"Can you never understand," she asked suddenly, "that I don't hate you because you mean to me—just nothing."
"You are sending me straight to the dogs."
She laughed. How theatrical men were! Beneath her ridicule, she felt the cruelty which gnaws like a worm at the heart of emotion in its decay.
"Why should I care?" she demanded.
"You mean you wouldn't care if I were to die a drunkard like my father?" His voice trembled, and she saw that he was wrestling with man's inability to believe that a woman's love can perish while his own still survives.
"No, I shouldn't care."
"You're hard, Dorinda, as hard as a stone."
Her smile was exultant. "Yes, I am hard. I'm through with soft things."
Turning her back on him, she walked rapidly away over the ploughed ground in the direction of the house. Oh, if the women who wanted love could only know the infinite relief of having love over!
On an afternoon in October, Dorinda stood under the harp-shaped pine in the graveyard and looked down on the farm.
The drift of autumn was in the air; the shadows from the west were growing longer; and in a little while Nimrod, the farm boy, would let down the bars by the watering-trough, and the seven Jersey cows would file sleepily across the road and the lawn to the cow-barn. At the first glimpse of Nimrod she would run down and slip into her overalls. Ever since the cows had come from Green Acres, she had milked them morning and evening, and she was wondering now how many more she could handle with only Fluvanna to help her. Only by doing the work herself and keeping a relentless eye on every detail, could she hope to succeed in the end. If she were once weak enough to compromise with the natural carelessness of the negroes, she knew that the pails and pans would not be properly scalded, and the milk would begin to lose its quality. Fluvanna was the superior of most ignorant white women; but even Fluvanna, though she was, as Dorinda said to herself, one in a thousand, would slight her work as soon as she was given authority over others. There were times when it seemed to Dorinda that this instinct to slight was indigenous to the soil of the South. In the last six months she had felt the temptation herself. There had been hours of weariness when it had seemed to her that it was better to be swift and casual than to be slow and thorough; but she had always suppressed the impulse before it was translated into outward negligence. Would her power of resistance survive, she wondered, or would it yield inevitably to the surrounding drought of energy?
Six months were gone now, and how hard she had worked! She thought of the mornings when she had risen before day, eaten a hurried breakfast by the crack of dawn, and milked the cows by the summer sunrise. From the moment the warm milk frothed into the pails until the creamy butter was patted into moulds and stamped with the name Old Farm beneath the device of a harp-shaped pine, there was not a minute detail of the work that was left to others. Even the scalding of the churns, the straining and skimming of the milk in the old-fashioned way without a separator,—all these simple tasks came under her watchful eyes. When the first supply of butter was sent off, she waited with nervous dread for the verdict. The price had seemed extravagant, for selling directly to her customer she had asked thirty cents a pound, while butter in Pedlar's store was never higher than ninepence in summer and a shilling in winter, measured in the old English terms which were still commonly used in Queen Elizabeth County.
"It seems a mighty high price," her mother had objected.
"I know, but Mrs. Faraday told me to ask more. She said the dairy would get a dollar a pound for the very best. Some people are always ready to pay a high price, and they value a thing more if they pay too much for it. I found out all I could about butter making in New York, and I'm sure nobody could have taken more trouble. It tasted like flowers."
"Well, perhaps—" Mrs. Oakley had sounded dubious. "We'll wait and see."
When the letter and check came together, Dorinda's spirits had soared on wings. The hotel and the dairy would take all that she could supply of that quality; and though she had known that her success was less fortuitous than appeared on the surface, she had not paused to inquire whether it was owing to influence or to accident. "If everything goes well, I'll have twenty-five cows by next fall," she said hopefully, "and Ebenezer and Mary Joe Green to help Fluvanna."
"You always jump so far ahead, Dorinda."
"I'm made that way. I can't help it. If I didn't live in the future, I couldn't stand things as they are."
Now, in the soft afternoon light, she stretched her arms over her head with a gesture of healthy fatigue. The aromatic scent of the pine was in her nostrils. In the sun-steeped meadows below there was the murmurous chanting of grasshoppers. At the hour she felt peaceful and pleasantly drowsy, and all her troubles were lost in the sensation of physical ease. She was thinner than ever; her muscles were hard and elastic; the colour of her skin was burned to a pale amber; and the curves of her rich mouth were firmer and less appealingly feminine. In a few years the work of the farm would probably coarsen her features; but at twenty-three she was still young enough to ripen to a maturer beauty. Though her hands were roughened by work and the nails were stained and broken, she wasted no regret upon the disfigurement of her body as long as her senses remained benumbed by toil. She slept now without dreaming. This alone seemed to her to be worth any sacrifice of external softness.
Her glance travelled over the cornfield, where the shocks were gathered in rows amid the stubble, and she reflected that the harvest had been better than usual. Then her eyes passed along the orchard path to the new cow-barn, and she watched the figure of William Fairlamb climbing down from the roof. An agreeable sense of possession stole into her mind, while she looked from the cow-barn to the back of the house, and saw her mother moving along the path from the porch. There were a hundred and fifty hens in the poultry yard now, and it seemed to Dorinda that the old woman's happiness had simmered down into an enjoyment of chickens. Though she still worshipped Rufus, he was only a disappointment and an increasing anxiety. Of late he had done no work on the farm; his days were spent in hunting with Ike Pryde or Adam Snead, and it was evident to Dorinda that he was beginning to drink too much bad whiskey. It would be a relief, she felt, when November came and he went away for the winter.
Turning her head, as she prepared to leave the graveyard, she glanced beyond the many-coloured autumn scene to the distant chimneys of Five Oaks. How far-off was the time when the sight of those red chimneys against a blue or grey sky would not stab into her heart? Her love was dead; and her regret clung less to the thought that love had ended in disappointment than to the supreme tragedy that love ended at all. Nothing endured. Everything perished of its own inner decay. That, after all, was the gnawing worm at the heart of experience. If either her love or her hatred had lasted, she would have found less bitterness in the savour of life.
For the first few weeks after her meeting with Jason on the edge of the pines, she had been enveloped in profound peace. Then, gradually, it seemed to her that the farther she moved away from him in reality, the closer he approached to her hidden life. As the days went by, the freedom she had won in his presence wore off like the effects of an anodyne, and the bondage of the nerves and the senses began to tighten again. Never, since she had looked into his face and had told herself that she was indifferent, had she known complete disillusionment. The trouble was, she discovered, that instead of remembering him as she had last seen him, her imagination created images which her reason denied. Not only her pain, but the very memory of pain that had once been, could leave, she found, a physical soreness.
Beyond the fields and the road the sun was sinking lower, and the western sky was stained with the colour of autumn fruits. While she watched the clouds, Dorinda remembered the heart of a pomegranate that she had seen in a window in New York; and immediately she was swept by a longing for the sights and sounds of the city. "There's no use thinking of that now," she said to herself, as she left the brow of the hill and walked down the path through the orchard. "Like so many other things, it is only when you look back on it that you seem to want it. While I was in New York I was longing to be away. There comes Nimrod with the cows, and Fluvanna bringing the milk pails."
On the back porch her mother was drying apples, for the apple crop had been good, and the cellar was already stored with russets and winesaps.
"We ought to have dried apples enough to last us till next year," Mrs. Oakley remarked, while she wiped the discoloured blade of the knife on her apron. "The whole time I was slicing these apples, I couldn't help thinking how partial your father was to dried fruit, and last fall there were hardly any apples fit to keep." Raising her hand to her eyes, she squinted in the direction from which her daughter had come. "I can't make out who that is running across the cornfield, but whoever it is, he's in a mighty big hurry."
