines were soughing in a light wind, and for a moment or two the sound of footsteps behind her was scarcely louder than the whispering trees. Then, with a start, she realized that she was followed, and glancing round, she saw Jason walking over the scarred field.
"I know you didn't want me at the funeral, Dorinda," he said, "but it was all I could do to show my respect for your father. He was one of the best men who ever lived."
Her breast quivered with pain, but she moved on without appearing to be aware of his presence.
"I was afraid you were angry because I came," he continued.
At this her pride was swallowed up in bitterness, and she stopped and looked back. "You had no right to come. You knew I did not want you there."
Without replying to her charge, he stared at her as if he were amazed by the change in her face. "This is the first time you've looked at me since you came home," he said. "You've treated me as if I were the dirt under your feet."
Her hand was on the slender bough of a pine, and stripping the needles from the branch, she flung them out on the wind with a passionate gesture. Over the chaos in her mind there darted the shadow of a regret. "If only I had killed him that night!"
"Even now, you won't let your eyes rest on me," he complained. "If you'd given me a chance, I'd have done anything you wanted. But you never gave me a chance. You never listened."
Her gaze, which had been fixed on the horizon beyond him, swept back to his face. "Your following me won't make me listen."
"If only you knew what I've suffered."
She was looking at him now with merciless eyes. For this thing she had ruined her life! Then, before the thought had left her mind, she realized that in his presence, with her eyes on his face, she was farther away from him than she had been in New York. Yesterday, he had had power over her senses; to-morrow, he might have power again over her memory; but at this instant, while they stood there, so close together that she could almost feel his breath on her face, her senses and her memory alike were delivered from the old torment of love.
"My nerve is going," he said weakly, attempting to soften her. "I've started drinking like Father."
Looking at him, she admitted that it was only her feeling for him, not the man himself, that had changed. Superficially, in spite of excessive drinking, he was as attractive as he had ever been; yet this appeal, which she had found so irresistible two years ago, failed now to awaken the faintest tremor in her heart. The contrast between his brown-black eyes and his red hair seemed to her artificial: there was something repellent to her in the gleam of his white teeth through his short red moustache. These were the physical details that had once affected her so deeply; these traits which she saw now, for the first time, in the spectral light of disenchantment.