Dorinda followed her gaze. "It's Rufus. He looks as if something were after him."
Mrs. Oakley's face was twisted into what was called her "neuralgic look." "He promised me to mend that churn before night," she said in a dissatisfied tone. "But I haven't laid eyes on him since dinner time. He goes too much in bad company. I haven't got a particle of use for Ike Pryde and those two Kittery boys over by Plumtree."
Dorinda nodded. "I'm glad he is going away. The sooner, the better."
"I reckon he has just recollected the churn." Mrs. Oakley's tone was without conviction, and she added presently, "He certainly does look scared, doesn't he?"
"I wonder what could have frightened him?" As the boy drew nearer, Dorinda saw that he was panting for breath and that his usually florid face was blanched to a leaden pallor. "What on earth has happened, Rufus?" she called sharply.
He waved angrily to her to be silent. His palmetto hat was in his hand, and when he reached the porch, he hurled it through the open door into the hall. Though his breath came in gasps as if he were stifling for air, he picked up a hammer from one of the benches, and without stopping to rest, bent over the broken churn at the side of the step.
"What on earth has happened, Rufus?" Dorinda asked again. She saw that her mother was trembling with apprehension, and the sight exasperated her against Rufus.
"You ought to have let me go away last spring," the boy replied in a truculent tone. He lifted the hammer above his head and, still wheezing from his race, drove a nail crookedly into the bottom of the churn. His hand trembled, and Dorinda noticed that the swinging blow fell unevenly.
"You haven't done anything you oughtn't to, have you, son?" his mother inquired shrilly.
Rufus turned his head and stared at her in moody silence. Though his handsome face wore his usual sulky frown, Dorinda suspected that his resentful manner was a veil that covered an inner disturbance. His dark eyes held a smouldering fire, as if fear were waiting to leap out at a sound, and the hand in which he clutched the hammer had never stopped shaking.
"Don't you let on I wasn't here, no matter who asks you," he said doggedly. "It wasn't my fault anyway. There isn't anybody coming, is there?"
"No, that's Nimrod bringing up the cows," Dorinda rejoined impatiently. "I must put on my overalls."
Whatever happened, the cows must be milked, she reflected as she entered the house. This morning and evening ritual of the farm had become as inexorable as law. Hearts might be broken, men might live or die, but the cows must be milked.
When she came back from the dairy, Rufus had disappeared, but her mother, who was preparing supper, beckoned her into the kitchen. "I haven't found out yet what's the matter," whispered the old woman. "He won't open his mouth, though I can see that he's terribly upset about something. I'm worried right sick."
"He's probably got into a quarrel with somebody. You know how overbearing he is."
"I reckon I spoiled him." Mrs. Oakley's lip trembled while she poured a little coffee into a cup and then poured it back again into the coffee-pot. "Your father used to tell me I made a difference because he was the youngest. I s'pose I oughtn't to have done it, but it's hard to see how I could have helped it. He was a mighty taking child, was Rufus."
"Where is he now?"
"Up in his room. I've called him to supper. He's loaded his gun again, but he didn't seem to want me to notice, and he's put it back in the corner behind the door."
"Oh, well, try not to worry about it, Ma. Some fool's play most likely. Can I help you get supper? I'll be straight back as soon as I've slipped out of these overalls. There's a lot of work for me afterwards in the dairy."
She ran upstairs to her room, and on the way down, as she passed Rufus's door, she called cheerfully, "Rufus, aren't you coming to supper?"
To her surprise, his door opened immediately, as if he had been hiding behind it, and he came out and followed her meekly downstairs into the kitchen. His excitement had apparently left him, but his healthy colour had not returned and his eyes looked strained and bloodshot. Bad whiskey, she thought, though she said as amiably as she could, "If I were you, I'd go to New York next week even if the job isn't ready."
He looked at her gratefully. "I was just thinking I'd better do that."
His manner was so conciliatory that it made her vaguely uneasy. Jason had been like that, she remembered, in the weeks before he had jilted her, and, unjustly or not, she had come to regard suavity in men with suspicion. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Rufus if he had got into a scrape; but she decided, as she brought his supper to the table, that it was a situation which she had better ignore. No good had ever come, she reflected with the ripe wisdom of experience, of putting questions to a man. What men wished you to know, and occasionally what they did not wish you to know, they would divulge in their own good time. Her mother, she knew, had spent her life trying to make men over, and what had come of her efforts except more trouble and stiffer material to work on?
When she sat down at the table, she expected her mother to begin her usual interrogation; but the old woman allowed Rufus to finish his supper undisturbed. Even when the last cake was lifted from the gridiron, and Mrs. Oakley dropped into her chair behind the tin coffee-pot, she was still silent. The cords in her throat twitched and strained when she raised a cup to her lips, and after a vain effort to swallow, she pushed her plate away with the food untasted.
"Poor Ma," thought the girl, watching the drawn grey face, where the veins in the temples bulged in knots of pain, "can she never have peace?" A longing seized her to fold the spare frame in her young arms and speak comforting words; but the habit of reserve was like an iron mould from which she could not break away. Nothing but death was strong enough to shatter that inherited restraint and resolve it into tenderness. While words of affection struggled to her lips, all she said was, "You look worn out. Is your neuralgia worse?"
"No, it ain't worse. I've got a stabbing pain in my temple, that's all."
Rising from her chair, she began to mix cornbread and gravy for Rambler and Flossie. Though she tottered when she moved, she put aside Dorinda's offer of help. "I'm used to doing things," she said, without stopping for an instant. "You and Rufus had better go along about what you want to do."
The hound and the cat were at her skirts, and she had just put the tin plates down for them and taken up the empty dish, when there was a sound of wheels on the rocks outside, and Dorinda, who was watching Rufus, saw him turn a muddy grey, like the discoloured whitewash on the walls.
"Don't you let on that I was off this afternoon, Ma," he whispered hoarsely.
"I declare, Rufus, you talk as if you were crazy," snapped Mrs. Oakley, flinching from a dart of neuralgia. Though her tone was merely one of irritation, her hands trembled so violently that the china dish she was holding dropped to the floor and crashed into bits. "This china never was a particle of account!" she exclaimed, as she bent over to pick up the pieces.
"I wonder who it can be this time of night?" Dorinda said more lightly than she would have believed possible.
"Maybe I'd better go," Rufus jerked out.
"You sit right down, son," his mother retorted tartly.
Going into the hall, Dorinda opened the front door and stood waiting in the square of lamplight on the threshold. It was a dark night, for the moon had not yet risen, and all that she could distinguish was what appeared to be the single shape of a horse and buggy. Only when the vehicle had jogged up the slope among the trees, and the driver had alighted and ascended the steps of the porch, did she recognize the squat shape and flabby features of Amos Wigfall, the sheriff. She had known him at the store in his political capacity as the familiar of every voter; yet friendly as he had always appeared to be, she could not repress a feeling of apprehension while she held out her hand. People, especially farmers, she knew, did not venture out, except with good reason, on bad roads after dark.
"Why, it's you, Mr. Wigfall!" she exclaimed, with cheerful hospitality. "Ma, Mr. Wigfall is here. I hope you've got some supper for him." And all the time she was thinking, "I might have known Rufus had done something foolish. Poor Ma!"
The sheriff heaved his bulky figure into the house. "I ain't come to supper, Dorinda," he said heartily. "Don't you go and get yo' Ma upset. I don't reckon it's anything to worry about. I wouldn't have come if I could have helped it."
Still grasping the girl's hand, he stood blinking apologetically in the glare of the lamp. His face was so bloated and so unctuous that it might have been the living embodiment of the fee system upon which it had fattened. He was chewing tobacco as he spoke, and wheeling abruptly he spat a wad into the night before he followed Dorinda down the hall to the kitchen. "The fact is I've come about Rufus," he explained, adding, "I hope I ain't intrudin', mum," as he whipped off his old slouch hat with an air of gallantry which reminded Dorinda of the burlesque of some royal cavalier.
"Oh, no, you ain't intruding, Mr. Wigfall," Mrs. Oakley replied. "What was it you said about Rufus?"
"He said he was sure it wasn't anything to worry about," Dorinda hastened to explain. She did not glance at Rufus while she spoke, yet she was aware that he had risen and was scowling at their visitor.
"Wall, as between friends," the sheriff remarked ingratiatingly, "I hope thar ain't a particle of truth in the charge; but Peter Kittery was found dead over by Whistling Spring this evening, and Jacob has got it into his head that 'twas Rufus that shot him."
"It's a lie!" Rufus shouted furiously. "I never went near Whistling Spring this evening. Ma knows I was mending her churn for her from dinner till supper time."
"Wall, I'm downright glad of that, son," Mr. Wigfall returned, and he looked as if he meant it, fee or no fee. "Yo' Pa was a good friend to me when he got a chance, and I shouldn't like to see his son mixed up in a bad business. Jacob says you and Peter had a fuss over cards last night at the store. But if you ain't been near Whistling Spring," he concluded, with triumphant logic, "it stands to reason that you couldn't have done it. You jest let him come along with me, mum," he added after a pause, as he turned to Mrs. Oakley. "I'll take good care of him, and send him back to you as soon as the hearing is over to-morrow. Thar ain't no need for you to worry a mite."
"I never saw Peter after last night!" Rufus cried out in a storm of rage and terror. "I never went near Whistling Spring. Ma knows I was working over her old churn all the evening."
His words and his tone struck with a chill against Dorinda's heart. Why couldn't the boy be silent? Why was he obliged, through some obliquity of nature, invariably to appear as a braggart and a bully? While she stood there listening to his furious denial of guilt, she was as positive that he had killed Peter Kittery as if she had been on the spot.
For a minute there was silence; then a new voice began to speak, a voice so faint and yet so shrill that it was like the far-off whistle of a train. At first the girl did not recognize her mother's tone, and she glanced quickly at the door with the idea that a stranger might have entered after the sheriff.
"It couldn't have been Rufus," the old woman said, with that whistling noise. "Rufus was here with me straight on from dinner time till supper. I had him mending my old churn because I didn't want to use one of Dorinda's new ones. Dorinda went off in the fields to watch the hands," she continued firmly, "but Rufus was right here with me the whole evening."
When she had finished speaking, she reached for a chair and sat down suddenly, as if her legs had failed her. Rufus broke into a nervous laugh which had an indecent sound, Dorinda thought, and Mr. Wigfall heaved a loud sigh of relief.
"Wall, you jest come over to-morrow and tell that to the magistrate," he said effusively. "I don't reckon there could be a better witness for anybody. Thar ain't nobody round Pedlar's Mill that would be likely to dispute yo' word." Slinging his arm, he gave Rufus a hearty slap on the back. "I'm sorry I've got to take you along with me, son, but I hope you won't bear me any grudge. It won't hurt you to spend a night away from yo' Ma, and my wife, she'll be glad to have you sample her buckwheat cakes. I hope you're having good luck with your chickens," he remarked to Mrs. Oakley as an afterthought. "My wife has been meaning to get over and look at yo' white leghorns."
"Tell her I'll be real glad to see her whenever she can get over," Mrs. Oakley replied, as she made an effort to struggle to her feet. "Ain't you going to take any clean clothes to wear to-morrow, Rufus? That shirt looks right mussed."
Rufus shook his head. "No, I'm not. If they want me, they can take me as I am."
"Wall, he looks all right to me," the sheriff observed, with jovial mirth. "I'll expect you about noon," he said, as he shook hands. "Don't you lose a minute's sleep. Thar ain't nothing in the world for you to worry about."
Picking up the kerosene lamp from the table, Dorinda went out on the porch to light the way to the gate. "There's a bad place near the 'rockery,'" she cautioned.
He had climbed heavily into the buggy, and Rufus was in the act of mounting between the wheels, when Mrs. Oakley came out of the house and thrust a parcel wrapped in newspaper into the boy's hand. "There's a clean collar and your comb," she said, drawing quickly back. "Be sure not to forget them in the morning."
Standing there on the porch, with the light from the lamp she held flaring out against the silver black of the night sky, Dorinda watched the buggy crawling down the dangerous road to the gate. Something dark and cold had settled over her thoughts. She could not shake it off though she told herself that it was unreasonable for her to feel so despondent. As if despondency, she added, were the product of reason!
Mother love was a wonderful thing, she reflected, a wonderful and a ruinous thing! It was mother love that had helped to make Rufus the mortal failure he was, and it was mother love that was now accepting, as a sacrifice, the results of this failure. Mrs. Oakley was a pious and God-fearing woman, whose daily life was lived beneath the ominous shadow of the wrath to come; yet she had deliberately perjured herself in order that a worthless boy might escape the punishment which she knew he deserved.
"I'm not like that," Dorinda thought. "I couldn't have done it." At the bottom of her heart, in spite of her kinship to Rufus, there was an outraged sense, not so much of justice as of economy. The lie appeared to her less sinful than wasted. After all, why should not Rufus be held responsible for his own wickedness? She was shocked; she was unsympathetic; she was curiously exasperated. Her mother's attitude to Rufus impressed her as sentimental rather than unselfish; and she saw in this painful occurrence merely one of the first fruits of that long weakness. Since she had been brought so close to reality she had had less patience with evasive idealism. "I suppose I'm different from other women," she meditated. "I may have lost feeling, or else it was left out of me when I was born. Some women would have gone on loving Jason no matter how he treated them; but I'm not made that way. There's something deep down in me that I value more than love or happiness or anything outside myself. It may be only pride, but it comes first of all."
The buggy had disappeared into the night, and lowering the lamp, she turned and entered the house. As she closed the door the mocking screech of an owl floated in, and she felt that the frost was slipping over the threshold. All the ancient superstitions of the country gathered in her mind. It was foolish, she knew, to let herself remember these things at such a time; but she had lost control of her imagination, which galloped ahead dragging her reason after it.
In the kitchen she found her mother bending over the dish-pan with her arms plunged in soapsuds.
"Come to bed, Ma. I'll finish the dishes."
To her surprise, Mrs. Oakley did not resist. The spirit of opposition was crushed out of her, and she tottered as she turned away to wipe her hands on a cup towel.
"I reckon I'd better," she answered meekly. "I don't feel as if I could stand on my feet another minute."
Putting her strong young arm about her, Dorinda led her across the hall into her bedroom. While the girl struck a match and lighted the lamp on the table, she saw that her mother was shaking as if she had been stricken with palsy.
"I'll help you undress, Ma."
"I can manage everything but my shoes, daughter. My fingers are too swollen to unbutton them."
"Don't you worry. I'll put you to bed." As she turned down the bed and smoothed out the coarse sheets and the patchwork quilt, it seemed to Dorinda that the inanimate objects in the room had borrowed pathos from their human companions. All the stitches that had gone into this quilt, happy stitches, sad stitches, stitches that had ended in nothing! Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked quickly away. What was it in houses and furniture that made them come to life in hours of suspense and tear at the heartstrings?
Mrs. Oakley was undressing slowly, folding each worn, carefully mended garment before she placed it on a chair near the foot of the bed.
"Do you reckon they will do anything to Rufus?" she asked presently in a quavering voice.
She had released her hair from the tight coil at the back of her head, and it hung now, combed and plaited by Dorinda, in a thin grey braid on her shoulders. The childish arrangement gave a fantastic air to the shadow on the whitewashed wall.
"Not after what you said. Didn't you hear Mr. Wigfall tell you that he was taking him just for the night?"
Mrs. Oakley turned her head, and the shadow at her back turned with her. "Yes, I heard him. Well, if the Lord will give me strength to go through with it, I'll never ask for anything else."
"He'll be more likely to help you if you get some sleep and stop worrying. The Lord helps good sleepers." Though she spoke flippantly, she was frightened by the look in her mother's face.
"I don't feel as if I could close my eyes." Mrs. Oakley had climbed into bed, and was lying, straight and stiff as an effigy, under the quilt. "Don't you think it would be a comfort if we were to read a chapter in the Bible?"
Dorinda broke into a dry little laugh. "No, I don't. The only comforting thing I can imagine is to get my head on a pillow. I've got seven cows to milk by sunrise, and that is no easy job."
"Yes, you'd better go," her mother assented reluctantly, and she added with a sigh, "I can't help feeling that something dreadful is going to happen."
"You won't prevent it by lying awake. Don't get up in the morning until you're obliged to milk the cows before day and get Fluvanna to help about breakfast as soon as she comes. It's a long way to Queen Elizabeth Courthouse, and we'll have to allow plenty of time for the horses. Do you want anything more?" She resisted an impulse to stoop and kiss the wrinkled cheek because she knew that the unusual exhibition of tenderness would embarrass them both. "Shall I put out the lamp for you?"
"No, I like a little light. You can see so many things in the dark after the fire goes out."
Dorinda moved away as noiselessly as she could; but she had barely crossed the hall before she heard a muffled sound in the room, and knew that her mother was out of bed and on her knees. "I can't do anything," thought the girl desperately. "It is going to kill her, and I can't do anything to prevent it." Every muscle in her body ached from the strain of the day while she washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen for the next morning. She realized that she should have to do most of her farm work before sunrise, and she decided that, in case Fluvanna came late, it would be well to put out whatever she needed for breakfast. After that—well, even if Rufus had murdered somebody, she couldn't keep awake any longer.
In the morning, when she came back into the house after milking, she found that her mother was already in the kitchen, and that a pot of coffee was bubbling on the stove. Of course Fluvanna, on the day when she was particularly needed, had contrived to be late.
"I told you not to worry about breakfast, Ma," Dorinda said, provoked in spite of her pity.
"I know you did, but I couldn't lie in bed any longer. I was so afraid you might oversleep yourself and not wake me in time." She was the victim of a nervous apprehension lest they should be too late for the magistrate, and it was futile to attempt to reason her out of her folly. "You sit right down in your overalls and drink your coffee while it's hot," she continued, stirring restlessly. "I've got some fried eggs and bacon to keep up your strength."
"My strength is all right." Dorinda washed her hands and then came over to the table where breakfast was waiting for her. "The sun isn't up yet, and we can't start before day."
"Well, I wanted to be ready in plenty of time. You'll have to be away from the farm all day, won't you?"
"I don't know," Dorinda rejoined briskly. "Fluvanna and Nimrod will have to manage the best they can. I'm not going to worry about it. People can always be spared easier than they think they can."
Her animation, however, was wasted, for her mother was not following her. Mrs. Oakley had grown so restless that she could not sit still at the table, and she jumped up and ran to the stove or the safe whenever she could find an excuse. She wore the strained expression of a person who is listening for an expected sound and is afraid of missing it by a moment of inadvertence. Already, before lighting the stove, she had put on her Sunday dress of black alpaca, and had protected it in front by an apron of checked blue and white gingham. If she had had the courage, Dorinda suspected, she would have cooked breakfast in her widow's bonnet, with the streamer of rusty crape at her back.
"Is that somebody going along the road?" she inquired whenever Dorinda looked up from her plate.
"No, I don't hear anybody," the girl replied patiently. "Try to eat something, or you'll be sick."
Mrs. Oakley obediently lifted a bit of egg on her fork, and then put it down again before it had touched her lips. "I don't feel as if I could swallow a morsel."
"Drink a little coffee anyway," Dorinda pleaded.
Again the old woman made a futile effort to swallow. "I don't know what can be the matter with me," she said, "but my throat feels as if it were paralyzed."
"Well, I'll fix up a snack for you, and you can nibble at it on the way. Somebody will be sure to ask us to dinner. Now, I'll clear the table before I get ready."
But, after all, Dorinda was left at home for the day. Just as Nimrod, animated by misfortune, was leading Dan and Beersheba out to the wagon, a buggy drove briskly into the yard, and Nathan Pedlar alighted.
"I kind of thought you'd want a man with your Ma, Dorinda," he explained, "so I left Bob Shafer in charge of the store and came right over. Rufus spoke to me as he was going by with the sheriff last night, and I told him I'd take his Ma to the Courthouse."
Though Dorinda was doubtful at first, Mrs. Oakley responded immediately. In spite of her protracted experience with masculine helplessness, she had not lost her confidence in the male as a strong prop in the hour of adversity. "I can't tell you how thankful I am to have you, Nathan," she replied eagerly. "Dorinda had just as well stay at home and look after the farm."
"Don't you think I'd better go too, Ma?" the girl asked, not without a tinge of exasperation in her tone. It seemed absurd to her that her mother should prefer to have Nathan Pedlar stand by her simply because he happened to be a man.
"I don't believe she'll need you, Dorinda," remarked Nathan, who, like Nimrod, was inspired by adversity. "But if you feel you'd like to come, I reckon we can all three squeeze into my buggy."
"There ain't a bit of use in your going," Mrs. Oakley insisted. "You just stay right here and take care of things."
"Well, I won't go." Dorinda gave way after a resistance that was only half hearted. "Take care of her, Nathan, and make her eat something before she gets there."'
Running into the house, she wrapped two buttered rolls and boiled eggs in a red and white napkin, and put them into a little basket. Then she added a bottle of blackberry wine, and carried the basket out to the buggy, while Mrs. Oakley tied on her bonnet with trembling hands.
"Where's my bottle of camphor, Dorinda?"
"Here it is, Ma, in your reticule. Be sure and take a little blackberry wine if you feel faint." Not until she had watched the buggy drive through the gate and out on the road, where the sun was coming up in a ball of fire, did the girl understand what a relief it was not to go. "I believe she'd rather have Nathan," she decided, as she went upstairs to change into her old gingham dress, "because he doesn't know that she is not telling the truth."
When she thought of it afterwards, that day towered like a mountain in the cloudy background of her life. Alone on the farm, for the first time in her recollection, she felt forlorn and isolated. It was impossible for her to keep her mind fixed on her tasks. Restlessness, like an inarticulate longing, pricked at her nerves. When the morning work in the dairy was over, she wandered about the farm, directing the work in the fields, and stopping for a minute or two to talk with old Matthew Fairlamb, who was handing up the shingles to his son William on the roof of the new barn. At a little distance the old house of the overseer, which had been used as a tobacco barn since her great-grandfather's death, was being cleaned and repaired for Jonas Walsh (one of the "poor Walshes") who had undertaken to work as a manager in return for a living and a share of the crops. After Rufus went, Mrs. Oakley insisted, a white man and his family would be required on the place, and though Dorinda preferred loneliness to such company, she found it less wearing to yield to her mother than to argue against her opinion. "Mrs. Walsh will be company for Ma, anyway," she said to herself. "Even if she is slatternly, they will still have chickens in common."
"Do you think Jonas will be useful?" she inquired of old Matthew, while she paused to watch the expert shingling of the roof.
Old Matthew made a dubious gesture, "Mebbe he will, an' mebbe he won't. I ain't prophesyin'."
"Well, he can shoot anyhow," William observed cynically, as he stooped down for the shingles his father held up. "He's got a gun and a coon dog."
"But I need him to work. How can you make a living out of the land unless you work it?"
Old Matthew chuckled. "The trouble with this here land is that tobaccy has worn it out. I ain't never seen the land yit that it wouldn't wear out if you gave it a chance. You take my advice, Dorindy, and don't have nothin' more to do with tobaccy. As long as you don't smoke and don't chaw, thar ain't no call for you to put up with it."
"I won't," Dorinda replied with determination. "All the tobacco fields are giving way to cowpeas."
"I see you're making a new field alongside of the old one."
"Yes. I sowed sweet clover with lime, and turned the clover under when it was in bloom. I can't afford to do that again. It was an experiment, but it improved the land."
"You're right thar, honey. Put yo' heart in the land. The land is the only thing that will stay by you."
She smiled and passed on, stopping to say a few words to Mary Joe Green at the door of the henhouse. Though she was aware that her aimless movements accomplished nothing, she could not settle down to the steady work which was awaiting her. The sound of a wagon in the road shook her nerves into a quiver of fear, and she started whenever a bird flew overhead or an acorn dropped on the dead leaves at her feet. At dinner time she did not kindle a fire in the stove, but drank a glass of buttermilk and ate a "pone" of cornbread while she stood on the front porch and looked at the road. One moment she wished that she had gone with her mother to the Courthouse, and the next she was glad that she had waited at home. Whatever Rufus's fate might be, she felt that the mental strain would be the end of her mother. Even if Rufus were to go free, Mrs. Oakley's conscience would torment her to death.
As the day declined the place became insupportable to her, and leaving the house, she walked across the yard to the gate, with Rambler and Flossie trailing at her heels. The road under the honey locust tree was strewn with oblong brown pods, as glossy as satin, and treading over them, she walked slowly past the bridge and up the shaded slope between the pasture and the band of Hoot Owl Woods. In the pasture she could see the Jerseys gathered by the stream under the willows, and now and then a silver tinkle of cowbells floated over the trumpet vine on the fence.
It was a rich October afternoon, with a sky of burnished blue and an air of carnival in the wine-red and ashen-bronze of the woods. For an instant the brightness hurt her eyes, and when she opened them it seemed to her that the autumnal radiance fluttered like a blown shawl over the changeless structure of the landscape. Beneath the fugitive beauty the stern features of the country had not softened.
She walked on, still followed by Rambler and Flossie, beyond the woods to the fork of the road. Looking away from the gate of Five Oaks, she kept her eyes on the acres of broomsedge belonging to Honeycomb Farm. The stretch of road beyond the burned cabin was deserted, and the only sound was the monotonous droning of insects and the dropping of persimmons or acorns on the dead leaves under the trees. Far away, in the direction of Old Farm, the shocked corn on the hill was swimming in a rain of apricot-coloured lights. "If only it would last," she thought, "things would not be so hard to bear. But it is like happiness. Before you know that you have found it, it goes."
Turning away, because beauty was like a knife in her heart, she called Rambler back to her side. In the middle of the road, bathed in the apricot-coloured glow, Flossie was sitting, and farther on, she saw the figures of old Matthew and William Fairlamb on their way home from work. When they reached her they spoke without stopping.
"Good evening. We'll be over bright and early to-morrow."
"Good evening to you both. There won't be a killing frost to-night, will there?"
"Not enough to hurt. Thar ain't nothin' but flowers left out by this time, I reckon."
Old Matthew's cheeks were as red as winter apples, and his eyes twinkled like black haws in their sockets. "He! He! When thar ain't nothin' to hurt, we've no need to worry!"
As they trudged away, she turned and looked after them. She wanted to ask what they had heard of the shooting; but she resisted the impulse until they were too far away for her words to reach them. Standing there, while the two figures dwindled gradually into the blue distance, she was visited again by the feeling that the moment was significant, if only she could discover the meaning of it before it eluded her. Strange how often that sensation returned to her now! Everything at which she gazed; the frosted brown and yellow and wine-red of the landscape; the shocked corn against the sunset; the figures of the two men diminishing in the vague smear of the road; all these images were steeped in an illusion of mystery. "I've let myself get wrought up over nothing," she thought, with an endeavour to be reasonable.
By the time she came within sight of the house again the afterglow was paling, and a chill had crept through the thick shawl that she wore. Perhaps, in spite of old Matthew, there would be a heavy frost before morning, and she was glad to reflect that only the few summer flowers in her mother's rockery would be blighted. Smoke was rising from two of the chimneys, and she knew that Mary Joe had kindled fires in the kitchen and in her mother's chamber. Already Fluvanna would be well on with the milking. It was the first time Dorinda had trusted it to the girl and Nimrod, and she hoped that there would be nothing to find fault with when she went out to the barn.
Two hours later, when the milking and the straining were both over, she hurried out of the dairy at the noise of wheels in the darkness. As the buggy drew up to the steps, she saw that her mother was seated between Rufus and Nathan; and even before she caught the words they shouted, she understood that the boy had been discharged. It was what she had expected; yet after the assurance reached her, her anxiety was still as heavy as it had been all day. When her eyes fell on her mother's shrunken figure she realized that the old woman must have paid a fearful price for her son's freedom. "She looks bled," the girl thought bitterly. "She looks as if she would crumble to a handful of dust if you touched her." A hot anger against Rufus flamed in her heart. Then she saw that the boy was shaking with emotion, and her anger was smothered in pity. After all, who was to blame? Who was ever to blame in life?
"It's all right, Dorinda," Nathan said, as he helped Mrs. Oakley to the ground and up on the porch. "Your Ma held up splendidly, but it's been too much for her. She's worn clean out, I reckon."
"I wish you'd been there to see the way she did it," Rufus added. "Nobody said a word after she got through." Had he actually forgotten, Dorinda asked herself, that his mother had sworn to a lie in order to save him?
For the second time in her life Mrs. Oakley allowed herself to be put to bed without protest. She hung limp and cold when they placed her in a chair, and watched her children with vacant eyes while Rufus piled fresh logs on the fire and Dorinda brought bottles of hot water wrapped in her orange shawl. When the grey flannelette nightgown was slipped over her shoulders, the old woman spoke for the first time since she had entered the house.
"Dorinda, the Lord gave me strength."
"They have killed her," the girl thought resentfully; but she said only, "Now you must get to bed as quick as you can."
Mrs. Oakley stared up at her with eyes that were wind-swept in their bleakness. Her face looked flattened and drawn to one side, as if some tremendous pressure had just been removed. "I reckon I'd better," she answered listlessly.
"You must try to eat something. Fluvanna is making you some tea and toast."
"I ain't sick enough for tea."
"Then I'll make you a cream toddy. There's some nice cream I saved for you."
While Dorinda was speaking she leaned over the bed and wrapped the clammy feet in the orange shawl. "Can you feel the hot water bottles?" she asked. The feet that she warmed so carefully were as stiff already, she told herself in terror, as if they belonged to a corpse. Neither the hot water nor the blazing fire could put any warmth into the shivering body.
"Yes, I feel them, but I'm sort of numbed."
"Now I'll make the toddy. I've got some whiskey put away where Rufus couldn't find it. If Fluvanna brings your supper, try to eat the egg anyway."
"I'll try, but I feel as if I couldn't keep it down," Mrs. Oakley replied submissively.
Flames were leaping up the chimney, and the shadows had melted into the cheerful light. When Dorinda returned with the cream toddy, Mrs. Oakley drank it eagerly, and with the stimulant of the whiskey in her veins, she was able to sit up in bed and eat the supper Fluvanna had prepared. It was long after the coloured girl's hour for going home, but the excitement had braced her to self-sacrifice, and she had offered to stay on for the night. "I can make up a pallet jest as easy as not in yo' Ma's room," she said to Dorinda, "an' I'll fix Mr. Rufus' breakfast for him, so he can catch the train befo' day."
There were few negroes who did' not develop character, either good or bad, in a crisis, Dorinda reflected a little later as she went out to the dairy. Though there was no need for her to visit the dairy, since Fluvanna and Nimrod had finished the work, she felt that she could not sleep soundly until she had inspected the milk. Was this merely what Rufus called "woman's fussiness," she wondered, or was it the kind of nervous mania that afflicted even the most successful farmer?
The brilliant autumn day had declined into a wan evening. From the dark fields the wind brought the trail of woodsmoke mingled with the effluvium of rotting leaves; and this scent invaded her thoughts like the odour of melancholy. Not even the frosty air or the fragrant breath of the cows in the barn could dispel the lethargy which had crept over her. "I'm tired out," she reasoned. "I've been going too hard the last six months, and I feel the strain as soon as I stop." Though she was saddened by the haunting pathos of life, she did not feel the intimate pang of grief. All that, it seemed to her, was over for ever. The power to pity was still hers, for compassion is a detached impulse, but she had lot beyond recall the gift of poignant emotion. Nothing had penetrated that dead region around her heart. Not her father's death, not her mother's illness—nothing. Drought had withered her, she told herself cynically, and the locust had eaten away the green of her spirit.
In the morning, Rufus went off on the early train, and Dorinda drew a breath of relief as she turned back to her work. The shock of the tragedy appeared to have cleared the boy's temper, and he showed genuine distress when he parted from his mother. "I feel as if I'd never see her again," he said to Dorinda on the porch, while he was waiting for the farmer who had promised to stop for him on the way to the station.
Dorinda shook her head. Helplessness in the face of misery acted always as an irritant on her nerves. "You never can tell," she replied. "But remember all you have cost her and try to keep straight in the future."
"I swear I'll never give her another minute's worry," he responded, stuffing his handkerchief into his pocket.
Perhaps he meant it; but it seemed to Dorinda that his repentance, like his gift with tools, was too facile. "Whatever comes of this, it has been the death of Ma," she thought, as she went into the house.
When the day's churning was over, and she was in her mother's room, the new doctor from the Courthouse arrived with his instruments and his medicine case. He was a brisk, very ugly young man, with an awkward raw-boned figure, and an honest face which was covered with unsightly freckles. As different from Jason as any man could well be! He had risen by sheer ability from the poorer class, and already, notwithstanding his plain appearance and uncompromising honesty, he had built up a better practice than the hereditary one of the Greylocks. For one thing, he insisted upon having his fees paid, and it was natural, Dorinda had discovered, to value advice more highly when it was not given away.
As the doctor sat down beside Mrs. Oakley's bed, she opened her eyes and looked at him without surprise and without welcome. Her bed was smooth and spotlessly clean; the best quilt of log-cabin design lay over her feet; and she was wearing a new nightgown which was buttoned closely about her neck. Without her clothes, she had the look, in spite of her ravaged face, of a very old child.
"I've never spent a day in bed in my life, doctor," she said, "except when my children were born."
"I know," he rejoined, with dry sympathy. "That is the trouble."
He did not waste words, but bent over immediately to begin his examination; and when it was over, he merely patted the old woman's shoulder before packing away his instruments.
"You'll have to stay in bed a while now," he said, as he stood up with his case in his hands. "I'll leave some medicine with your daughter; but it isn't medicine you need; it is rest."
Her groping gaze followed him with irrepressible weariness. "I don't know what will become of the chickens," she said. "I reckon everything will go to rack and ruin, but I can't help it. I've done all I could."
He turned on the threshold. "My dear Mrs. Oakley, you couldn't get up if you tried. Your strength has given out."
She smiled indifferently. All the nervous energy upon which she had lived for forty years was exhausted. There was nothing now but the machine which was rapidly running down. "Yes, I reckon I'm worn out," she responded, and turned her face to the wall.
Not until they had left the porch and crossed the trodden ragweed to where the buggy was waiting, did Dorinda summon the courage to ask a question.
"Is she seriously ill, doctor?"
At her words he stopped and looked straight into her eyes, a look as bare and keen as a blade. "She isn't ill at all in the strict sense of the word," he answered. "She told the truth when she said that she was worn out."
"Then she will never be up again?"
"One never knows. But I think this is the beginning of the end." He hesitated, and added regretfully, "I ought not to put it so bluntly."
She shook her head. "I'd rather know. Poor Ma! She is only sixty-two. It has come so suddenly."
"Suddenly." The word broke from him like an oath. "Why, the woman in there has been dying for twenty years!"
Her eyes were stony while she watched him mount into his buggy and turn the horse's head toward the gate. The wheels spun over the rocks and out into the road, as if they were revolving over the ice in her heart. Would nothing thaw the frozen lake that enveloped her being? Would she never again become living and human? The old sense of the hollowness of reality had revived. Though she knew it was her mother of whom they had been speaking, the words awoke only echoes in her thoughts. She longed with all her soul to suffer acutely; yet she could feel nothing within this colourless void in which she was imprisoned.
When the buggy had disappeared, she retraced her steps to the house and entered her mother's room with a smile on her lips.
"You'll have to rest now, Ma, no matter how you hate it."
At Dorinda's cheerful voice, the old woman turned over and looked at her daughter as if she were a stranger.
"I don't know how you'll manage," she answered; but her tone was perfunctory.
"Oh, we'll manage all right. Don't you worry. Just try to get well, Ma."
A change of expression rippled like a shadow over the grey features, and passed without leaving a trace. "I was afraid maybe the doctor didn't think I was sick enough to stay in bed. I know I ain't exactly sick, but I seem to have given way. I reckon Mary Joe can look after the chickens till I'm able to be up."
After this she fell into a doze from which she did not awaken until Dorinda brought her favourite dinner of jowl and turnip salad.
"The doctor says you must eat, Ma, or you'll never get back your strength."
"I know I ought to, daughter, but I feel as if something was choking me."
Day after day, month after month. Nothing else all through the autumn and winter.
Though Mrs. Oakley lived more than a year longer, she was never able again to leave her bed. For the greater part of the time she lay, silent and inert, in a state between waking and sleeping, unconcerned after all her fruitless endeavours. Rufus, she never asked for, and when his letters were read to her, she would smile vaguely and turn away as if she had ceased to be interested. Old Rambler spent his days on a mat at the side of her bed, and Flossie lay curled up on the patchwork quilt over her feet. If they were absent long, she would begin to move restlessly, and beg presently that they should be brought back. At the end, they were the only companions that she desired, for, as she said once, they "did not bother her with questions." The tragedy to Dorinda was not so much in her mother's slow dying as in her unconditional surrender to decay. For more than forty years she had fought her dauntless fight against the sordid actuality, and at the last she appeared to become completely reconciled to her twin enemies, poverty and dirt. Nothing made any difference to her now, and because nothing made any difference to her, dying was the happiest part of her life.
"There ain't any use struggling," she said once, while Dorinda was cleaning her room, and after a long pause, "It doesn't seem just right that we have to be born. It ain't worth all the trouble we go through."
But there were other days when her inextinguishable energy would flare up in sparks, and she would insist upon sitting up in bed while the white Leghorns flocked by the window. Then she would recognize her favourite hens and call them by name; and once she had Romeo, the prize rooster, brought into her room, and kept him under her eyes, until he began to strut and behave indelicately, when she "shooed" him out in her old peremptory manner. Frequently, in the last few months, she asked to have Dan and Beersheba led to her window. Tears would come into her eyes while the long sad faces of the horses looked at her through the panes, and she would murmur plaintively, "There's a heap of understanding in animals. You'll never let those horses want, will you, daughter?"
"Never, Ma. In a few years, if nothing happens, I'll turn them out to pasture for the rest of their lives."
Mrs. Oakley would smile as if she had forgotten, and after a long silence, she would begin talking in an animated voice of her girlhood and her parents. As the weeks went by, all the years of her marriage and motherhood vanished from her memory, and her mind returned to her early youth when she was engaged to the young missionary. Her old tropical dream came back to her; in her sleep she would ramble on about palm trees and crocodiles and ebony babies. "I declare, it seems just as if I'd been there," she said one morning. "It's queer how much more real dreams can be than the things you're going through."
At the end of the year, in the middle of the night before she died, she awoke Dorinda, and talked for a long time about the heathen and the sacrifices that Presbyterian missionaries had made to bring them to Christ. "Your great-grandfather was a wonderful scholar," she said, "and I reckon that's where you get most of your sense. I s'pose missionaries have to be scholars. They need something besides religion to fall back on in their old age." Never once did she allude to anything that had occurred since her marriage, and she appeared to have forgotten that she had ever known Joshua.
The next afternoon she died in her sleep while Nathan was sitting beside her bed. For a few minutes Dorinda broke down and wept, less from grief than from the knowledge that grief was expected of her; and Nathan, who was always at his best in the house of mourning, won her everlasting gratitude by his behaviour. She found herself depending upon him as if he had been some ideal elder brother such as she had never known. So naturally that fate seemed to have arranged it on purpose, he assumed authority over the household and the funeral. He thought of everything, and everybody deferred to him. Funerals were the only occasions when he had ever risen to dignity, and though he had sincerely liked Mrs. Oakley, the few days before her burial were among the pleasantest that he had ever spent in his life.
"I shall never forget how good you have been," Dorinda said, when it was over. "I don't know what I should have done without you." And though the words were spoken impulsively, as a matter of fact she never, in the future, forgot Nathan's kindness. It was a mark of her proud and self-sufficient nature that she could not forget either gratitude or resentment.
When he had driven away, she turned to Fluvanna, who was picking up bits of rusty crape from the floor of the porch.
"I really don't know what we should have done without him," she remarked over again.
"If you ax me, Miss Dorinda, he is one handy man at a funeral," answered Fluvanna, who relapsed into dialect on tragic or perilous occasions. "I was thinkin' right along how pleased yo' Ma would have been if she could have seen him, for she cert'n'y did like handy folks about her."
"Poor Ma, I wish she could have had the chickens a few years earlier," Dorinda sighed. "To think of the years she went without a cow."
"Well, she enjoyed 'em while she had 'em," Fluvanna responded fervently. "Have you thought yet what you're goin' to do, Miss Dorinda?"
"Yes, I've thought. The farm is mine. Ma left it to me, and I'm going to stay on as we are."
"Just you and me? Won't you get lonesome without some white folks?"
"After Jonas Walsh moves out of the overseer's house, I'll engage Martin Flower, who is a better farmer, and has a sensible wife. Mary Joe can take care of the chickens, and I'm going to hire her brother Ebenezer to help Nimrod with the cows. If everything goes well this winter, I'll be ready to start a real dairy in the spring. Then I'll need more hands, so we shan't be lonely."
"Naw'm, I don't reckon we'll, get lonesome, not the way we work," Fluvanna agreed. "I ain' never seen no man work as hard as you do, Miss Dorinda. Yo' Ma told me befo' she passed away that you had stayin' power and she reckoned that you was the only one of the family that had. Sprightliness don't git you far, she said, unless you've got stayin' power enough to keep you after you git thar. Well, it's all your'n now, ain't it?" she inquired placidly, as Dorinda's eyes swept the horizon.
"Yes, it's all mine." Walking over to the edge of the porch, Dorinda looked across the vague, glimmering fields. Another autumn had gone. Another sunset like the heart of a pomegranate was fading out in the west. Again the wandering scents of wood smoke and rotting leaves came and went on the wind.
For an instant, the permanence of material things, the inexorable triumph of fact over emotion, appeared to be the only reality. These things had been ageless when her mother was young; they would be still ageless when she herself had become an old woman. Over the immutable landscape human lives drifted and vanished like shadows.
When she looked back on the years that followed her mother's death, Dorinda could remember nothing but work. Out of a fog of recollection there protruded bare outlines which she recognized as the milestones of her prosperity. She saw clearly the autumn she had turned the eighteen-acre field into pasture; the failure of her first experiment with ensilage; the building of the new dairy and cow-barns; the gradual increase of her seven cows into a herd. Certain dates stood out in her farm calendar. The year the blight had fallen on her cornfield and she had had to buy fodder from James Ellgood; the year she had first planted alfalfa; the year she had lost a number of her cows from contagious abortion; the year she had reclaimed the fields beyond Poplar Spring; the year her first prize bull had won three blue ribbons. With the slow return of fertility to the soil, she had passed, by an unconscious process, into mute acquiescence with the inevitable. The bitter irony of her point of view had shaded into a cheerful cynicism which formed a protective covering over her mind and heart. She had worked relentlessly through the years; but it was work that she had enjoyed, and above all it was work that had created anew the surroundings amid which she lived. In a changed form her mother's frustrated passion to redeem the world was finding concrete expression.
At thirty-three, the perspective of the last ten years was incredibly shortened. All the cold starry mornings when she had awakened before day and crept out to the barn by lantern light to attend to the milking, appeared to her now as a solitary frozen dawn. All the bleak winters, all the scorching summers, were a single day; all the evenings, when she had dreamed half asleep in the firelit dusk, were a single night. She could not separate these years into seasons. In her long retrospect they were crystallized into one flawless pattern.
Through those ten years, while she struggled to free the farm from debt, she had scrimped and saved like a miser; and this habit of saving, she knew, would cling to her for the rest of her life. She went without butter; she drank only buttermilk, in order that she might keep nothing back from the market. Her clothes were patched and mended as long as they held together, and she had stopped going to church because her pride would not suffer her to appear there in overalls, or in the faded calico dresses she wore in the house. Though she was obliged to hire women to help her with the milking and in the dairy, she herself worked harder than any of them. Nothing, she told herself grimly, could elude her vigilance. In her passionate recoil from the thriftlessness of the poor, she had developed a nervous dread of indolence which reminded her of her mother. She went to bed, stupefied by fatigue, as soon as the last pound of butter was wrapped for the early train; yet she was up again before the break of day while the hands were still sleeping. And only Fluvanna, who lived in the house with her now, knew the hours she spent beside her lamp counting the pounds of butter and the number of eggs she had sent to market. If only she could save enough to pay off the mortgage and return the money she had borrowed from the Faradays, she felt that she should begin to breathe freely for the first time in her life.
And there was more than hard work in her struggle; there was unflagging enterprise as well. Her father had worked harder than she could ever do, toiling summer and winter, day and night, over the crops, which always failed because they were expected to thrive on so little. She remembered him perpetually hauling manure or shredding fodder, until he loomed in her memory as a titanic image of the labourer who labours without hope. "The truth is, I would rather have failed at the start than have gone on like that," she thought. "I was able to take risks because I was too unhappy to be afraid." Yes, she had had the courage of desperation, and that had saved her from failure. Without borrowed money, without the courage to borrow money, she could never have made the farm even a moderate success. This had required not only perseverance but audacity as well; and it had required audacity again to permeate the methodical science of farming with the spirit of adventure. Interest, excitement even, must be instilled into the heartless routine. The hours of work never varied. Chores were done by necessity, as in the old days without system, but by the stroke of the clock. Each milker had her own place, and milked always the same cows. After the first trial or two, Dorinda had yielded to the reluctance of the cow when her accustomed milker was changed. She had borrowed money again, "hiring money" they called it at Pedlar's Mill, to buy her first Jersey bull; but the daughters of that bull were still her best butter-making cows.
Gradually, as the years passed, her human associations narrowed down to Fluvanna's companionship and the Sunday afternoon visits of Nathan Pedlar and his children. The best years of her youth, while her beauty resisted hard work and sun and wind, were shared only with the coloured woman with whom she lived. She had prophesied long ago that Fluvanna would be a comfort to her, and the prophecy was completely fulfilled. The affection between the two women had outgrown the slender tie of mistress and maid, and had become as strong and elastic as the bond that holds relatives together. They knew each other's daily lives; they shared the one absorbing interest in the farm; they trusted each other without discretion and without reserve. Fluvanna respected and adored her mistress; and Dorinda, with an inherited feeling of condescension, was sincerely attached to her servant. Though Dorinda still guarded the reason of her flight to New York, she did this less from dread of Fluvanna's suspecting the truth than from secret terror of the enervating thought of the past. That was over and done with, and every instinct of her nature warned her to let dead bones lie buried. Sometimes on winter nights, when the snow was falling or the rain blowing in gusts beyond the window, the two women would sit for an hour, when work was over, in front of the log fire in Dorinda's room which had once been her mother's chamber. Then they would talk sympathetically of the cows and the hens, and occasionally they would speak of Fluvanna's love affairs and of Dorinda's years in the city. The coloured girl would ask eager questions in the improved grammar her mistress had taught her. "I don't see how you could bear to come back to this poky place. But, of course, when yo' Pap died somebody had to be here to look after things. I don't reckon you'll ever go back, will you?"
"No, I shall never go back. I had enough of it when I was there."
"Wouldn't you rather look at the sights up there than at cows and chickens?"
Dorinda would shake her head thoughtfully. "Not if they are my cows and chickens."
In this reply, which was as invariable as a formula, she touched unerringly the keynote of her character. The farm belonged to her, and the knowledge aroused a fierce sense of possession. To protect, to lift up, rebuild and restore, these impulses formed the deepest obligation her nature could feel.
Though she talked frankly to Nathan about the farm and the debts which had once encumbered it, she had never given him her confidence as generously as she had bestowed it on Fluvanna. Kind as he had been, the fact that he was a man and a widower made an impalpable, and she told herself ridiculous, barrier between them. She had grown to depend upon him, but it was a practical dependence, as devoid of sentiment as her dependence upon the clock or the calendar. If he had dropped out of her life, she would have missed him about the barn and the stable; and it would have been difficult, she admitted, to manage the farm without his advice. There were the children, too, particularly the younger boy, who had been born with a clubfoot. The one human emotion left in Dorinda's heart, she sometimes thought, was her affection for Rose Emily's boy, John Abner.
If he had been her own son he could not have been closer to her; and his infirmity awakened the ardent compassion that love assumed in her strong and rather arrogant nature. Though he was barely fourteen, he was more congenial with her than any grown person at Pedlar's Mill. He devoured books as she used to do when she was a girl, and he was already developing into a capable farmer. Years ago she had given Nathan no peace until he had taken the child to town and had had an operation performed on his crippled foot; and when no improvement had resulted, she had insisted that he should have John Abner's shoes made from measurements. As a little girl, her mother had always said to her that she preferred lame ducks to well ones; and John Abner was the only lame duck that had ever come naturally into her life. Fortunately, he was a boy of deep, though reserved, affections, and he returned in his reticent way the tenderness Dorinda lavished upon him. Minnie May, who had grown into a plain girl of much character, had been jealous at first; but a little later, when she became engaged to be married, she was prudently reconciled to the difference Dorinda made in her life. The two other children, though they were both healthy and handsome, with a dash of Rose Emily's fire and spirit, were received as lightly and forgotten as quickly as warm days in winter or cool ones in summer. The girl Lena, who had just turned seventeen, was a pretty, vain, and flirtatious creature, with a head "as thick with beaux," Fluvanna observed, "as a brier patch with briers"; and the boy, Bertie, familiarly called "Bud," was earning a good salary in a wholesale grocery store in the city. It was pleasant to have Nathan and the children come over every week; but John Abner was the only one Dorinda missed when accident or bad weather kept them away. In the beginning they had visited her in the afternoons, and she had had nothing better to offer them than popcorn or roasted apples and chestnuts; but as the years passed and debts were paid, there was less need of rigid economy, and she had drifted into the habit of having the family with her at Sunday dinner. This had gradually become the one abundant meal of the week, and she and Fluvanna both looked forward to it with the keen anticipation of deferred appetite.
The work was so exacting and her nerves so blessedly benumbed by toil, that Dorinda seldom stopped to ask herself if she were satisfied with her lot. Had the question been put to her, she would probably have dismissed it with the retort that she "had no time to worry about things like that." On the surface her days were crowded with more or less interesting tasks; but in her buried life there were hours when the old discontent awoke with the autumn wind in the broomsedge. At such moments she would feel that life had cheated her, and she would long passionately for something bright and beautiful that she had missed. Not love again! No, never again the love that she had known! What she longed for was the something different, the something indestructibly desirable and satisfying. Then there would return the blind sense of a purpose in existence which had evaded her search. The encompassing dullness would melt like a cloud, and she would grasp a meaning beneath the deceptions and the cruelties of the past. But this feeling was as fugitive as all others, and when it vanished it left not the glorified horizon, but simply the long day's work to be done.